David Rubenstein: We took $5M and turned it into $500B

i raised five million dollars from four investors in i eighty seven today carly manages not five million dollars but five hundred billion dollars how old do are you then when you started carly thirty seven i said i don't do it now i'll never do it do you any habits that you think would shock people i always view myself as being from a blue color family in baltimore but even like in near ten you weren't thinking like alright i can breathe a little this is gonna work i think i'm safe no because if you're an entrepreneur always think something bad that's gonna happen you still feel that way every day ninety nine point nine percent of the companies have started in the united states are not in business five years later if you go back and look at anybody that built a company they have self confidence that is staggering a met jeff bezos for the first time and he said i'll give you twenty percent of the company that i'm about to build later after the company was going somewhere i said we should've have taken that deal that was stupid that stocks probably worth fourteen billion dollars now can i ask you about seeing people get power well i feel like i could rule world i know i could be what i want to put at all in it like a days off on a travel never i was at this photo there's this photo here of i think it's you and your parents yes her with president carter and you know i was twenty seven years old i got a job as the deputy domestic policy adviser i obviously wasn't qualified and it wasn't experienced but in our system if you work in a campaign and you win you might get a job in the white house and so my parents who were blue collar workers never graduated from high school when i got a job at twenty seven at the white house you know they couldn't believe it and i took them in to meet the president which is what that picture shows and they were you know in all because they were i what do would call yellow dog democrats what's that it it it's an old expression it means that i a democrat and i would vote for a democrat for a candidate sit for a president or ray office even if it was a yellow dog so there's just hardcore den absolutely what do you do your first month when you're in office because getting any type of new job is a big deal particularly one where it's like one the most powerful things on earth what do you do your first month do you remember carter had a lot of promises and what i did is i worked on comp compile what his promises were see there wasn't no internet then and so carter had wanted to know what he actually promised in the course was two years campaign well you have to go dig it out talks interviews his questionnaires what did he actually promised and i got to sit in a lot of carter's meetings because i would wouldn't i knew his promises better than anybody and so i would be able to check and say mister president it's a good idea this person has but it's a violation or campaign promise every administration the current administration every administration as young people who are in their twenties or thirties were working a campaign and they're energetic and eager and they get jobs in and so i'm a turn it out to be great and so we'll turn it out to me that was great but how did you figure out how to make good decisions because you are so young i mean i didn't have a lot of policy experience i'd work from capitol hill for about a year so i didn't really have that much policy experience my boss did and then we hired a staff of really talented people and they're all young but they were talented in their area energy or environment or whatever be and then we'd have issues and we come up with positions remember the president has policy positions that he wants to take because of campaign promises so we would articulate you know how we could fulfill his promises so you were there for four years what did you feel like when it was done well when you work in the white house people come to you and tell you how great you are nobody says yeah you're an idiot they come and tell you you're smart guy you're great and by the way can you help me on this for that and they always will say and by the way if you ever wanna leave call me because i hire you something but i always said i don't wanna be hired but i'm gonna be here for four years and we win i'll be maybe the senior of ask adviser in the next four years after we lost the election i started calling these people saying remember me i'm the bright young guy you said it was so great i didn't get calls back because you're out of power people wanna go and get contacted with the reagan people so i i i struggled for a while to find a law firm that would take because nobody really wanted about junior white house aid who was a carter person and thirty two i was left white house of thirty one so at thirty one i'm trying to figure out i wanna tell my mother look your son is employ nobody wants a carter or white house aid not unlike the experience of the biden people have had the biden people have found it more difficult to get reestablish than they would have preferred and when you're lose an election you know you're out of power so as harry truman said you want a friend in washington get a dog eventually i got a job practicing on i realized i wasn't that great a lawyer i didn't really like it and so i i started for investment firm about a year couple years later i think the best way to become successful is to see how other people did it whether you're gonna copy them or just use it as inspiration because then now you know what's possible starting at the age of twenty four i did this relentlessly and i was very methodical about it and i created a spreadsheet where i tracked roughly fifty people who were uber successful and i looked at the year that they were born the year that they started their apprenticeship and then the year that they started the first thing that made them successful finally the year that they broke through and i aggregated all this data along with the stories of what they did to be an apprentice and what they did to finally break through and i put it together in a database and hubspot went and found this thing that i frankly even forgot about but it did change my life and they pre resurfaced it they made it even better and they put into a thing that you can download for free right now so if you click the link in the description or click the qr code right here you can see this database that i made when i was twenty four and it changed my life and so if you're looking to become successful or you're already successful and just want some more inspiration check it out how old were you then when you started carly i was thirty seven because i read that an entrepreneur will start his or her first company between the ages of twenty eight and thirty seven now obviously this is the mark zuckerberg and bill gates of the world that are different but average person will start at first company between twenty eight and thirty seven if you haven't done it by thirty seven i read you probably will never start a company so if you have an entrepreneurial instinct you better do something by the age of thirty seven was what i read and i was then thirty seven i said jeez i don't do it now i'll never do it did you think like a lot of times when people start businesses they're like how much runway do i have yeah when i started carl i i was married when i left and white house i was right i got married a couple years before i started carl so you had the pressure of like i need to provide well you have some pressure but you know is pressure but the pressure getting a company off the ground is is considerable as you know you started your own company you ever you never know when you start a company if you're gonna be able to pay the rent the next day or next month and are the are people gonna want your services you don't know yeah when i started my first company that was one that led to some success i was lucky because i was twenty four or twenty five and i was single and like i only spent fifteen hundred or two thousand dollars a month and so like i had saved up maybe i don't remember fifty thousand dollars i'm like i'm good i have thirty six months or something like that well remember ninety nine point nine percent of the companies have started the united states are not in business five years later ninety nine point nine percent so the small percentage of companies that are there five years later and a very small percentage are there ten years later so most companies that are started just don't work out what did you do the first handful of weeks after you decided to start the company i had to recruit people and recruit people and then we raised i had to to raise money to get a start i raised five million dollars from four investors in nineteen eighty seven today carly manages not five million dollars but five hundred billion dollars so it's grown to be up one of the larger private equity firms the world the help of a lot of people but i did that for many many years who was your first few hire well i i had a couple partners i hired a person who had been the chief financial officer of a company called mc which was a long distance telephone company and he became my c ceo with me over the for some thirty years named is bill conway and we hired another person senior officer from marriott so we hired a number of people at the beginning four of us at beginning and then we grew it the companies we carly controls that we've about a million and a half employees and the carly out itself got about twenty three hundred core it sounds like the like whenever ever i started my last company the people or in this company the people who i initially hire they're basically like rejects like it's like it's like smart ambitious rebellious but it sounds like the people you hired early on were very pe well they have pe in the sense that they had went to good schools i i was a probably a sucker for hiring people that went to good schools but in the end everybody is leaving somewhere because they're not happy there and they're not thinking it's it's working well for them so everybody is really inc to try to get the better position in life and a lot of people at the age of twenty or thirty they realized the job that they currently have may not based so great so they take a chance and you know some people work out and some people doesn't work out i know your your job is recruiting and your job is helping fund raise and i already know because i've listened so many of you you're very charming and you're very persuasive if you do you're very good with the words i i don't know about that but i would say that my partners had mba i didn't have an mba so they really knew the investment world so i figured okay they can really assess deals better than i can what i'll do is i'll raise the money and then i'll ultimately recruit people and then i'll be the face of the firm because i was better at that than maybe they they were and so that's what i did for thirty plus years run around the world raising money and then recruiting people to build our new firms so what we did that was different was we set we had melt multiple funds in private equity historically you had a a buyout fund if you're a buyout business and you had a venture fund every four years you raised a new one if your track record was good enough to justify i came up with the idea of having a buyout fund the growth fund of real estate fund debt fund that had multiple funds and then i had the idea of global i have a funded europe in asia and japan so forth that was novel at the time but to do that i had to run around the world recruiting people and raising the money and so i took a lot of time do you remember how so you got your first five million dollar fund how long did that take to raise well i was one person who was a friend of mine who helped me raise the five million dollars and was from four investors and we did we did things what's called deal by deal we didn't have money to do a big fund so we find a deal and they go raise money for that deal if it worked out then we go raise money for another deal and we did that for a number of years before we raised our first fund which was a hundred million and the second phone is a billion and so we got bigger how did you pay your team then if you're if you don't have a fund if you're doing deal by deal well it's harder because if you do a deal by deal you have to go to people and say here's a good deal and give me some money for it and they say i'll get back to you i'm not sure so it takes time and it's hard to do what we were trying to do at the time is we're buying publicly traded stocks and you can't tell people here's the opportunity because they could trade on it if the it if they didn't give you the money and they legally i guess they could trade on that they shouldn't have so it took a while to get tony but that's true of all everybody anybody had built a successful company is always gonna have a hard time at the beginning and you know we had a hard time at the beginning but blacks stone and k and apollo and k k r they all had similar stories i no money at the beginning and then they started blacks stone which are the biggest of the private equity firms these days steve schwartz wrote in auto geography that you know they got turned down by ninety seven percent of the people they went to to raise their first fund yeah the first one was huge wasn't it like it was made eight hundred million i think yeah it was huge but what i'm curious about i don't think that you you don't talk too much about your entrepreneurial side and i'm always very curious about that do you remember like the scrappy stories of what your first office looked like when i started the firm we didn't have any money we had no credibility so there was a new office building that had been built in wash and it looked like a building that was a class building for wealthy kind of set up a tenants and they had a little space left because they had filmed the movie called broadcast news with jack nicholson in that space so the space was now available i said i would take the space was five thousand square feet and the leasing agent said look dude you can have another five thousand if you want you have an option for five thousand i said no i didn't take it i said i don't want it she says it's free you sign anything thing here you get the option to have five thousand square feet more i said i don't want it because i don't wanna to be tempted to ever grow that big firm why didn't you wanna grow that big at the time i didn't know much of about business compared to what i know about government i knew about practice law and i was afraid of i took about a bigger space that we would try to expand through rapidly so that's probably why we didn't do it that later we had to expand and now we're the biggest tenant in the biz in the building about one out a week i'll be laying in bed with my wife you know doing pill talk and i'm like you know one day if we nail this this and this in the next ten years maybe we can be this or maybe in fifty years we could be this and like you like have these like you know vision sessions where you doing that with your spouse every day was a was a challenge because we're trying to start a firm remember in private equity was not as big as it was today in fact the phrase private equity wasn't they've invented again we were in washington dc washington dc was not new york people didn't take you seriously and people asked me why did you do it in washington well senator everett dirk used to be a senate minority leader said famously when you're getting kicked out of town get out in front and pretend you're leading a parade what does that mean means take advantage of the situation in so i said we're in washington we understand the company's heavily affected by the federal government bet on the guys in new york maybe it was true maybe it wasn't but it sounded good and kinda some people gave us money you're the second person in the past couple weeks over here we've had ray in recently and i asked him the same question i was like when you were getting bridge water going did like what were some crazy ambitions did you say like oh it would be awesome if we made a hundred million dollars or a billion dollars or had ten thousand employees or whatever and he was like i just wanted to make a hundred grand a year so i could like pay for my family that was my goal or raised case i think he started the business out of his apartment yeah and he had a asses his dad for money one time because he went broke they he had to borrow money from his father if that's correct yeah and so it's funny hearing you say this because you've built such an amazing company that like i can't believe that there was no like aspirations early on just for the sake of motivation you know if you have the grand expectations or plans at the beginning you might be you know fooling or so i don't think bill gates when he started think he was gonna build what he built or mark zuckerberg or all these others for example mark zuckerberg was at harvard my now son was one of his classmates and i heard about the opportunity this guy was building his company and they asked me to invest that i said i'm not gonna invest and that's it's a dating company because the original idea was simply to help people get dates at harbor you have pictures of people their faces and you can do it through social media and then they thought maybe that expanded to yale or prince it that was it the audio idea of doing non students really hadn't wasn't even surface then i don't think mark zuckerberg actually thought he would ever build what he built yeah i think i remember some awesome story of jeff bezos at a pitch he goes look if we really nail this i think we can make a hundred million dollars a year okay i saw jeff at the beginning because he had to had a bib of books and print to go to sell books of internet one of our companies had a a bib books and print he came to rent it from us and we said we don't rent it he said well i'll give you twenty percent of the company that i'm about to build and our guy said we don't want a piece of an ill liquid company a startup that's not working we want cash ultimately that we agreed to i think a hundred thousand a year for five years we rented in the bib wait you owned a company that was a book publisher and it had a book that had a list of every book every written and the offer was twenty five percent that's twenty to twenty five percent later after the company was going somewhere i said we should've have taken that deal i flew out a met jeff bezos for the first time in he had one office he was doing the books himself and he would take him to the post office every night it was very small and i said you know you're gonna compete against barnes and noble he says yeah but i understand how to do do this better than they do and so i i said this guy not gonna really make it i said look we'll take some stock now we'd like some stock twenty percent is okay he said well david that was a couple years ago now i don't need you quite as much but i'll give you some stock he got some stock then we sold it at the ipo when i was stupid that that stocks probably worth fourteen billion dollars now did he have any attributes back then that you saw this guy is gonna be the be the guy he's very smart and and held self confidence and he said he had a lot of good computer skills and maybe he did i even couldn't judge that but he was very driven very smart hardworking like a lot entrepreneurs entrepreneurs people that build companies are not shrinking mileage you know if you go back and look at anybody that built a company they have self confidence that that is is staggering because if you're out you're a shrinking vial you're not gonna build a company bill gates is a young man and jeff bezos or mark zuckerberg or steve jobs the enormous mental of self confidence and that's what it takes to really build a company did you have that i didn't have as much as they did because i didn't think i was as smart as they were but i i was surrounded by people that had more i recruited people i knew more than i did and you got really good at not just recruiting talented people but you got really good at recruiting big shots like you you had a bunch of big shots to i i don't know the right terminology there like advisers well what happened was when we were starting the company or right after we started it they started eighty seven ronald reagan's presidency was over in eighty eight and a former law partner of mine said that a man who had been the secretary of defense was gonna go on a lot of corporate boards but in those days if you were not a lawyer you couldn't join a law firm so he was looking for a place to be a base and he my former law partner knew about what i was doing and since that we were in a law firm he said why don't you interview frank carlos the former secretary defense we're about to be former secretary defense and he can join your firm he's gonna be a lot of corporate boards so maybe he can open some doors for you so i'll be interview interviewed frank carlos he joined us and then he he he'll he could open doors that i couldn't open he was a former secretary fence four years later jim baker was leaving a secretary state but while this is the ultimate great man of the world secretary state a great treasury white house of was staff and i was able to recruit him how many other options did they have like why would they trust like a a startup up i mean they always had all other things that we weren't doing and frank carlos case he was joining like six zero seven corporate boards that was his main activity and jim baker case he went back to his family's law firm he was a partner there but he's also a partner in our firm and then after baker we had dick da who been one of his pro who would been the head of b and then later george herbert walker bush from more president of united states became a an advisor to us and then john major former prime minister became an advisor to us as well so we did open doors with these people because if your last name was rubin and you go to the middle east to raise money might not be as compelling as if you go with jim baker do you remember what the pitch looks like or sounds like when you're when you're swinging above your weight oh it's saying look we're firm in washington we understand a companies heavily effect by the federal government we're buying an aerospace defense company we have a former secretary defense and you know in the end you have to build your track record so if you did one deal and it exited well then you can go and use that to say we're gonna do another deal similarly so it worked out but but we made some mistakes and everybody makes mistakes and you know but it worked out yeah that's crazy but it seems like hey you guys had like a pretty good trajectory do you remember any times where you're like this is not gonna work one time we had a limited amount of cash and then we were trying to buy a company and we was in bankruptcy corp we're trying to buy bankruptcy and we basically spent all our money trying to buy it and then we lost a bankruptcy court so we'd spent all our money we didn't get the company we had no more cash and so we were we said hey what are we gonna do to meet the payroll but in the end we actually got the company in the end turned out to be a successful deal but you know i remember waking up in the middle of the night i hey i'm not gonna pay the rent what year or how many years into the company did you feel like you personally were like alright i'm financially stable maybe the yesterday it takes a while i mean when we were building a company we ultimately sold a piece of it to cal per i think about five percent to california retirement system and they've value the company at something being worth like two billion dollars the company was worth two billion or two and half billion nobody thought that a a a private equity firm in those days had franchise value and could be sold but we sold five percent to cal her that was probably two thousand and nine or something like that and then a few years later we sold seven a half percent to move bottle which was a abu dhabi investment arm that and that value of the company had being worth twenty billion and then we later took the company public but even like in year ten or so you weren't thinking like alright i can breathe a little this is gonna work i don't know how well it's gonna work but it's actually gonna work and i and and personally i i i'm i think i'm safe no because if you're an entrepreneur i always think something bad gonna happen and so i'm always worried that something bad gonna happen tomorrow somebody will do something they shouldn't the done we a deal won't work out so i never felt comfortable you know i i tend to be a work alcoholic a so i'm always working on things and i'm always thinking what can go wrong you still feel that with every day really look i'm always thinking bad things gonna happen maybe that's what entrepreneurs do because you have to have some certain self confidence but you you always have to assume something bad i can happen you have to protect against it but it seems like you've had good partners i'm i'm highly neuro nikita my business partner who runs hampton is not neuro neurologist at all and he's very common steady and it's like the greatest para ever because he's the only one who i will be neuro with well i have two people that i really built the company with and one of them is now eighty years old has all dark hair then have one gray hair so he made me not as neuro rad as i am and then bill conway has gray hair but he doesn't seem to worry about some of the things as much as i do maybe because he's more self confidence about his abilities he's don't be an investor but look you're always worried something band's gonna happen i'm worried every day i now the principal under the baltimore memorial i'm worried every day that's something may i can happen what are you worried about with the oreos i wanna make the playoffs and you know we're now one game out of the playoff but one game away from being able to get into the playoffs but one by one game behind the cleveland guardians and then they're are all the teams that i could catch up to us so i'm always worried that i didn't do a good enough job in in helping the team i get worried about looking stupid on the internet and like the comments i i act like they don't bother me they do do you get bothered by comments or people criticizing an interview advisors are are training not to read social media because you're inevitably gonna find people saying something critical of you does that bother you well nobody wants to be criticized so i tend not to read the social media sure if so i generally don't go into social media i was reading about how i think you said you were traveling like two hundred plus days a year so how old were your kids when you were doing that and how did you balance being a good dad well it's always a challenge of course but as you know my all my all three of my kids have mba and they all they're in private equity so you can say i did something wrong or did something right but look parents who are driven and have businesses that require to travel you have to depend on your spouse and other people that help make sure the kids get grown and i when i came back on weekends for my travels you know i would try to spend time with them do you get to work with them on a weekly or daily basis now like are they part of an organization that you're a part of no i have a family investment office and very often a family investment office will and be it's something where you can bring your children to work in it and so forth some people do it that way i didn't wanna do that so they have their own businesses that i've helped support but now they're kind of on their own and i have a family investment office which is owned largely by the people that work there are professionals and i own a piece of it as well and then when i dropped ed my children will get some something probably out it but i'm i'm committed to giving away most of my money i was an early original honor of the giving pledge that i've given away a lot of money i intend to give away the bulk of what i have left hey let's take a quick break you know that feeling when strategy is done the brief is written everyone's aligned and you realize someone still has to sit down and actually create all the content that someone is usually you and it's due tomorrow and well the breeze assistant from hubspot can help it works right inside hubspot you can draft campaign copy blog posts emails all in your brand voice all using your actual customer data so you don't create just content you create content that convert check out hubspot dot com the agent customer platform for growing businesses one of the reason that i respect you is because you seem like a very fulfilled person have you ever thought about who you know in your life who seems fulfilled and has a really rich life like a well rounded rich life because a lot of times successful people you don't wanna trade spots with them what there are very few people who every everything works perfectly for there may be some people like that but everybody's got their challenges and this weekend i hosted in in na pocket friends from mine from high school from sixty years ago when i was growing up i wasn't a great athlete some of the people i had in my home this weekend were great athletes now they often have artificial hip artificial needs because they were such great they they hurt themselves so i don't really have those with that problem though but when you think of do you everything think of like who do you admire most not just for their business ability but further they're like holistic like this person under these circumstances has mostly nailed aspects of life that i'd admire well there are lot of people i'm the person was in my firm i thought his professional career was extraordinary and that was jim baker great job in the federal government and very well respected person you know there are a lots of business people that i i've looked at and admired over the years and people have great personalized professional lives and the people want to emulate so a lot of people like that but there's nobody's out there it's perfect i talked to someone who worked with you carl he was an associate he was saying something he's like i love working for david because i think he's lived in mostly the same house for a very long time when you walk into the office his office you don't see like a lot of fancy stuff he's pretty low key when he leaves the office there's not like a limo driver or whatever you would think of like the stereotype and he said that that's one of the reasons why i really respect him and i really like him is because he seems like he's still very down to earth regardless of how successful he's got i always view myself as being from a blue color family in baltimore and i always you know realized that neither of my parents graduated from high school i got lucky in life and you know you wouldn't have predicted what would have happened to me and you know i've tried to give back to society and i've given that dealing a lot of things in phil and i've tried to share a lot of nonprofit boards and so forth to kind of give back to society but you know in the end you know i'm not that fancy person i guess when we had lloyd in he was like he told the story behind ohio i think his dip father was a post post officer his father had the same job my father had postal occur his father did it in new york i think brooklyn and my father didn't baltimore i forget his father was high school graduate but my parents didn't graduate high school and my father came back from world war two the only job could get was this post job and job he had his entire life and he told the story he was like i still have the lower tier of netflix he was like it's kinda funny he was like i could afford these things but i definitely like being broke or not having a lot of money at a young age it still has impacted me did does it still impact you do you any habits that you think would shock people you know i still go to the same barber for like fifteen dollars to get a haircut or something in my neighborhood so i i am wealthy but but not it's so wealthy that i am you know i have yachts and i don't know i i guess i'm you know somewhat old school and i still i have this suit i'm wearing i've had it for like ten years of the trick is being able to fit in your suits say for ten years that's a trick how many do you have because that's all that's the only thing ever seen wear we have a lot of suits and it's an interesting phenomenon today in the business world not wearing a suit is considered more normal but i guess me my father was a blue collar worker and he had the obsession with never wearing a tie he just saw ties were terrible and i guess to kinda show that i was achieve more than he had achieved i guess i bought a lot of suits and i have a lot of ties and i'm am advertising them i still wearing the same pies and suits i've had for many years well looks good i mean that photo when you're twenty seven you look sharp there too by the way they dressed the president and a government official they dressed amazing during that era like when you look at ronald the reagan suits he was a sharp dresser he's very good at dressing compared to a lot about people now he was hacked and he looked one of the look you know good and carter was you know carter was a little cheaper than reagan was probably he had his suits made in plains george or someplace place like that and you know but he wasn't a fashion plate i think it's fair to say we can i ask you about seeing people get power because i've read i think is it the governor of virginia was like was an intern with you guys glenn young can work to crawl off for twenty five years and they got elected governor glenn young yes and then you also know world leaders you know a lot of really successful entrepreneurs what is it like you see someone go from just knowing them as a young person or someone without as much power and money or success and then seeing them become like the man is there something that power can change you and how howard does change some people and glenn young i hired him pretty much adam mckinsey right at a harvard business goalie he worked for us for twenty five years and then he decided to leave and run for governor i didn't think he would got elected because he never been a politics before he got elected and all of a sudden people are talking about mean potential pre of the united states so but i met a lot of people over the years who i thought were modestly talented or very talented and you never know which ones are gonna be the ones that actually go on and again you don't think you can predict that it's impossible you know you just have lucky brakes i mean who would have predicted bill gates dropping out of harvard and it's gonna build a company that became microsoft or steve jobs didn't even go to college would predicted any of these things yeah but there are some like traits or little antidote or stories that you hear about these guys where they just like they sound like animals like i i heard the story and all of these stories that could be myths at this point but it was a story about bill gates and apparently he didn't have a radio in his car because he said that distract me from thinking about microsoft just in my twenty minute drive and like you hear these things and you're like i don't know if it's gonna work amazingly well but like you got something where you seem him a little bit unstoppable well but there are a lot of people that have those qualities and they don't make it you know you have to have some luck too microsoft you know had some very good fortune of the very beginning ibm in fact made i think a mistake when ibm was looking for a software or operating system for its pc they hired microsoft to provide it but they didn't own it like operating system had they owned the system microsoft wouldn't have made all that money by selling the effect operating system to the other other other computer operators or by building a whole system of software have ibm has said well buy microsoft at the beginning does they have the operating system have been different can i see about owning all these awesome documents yeah sure how much have you spent in some i've never added it up i don't really honestly know but what happened was i stumbled into buying the magna carta i didn't really intend to but i somebody told me it was about to be sold and and it was the only copy the united states and it was the only one in private hands and it would leave the country blah blah so i bought it and then i'd put it on display at the national archives on a permanent display and then i started getting other historic documents say emancipation proclamation declaration independence i own i think we're we're copies than anybody of that and then the thirteenth amendment which reads slaves and then other historic documents that i started fixing up buildings into the washington monument at jefferson memorial i'll link him world and the reason is i want people to know more about american history and if you have original documents people may be more likely to look at them learn more about history and the same as true of these buildings if they're restored people might go visit them and learn more about american history when you're bidding on them are there other bidder typically well there typically are sure when you like when i bought the magna carta i was bidding but i was in a room they put me a little room at a telephone and and i i they said how aren't you gonna bid the almost over i said okay i'll bid i put a bid in and they said sold right away i don't know if anybody else ever bid i never found out how big is the market though people buying these documents yeah it's wasn't as big as it's now becoming because the now some art buyers who spend three hundred million dollars for a painting are now getting gigabyte documents for a lot less so and they now gravitate to that so it's more competition and look the declaration and tennis because of the semi centennial become a talking a a greater interest of people so the prices have gone up dramatically to buy these historic copies well i think it's walter isaac san he's got a a new book about the greatest sentence ever ever run and it's awesome and i didn't realize how amazing the founding fathers were when it came to a bunch of different stuff like thinking very long term and they're like the idea of like we hold these shoes to be self evident that's kind of interesting and that it's a very self it's a self document like is a lot of like really interesting parts did you think that when they were writing this that they thought someone is willing to pay all this money to own this and save this and like cherish hit well when they they they didn't treat the document that well when the decor declaration independence after it was drafted it inside they basically folded it they they they hit it place they put it at sunlight no i don't think they thought that at all not until eighteen twenty three when john quincy adams was secretary state he realized that the document was fading so much they better get some copies as sooner nobody would be able to see it and they made copies then yeah i i often think about that about what they were like where their minds space was when they're doing it because it's pretty amazing how old does thomas jefferson i think thirty three thirty three remember they it's there were three million people in the united states at the time of the the declaration declaration from the independence and half a million slaves and two and eight million whites and it was on the eastern sea board and nobody really thought this country would out to that much even if we won the war which no one thought we would do but even after winning the war there was not clearly a country would survive jefferson didn't think it would survive from more than twenty years that he said that he did he he wasn't at the constitutional convention but he wrote with madison back and forth and he kinda thought twenty years with bobby about what it would take and so that's kinda like a common trend of what i was asking earlier about jeff bezos and how it's kind of hard to like have big ambitions when you're just getting going yeah look the founding fathers if they were to come back today they'd be astounded that the country that that was a tiny country in the eastern sea board has been for these since world over war two the most powerful country in the world in every category i mentioned they would never dreamed that thanks podcast is bought you buy my friends at mercury they make the world's best banking product i think you know this already i used mercury for all of my businesses i think i have like maybe seven or eight businesses we use mercury as our business banking across all of them and now they actually just launched a personal banking account so i have my personal account there i moved off of wells fargo in chase i'm just all in on mercury why i like products that are easy to use i like products that get me and the problems that i have so like it very easy to make a joint account with my wife very easy to spin up virtual cards one click and i get savings yield it just has all the stuff that i need in one place so if you're looking for the best banking product on the market definitely mercury i will fist fight anybody who disagrees me on that go to mercury dot com slash personal and learn more mercury is a fintech not an fdic insured bank banking services are provided through choice financial group and call them an a members fdic one of my favorite parts about reading history is that there's like a handful of rules or ac axiom or trends that like tend to repeat themselves for example i was reading about winston churchill and he was talking about how he was you like said it like to someone one when he's like i think the world might end like in and like it was just like funny that there was like different periods of time where people always think like the worst gonna habit and we end up working out are there any like sets of rules or axiom or trends that you have seen repeat themselves over and over again that have helped you deal with whatever you're dealing with at the current time well you're always worried about things i worry about the federal debt for example we have forty trillion dollars of federal debt our ability to pay this office virtually nonexistent existent and so we're really gonna have to do is is in effect pay it off in dev value dollars and the dollar will go down in value almost certainly and you always worry if you have children as you do right that are they gonna grow up in a world that's gonna be more difficult than the world that you grow up in and will they be ready to deal with the world and they gonna be educated appropriately and what are they gonna turn out to be and it's some more complicated situation every parent worries about the whether world be good enough for their children to kinda of be able to do what they did so i read a a lot of great books and the reason i do it is one i have some tv shows where i interview authors and i feel it's a courtesy to the author to read the book yeah secondly i actually generally interviewing interview people about books i am interested in reading i this kinda forces me to do it third it's my anti alzheimer's device because they tell you when you reach certain age if you don't have a genetic predisposition alzheimer's you could still get it by maybe your brain is allowed to to to not be exercising up they tell you to learn a musical instrument do a cross puzzle or had do cross word puzzles and do that frequently or or learn foreign language i'm not goodness at any of those things so one of the things i do is i read a lot in i interview people and when you interview people you gotta keep your brain sharp as you can see you gotta go back and forth this to a person saying think of the next question while you're listening to a person and you gotta keep your brain active and it it's a good way to keep your brain active when you reach my age so i do it as my anti alzheimer's device what are some of the favorite things that you've read in the last six or or twelve weeks i've read a book on roy cohn it's called i american sc which was a really good book by k a previous sort of book on robert oppenheimer that won the pulitzer prize and it's just amazing what boy cohn was was and so forth recently read beverly gauge book on jay hoover which is a astounding book and won the pulitzer prize a really terrific book so i'm i'm always reading books and one of the programs i have another book coming out this year on my best interviews at the library of congress so about fifteen years ago i started a program where i interview a great historian about an american history subject in front of members of congress only and i i pay for it i host it and i and i we have a dinner members of congress come they said with people from the opposite party no press there to see them f with somebody from the opposite party and then then we have a great person da ski go or something like that i'll interview them and members of congress are fascinated by american history as they should be and then they asked questions after the interview done and i've i've now taken the best of those interviews and put them in a book coming out in a couple weeks who do you think the audience learned from most given what they needed to learn at that time well i'll give you one example of a story i interviewed john roberts the chief justice the united states i wanted members the congress to learn more about the court and he did a really good job explaining the court and so forth and at one point i said mister chief justice do you always wanna be chief justice the united states no but did you wanna be a lawyer no well what did you wanna be when you were growing up i wanted to be american history professor that's all i cared about is american history my father said john you'll starve that there's no money in american history get a real profession but john went to harvard a major in american history and if his junior he came back from a spring break got into the airport at logan in boston got into the cab line got into the cab and so that the cab driver kicked me to cambridge and the cab driver said are you a student harvard yes i am what are you majoring him i'm majoring in american history cab driver said seven when i was a student at harvard that's what i major in also so john concluded me didn't wanna be a cab driver he shouldn't be a cab driver well i'm like a history is my passion american history particularly from like eighteen eighty to like nineteen forty that's my favorite era well while there are a lot of great books in that era i just started finally reading the power broker power broker is a historic book considered one of fifty best books of the the of the twentieth century yeah and the american history museum or i figure what's it's called up here on upper west side i just did a big exhibit on robert carr when he was writing the that book and that's the new it's the new york historical yeah sorry and it was awesome and so i saw that and then i also saw you say that it was one of your favorites so i started reading it last week great book but he's now everybody's waiting for him to finish the fifth volume of his series and linda then johnson a thirty five year project i don't think i can read five volumes on that maybe but that's a lot well one of the volumes won the pulitzer surprise that might be the best one but but you know people would really wanna see remember the fourth volume ended when john kenny was assassinated and lyndon johnson weren't in so the entire johnson presidency were waiting to see what he thinks after all these years are working on the fifth volume he's now ninety years old i also love titan that's probably my most favorite business biography on john rockefeller oh yeah he was a very fascinating character he seemed like a mostly a good dad and a good husband and a ruthless businessman and i like that combination i think that's super interesting carnegie is one of my favorites i got married at carnegie hall because i loved his book so much well he was famous for saying you should give away your all your money and there's a book of that era of nineteen twenty nine by andrew ross sc if you're really care about the early twenties so it's a great break book yeah i thought i thought that was awesome other than i you cite lincoln all the time you cite jfk k and i think washington when you think back to some of the early presidents or really early leaders or business folks who do you often refer to when you're like how would this person handled this situation well look lincoln was in a league by himself as president because he saved the union a this slaves and he did it with grace and humility he didn't say guess what everybody look how great i am i just want the civil war or i just wrote to get his word addressed by myself he humble humility george washington set the tone for what a president should be and he really got us off to a pretty good start so those are people that i often cite as really great leaders as presidents and we've obviously had some great the twentieth twentieth eighth century as well have you read man hunt about lincoln's assassination i did that is a it's an interesting book in the sense that john wi booth thought he would be a hero and you know interestingly what happened there is that had ulysses grant taken the invitation to go to lincoln that night to with the see ford's theater he would have had twenty military grades or or aides around him probably john wolf booth would not have gotten into that presidential box because there would been a lot of military aids lincoln only had one military aid and he was drinking at a bar at the time the shot occurred wasn't there one of my so i've read there's been four books four presidents i think have been successfully assassinated and i've read i don't know if there's one on mc kin but the there are there's a bunch on kennedy there's a few on lincoln and then garfield has his most famous one or there's a book a famous book there garfield the book is written is used to a book this it's awesome i didn't know anything about him he seemed like a really good guy i didn't realize how great of person he was and what's crazy when i'm reading these books is the secret service really wasn't a thing until like the seventies like they talk about j jfk secret service it was pretty rink dink well i wouldn't use the word rink dink but i would say the mistake that was made on the kenny assassination was was this the secret service allowed the route to be put in the newspapers they shouldn't have done that secondly it was raining that day and they had a bubble top on the convertible the secret service asked whether they should take the bubble top off or not because it wasn't clear wasn't gonna be rainy or not and president kenny chief staff said no the president wants to be seen and take the bubble top off secret service should not have listened to a political adviser it should've have kept the bubble top on had they done that kenny would have lived and i think one of his whole sticks was like look my father is this big shot rich guy people think that i'm out of touch it's important that i like p i'm like a man of the people well he remembered he that was the first time that jackie kennedy had gone with him on any political trip first time she'd been west of mississippi as as first lady it was a big deal that she did that and he wanted to show her off for sure yeah and then i think like a week prior in miami there he didn't have the bubble top either and they're driving through like downtown miami am and the secret surfers like you we gotta be more careful and he's like look guys i gotta be a man of the people and i think is this right right before or miles before he got shot he like stopped the car and ran over to like a young family that was holding a sign as he was driving by and thank dumb and stuff it's crazy to think that i mean that never happened today when i worked for carter there were no metal detectors of the white house you can walk in with the pa there were no metal detectors and i remember a couple times carter would stand on the roof of the presidential limo scene with a with a microphone and talking to people i mean incredibly exposed today we're we're much more careful i appreciate you doing this i've had a lot of admiration for you for years i'm so happy to go to talk to you i don't disappoint you now you remember me you say hey this guy was as good as i thought right no not but you know i feel that way about reading a lot of books has has there anyone who you've read about where you're like not my guy anymore well usually biographer write books about people they like they don't use it right about people they don't like the other the book on white cohn is not want somebody that they author like you know i and most of the times i you you find something to admire doris ke goodwin when always says she falls in love with the people yeah and because we have to spend ten years with them and you know you only wanna spend ten years somebody you hate so generally people write books about people they tend to admire generally and we have so many books about the same people we have ten thousand books on lincoln ten thousand books on kennedy why do we have so books on the same people because people buy these books people like them and so people on authors write more about well and you've done like the ultimate thing when it comes to reading a book for you just it's interviews i don't have what it takes to write a book but if i did that's the style it seems awesome i grow i love your style books i love that thanks very much yeah thanks for doing this man you're the man my pleasure appreciate you i feel like i could rule world i know i could be what i want to put my all in it like a day's off on a road less travel never looking back alright let's take a quick break i wanna tell you about marketing school it is a podcast that's is part of the hubspot podcast network and it is run by neil patel and eric who these guys are both marketers who are running businesses and so if you want real world tactics from practitioners who are actually out there in the field doing it this is the podcast for you check it out wherever you get your podcast and