SPEAKER_00 0:00

Um, hey guys, welcome back to the Sunbelt Developers Podcast. Uh, it's a very special episode. We have David Rubinstein, the Carlisle group, and we also have David Sanji here as a co-host today. Um, this is uh uh again a special episode. We are not running any ads for this, just so you can enjoy the conversation. Um we're gonna get into a lot of things about David's past and um just where the state of the world is now and his insight on life and history and all the things. So at that, I'm I'm gonna hand it over to David Sanji. I'd love for him to kick us off and um give a little bit of background.

SPEAKER_01 0:34

Great. Thank you, Tim. David, thank you so much for being with us today. We we started Sunbelt Developers. Tim's been running that for the last couple of years. We've been doing a lot of local and regional real estate interviews, kind of plan out of your playbook for for peer-to-peer, uh, but uh you know, less prolific, I would say, than yours. Uh and so more local, regional about the real estate industry. So thank you for uh allowing us to step up our game and and agreeing to do that. So for uh, Tim, for purposes of our audience, uh David and I met. David's been a while, 2013 was our first meeting, but uh uh thanks to the Carlisle uh team in the real estate joint venture group, we we joint ventured a large project, mixed-use project in the Houston Galleria. It was uh 500,000 feet of office buildings, two ground-up Hyatt hotels uh for a project cost of around $250 million. Uh Carlisle was our majority partner. We're still partners on half of the project with the hotels, and the office buildings had had good fortune. So we're we're pleased with that. So that's a little bit about how we met, and David and I have stayed in touch through the years. And again, thank you for being with us today. So, David, with that, I want to introduce Tim, our host, uh, who will be conducting the interview. And uh he and I met obviously through real estate. He's with Cushman in Wakefield, he's a rising star here in Atlanta and the region, and uh and so we wanted to uh collaborate on on an idea where uh again, taking part of your playbook, um getting out in the community and and getting to know the real estate industry through these interviews. So a peer-to-peer, you know, through the specialized case of of real estate. Uh so uh with that backdrop, you know, I'd just say that the the first question is, David, you know, you're well known for uh so many reasons, but Carlisle comes to mind. Your philanthropic uh has work has been phenomenal. Uh the DC monuments uh have been so much, and then of course, peer-to-peer over the last few years has just been a huge success and and very much appreciated. So uh uh you know what we'd like to know is everybody knows about you in these regards, but I I think probably a lot of people, including myself and Tim, would like to know more about your past, your childhood, uh, a glimpse of your past and your formative years, if you could share that, please.

SPEAKER_02 2:59

Sure. Um I grew up in Baltimore. Um my parents were blue-collar workers. My parents did not graduate from college or high school. My father had gone into World War II as a Marine, uh, dropped out of high school to do so, came back, met my mother about a year later, they got married. Um she dropped out of high school to marry him. Uh they were both at the unseemly young age of 20 in his case, 17 in her case, which today seems like, you know, ridiculously young, but I guess it wasn't that uncommon then. I was their only child. My father worked in the post office his entire career as a uh postal mail sorter, uh not a high-paying job, uh, but it was one he had and was uh government security for it, so he liked it. Um I got a scholarship uh to go to uh Duke University, and then later I got a scholarship to go to the law school at the University of Chicago, and then I practiced law for New in New York for a few years before coming to Washington to work on Capitol Hill, and then I worked in the White House for Jimmy Carter for four years and met many Georgians at that time.

SPEAKER_01 4:08

Thank you. Thank you for that background. Um and uh you know obviously you've come a long way and and uh a lot to be proud of and um a lot of people following your your career path. So uh uh as a although we do not know you that well, we know a little bit about the way you operate in these in in both in business and in your demeanor. I've seen you speak at fundraisers. Um I have heard you through peer-to-peer, but you seem to have uh uh you know this insatiable level of curiosity that is that is natural, and you also are known to be, you know, to covet uh you know securing data and attracting data and learning, you have a an appetite to learn more and more. Tell tell us where that came from. Is it is it natural, organic? Is that something you've developed and how important has that been in your career?

SPEAKER_02 5:01

Well, I think intellectual curiosity is good for anybody uh in the business world or in the non-business world. Learning as much as you can is always good. Uh if I had been a great superstar athlete or a great student leader, I may not have had time to read as much as I did, but I probably wasn't a great athlete. I wasn't as great student leader, I wasn't all that talented at anything, and so I spent a lot of time uh by myself reading, and I began to really appreciate the importance of reading. And so maybe my intellectual curiosity comes from the fact that I'm always thinking I should read another book or learn more. And then I'm always trying to find questions to answers I might uh to questions I'm sorry, I'm always trying to find answers to questions that I have about uh various subjects, and I do read a lot and try to always talk to the experts or the authors, and the book interviews that I've been doing recently on uh on C-SPAN and the interviews I've been doing in Bloomberg on peer-to-peer and some PBS interviews have been really designed to take advantage, I guess, of my curiosity. I I like to ask people questions, I try to prepare for the interviews, and uh, you know, it's been enjoyable for me to do this.

SPEAKER_00 6:11

Aaron Powell I went on uh it seems like you've done 800 to 1200 interviews. There's some estimate around there. I'm curious how your style has has evolved and um just what you've learned. I've there's a a whole list of things that you've learned along the way.

SPEAKER_02 6:24

But well, the style that I've used, and I've written a piece on on how to interview, and I might be write writing a book about it as well. It's just not that novel, but but basically it I try to read as much as I can about the person I'm about to interview. If the person has written a book, I think it's a courtesy to read the book. I prepare questions in advance and send them to the people that I'm interviewing, not so much because um I think that they need them, but I want to show them that I'm not gonna be Mike Wallace trying to embarrass them or ask them uh questions they might not want to answer. Um I don't use notes in front of me when I'm doing the interviews because I like to have a conversation where it looks like there's no um, you know, I'm not reading a script. And so therefore I can't remember 100% of the questions I might have prepared, but I can probably get about 90% of them. And then I always find it's important to listen to what the person says, pivot off of that so that if the person is doing an interview and you says something you didn't expect, don't ignore it and go on to the next question you might have had in mind, but follow up on the question the person might have uh uh answered in a way that you would didn't expect. And then again, um I try to be uh polite to the people and never embarrass anybody or asking questions that I think they won't uh feel comfortable with and try to inject humor from time to time. And as a result of all that, it's kind of worked out.

SPEAKER_00 7:45

That's great. So I've been told you have another book coming. I I've I've read at least the first couple chapters of all five that you have out right now, and um I'd love to dig into some of those, but tell us about this new book you have coming.

SPEAKER_02 7:58

I have actually two books coming out. One of them is uh called In the Owner's Uh Box, and it's basically uh a book about what it's like to buy a baseball team. Uh uh three years ago I bought the Baltimore's baseball team, which is my hometown baseball team, and I wrote a book about why I did it, how I did it, and I interviewed other owners of sports teams and other sports about why they bought the team and their teams and how they did it. And so it's really designed to give an inside look at what it's like to be an owner. I have another book coming out, and that book is being published by Simon and Schuster, coming out in September. I think in early October I have another book coming out. Uh that book is a book about the interviews I've done at the Library of Congress. Over the last uh dozen years, I have been interviewing uh prominent historians or other kinds of government leaders at the Library of Congress in front of only members of Congress. Since a dinner I host, I pay for, I started, where I try to bring members of Congress together from both parties, have them sit together in a table, no presses there, and they, you know, enjoy getting to know people they don't otherwise you normally get to speak to. And then I try to make it exciting by having a really terrific uh historian or or guest speaker, and I interview them. And I have about the 15 best of those interviews are coming out in a book being published by the Library of Congress in October.

SPEAKER_00 9:22

Yeah, that's really that's a really special event. Um I'm curious, you you've been involved in DC for a long time, and you play a very unique role of you're you're not decided with any any one of the political sides, but you're just you're pro-America. You've done so much for our our capital, so much for our country. And I'm like, is there anybody else that's you know playing this I would say broker role, but really just you know helping helping the overall picture? I think you play such a unique position.

SPEAKER_02 9:51

Well, I did work in the White House for President Carter, and at the time I was a registered Democrat. But since that time, I um I'm a registered independent and I don't give money to politicians at any party, so I try to stay apolitical. And that's enabled me to do things like chair the Smithsonian Board without people thinking I'm political. I've chaired the Kennedy Center Board for 14 years. I chair the Library of Congress Board now, I also chair the National Gallery of Art Board. And I was able to do that and am able to do it because I'm not seen as overtly political. I've interviewed all the presidents and known all the presidents since Jimmy Carter, and I had a book out about the presidents not long ago. And so I've tried to, you know, do things uh that might be help the country in some way and not be seen as uh political.

SPEAKER_00 10:37

No, I think it's great. And and that specific book, interviewing all all these presidents and you know, digging into I think it's called The Highest Calling.

SPEAKER_02 10:44

The Highest Calling, correct.

SPEAKER_00 10:46

Yes. What was what was your thought going into writing that book? And maybe it was like you kind of had enough data to kind of lay the groundworks, but I'm curious what you were you discovered along along the way that really surprised you. Trevor Burrus, Jr.

SPEAKER_02 10:59

Well, well, I had interviews then with Donald Trump, who was out of office, and then I had an interview at the in the Oval Office with Joe Biden, and then I interviewed uh Bill Clinton and other presidents as well. And you know, I realized that all of these individuals who become president are are humans and they have their their emotions and they have their pluses and minuses, and there's nobody that's perfect. But in our country, we've kind of elevated to almost um exalted status our presidents, and maybe we should, maybe we shouldn't. We've had 47 of them, and I just think people are always fascinated by them, as I have been, because I worked in the White House, among other things, and therefore I tried to give people an insight uh on my on the presidents by interviewing them and giving them my own assessment of those presidents.

SPEAKER_00 11:42

Aaron Ross Powell Along with the philanthropic involvement, you've done a lot. I I I want to ask you about this document that's behind you on the wall.

SPEAKER_02 11:51

That is a uh stone copy of the Declaration of Independence. The Declaration of Independence, which we're about to celebrate our 250th anniversary of, uh, was agreed to on July the 4th, 1776. It wasn't actually signed until August the second, 1776. And that signature uh on that copy is in now in the National Archives. But in 1823, uh the document was beginning to fade. So John Quincy Adams, a Secretary of State, said we should begin to have perfect copies made so other people can see them, not just have one copy you can only see if you come to Washington. So 200 perfect copies were made from the original, and I own about uh ten of those copies. Uh one of them is behind me. And uh, you know, I'm I think I I'm now spending a lot of time this week, next week, talking about the declaration, how it came about, why it's important, and so forth. How'd you get your hands on the one behind you? Um these are auctions uh typically in Sotherby's or or um or Christie's, but this particular one um I believe is one that I bought uh from somebody who called me out of the blue saying that he was a descendant of James Madison, which I get a lot of these kind of calls, and most of them are not accurate. Um but turned out this person uh was a descendant of James Madison, and James Madison had been a copy, had been given a copy of this stone copy in in uh 1823. There were three surviving uh members of the uh who had signed it the Declaration of Independence in 1823, Thomas Jefferson being one of them. Um uh uh uh and Madison actually hadn't signed it, but Jefferson signed it, and and so did uh John Adams. They were still alive, and then John Carroll of Carrollton was alive. But this one was given to James Madison, and ultimately I bought it from his uh great-great-great nephew, I think it was. Wow, so it only had traded hands just a handful of a few times.

SPEAKER_00 13:47

A few times, probably. I'm curious, what what are you doing for America 250?

SPEAKER_02 13:52

How are y'all spending your well um the last couple days I did these things? I I put up some money to help redo the Jefferson Memorial. The Jefferson Memorial opened in 1943. Uh 10 uh Franklin Roosevelt was a big proponent of Jefferson. That monument and memorial opened then. Um it's it's not a perfect monument or memorial, and I gave the Park Service some money years ago to build an underground education center there, so it tells you more about Jefferson than you might have otherwise known. And then the next day, also last week, um, we opened up the so-called undercroft of the Lincoln Memorial. The Lincoln Memorial opened in 1922, and uh it's the most visited tourist site in Washington, but it was built on a marsh, and uh under the marsh uh or into the marsh, the bet uh steel pylines were put, and there's a big, large uh space under the Lincoln Memorial, and I thought we could probably use it for educational purposes and show people what was under the Lincoln Memorial. And so the Secretary of Interior came to that uh a couple days ago, and we opened it, the so-called undercroft, and now you can go to the Lincoln Memorial, have educational information given to you, videos about Lincoln, and learn more much more about Lincoln than you otherwise would have known. So I did that the last couple days. And then on the 4th of July, I'll be making a number of speeches around the country about the Declaration of Independence and its its significance.

SPEAKER_01 15:17

I was gonna ask a follow-up question on on your you've interviewed the the presidents uh you know over the last number of years, and I'm not gonna ask you into your favorite uh in that regard, but I would like to ask, given your history of of knowledge and and and uh patriotism, you know, if you look, for example, at Washington, Lincoln, and Jefferson, did you have a favorite? I know they all had their pluses and minuses, as you said, but you just mentioned that Lincoln is the most uh most visited of all, which a lot of people don't know. Uh do you have a favorite?

SPEAKER_02 15:48

Well, the two great presidents of the United States, and people debate who was better, Washington or Lincoln. Washington got the country off the ground. Obviously, without him, we wouldn't have won the Revolutionary War, and we probably wouldn't have had a constitution because he presided over the Constitutional Convention and helped ensure its ratification. Lincoln held the country together at a time when it was split apart, when it was going to be split apart. He ultimately freed the slaves, and he ultimately gave his life for that. And I think those two people are the most uh important presidents we've ever had. Trevor Burrus, Jr.

SPEAKER_00 16:19

So we've got America 250. This is a a big date. So these these talks you're giving on the Constitution, I I'm curious what what are you you hitting on? It's it's a it's the fabric of our country. It's an amazing document. I love your take.

SPEAKER_02 16:31

Well let me explain. Uh the Declaration of Independence was signed uh in August, but it was agreed to on July the 4th. And we have made that date, July the 4th, the birth date of our country. John Adams had thought it should be July the 2nd, which is the date we actually voted to be independent of England. But the document that explains why we we wanted to be independent uh was actually agreed to on July the 4th. And for since 1870, Congress has decided that the official birthday or holiday is July the 4th. The reason July the 4th is important is not just because the declaration was agreed to then, but it's because there's a sentence in the declaration that became the most famous sentence in the English language. We hold these truths to be self-evident that all men are created equal, that they're endowed by their creator or certain unalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. That sentence is the creed of our country. Now, obviously, it was written by people who were slave owners. Three-quarters of the people at the Second Continental Congress were slave owners, uh, although the word slavery is never mentioned in the Declaration, nor is it mentioned in the Constitution. So we had an imperfect birth defect, you get to argue, slavery. But the idea of trying to move towards a situation where everybody is equal, everybody has equal rights and equal opportunities is kind of the hallmark of that sentence, and it's really the creed of our country. And so when I talk about the Declaration of Independence, I try to explain how it came about, who drafted it, why they drafted it, and how they uh ultimately used it during the declar during the sh the Revolutionary War to kind of make justify what they were doing.

SPEAKER_00 18:06

Aaron Powell When you're going about this, the objective you have in your mind, do you feel I mean obviously the current generations are disconnected from what happened 250 years ago, but I think there's a lot in our culture that has disconnected from being proud of being an American and what it stands for. And um I love your your insight on I don't know, kind of the the thoughts behind that. You you've hit on it, it's a very, very important document. But um if you're trying to strike you know some inspiration and and the the listeners, I mean what what's going to your head?

SPEAKER_02 18:36

Put it this way. The document is very important because it has the creed of our country, but what we're really celebrating on the 250th anniversary is not a sentence that was written 250 years ago. We're really celebrating the fact that the United States became the most important country in the world over the ensuing 250 years. We're the leading educational, cultural, scientific, uh, technological, military, geopolitical power throughout the world, certainly over the last hundred years, if not even longer. And as a result, uh we are a beacon of freedom to people. We have 55 million immigrants in this country, and no other country in the world has more than 76 million immigrants. People come here, and they come here because this is a place where the rule of law prevails, where you can rise up onto the American dream concept and become something significant with your life. So, America, what we're really celebrating is what this country became over the last 250 years, and hopefully what we will continue to be over the next 250 years.

SPEAKER_00 19:40

Yeah. I'm really I'm trying to dance around asking anything like about where where do you think the state of affairs are, where are we heading as a country, but I I totally commend the like where where we have been as unmatched and incredible.

SPEAKER_02 19:54

Um obviously the country has some challenges. Uh bipartisanship is not uh uh you know something very common in Washington these days, but I'd like to remind people during the Civil War, it was much worse. Sixty-five members of the House of Representatives and the Senate were hit over the head uh while they were on the floor of the Senate or House by other members of the Congress. Uh we uh we also lost uh about 750,000 men and women during the Civil War, about 3% of our population. That would be the equivalent today of about 10 million people being killed. So we we you know we're not in that bad situation. We have divisions, there's a lot of political skirmishing. Clearly uh the both sides are not really interested in bipartisanship at this moment, but the country still is a beacon of freedom and the place that most people in the world, if they were going to leave their country, would come to.

SPEAKER_00 20:46

Aaron Powell One of my my favorite quotes is the uh foundation of gratitude is an understanding of history. You don't realize how how good we have it until you start reading these old books about how things really were. And uh it's good, we don't have brawls in the house reporting that. That's great. Okay, so if you had a megaphone over the whole country, would you say everybody needs to read this document? Just get it, get your own copy and go through it.

SPEAKER_02 21:27

Well, you know, it's a document that's 250 years old, so it may seem a little archaic to people. I don't think it's a bad thing to read, but I think there are other things people should read. Remember, it's an interesting document, but it's uh it was more or less a propaganda document. Uh it was designed to explain what we're doing. It doesn't have the force of law. The more important document is really the Constitution, which is the the document under which we live and operate, and the Bill of Rights that are part of it. Those are probably more important documents in some respects.

SPEAKER_00 21:57

David, I'd I'd love to get your Original vision for the Carlisle Group. I understand you were in DC and you were trying to figure out what this next season of life was like. And I think you've a number of times have said 37 is kind of the closing window for starting your own venture. And uh Yeah, what was what was the original vision?

SPEAKER_01 22:17

And also, why not New York? DC at the time wasn't known for private equity, if I remember correctly.

SPEAKER_02 22:22

Okay. So um I was 37 years old practicing law in Washington after the Carter years, but I really wasn't that great a lawyer and I didn't enjoy it. And if you don't enjoy what you're doing, life can be very long. So I decided I would start the first private investment firm in Washington of its type. But the reason I didn't go to New York is because I didn't have any credibility as a private equity investor or even investment banker, or I didn't have any finance background. So I decided I would do it in Washington and focus on things more heavily affected by the federal government than the people in New York would. So by saying we f we're focused on things heavily affected by the federal government like telecommunications or defense, I think people thought maybe it makes some sense. And I also was reminded by a sentence by Everett Dirksen, the former Republican uh Senate leader in the 1960s, who said, When you're getting kicked out of town, get out in front and pretend you're leading a parade. What does that mean? That means take advantage of the situation you find yourself in. So I found myself in a situation where I'm in Washington and I wanted to make a virtue of it, so I I did. What I wanted to do that was unique at the time was to build a private equity firm that had multiple disciplines venture capital, buyouts, distress debt, uh real estate, and so forth, and then globalize it by having arms in Europe, Asia, Middle East, Latin America, and so forth. And so that's what I spent that 25 years or so building.

SPEAKER_00 23:49

So you guys raised five million out the gate. Then quickly after 100 million, and then it was a billion. Did I get that right?

SPEAKER_02 23:57

Correct. Our first fund, we our first fund was 100 million, and we co-invested about 600 million alongside that, so we were able to raise a billion dollars for our second fund. But we started with just five million dollars that four people gave us to get started. Trevor Burrus, Jr.

SPEAKER_01 24:11

If we were to ask about your original business plan, the back of the napkin, so to speak, that you drew up on weekends and nights, what did that look like originally? I mean, did it go as global as you just said, or did you start with the company? Well, not at the very beginning and nationally.

SPEAKER_02 24:25

Not at the very beginning. In the very beginning, we basically uh took positions in companies that were publicly traded, bought a position and tried to buy the company. Sometimes we did, sometimes we didn't, always in a reasonably friendly way. But later we started doing buyouts and small buyouts, and ultimately it worked out. And we evolved from the buyout business to the many other businesses we now have. Aaron Powell What would you say were the hardest years for the Carlisle Group? Well, the hardest years were the Great Recession of 07-08, because we had a lot of companies that weren't doing well. We had one of our funds that went bankrupt in effect, uh a large uh debt fund. Um sure, that was a very tough period of time for the entire economy, and but it was you know tough for us as well.

SPEAKER_00 25:05

Aaron Powell Curious, how how do you navigate a situation like that? Some people meditate, some people, you know, go go up to the woods for a bit.

SPEAKER_02 25:14

Uh like how do you handle stress and I'm not very good at meditating and probably not that good at going to the woods. Basically, you just try to talk to people and think through the problems and just try to keep working harder. Eventually, you know, you can probably work your way through most problems, assume you haven't done something that's illegal, and we just had to deal with the fact that the economy was not in very good shape and and we just had to make sure that people understood that we weren't going away. We were just gonna, you know, just have to do things a little differently and a little better than before.

SPEAKER_00 25:44

Aaron Powell Do you remember maybe the the sense of relief or what what that moment was when you felt like you could kind of see the the light at the end of the tunnel?

SPEAKER_02 25:52

Aaron Powell Well, I I would say when some of our companies began to turn around, we had a lot of companies that were not doing well, and then a number of them started to turn around as the economy got better. And so, you know, it it worked out. I mean, you lived through that as well. I guess uh everybody who lived through the Great Recession of 07-08 recognizes that uh was a difficult time for people.

SPEAKER_00 26:11

Aaron Powell So y'all, I mean, you you were still in a a very strong position, and there was no risk of I don't know. I mean there's always risk of uh getting worse and nobody knew what was ahead.

SPEAKER_02 26:20

Well, we were in a strong position, but uh, you know, we made mistakes and some things we could have done better, and fortunately things worked out.

SPEAKER_00 26:26

Aaron Ross Powell Okay, another question for just kind of getting the Carlisle group going. What what decisions did y'all make early on that really had a big impact on the trajectory?

SPEAKER_02 26:35

Aaron Powell Well, one of the best decisions I made was that I would not become the chief investment officer. Um I was not a uh uh investor by say by background. I didn't have an MBA. So at the beginning I recruited two people that had uh MBAs, one from Harvard and one from the University of Chicago, and they really had investment experience, and so I kind of let them run the investment process and it worked out pretty well. And I took on fundraising and and um you know recruiting and and the kind of vision of the firm, and I was the more or less the public face of the firm, but the other guys were doing day-to-day investing and they were doing a good job.

SPEAKER_00 27:10

Yeah. And I I've I've heard on interviews, you've talked about how for years you were traveling 200, 250 days a year, just going and meeting with people constantly. And um I just how did you put that together? Like, did you have some some list of all your targets and starting top?

SPEAKER_02 27:29

I mean, I basically started with people I knew, and then you have concentric circles of people you didn't really know, but maybe somebody you knew knew them, and then just keep working around. So initially people I knew were in Washington, then New York, then California, other parts of the U.S., and then I started going to Europe and the Middle East, the Far East, China, Japan, Australia, just work my way around the world, Latin America. And so, you know, I got to know people, and we had a reasonably good uh track record, so people were willing to invest with us.

SPEAKER_01 27:57

That's incredible. On the expansion from a national firm to international, you just mentioned all the countries that that you expanded into. Cultures are different, lifestyles are different, business practices are different. How do you morph and elevate into such an incredible complex arrangement from one country to all those countries?

SPEAKER_02 28:19

Well, we didn't send Yankees overseas. More or less we basically hired local people that I would recruit, and so they knew the local culture, and I didn't send over people from Washington saying, we understand how to do this better than you. So we we had an investment committee that that uh people from Washington were on, but in the end we let the local people lead the efforts. What a crazy network. How do you keep it all straight? Well, I'm not sure it is all straight, but uh we're always making uh problems and challenges and so forth. But in the end, I've had very good partners. And when you have good partners, you can you know go to sleep at night and not worry that uh the world's gonna fall apart. So always try to hire people that are smarter than you and and and uh and are compatible.

SPEAKER_00 29:05

Yeah. I'm curious where where do you see opportunity in the market right now? There's been all this stuff with AI and data centers and building, but uh I'm curious what um what you're looking for.

SPEAKER_02 29:16

Well you well, I think that data centers are gonna be a major business. Whether the values will be there that people currently think, I don't know. Uh AI is obviously going to transform the world. Whether the earnings will be there consistent with uh the anticipated earnings, I don't know. Um an area that's been particularly attractive for Carlisle in recent years has been the so-called secondaries market. We bought a company from two Dutch pension funds called Alp Invest, and it's one of the leading secondaries firms in the in the in the world, basically buying other partnerships that people want to sell, and we've been able to get very good returns from that.

SPEAKER_00 29:50

Interesting. Uh I'm in real estate world, I I don't know the secondaries market. So you're saying they buy minority stocks.

SPEAKER_02 29:57

The way it works is this. Um and real estate has this as well now. Um let's suppose I invest in a partnership. I'm an individual and I invest in a partnership or I'm a pension fund, I invest in a partnership, but I don't want to hold for 10 years, and so somebody might come along, a secondary's buyer, and say, Well, the value of what you have today, you put a million dollars in, it's worth on paper today $900,000. I'll pay you $800,000 for it. You can take $800,000 and do what you want with it, and I'll ride the upside, and maybe it'll be worth more than $900,000 or something down the road. So um that's been a very big business now, and and it's one of the biggest high growth areas in the private investment world.

SPEAKER_00 30:38

I'm curious. Um I bet y'all are invested in some stake of SpaceX. I'm love to get your take on if these valuations are insane, but everybody says don't bet against Elon. I I'm I'm curious what you think, SpaceX, how the how things are going to play out over the next 10 years with them.

SPEAKER_02 30:55

Well, Elon Musk put in the first hundred million dollars. 100 million dollars, and then he raised, I think in 2001 or two, another 12 million dollars. If you had been in that group that invested 12 million dollars and you held through the IPO, you'd have a return of over a million percent. So it turned out to be one of the best investments anybody could have made if you held on. Um I was not that fortunate or that well connected. So I invested um in at uh SpaceX when it had a valuation of $175 billion. When it doubled to $350 billion, I sold. So I doubled my money, but I would have made 10 times my money if I had been smart enough to hold on, but I didn't.

SPEAKER_00 31:37

Damn. I think you had uh you had both investments. Yeah. Um I I I heard you had this opportunity with Facebook really, really early on. What was it? Somebody knew.

SPEAKER_02 31:50

My my daughter was a student at Harvard. The young man she was going out with at the time was a uh classmate of Mark Zuckerberg's. Um this young man uh is now my son-in-law, and he told me that this friend of his at Harvard was starting a company to build a dating service for students at Harvard, then would go to Yale and then Princeton, so forth. And he said, I had a chance to invest $30,000 in it, and I said, This is crazy, it's not going anywhere. So I didn't do it. Um one of his other roommates did put in $30,000. He used his bar mitzvah money, put in thirty thousand dollars, and that today that that money is worth about fifty-three billion dollars. Oh my gosh. From thirty thousand. That's correct.

SPEAKER_00 32:33

What was going through your head? You're just like, this is some dumb college project, this kid's gonna lose my money. Well, David, I I got a question for you. Just with how many interviews you've done, I I think our audience knows this is number 21 for us as far as how many interviews we've done. We've we've been going for about two years now. I'd I'd love your your advice, your input on maybe taking our own platform to another level and what what you've learned along the way with building your own. You how many shows and podcasts do you have now? It's probably four or five.

SPEAKER_02 33:07

Uh five of them I do. But uh, here's what I'd say. Look, the trick is uh, you know, being polite to people helps. Um getting as many uh in new people to interview as helps. Uh being trying to, you know, go pursue people that will be willing to be interviewed as helps. Prepare for the interviews. Um try to treat the people politely when you do the interviews with them, and always listen to what they say and then pivot off of what they say. And um when I interviewed Oprah Winfrey, she said uh she wasn't that good an interviewer, she said. She was a good listener. And what that meant was she listened to what the people said and then kind of pivoted off of it, as opposed to having her pre-arranged questions and never paying attention to what the person says. Uh I use the analogy of uh this. Um if the FBI ever comes to you to do a background check, they have a list of questions on somebody they might be asking you about. And uh I've noticed over the years that they go through that list of questions, they don't pay that much attention to what you say. So if you say the person is an axe murderer, they just go into the next question. Um they want to finish their ten questions, but they don't l they don't listen. They, you know, if somebody says this person's actually an axe murderer, they might pay up attention and then say maybe we should go learn more about it, but they just go into the next question, like uh what color uh car does the person have?

SPEAKER_00 34:24

Aaron Powell Got it. So be engaged, listen. I mean Oprah's got to be the greatest interviewer of all. She's very good.

SPEAKER_01 34:31

So David, have you have you ever pivoted off of a topic that you thought would be interesting and and fired back a question that they chose not to answer?

SPEAKER_02 34:40

Well, I I I always um try to listen and and I don't try to ask questions that I think will embarrass them. Um I don't try to ask questions that I know they don't want to talk about. Um last night I interviewed them for a TV show, a woman uh whose husband had dropped dead um uh uh about a year or two earlier, and she wrote a book about it, and I wasn't sure whether she'd really want to talk about her husband dropping dead of a heart attack, and turned out uh she was willing to talk about it, but normally somebody might not be willing to talk about it.

SPEAKER_00 35:11

What was the theme of that book?

SPEAKER_02 35:12

How to how to handle the grief or well it was about that, yes. I mean it was it's a very famous woman who is uh uh a writer and um and she wrote she's a Pulitzer Prize winning author, and um and she happened to write a book about her husband who who just had a heart attack and died within five minutes on the street of Washington, D.C. And as a cathartic thing, she wrote a book about it.

SPEAKER_00 35:34

I guess you gotta you write a book about it.

SPEAKER_02 35:37

Um she did, and uh, you know, it's uh it's a very good book, and she's won the Pulitzer Prize herself uh for other things, and you know, um you know she's a very, very talented writer. And uh anyway.

SPEAKER_00 35:50

Okay, my my next question about books. How how many more books are you gonna write?

SPEAKER_02 35:55

Well, uh I don't know how long I'm gonna live, but um I have uh the two books that I mentioned, then I have a new book also coming out uh in about a week or so where I um wrote the the preface and did the interviews for a book that the National Geographic is coming out with about our 250 year history. So the National Geographic Geographic has a lot of great pictures and articles about the most important things that happened over the 250 years. I picked four great historians, interviewed them about each of our centuries, 1700s, 1800s, 1900s, and and and and this century, and then I wrote the preface for it. And that's coming out uh in about a week or so. Beyond that, I'm gonna be I'm working now on a couple other ideas for books and we'll see what happens.

SPEAKER_00 36:41

Yeah. What's your process? Do you do you get a legal pad out? Do you dictate your phone? Like how do you get your thoughts?

SPEAKER_02 36:47

I usually try to res do research and then try to write down things by long hand and then eventually get them typed up and then edit and re-edit and re-edit and keep editing, and eventually uh it it seems okay, but it takes a long time.

SPEAKER_00 37:01

Yeah, yeah, it does. Um David, I I know we have you for just a limited amount of time. Sanjay, do you have any other questions?

SPEAKER_01 37:08

I I have one. You know, I think that as as we look at your career and and all that you've accomplished, uh, you have a lot to be proud of. And and I think when I look at you compared to other people that are in in similar levels of accomplishment through their lives, um, you seem to have a vigor and energy and engagement. You you enjoy the engagement, the interaction, learning more, like you want to keep going. So with that, with that backdrop, what's left? What's for tomorrow what's for tomorrow for you, David, and the rest of your life? Where do you where that goes?

SPEAKER_02 37:44

You never know. Um four weeks ago, I got married. Um, so um I wasn't expecting to get married a second time, but I did. I was married 33 years the first time, and the second time I wasn't sure I would get married again, but I did. And uh the Chief Justice, the Chief Justice of the United States, John Roberts, agreed to marry me at the Supreme Court. He did it four weeks ago in a little private ceremony with just our children. And so I guess the next phase of my life, I'm gonna be a married man and you know, do all the things that married men do, right?

SPEAKER_01 38:17

Well, I hope you took time to go on a honeymoon with everything you have going on.

SPEAKER_02 38:21

I had to go to the University of Chicago graduation the next day because I'm the chairman of the board there. I knew who you're getting on that one. So I but uh but I uh but I uh did go to Europe the next day, and you know, it was a day and a half honeymoon.

SPEAKER_01 38:34

So, David, uh when we became partners with Carlisle back in 1314, and I was hearing stories about you and uh all your travel and and accomplishments, uh someone mentioned that you drove around an older beat-up suburban or something that you weren't driving around in some fancy car or being chauffeured around. Do you still practice that that that's a good thing?

SPEAKER_02 38:56

Yeah, I I generally hold on the um well, generally I hold on the cars for about 20, 25 years. Um I don't I don't like to buy cars. I'm not good at negotiating with salespeople, and I'm really not a speeder, so I I generally buy old cars. I buy cars and hold them for a long, long time. And so uh yeah, I still do that. But my new my new wife is not as happy with those old cars, and she said we should get a new car. So I'll I'll see. I guess we probably will because if you're married, if your wife wants to do something, probably you'll do it.

SPEAKER_01 39:27

Yeah. Yeah. Congratulations on on that's that's big news. And uh we're very happy to hear that and and uh uh many years ahead personal on the personal life for you both. So congratulations. That's a very impressive setting to get married in. I don't know many people that can that can equal that equal that location. Right.

SPEAKER_02 39:48

The Chief Justice uh hasn't done that many weddings. I think he told me he'd done one other before, but but I've gotten to know him over the years through the Smithsonian where I was the chairman and he was the chancellor, so he was willing to do it, but probably doesn't want to do that many of them. How'd it go when you called him up? You just said, Hey, this is what's going on. Yeah, he seemed to be okay with it. I mean, I've known him for a while and uh, you know, you know, he seemed to be okay with it.

SPEAKER_00 40:12

I was, you know, if he said no, then you know, what could I do? David, this has been amazing. I I really appreciate your time. We appreciate your time. And uh we just thank you for what you've contributed to our country.

SPEAKER_02 40:22

Thank you. My pleasure. Congratulations on what you've achieved. Thanks very much, guys. Thank you so much.

SPEAKER_01 40:27

Good luck with the fourth of July weekend and all you've done for that and for our country. Thank you.

SPEAKER_02 40:32

Okay, thank you. Bye.

SPEAKER_01 40:33

Bye bye. Thanks, man.