Re-Run: Why Wall Street Giant David Rubenstein Bought the Baltimore Orioles

Alex Rodriguez and Jason Kelly recently had the opportunity to sit down again with David Rubenstein, co-founder of The Carlyle Group, to chat about his new book, “Inside the Owner's Box: Conversations on Power and Leadership in Sports.” That conversation got us thinking back to an earlier episode of The Deal, recorded shortly after Rubenstein's purchase of the Baltimore Orioles. We revisit that conversation, with Rubenstein telling the hosts why he bought his hometown baseball team, how he assembled the ownership group, and what the Orioles mean for the city of Baltimore. 

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:02):
Bloomberg Audio Studios, Podcasts, Radio News. Welcome back to the Deal.

Speaker 2 (00:09):
I'm your host, Jason Kelly, back with my co host
and partner Alex Rodriguez.

Speaker 3 (00:13):
How you doing man, I'm doing well. What's up? Jas?

Speaker 1 (00:16):
Well?

Speaker 2 (00:16):
I'm excited because today we're going to run it back
and reshare a conversation. We don't normally do this, but
this was a good one. David Rubinstein he as you know,
co founder, co chairman of the Carlisle Group. He's a
fellow host here at Bloomberg. He's also a fellow team owner. Alex,
you're in the NBNWNBA. He's in Major League Baseball as
principal owner of the Baltimore Orioles. So we're playing this

(00:38):
episode again because Alex and I recently had the pleasure
speaking with our pal David about his new book, Inside
the Owner's Box, Conversations on Power and Leadership in Sports.
This is part of a book series that another friend
of ours, David Marchek, who's the president of American University,
put together across the summer and encouraging people to read
always a good thing and listen. This is a book

(01:01):
that is tailor made for our audience. And you know,
one of the things that I found interesting, Alex is
you and David. You know, you come from different worlds,
but you have collided in this, in this world of ownership.
This is obviously a guy who you knew of even
before he got into the business of baseball.

Speaker 4 (01:20):
I have, and I studied him for a long time.

Speaker 3 (01:23):
You know.

Speaker 4 (01:23):
For what he's really known for is the co founder
of Carlisle. As you mentioned, David Rubinstein is like one
of one. He's one of the best communicators alive. He
can raise more capital than anyone and you know.

Speaker 5 (01:36):
The reasons why we got into sport. I believe is
a little different of ownership. I think a lot of
him is passioned for Baltimore area. He does a tremendous
amount in a philanthropic way, and I've heard him say
it's less about an investment and more of about a
social give back to the community.

Speaker 1 (01:53):
Yeah. Yeah, it's a lot about stewardship.

Speaker 2 (01:56):
And you understand that very well given what you're doing
there in Minnesota. So the book is interesting because he
talks about his own journey and then he interviews a
lot of people that have either been on our show,
like Ted leonsis or others who are very much in
our orbit, be it Tony Wrestler, the owner of the
Atlanta Hawks, Bob Kraft, who's a good friend of yours,
obviously with the New England Patriots. A lot to learn

(02:17):
in this book. So in that spirit, here's a rerun
of our conversation with David Rubinstein. All right, so we
like to start every one of these shows by having
the guests introduce themselves and what they do.

Speaker 3 (02:30):
I'm David Rubinstein.

Speaker 6 (02:31):
I am the chairman of Carlisle Group, a firm I
started in nineteen eighty seven with a few other people,
and I do some other things, but I guess that's
probably what I do mostly.

Speaker 2 (02:40):
You also have recently gotten involved in the game of baseball.

Speaker 3 (02:45):
That's correct.

Speaker 6 (02:46):
Despite my appearance as a Little League All Star shortstop,
didn't think it would go very far. But I had
now regained my baseball acumen and interest, and I am
now the principal owner of the control partner they call
it in baseball, of the b Oriols baseball team. I
grew up in Baltimore, and after fifty years of not
really focusing on Baltimore and the Orioles, I'm now refocusing on.

Speaker 2 (03:09):
It, and boy, are you ever. Let's just dive into
this deal. How does this come to you? What's the
process by which you end up owning this team?

Speaker 6 (03:17):
A little convoluted like everything in the big world of sports.
The team has been owned for thirty years by the
Angelos family. They bought it out of bankruptcy in nineteen
ninety one or nineteen eighty two. And let me just
explain what happened. Saint Louis Brown's were a team in
Saint Louis. They weren't doing well there. They went to Baltimore,
and Baltimore group of people bought up for two million dollars.

(03:40):
Two million dollars, that's in nineteen fifty four. Edward Bennett
Williams bought it when the family wanted to sell that
owned the Hofburger family. He bought it nineteen eighty one
for roughly twelve million dollars. When he passed away his
estate sold it to Eli Jacobs, a buyout person in
New York, for roughly seventy five million dollars. And then
when that went bankrupt, it went into bankrupt court and

(04:00):
was bought in bankruptcy court for a net price of
roughly one hundred and fifty five million dollars by a
lawyer in Baltimore named Peter Angelo's. He did have some
other Baltimore people come in with him, most famously, I
would say Tom Clancy, who was a very author lived
in Baltimore, and Pam Shreiver, among others. But he owned
it and was the control partner for a long time.
His health went south and his son began running it

(04:23):
about five years ago.

Speaker 3 (04:24):
Son John.

Speaker 6 (04:25):
I don't know exactly why they decided to entertain an offer,
but I had thought they might be interested in selling it.
I was told by some people in Baltimore that maybe
they'd be recepted to somebody from Baltimore buying it, and
so I actually teamed up with Ted the Yonsis who
owns the Washington Caps the Washington Wizards, and he said
to me correctly, he knows more about sports than I did.

(04:46):
Why don't we team up. I would invest in Monumental,
and then Monumental would buy the Orioles, and he led
the negotiations with John Angelo's about a year before we
actually consummated the deal that actually happened, and then it
didn't work out. They couldn't reach in the agreement, and
so it fell apart. Last summer, John Angelos, who was
renting a house in Nantucket, came to see me at
my home in Nantucket and he said, why didn't I

(05:08):
buy a minority interest in the team. If I'd liked
the Oriols and didn't work out through Monumental, I could
buy a minority steak. And I went back to him
and said, well, maybe if I could buy a steak
that would get me to control at some point, I'd
be much more interested. He came back and said, okay,
but it doesn't have to be over three or four years,
which is what I anticipated. He said, maybe we can
buy control sooner, and so I decided to move forward

(05:29):
with it. I called somebody who had once said to
me he'd like to buy the Oils with me, and
it's a guy in New York named Mike Earraghetti, who
is really the CEO of ARI is a very excellent
private credit firm private equity as well, And so I
called him and said, there may be a chance to
buy the Oriols.

Speaker 3 (05:43):
Would you like to come in with me?

Speaker 6 (05:45):
And he said yes, and then together we negotiated for
six or nine months or so with John Angelo's. I
didn't think the deal was going to happen at one
point because in Christmas when we were negotiating the deal,
it blew up a bit. It wasn't looked like it
was going to happen, and I maybe lost my and
I walked away from the deal saying, this is not
going to happen.

Speaker 3 (06:02):
I'm not happy.

Speaker 6 (06:03):
And then for about a week it kind of was nowhere.
But then like deals always come back, it seems, and
this one came back, and we negotiated the deal and
we closed it. The first part of it right at
the beginning of the season, right before opening day. And
then the second part of the deal was we bought
forty percent at the beginning and the remaining sixty percent
we just closed.

Speaker 3 (06:21):
That's incredible.

Speaker 7 (06:22):
So I mean, you go to Duke undergrad then you
get a law degree in Chicago, you run what I
call the Yankees of private equity in Carlisle, one of
the most amazing companies that you started manage almost half
a trillion dollars today. And you say, well, I'm not
good enough to make a major League baseball team, but
I'm rich enough now to buy one how does that
conversation go, David, when you're like, all right, I am ready,

(06:43):
because this is a big move for you.

Speaker 6 (06:45):
It's always complicated to figure out what you want to
do with your life when you're past running something. So
I gave up at the age of sixty nine. I
gave up being the co CEO of Carlisle, and I
became the co executive chair and then the co chair
and I have a family office that I invest through
called Declaration, and I chair seven nonprofit boards, so like
the Kennedy Center, or the Library of Congress board, the

(07:07):
National Gallery of Art board, the Universicago Board and councilor
Correlations and so forth.

Speaker 3 (07:12):
So that takes time.

Speaker 6 (07:13):
And then I have I try to do one book
every two years, and then I try to do TV
shows on a place called Bloomberg, So I do a
couple of TV shows there and on some on PBS.
So I have a lot of things to do. And
I'm not sure why I thought, at my current age,
an age that I never thought i'd live to be
this old, that I would go back and buy a
baseball team. But the reason I really did it was

(07:34):
not because I thought I'm going to make more money,
and that's going to make me a happier person having
more money. That wasn't it. I just grew up in Baltimore.
I got a public education there, public school education. My
parents were born there, they were raised there, they were
married there. They lived their entire life pretty much there
until they retired, and they're buried there. And I realized
I won't know doub't be buried in Baltimore as well.
But I thought I hadn't really done enough for Baltimore

(07:56):
compared to what I've done in other philanthropic areas. Thought
if the ownership was ready to be sold and the owner,
the current owners were ready to sell it, I would
maybe come back and bring in some other people in
it and try to infuse some energy into the team.

Speaker 2 (08:11):
You come into this at a moment where you've seen
a number of your friends and peers, and you and
I have talked about this.

Speaker 3 (08:17):
Over the years.

Speaker 2 (08:17):
You've seen them get into sports and in various forms
and fashions, whether it's Tony Wrestler or Steve pel Huger,
Mark Lazri, many others. What did you hear from them
that made you either initially disinterested or interested, Like, what
did you take from those conversations.

Speaker 6 (08:33):
Initially, I had opportunities to buy sports teams as well.
In fact, the Wizards and the Caps owned by Abe
Poland Abe was a friend of mine. He asked me
to consider buying it well before he actually sold it.
I didn't do that or buy any other team for
this reason. I was running a large private equity firm
with my partner who was the co CEO, and I thought,
if I say to my investors, who are giving me
money to try to get a good way to return,

(08:54):
by the way, I'm not spending that much time on
your investments. I got a sports team I'm spending time on.
I thought they would criticize me, and I thought they
would say, you're not focused on what we're giving you
money for. But as I saw some of my colleagues
in private equity who had the same dilema I had
by sports teams, the rates of return didn't go down
and they actually made money on the sports teams, I said,
maybe I was wrong, Maybe you can do both. And

(09:14):
so I maybe regretted that I didn't participate in some
of the earlier deals when NBA teams were bought for
a lot lower prices than they were bought for it today,
and the same with baseball teams. And since I wasn't
really running Carlisle day to day any longer, I thought
I could afford to do it. But what I learned
from others is that you know, you got to put
energy into it in time, and it takes more time
than I originally thought. I mean, I knew it would

(09:35):
take time, but what happens is you get addictive to
showing up at the games. So I hadn't been to
Oriols games very much, but now I'm going to more
Oiols games than I ever dreamed of. I was going
to because as the owner I feel and the control
partner I feel, I should show up as a symbol
of the ownership group that I put together. And it
can be rewarding but also very time consuming.

Speaker 2 (09:54):
Talking about your deal, consensus out there is you got
a pretty decent deal for this franchise.

Speaker 1 (10:00):
Does it feel that way to you?

Speaker 6 (10:02):
Well, I think we got a good deal because you know,
if they had auctioned it off and said, whoever the
highest bidder is, we'll get this, maybe somebody would have
come into a higher price. However, the Angelos family did
not want to be seen as putting a company or
the team up for sale in a way that might
lead to somebody coming in and wanting to move the
team from Baltimore. It's very important Baltimore to have the

(10:23):
team stay there.

Speaker 3 (10:24):
And while the.

Speaker 6 (10:25):
Lease was signed was really a fifteen year lease. It
might turn out to be a thirty year lease, but
it's a fifteen year lease. And I think Baltimore was
always nervous that maybe somebody from a big city would
come in and say we're going to buy the team
but ultimately move it. So the fact that I was
from Baltimore, I think made the family feel more comfortable
in selling to me, maybe at a slightly lower price,
but maybe not as much as you think slightly lower price,

(10:46):
and maybe others would have paid. The team was not
without its challenges because remember they have not been in
the World Series in forty years. And while the team
was very good the year before I bought it with
my partners, teams had some real challenges up until the
last year. So it's not a foregone conclusion that it's
going to be a home run that buy it at
the price we paid.

Speaker 2 (11:04):
Well, he's you know, he's already using the you know,
the metaphors to you know, talk about his sports team,
talk to us about putting this consortium of investors.

Speaker 1 (11:12):
Get you mentioned Mike Arraghetti, the CEO of ARES.

Speaker 2 (11:15):
He's a big baseball fan, grew up in Rockland County,
you know, really a self made guy.

Speaker 1 (11:20):
You know Yale goes to Ares, et cetera.

Speaker 2 (11:23):
You also, I think, in a very savvy way, put
together some people who have also relationships to Baltimore.

Speaker 1 (11:30):
Tell us about that process.

Speaker 6 (11:32):
Well, I thought it was important to have people in
Baltimore who would show to everybody that is a Baltimore
related effort. So Kurt Schmoke, who was a former mayor
of Baltimore, and I grew up with Kurt, he agreed
to come in. He's not a wealthy person by the
standards of private equity people, because he'd been in public
services whole life, but he came in. I asked Cal
Ripken if he would come in, and he did come

(11:52):
in as well. And then the number of wealthy Baltimoreans
who had not had a chance to invest in the
team when Peter Angelos bought it, they were willing now
to invest in it. So I mostly was focused on
people from Baltimore or that area. There are some from outside.
But what I've also found there's a lot of people
who left Baltimore have always retained an interest in Baltimore.
So there's one person who I won't raim him, but

(12:13):
who has an obsession with Baltimore Orioles. He mentioned to
me one time when I was with him in a
business meeting, and he said, if you ever buy the ools,
let me know I'd like to come in too, friends
and family. I thought he might be put in a
million dollars or something, but he put INT's say, well
over fifty million dollars, and if we're obviously wealthy guy,
but he told me that he's not missed a game
in twenty years. If he's not physically there, he watches

(12:33):
it on MLB dot com. And he's just got this
obsession with the Oriols. And I found there are a
lot of people that have this obsession with the Oriols.
For example, the owner's suite income in the New Yarts has
fifty five seats. More or less, I told the management people,
always make sure it's filled with people from Baltimore, or
season ticket holders or Little leaguers or people that are diverse,

(12:54):
and we're not just a bunch of old white guys
like me sitting there. So they've done a very good job.
And we haven't filled every night. That's one of the
dangers of actually being an owner. There was filled every night.
But there's a lot of food in this in the
owner's boxes, and I found that you can gain a
lot of weight because the food is like pizza and
French fries and so forth. So I got to be
very careful ballpark food.

Speaker 3 (13:15):
Yes, I have it filled up.

Speaker 6 (13:17):
And there are people who have been season ticketholders for
forty years, forty five years, and they said they've never
been the owner's box and they just love the ools.
And so I'm trying to say to people, look, I'm
not criticizing my predecessors. They had a complicated situation, but
I'm now trying to say this is part of the
revitalization of Baltimore that I'm trying to help with. Baltimore

(13:38):
is a city that has a lot of challenges. When
I was growing up, it was the ninth biggest city
in the United States, population of roughly nine hundred and
thirty thousand people. Today it's about half that size. A
little bit more than half that size, and one of
the reasons is that there's been white flight to the
Baltimore County. Baltimore City is one of the two cities
in the United States, the other being Saint Louis that is
not in a county. So when you leave Baltimore City

(13:58):
and go to Baltimore County, you're in income taxes and
your property taxes don't flow back to Baltimore City. The
city therefore has had lots of challenges that you see
in urban areas, and it has had, you know, crime problems,
It's had STD problems, illiteracy problems, and so I'm not
by myself going to solve all those problems, obviously, But
what I'm trying to do is say, let's revitalize Baltimore.

(14:19):
Let's get some corporate headquarters to come back there. Many
corporate heculders have left, and so what I'm trying to
do is infuse the team with a sense of energy
and hopefully more people in the city will say this
is a great place, we should stay here, and maybe
people from outside of Baltimore City might relocate there or
move back there. I hope that will happen, but Obviously
it takes some time.

Speaker 2 (14:37):
Before we get too far away from the ownership. We
probably should also point out that Mike Bloomberg is part
of the ownership group.

Speaker 7 (14:45):
So David playing against Baltimore for almost twenty five years,
I'll tell you, is one of the greatest iconic blue
chip franchise. I don't even baseball, but in all of sports,
and for me playing there for so many years, it
was my favorite stadium. Candeen yards is just amazing. Kyle
Ripk is my favorite player, So I'm very I too
cowed Senior Eddie Murray in the great history of the Orioles.
What kind of owner are you going to be?

Speaker 3 (15:06):
Or are you?

Speaker 7 (15:06):
Are you one that talks to the GM and says, hey,
one guy's moved around. Do you tell Gunner Henderson get
your elbow down, get it up? Are you kind of
more just like watching from the stand and hoping for
the best.

Speaker 6 (15:16):
Well, I have to be very honest, I don't know
as much about baseball as as maybe I wish I did.
I played Little league baseball and I peaked at eleven,
and then twelve or thirteen people started getting bigger than me.
And I thought when I was eleven you know, maybe
Jewish Little League All Stars would get to the major leagues,
but I found out that doesn't usually happen. So I

(15:37):
haven't followed baseball as closely as other people have, and
therefore I'm learning the game right now. We have a
general manager who was voted the American League General Manager
of the Year last year. His name is Mike Elias,
who was a baseball player at Yale. Very smart person
from the Washington area, went to high school in Washington.
He has what they call sabermetrics down cold. What was

(15:58):
described as moneyball years ago is hieroglyphics compared to what
it is today, because today it's so much more sophisticated.
And so when he comes to me and Mike arraghetty
and says this player is worth X or Y or Z,
I don't really know how I can challenge him because
he knows much more than I do. And he's got
about twenty some people on his team that do statistics

(16:19):
and do scouting and so forth. So it's hard for
me to say, well, you should do this or do that.
So I am the type of owner right now says
I'd like to be informed if you want my judgment
I'm happy to give it to you, but I really
don't have enough knowledge to tell you do something different
than you want to do. So, for example, when the
trading deadline came and then everybody's sitting around for a
couple of days trading, I really don't have the ability

(16:41):
to say you should get this picture versus that picture.
I don't have that kind of background. So I can
help the team by saying, look, I know the CEO
of this company. Maybe they can be an advertiser, or
they could buy sponsorships. I can do that now. If
i'd seen Alex Rodriguez, I'd say we should get this
guy signed up. But you know, I haven't seen a
lot of Alex rodriguez is floating around. So but if
I see one, I'll say we should sign that person up.

Speaker 2 (17:03):
You mentioned that the other owners mean you've you've been
in some interesting consortia of investors before. What's this group
been like?

Speaker 6 (17:11):
Well, it's an interesting phenomenon. I think it's true with
the NFL and the NBA. When you own a team,
people treat you with much greater respect generally than maybe
you would have expected. In other words, if Carlisle owns
a company, I don't really have people walking up to
me in the streets saying, hey, you bought a great
automobile parts company. Yeah, that's great. You're doing a great
job for America. I'm making automobile parts more readily available.

(17:33):
Nobody says that. Like when you buy a baseball team
or a football team, people come up and you say, hey,
you should do this, you should do that. People feel
more engaged and they're willing to talk about it much more.
And I've reconnected with a lot of people. People call
me all the time, you can get me tickets for this,
or can I come to the owner's box. And you know,
it's a good feeling because I'm, you know, making people
happy because they want to come to the owner's box.
And I enjoy it at the time being it's been

(17:55):
relatively pleasurable. That's because we're doing reasonably well. If we
weren't doing well, I guess I wouldn't be so happy.
I can't say that I'll get great air from it,
because I already have great It's fun. I can see
why people who are owners enjoy being owners.

Speaker 3 (18:07):
You're treated with.

Speaker 6 (18:08):
Some respect in most cases, not always. You're building something,
you're doing something to help your local community. And I
can see the pleasure that people get out of owning sports.
And if I had it before, maybe I would have
done it earlier, But I didn't.

Speaker 2 (18:19):
Did any of the existing owners, the more senior owners
or folks who've been in the game, did they give
you any advice when you came in?

Speaker 6 (18:26):
Yes, one owner said, you know, I like you, You're a
good guy, but you should have paid a higher price.

Speaker 3 (18:32):
So what do you mean?

Speaker 6 (18:32):
He says, Well, I think my franchise is worth more
than you think it's worth. In other words, I think
baseball franchise are worth more. And so you didn't pay
a high enough price, right?

Speaker 1 (18:41):
You put a comp in the market that he didn't.

Speaker 6 (18:43):
Yeah, so I guess that's right. I won't identify that person.
But I'm reasonably happy with where we are today. I
hope we continue to do reasonably well.

Speaker 2 (18:51):
And what about within your group? You know, I mean,
Mike Irraghetti is a really interesting figure. And I mean
I don't think you guys were super close friends.

Speaker 3 (18:59):
I do really know that.

Speaker 6 (19:00):
Well, Mike knows much more about baseball than I do,
and did Mike played fantasy baseball for twenty seven years?

Speaker 1 (19:07):
Wow?

Speaker 6 (19:08):
I didn't even know what fantasy baseball really was. And
he also played baseball in high school, so he has
much more background. He really knows the players inside out,
upside down, much better than I do, honestly, So I'm
really learning it. So like the situation was this, I
did follow baseball until I went to college in nineteen
sixty six. My mother then threw away all my baseball cards,

(19:29):
threw away all my baseball books, and so I kind
of been rip van Winkle for fifty years. I kind
of coming back, and now I'm learning that there's statistics
that I did never heard of before in nineteen sixty six,
so I didn't know what war meant, wins above replacement.
I never heard of that really before, and now I'm
digging into that, or quality starts. I mean the old

(19:49):
days was complete games, now quality starts or ops. So
the statistics are a little bit different than the ones
I used to know about and focus on. It's amazing
how much data you can get now and how much
statistics are so important at analyzing whether players good or not.
And then other way is, you know, in the free
agency situation in baseball, you can get these large contracts.
I don't know if you know anybody ever got a

(20:09):
large contract. But these contracts going to be very, very large,
and in some cases they work out, some cases maybe not.
But you have to make these big bets. And then
you know, sometimes you give a person a large contract
and they get injured right away. You're on the hook
for a long time.

Speaker 2 (20:26):
Well, some people know a little bit about being on
both sides of a large contract, right, no comment. So
I want to go back to this notion of the
team as a community asset. You and I have talked
a lot over the years about patriotic philanthropy. Your philanthropic
portfolio is fascinating to sort of go down the list

(20:46):
from documents to pandas what did you learn through those
essentially philanthropic almost investments, as I think you might consider
them that informed this deal.

Speaker 6 (20:58):
Well, clearly, if you buy something like the Declaration of Independence,
people feel that you're in contributing something to the country
because all these will be in effect publicly available and
I'm not just courting them and putting in my house
to show just my friends. And so when I bought
the Magna Carta, I gave it to the National Archives
to put on permanent display, And so I realized that

(21:19):
people are thanking other people who do things for the country,
but people also thank people do something for a city.
So if you buy a baseball team and you're thought
to be adding value to the city, you're going to
do more than just try to make profits. You're going
to try to help the city. You're going to re
energize the franchise, You're going to help do things that
make people happy in the city.

Speaker 3 (21:38):
That's a plus.

Speaker 6 (21:40):
In Baltimore, like some of the cities, there aren't as
many other outside activities as there might be in New
York or Los Angeles. So in Baltimore, the Oriols have
been a really important part of the culture for such
a long time. And when the Colts left years ago
to go to Indianapolis, that also tore away some of
the fabric of Baltimore. Now where they do have the
Ravens an excellent team, but it's not quite the same

(22:02):
as the Cults in many respects. So it's a very
good team and a very good owner. The Oriols are
just part of the fabric of Baltimore. And I remember
when I was a little boy, you could get a
letter from your mother or father saying I want to
be excused to go to opening day, and every teacher
would honor that because going to opening day of the
Oriols it's like a patriotic kind of thing. How could
you not let your student go to do that? And

(22:24):
it is interesting though, when you think about sports teams.
Why is it that somebody lives in Baltimore roots for
the Baltimore Oriols.

Speaker 3 (22:29):
What is it?

Speaker 6 (22:30):
Or lives in Los Angeles roots for the Dodgers or
the Angels.

Speaker 3 (22:33):
Why is it?

Speaker 6 (22:34):
Because it makes people feel proud of the area they
live in. They feel like they're part of something. And
so if the Minnesota Timberwolves, for example, is a good example,
it's a state name around it, not in Minneapolis, right,
So people and throughout the state are probably very proud
of the team, as they should be. And some teams
are really focused on cities, some are the states, but
people take a pride in that. Just like when our

(22:55):
Olympic team goes overseas, all Americans are proud of what
the American Olympic team does, and when your local team
does well, feel kinds of pride in. I guess it's
a sense of people feeling that I'm more than my body, myself.
I'm just more than just one person. I am part
of a larger organization. It makes me feel proud to
be part of a larger organization that's doing well. That's

(23:15):
why I guess people root for these teams and they
feel so passionately about them, you know.

Speaker 3 (23:20):
David, I always find that interesting.

Speaker 7 (23:21):
When Carlile has a great return on capit on a
big investment, your investors don't say we, They just said Carlow.
And I'm an investor, right. But when the oreas win
is we won or we lost. In my mood either
goes up or down depending on wins and losses. I
find that to be fascinating.

Speaker 3 (23:36):
It's true.

Speaker 6 (23:36):
When we go to a game and we win, I
feel really happy, I'm really cheering, I'm going out, you know,
getting selfies with people who want them and so forth.
When we lose, I'm so dejected. It feels like a
dagger is in my heart and saying, how could I
have let the fans down? Why didn't we do better?
I notice I get fewer selfie requests after we lose again.
People don't as interested in pictures anymore, and I feel

(23:58):
bad for people that boys it will come up to
me and girls as well and say will you autograph
my baseball? And I say, look, I'm not, you know,
a player, but they for some reason they want my autograph.
And so I don't have very good handwriting, and as
you know, signing a baseball is not easy. And I
think when handwriting was being taught, I think those were
the Jewish holidays. So I wasn't in school, and so

(24:19):
I have to write, I do his little print, and
then because I'm a lawyer, I write I put the
date in. No other person puts the date in when
they signed the autograph, but I want to make sure
they know it's it.

Speaker 3 (24:29):
Actually happen on a certain date.

Speaker 2 (24:31):
Do you think you could do some sort of clinic
with him signing baseball?

Speaker 7 (24:34):
That's about the only thing tee, David Rubenstein.

Speaker 2 (24:50):
You do raise a really interesting point that I've been
thinking about. Because you make your career, I mean, we'll
do a very quick career journey. You know, you start
as a lawyer, you work in the White House, you
work for some law firms, you start carlist. I'm going
very fast here. Obviously you're very successful at Carlisle. You're
one of the pre eminent fundraisers in the industry in
across Wall Street. Then, as you mentioned, you do a

(25:12):
TV show with Bloomberg, and you know, you get a
little notoriety from that, and people want to come on
your show and talk to you. This feels like an
entirely new level of notoriety. Tell us what that's like
and how you're responding to it.

Speaker 6 (25:25):
Well, in all the years I've been in private equity,
nobody ever came up to me in the streets and said, hey,
you're doing a great job at private equity. Nobody ever
said that. They might have said the opposite they maybe
they did, but nobody ever paid attention. I running around
the world, nobody ever paid attention. I will walk down
the street, nobody know who I am. When I started
doing the Bloomberg Show. Bloomberg is all over the world,
and so any city I go into now, just inevitably

(25:46):
somebody will come up to me and say, I really
like your TV show so great. That's amazing to me
that young people or older people see it all over
the world. But baseball is even a higher degree than that.
I mean, I am recognized more than I ever have
been because I own a sports team, and not because
I've only done anything good for the sports team yet
day you know, we haven't done anything so, you know,
to win a World Series yet since I've been an owner,

(26:08):
I am amazed at how many people are happy to
talk about it. People don't come up to be on
the street and say, let's talk about this private equy deal.

Speaker 3 (26:14):
You did recently. No one does that. They say, let's
talk about the team. Yeah.

Speaker 6 (26:18):
It is amazing and how I've reconnected with people that
I hadn't seen in twenty or thirty or forty years.
It's a good way to reconnect. I recognize that, like
anybody who's an owner of a team, you're really a
temporary custodian because somebody's going to own it after you,
and then somebody's going to own it for that person.
So you're really representing the city for a relatively finite
period of time. Now, there are owners who owned teams
for fifty years or so, but generally most owners probably

(26:41):
own it for a shorter period of time than that.
And it is an interesting phenomenon how the business of sports,
as you all have recognized so well, has taken off
in a way that didn't exist when I was a
little boy, you didn't see owners selling teams all that much.
You didn't read about profits being taken all that much. Today,
many people buy these team tams and in four or
five or six years they go on the next thing,

(27:02):
or they sell their team at a big profit. It's
a different world. Maybe better, maybe not, but in any way,
it's a much different world. And it's not only confined
to the United States. Obviously, overseas people are buying sports
franchise as well, and people in America are buying sports
franchise all over the world. And then in the old days,
it was only males who were sports figures who are
on these teams. Now you have women sports that has

(27:24):
also done quite well financially for people.

Speaker 7 (27:26):
So I'm going to go back to something Jason said,
because you know, you talked about being one of the
greatest prolific fundraisers. Two things I really admired about you
from a long time, even before we've met, is your
ability to capital raise, but not only capital raise, but
do it at a time where you were crossing the
pond across the globe. When you go to Saudi or
you go to London and you go to Paris. People
know you and they think you're a celebrity over there

(27:47):
like they're doing Baltimore now. And then also recruiting great talent.
But focusing on the first one, what makes you such
a great capital raiser one? And to what gave you
the idea to be a visionary to go across the
pond and raise capital for Carlisle.

Speaker 6 (28:00):
Well, you could argue that maybe I couldn't get any
investors in the United States, so I had to go overseas.
Now what happened was I came up with an idea
that wasn't going to win a Nobel prize. But the
idea was you could build a private equity firm based
in Washington, which was not seen as a capital center,
and I could do it by saying, we understand companies
heavily affected by the federal government better than the guys
in New York. So that was a bit of a
niche that we could exploit. But then the other two

(28:22):
things that I tried to do was I would say
that we were going to do more than buyouts. Historically,
buyout firms only did buyouts, venture capital only did venture capital,
and so forth. But when you were in the mutual
fund business. For example, you could have mutual fund A
or B or C or D under a fidelity. You
have ninety different opportunities. I thought I could do the
same in private equity, have a buyout fund, a venture fund,
a growth capital fund, a real estate fund. And the

(28:44):
theory was, if you liked our brand name, you give
us a chance, and all these other things. And then
I decided to globalize it by setting up partnerships in Europe, Asia,
Latin America and Middle East, Africa and so forth. And
that was novel at the time. So building a multi
discipline firm and globalizing it was unusual the time. Others
have done it, and some have done it better than
we did. But to do that, I had to go
around the world to raise money, and so I just

(29:06):
made myself into a fundraiser. I wasn't trained that way,
and I just basically tried to learn how these investors
would react to the kind of things I was selling
and try to follow up. And the key is being polite,
knowing what you're talking about. Assistance follow up is always key,
and just trying to have a good track record too.
If you don't have a good track record, you can't
sell almost anything. So it turned out that I spent

(29:28):
you know, twenty plus years running around the world raising
money for Carlisle and you know, help us build along
with a good track record, a very good franchise.

Speaker 2 (29:36):
Well, you also were keyed in pretty early to the
idea early in the Carli journey, especially to the power
of showing up right, I mean to actually getting on
the plane right and going and actually asking for money.

Speaker 6 (29:51):
You know, people like to say, you've heard this phrase
from time to time. I hate to ask you for money,
and then they ask you for money. So the way
I looked at it, there are three types of fundraising
you do. One is for business. You're trying to raise
money and you're saying that people give me money, but
I'm going to give you more back, so ultimately you're
getting something really very tangible. That's not the hardest to

(30:11):
do because you're giving money back to people if you're successful.
The second is philanthropic. Philanthropic you're saying that people you're
going to get to heaven more quickly if you give
this charitable and that's hard to do because some people say,
you know, I like the tax deduction, but I have
my money and maybe I don't want your cause. The
third is political fundraising, which I've not been involved in.
I don't make political contributions. But that's a tricky one too,

(30:33):
because you're asking people to make a contribution to a candidate,
you're not getting a tax deduction for it. With the
philanthropic investment or gift, you're getting a tax deduction.

Speaker 3 (30:41):
So with political.

Speaker 6 (30:42):
Basically you're helping somebody get elected and you have to
hope that that person does what you think they should do.

Speaker 3 (30:47):
So those are the three different types.

Speaker 6 (30:49):
They have different skill sets, and different types of people
do well in them.

Speaker 3 (30:52):
Very few people do well in all three of those.

Speaker 2 (30:54):
You certainly did well in the first two, though, So
what did you learn from that?

Speaker 3 (30:57):
Well, how did you learn to do it?

Speaker 6 (30:59):
Interesting if you go to Harvard Business School or Stanford
Business School and say you don't want to be a fundraiser,
you know, there's no courses in fundraising by and large,
or maybe they have one now, but they used to
not do that because fundraising was considered the lowest part
of the totem pole in the private equity world. The
star is the guy that's doing the deals and the
person at the bottom is the person who was raising
the money. It wasn't taking that seriously and it was

(31:20):
something that people didn't really want to do. If you
had the ability to be a deal maker, that was
considered better than being a fundraiser. I made myself a
fundraiser because I really didn't have the skill set the
background to be an investor. So while I was sure
of the Carlisle's investment committees, of the other people really
day to day doing the deals and overseeing them. So
I made myself into a full time fundraiser, which hadn't
quite been done before in the private equity world, where
a founder of affirm basically was spending most of his

(31:42):
time fundraising, and that was novel. Now many others do
something similar.

Speaker 7 (31:46):
Well, David, I don't think you're give me you some
enough credit, because there's a lot of people out there.
Were not a lot, but there were some other folks
that were doing just as good as Carlisle as return wise,
but they weren't raising the capital you were raising. Did
you find the key to your sauce was the actual
de to deal flow, the returns or actually that you
were connecting with the investor and you were gritty as.

Speaker 6 (32:05):
Hell Oprah Winfrey said to me she wasn't a great interviewer,
she's a great listener. So I think the best way
to do it is I've learned over the years, is
when you go in to make a presentation to somebody,
it's not to say, here's why this fund is great,
here's why you should come in. You get in there
and listen to what they're interested in. Let them talk first.
Let them say here's what they're interested and here's what
they're doing, Here's what's going on in their country, here's

(32:26):
what's going in their city. And then you can understand
what is making them tick, and then you can pivot
what you want to say by blending in with what
they like they want to hear. You have to go
in and listen to people, and then you also have
to follow up. When you have a good fundraising meeting
and you meet with somebody that wants to give you
money as interested in it, the good will lasts about
two and a half weeks because in two and a

(32:46):
half weeks they're going to go onto something else. If
you haven't followed up in two and a half weeks
and made another connection with a follow up letter, more
materials they want, it's probably not going to happen. So
you've got to make sure your follow up. That's the key,
is making certain that you are telling them why what
they want to do is something you can help them with.
And you've got to be very polite and you have
to learn how to say no or take no. For example,

(33:06):
when Steve Schwartzen and Pete Peterson were raising the money
for Blackstone, their first fun Steve wrote in his autobiography
they only got money three percent of the time. Three
percent of the time.

Speaker 3 (33:16):
Wow.

Speaker 6 (33:16):
So these very well known guys, they were not as
well known that as they later became, but they were
being turned down by friends and people told them they
would give them money and they didn't give them money.
I would say probably early on I had a similar percentage.
But you can't take it personally. Sometimes people might say
to you, come and see me, and then you actually
go see them and they really don't want to give
you money, but they're just trying to be polite. I'm

(33:37):
sure you may have encountered some of that. And sometimes
it's hard to read what people are really thinking and
you don't know whether they're really interested or not. I
say the most of the money that I raised for
Carlisle in the early years came for people I hadn't
known before. The people that I knew before I didn't
really raise that much money from. Maybe they knew me,
they didn't want to give me money. But you just
never know who's going to lead to something. So when

(33:58):
I recruited the people for Carlisle, I recruited them in
a circuitous way, right, the people I didn't know before.

Speaker 3 (34:03):
It led to one thing led to another.

Speaker 6 (34:04):
For example, the co CEO of Carlisle for many years
and the chief investment officer was Bill Conway, and I
didn't know him from Adam. He lived in Washington, but
I didn't know him. I went to recruit a woman
who was just become the treasure of Gannett and that's
a big position. And this is in nineteen eighty seven,
and I went to her and said, here's what I'm
gonna do. I'm gonna start a pry out firm in Washington.
I'd like you to join us, be one of the

(34:25):
original partners. After I made my presentation, she said, let
me see if I got to write, you've never done
a buyout before, right, that's right, You're going to bring
people together, never worked before, right together before. Yes, you
have no money yet, that's right. And you want me
to leave my position as treasurer of Gannett to come
do that. I don't think so, but she said. As
I was leaving out, she said, Oh, there's a guy
named Bill Conway who's the chief financial officer of a

(34:46):
company in Washington called MCI.

Speaker 3 (34:47):
I heard he might be leaving. Why don't him a call?
So I called him.

Speaker 6 (34:50):
I'd never known him before. We had lunch in Ultimately
he became my partner for forty years old. So you
never know where this is going to lead.

Speaker 2 (34:57):
You've made some sort of evolution and pivots along the way.
And one sort of concurrent with your success in private
equity was being a philanthropist, but a very involved one,
especially on a number of boards. And I would say
you're more active and more involved and spread across as
many as I've ever seen anyone do. What's your thinking

(35:20):
behind that? How did you create that playbook?

Speaker 6 (35:22):
I have four standards for philanthropy. I want to start
something otherwise wouldn't get started, Finish something otherwise wouldn't get finished,
Be intellectually involved so that I'm going to do more
than write a check. And four, I want to see
progress in my lifetime. The third thing, which is to
say be intellectually involved, which I will go on a
board typically if I'm giving money, or very often i will,
and for reasons that are not completely clear to me,

(35:44):
I've often wound up as the chairman of the board.
So I've chaired a lot of organizations in the nonprofit world.
I've shared all the culture major culture organizations in Washing
and I chaired the Smithsonian, still chair the Keunny Center,
share the Library Congress Board, and now the National Galley
of Art. And it's because I enjoy it and I
loved learning about it, and I think I'm giving back
to the country in that way. So you have to

(36:04):
be motivated as well. I chaired my two university boards.
I went to Duke, I chaired that board for four years,
and now I'm the chair of the Universiticago.

Speaker 2 (36:11):
You know, it's been fun to watch you, you know,
really lean into this role as an interviewer. And I'm
not just trying to plug your show, although I'm happy
to plug your show at any time.

Speaker 1 (36:20):
I was there at the inception. What drew you to
being on that side of the microphone.

Speaker 2 (36:25):
You had given many speeches, you had been interviewed, You
were probably the most public face of private equity for
a long time, and then you turned around and started
asking questions.

Speaker 6 (36:35):
It isn't like I hired mackenzie and said, tell me
what I can do to be more visible. It happens,
like most things in life, by happenstance. So what happened
was Carlisle had big events, a thousand people, fifteen hundred people.
We want to have people come to these events, and
so I was hiring people that would be a draw.
I wasn't a draw. So I would hire former presidents
of the United States, former secretaries of state. You'd pay

(36:56):
them speaking fee and they would come. But they were
often boring, and so people were looking at their watches
and they didn't couldn't wait tho speeches over. So I
said to the speaking agent, you think I could interview
these people make a difference, and you know, I think
I could live en up and use some humor. And
they said, is the fee going to be the same?
I said, the fee is the same. So I said,
they're happy to do it because they don't have to
prepare a speech. So I started having these people come

(37:18):
I interviewed. I made people look funnier than weren't so funny,
and made people look charming. And then I became the
president of the Economic Club in Washington. Vernon Jordan asked
me to succeed him, and I was supposed to get
business people to come in and speak, and they were boring.
So I finally said, my watch is interview them. And
then Bloomberg at her about five years, has heard about it.
They saw it and they said let's make a show
out of it. I remember at the kickoff, I said,
what are you going to call the show? They said

(37:39):
they're going to call it David Rubenstein Show, Peer to Peer,
David Rubenstein's Show. I said, you think a long Jewish
ethnic name is going to work? And Mike Bloomberg said, no,
it's not a problem. So now it's been ten years
and we have two shows, Peer to Peer, and then
there's one or more financi oriented Wealth with David Rubenstein.
I've enjoyed it, and what I like is the intellectual
challenge of talking to other people.

Speaker 3 (38:00):
People.

Speaker 6 (38:00):
But I prepare as you obviously do as well, and
preparing gives you, you know, an opportunity to learn more
about people. And one of the things I'm trying to
do is this, when you reach a certain age, you
always begin to worry are you losing it? So I'm
trying to figure out what I can do to keep
me my brain active. And one of the things I
can do is interview people, and we do it regularly.
I'm preparing for it. I'm intellectually challenging with these people

(38:21):
when I talk to them, and so it keeps me busy.
And also a lot of the times I'm interviewing authors
and authors I think as a courtesy, you should read
the book when you're interviewing them. So I'm reading a
lot of books all the time, and you know, I'm
hoping it keeps my brain sharp.

Speaker 3 (38:33):
We'll see.

Speaker 2 (38:34):
So let's talk a little bit more about the intellectual
challenge of baseball. So this is a business that you know,
you're obviously familiar as a fan growing up in Baltimore.

Speaker 1 (38:45):
You're aware of it. You talk to your friends who
are team owners. But now you're in it.

Speaker 2 (38:50):
What have you learned so far that has surprised you
about the business of baseball?

Speaker 6 (38:55):
Well, first, everybody should remember these are small businesses. Relative
to the businesses that the big buyout firms typically buy.
So there's no baseball team that has revenues of a
billion dollars or two billion dollars. Earlier today, Carlisle announced
a deal where we're buying a company, a spin out
from an automobile supplier. It's about a billion and a
half revenue company or something like that. Those are not

(39:15):
considered all that big. We've bought companies in the buyout
where we bought a company with Blackstone at the helmet
and Freemant for thirty six billion dollars a few years ago.
These are big companies and gigantic revenues. When you buy
a baseball team, you're buying a team that might have
one hundred million, two hundred million.

Speaker 3 (39:29):
Dollars in revenue.

Speaker 6 (39:29):
So they're small businesses relatively speaking, but their business the
get enormous amount attention. So you've got sports writers who
are spending all their time trying to figure out whether
you're doing something right or wrong, and the amount of
coverage is enormous. So you're under a microscope when you
own a team, and if you say something wrong or
do something wrong, everybody's going to criticize you. It's also
hard to please everybody. So what I've learned is people

(39:50):
really have a fanatical care for their local team too.
You've got to be very careful what you say about
the team publicly, because everybody's paying attention to everything you
say and anything you might do. I also learned that
it can be fun. Everybody likes to win in life
and people don't like to lose, and it s maybe
win more than you lose.

Speaker 3 (40:05):
It's good.

Speaker 6 (40:06):
But I recognize that the team that my partners I
bought was in pretty good shape when we bought it.

Speaker 3 (40:11):
On the ascendancy.

Speaker 2 (40:12):
How do you think the business of baseball will evolve?
You've made a living of very good living investing in
things that grow in value.

Speaker 1 (40:19):
I know that, as you.

Speaker 2 (40:20):
Mentioned, this is an asset that is, you know, part
of financial purchase and part of philanthropic win.

Speaker 1 (40:27):
But you do want the overall business to grow.

Speaker 2 (40:30):
How do you affect that and how do you think
it should go well?

Speaker 6 (40:35):
Baseball was considered the national pasttime for a long time,
and then obviously the NFL came along in NBA and
they have taken a lot of TV dollars away from
baseball and fans support away from baseball.

Speaker 3 (40:47):
Baseball is a.

Speaker 6 (40:48):
Sport that has enormous number of ingrained supporters, but it
also doesn't have everything you want. For example, right now,
probably of the Major League Baseball players, maybe seven or
eight percent or African American, and maybe the fan base
is four percent African American, so it's relatively small. Because
a lot of African American young boys are now playing
basketball and football, and that's a sport that is attracting

(41:09):
more people. And one of the ways that baseball has
got more African American boys playing is to do things
in the youth leagues in parts of cities that they're
going to likely have young African American boys playing. But also,
as you probably know, in some parts of Latin America,
baseball is a religion, and so in the Oriels case,
we have a training facility down in the Meinican Republic,
and we're not the only ones that do that as well.

(41:30):
So you've got to get people engaged. We have to
make sure the fan base is not aging too much.
I think the fan base could be younger, and I'd
like to try to get the fan base younger in Baltimore.
That's all the thing I can focus on. I also
want to make sure that people are bringing their children
there because they want to educate their young children at
baseball and help them kind of feel about baseball as
many people my age do because they were brought up

(41:53):
with baseball. Now many young kids are not brought up
on baseball as much as they used to be.

Speaker 3 (41:57):
It's not easy to do.

Speaker 6 (41:59):
Baseball is not as international sport as probably basketball is.
The NFL is trying to become a global sport as well,
going to Europe and doing other things they're Baseball is
played overseas, of course, but it doesn't have the overseas
residents yet that I hope it ultimately will have.

Speaker 7 (42:13):
David, You've been really good in your career over the
last forty years of taking a big idea, hiring a
great team and then executing. If you had that same
challenge in baseball, and I think Rob Manford belonged in
the Hall of Fame just for the time clock alone.
I mean, that was an incredible move for a game.
What are two or three things if you were commissioned
for a day that you would focus on to make
the game livelier.

Speaker 6 (42:34):
Well, I'm nervous about answering that question. Directly because I'm
the newest owner in baseball. So for the newest owner
of thirty owners to say here's what Baseball should do,
it's probably going to get me in trouble. So I
all I want to say is all the other owners
are much more experience, they know much more than I do.
It's a diverse group of people in some respects in
terms of their backgrounds. I would say Baseball I think

(42:54):
wants to appeal to younger people than it does now.
It wants to expand the television audience that it only has.
I think it would like to expand overseas a bit
if it can, but that's obviously going to take some time.
And I also think it probably like to, you know,
find more ways to get the game into people's homes,
either through streaming or other kinds of devices that enable

(43:14):
people to watch it even if they don't go to
the game.

Speaker 7 (43:16):
So, David, I am interested because you've done a fantastic
job and identifying great talent again.

Speaker 3 (43:21):
For our audience. It's a very entrepreneur driven.

Speaker 7 (43:24):
What are some of the qualities you look for when
you hire someone young men or women for one of
your companies.

Speaker 6 (43:29):
Well, you're always looking for somebody who's reasonably intelligent. Don't
have to be a geniuses. Genius are hard to manage.
Reasonably intelligent, hard working, they have a sense of willing
to cooperate with other people. They know how to share
the credit. They also people that know how to get
along with other people and give orders in a way
that isn't offending other people. You want people are ethical
as well. You don't want people that are cutting ethical corners.

(43:51):
You want people that other people want to be around.
And so I've made a lot of hirings over the years.
Some people worked out well, some people didn't work out well.
I hired a young man years ago, nice man, and
he now is a chairman of the Federal Reserve Board.
I didn't realize that Jay Pow would be the chairman
of the Federal Reserve Board. I heard another young man
one time, and he later became the governor of Virginia,
Glenn Younkin. So sometimes you make very good decisions about

(44:14):
young people. Sometimes you know, not everything works out.

Speaker 3 (44:17):
You want to hire me a future but I don't
know if I could do.

Speaker 1 (44:21):
A ten year contract.

Speaker 6 (44:24):
You know, when you're hiring people, you really want people
that you can work with that you think that you
will enjoy talking to and you can listen to them
and they will listen to you, and you know you
want to have a good working relationship with people.

Speaker 7 (44:37):
Was there one particular deal over the last twenty years
in sports? They said, boy, if I can have that
one back? Which one of that deal?

Speaker 6 (44:44):
The greatest sports deal I think financial deal that was
ever done was done in the last couple of years
when the number of people who were at Guggenheim bought
the LA Dodgers. Because they structured in a way where
they didn't have to write I think a personal check.
I think the purchase price is roughly tw one billion
dollars or something like that. They didn't put up that
much equity. They put it in a modest amount relative

(45:04):
to what it's now worth. So that was one of
the best deals of all time. One of the best deals,
you could say, is also the New York Yankees, I
think in nineteen seventy two when CBS sold it for
roughly ten million dollars to George Steinbrenner. If I have
it correct, I think he put in two hundred and
fifty thousand of his own money and he syndicated the rest,
and you know, the franchise is probably worth five to

(45:24):
seven billion dollars today, and I think if I got
a right, they only put it in two hundred and fifty
thousand initially. Now it's a long time ago, but still
it's a pretty good deal.

Speaker 1 (45:31):
Mm hmm.

Speaker 2 (45:32):
Well, they've you know, paid some players along the way
to a pretty good effect. All right, So we're going
to move to the last portion of the interview, which
is a rapid fire around so it can just answer
as quickly as when I'll start, and then you can
pick up. What would you say is one word to

(45:53):
describe your deal making style?

Speaker 3 (45:55):
Modest?

Speaker 7 (45:56):
What's more important goot instincts or data and making big decisions.

Speaker 2 (46:00):
Instinct what's the hardest part of deal making? The beginning,
middle or the clothes?

Speaker 3 (46:04):
The clothes for sure.

Speaker 1 (46:06):
Who's your dream deal making partner?

Speaker 6 (46:09):
Well, the people that bought the Minnesota Timberwolves. They did
a pretty good deal, I would say, so I'd like
to have those people on my side.

Speaker 1 (46:18):
What's the best deal you've ever made?

Speaker 6 (46:19):
Best deal I ever made was probably decided to start
Carlisle and hiring the people that did the outset. That
was the best business thing I ever did.

Speaker 7 (46:26):
What's the best piece of advice you've received on deal making?

Speaker 6 (46:29):
Always try to remember what the other side needs to do,
and so they have to come away with a victory
as well. You can't make it to one sided.

Speaker 1 (46:36):
What's the worst advice you've been given?

Speaker 3 (46:39):
Trust your own instincts only.

Speaker 7 (46:42):
What's your hype song before you go into a big meeting?

Speaker 3 (46:46):
My way, Frank Sinatra. That's good. You can only watch
one sport for the rest of your life.

Speaker 1 (46:51):
What sport would it be?

Speaker 3 (46:52):
Major League Baseball?

Speaker 2 (46:54):
This is a very easy one. What team do you
want to see win a championship more than anything?

Speaker 6 (46:58):
The Baltimore Orioles Number one, the Duke Blue Devil's number two.

Speaker 7 (47:02):
One fun fact about you that you colleagues will be
surprised about hearing about that.

Speaker 6 (47:06):
I am a great athlete and that I actually I
try not to show this when I played tennis or
with other people, but I am actually a spectacular athlete,
but I try to hide it from people.

Speaker 1 (47:16):
David, it has been our pleasure to have you.

Speaker 6 (47:18):
Thank you for congretulations our success, and thank you for
having me.

Speaker 1 (47:23):
It's good to be on the same network as you.

Speaker 3 (47:25):
Thank you very much, Thank you, dude.

Speaker 8 (47:29):
The Deal is a production from Bloomberg Podcasts and Bloomberg Originals.
The Deal is hosted by Alex Rodriguez and Jason Kelly.
Our producers are Anamazarakus, Stacey Wong, and Lizzie Phillip. Original
music and engineering by Blake Maples. Our managing editor is
David E. Ravella. Our executive producers are Jason Kelly, Brendan

(47:50):
Francis Newnham, Jordan Opplinger, Trey Shallowhorn, Kyle Kramer, Andrew Barden,
Kelly Laferrier and Ashley Hoenigg. Stage is our head of podcasts,
Additional support from Rachel Scaramazzino and Elena Los Angeles. Joshua
Devau is our director of photography. Rubob Shakir is our

(48:11):
creative director. Art direction is from Jacqueline Kessler. Casting by
Julia Manns. Our associate producer is Natasha Abelard, Camera operation
by Jesse Ridner, Tsine Rabbi and Suma Hussein. Our gaffer
is Julia Geweski, and our grip is Megan Miller. Our
production assistant is Gabriella Demataes. Alex Diacanis is our video editor.

(48:35):
Listen to the Deal on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever
you get your podcasts. You can also tune into the
video Companion on Bloomberg Originals and on Bloomberg TV. Thanks
for listening.