David Rubenstein: Defining Great Investors, Guiding Presidents and Preserving History

Hi, everybody, and welcome to In Good Company. And today, I'm here with David Rubinstein. David is the founder and chairman of the Carlyle Group, one of the biggest private equity firms. And he also hosts the David Rubinstein Show, where he interviews prominent leaders in business and so on. And earlier this year, I had the pleasure of being on your show. So this is like revenge time, actually, David. Well, thank you for inviting me, and, you were great on my show. And anytime you wanna come back, please let me know. You sometimes talk about people being on like brands. So what's the David Rubinstein brand like? I'm not quite sure what it is. Maybe it's just too busy to do anything very well because I'm doing so many different things that I don't really have as good a brand as I maybe would like to have. But the truth is, I spent thirty years I'm now still in private equity. I spent thirty years building a firm. It became one of the larger private equity firms. But I find that I'm better known now for the TV shows I do Yeah. Or the interviewing I do, or for my philanthropy. I have a lot of philanthropic things I've done, and people talk to me more about that than anything I've done in the investment world. So I guess my brand is that somebody that can't do anything well. I do many different things, but none of them that well as I would like to do. Well, we're going to get through it, and you for sure do a lot of things well. But you were you were an adviser in the White House at age 27, and now you are here. Just what are the what are the highlights in your life since then? I mean, briefly. Well, briefly, I came from very, modest, stock. My parents were not graduates of of college or high school. They both dropped out of high school. They were married young. I was their only child. So I grew up in a blue collar setting. And, you know, so if you grow up in that setting, you have to make it on your own. So there's a plus about that. My own children have had some advantages that I didn't have. Mhmm. Yeah. But I, was only interested in politics and government at the time when I was young. I had no interest in making money. In the days of of in the nineteen sixties or so, there were no hedge funds, private equity funds, tech startups. There was no there were no billionaires, and you didn't aspire to be a billionaire. And my family was Jewish. If you were Jewish and you wanted to go into business, you wanted your family's business, your family might have a business. If you didn't have a family business, you became a lawyer, a doctor, or a dentist, and that's what your mother …