ANNOUNCER: This program is made by MPT, to enrich the diverse communities throughout our state, and is made possible by the generous support of our members.

Thank you.

MIKE GILL: Baltimore born and raised, David Rubenstein is an author, television host, legendary businessman, and philanthropist.

A Co-founder of The Carlyle Group, his rise from a student at Baltimore's City College to White House aid to billionaire global investor took patience, hard work, and a dash of good luck.

I'm Mike Gill, former Secretary of Commerce for the state of Maryland.

Join me as we discuss David Rubenstein's upbringing in Charm City, his search for the right career, and the keys to his success.

All coming up... next.

* * Mike Gill: Beautifully set on the Chesapeake Bay, Maryland's capital city of Annapolis contains 400 years of history, and it was at Maryland's historic state house where I greeted David Rubenstein.

David's love of history is well documented, and can be experienced with him on his public television series "History with David Rubenstein", where he interviews people from presidential historians to Pulitzer Prize winning authors with an informed enthusiasm.

With that in mind, I was thrilled to bring him inside an historically significant place he had never seen, the Annapolis State House's Old Senate Chamber.

Here, George Washington once stood before Congress to submit his letter of resignation from the Continental Army in 1783.

An avid collector of historical artifacts, David owns one of the surviving copies of the Magna Carta which is exhibited at the National Archives, as well as two copies of the Emancipation Proclamation, currently displayed at the National Museum of African American History and Culture.

His philanthropic efforts have also included the preservation of the Washington Monument and Lincoln Memorial.

Surrounded by all this history, there was no better place to find out how this kid from Baltimore has accomplished so much and has so much positive impact on our country.

MIKE GILL: David welcome to Annapolis, welcome to the State House.

Thank you for being here with me.

DAVID RUBENSTEIN: My pleasure to be here.

It's an historic place, and I'd like to be at historic places.

GILL: So let's go to Baltimore, let's talk about Baltimore and then move on from there.

And as I- when I talked to you yesterday and we got ready for this interview, I said to you, you know David, if I had a title for it, let's just call it two kids from Baltimore because our roots uh, have more similarities than dissimilarities.

RUBENSTEIN: Well, Baltimore is a very unusual city.

It's a family-oriented city when I was growing up.

And it had very much a demarcation between people who were Italian, there were Greek, there were Jewish, they were black, they were Protestant.

And people tended to live in these subgroups I get, and there was big high schools that brought people together.

So Baltimore City College, Baltimore Polytechnic brought men together.

And from all parts of the city, it was very unusual.

But I found over the years now, some 50 years later that whenever you meet somebody from Baltimore, one of the first questions is where did you go to high school?

Because people can judge you about what you're like or something about your background by where you went to high school.

So people still ask me when I say I'm from Baltimore, "What high school did go to?"

And I ask people the same.

GILL: We know David, knowing that you grew up in the Fallstaff staff area.

Um, let's go back to this childhood.

I know you're a single child, tremendous mom, tremendous dad.

Can you talk about your parents and those memories that just will always be there for you?

RUBENSTEIN: Well, Baltimore was a place that was rigidly segregated by religion.

And if you were Jewish, you weren't allowed to own homes in certain places of the Jewish community basically moved to Northwest Baltimore.

And there were three types of people in the Jewish community as I recall, those who were entrepreneurs or business people that had a fair amount of money, those who were, let's say civil servants or had nice professional jobs.

And then there were people who were blue collar workers.

And my father was a blue-collar worker.

He had worked in the post office, his entire life.

He dropped out of high school to go into World War II, never came back to finish high school.

My mother also didn't finish high school.

They married when they were very young, but seems to me incredibly young 21 for him and 17 for her.

And I was their only child.

But you know, it's an interesting thing.

When you grow up without a lot of money.

You don't really feel that you are unfortunate, you just take the circumstances you find yourself in and you make the best of it.

In hindsight, growing up without a lot of money was a big advantage.

Because I knew if I did anything, I had to do it on my own.

If I got something that happened, that was good.

People would say, well you did it because you worked hard and so forth.

If you grow up in a wealthy family, and you succeed, well, your people gonna say, well, your father was wealthy, help you and so forth.

So in the end, it was a big advantage.

And also, you knew, you had to do something on your own.

GILL: Now, I know you skipped the eighth grade.

Somebody told me that, what was that a good idea?

RUBENSTEIN: It was a terrible idea.

In sixth grade they gave you some tests.

GILL: So anybody who's listening has a chance to skip the eighth-grade, stay.

RUBENSTEIN: I agree.

But Baltimore had a program then.

And if you were in the sixth grade, you pass some tests, which I guess I must've passed.

You could go into a program where you in effect, skip the eighth grade because junior high school was only two years, but the downside of that is you're with the rest of your life.

People who are a year older than you.

So I graduated from City College when I was 16 years old, probably a little bit young to go to college, maybe a year, a year and a half younger.

And so I didn't know it at the time my parents were proud.

I got into the special program, but in hindsight it wasn't a good thing in my view.

GILL: Well, you went to City.

And I remember because I was at Calvert Hall at the same time you were at city, there was no more prestigious public high school in America than Baltimore City College.

It was known as... the school of judges and mayors and governors and doctors and lawyers and future private equity executives.

Actually, they probably didn't have any private equity executives yet did they?

RUBENSTEIN: They had a lot of distinguished graduates.

The school was started in 1839 is the third oldest public high school in the country.

And it was a melting pot because people from all over the city would go there.

If they weren't going to be engineers, if they want to be engineers they would go to Poly.

So you had incredibly talented people, some of the most famous writers or government officials came from there.

And so it was quite a quite an impressive place to go.

To get there I had to take a bus from you know, and then transfer some of YOU- GILL: Was it the seventh?

RUBENSTEIN: -take the seven and transfer to the 22.

And so it was an hour each way.

It wasn't Abe Lincoln walking to school necessarily, but it's an hour each way out of your life each way each day.

But anyway, I enjoyed it.

City was then very crowded, City College.

And so we had shifts.

And so you went from 8:00 to 12:00 as I recall.

And then from 1:00 to 5:00, I think it was so I was only in school for half a day, usually.

And then you had time for extracurriculars or whatever else you wanted to do.

GILL: How about favorite teacher?

Did you have one at city?

Is there a person who left an impression, left- added something to your life after City that you always remember?

RUBENSTEIN: I think everybody has one or more teachers that have made an impression.

There was a very famous teacher at Baltimore City College who was an English teacher.

His name was John Pentz and he was really good at teaching people how to write and to the extent that I know how to write it all, it's because he really drilled into me and my classmates, how you have to actually have to write things in English language in a certain way.

So there's one teacher that was really helpful to me.

It was John Pentz.

GILL: Yeah.

And uh, and I know you're... commitment to literacy.

It's something that keeps you up.

You're passionate about literacy and because it's slipping.

It's not the way it was when John Pence was teaching at City College.

RUBENSTEIN: Literacy is a very important thing to me.

I got my Enoch Pratt Library card when I was six years old, you can take out 12 books a week and I took them out.

I read them that week.

And then I had to wait a week before I could get 12 more.

I loved reading because it gave me a whole new perspective on the world than I had in my little cloistered group that I was growing up in the neighborhood I was growing up- growing up in and so I really loved reading and uh today, I'm still an avid reader.

With respect to literacy, it's been important to me because I think if I hadn't been literate and I hadn't read a lot, I would not have been able to do some of the things I've done.

But it's sad that 14% of adults in this country are functioning illiterate, which means they can't read past the fourth-grade level and a large percentage of people who can read are alliterate, which is to say they don't choose to read.

RUBENSTEIN: So 30% of all the people that have graduated from college in this country have not read a book in the last five years.

And that's because they'd say, "Well, I graduated and I don't have to read anymore."

But the truth is you have to keep reading.

You have to exercise your brain.

It's a muscle and it has to be exercised.

And you really have to keep reading and reading and reading and reading books is more important than reading anything else because it focuses the brain much more than reading a magazine article or a tweet does.

GILL: Hey, last thing about Baltimore City College.

You were a member of the Lancers Boy's Club.

RUBENSTEIN: Right.

GILL: And our good friend and future Mayor Kurt Schmoke was what were your memories of the Lancers Boy's Club?

And maybe that trip?

RUBENSTEIN: Well, the Lancers Boys Club was started in the 1950's, really by Bom Hammerman who later became a judge and served, I think, as a judge longer than anybody else ever served as a judge in Baltimore City.

And he basically devoted his life to this boy's club.

Initially it was for Jewish boys, but then it expanded and it all boys all over the city and then later boys and girls but it was a place where you learn how to play sports and you learn about intellectual things as well.

And very talented people like Kurt Schmoke were members of it.

So, I still stay in touch with them and Kurt and I, and some of the others, we gather from time to time to talk about how great we were when we were 14 years old.

GILL: Hey, let's leave 33rd Street and head to Durham, North Carolina.

How'd you go to Duke?

RUBENSTEIN: Well, I was an equal opportunity applier for the scholarships.

Whoever gave me the biggest scholarship that's where I went.

My parents didn't have a lot of money.

So I kept telling my parents, "Don't worry, they'll give me a scholarship."

So Duke gave me the biggest scholarship and that's where I went.

I had never been there.

And I only filled out the application the day before it was due.

And I wasn't sure I would get in because I didn't have a typewriter.

So I wrote it out longhand and my handwriting is very bad.

I wasn't sure that I would get accepted because they couldn't read my handwriting, but actually maybe because they couldn't read my handwriting, they accepted me.

They thought I had better answers to the questions than I really did.

So I went there and I would say it was a different university.

I later became chairman of the board of the university, but at the time that I went there, it was fairly cloistered university, it had been segregated until 1963 for undergraduates.

And it had a Jewish quota that I didn't know at the time, about 5%, which was not uncommon at a lot of good schools.

So it was a different school today.

It's a global university and one of the best colleges and universities in the United States, for sure.

Then it was more of a Southeastern university, more regional than it turned out to be later on.

GILL: You go to the University of Chicago School of Law, you're president of the Law Review.

You get a great job.

Paul Weiss in New York.

And then shortly thereafter, you went down to Washington to take that position in '75 as chief counsel to the Senate Judiciary Committee.

What was it, what pulled you to Washington at that point?

RUBENSTEIN: I was interested in politics and government, when I was growing up, there were no private equity firms.

There were no hedge funds.

There were no tech startups, it was a different world.

So if you grew up in Baltimore you're Jewish, you might want to be a doctor or a lawyer, and I didn't want to be a doctor.

I wasn't that good in the sciences.

I figured I was better at maybe talking or writing.

So I'd be a lawyer, but I was really interested in politics.

And so that was my first love.

And so I went to work at Paul Weiss because Ted Sorenson had been there and was there, Ted Sorenson was the great speech writer for President Kennedy.

RUBENSTEIN: And so I thought I could maybe get some of his uh, gold dust sprinkled on me and maybe I'd get a job in the White House someday as he had done.

And he did help me get a job with Birch Bayh, and that led to me ultimately to working in... for Jimmy Carter and the campaign.

And when Carter got elected in 1976, as most people get elected president, do they say well, okay, people worked in the campaign, you should work in the administration.

So I didn't really know Carter, but my boss was close to him.

And I got him a job in the White House.

And I was only 27 years old.

GILL: You've got a big title.

You're hanging out with the president of the United States, with a title that needed a business card this big, Assistant Director to the President.

RUBENSTEIN: I was the Deputy Assistant to the President for Domestic Policy.

I didn't really know Carter because I never really met him in the campaign.

He was out campaigning.

I'm working in Atlanta.

I didn't meet him probably for two weeks into the White House.

And he ultimately, he'd like my boss a lot and I did some work for my boss and ultimately the President Carter got to know me, but you can think about it.

My parents were blue collar workers.

I'm their only child.

And a couple months after Carter is elected and becomes president.

I'm walking out of the Oval Office on the South Lawn, just Carter and me and the Secret Service getting on Marine One to go to Camp David or go on some trip.

So, they were there sometimes and they would see it.

And they'd say, "How did this happen?"

I was saying the same thing.

You know, it's very important to not let yourself get too full of yourself when you work at the White House.

It's a very temporary thing.

You're there for four years or eight years, or maybe a very shorter period of time than that.

And sure enough, we lost the election.

So my job has gone.

So one day I'm at the White House.

I'm on Air Force One, Marine One going to Camp David, the next day, I'm unemployed.

You find then that people will tell you how great you are when you're in the White House, they want something from you.

You can't get them on the phone again.

So it's a learning experience that was useful for me.

GILL: Did you have a plan B or you had to scramble pretty quickly to figure out plan B.

Did you think about coming home and maybe running for mayor or something like that?

RUBENSTEIN: There was no- GILL: Was that in the possibility?

RUBENSTEIN: I didn't see any groundswell of support of somebody who working with Carter in White House coming back to run for mayor, no.

I think somebody who worked on our staff did come back with that idea and his name was Kurt Schmoke.

And obviously he was elected three terms as mayor.

No, my plan B was to get a job practicing law.

But the problem was that people didn't want to hire Carter White House aides when Reagan was president.

And I was still very young and I hadn't practiced law very much.

So it wasn't as if people were knocking down the door to say, "Please come in."

But I didn't want to tell my mother that her only child was unemployed and unemployable.

So I kept saying why the reason I haven't taken a job as I have so many offers, I don't know which one to pick.

So this is going on from January, February, March, April, May, June.

My mother said, "Funny, take some offer, take something, go back to work."

Finally, somebody came through with something and I got a job in June.

I started practicing law again, but then the great realization- GILL: Went to Shaw Pittman.

RUBENSTEIN: I did, I got very nice firm in Washington, but I realized relatively quickly as my partners and clients did, that I wasn't a good lawyer.

And that's an advantage to see if I had been a very good lawyer.

I'd be practicing law still.

And maybe that's okay, but I wouldn't have enjoyed it that much.

And so I realized I wasn't that good at this and I didn't enjoy it.

And I tell people, young people all the time, find something that you enjoy because nobody ever won a Nobel Prize, hating what they do.

You have to love what you're doing and you have to be pretty good at it.

GILL: Well, lets go to what I think is the most exciting story, coming from a business background, The Carlyle Group, it's 1987.

David, usually if a story starts, something like this, there's a Jewish fella and an Italian fella and an Irish fella, usually the next part of the punch line is a rabbi and a priest.

But in this case, there was a Jewish fellow and Italian fella and an Irish fella that started something called the Carlyle Group.

RUBENSTEIN: Well, I'd wanted to start a private equity firm in Washington, which didn't exist before there had been no private equity firms.

And so I was looking for people and everybody, I talked to said, "David, you have no experience.

You have no money.

You have no knowledge to buy a business.

Thank you very much."

In fact, I went to see a young woman who had become the treasurer of Ganette.

Her name was Grace Shamar Tori.

And I said, "I'd like you to join.

We're starting a firm.

You're very credible."

And she said, "Wait a second, you have no money.

You've never worked together with anybody that's been in buyouts.

You don't have them do buyouts.

And why would I leave my career?

No."

But as I was leaving the door uh in her office, she said, "By the way, there's a guy named Bill Conway who's the treasurer and CFO of uh, MCI," a telecommunication company.

"I think he might be leaving, give him a call."

So I gave him a cold call and like a lot of cold calls.

You expect nothing would really happen, but Bill agreed to have lunch with me.

And ultimately, we recruited him and ultimately, he became one of the best private equity investors in the last 30 years.

GILL: And now you're on the search for the finance guy.

And you had raised five million, was the number to get the- Carlyle off the ground.

So you find a fellow Dan Danelo, who was at the Marriott Corporation, big job.

And he loved it.

He quit Mr. Marriott tried to talk him into staying, but he quit.

And then I've heard he came in to see you and Bill, he's all excited.

And he said, "Well, let's go.

We got the 5 million.

Right?"

And you said "Well, we still got to raise it."

He said, "Wait a minute.

I thought you had the five million."

Is there any truth to that one?

RUBENSTEIN: Well, it's pretty much true what you just said.

We meant to say to him, we were going to get the five million.

Maybe he didn't hear that quite clearly.

GILL: It was misunderstood.

RUBENSTEIN: And then actually it's because of our Baltimore connection really, or my Baltimore connection.

We raised the money.

What happened was somebody I'd met when I was in the White House who was working at T. Rowe Price, Ed Matthias, he said, "I'll help you raise the money."

And he introduced us to four investors.

Two of whom were based in Baltimore.

One of them was T. Rowe Price, the other was Alex Brown and they became our investors.

So we started with 5 million.

Now the firm has about $250 billion or so.

So it worked out pretty well.

GILL: Oh yeah, and 1,700 team members and 31 plus countries.

And I know one thing I've heard in your interviews, you're so proud of is the distributions.

RUBENSTEIN: We've made profits well over $100 billion for our investors.

Well, over $100 billion from investors.

So it's been a good story, but we got lucky and we made some mistakes.

We could have done a lot of things better.

And I think back on all the deals that we didn't do, that we should have done all of the mistakes we made.

I talk about what we've done at Carlyle over the last 30 years.

I like to talk about the mistakes that we've made, because they're the ones that drive me crazy.

GILL: Well, we could probably do a multi-part series and just talk about the mistakes, right?

Because you got to get up to bat.

You can't hit homeruns until you get in the batters box.

RUBENSTEIN: We helped in a way Jeff Bezos started Amazon with giving him a bibliography of books in print, and we got some stock, but we sold it at the IPO.

It's probably worth $20 billion today.

I had a chance to invest in Mark Zuckerberg's company, when he was still at Harvard and I turned it down thinking he wouldn't get anywhere.

So, many times I made big mistakes.

GILL: David, I know what you brought to the team.

Meaning that Bill was the analysts and extraordinary.

Dan was extraordinary on the finance things and you became the guru of fundraising, how... where'd you learn how to sell?

Did you go take a Carnegie course or how did that happen?

RUBENSTEIN: Well in any- GILL: Because I heard you're a superstar selling.

RUBENSTEIN: Well, in any organization.

You have to figure out what you're going to do to make yourself useful.

Otherwise, there's no point in being there, even if you're the founder of the firm, people would say, "Well, what are you doing here?"

So I had to figure out what can I do?

I didn't really have finance skills.

I didn't have the kind of skills that Dan and Bill had.

So I said, okay, I'll go out and raise the money.

So I wasn't a backslapping cigar chomping... kind of uh, suspender wearing kind of guy who was playing golf every weekend with prospective investors.

I was just the guy that knew something about Washington and maybe could talk, okay.

So I just started meeting with people around the world and I would spend 200 plus days, maybe 240 days around the world, traveling and meeting with prospective investors.

We built a very large fundraising base.

I would say I did learn how to be a fundraiser.

And it was something that, a skill that I didn't think I would have, I didn't go to law school to do it.

And I think about it.

And you would know as your own background, nobody really takes a course in fundraising.

They don't teach it at Harvard Business School or Stanford Business School or the equivalent, but actually most people spend half their life either being solicited for something or another, or soliciting other people for charitable contributions, political contributions, or investment contributions or investments.

So it's a skill that more people probably should think about.

GILL: David, I brought one of my favorite new books.

It sits there by the bed stand.

And what I'd love to talk to you about for the next few minutes is leadership.

You've interviewed, somebody probably counted it up.

Hundreds of people.

It's a lot of people.

What are the common, the more common characteristics that you've observed with great leaders?

Because there's some that probably are consistently across the board, what do you say?

RUBENSTEIN: All leaders have luck.

You just don't become a leader from day one.

You have to have some luck.

You have to have somebody that nurtures you.

You have to have somebody that introduced you to somebody, a certain circumstance happens.

So there's luck.

Secondly, there's failure.

Nobody goes from the beginning of their life to the top without any failures, there's always setbacks and setbacks help you because you learn from them.

And then there's persistence.

Everybody's persistent.

Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, Mark Zuckerberg.

People told them those ideas wouldn't work, but they persisted the same is true in politics or in business or in any area of life.

RUBENSTEIN: You've got to persist.

I also think there's a certain amount of humility that works.

I think there's always leaders will know about Napoleon wasn't exactly a humble person I think, but I think most leaders today, the ones you admire, or you should admire have a certain amount of humility because you realize they had luck.

If you could sit with Warren Buffet for days and he wouldn't tell you how wealthy he is, you could sit with War- Bill Gates for a long time, and he's not going to tell you how smart he is.

You can observe that, but you can see that these are people that don't brag about what they've done.

They just move forward and they have certain amount of humility.

I also think it takes the ability to communicate with people.

You can't be a leader if you don't have followers and you have to get followers by communicating with them, you're orally or writing or things like that.

Or leading by example, George Washington, as we sit in this room, George Washington statue's right over there.

When he was in Valley Forge in 1777, he could have gone down to the Ritz Carlton or the Four Seasons and not stay with his troops.

He could have afforded that, but he didn't do that.

He stayed with his troops because he wanted to lead by example.

He wanted to say, "I'm with you."

GILL: So I've heard you are an angler, a fisherman.

So, if you're going to charter a nice boat to take- to go out in the Chesapeake Bay, any three people from all of history, from any walk of life, politics, business, religion, sports, name three people that you might want to call up and say, "Hey, you want to go fishing?"

RUBENSTEIN: I think it would be more interesting I guess, to get people that are not alive anymore.

I would love to spend some time with William Shakespeare or Abraham Lincoln or George Washington.

I wish someday we could figure out a way to do something with them that we can't do now.

Now think about this, the interview format we have now, it's a relatively new format where somebody interviewed somebody else and you watch it for information entertainment.

We didn't have that with Shakespeare or with George Washington, Abraham Lincoln.

They were never interviewed.

So it'd be wonderful if some time, if we could figure out a way to interview them and get the answers that they would have given.

So maybe that we could work on that.

GILL: You may have already said it earlier, but best advice you ever got from your parents, best advice.

RUBENSTEIN: Best advice from my parents is that "Do the best you can and we still will love you no matter what happens."

And so they didn't put pressure on me to do anything, but they always made it clear.

They would support whatever I wanted to do.

GILL: Good.

We're winding down now, David, and this has been fabulous to be with you.

We just have a few more minutes.

So if we're on a plane, everybody's got their seatbelts fastened and the trays are up and we can see the runway, next 50 years, so that's what we're going to talk about for just a few more minutes, the next 50 years.

And you said to Oprah in the interview, which was awesome by the way you said to her something like, "Why don't you slow up?"

So let me ask you the question.

Why don't you slow up?

RUBENSTEIN: Well, because everything I'm doing now, I enjoy.

So I wouldn't want to slow up because- GILL: You stop enjoying it.

You'll slow up.

RUBENSTEIN: Well, I wouldn't enjoy playing shuffleboard or something like that.

So I enjoy what I'm doing.

I also think if you keep active physically and mentally, it enables you to live longer.

And so that's what presumably most people want to do.

And so I love what I'm doing.

I just wish I had more time in the day.

And I do find, as you get older, you can't probably work quite at the pace you did when you were 20 years younger, but I'm doing the best I can.

And I love what I'm doing.

GILL: If I could give you one mulligan, I'm not going to give you like three or four.

I'm only going to give you a one mulligan so far.

The next 71 years of your life I could give you another mulligan but for the first 71, I'm going to give you a mulligan.

Is there anything that you want to use it for over this first that you want to do different?

If you could rewrite something, anything sticking out?

RUBENSTEIN: Well, there's always a tendency that I have to look back and think of all the things I could have done better.

But right now I'm reasonably happy with where I am.

I just hope that I can live long enough time to give away my money in productive way to say thank you to the country for my good fortune, and to live to see healthy and happy children and grandchildren do things that they want to do with their lives.

GILL: Yeah.

David, thank you.

It's been an incredible time with you and I'm so glad to have got know you.

RUBENSTEIN: My pleasure, happy to be here.

It's a great historic setting.

I want to thank everybody that made it possible.

GILL: Thank you, George Washington, he listened to the whole thing.

He's probably going to critique it.

RUBENSTEIN: He probably will.

RUBENSTEIN: Thank You *