HIGHLIGHTS: David Rubenstein

0:01Hi everybody, tune in to this short version of the podcast which we do every Friday. For the long version, tune in on Wednesdays. Hi, everybody, and welcome to In Good Company. And today I'm here with David Rubenstein. David is the founder and chairman of the Carlyle Group, one of the biggest private equity firms. And he also hosts the David Rubenstein Show, where he interviews prominent leaders in business and so on. And earlier this year, I had the pleasure of being on your show. So this is like revenge time, actually, David. Well, thank you for inviting me. And you were great on my show. And anytime you want to come back, please let me know.

0:35You were an advisor in the White House at age 27, and now you're here. Just what are the highlights in your life since then? I mean, briefly. Well, briefly, I came from very modest stock. My parents were not graduates of college or high school. They both dropped out of high school. They were married young. I was their only child. So I grew up in a blue-collar setting. And so if you grow up in that setting, you have to make it on your own. So there's a plus about that. My own children have had some advantages that I didn't have. But I was only interested in politics and government at the time when I was young.

1:12I had no interest in making money. In the days of the 1960s or so, there were no hedge funds, private equity funds, tech startups. There were no billionaires. And you didn't aspire to be a billionaire. And my family was Jewish. If you were Jewish and you wanted to go into business, you wanted your family's business. The family might have a business. If you didn't have a family business, you became a lawyer, a doctor, a dentist. and that's what your mother, my mother, aspired me to be. It was the doctor. And you became a lawyer. I became a lawyer because I wasn't that good in sciences and I thought I was interested in politics and being a lawyer, you could go into politics and my role model was John Kennedy's advisor.

1:46John Kennedy was a charismatic person, became president of the United States at 43 but his role model, his advisor and my role model was a guy named Ted Sorensen who had been his speechwriter and great intellectual blood bank at the year 31. So at 31, Ted Sorensen was writing the inaugural address and every other great speech that Kennedy gave. And I thought, I'm not a charismatic figure. I don't have any money, but I could be like Ted Sorensen. So I attached to myself. And you became a Ted Sorensen in his 27. Well, I did. In effect, I wasn't as prominent as he had become because he was more senior.

2:17But at 27, I did become a deputy domestic policy advisor to President of the United States. I wasn't qualified for the job. But White House staffs are often filled with people who aren't qualified. So I got the job. Right. But unfortunately, I got inflation to 18 or 19%. So, you know, I didn't last. Carla didn't get reelected. Now, you have interviewed many of the best investors in the world. And just coming back to that, what you say here is that many of them come from middle class background, just like you did. Why is that? Well, I think people that grow up in very wealthy families may not have quite the hunger and the drive to put yourself through the torture you have to do to learn how to be a really good investor.

2:57And investing is a very tortuous business because you're going to be wrong a lot of times. And so I think a lot of people who are really great investors came from middle class backgrounds. They tend to have these things in common. They're pretty good in math generally, not maybe a math superstar, but pretty good in math and arithmetic. They have a certain degree of humility because when you're trading or you're investing, you're going to lose money a fair bit. You have to get used to that. They also have the ability to make a decision to get out of something relatively shortly after they find out it's not going right.

3:25In other words, some people have egos that are so big, they say, this position is right, the market's wrong. If you have that position all the time, you're probably going to be wrong a lot because the market's going to go against you. So really good investors say, look, I made a mistake. I'm getting out of this position. Also, you have to know how to get along with people. And I think a lot of investors who are really good get along with other people. You have to motivate people to want to work for you. You have to motivate people to want to tell you information. And so I think getting along with people is a pretty good skill.

3:51Do you think rich people are less good at getting along with people? Well, the richer you get, I think the bigger your ego usually gets. Obviously, not always the case for some humble people. Warren Buffett is pretty humble, but also very wealthy. But it's a general rule of thumb. If you want to find people that are low ego, don't look for the richest people in the United States or the richest people in the world. Because when you get a lot of money, and I mean money, but being worth$100 billion or more, you're generally going to say, look, I'm pretty smart, and I'm smarter than the average person, and your ego tends to get bigger.

4:21Why does a good investor have to go against conventional wisdom? Well, conventional wisdom, if you did what conventional wisdom would be, you're doing what everybody else is doing. So if you do everything everybody else is doing, how are you going to be ahead of the pack? So you have to do something that conventional wisdom says is not the right thing to do. And so the best investments generally are against conventional wisdom. Of course, the conventional wisdom is when the market goes up, what do people do? They jump in. When the market's going down, what do they do? They jump out. Why is it so difficult?

4:48Why is it so difficult to go against conventionalism? Because generally, people want to be liked by other people, respected by other people. And if you tell people you're doing something nobody else thinks is a good idea, they're going to tell you're stupid, and nobody likes to be told you're stupid. You kept in touch with all the American presidents since you were 27 years old. So for 50 years, what's the key to keeping in touch with the presidents? I know some presidents better than others. And, you know, I enjoy it, I guess, because I've always admired the presidency and wanted to be around it.

5:21That's why I worked in the White House. So I've had a special interest in knowing presidents and maybe hanging around the White House or doing things that preserve American history and particularly White House history. What do presidents have in common? Presidents have in common ambition. There are some presidents who became presidents without ambition to be so. Calvin Coolidge, a long time ago, really didn't really want to be president. But generally, remember, to be president of the United States, you have to put yourself through a hellacious process for roughly two years or so to kind of go from a primary, work your way up, win the primaries and the general election.

5:53It's a very complicated process. And you have to say, why do they want to do that? Because they want to, they're ambitious. This is their profession, politics. The top of the profession is the presidency. But think about it. John Kennedy was assassinated. Lyndon Johnson, driven out of office. Richard Nixon, driven out of office. Gerald Ford couldn't get reelected. Jeremy Carter couldn't get reelected. Ronald Reagan almost was assassinated. George Herbert Walker Bush couldn't get reelected. And so you say yourself, why do these people want this thing? You might be getting assassinated or maybe assassinated or you have a scandal or you're almost impeached.

6:26I mean, Donald Trump was impeached twice. Bill Clinton was impeached once. So why do people want this job where it's so difficult? That's because at the top of the totem pole in the politics world is being president. And so people want to be at the top. Your humor is more English than American, right? I have what people call a dry sense of humor. And also it strikes me because you're a pinstripe, so it's a bit English, the whole thing, right? I have a dry sense of humor. Where does that come from? You know, it may be a self-deprecating style. I'm not quite sure, but I'll give you an example. I interviewed Bill Gates one time.

7:01And I've known Bill for a while, but I wouldn't say I'm that close to him. I interviewed him one time for my Bloomberg show. I think it was maybe one of the first ones I was doing. And I went to his personal office. And I said to Bill, tell me this. If you had a college degree, you think you could have been more successful in life? Well, it went right over his head. He gave a serious answer. When I gave that question to him another time I interviewed him in front of an audience, the audience laughed. And then he got the picture that it was a humorous thing. So sometimes people don't have senses of humor.

7:34And if you ask them a dry sense of humor kind of question, they won't get it. But, you know, Jeff Bezos, I interviewed him in front of a large audience. And I asked him humorous questions. He got the point. But I like interviewing people in front of an audience. And the reason I like to do it is because the audience reaction is something I can play off. If people laugh, that's good. And it also loosens up the person you're interviewing, I've found. And also, I like to make people happy. and when I'm interviewing people, I can make people enjoy it because I tend to use a fair amount of humor and by the humor, people kind of, they might not remember the substance of things, but they always come up to me and say, that was a funny thing or that was a funny line and I just have a good sense of how to do that, I guess.

8:21Let's talk a bit about values. Why is humility an important virtue? Well, I value humility because I think that arrogance, the opposite of humility, is something that is not an endearing trait. And to me, the leaders that I most admire are people that are humble. Abraham Lincoln won the Civil War. Can you imagine Abraham Lincoln walking around the White House saying, hey, just won the Civil War. Yeah, pretty impressive, aren't I? Or can you see him signing the executive, to the executive order that outlawed slavery, the Emancipation Proclamation, and holding it up and going like this so everybody could see Abraham Lincoln?

8:56You can't picture that. He was a humble man. and I think humility is a real virtue. Now, there is false humility, of course. People pretend they're humble, but then they tell you how great they are. But I think humility is something that is a good virtue to have and I try to be as humble as I can. I'm not trying to brag about myself unduly, but obviously I'm not perfect in this regard. I put my name on buildings. If I put up money for a university building, I put my name on it. And the reason I do that is I try to show people, and particularly in Washington, D.C., where my name is on something, that somebody who can come from a poor background can rise up and they can do something useful for the country or university by giving money that helps other people, presumably.

9:35And so that's why I often put my name on buildings if I've given money to help a building get off the ground. You talk a lot about history and you have a lot of historical references. Why are you so interested in history? My view is that history is something that teaches you about the mistakes of the past. And the theory behind studying history is that if you learn about the past, you learn about the good things that you should do in the future and the bad things you should avoid. And so I think it's very important for people to have a sense of history. And I think presidents of the United States particularly should have a sense of history too, or leaders of organizations, because, you know, people have made mistakes over the years.

10:09And if you're going to make the same mistakes, you can avoid them if you learn about history a bit more.