Entrepreneurship, the American Presidency, and Baseball with David Rubenstein

25:28Is it safe to say this is the single most difficult job in the world? Well, other than the job of doing interviewing, as you and I are doing. I'm going to let you in on a little secret. I think you and I have the best gigs in all of finance. You find this difficult? I don't. No, it's fine. I'm just being facetious. I would say the presidency is often said to be the hardest job in the world. And so it does have enormous amount of difficulties to it because everything you do affects everybody in the world. If a president makes a decision, it's going to affect people all over the world almost all the time.

26:03So it's a tough decision. If you tell people who become president, they age. They age a lot. when you look at somebody who's been in there for four years or eight years, you see what they look like at the end and what they looked like in the beginning. You kind of realize how it can really aid you. And the reason is the toughest decisions get resolved only by the president. If it's not that tough, it'll get resolved at a lower level. When it comes to a president making the final decision, it's usually a very difficult decision. So you do a poll in the book on the best and worst presidents in U.S.

26:32history. What motivated that poll, and what surprised you in those results? I had a poll commissioned to just figure out who people thought were the best presidents, who were the worst presidents, what are the qualities you want. And not surprisingly, the poll said that Abraham Lincoln was probably the best president, George Washington maybe the second best. But in some respects, more modern presidents have very high ratings as well. President Kennedy is extremely highly regarded today, even though, interestingly, only 70 % of Americans, it's hard for you and I to believe we were alive when President Kennedy was alive, only 70 % of Americans, well, only 30 % of Americans were alive when President Kennedy was alive.

27:1370 % of Americans don't know anything about him, or very little about him, because they weren't alive when he was president. I'm the chairman of the Kennedy Center in Washington, and we built an exhibition recently to show people who President Kennedy was and what he's done. What I think overall, what I'm trying to do with the book is say to people, have a civic responsibility and learn your presidential candidates. Be informed. Learn about their personalities, their characteristics, their programs, and then make a decision to vote. In this country, we have pretty much the lowest percentage of people in Western democracies who are actually voting.

27:48So in some countries, maybe they give financial incentives to vote, but you get 90%, 95 % of the people or more voting in a major election. Here we get maybe two-thirds in a presidential election. In non-presidential election years, we sometimes can get mayors elected in, let's say, New York City or someplace else with 20 percent of the vote. You know, it's kind of fascinating. I always wondered, is that a function of a dysfunctional democracy, or is it a function of an economy that's so robust that people almost don't care? Hey, we're so wealthy as a nation, whoever's president is almost irrelevant.

28:22There are many different reasons why people don't vote. Some people have a theory that people are generally happy with where the situation is, and they think the outcome is likely predictable, and so why would they make a difference by voting? Some people can't really vote easily because you have to wait in lines if you don't vote early. Sometimes people don't have the ability to wait in lines. Sometimes people don't know much about voting in advance or doing the ability to get a ballot in advance. There are many different reasons, but I think it's unfortunate that people don't vote, and I really encourage people to vote.

28:52and whatever your decision is, vote and just make the democracy stronger. If you have 95 % of the people voting who are eligible to vote, more likely than not that government is going to be empowered to really do much more than we do if only 60 % voted. You know, you look in Europe and many other democracies, Election Day is a national holiday. The stock market's closed. The banks are closed. People in schools are closed. It encourages people to go out and vote. Is that something we should be thinking about here? We should look at things like that. For example, people have suggested we allow people to vote on Sundays or basically make Election Day Sunday.

29:27Now, for religious reasons, people don't like that in some cases. But having it as a national holiday wouldn't be a bad idea. Now, with advanced voting or early voting, we've mitigated that problem to some extent. But making it a national holiday, we have a lot of national holidays. Adding one more probably wouldn't be the worst thing in the world. So let's get back to the highest calling, to the book. One of the things that really struck me were the last two chapters on Trump and on Biden. Those two chapters felt very different to me than the rest of the book. And I don't know if it was the conversation or just because it's so present and current and fresh, but they felt qualitatively different than me.

30:08It's also, as you're reading it, the things that are being discussed are just so fresh and vivid in my recollection. But I found those two chapters to be really intriguing. Both journalists you interviewed and both subject matters really fascinating. Well, Maggie Haberman is a New York Times reporter who covered President Trump when he was at the White House. She also covered him before he became president. Like many books about the Trump administration, her book called Confidence Man was not probably that favorable. Franklin Ford is a journalist at The Atlantic, and he took the first two years of the Biden administration and wrote about it.

30:46And it was one of the best books that had been written so far about the Biden administration. So while I do have an interview with President Biden in the book, and I do know him reasonably well, I thought having a journalist's perspective would add something to the book. And Franklin Ford did a really good job in the first two years of the Biden administration. Obviously, it didn't cover the last two years of it, but the books about presidents probably are best read 20 or 30 years after the—or written, but probably best 20 or 30 years after the president served because you really get more data then.

31:15You have more information. But I think for a book that's really relatively contemporaneous with the president, Franklin Ford did a very good job describing Biden. It's just you have to bring your own perspectives to it. But I try to be as balanced as I can. And as I point out in the book, while I did work in the Carter White House, I do not give money to politicians. I make no political contributions. I don't advocate any candidate at any given time. So I'm as apolitical as probably you can realistically be. I also have, you know, because I chair the Kennedy Center and chair the Smithsonian, chair the Library of Congress Board, I felt that I should be best to be apolitical.

31:51So you interview Biden. You interview Trump. You interview George W. Bush. You interview Bill Clinton. both journalists you interviewed they seem very forthcoming it doesn't feel like they're hedging their words or being guarded some parts of the conversations with presidents it seems like they are very intimately aware that everything they say impacts their legacy sure um journalists their job is to penetrate the information uh that is available and kind of give it the perspective that they have and write as fully as they can about it. Presidents are more guarded. All politicians are more guarded.

32:35Some presidents don't have filters, but generally presidents have filters, and they say things that, you know, they're going to probably appeal to their constituents. There was a movie where Warren Beatty played a candidate named Bullfinch, I think it was. Oh, sure. And basically that candidate had no filter and was saying things you shouldn't say. You rarely get candidates getting to be the president of the United States without without some filter. Obviously, some candidates in recent years have been thought to be having not enough of a filter, but generally they have some kind of filter. Journalists don't have a filter as much because they're not basically trying to run for election and get votes.

33:08Do you find when you're talking to a president and you're past the 30 or 40 minute mark, their guard drops a little bit, you can get a little more to the core without that facade or media training getting in the way? Well, they're pretty experienced. If you interview Bill Clinton or George W. Bush, and I've done that several times, they're very experienced and they're not likely to say some things that are going to get them in trouble, I wouldn't think, because at this point they're so experienced and so used to doing interviews. But sometimes people say things off the record that you don't publish, but that you do get a better sense of them in that way.

33:46But off the record is something that people don't do as much anymore because nobody thinks anything's really off the record anymore. My sense of George W. Bush is that he wasn't, obviously Trump is the ultimate unfiltered president, but I never really got the sense that despite growing up in a political family, his father was first head of the CIA and then vice president and then president, he doesn't strike me as someone who was especially filtered. He doesn't reveal what he doesn't want to reveal, but it seems like there are broad areas he's very comfortable talking about. What was your experience like interviewing Bush?

34:24I've known the Bush family for quite some time. George Herbert Walker Bush joined my firm as an advisor after he left the presidency, so I got to know him and I got to know his son reasonably well. George Herbert Walker Bush and George W. Bush are really very different personalities. George Herbert Walker Bush grew up really in Connecticut. George W. Bush grew up in Texas. George W. Bush, I think reflects his mother's personality more than his father's. And his mother was very, had a sharp tongue, and she was fairly critical of certain things, and she would tell you what she would say, thought, without a filter.

34:55And George W. reflected that to some extent as well. As he became more experienced in politics, I think he had a little bit more of a filter. But still, he's willing to make fun of other people. He's willing to use humor in a way that I think is advantageous for him. And so I think the interview on the book is, it does reflect his personality. So you had the interview with Peter Baker about Obama. I would have loved to see your interview with Obama. How come that didn't come about? I did interview President Obama at a Carlisle event years ago, but it was not recorded, and it was right after he left the presidency.

35:30And just for space and other reasons, I couldn't get everybody in there and his scheduling problems and so forth. But I think that the Peter Baker book on Obama does reflect pretty well what Obama did as president. And he's another one that he seems very structured and controlled, but occasionally will tell you what he really thinks. Yes. President Obama is an extremely smart person, very intelligent, president of the Harvard Law Review. And early on, he decided to get into politics and not really become a lawyer or law professor, which he had the opportunity to do. I got to know him reasonably well when he was president of the United States.

36:10Very cerebral, a person who would like to, would read a 100-page memo and go through it quite well. He's a very, very talented writer, maybe the best writer who's been president since Woodrow Wilson. Wow, really interesting. So when you, the manuscript is locked, I don't know if people are aware, you know, when a hardcover comes out, It's months in advance. So in between the time this is locked and published, we had a pretty substantial shift in the political scene here. When you submitted this, you could take surveys of Republicans or Democrats. They were both unhappy with their presidential candidate.

36:47We've now had this massive change. In the paperback version that comes out in six months, what's the addendum you're going to do about the 2024 election? Well, when this went to the printer, it was really in June. And at that point, Biden and Trump were likely to be the nominees. As it was getting ready to be printed, all of a sudden, President Biden said, I'm not going to be the nominee. And as we now know, Vice President Harris is the nominee. So I did write an addendum to the book on the very back that does say, look what happened in just the three weeks after I submitted the manuscript until today, which is that you have a new person running for the Democratic presidency, you have President Trump was shot at, and then things like that have changed a great deal.

37:36So I did try to reflect that, but there's no doubt that when you're writing a book about the presidential situation and you're having the middle of a presidential election, things can change. And so even in the last week or so, things have changed from what we knew. I didn't have a chance to put the Tim Walz selection in their book either. So the book runs from George Washington to Biden. Let's talk a little bit about how the important roles of the president as both leader of the country and leader of their party has changed over that two and a half century era. How has the role of the president of the United States evolved in modern times?

38:17Okay, so initially when the president was the president, George Washington, it was not a global figure, really, and the United States was not a global country. Today, the United States president is the most important person in the Western world, for sure. He plays, or she will play, if she gets elected, a role where you are not only the head of the government, but the most important person in the political arena. You're also a global figure who are making decisions about war and peace from time to time. So it's an incredibly important job. It's hard to think that any one human can do it perfectly, and nobody really has done it perfectly.

38:54But it's a role that very few people would say that there's an equivalent anywhere else in the world. You've written that as a 12-year-old boy, you were deeply inspired by President Kennedy's inaugural address, particularly his call to public service. Tell us about that. Yes, I was young, and my sixth grade teacher went over that speech with us the day after it was given. And I recognized what he was saying is that people should give back to the country. He was not from a wealthy family. I didn't know what I wanted to do at 12 years old, but I thought serving in the government in some way would be a thing that would be a worthy goal.

39:32And so I ultimately did try to do that by working in the White House for President Carter. So that led to other things, and it led to the company that I created, Carlisle, after we left the government. And then that became successful, and I decided to devote a large part of my life now to philanthropy. So let's talk a little bit about some of the things you do, because it's really a fascinating arc of things. First, you're one of the original signers of the Giving Pledge. Tell us a little bit about that. Bill Gates, Melinda Gates, and Warren Buffett conceived of a pledge. It's informal. It's not binding in some ways, but it's basically an informal pledge that you would agree to give half of your net worth away during your lifetime or upon your death.

40:14And there were 40 of us who signed it initially. Now there are probably more than 200 have signed it, mostly from the United States, but there are some certainly from around the rest of the world. And it's a commitment that I've tried to honor. I have given away a fair amount of money in my lifetime to things that interestingly get more attention than others. So a large part of what I've done is medical research and universities and scholarships. The thing that has caught the most attention is what I've called patriotic philanthropy, which is to say giving money to remind people of the history and heritage of our country.

40:44So fixing the Washington Monument, fixing the Lincoln Memorial, fixing the Jefferson Memorial, fixing Mount Vernon, things like that, Monticello, Montpelier. I've been willing to kind of put up the money to help get these things restored on the theory that if they're restored, people will visit them. And if they visit them, more likely they'll learn more about presidents, more about our history and heritage. And I've done the same in trying to buy historic documents like the Magna Carta, Declaration of Independence, preserve them, have people see them, hopefully learn more about our country's history.

41:13So it's a fascinating phrase, patriotic philanthropy. How did you find your way into that space? It didn't seem, I remember when there was a problem with the Washington Monument and there was a call to raise capital to kind of repair it. It didn't seem that like very many people are spending time, efforts, and money repairing the great monuments of the United States. Well, many people think that the federal government has the responsibility to put up the money for that. So when I called the head of the Park Service and said, how long is it going to take to fix it and where are you going to get the money?

41:46He said, it's going to take a while getting the money from Congress. I said, forget that. I'll put up the money. Wait a second. I got to stop you right there. Which monument are we talking about? The Washington Monument. And that was not an insubstantial job. That was tens of millions, hundreds of millions of dollars? No, it wasn't that significant. What happened was the Washington Monument, which was opened around 1888 or so, they had earthquake damage in 2011. And so the head of the Park Service said he didn't know exactly what it would cost. I said, well, tell me what it would cost and I'll put up the money.

42:18And he ultimately said that maybe Congress would put up some money. But he was worried initially that Congress wouldn't move quickly enough, given the money when he needed it. So I decided to move quickly to do it. I've been surprised at how many people think about that because it was not the largest gift I've ever given by far. But it was a symbol. that the Washington Monument was a symbol of our country and that a private citizen would put up the money for it, kind of struck people as strange. Why wouldn't the federal government do it? And I've tried to do many things that the federal government could eventually do, but maybe they can't move quickly enough or they don't have the resources to do it in some cases or they can't allocate the resources.

42:52I've tried to buy historic documents for the same kind of reason. The federal government doesn't buy historic documents typically, but I think by preserving them, we give people a chance to see these documents and have them think much more about our history and heritage. And the reason that's important is Jefferson said that to have a representative democracy work, you need to have an informed citizenry. And very often we don't have as informed a citizenry as we should have. We don't teach civics in high school or junior high school as much as we used to. Americans don't pass civics tests very well at all.

43:23And as a result, we don't have people that actually know as much as I think they should know about our country, its history, and its heritage. So you buy a lot of these documents. How are they visible to the public? All my documents are on display. I put them on the Smithsonian or the National Archives or the Library of Congress or equivalent organization, National Constitution Center, so people can see them. And there will be obviously a curator to describe it in more detail. And the theory is that, well, if you could look at what's in the Declaration of Independence on a computer slide, you don't need to go see the original.

43:54But the human brain still works in a certain way. If you know you're going to see an original, you're probably going to read about it before you go there. When you go there, you're going to have a curator tell you about it. And afterwards, you'll probably read more about it. So the human brain still gets much more out of seeing an original, in my view, original building or an original document than just seeing something on a computer slide. So the documents that you have purchased and made available to the public, the Declaration of Independence, an original copy of the Constitution, did you say Magna Carta?

44:23Yes, I bought the only copy in private hands of the Magna Carta, and I put it on permanent loan to the National Archives. Besides those three, which are not insubstantial, any others worth mentioning? Well, the Bill of Rights. I recently bought a rare copy of the Bill of Rights and put that on display at the National Archives as well. I have the first printings of the Declaration of Independence, the first printings of the Constitution that were printed actually in newspapers at the time, and a lot of other historic documents like that. The 13th Amendment is also one that I have, which is the amendment that abolished slavery.

44:55Huh. Really, really quite fascinating. Let's talk about boards. You sit on a number of boards. You're chairman of the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, the Council on Foreign Relations, the National Gallery of Art, the Economic Club of Washington, the University of Chicago. That's a pretty busy schedule. What are you doing with these various boards in terms of helping them raise money and helping them do programming? Nonprofit boards are ones that are time-consuming, like for-profit boards, but there's no compensation. You do it because you really want to help the cause. I joined all these boards thinking I wanted to help in that particular cause or project, and I got elected chair in some cases to those boards.

45:37And I try as a chair to be a representative of the organization and to help them raise money. And obviously, if you're the chairman, you're going to be expected to give money as well. So I've been the chairman of the Kennedy Center for the last 14 years, and I'm now the chairman of the National Gallery of Art as well, and the chairman of the Library of Congress Board. And the Library of Congress Board reflects my interest in reading. This weekend, we'll have the National Book Festival in Washington, and I'm the chair of that as well, and with Carla Hayden, who's the Librarian of Congress. And I just love reading, and I love promoting books, and that's one of the reasons why I enjoy the Library of Congress.

46:11So we'll talk a little bit about books in a few moments. I want to stay focused on your reliance on scholarships to attend college and law school. And now, as part of your philanthropy, you're aiming to expand access and opportunity for young people from disadvantaged backgrounds to get a better education. Tell us about that. My father did not graduate from college or high school. He went into World War II, came back, got a job in the post office, married my mother. They were very young. I was their only child. My father had a blue-collar salary his whole life. and so to go to college I needed a scholarship and I got the biggest scholarship from Duke University I'm sure it was not a basketball scholarship though and and then I got a scholarship to go to University of Chicago Law School so I've tried to help those universities by being board chair I've been the board I was the board chair of Duke University for a long time and then now I'm chair of the University of Chicago I I've given a fair amount of money those universities for scholarships for people who didn't have the chance to get there if they didn't have a scholarship.

47:16And I've something I'm very interested in doing because I think scholarship money is the best money you can give to see some progress in the near term. Very often when you make a philanthropic gift, it may be decades before you see the progress. But with scholarships, you know you're giving somebody money to go to school who otherwise wouldn't go to that school or probably couldn't attend that school. So let me change gears on you in the last few minutes we have. You grew up how far from Baltimore? I was in Baltimore. You grew up in Baltimore. Now you're the principal owner of the Baltimore Orioles, which you purchased this year.

47:52Tell us what motivated you to buy the team and how it's been going. I did play Little League Baseball, but I assure you I was not a superstar. And like all kids who play baseball, you always want to play in the major leagues, but you realize by the time you get to 14 or 15, that's not going to happen. I spent most of my career living in Washington post the White House years, and I've given a fair amount of my money and time to causes in the Washington area or national causes. But I felt that I hadn't done enough for Baltimore, my hometown, which had given me a public school education, where my parents were born and raised, where I was raised, where my parents are buried, and where I no doubt will be buried as well.

48:30And I just thought if an opportunity came along to do more in Baltimore, I would try to take advantage of it. And an opportunity came along to buy the Baltimore Orioles, which is very important to Baltimore. Baltimore has lost a lot of jobs in recent years, a lot of businesses in recent years. And as a result, Baltimore doesn't have as many things to brag about as maybe New York City or Los Angeles. And therefore, the Orioles, which have been there since 1954, are really central to the ethos of the city. And I just thought I wanted to help contribute in that way. And so I put a team together to buy the Orioles.

49:01What surprised you most as an owner of a Major League Baseball team? how dedicated the fans are. I've met fans who've had season tickets for 45 years, 50 years in some cases, and I'm just surprised how people regard baseball and the Orioles almost like a religion. And people know every statistic, they watch every game. People are much more dedicated than I actually knew, and I was surprised how important Baltimore really regards the Orioles as central to its fabric. And so that's been one of the most important things I've learned. So let me give you an opportunity to push back on some nonsense I read when it was first announced.

49:37Oh, no, a private equity guy is buying the Orioles. Ticket prices are going to go up. Hot dog prices are going to go up. This is going to be a disaster. Well, there are private equity people before me who have bought sports teams, and the results have been reasonably good. I think baseball is a complicated sport because it doesn't have kind of the arrangements that the NFL has or the NBA has. And so it's much more challenging for small-town teams to do as well as big-town teams. But I don't think that's the biggest focus is increasing prices on food or something like that. Our focus is winning a championship and putting the best team we can on the field.

50:17And that's what I'm really focused on, and that's what our energies are devoted to. And arguably, you have the best stadium in all of Major League Sports. What makes Baltimore so special? In the 1950s and 60s and 70s, stadiums were being built around the country that were what I would call androgynous. They could be used for football. They could be used for baseball. And they were not really baseball-centered the way, let's say, Wrigley Field or Fenway is. And as a result, baseball kind of went away from its roots and having very unique kind of designs in its stadiums. when the Camden Yards was open about 30 years ago, it returned baseball to its roots and building a stadium that's built only for baseball and which has some unique characteristics.

51:02And it's now 30 years old. We'll rehab it over the next three or four years with money that the state of Maryland is providing us. And so we wanted to make it one of the best experiences in all of baseball to come to a game like that, experience what a great stadium is like, and actually enjoy the team on the field. It's a historic stadium in many respects. It's not old, but it's 30 years ago when it was built, but it now is iconic. It's iconic because many stadiums that are being built since the Camden Yards were built are trying to pattern themselves after what Camden Yards is looking like. And so today when baseball stadiums are built, they're built to be like the old stadiums.

51:40They're not built to be ready for football or some other sport. I grew up as a long-suffering Mets fan and spent a lot of afternoons at Shea Stadium. And when the new Citi Field was rebuilt, Camden Yarn seems to be the blueprint for that. Arguably, Citi Field is a better experience for a fan than the new Yankee Stadium. Well, I've been to the Yankee Stadium, and I've been to Citi Field recently. In fact, the last two days, we had games there with the But the Mets, and unfortunately, as we talked today, we lost two of the three games to the Mets in kind of walk-off home runs in the last inning.

52:21But the stadium is very modern in many respects. It's iconic in the fact that it does look like a baseball stadium, but it has electronics and a scoreboard and other kinds of fan services that are really unique. So I think people should be proud in New York of that stadium. Yeah, they did a really nice job. All right, I only have you for a few minutes. So we're going to jump to our speed round. Let's go through these as quickly as we can, starting with who were your mentors who helped shape your career? Well, I worked in the White House for a man named Stuart Eisenstadt. I dedicated the book to Ted Sorensen, who I mentioned earlier, and to Stuart Eisenstadt.

52:58He was my mentor who helped me work at the White House and been very helpful to me. And I would cite him as a mentor. I know you're a big reader. supposedly used to read four or five books a week when you were younger. What are some of your favorites, and what are you reading right now? Well, right now I've just finished reading a book called G-Man, written by a professor at Yale, and the book won the Pulitzer Prize. It's about J. Edgar Hoover, a really good book. I just finished reading a book on Martin Luther King that also won the Pulitzer Prize by Jonathan Eig. That's a really, really good book.

53:31I just finished reading a book about Winston Churchill by Eric Larson, about Churchill's first year in office, and I think that's an excellent book as well. I like reading books that are non-fiction books and typically books that are, you know, books about history, but I did read a book by a very famous author, James Patterson, recently on his new book on Tiger Woods. I'm going to interview James Patterson soon, and he's written an enormous number of books, but this one on Tiger Woods is quite interesting, and I enjoyed that as well. Really intriguing. You mentioned McCullough early. Did you ever read his book on the Wright Brothers?

54:03Of course. I interviewed him about that book, and I think it was a great book. I didn't really know much about the Wright Brothers compared to what I should have known, and he didn't know much either, and he dug into it, and he actually did a great book. Yeah, really fascinating. All right, our final two questions. What advice would you give to a recent college grad interested in a career in either private equity, philanthropy, or investing? Learn how to read. Keep reading. You can't read too many books. Learn how to write in a simple way. Learn how to communicate orally. Experiment. Try many different things.

54:38Don't take the path of least resistance. Don't make ethical mistakes because in the end, you could ruin your entire life. You only have your reputation to walk around with. And if you ruin your reputation, you'll never be able to recover it. And our final question, what do you know about the world of private equity investing today you wish you knew back in 1987 when you were first launching the firm? Well, I wish I knew how big and complicated it was. It wasn't as big and complicated then. I wish I'd known many different types of deals that I could have done that we didn't do. I passed on some great deals.

55:14We had a chance to invest early on in a company like Amazon, and we passed up on that and we had stock in it, but we didn't really hold it as long as we should have. So I've made a lot of mistakes, but on the whole, I'm reasonably satisfied with where my career now is. Well, this has been just tremendous. Thank you, David, for being so generous with your time. We have been speaking with David Rubenstein, founder of the Carlyle Group and author, most recently, of the highest calling conversations on the American presidency. If you enjoy this conversation. Check out any of our previous 500 interviews we've had over the past, is it 10 years?

55:55Wow. Over the past 10 years, you can find those at iTunes, Spotify, YouTube, wherever you find your favorite podcast. And be sure and check out my new podcast, At The Money, short form interviews with experts on specific topics, 10 to 12 minutes with various people talking about your money, earning it, spending it, and most importantly, investing it. At The Money, wherever you find your favorite podcast and in the Masters in Business podcast feed. I would be remiss if I did not thank the crack team that helps with these conversations together each week. My audio engineer is Meredith Frank. My producer is Anna Luke.

56:36Sage Bauman is head of podcasts at Bloomberg. Atika Valbron is our project manager. Sean Russo is my head of research. I'm Barry Ritholtz. You've been listening to Masters in Business on Bloomberg Radio.