Got a great guest today, David Rubenstein. He is a prolific author, multiple best New York Times best-selling author. He's got a new book, Speaking of America: Great Conversations at the Library of Congress. He is the owner of the Baltimore Orioles. We're going to talk about Pete Alonso, but I'm still not happy about that. One of the bright spots this year. He's the host of PBS's Iconic American History with David Rubenstein, Bloomberg's Wealth, and with David Rubenstein and the David Rubenstein Show. He's got other shows. He's one of the recipients of the Presidential Medal of Freedom. He sits on some of the most... He's the chairman of some of the most prestigious boards. He's a busy guy. Welcome to the show, sir.
Thank you very much, but I think you're busier than I am.
Not really, but first of all, we have to get a little personal business out of the way. We were just talking. Congratulations. You recently got married to one of the great women of all time, an old friend of mine, Karen Zucker. Just quickly, how did you guys meet?
Well, um, she came to see me one time when I was in Palm Beach for a holiday, and she wanted me to make a speech for the 92nd Street Y in Palm Beach, and I said I'm not really a big enough draw, I thought, to be attractive to get the 92nd Street Y to have a program there. So, we kind of didn't pursue that, but then later we went out to dinner, and then a couple years later we got married. And so, now I'm married. I got married by the Chief Justice of the United States. I know the Chief, and I asked him if he would marry us, and he doesn't usually do that, but he did. And we had a ceremony at the court, just our children and grandchildren. And my 7-year-old granddaughter came up to me right afterwards and said, 'Now that you're married, are you going to have babies?' So, you know, I'm in my 70s.
That's a hard no. That's a hard no.
Yeah, so I'm not having babies, but anyway, we're happily married for 4 months.
Congratulations. I was so happy to hear that, and I just was shocked. I knew nothing. I knew you guys were dating, but then just all of a sudden, boom, you got married. So, well, congratulations. Let's also talk a little Orioles baseball. You know, you've been very open and candid that, you know, it hasn't been a smooth ride. You remind me of my friend Stevie Cohen, a guy who was a master of the universe and baseball's not that easy. You know, you took them over and you tripled the payroll, but yet things have not gone well. Talk to me about lessons learned and where are we going with the Orioles?
Well, I've written another book about that that's just come out by Simon & Schuster about why I bought the Orioles.
I didn't know it was out yet. I'm sorry. I thought it was a book you were working on. I didn't know it was out yet. Okay.
It just came out and it's basically a book on why I bought the Orioles. It was really designed to kind of be a philanthropic gesture for my hometown. I am from Baltimore. I've given away a fair amount of money over my lifetime, but never really much in Baltimore. I thought I should do more for Baltimore, so I bought the team with the idea I could revive the team and revive Baltimore, but it didn't turn out to be that easy cuz I had a team that was in first place in the American League East and I bought them and now they're in last place. So, uh...
That took a lot of work though, didn't it? You had to triple the payroll to make that happen.
I tripled the payroll and if I hadn't tripled the payroll, I'd probably be in the same place, but the team is... I'm learning a fair bit and, you know, as you mentioned, Pete Alonso was our star player this year. He led the American League in RBIs and home runs and became the first player in major league history to ever win the batting, the RBI and home run title in two different leagues. Nobody else ever did that.
I didn't realize that. That's incredible. It was a big loss for the Mets. Hey, you mentioned philanthropy. You have a term, patriotic philanthropy. I was astounded to read the various landmarks, treasures of this country that you've been involved in preserving and keeping them wonderful.
Well, what happened was I worked in the White House when I was a young man. I worked for Jimmy Carter. I managed to get inflation to 19%, so we didn't get reelected.
We'll get there. We'll get there.
And so, I left the White House, but I retained my love of history. And when you work in the White House, you get a sense of history. And so, when things happened in Washington, I tried to help out. So, when the Washington Monument had its earthquake damage, I put up the money to fix it. Then the Lincoln Memorial, the Jefferson Memorial, other kinds of things. And, you know, it's been something I've been focused on. I also like to buy a lot of historic documents, like the Declaration of Independence. And...
I understand that it sits very prominently in your home.
It does. Well, the originals that I have, I have more originals than probably anybody else, for better or worse. But I put them on display at the Smithsonian or other places. But what I've done this year in honor of the 250th is I had perfect replicas made of the Declaration. And I gave one to every Major League Baseball owner, every NHL owner, and to every governor, and to every embassy that the United States has around the world.
You gave one to every state house. Didn't you give it to every state house? Yeah.
So, everyone can display it. And it's a document that I hope people will take a look at, cuz it's a historic document.
You've had an incredible arc. You're one of the founders of Carlyle, one of the most successful private equity firms of all time. How did you drift from finance into... philanthropy speaks for itself, but into media? I mean, you're a media Swiss Army knife. I mean, it's amazing what you've done.
Well, you know, I'm not sure I'm as good as you are in this area. I'm just learning. But I would say I started Carlyle after I left the White House. When I was a young man working in the White House, people told me how great I was. And then I called them up the day after we lost the election to Ronald Reagan, and nobody would call me back. You know, when you're out of power in Washington, nobody wants to talk to you. So, I struggled for a while. I finally got a job. I didn't want to tell my mother I couldn't get a job. Took me a while. Finally, I realized I wasn't that good as a lawyer. And I started to get into some other business, and I picked private equity. And I started Carlyle in 1987. It grew to be a very large private equity firm, and the result of it was I made enough money to be able to give it away, and I was an original signer of the Giving Pledge with Bill Gates and Warren Buffett and Melinda Gates, and I've given away a fair amount of money, and I hope to give away the rest of it while I'm alive.
Good for you. Well done. Well done. Let's talk about the book. It's fantastic. It's basically kind of an amalgam of all great conversations in the Library of Congress. Talk to people who may not know about the conversations at the Library of Congress.
Okay. So, I'm the chairman of the board of the Library of Congress, and I've been very involved in the library for a long time. I'm an avid reader of books, and what I decided to do in this program is this. I wanted to bring together members of Congress in a non-partisan way. So, about 12 years ago, I started a program with the cooperation of the Librarian of Congress, where I would host a dinner at the Library of Congress only for members of Congress. And members of Congress would come. I would ask them to sit with people from the opposite party and the opposite house, so they get to know people they don't really fraternize with very much. And then I would bring in a great historian like Doris Kearns Goodwin or David McCullough or Walter Isaacson, and interview that person about American history in a non-partisan, bipartisan way. And then the members could ask questions as well. And so, I've now done about 75 of these. I took about 20 of them and put them in a book recently, and the authors that I interviewed are people like Ken Burns, Michael Beschloss, Chris Wallace, Max Boot, David Maraniss, Beverly Gage, Admiral McRaven, David McCullough. So, American heroes like Admiral McRaven who captured Osama bin Laden, or great authors on subjects of history, or people like David Grann who's written a lot of bestsellers, or Arthur Brooks who's written a book about happiness, or Eric Schmidt about artificial intelligence. So, that's what I've done.
Yeah, let's talk about something. Let's get into Michael Beschloss who talks about wartime presidents. What's the through line there?
Basically, the net net is that a president is pretty much defined by how they did in the war that they were involved in. I mean, it kind of trumps everything else, no pun intended. When the Constitution was developed, it said the war powers are in the hands of Congress. Congress can declare war. The president wasn't supposed to declare war. But actually the way that the world has evolved or our Constitution has evolved, we haven't declared war since 1941.
I was just astounded to see that. Now, you know, you think about it, you go, 'Yeah.' But that's just astounding being how much we've warred since then.
Right. We've had a lot of wars: Korean War, Vietnam War, Iraq, Afghanistan, and Iran, and we've never declared war legally. Now, we've had some resolutions that were kind of supportive of it, but not a real declaration of war. And clearly, we don't have anything close to that now because Congress was not really involved and informed, and Congress has blocked any effort to have a kind of a resolution approving the troops there now.
Crazy. Well, was there a kind of a thread of all wartime presidents that this is what made it work for them, this is what didn't work for them? I mean, or is it just kind of randomly the war you got stuck with is the war you got stuck with and you did what you did?
It depended. For example, in Korea, President Truman said, 'It's a police action. I'm not going to go to Congress.' He wasn't sure Congress would approve a declaration of war. In Vietnam, we had a Gulf of Tonkin Resolution, which kind of said, 'It's okay to fight back against the attacks on our ships.' But it really wasn't a declaration of war. And presidents have been afraid to go to Congress to get a declaration of war cuz they're not sure they'd get it.
Yeah, one of the fascinating chapters you reference is Eric Schmidt and AI. Obviously, AI is the topic of the moment. What was the net takeaway from that?
That was interesting. He wrote a book with Henry Kissinger. Henry Kissinger was one of the great statesmen of the 20th century. Whether you agree with his politics or his position or not, there's no doubt that he had incredible impact on our foreign policy. Yet, at the age of 98, he wanted to learn more about artificial intelligence. So, he's learning from Eric Schmidt, who was the former CEO of Google, all about artificial intelligence. And with Eric Schmidt, he wrote a book on artificial intelligence. And it's quite impressive.
