YouSaid · the spoken record

David Rubenstein

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2022-03-29
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2022-03-29
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  1. “GIA gave them a contract many years ago. People said, Wait a second, the CIA is giving a contract for cloud work to Amazon. What is Amazon doing in this business? And people didn't realize it. And then people began to dig into it and realized it's good enough for the CIA. It's good enough for me. And so the Amazon business at AWS grew to be the biggest in the world.”

    2022-03-29 · Invest Like the Best · David Rubenstein - Life, Leadership, and LBOs - [Invest Like the Best, EP. 270] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  2. “The truth is, many of the great fortunes are made because people observe that government has developed a policy, had a policy, or has a new policy that will encourage one industry versus another industry. And so people take advantage of it. Don't think of almost any company. They're probably going to take advantage of something the government has done to make it possible for them to do what they've done. The government has incentives in one type of another, or it does certain things that are politically popular, and you might want to take advantage of it. So government has a gigantic impact on what you do in the business world. And I think it was a mistake for some of the technology companies to ignore Washington early on. Now they are spending a lot of time here because they realize government can really affect their business and maybe for the better, take Amazon as an example. Amazon's biggest profits really are not from selling books over the internet or anything over the internet. It's from AWS. That's where the biggest margins are. People recognize they were a leader in this when the”

    2022-03-29 · Invest Like the Best · David Rubenstein - Life, Leadership, and LBOs - [Invest Like the Best, EP. 270] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  3. “Branding Carl, we were obviously well known for being in Washington, so therefore people thought we understood government better than people elsewhere. And so very often, and when I was meeting investors, I would explain to them what's going on in Washington. People were fascinating all over the world about what is going on in Washington, D.C. So I would often talk about that, and I could talk about president's policies or politics reasonably well. So people were interested in that. People also thought our brand was that we were not at the cutting edge of doing the most chaotic things, but we're pretty cautious and careful and we had a pretty respectable track record and that we basically were people that didn't have our egos out of control. We didn't come from Wall Street. We weren't really focused on fees that much. We're focused on good investment returns. And the combination of all these things, plus working very hard to develop investor relationships all over the world, paid dividends at some point.”

    2022-03-29 · Invest Like the Best · David Rubenstein - Life, Leadership, and LBOs - [Invest Like the Best, EP. 270] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  4. “I heard about all this about two years into Amazon's existence. I flew out to meet Jeff and said, look, I think we would take some startup capital now because you're going to do well. And I think we now made a mistake. Can we get our 20%? And he said, well, I don't really need you so much anymore because a company is now two years old. But I'll give you 1% of the company in return for tearing up the deal we have. Thank you for helping me get off the ground. So we took that 1% and we ultimately sold it at the IPO. It was stupid, but we did.”

    2022-03-29 · Invest Like the Best · David Rubenstein - Life, Leadership, and LBOs - [Invest Like the Best, EP. 270] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  5. “We did what happened was Baker and Taylor was a company we own, which is the second largest book distributor in the United States, not a very profitable company, never had been, but it was kind of a break-even. And apparently Jeff Bezos went to Baker and Taylor and asked if he could rent their bibliography of books in print because he was going to sell books over the internet. And I didn't really hear about it at the beginning, but our guy later told me that he offered, I think, was 20% of the company in return for using the bibliography. And our guy said, no, we want cash. We ultimately agreed to $100,000 a year for five years.”

    2022-03-29 · Invest Like the Best · David Rubenstein - Life, Leadership, and LBOs - [Invest Like the Best, EP. 270] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  6. “Capital fund, a venture fund, a real estate fund, a debt fund, and have multiple funds and then take advantage of that by building up my back office so I could centralize the administrative and use it for all the various funds and then get people to buy into the brand name of Carlisle and then if they were happy with fund one, they would go into fund two and fund three and so forth in different areas. And then I decided to globalize it by doing something that had not been done before. Go to Europe, go to Asia, go to Japan, Middle East, and build teams in these places so we would have a global thing. And then, of course, the track record was good. My partners were responsible for investing the money more than I was. And so the track record was good. And so that was a combination of it, but also willingness to work hard and then not trying to make enemies. And we always put our investors first. Jeff Bezos is famous for saying, put your customers first. That's always the most important thing. And we infected that. We always would put the investors first. If we made a mistake, we try to make it up to the investors in the early days. We could basically say.”

    2022-03-29 · Invest Like the Best · David Rubenstein - Life, Leadership, and LBOs - [Invest Like the Best, EP. 270] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  7. “We were based in Washington, DC. And by being based in Washington, we were out of the gunfire of people in New York who would have said, you don't have investment banking background, you're not qualified. Secondly, by being based in Washington, I could recruit people who wanted to stay in Washington or be connected to somebody in Washington. So Jim Baker, Frank Carlucci, George Herbert Walker Bush, Dick Darman, Arthur Levin. There are people that were in Washington and are connected to Washington. So I had an advantage and I could get people that people in New York might not have otherwise hired or thought of hiring. Third, I came up with an idea was kind of my idea that sort of worked, which is to say this, when private equity firms started, they were mom and pop firms. You had one fund and a small amount of people and they might have a fair amount of money, but not that many people. KKR did the RJRD on 1989. They only had seven or eight investment professionals. And that was the biggest buyout of all time at about $24 billion. I decided what I would do is I'd have a buyout fund. But after I had that, I would go raise a growth.”

    2022-03-29 · Invest Like the Best · David Rubenstein - Life, Leadership, and LBOs - [Invest Like the Best, EP. 270] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  8. “Well, I tried to focus on what I knew best. I mean, the way Bill Carlisle, I didn't really have the investment skills as a background. I didn't go to business school. I was a lawyer. So I brought in people that actually knew what they were doing about investing. And so I let them take care of that. And I decided to figure out what was my comparative advantage. And it was that I was willing to go on the road and raise money and ask people for money, which you have to do if you're going to be in the investment business. I was willing to go recruit people. I was pretty good at convincing people to join us. And I came up with a strategy of building out a global firm in the way we did it. So I was really focused on what I knew how to do better. And then I deferred to my partners in their area. So I would rarely say this deal you guys want to do, it's terrible. I'm against it. I'm going to block it. I didn't usually do that. I would give him my questions and my concerns, but I wouldn't try to block it just so they wouldn't try to block what I was trying to do. And it kind of worked out.”

    2022-03-29 · Invest Like the Best · David Rubenstein - Life, Leadership, and LBOs - [Invest Like the Best, EP. 270] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  9. “Humorous moment, I try to intersperse humor. And one of my techniques, you may have observed, is I'd like to use humor a bit because I think humor relaxes people. It makes audiences feel better. So I'm not a Mike Wallace, 60 minutes kind of person. I never try to embarrass anybody. I never try to do anything other than make them feel good. And the people that I interviewed generally feel good about it. And so that's my style. Now, you can criticize me by saying you shouldn't give the questions in advance. A serious journalist wouldn't do that. I'm not a serious journalist. You should say you should ask tougher questions and be meaner to these people. Okay, people can do that. That's just not my style. I do what I'm comfortable with and people seem to like it.”

    2022-03-29 · Invest Like the Best · David Rubenstein - Life, Leadership, and LBOs - [Invest Like the Best, EP. 270] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  10. “My style is this here's what I do. It's not a secret, everybody has their own style, you have yours, I have mine. What I do is I do as much research as I can and then I put it in my brain and I sit down and I type up what I would like to have as the questions. Introductory things to kind of have grand overspanning arching questions, then go through the trajectory of the person's life and then have some overall larger questions. And then I send a question to the person. I do that. They're asking me sometimes, but I like to do it because I want to make sure they realize I'm not trying to embarrass them. I'm not 60 minutes in the old days and trying to embarrass people. I'm just trying to have a nice, light, reasonably intelligent conversation. When I have the conversation, I don't use those notes. I kind of memorize them because I wrote them. So I know about 80, 90% of it. And then I start through the interviews. And then I listen to the people. And then as they depart from what I think they're going to say or they say something, I think they're going to say, but I think there might be a.”

    2022-03-29 · Invest Like the Best · David Rubenstein - Life, Leadership, and LBOs - [Invest Like the Best, EP. 270] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  11. “Maybe you've had this. Somebody wants a background check. The FBI will typically have a checklist of 12 questions. You could say in response to question number three, the person's actually an axe murderer, and I know where they bury the bodies. They're just going to question number four. They don't listen to what you say. They just go on the next thing. They get their checklist done. So you have to listen and then play off of what the person's saying. And that makes the interview more effective”

    2022-03-29 · Invest Like the Best · David Rubenstein - Life, Leadership, and LBOs - [Invest Like the Best, EP. 270] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  12. “I've known a little bit because when I became the chairman of the Kenny Center, we gave her Kenny Center honor that first year, and I kind of met her. And I remember the story my mother had told me, I'm from Baltimore. And when I went off to college, my mother would tell me that we have a great newscaster in Baltimore now, Oprah Winfrey. I said, really? And she said, yeah. And she's going to go somewhere nationwide. She's too big for Baltimore. I said, no Baltimore newscaster's ever gone nationwide, so I don't think so. Later, I told Oprah that story when she became the Kenny Center Honors. Oprah said to me when I interviewed her, look, I'm not a great interviewer, she said about herself, but I'm a good listener, really good listener. And she's right. To be a good interviewer, you have to listen to what the person says and then play off of it. When the FBI comes by and does a background interview.”

    2022-03-29 · Invest Like the Best · David Rubenstein - Life, Leadership, and LBOs - [Invest Like the Best, EP. 270] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  13. “when occasion occurs, take President Zelensky of Ukraine. He would have been seen as a comedian who happened to get elected by accident as the president of Ukraine had this war not come along. Now he's going to go down and certainly today's period of time as one of the great heroic leaders of our age because he stood up to the Russian machine.”

    2022-03-29 · Invest Like the Best · David Rubenstein - Life, Leadership, and LBOs - [Invest Like the Best, EP. 270] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  14. “You don't have to be Martin Luther King, but you have to be able to speak in a very effective way so you can get people to follow you, or you have to be able to write an effective way. You don't have to be Thomas Jefferson, but you have to write in a way that people will read what you say and then they'll follow you. Or you lead by example. Those are important things. You've got to get followers and you know how to communicate with them. You have to share the credit. Obviously there's some leaders that tell everybody how great they are, but they're not the leaders you want to admire. The ones that share the credit. Turns out a lot of business stars, superstars, had partners when they started these companies. They didn't really do it by themselves. Sometimes they share the credit, sometimes they don't. And then also, I think great leaders are people that rise the occasion. If you're in a business and your business about to go bankrupt and you rise the occasion and you survive and make it turn around, that's great. Or if you are in a war, we probably never would have heard of Abraham Lincoln if the Civil War hadn't arisen or FDR would have been seen as a modestly competent person if World War II hadn't arisen.”

    2022-03-29 · Invest Like the Best · David Rubenstein - Life, Leadership, and LBOs - [Invest Like the Best, EP. 270] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  15. “Number one, have a vision of what you want to do. In other words, you can't just sit around your office, say, I don't really want to do anything, and all of a sudden you're going to be a leader. You have to say, I want to do something, accomplish something, have a vision. Bill Gates had a vision. Steve Jobs had a vision. And so whatever it is. Second, you've got to persist. Because whatever you say you want to do, there'll be inevitable resistance to it because it was such a great idea. Somebody would have done it already. So you've got to persist because people are going to tell you no. And then at some point in your career as you're persisting or maybe before you started this new idea, you have to fail. You have to learn what it means to be a failure. I've met a few people in life who were so charming and so good looking and so wonderful that they never failed at anything. And then when they got later in life and they ran a challenge, they didn't know how to deal with it. You have to learn how to fail. Failing earlier is better than failing later. You also have to know how to communicate with people. How do you actually persuade anybody to follow you? You have to be able to be an oral communicator.”

    2022-03-29 · Invest Like the Best · David Rubenstein - Life, Leadership, and LBOs - [Invest Like the Best, EP. 270] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  16. “Actually, challenging to get ready to prepare to interview them because I have to read about them and get my mindset ready to do the interview.”

    2022-03-29 · Invest Like the Best · David Rubenstein - Life, Leadership, and LBOs - [Invest Like the Best, EP. 270] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  17. “When I was a little boy, I looked up to John Kennedy. He was president of the United States. I was in awe of him. When I went to work in the White House, I was only 27 years old. And the president of the United States' office is not that far from mine. And so I guess I was in awe of him. There are many people that I have met over the years who I've been extraordinarily impressed with. And when you meet people that are famous and you get to see them up close, you kind of say, okay, they put their pants on one leg at a time if they're a male or something like that. And you realize everybody has their own story. Everybody is, with some exceptions, a reasonably likable person you can have a conversation with. So for example, this weekend, I did an interview from my TV show of somebody I'd never met before, really. I was always intrigued by him. Sylvester Stallone. Now, here's a guy that started Rocky and he's Rambo and great dialogue with him about all that stuff. So I'm always looking at interesting people that I can interview. And earlier this week, I also interviewed Lionel Ritchie, who I'd never had a chance to interview before. I find it intellectual.”

    2022-03-29 · Invest Like the Best · David Rubenstein - Life, Leadership, and LBOs - [Invest Like the Best, EP. 270] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  18. “Why should we want to have leaders? Why not have everybody a follower? Well, the 7.5 billion people, everybody was a follower and nobody was a leader. You wouldn't get as much done. Leaders are the ones in business, in politics, in engineering, in entrepreneurship who really make the world a better place, I think, because they take people where they maybe want them to go. So I am interested in leadership. And on my audiobooks, what I do is this I tape record my interviews when we do an audiobook we actually use the actual voice of the person. Very often audiobooks you have professional readers who read what was in the book. I don't do that. I have my voice and the interviewees voice. So if you want to listen to the audiobook, you actually hear what the person said as they said it.”

    2022-03-29 · Invest Like the Best · David Rubenstein - Life, Leadership, and LBOs - [Invest Like the Best, EP. 270] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  19. “So let's take whoever was first near class, president of student government, and tapped in the football team. What happened, those people? Well, I've often gone back and tried to find out these things because surprisingly, it's very rare to have somebody be a great student leader, a great person in the middle part of their career, and then in the latter part of their career, they're still a great leader. That happens occasionally, but rarely. I've gone back, in fact, in my high school, I went to large public high school, and there were 1,500, 1,500 people in my class. And there was only one person who got in the Harvard. He was student body president, all American, all state lacrosse player, good looking guy, everything you want. And then what happened to him? He went to Harvard and apparently dropped out. He now is selling, I think, Tai Chi exercises for $125 an hour somewhere in upstate New York. But somebody who was nothing in high school, I was barely anything. You know, I got luckier in life. So you never know what's going to happen. And I am interested in leadership because I'm interested in what makes people a leader.”

    2022-03-29 · Invest Like the Best · David Rubenstein - Life, Leadership, and LBOs - [Invest Like the Best, EP. 270] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  20. “When you were in grade school, there was somebody that was probably the principal or the teacher's favorite or he or she was the best athlete or the best student. And you always say, why is this person the leader? I guess I always in the same situation. Why is this person the leader? What are their skill sets? How do they get this way? How do they become a leader? And so I'm always looking up to people and saying, how did they become a leader when I was not so much of a leader? And gradually, as people more and more began to see me more of a leader, I began to say as I got older, I wasn't such a great leader earlier, how come I became a leader now? And I have a tortoise and hair theory that if you're really a hare and you're great in high school, you might peter out and you might say, I don't need to work so hard. You take back your grade school or your high school. I don't know whether you were first in your class or not.”

    2022-03-29 · Invest Like the Best · David Rubenstein - Life, Leadership, and LBOs - [Invest Like the Best, EP. 270] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  21. “I generally ask people questions that I'm seriously interested in, but I don't try to get in arguments with them and say, okay, tell me what you know. And by the way, you're wrong. I listen to them and try to learn. I give them my points of view, but I don't try to get no arguments and tell them that they're wrong or they don't know what they're doing. I try to get as much information from them so that I can learn more. Maybe that's it. I have a way of asking people questions, as you do, that lets people talk. In other words, as you probably know, being in good interviewer means that you let the interviewee be the star of the show. Don't be the star of the show if you're the interviewer. Some people who have been interviewers try to dominate the questioning and therefore they don't let the interviewee feel that he or she can really speak freely.”

    2022-03-29 · Invest Like the Best · David Rubenstein - Life, Leadership, and LBOs - [Invest Like the Best, EP. 270] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  22. “So, I think I probably always had that curiosity. And then I think I've always had an intellectual curiosity because I always want to know more. And so I'm always reading things. And just like you, you want to read as much as you can, learn about as much you can now because of the position I'm in, I can get some of the best leading people in any given sphere. I can ask them questions and I get access to them. And so I like to take advantage of it. Just as you on this podcast can get almost anybody you want to come on and you can ask them questions. I am in a similar position sometimes and I can ask people a lot of questions. I take advantage of it and get the best expert to tell me what's going on.”

    2022-03-29 · Invest Like the Best · David Rubenstein - Life, Leadership, and LBOs - [Invest Like the Best, EP. 270] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  23. “When I was growing up, there's a Yiddish word. The Yiddish word is called Yenta. Yenta is a busybody who wants to know everything. And I think my mother always would say when we have guests coming to our house, my mother would say, don't ask them all the questions all the time. You're being a Yiddish none of your business.”

    2022-03-29 · Invest Like the Best · David Rubenstein - Life, Leadership, and LBOs - [Invest Like the Best, EP. 270] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  24. “It's a self fulfilling thing. If you think there's inflation and you read there's inflation, then you all of a sudden you. To act like disinflation. So, yes, it does have that impact. But when you go to the gasoline pump and see that gasoline is now 458 a gallon or $5 or $4, you see it every day right in front of you. So it does make you think differently about inflation for some time. For 25 years, our inflation rate's been more or less 2% or less. And we couldn't get inflation. We couldn't buy inflation. We thought if we wanted more inflation, we couldn't get it. Now we don't have that problem. But now it's getting the point where people are nervous about it, and that will have an impact on the way everything is priced in this economy.”

    2022-03-29 · Invest Like the Best · David Rubenstein - Life, Leadership, and LBOs - [Invest Like the Best, EP. 270] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  25. “That yes, I will pay more for this product at McDonald's, or yes, I will pay more for this show that I have to go see, or I want to go see. It builds into the system. Paul Volcker used to say that once inflation gets into the system, it's very, very difficult to get out of it. We're talking about now, for example, the inflation rate, let's say right now, month over month, last month, it was close to 8%. The Fed is going to increase interest rates on Wednesday by 25 basis points. But that is a drop in the bucket compared to what Paul Volcker did. Paul Volcker increased interest rates by 200 basis points in one weekend and obviously had some deleterious effects on the global economy and on our own economy. I don't suggest that we should do something like that. And I think the Fed is doing the right thing, but you should recognize that as we do begin to increase interest rates, it will slow down the economy. And when you have inflation and high interest rates, that's not a good combination.”

    2022-03-29 · Invest Like the Best · David Rubenstein - Life, Leadership, and LBOs - [Invest Like the Best, EP. 270] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  26. “Inflation is coming back for the first time, and since I was in the White House, we had inflation in the mid-teens in those days. I think it's probably going to peak this year. The annual inflation rate this year when it's all said and done will probably be somewhere around 5%, 6%. It's obviously higher right now, but that's a bit of a temporary phenomenon because of what's going on in Russia. But by the end of the year, I think when you look back, we'll probably be maybe 5% or 6%. And so people who haven't had to ever worry about inflation are now beginning to do so. People will change their conduct. They may buy things in advance in greater quantities because they're afraid prices will go up, ask for higher salaries and wages because they think that their cost of living is going up. Businesses will have to respond to that. And the price of everything you buy day to day is probably going to go up. And when you find with inflation is that if somebody says, well, I have to increase prices because of inflation, people say, well, no, you don't have to. You don't really need to. People understand it. And therefore, you get a consensus.”

    2022-03-29 · Invest Like the Best · David Rubenstein - Life, Leadership, and LBOs - [Invest Like the Best, EP. 270] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  27. “Is going to try to be more insular and not be so dependent on supply chains all over the world and be so dependent on things that we can't control.”

    2022-03-29 · Invest Like the Best · David Rubenstein - Life, Leadership, and LBOs - [Invest Like the Best, EP. 270] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  28. “I also think that many people are going to look at whether the U.S. economy is now going to be needing some stimulus in some ways. We're increasing interest rates. The Fed will this week increase interest rates for the first time in quite some time. How much more can they increase and not hurt the U.S. economy? Because the U.S. economy stalled a little bit. It was growing back after COVID, but now it's going to be stalling a little bit because of Russia. Let me give you an example. Right now, it's very difficult to do certain things, even though politically the world is united. You can't have overflights over Russia. So if you're an American airline and you want to fly from Europe to China, you can't do that right now. If you want to ship certain things from some parts of the world, you're going to have a hard time going across certain borders. It'll have some impact on our economy for sure. And we've now also learned how interrelated the global economy really is in the last couple of years through COVID and this. And now increasingly, I think the U.S.”

    2022-03-29 · Invest Like the Best · David Rubenstein - Life, Leadership, and LBOs - [Invest Like the Best, EP. 270] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  29. “In this world, we've done something that was good, you might argue, depending on your point of view. We've tried for years to get NATO to be stronger militarily and NATO to be more united. Putin managed to do that. He united into NATO in a way that no president's been able to do it. He's gotten the Germans increase their defense spending in ways that nobody else has been able to do it. So in that sense, there's been a positive, which is to say, assuming they keep with it, you've got NATO and the United States more closely aligned before. And we've now shown that the world can move quickly to isolate somebody in a way we've never seen before. No country as so big as Russia has ever been so isolated from the world economically and financially as we've now seen. So in that case, we've learned a lot in terms of the impact on the U.S. economy, though, whatever the outcome is, and let's assume there's some outcome negotiated in the next couple of weeks or so, clearly the U.S. will be involved in some kind of help to rebuild Ukraine, it'd be my guess along with other people.”

    2022-03-29 · Invest Like the Best · David Rubenstein - Life, Leadership, and LBOs - [Invest Like the Best, EP. 270] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  30. “So now, for the first time, countries are saying, wait a second, maybe my money isn't secure. Suppose you're Chin You're saying, well, maybe we do want to look at Taiwan, or maybe we do want to do something. They have $2 billion in U.S. Treasury bills. Trillion dollars. So, are they going to look at those $2 trillion as being safe and they can get it anytime they want?”

    2022-03-29 · Invest Like the Best · David Rubenstein - Life, Leadership, and LBOs - [Invest Like the Best, EP. 270] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  31. “Article 5 of the NATO agreement, we'd all require to go in and fight. But we never have had a war against a nuclear power, a physical war in this way. So how do you deal with all that? Nobody really knows. Another thing that's very important is this. If you put your money in a bank, you assume certainly since the FDIC came along that your money is going to be good, at least to the amount of money you put in, and nobody believes that the banks of the United States are going to be completely collapsing or that you won't get your money back. The countries had the same view. So Russia took two-thirds of its foreign reserves and put it in. Banks in the United States and around the world. Well, now that money's frozen, so they don't have that money.”

    2022-03-29 · Invest Like the Best · David Rubenstein - Life, Leadership, and LBOs - [Invest Like the Best, EP. 270] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  32. “Has changed everything in this respect. It's always dangerous to say this time is different or this is the most important thing that's happened since whatever. That's always dangerous and people like to always make it sound like they're living through the greatest tragedy or greatest triumph of all time. The truth is, the reason this is very important is this. One, this is the first time since the Cold War. Where you've had a chance where Russia and the US and Russia and NATO countries could militarily be in a conflict, we're coming very close to that. I mean, Russia bombed something just a few miles from Poland the other day. And they do something in Poland. If they were to bomb Poland by accident, or maybe not by accident”

    2022-03-29 · Invest Like the Best · David Rubenstein - Life, Leadership, and LBOs - [Invest Like the Best, EP. 270] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  33. “Or an off ramp. In other words, he's not going to conquer Ukraine almost certainly. And he certainly can't hold Ukraine, even if he could conquer it. So he now realizes this is not what he once thought. And his economy is collapsing. Whether it will collapse before Ukraine is beaten to a pope, not clear, he's clearly using higher level weapons than he was before, and he's trying to gain other people's support, getting mercenaries to come in, getting China to try to come in to support him with military equipment. My own view is that within the next two weeks or so, some kind of truce is likely to occur because I think the Russian economy is collapsing so quickly that I think he's afraid that he will not be able to sustain what he's doing much longer. And I think he'd want to make sure he can control the Russia and not lose control of Russia. So I think he'll work out some deal. But I don't know that the deal will be one that is so wonderful from what he thought he was going to get.”

    2022-03-29 · Invest Like the Best · David Rubenstein - Life, Leadership, and LBOs - [Invest Like the Best, EP. 270] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  34. “Well, thank you very much for inviting me. I'm honored to be on your show. Russia, Ukraine is something that's top of mind for me because as the global economy is beginning to recover or was beginning to recover from COVID, we now find ourselves in a free fall a bit in terms of the global economy. We're seeing a dramatic decline in obviously the Russian economy and obviously the Ukrainian economy, but it's spilling over in the European economy and to some extent in the US economy. And so until that issue is resolved, I don't think we're going to really know how the global economy is going to perform over the next year or so. My own view is that Putin made a miscalculation. Obviously, he thought this would be a walk in the park, and it turned out not to be. And as a result, he now is scrambling, in my view, to negotiate the best possible position for himself from which to negotiate an exit.”

    2022-03-29 · Invest Like the Best · David Rubenstein - Life, Leadership, and LBOs - [Invest Like the Best, EP. 270] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  35. “Opinions expressed by Patrick and podcast guests are solely their own opinions and do not reflect the opinion of O'Shaughnessy Asset Management.”

    2022-03-29 · Invest Like the Best · David Rubenstein - Life, Leadership, and LBOs - [Invest Like the Best, EP. 270] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source