ross perot had bought this from a british family that had it in its possession for 500 years and he put it on display at the national archives he decided to sell it it was being sold by sotheby's in an auction and i just happened to be at sotheby's the night before invited to a viewing of it and i had never paid much attention to magna carta
and the the the sotheby's curator said it's likely to be sold the next night to somebody from outside the united states so i realized quickly that the document that was the inspiration for the declaration of independence among other things would leave this united states and so i thought one of the 17 copies should stay
in the united states so i just resolved to go back the next night at the auction and buy it and i got lucky and bought it and basically put it i gave it to the us archives david welcome to the show thank you for inviting me i'm curious to get a sense of what your parents were like in your childhood
well my parents were not college graduates or high school graduates even my father dropped out of high school to go into world war ii came back met my mother she dropped out of high school to marry him he was 20 she was 17. um they were relatively simple in the sense that they didn't have a lot of outside interest their main
interest was their their relatives so they spent most their time with their you know relatives uh their nieces or nephews or cousins or aunts or whatever so uh they were simple they were not the people pushing me to become this or become that given you grew up relatively poor i'm curious how you talk to your own kids about money well
that's a more challenging subject for me because um my parents didn't really have to talk about money very much because they didn't have anything to talk about um clearly it's easier to be raised when a family doesn't have money because you don't have a lot of the challenges that money brings in my case i tried to shield my my
children for a long time for my wealth but when forbes and other people come out and write articles eventually they hear about it and they might see it so i've just tried to have them lead a reasonably normal life they've gotten good holi good college degrees and graduate degrees but they haven't been on a
um you know i don't they don't have trust funds they don't have large amounts of money they can tap into and so forth and so on so uh you know i i make a lot of speeches saying i'm giving all my money away and i hope they listen i like that what do you consider success as a parent well uh some parents might say if your children will
are willing to call you from time to time that might be a success but i generally i think most people would say if you raise children who are happy reasonably well adjusted to life have a purpose in life and seem to be um you know becoming productive citizens what else can you want out of life for your children let's
uh switch gears a little bit to the carlyle group how did that come to be i was a a lawyer in washington previously worked in the white house i wasn't that great a lawyer wasn't happy with it i decided to start an investment firm in washington and i recruited some people had more investment experience than i did and
we got lucky and it took off and became one of the larger private equity firms in the world how would you define private equity um like what is that business all about it seems like a misunderstood term by a lot of people well private equity outside the united states basically means leveraged buyouts in the united states it means buyouts
but also venture capital growth capital whole range of private investments but the essence of private investments is you're trying to invest money in a company to improve the company you are highly incented to do that because you're going to make a large piece of the profits if you're successful and you're trying to return
to your investors in four five or six years a rate of return that would be somewhere around depending on the asset class 15 to 25 percent per annum so if you put your money in the bank you might get zero to one percent uh if you can put your money with a good private equity firm you might get 15 to 20 25 per annum so it's it's a riskier
business high reward high risk but it's one that's been reasonably successful for many people in the last several decades how would you describe sort of the near-term and the long-term projections for private equity industry as a whole well in the near term private equity has not really been that hard hit by covid
because we we do so much by zoom it's been easy to do so so if you came in from mars and said how has private equity been affected by covet you wouldn't find any real effect we basically doing the same things we did before though we're not doing in-person meetings but everything else is being able to be done over the over the zoom or computer uh in
the short term over the next year or so i'd say it continues to be pretty attractive and people are raising a lot of money people are investing a lot of money and people returning a lot of money five or ten years from now it's hard to say i suspect it'll be more competition prices will go up returns will come down
and the biggest worry that we have in the industry i would say is number one we always worry about excess of government regulation we think that the government regulation now is probably okay but you're always worried more can happen secondly you worry about getting blamed for economic problems that are not your own
but if something bad happens the economy people will say well it's because private equity people did something bad and then in the longer term i i would say there's always a a risk that the economy has a recession of some type in the next one two three four years and that would make the returns much lower than they would
otherwise be and investors would be unhappy how would you explain the current economy the current economy is a tale of two cities if you are able to use zoom and you're computer literate and you're in a financial services type of company healthcare company or other things that are not really hard hit by covet in the
sense that your business can continue you're fine if you're in the movie picture business you're in the entertainment business live entertainment business outdoor sports business cruise ship business hotel business restaurant business you've been devastated more or less so one part of the economy is doing quite well and one part is not doing well
but the part that is the most con most concern is that workers in the industries i described that are not doing well they have often been laid off if not furloughed uh before they've been laid off and then they they now have to retool themselves or find a new job in many cases these are not people that have a lot of extra money saved up
these are people who really depend on the social net that we we have established which isn't as great as it should be i never thought in the united states i would see long lines of cars miles and miles and miles of cars lined up to get food in cities that are seen as relatively prosperous like dallas but it's happened
now because people have been living paycheck to paycheck at certain parts of our economic structure and now they've been laid off and they'll they don't have money and how do you think about the stimulus the government's providing what's your framework for that thinking through that well when the government had a uh
severe economic problem in 2007-2008 uh the the people running the government then in the financial world ben bernanke and hank paulson went to congress and said we need a big stimulus package a bailout of 800 billion dollars that shocked people so much that congress initially said no at least the house of representatives did
eventually that money was put in and maybe some more it was recognized that had not not had not not been done the economy would have collapsed today the economy is bigger more money is needed so so far the u.s government has put in i would say roughly two and a half trillion dollars into bailing out the economy
that covet has devastated now president biden wants another 1.9 trillion i don't think he'll get all of that but i think if he didn't get any of that the economy would collapse so i think it's recognized we need to do more than we're doing now but maybe not as much as some people would like and how do you see the path towards
paying off that debt does that include asset sales from the government to private equity companies how do you see this or or is it sustainable the way that it is well generally people are taught in life you know when you borrow money you're supposed to pay it back and if you don't pay it back that's not good and so that's what everybody has
learned the government seems to have a different principle if you borrow money and you can't pay it back borrow more money and then borrow more money to pay back the money you couldn't borrow you couldn't pay back and just keep borrowing money and printing money obviously at some point this will probably end but right now
the view in washington and new york and other financial circles is the united states can keep printing dollars people will still buy them at low interest rates because it's relatively likely that the money will be repaid at some point even though the interest rate is very low so for the time being i suspect we can
continue to keep borrowing money but at some point uh when interest rates rise again it's going to be very expensive so if you have today 26 trillion seven trillion dollars of federal debt and that the interest rate is you know less than you know one percent you can afford it when interest rates go to three four or five percent
that is going to squeeze out all the other federal expenditures we need so for the time being it's okay sustainable not desirable but sustainable in the longer term it's a problem it seems like it's an example of a strategy that sort of works within a narrow set of parameters and as soon as those parameters change it breaks pretty quickly
yeah well it's like everything is fine until it's not so you know as somebody once said a famous economist worked for president nixon um if something can't keep going on forever eventually it won't so at some point people will wake up and say oh we didn't realize we were borrowing all this much money we can't sustain it as if you know it
was news to people but right now the people in washington dc say look if it was a problem the debt markets in new york they would respond and the people in in new york say well if it was a problem congress wouldn't be doing this so they're each kind of waiting for the other to make a mistake or make a move but so far they're both
playing the game of musical chairs and they think the music is going to play for a little bit longer it seems like the the current environment as you alluded to has obviously benefited companies that are sort of like zoom based what how do you see the physical recovery for companies in the infrastructure space the sort of
asset space that what has largely been considered the core of the economy before recently well the core of the economy for much of the 20th century was manufacturing but our manufacturing base has been hollowed out a bit and so the united states is now more of a service economy than a manufacturing economy
but as we talked today uh president biden is trying to get more people to manufacture more in the united states and also buy more things manufactured in the united states which means that we need to produce more in the united states for example in the uh recent pandemic we realize that we're not producing face masks in the
united states we have to depend on china to produce get the face mask or other you know kind of medical equipment so i think they want to change that i think it will probably be some internal increase in manufacturing on the other hand we should recognize that the economy works in a certain way and basically if somebody can produce something more
cheaply overseas it probably will be produced overseas and not probably produce the united states so unless the government predicts makes some real incentives for people to produce here i suspect we won't change too much in terms of infrastructure it's like the weather everybody likes to talk about the weather and very few
people do anything about it everybody likes to talk about infrastructure and nobody really does much about it infrastructure was better when it was called pork barrel years ago members of congress could earmark certain bridges or toll roads they want it built in their district and then we get through because of their
political clout we eliminated earmarks and we also eliminated the phrase pork barrel we call it infrastructure but the truth is we're not building any right now because we are don't have the money to do it democrats republicans can't agree on how to basically finance it and the result is about 40 000 bridges that are not in good shape
uh airports are embarrassing in many cases and we also have uh air traffic control system that's out of date the the 5g system that is being built around the rest of the world is not really being built in the united states for a lot of reasons so our infrastructure is not as good as it should be certainly not for a country that's the
richest in the world i'd love for you to walk me through sort of your pessimistic view for the next five to ten years and then your optimistic view for the next five to ten years in terms of how we we go forward from here well the pessimistic view is that eventually we have to uh we go through a deep recession we have big
debt we have to pay off the debt it's going to be a problem uh we have to increase taxes that produces other distortions in the economy and in the end we also have more fighting between the democrats and republicans for the red states and the blue states in the end we basically have political stalemate not producing anything
and the economy continues to go down the optimistic viewpoint would be that let's say president biden can start a process where people say let's try to work together better than we have done before the us economy uh because of stimulus is is growing and ultimately covett is resolved and we don't have another covet-like problem
for the next five to ten years and we can use our entrepreneurial spirit and our financial capability and our ingenuity to continue to grow and expand the economy i do think we all should recognize that under the optimistic scenario or the pessimistic scenario the united states will not be the biggest economy in the world in 10 years
china will be and china will be the dominant economy and the rest beyond that for quite some time do you think the us how do you think the u.s should respond to that policy-wise not only in terms of repatriating manufacturing what does that mean to actually bring it back and then does it involve a shift in the economy
away from service to another sector that's possibly more sustainable for a global competitive position well it's like when water goes down a hill it goes down and goes it goes in different directions it goes through the path of least resistance right now the path of least resistance is to produce a lot of products overseas
because it's much cheaper so you can manufacture something in thailand ship it over the united states and it's cheaper than manufacturing it in michigan and for that reason walmart and other stores load up on things that are produced overseas at much lower prices than we can produce them in the united states
and that's why we've had very modest inflation for the last 25 years as our economy has become more dependent on foreign products i think trying to reverse that is very very difficult unless we're willing to accept enormous amounts of inflation and i don't think we're prepared to do that and so i suspect for the foreseeable
future we're going to be more of a service economy and more of a economy that outsources things and more of an entrepreneurial economy that comes up with creative ideas but they are often manufactured overseas i'm curious if there's a moment with carlyle where everything seemed to be going wrong or you didn't think it was going to work
out what happened and how did you recover from that well when we first started the company we didn't really have much money and so we almost spent all the money we had on one deal that we lost we were about to lose a deal and so we had no more money we lost that deal we couldn't make any profits on that deal
finally we got lucky we turned that around we bought the company and it did well in the great recession we had a uh a debt fund that that didn't do well and as a result uh we had to to deal with with the consequences of that but generally um you know we we've done okay over the years is that because you position yourself
where one deal's not going to kill you or well we've done about a thousand deals over the years and not counting real estate i'm talking about corporate investments real estate would probably be another thousand assets or so so you don't want to be that dependent on any one asset and therefore i think that uh you know that's a good thing you don't
want to put too much money into any one one deal what have you learned from doing a thousand deals well you learn that every investment committee memo tells you that every deal is going to be spectacular and uh there's a general view that the longer the investment committee memo it must be a better deal so people will
write these two or 300 page memos as if a long memo will convince you how great the deal is but um i would say that you know you learned that you're going to make some mistakes all deals won't work things you can't anticipate happening happen and sometimes there's also a lot of luck involved and you get
lucky sometimes what do you look for in a deal when you you see those memos what is it that you're you're you're not reading the 300 pages what do you go to well i should point out that there are a lot of people carla who are the really the investment pros i have specialized in other things i'm on a lot of the investment committees
so i wouldn't say that the firm is depending on my judgment on investments we have people more experienced at doing the investing but generally what you're looking for is a a company that um has a good manager has some kind of business that's relatively proprietary there are some barriers to entry so you can't have
unlimited competition you have the ability to improve the the company that you're buying you have an expectation of getting a reasonably good rate of return so if it's a great company and you're paying a high price you might feel good owning this company but you might not make that much if it's not such a great company
and you're banging it very cheaply and you've got a good co that might be a better bet and how do you think through real estate well real estate is uh something that throughout organized history has been the principal source of people's wealth because people own uh their own homes is for many people is the most uh there's the biggest source of their
net worth is their own homes but people who buy real estate and hold it over a period of time generally do well the rates of return generally lower than in buyouts or venture capital but it's a good asset class if you're not over levered a leverage can kill you in real estate because real estate's a very cyclical business
but if you don't tend to be overlevered and you know what you're doing real estate can be a good business what's the relationship between interest rates and real estate like we're seeing almost zero percent now possibly negative what happens in those cases with low interest rates yeah well low interest rates
tend to inflate the value of assets so i think most people would agree that if interest rates are low uh probably asset values will be higher and if interest rates go up then asset values will go down so if the federal reserve were to increase interest rates tomorrow unexpectedly and unlikely almost certainly the stock market would go down
so that wouldn't be a good thing but right now though the fed has said it's going to continue to have low interest rates for quite some time so that isn't expected uh right now but low interest rates are generally artificial people generally when they give you money they want to get something back for it so as over a period of let's say 50
years or so generally money that is lent to a bank the given you put a bank deposit in you expect to get a one or two or three percent rate of return but if you're getting zero percent rate of return that seems to be artificially low compared to the norm and therefore there'll be a adverse consequences at some point
from having artificially low interest rates it's very pleasant to have them when you're living through it but then when the market turns on you it can be very unpleasant how do you think about negative or the possibility of negative interest rates and what that would do to asset prices like office buildings or
other sort of real estate that you would be investing in as a general rule of thumb the federal reserve in the united states is not a fan of negative interest rates and part that's because they've observed around the rest of the world where there have been negative interest rates it doesn't tend to stimulate the economy as much as one
might think so in places like japan where there have been negative interest rates for a while in some scandinavian countries it really hasn't really stimulated the economy as much as you might have predicted so i don't really think negative interest rates are probably a cure in the united states nor have they been really cured elsewhere
so i don't really think that the logical uh outcome of negative interest rates is that it will stimulate the economy it's probably been proven to be true i'm curious how you separate you're surrounded by people through throughout life who are always trying to pitch you on things or do things for you how do you separate
the people who know what they're talking about from those that only pretend to know what's your process for sort of distinguishing you mean in business deals yeah on business deals um you know at this point people aren't bringing the deals to me so much because they realize we have a team of people if they bring
them to me i really don't look at them initially i wait to the experts in our firm to review them so it you know i i looked at every deal that came in to me i would spend all my time doing that and i probably wouldn't be the best person to look at it so we have experts in given areas they look at them and they work their
way up to the investment committee then i'll take a look at it people always think a deal is going to be great they want to bring you an idea but you have to be polite and say well this might be good let me have my expert look at it as opposed to let me say i'll i'll look at it and i'll tell you myself it's not a good idea
generally you try not to do that it seems like a large part of making effective decisions is dealing with reality how do you make sure that you're dealing with reality how do you observe the present how do you think about the future well all of life as you grow up is a maturation process where you're trying to um deal with reality so everybody has
ambitions everybody has hopes but you ultimately realize that you're not going to be willie mays you're not going to be hank aaron you're not going to be lebron james you're not going to be a nobel prize winner generally you come to these realizations as you go through life and so therefore as you move through life you kind of
have realist more realistic expectations of what you can achieve and not achieve and you tend to get that as you get older and older you're more conscious of the risk of doing things that's why great entrepreneurial ventures are often started by people in their 20s because they don't know what they don't know so if steve jobs
or jeff bezos or bill gates were in their 60s uh when they started those companies they probably wouldn't have started them so you almost need to be a little bit delusional you have to be willing to defy the experts by definition any company that started is trying to do something that almost nobody else did
so if nobody else did it or was willing to do it why do you think you can do it and and therefore the odds are against you i'm curious how you think about opportunity cost and how that comes into play for you and making decisions personally and professionally well opportunity costs for those people that may not be familiar with that phrase
is an economist phrase that basically means the cost of doing something or not doing something what's the alternative that could be done so for example uh if people bring me ideas all the time and i just sit through and sift through and i just spent all my time looking at business ideas the opportunity cost would be high
because i wouldn't be probably doing those deals and or knowing how to analyze them properly because i'm not an expert in all those areas but i the opportunity cost would be i wouldn't be able to do something else that i might be more knowledgeable about so you always are having to trade off what is the best use of my time is the
best use of my time running around the world raising money or is the best use of my time analyzing deals or the best use of my time learning how to become a scratch golfer well probably in the latter case uh it would be a very high opportunity cost to me if i said i'm going to learn how to be a scratch golfer because i don't
know how to play golf and so it would take an infinite amount of time for me to even get a 50 handicap i suspect so therefore if i spent time on that that probably not a good use of my time it'd be high opportunity cost because anything else i could do slightly better would be more useful and how do you think about that balancing
between say work and life well what is the purpose of life the purpose of life is presumably to enjoy what you're doing create happiness on other people particularly let's say your children and to feel like you've done something useful for humanity so if i say look i'm going to basically enjoy life by just uh eating a lot
drinking a lot uh going to parties a lot you know you would feel that you maybe haven't contributed that much to society because what are you really doing to add to society's benefits if you say i'm going to spend a large part of my time creating a company that's going to make people have better lives because they're
going to have new products or new services that they could really use you could say that's a more useful use of your time and so everybody makes adjustments to their life depending on what they think is the value of their contributions to society what they think they can realistic do to help society and what they think they need to do in
terms of relaxation and rest in order to be able to do other good things on the other side of their life so it's always an adjustment and in my case i probably spend more time working and trying to do things in a professional way than relaxing how do you spend your days it used to be that i would travel the world a lot i
used to travel 240 days a year i'm always going to somewhere to raise money make a speech see somebody now i go from my living room to my dining room to my kitchen to my bedroom and i try to do that you know several times a day i guess but basically i'm in i'm in uh zoom mode like many people are and it's a big day to me to actually go outside
so i um i i do that and what i do today and what i'm doing now is i i am trying to do several things i have an uh carlyle where i'm involved in some investment committees and involved in helping the firm in ways i can i have a family office that invests in things that carl law doesn't do you have to be involved in knowing what
they're doing and then i have a tv show that i do interviews for i have some other programs i do interviews for i'm trying to write some books so i gotta write that i write some articles um and i uh try to make sure my kids are okay during the day because then i can and then try to figure out what i'm going to do to you know
complete all the things i want to do before my brain collapses or my body collapses when you get to be a certain age you're obviously not there when you get to be a certain age i'm now 71. in age that i thought was was completely ridiculous before when i was younger you realize though you're not going to live as long
as you have lived so when i was in the white house and i was 31 years old and ronald reagan was running against us for president i said to president carter look you don't have to worry he's 69 years old nobody that old can get out of bed in the morning now i'm 71. uh and of course i'm a teenager by the standards of
you know people running for president united states now i'm younger than them but to be very serious when you're 70 you can't do what you did in your 50s or your 30s and so you have to adjust your time to to be able to do things that are going to be realistic for you to get done and so i'm trying to do that and you know have like everybody else who
reaches a certain age i have a bucket list of things i want to get done before the brain collapses or the body collapses and when you hit 70 it's more likely than not that uh you know something bad will happen at some point the next couple years people don't live to 100 years old as a general rule of thumb
if you go back and tell your 40 year old self something about the future what would you tell yourself about life well i would have told myself to invest in facebook which i had a chance to do and turn down when mark zuckerberg was at harvard i would have held on to the stock i had in amazon all those things but another way i would
say look um find something that you enjoy doing and you know work hard at it and ultimately if it's successful and you make money do something creative with the money and do something that gives back to society and that's what i try to do and in recent years i wish i had started 20 years earlier i think that's an important part of a
well-lived right life right like contributing back in different ways well nobody ever says uh you know i really hate myself i'm helping my country but i hate myself for doing that or i'm giving back to society i hate myself for doing that you feel better about yourself and maybe that'll make you live longer
if you feel like you're giving back to society what do you do for rest and relaxation podcasts like go on other people's podcasts um so i you know do a lot of them but i would say i i'm not that good at that um because i don't rest and relax as much as i should so i i gotta i should exercise more i have a
gym in my basement and i operate on the osmosis theory that if i walk past the equipment by osmosis uh something good will happen i'm not sure that other people agree with that so i wish i was better at resting and relaxing i'm not that good at that so i i don't really take vacations and i don't really rest and relax that much
um so i wish i that's one of my big weaknesses what's your daily eating how that's like are you uh morning you eat breakfast you get up coffee and then lunch or you skip breakfast what do you what is that well i try to get up reasonably early and read the newspapers it's an old-fashioned thing or you know what newspapers are i don't read them online
i like to go buy the newspapers and then uh i i don't drink coffee but i might drink some tea and then uh look at the morning news shows and then look at my schedule and figure out okay am i prepared for all these events i've got to do today and make sure i'm prepared and then go through the day which is typically a
series of now speeches interviews being interviewed doing the interviews myself writing reading catching up with contacts and and doing what i can to you know make life as normal as i can do you have a process for winding down at the end of each day or like a routine no at the end of the day i try to uh just catch up on emails
and read and try to read a book i have a i read i interview a lot of authors on various tv shows i might have and so i think it's a courtesy to read the book so i intend to read the book and and so i'm always trying to finish the books that i'm supposed to be interviewing somebody about so that probably winds me down how is it you
want to be remembered by others well uh some people would say i want to be remembered as the oldest person who ever lived uh that could be won but i guess more seriously i'd like to be remembered as somebody that gave back to the country in a way that the country uh appreciated what he did and that he was a good
uh father to his children and they are going to be uh his ultimate legacy one of the things you've given back to the country is the magna carta i'm curious where that came from and what's the story behind that and why was that important to you you know i lived uh many years of my life and i never paid attention to the magna carta
you know and it turns out that there are 17 copies in the world of various versions of it what is the magna carta yeah just so everybody's on the same page the magna carta was essentially a charter agreed to in by king john in june of 1215 in which barons had certain rights it wasn't for all the people the rights were like a right to uh
punishment that's proportionate to the crime or an effect of no taxation without representation or things that are basic rights and very many of them are in our bill of rights it was really for the barons it was for the wealthy upper class to make certain that the king didn't do certain things to them but it got
elongated over the years into a a document that is seen as symbolizing the rights and basic freedoms that humans should have and so uh ross perot had bought this from a british family that had it in its possession for 500 years and he put it on display at the national archives he decided to sell it it was being sold by sotheby's in an
auction and i just happened to be at sotheby's the night before invited to a viewing of it and i had never paid much attention to magna carta and the the the sotheby's curator said it's likely to be sold the next night to somebody from outside the united states so i realized quickly that the document that was the
inspiration for the declaration of independence among other things would leave this united states and so i thought one of the 17 copies should stay in the united states so i just resolved to go back the next night at the auction and buy it and i got lucky and bought it and basically put it i gave it to the us archives
and why was that important to you personally well i thought it was important that we have this historic symbol of freedom in the united states and i thought it was a way to give back to the country a little bit for my good fortune my theory is that when you see historic documents or you have historic buildings like the washington monument
we should have them be attractive to people to visit because when they visit them they'll learn more about history more about our government and that'll make a more informed citizen right now we don't teach history very much american history in college or high school anymore we don't teach civics very much either so the result is
we have a lot of uneducated people about the basic facts of our history and the basic facts of our government and i think it'd be better if people are better informed so this is a small way to move in that direction i want to come back to you you mentioned you interview a lot of people you get your podcast you
you um do it at the economic club of washington i watched some of your interviews in preparation for this i'm curious as to some of the timeless lessons that you've learned from others that you sort of wish you would have learned sooner well the people i've interviewed i i would say generally i interview
people i know somewhat though obviously not everybody i interviewed do i know before i would say that the lessons i've learned is that the the most successful people tend to be relatively uh humble and and and uh modest about their accomplishments maybe because they realize they had a fair amount of luck the key that many people i've
interviewed worked very hard to get where they came from they came from modest circumstances that uh arrogance is not generally a thing that they they follow as much obviously there are arrogant people that become successful leaders but generally the people i interview tend not to be as arrogant as some people and generally i've learned
that people are willing to talk about themselves and if you treat people with respect in the interview you can get them to say a lot of things that'll be interesting to other people what's the most interesting thing that's been revealed jeff bezos told me he um has to get eight hours of sleep every night and i say geez
if i'd had eight hours of sleep every night maybe i'd be wealthier but he said he has to have eight hours of sleep i didn't realize that was the key he also said he doesn't make any key decisions before 10 a.m or after 5 p.m i didn't wish i'd known that as well is that something that you've started to apply after that
are you getting eight hours of sleep a night no i'm not i'm probably getting uh six so i just don't know whether i'd be more successful i got more sleep but it's it's hard for me to do that and so i am what i am do you have any regrets in life well as frank sinatra said i regrets i've had a few but too few to mention so sure i regret
that i wasn't uh more successful when i was younger i wasn't a great student athlete i wasn't a great uh scholar i wasn't a social bon vivon i was basically a you know slightly above average student and probably a below average athlete and i wish i had been more successful in my business career earlier so i could have had more
time to give away the money i have i wish i'd spent more time with my children when they were growing up i wish i had given back to the country much more than i've already done but on the whole i'm saying i'm reasonably happy with the good fortune i've had how do you think about giving back and making that effective
i know you've signed up for the giving pledge but how do you think about using your your wealth to give back like what does that look like for you well when you have a fair amount of money what are you going to do with it so you can give it to your children you can give it to uh um you know a motionary organization or
something like that i decided that i wanted to give away the bulk of my money if not all of it before i died so i could see what it was being used for and i i you know sometimes you give away money and things seem to be working well as a result and sometimes you give away money you say why did i do that that's kind of a waste
so i you know you have to experiment as you do in many things in life but generally i think people are happier and maybe they live longer because happier people tend to live longer than grumpy people is my experience is maybe you'll be happier if you feel felt you've done something to improve society your country your state your
your your some part of an organization you've been part of so by helping other people in some way i think you feel better about yourself and you're actually doing something i think um is is uh is is worth doing was there a moment when sort of money stopped mattering where i guess it stopped preventing you from doing things
that you wanted to do or that you felt sort of like it wasn't the the goal or the how do you think about that well it's a funny phenomenon when you're little when i was little i didn't have any money but i didn't aspire to have any because there weren't the hedge funds private equity funds billionaires all those kind of things that
that were around then tech startups didn't really exist so it wasn't in your consciousness to go out and make a lot of money people didn't think about that at least i didn't and so money was never that important to me and frankly i didn't care about money at all i just had no meaning to me at all i was interested in government politics those
kind of things when i you know um started uh in my professional career after the white house i saw that people were measured in in the legal world by money how much they make more than how good a lawyer they are and i figured i might go into the business world which is maybe better than the investment world if you're
in the legal world if you're really just trying to make money and so i started doing it as a way of measuring success and and building something that i can be proud of but when i started making a lot of money it didn't make me happier you know having x dollars doesn't necessarily make you happier than when you have half of x
i have more than enough to to get by with the things i want and so if i have another extra billion dollars or two billion dollars i don't know that my happiness quotient will go up but you'll be able to do more like i find it really interesting more money i want to give back and pardon well sure if i have more money or
basically all the money i'm earning now i'm giving away so i'm giving away a fair amount of money now and i tend to give away a lot more and i hope if i live a reasonable lifespan i'll have given it all away thank you so much for your time today david my pleasure thank you for very informed questions and i appreciate it thanks for inviting me you