The Daily Stoic - David Rubenstein on Investing and Designing the Optimal Life

Episode Date: October 12, 2022

This episode comes out for free on 10/12/2022Ryan talks to David Rubenstein about his new book How to Invest, his experiences working for President Jimmy Carter, how design your life for happiness and productivity, and more.David Mark Rubenstein is an American billionaire businessman. Former government official and lawyer. A Co-Founder and Co-Chairman of The Carlyle Group, one of the world’s largest and most successful private investment firms. Mr. Rubenstein co-founded the firm in 1987. Also the host of The David Rubenstein Show: Peer-to-Peer Conversations on Bloomberg TV and PBS.📕 Ryan Holiday's new book "Discipline Is Destiny" is out now! We’ve extended the pre-order bonuses for the next week—among them is a signed and numbered page from the original manuscript of the book. You can learn more about those and how to receive them over at Dailystoic.com/preorder. ✉️ Sign up for the Daily Stoic email: https://dailystoic.com/dailyemail📱 Follow us: Instagram, Twitter, YouTube, TikTok, FacebookSee Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Hey, prime members, you can listen to the Daily Stoic Podcast early and add free on Amazon Music. Download the app today. Welcome to the Daily Stoic Podcast, where each day we bring you a passage of ancient wisdom designed to help you find strength, insight, and wisdom every day life. designed to help you find strength, insight, and wisdom every day life. Each one of these passages is based on the 2000-year-old philosophy that has guided some of history's greatest men and women. For more, you can visit us dailystow.com. Hi, I'm David Brown, the host of Wunderree's podcast

business wars. And in our new season, Walmart must fight off target, the new discounter that's both savvy and fashion forward. Listen to business wars on Amazon Music, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, it's Ryan Holiday. Welcome to another episode of the Daily Stoic Podcast. I am just now coming out of the other side of having

signed 10,000 copies of Discipline Estestiny, the new book. That number is unfathomable to me. Physically, I did that. That my team was able to get all those orders out in time. But the 10,000 of you ordered signed copies as a mind blowing to me. And then of course, that 10,000 more of you bought unsigned copies. You supported me, the author directly, and instead of getting it from a big conglomer or something.

And that just, it just means a ton to me. If you're curious how one signs 10,000 books, the answer is one book at a time. That was how I did it. I mean, there were some tips and tricks. I had some little things that go over my finger. When I signed them at our warehouse in Mantino, I wore a long sleeve shirt. I found that it was rubbing against a certain part of my forearm.

There's definitely going to be some calluses all around from it, but it was an experience. I think logistically we learned a lot creatively. I learned a lot. And, you know, it's just amazing to see something you made stacked up so high. We overwhelmed a little post office here in Bastion of Texas. But most of all, you all overwhelmed me in a really good way, and I just appreciate it so much. overwhelmed me in a really good way. And I just appreciate it so much. And I feel as wealthy as today's guest, second time appearance on the podcast for David Rubenstein, co-founder and co-chairman

of the Carlisle group, the host of the David Rubenstein show peer-to-peer conversations on Bloomberg TV. And one of the more interesting philanthropists in the world, when he was on last time, we talked about what he calls patriotic philanthropy, which I found to be quite interesting. He sponsored the cleaning of the Washington monument, the rebuilding of Monticello. He has many, many rare documents from including the Magna Carta and other places

that he loans out to various museums, which is fascinating. But the reason I wanted to have him back on, not just because he has a new book called How to Invest, which has all sorts of fascinating investment tips and ways of thinking about money and growing wealth from a very wealthy, successful investor. But as I tell him at the beginning of the episode, I've been reading quite a bit about Jimmy Carter, who is a character, a little bit in the discipline book, very much a character in the Justice book. And early on in his career, David worked in the Carter administration. He was hired at the law firm of Ted Swordson, the author of a JFK speech that had inspired him. But he discovered he wasn't a good lawyer and he of course corrected

and he found a job working for Carter's presidential campaign. And when he was elected at 27, he became the deputy director of domestic affairs and had an office in the West Wing. Fascinating experience, overall a fascinating life. And I wanted to have a great conversation with him about that. After he left Washington,

he started what became the Carlisle Group, which is a multi-billion-dollar investment private equity firm. And he has his own podcast. As I said, he's written a number of books including How to Lead, and more importantly, his new book How to Invest Masters of the Craft is available. Everywhere you can go to his website, DavidRumansdine.com, or you can follow him on Twitter at DM Rubenstein and I hope you like it. Hey David, how are you? How are you? I'm doing amazing, it's good to chat again. And to talk to you.

Well, I love the ideas in the new book. I want to talk about that, but I wanted to start back in time a little bit, which I promise we'll come back to the idea in investing. I have become fascinated with Jimmy Carter. I read the Kybird biography. I read the Eric Altramin one, his very best. And you appear briefly in both of those.

Right. What was that like? What was working in the Carter administration? Like it seems like a very long time ago and yet also very recent. Well, it was a long time ago. I was 27 years old, so I didn't really know much. You get jobs in White House staffs by work on campaigns,

and I worked in the campaign just for three months in the general election part, and my boss, who stood eyes as that, who became the domestic advisor to Carter, at an age that he seemed, it was young, but he was like one of the oldest people there. He was 34 years old. I was 27, there were people younger than me.

So, I remember Carter had not attracted, I'll say the best and the brightest because he was an outsider candidate. So the establishment people all went for other candidates. And so when Carter won, he had a lot of people relatively inexperienced and relatively young and many of them were from Georgia. There's sort of an investing concept there, which is you bought in on an undervalued asset

that appreciated quite quickly. You're correct. It was only in the campaign for three months. The amazing thing about those two books and the second book was written by Jonathan Alter. Yes, yes, sorry. And is this, today, if a president gets a piece of legislation passed, people say, wow, look, he got something passed.

I mean, getting one or two bills passed is amazing. Carter had so many things passed, but his expectations were even higher because he proposed so many more things. And so people thought he didn't get a lot done because he proposed, let's say, 50 things and he got 25 done. Today, anybody trying to propose that many things would never be taken seriously. And Carter wasn't taken seriously either because he had so many things he was trying to get done at once. And we never thought we would lose for reelection.

We never believed we would lose the election because we figured Ronald Reagan was so old and it was so conservative. It was a war monger. And we didn't think American people would vote for somebody who didn't know anything about policy. Obviously we were wrong. But the hostage crisis, hostage crisis killed us had Carter not had the hostage crisis and had he not been challenged by Ted Kennedy in the primaries, Carter probably would have been reelected. So it is interesting because I think a lot of people see Carter now as this kind of kindly old man, or this almost saint-like figure. They don't see him as he is portrayed in those books and I read

his campaign biography, Why Not The Best. They don't see him as a very ambitious, but I would also say extremely competent, man, like they don't see him as the commander on a nuclear submarine, a physicist, an entrepreneur. When an image takes hold, it's very difficult to change it. So his image is a weak president and a failed president. We consider people failed presidents if they don't get reelected. So he spoke failed.

And he considered him weak because he doesn't project the strong voice, the image of a Ronald Reagan. He was shorter, had a high pitch voice, a southern accent. It didn't sound like Hollywood's version of what a president should look like. But Carter in the many years since he's left the presidency about 40 years, what he's done is amazing. When you think about it and you've read the books, I would say, Carter's now 97 and not in great health.

No presence lived as long as he has, nor has anybody been married as long. He's been married now, I think, 76 years. I think it's right, something like that. And it's just amazing. Now, what he's done post presidency has been so significant compared to what other presidents used to do that it has taken precedence over what he did as president. Maybe he's been an ex-president for 40 years. He was president for four years. So, in times as long, appear to time time. And therefore most people in the United States probably don't remember what he did as president. Well, so not to get too into the weeds. And I do think this is a connection then to

investing. I am fascinated with, I'm writing about this right now. He makes this decision. He runs, as he runs for governor, he runs sort of a conservative kind of low key campaign. Some would say there's a little bit of dog whistling in it, but then in his inauguration speech, he shocks everyone by saying that the time for racial discrimination is over. And this is a bold and I think brave move. But the downside of it is captain that the governor of Georgia can only run for one term at that time. So then he runs for president and it's kind of an outsider campaign. He ends up winning. And both the books talk about this moment where basically his first day in office, he begins the process of a blanket pardon

for all the people who had evaded the draft or had protested the war in Vietnam. Now, what I think is interesting in both these moments, it's a moment where a politician is spending their political capital, they're going sort of all in very early. How do you think about that move, given that he does it when re-election? How have you thought about

Carter's decision to often do what was the right thing, but some would argue maybe wasn't the pragmatic or the political thing? Is that something you respect or is that something you felt useful? Obviously, it's always good to say, a president is doing the right thing he doesn't care about the politics of it. That's rarely the case. But with Carter, Carter saw himself as an anti-politician. And his view was, if you tell me what the politics are of something, and this is going to be good for me politically, he would do almost the opposite. As Halton Jürgen used to say, if you want to convince Carter something, telling this will be politically bad for him, then he would do it. Because he did, he wanted to be seen as a non-politician and he was.

So, so did you, do you feel like that helped or hurt him? Like, could, is that somewhere he could have, I've just, it's like, it's easy to be pure and ideological and yet also if you don't win reelection, you can't do more good. Carter never really thought he would lose the reelection because he didn't take Reagan seriously, none of us did. We also didn't realize one thing we learned later. We thought eventually the hostage would come out because surely the hostage holders would know that Carter was an easier guy unless of a war monger than Reagan.

Why would they want to let Reagan get the credit? That was long. It turned out that they hated Carter for letting the shion, and they didn't care about Reagan's record before. They just didn't want him to get, they just didn't want Carter to get the pleasure of letting the hostages out. So we didn't know that at the time. We also, I think, Carter, I would say, he was really hobbled by the campaign against him by Ted Kennedy, barely beat Kennedy in the end for the nomination. And so when you have an income in president who's challenged by a person

in his own party, he almost never wins for reelection. George Herbert Walker Bush was challenged by a number of people, William Howard Taft was challenged in his party. When you're challenged within your party, it's very difficult to win a election. No, that's really interesting. And yeah, I guess it's obviously you wrote this fascinating book about investing, but a lot of the strategies, I think, make sense in other facets of our lives. Like we're saying, like, do you do you bet on a on an unpredictable candidate? And then it advances your career in a way that if you take in a safer bet it couldn't have worked. And then also we all have political and social capital. How and what do we spend it on is an important decision. So are you writing a book on Carter or something like?

No, so I'm writing a series right now on the Cardinal Virtue. So I wrote a book on courage. I did a just did a book on self discipline and now I'm doing the virtue of justice. And I'm interested in, you know, how does one bring justice into the world? It's not just, is your cause right? But there have, you have to make pragmatic decisions. But I think I'm ultimately going to present the decision to front load, doing good in your first term as kind of the ultimate pragmatic decision, right? If Carter had waited, there's no guarantee that you get reelected, right? And so that he was a largely effective single term presidency, was a pragmatic bet in that there's no guarantee he would have gotten a second term.

That's true. He never really thought he would lose for reelection, though. Yeah. He was, he just never really had never even the day before the election. He thought he was going to win. So we just never took it into account. We just didn't take Reagan seriously. But you're correct. In the beginning, you should use your, you have your, the most amount of political capital when after you've been elected.

And Carter had a lot of political capital in the beginning. He squandered a lot of it by doing things that upset a lot of political capital in the beginning, he squandered a lot of it by doing things that upset a lot of politicians like the things with the dams and the water works and other things that just upset the core constituency of the Democratic Party. Yes, he didn't seem too interested in what the establishment thought and made a lot of enemies in the process. His view was establishment didn't want him to be the nominee and didn't support him. So he said, I don't know the AFL CIO anything. I don't know the traditional democratic constituent groups, anything. I got elected on my own.

So he didn't really care about them. And it showed as president. And probably either could have done a better job making Ted Kennedy an ally or seeing him as an enemy earlier. He sort of left himself exposed. You could argue. Look, but Ted Kennedy looked for a way to run for president. And he basically latched on to healthcare.

Carter could have gone along with Kennedy's healthcare program because it wouldn't have passed anyway. Right. It wasn't enough support for it, but Carter didn't want to give in to Kennedy because he said, you know, I can kiss my ass as what Carter said. And he didn't really care what Kennedy thought because he thought Kennedy was too far to the left and he didn't want to be seen as being dragged to the left. But the truth is, Kennedy couldn't get his healthcare bill through.

Remember, even today, 2022, that bill still has not passed. Obama got a healthcare bill through, which was a fraction of what Kennedy wanted. So there's just not never been enough support for what Kennedy wanted. The other fascinating part, and this would be the last thing we can say about Carter, because I won't talk about the book, but I thought the decision to put solar panels on the roof of the White House, the moral equivalent of war. And then the first thing Reagan does is rip the solar panels off the roof was a sort of an illustrative symbolic moment of pivot point in American history. And who knows where we would

be now had we been able to see that he was so right in that moment. Well, of course, the solar panels weren't working that well, because they were not the technology. It wasn't great. But the truth is, it was symbolic. Reagan didn't want to do anything that Carter started. I'm the chairman of the Kennedy Center in Washington. We have the Kennedy Center Honors. And after Carter started them, for three years of it, they went to Reagan and Reagan's people and said, we want to continue to Kenny Center honors. They said, don't you understand anything Carter started? We're not going to do. We just can't stand Carter. And so anything he did, they

wanted to change. Oh, man. Yeah, it's funny that even at the not funny, it's sad, but at the absolute top, even I've got to imagine multi-billion dollar business decisions and investments, they can hinge on to somebody like somebody, to somebody you want to, you know, it's like somebody takes over a movie studio. The first thing they do is cancel all their predecessors projects, even if they were good. That's always what they do. I agree. We like to, I guess we'd like to think that the markets are rational, but individuals inside the markets are fundamentally not rational. That's true, absolutely.

So when you think about investing, obviously, it must be interesting at your level, what you see, what do you feel like some of the big things that the average person can learn from the sort of rooms that you have been in. Okay. The biggest mistake the average person makes is when the stock market goes up They rush in and say I'm gonna miss something and when stock market goes down They sell everything because they trade. They're gonna, you know, get wiped out and actually the reverse is better Is the better for it of course the pursue and when the markets are going down That's when the smart guy are getting in and they're buying things at relatively cheap prices.

That's the biggest mistake. The second biggest mistake is thinking that you can actually become Warren Buffett or somebody like that by reading a little bit about the stock market. The truth is, the average person is not gonna be the stock market. So for the average person, just buy it index fund

and you'll do as well as the market does. And that probably the story of Warren Buffett is less a story of his brilliance as an investor and your point about how Carter has lived longer than any president. The fact that Warren Buffett has done it longer than essentially any investor is probably one of the biggest drivers of his immense wealth. I saw a stat once that like 50% of his fortune came after his like 70th birthday. Well, the truth is like he committed to give a large amount of stock to the Gates Foundation, but that's insignificant amount compared to what the, what his stock has appreciated to since that time. So it's going to give away the bulk of them.

His stock is actually not going to go to the Gates Foundation. But the truth is, Warren Buffett has averaged 20% a year for 60 years. That's a long time to average that. And he's very smart and he's a good person. But his point is he does this full time. This has been his life forever. If you are just going to dabble in the stock market, it's a different thing.

Sure. But even if that return had been lower, if it had been 10% a year over 60 years, that would be a still an enormous number. It's time is your most valuable thing. And Warren Buffett has made a lot of that money by making some good decisions for sure, but by not selling, he avoids transaction costs and invoices taxes. Remember, you've never paid, you never has to pay capital gains tax, he never sells anything.

So you talk about that in the book, and I think that's an interesting question. So you're basically saying that one of the keys to investing well is never selling or minimizing selling for the transaction costs you're talking about, and then also buying and holding tends to be the best strategy. But what I guess that even me personally, I always find myself feeling like when something

goes up a lot, it's greedy to assume it will continue to go up. So how do you balance this sort of, well, I want to take profits. I don't want to expect things to go up forever. And as you're saying, holding being generally the best strategy. Well, it depends on what your what your need is for cash and what your time horizon is. But for the average person, if you need to live off the cash

of your stock market investments, that's probably not a great thing. But then you should probably be selling things from time to time. If you're basically saving for the very long in the future, probably selling is not a great thing to do. I see. Yeah, it's like my first house that I bought in Austin, I kept, and it's now like triple

then value. That's see, there's a part of me that that feels so fundamentally insane that a house would triple in value in 10 years, that holding it and going, of course, it will go up more. So I think, which I guess you're just- Well, nobody anticipated Austin would become the center of the investment world, but it's the largest and it's become a major investment and tech center now that it wasn't before.

But also, for most people, their greatest asset is their house. Right. But you should recognize that. Most importantly. And that's what I mean, though, the psychology, I guess you're saying that often what we do is we second-guess ourselves. So either the market's going up, so we feel there's fear of missing out, or the market's going down, and we want to avoid losses.

When really, it sounds like what the great investors do is have rules that they stick to. So their short-term psychology isn't violating these sort of long-term laws. Right. Now, I didn't put in the book, but Sir Isaac Newton was considered to be one of the smartest men ever. You've heard about what he did. Yes, yes. Okay, so he got out at the wrong time and then he was afraid people are making money. That's what often happens. You're afraid your neighbor is making money when you're not. And as a result, you often chase things. You shouldn't be chasing. So how have you thought about moments in your investing career where you look back and you see yourself sort of falling prey to these things? Like, what do you think like your most expensive mistake has been as an investor? Well, it was not investing in Facebook when Mark Zuckerberg was at Harvard. My now son-in-law was his classmate and he told me about the opportunity to invest

when Mark was at Harvard and he needed some money. And I said, this is a dating service, they don't ever get anywhere. And most dating service companies don't get anywhere. So that was a big mistake. And then I had stock and Amazon at the beginning and I sold that relatively quickly because I didn't think that was gonna get anywhere. So that's what I'm talking about. You probably saw it go up and then you took your profits and the world in which it's worth $3,000 a share

probably seemed inconceivable. Well, remember, when Jeff was taking a public, it was basically a bookseller. Yeah. It didn't sell everything else. They were just selling books pretty much. And I didn't think that was a great growth business. When you think about what you saw in Facebook, and then Peter Tio, who I wrote a book about a few years ago, he clearly saw the opposite of what you saw in Facebook.

What do you think the differences of your worldviews were that allowed you to make these different? He's a lot smarter. One thing, but I would say it was this. When Mark was in Harvard, the company was basically designed to give people pictures of people they could date. It was basically a dating Facebook. That's what it was. And the ignobility, and I remember my daughter telling me about it, she says, guess what? Basically, she said, they're going to let Facebook people who are adults join, not just college kids. I said, the adults are never going to be interested in that kind of thing. But that was the revolutionary thing was it was really only for college kids.

That was the original idea. And also, Mark had started many companies at Harvard and none of them got anywhere. So he was a serial company starter. And most many of us people didn't take him seriously because he was always starting companies and going to the next woman. It didn't work out. I remember I was in Austin at South by Southwest in 2007. And this is the year that Twitter launched. And they had these screens all over the convention center showing what it was. And I remember seeing it and saying to myself, this seems like the dumbest idea in the entire world. My friend Tim Ferris invested in Twitter, like shortly thereafter,

made obviously a killing on it. And it does continue to seem like the dumbest idea ever, but also a very successful company. So how do you think about that, too, where something might seem crazy, but it could still be a money-making opportunity? Well, for most of the last 40 or 50 years, people would say those kind of ideas don't work. Facebook doesn't work and Twitter doesn't work. But now that we've seen these companies change the way we live, now everybody who has any idea at all is seen as maybe

potential in Mark Zuckerberg or Jeff Bezos. And what's everybody is looked at, seriously, died by venture campus. I remember I was at a dinner once at JP Morgan dinner and everybody at the table was very famous. It was Lou Gerstner or Jack Wells, Jamie Diamond, and was one guy that said next to me and I said, okay okay, give up. Who are you? What are you doing at this table? And he said, well, I started a company called Twitter, but I have another company. I have this little piece of the device and he showed me it was square. And he said, I'm going to start this company square. I said, hey, geez, I don't really know if that's going to get anywhere. But, you know, he was very modest. It was Jack Dorsey, obviously.

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And I'm Sydney Battle, and we're the host of Wundery's new podcast, Disantel, where each episode we unpack a different iconic celebrity feud. From the build-up, why it happened, and the repercussions. What does our obsession with these feud say about us? The first season is packed with some pretty messy pop culture drama, but none is drawn out in personal as Britney and Jamie Lin Spears. When Britney's fans form the free Britney movement dedicated to fraying her from the infamous conservatorship. Jamie Lins lack of public support. It angered some fans. A lot of them. It's a story of two young women who had their choices taken away from them by their controlling parents, but

took their anger out on each other. And it's about a movement to save a superstar, which set it sites upon anyone who failed to fight for Britney. Follow Disenthal wherever you get your podcast. You can listen ad free on Amazon Music or the Wondery app. Man, that's fascinating. When you make the point in the book that most people who have made a lot of money end up giving it away. So what does that say about money, I guess? And then what does that also say about the people who spend so much time and energy trying to acquire more and more of it?

Well, most people wind up coming to the conclusion that building a pyramid and to yourself is probably not a great use of the money after you die. And then ultimately, we are getting down to, we are giving your money after you die. And then ultimately, where you're getting down to, where you're giving your money to your kids, or your grandkids, you're giving your money to other social causes. And most people who are very, very wealthy wind up giving away to non-family members,

the bulk of it. I mean, that's probably true. And today philanthropy has looked upon recently favorably. So I'd say most of these guys who make this kind of money are doing it after they've made a basic amount of money That's necessary for their homes or whatever to do it to kind of they're showing their wits They like to out with them are other people and it's an intellectual challenge and it's fun Great investors don't go to work every day saying I wish I could play golf

They love what they're doing and as you probably know from your own work experience if you love what you're doing It's not it's not work and you're more likely to enjoy it and be better at it. If you really find it, it's it's an enjoyable thing. Nobody ever want a Nobel Prize hating what they did. They win the Nobel Prize. They love it so much. They would do it even if they weren't getting paid. Right. Yeah, that was one one illustrative lesson as I started meeting very successful people like you after I'd written my books, is that I found that almost to a rule, they all also wanted to write books. And it was a reminder like, oh, hey, the people with lots of money are trying to for fun or on the side do what I do for a living.

I should protect that thing that I do and not be distracted by other things that might be more lucrative. When really I already have the gift of getting to do the thing that like, I don't know if you've watched the show Yellowstone, but in the first episode, he says something like, if someone had all the money in the world, you know what they would use, they would use it for, they'd use it to buy this, right, the ranch that they have. And sort of thinking about what people with money actually want can help you, I guess, see what's actually important.

Well, tomorrow I'm supposed to interview Elon Musk. Yes. And I'm trying to think about what's the best first question they ask him. And I guess I'm thinking like something like, you know, you got all the money in the world, the richest managers they ever live, you know, but you don't seem to be enjoying it in the way that members of wealthy people seem to do it.

Yeah. So being in the wealthiest man in the world, pleasurable or not. Yeah. Do you think he seems to buy himself trouble or headaches? To me, it seems like one of the perks of being the richest person in the world would be not having to deal with a lot of bullshit. And it seems like he seeks out bullshit in chaos. Well, I think what he's trying to do by not owning homes is get rid of all the aggravation of managing all these homes, I guess. But at some point, you know, generally people

have a lot of money tend to buy things. They're not exceptions. Like, they got who started Atlantic Philanthropies and really it's given away all of his money, essentially. And it basically spends no money. But generally, wealthy people tend to spend it and buy some nice things that make life easier for them. What do you feel like you have purchased that you is most meaningful or valuable to you. Well, I don't know if it's being valuable or meaningful, but it's making my life easier as

an airplane. So I travel, and when I was building Carla, I was traveling 240 days a year, and I'm still traveling a lot, maybe 200 days a year. And so I'm not having to fly commercial makes life a little bit easier. Sure. I have heard that the only reason to become extremely wealthy is to not have to fly commercial. It's like the one thing that regular wealthy people can't do. It's not the only thing, but I would say I've told my family bury me in my airplane. I'm never so happy as long I'm in my airplane. You know, it's quiet. I can go to sleep when I want to go to sleep, I can call. Nobody can bother me unless I want to be bothered. So what more do you want out of life?

Yes. Yes. Right, because after a certain point, they say after $70,000, happiness doesn't change that much. But after, let's say you're making the, in the mid six figures, there's pretty much all the normal, all the things that even an insanely wealthy person can do, you can do as far as restaurants or visiting certain places.

But then there are those things above that, which would be like, yeah, a private airplane. There's no doubt that that makes it easier. But, you know, how much money does it take to be financially secure? Someone once said it takes exactly twice whatever you have. So no matter what level you have, you always think I need to have twice as much before I'm really secure. Yeah, there's a Silicon Valley entrepreneur I'm forgetting his name, but he said, you know, everyone's after fuck you money. He's like, but I've never actually seen anyone say fuck you, as they get it. And then they realize that to say that would

mean costing them more, you know, more earnings more. And so nobody ever actually arrives at the number that they think will purchase them security, freedom, not caring, etc. Oh, look, some of the wealthiest people in the United States are not very happy people. I know a lot of tortured souls who are multi billionaires. And some of the happiest people I know don't have any money at all. Well, if time is such an, it seems like what's interesting about time is time is how one makes a lot of money because compounding over time in the market is the most powerful force there is. But also time is the, is the only thing that you really can't buy more of, that the only truly non-renewable resource. That is also interesting to me, though, as you look

at a very wealthy people, is that they don't always seem to be great protectors of their time. I sometimes I see this with Elon Musk, it seems like he sends out, seems like he has a lot of strange opinions about things that I feel like if I was the richest person in the world, I would never think about. Or it seems like wealthy people sometimes attend conferences. And I'm like, well, I know why I'm here. Why are you here?

You could do anything you want to do. Yeah. Well, a lot of people like to connect with other people. There's no doubt, you know, conferences have a lot of people. You might say, why are they coming? But whoever's the wealthiest person in the world usually has some eccentricities about them. Sure. How it's used, Jay Paul Getty, Elon Musk, they all have some things that make them a little different. That's probably how they made the money. They were thinking differently than other people. If

you think like the average person, you probably won't make the money. Well, also, I don't want to say a more normal person because that seems judgmental. But if you weren't eccentric, you would probably stop at a certain point, right? Like you wouldn't start your fifth company. You would say, I have enough. I'm going to spend time with my children. There's a theory that all people are crazy. It's just that the wealthy people get to act it out, whereas the poor people can't act it out. Sure.

Sure. So over commitment for me looks like one thing, over commitment for Elon Musk means trying to buy a social network on the side. Yes. He needs another job, I guess. Thanks. Well, what do you think about that as I'm fascinating with real estate?

But it's always interesting when you see people purchasing jobs for themselves, essentially. So they have money, they could invest it in the market passively. And instead they purchase things that take a lot of work or maintenance. Again, it comes down to we don't seem to be the best at finding a good valuation of our time. But for example, if you were to say to Elon Musk, you're not doing good things with your time, he would say, well, look, I made $250 billion. Let me figure out what to do with my time, right?

Yes. billion dollars, let me figure out what to do with my time, right? Yes. But I mean, with the average person, you see them, like, like looking at two investment strategies, let's say, you can put it in an index fund and it makes a seven percent a year, or you can buy a rental property and it makes 10 percent a year, but you have to spend a lot of time and energy thinking about this place mowing the lawn in front of it, et cetera. People will often take the one that has a higher return, but that's because they don't value their time very well.

It's probably true, but as you point out, as I tell people all the time, the most valuable thing you can give to somebody else is your time. You can get more of it. You can make more money if you want to make more money. You can't make more time. And I try to encourage people to give their time when they really want to give something to an organization as a non-profit kind of thing. Because time is more valuable than anything else. And as you get older, you realize you have less and less of it. Have you thought about that even with something like your plane that you're not just buying the convenience, but you're also buying flexibility and time being worth a lot to you?

Sure. If you fly commercial today, you're probably going to be stuck in airports a lot, right? Yeah. And transferring and everything like that, it's not easy. So, yeah, I'm saving time. I was like, get older, I want to save more time for things I really want to do. Where do you, having, you know, you obviously don't have to work, you don't have to do anything with the time that you have? It seems like you focus a lot on ideas, so writing and your podcast and philanthropy, your patriotic philanthropy. What are the things that, when money ceases to be an issue, what has been, where do you put that time?

Well, I still have, I've started a family office, I have that. My children have their own businesses, and I try to help them with that to extent I can. And then I have Carl family office, I have that. I have my children, I have their own businesses, and I try to help them with that to extend I can. And then I have Carlisle, but I do have a large philanthropic program, but I also share a lot of boards. I share the University of Chicago board. I share the National Kennedy Center board.

I share the Council and Foreign Relations board, the Library of Congress board, and the National Gallery of Art. So it takes time when you're chairing these boards. And then I have a lot of boards I'm one that I own chair. So I'm trying to juggle things all the time. Do you, what do you feel like you've used your money to eliminate things that take up your time? Like if you're thinking about purchasing time being a valuable asset,

what do you spend money to eliminate time? So just traveling around, well, first, it was great during COVID because I didn't have to travel so much. Yeah. Because speech in the Middle East, a speech in Europe, and a speech in China the same day. Right. Now you can't do that anymore. It's because, as Woody Allen famously said, 90% of life is showing up. That's still the case.

Yeah. So expect you to show up. And so you got to show up and take time and you got to have juggle all that and that's my most valuable commodities my time. But the thing I enjoy the most is giving away my money to causes that I think help society or helps our country. Yeah, I think the weird part of COVID was not just not traveling,

but it illustrated as a result of not traveling and not doing things that we take for granted, the opportunity costs of travel and disruption and a lot of the things that we do, which is probably the hardest thing I think to understand when we deal with money and investments is what is the opportunity cost because it's usually so unknowable. Yes, I agree. So, most people that have a lot of money, what they want to do is spend their time in ways that they don't see that it's wasting their time. And so, they're, but obviously they're making their own decisions about what doesn't waste

time. Why does E-Line Musk go on TV shows and be interviewed or go on podcasts and be interviewed? You could say to him, you don't need to do that. What do you need that for? But he obviously enjoys it or he wouldn't do it. Why do you do it? Why do you do your podcast and write your books?

Well, I like to think I'm reasonably intelligent. And so I like to, as you know, writing a book takes some gray matter. And so doing it, I don't have a ghost writer or I like that you know it's a you know writing a book take some gray matter and instead of doing it I don't have a ghost writer or anything like that. So I like doing it. It's a legacy a bit I guess when I'm gone I'll have these books will probably be around and so my children and grandchildren can say look what he wrote and I also try to get a message out to people about things so I enjoy it. It's speaking investing, what do you think of fire? Do you know what fire is? The acronym fire?

It's sort of an online movement. It basically stands for financial independence retire early. So like the, the, the quintessential example would be like a programmer in Silicon Valley. They make $300,000 a year. So they try to live on $50,000 a year for 10 or 15 years. And then they retire at 35 as opposed to retiring at 65. Well, I am not familiar with it because it's too far and for my concept of what I should think about it. You know, the retirement, my father was a blue collar worker. He retired at 55 because he hated what his job was, working in the post office.

But if you retire, basically means you're doing what? You're just sitting around, lounging around. What you want to do is I think accomplish something. So I wouldn't want to retire. I'm never going to retire. But you have to find something you love doing and then you're not retiring. Yes. There was a New York Times profile of some of the people in the fire movement and the

this guy had retired at 30 or something and they said, well, what are you doing now? And he said, well, I'm trying to watch all the movies in the criterion collection. And I thought you should probably get a job. That sounds like you should get a job. Yeah, and we'll see in 20 years, one of those people are happy that they were tired. So yeah, but to think about it, professional athletes more or less retire in their mid-30s, let's say. So, you know, if you look at most professional athletes, are they happy with what they did after they retired? Most of them probably didn't accomplish that much after they were tired. Yes. Well, that's always an interesting thing when I've met a lot of athletes because of my books. There's always a split, like the ones that, so they make a lot of athletes because of my books. And there's always a split like the ones that,

so they make a lot of money and then they can do whatever they want. What we don't think about sports is just how grueling it is. The NBA, you're on the road 40 games a year, the baseball year on the road even more than that. The ones that decide to go into coaching are usually very addicted to the game. They can't not do it because you think about, you've made all this money and then you have to start

as an assistant and you, you have to maybe 10, 15 years before you even get a head coaching job. And then your reward is this thing that consumes all your time and energy. So there's kind of this split I found with athletes, the ones who can walk away and the ones who can't. Well, usually the months have made the most money don't go in the coaching. Yes. They just think it's beneath them and they don't want to deal with people that are below their

capabilities and they also made enough money. They don't have to go coach. It's the average player or subpar player who actually comes to coach typically. Yes. Although, like Steve Ker Kerz a good example, I mean, he wins a bunch of rings and then goes on Phil Jackson being a good example. It's like, are you, are you a life or not? Well Phil Jackson is a good example. He was playing behind, you know, everybody else and the time he was on the next, he wasn't a superstar on the next. Superstar was still Bradley, not Phil Jackson.

Then Jackson became more famous. And sometimes you would see the two of them together, Bradley, not Phil Jackson. Then Jackson became more famous. And sometimes you would see the two of them together, people running after Phil Jackson. And he was nothing when Bill Bradley was playing and he was playing. Yeah. No, and I think to going back to fire, because I think this is an investment strategy that a lot of people think about, which is they try to optimize for spending as little as possible which makes sense. Obviously, you can invest what you spend or what you don't spend. But then there if we're talking about time and we're also talking about the fact that life is short and unpredictable as COVID proves. I'm often skeptical of the idea that you should pinch every penny with the hope of some distant future in which you

won't have to do that. I don't know. We'll find out in 10 or 20 years where those people that did that are happy or not. Yes. But if they're not, they wasted a lot of time. Yeah. My parents, we grew up in Sacramento. They saved, you know, they were sort of your millionaire next door types of investing and compounding. And, you know, they were sort of your millionaire next door types of investing and compounding and, you know, they had great retirement plans because they're public servants.

But now they live in Hawaii, but I often joke with them, I go, why didn't we just live in San Diego or something for most of your life instead of enjoying the last few years of your life in a beautiful place? It's hard to understand why people do certain things, but there's no doubt that that's a phenomenon. People retire to place, they think it's going to be enjoyable to live in. Why didn't they live in some place like that earlier? Yes, and these things are often more affordable or accessible than we think that they are if

we are willing to comprehend, if it actually is important to us. Were they happy and her why? I well, you know, I'm not sure they are. At the end of the day, it's a it's an I a small island in the middle of the ocean 5,000 miles away from everything else. Right. I'm not sure it's actually where you want to live in your 60s or 70s unless unless you actually love golf as much as you think that you do. Right. Yeah, well, I try to avoid golf. So that's my big thing to avoid. Well, as George Carlin said, it's an arrogant game, golf, that it needs all that land. Well, it's also, you know, your chasing is this little ball around and, you know, why are people so addicted to chasing this little ball? I mean, it's hard to understand

the appeal of that, but I don't know. People have frustrated, but they love it anyway. I think I think it's, it's there enjoying the puzzle of the game, whereas if your career or your passions or your hobbies are also puzzles, it's sort of mystifying the pleasure or satisfaction that you would get out of that game. Well, in my case, I don't play because if I have a meeting with you and you think I'm an intelligent competent person, I would destroy the illusion of competence and intelligence if you saw me play off. You say, how can anybody be intelligent? If he can't hit the bomb, we're in three feet or something.

Yes. I also have trouble telling my wife that for fun, I need to go be gone for six hours. Yes. The only stroke that I perfected was the practice swing where you pretend that you wanted to not hit the ball, but you were kind of hit the ball, but you missed completely. That was my best shot. So as you think about your philanthropy, how has your approach to making and earning money or what you've learned from people who have made and earned a lot of money, how has that

informed how you approach philanthropy, which is partly driven by a return on investment and yet fundamentally not driven by that? Well, look, I've enjoyed doing things, just go, what I call patriotic philanthropy, because people think that if you're giving back to the country in some modest way, it's probably a good thing. And when my parents were alive, they like hearing people say, your son is doing a good thing for the country. That was part of the pleasure of it. But I just think when people come up to you and say, you're doing a good thing for our country, you know, you probably feel good about it. And I enjoy

the things I'm working on. So I enjoy the philanthropy, but I'd like to remind people that giving your ideas in time is really as valuable as giving your money in the end. Well, what do you think of effective altruism? Do you know what that is? Yes. What's your thought on it? Sam Bankman freed about that the other day. Oh, okay. It's a great proponent of it. Yes. You know, he has, you know, I, I, I, nothing wrong with it.

I just think in the end, it's hard to find things that are going to be so wonderful that you're going to be doing everything you're doing is me outruistic and saving all your money for outruistic things. You know, I, I don't know what the hell be able to do it. He's 30 years old. At one point, he was worth 22 billion. That he's worth eight billion now or something. I don't know whether he'll continue to do that. He doesn't know when the house is or anything like that. No real close.

Whether he'll continue to do that and just worry about altruism this whole life, I don't know. Do you think about ROI when you're investing in, or when you're giving money to an organization? Well, Bill Gates is much smarter than me and he's tried to develop metrics to measure the success of his philanthropy. I think it's very hard to do that and so we don't have a metric test that I use for my philanthropy. I kind of look at it and see how they've done and give them more money if I think they've done a reasonable job. But it's no really perfect way to measure

whether I've done an ROI on it. You know, I guess if you did something and your mother called you up and said, I'm proud of what you did as my son, I guess that's a good ROI, right? Yes, yes. Well, the other sort of arm of effective altruism these days, and I interviewed Will McGaskill

who just wrote a book called What We O The Future. that was really interesting. He was saying that a lot of philanthropy or a lot of our efforts are we have a sort of blinkered view of like helping only the people that are around us or that are existing today. His sort of argument is like, look, if you saw a broken glass, a bottle on the ground that was broken that could cut someone's finger today, that would cause them pain, you should pick it up. But also if you could pick up a glass bottle 100 years in the future, prevent a glass bottle from cutting someone's finger 100 years in the future, that is also good. It basically the idea that future people matter. How do you think about impact and legacy and your work reaching beyond today?

Well, I think almost everybody wants to feel they've done something useful with their life. They don't want to be on their deathbed saying, you know, I wasted my entire life. The people want to feel they did something useful. And, you know, and when you read the obituary pages, most of those obituraries are written by the people who died. I mean, they were kind of interviewed by the obituary writer and part of the stuff in there is what they want to be in there. You know, I like to have my legacy be something that people, my children, grandchildren, think is a good thing, but who really knows? And I'm not sure I'm going to really live this, I mean, I'll be in a place where I'll see how my legacy is viewed. But I do feel like some of your philosophical,

philanthropic things, whether it's restoring the Washington monument or much cellar or whatever, it must be interesting to think that people who are not even born yet are going to one day hopefully be able to enjoy the work that you did or the thing that you preserved. It's nice, but it's just too hard to think about 100 years down the road or 50 years down the road. So I'm really probably more appealing to people than I know or people that I think are alive today. But I understand your concept. I just haven't thought about it that much.

Yeah, Marcus are really as rights and meditations that we forget. He says, people who long for posture miss fame forget that people in the future will be just as stupid and annoying as the people who are alive today. It may be true. I mean humanity doesn't change all that much. Does it? No, and you're not around to enjoy your posthumous fame. So you may as well try to do good now. That's true. I mean, nobody knows whether there's a heaven you can watch down from people like to believe there is because it makes you feel like you're doing something that will survive forever, that you'll survive forever, but nobody really knows, of course. Have you, do you, it is interesting. All of us have the ability, obviously, to have multi-generational impact through our children. Obviously, just those of us who have children,

but we have the ability to do that. How have you thought about teaching, you know, the ideas of investing, being so I imagine having children when you have essentially unlimited money, you know, presents a different kind of parenting challenge than a single mother who's trying to get by. And do you have children? I do. I have a six year old and a three year old. Okay. I've said many times the hardest thing in the world to do is to raise children

or happy and healthy. You kind of feel that you've finally done that and that you've discharged your responsibility when they turn about 70 years old. Your entire life, no matter what age, my mother died when I was probably late 60s. She's still calling to tell me what to do and they're always worried about what you're doing. So parenting is a tough, tough job. If you are wealthy, it's even tougher because avoiding spoiling your children is a very big challenge. And you've all seen children of very wealthy families that have spoiled their children at the point where the children

need accomplished nothing other life. And sometimes they just become drug addicts or alcoholics. And it's a sad situation. It's not easy raising kids with a lot of money. Yes. Yes, someone told me that the tricky thing is if your house is so big, you can't yell at your kids from across the house. I haven't heard that before, but maybe there's something to that. But in the end, look, everybody does parenting differently, but there's no doubt that if you have more

time, you spend your kids, you're probably going to be better off in the end because they're probably going to turn out better. It's rare that you've turned, you ignore your kids and all of a sudden they turn out to be road scholars. Well, yeah, and it's probably not fair. I mean, most parents struggle to raise good healthy kids, right? So it's probably just that we look at the children of wealthy parents and go, oh, you know, they did about a worse job or do a worse job

than the rest of us. But how have you thought about, like, I guess if you're the richest or most successful or best person in the world at what you do, and yet your kids are miserable or your kids are struggling. You probably don't feel very successful. And yet we spend way more time on our professional advancement than our sort of personal happiness. So people like to be involved doing things that are productive and make them feel good.

And when you're making a lot of money and you're successful at it and then your kids are terrible, you don't want to spend time with your kids because you realize it's not as much fun. In my own case, I have free children, and I either fail, or not, depending on your point of view, all of them are in private equity. So they all have their own separate private equity funds. They now have MBAs from really good schools and they're all well educated. And did I make a mistake by producing no poets or playwrights? I don't know. Well, at least they're working, right?

They are working. There's no doubt about it. Yeah. And I've got to imagine, too, it's like when you're really good at something and respected and powerful in that thing, it always goes or most of the time goes exactly the way that you want it to go, whereas even the president or a dictator has trouble, you know, getting their kids to do what they want. And so we might veer away from this difficult unpredictable challenging thing in favor of something much

more comfortable and rewarding, which is work. Look, people who work hard and make become presidents of the United States rarely produce children who themselves, anybody else, thinks would become president of the United States. Obviously, George Herbert Walker Bush did, but generally, you would say the kids of president of the United States are often not getting as much attention from their fathers when they're growing up. Ronald Reagan didn't have a great relationship with his kids. I think Jimmy Carter would say he didn't do his good job with his kids, as he did with

his grandkids. You rarely see somebody who strives to be President of the United States and does everything necessary, spending as much time with their kids as later they think they should have. Why do you think your kids all went into private equity? Is it a gene or do they want to impress you or do they? I don't know. They all went to good schools and Harvard and Stanford and Duke and things like that. I don't know. Maybe they thought my business was a good business, but I don't really know. I mean, I haven't really quizzed them, one of the, they thought it was a reasonable way

to spend their time and they enjoy it and they saw that I was doing. If you were doing it again, would you design your life to be able to spend more time with your family and kids? Oh, well, nobody says, I wish I spent less time with my kids. Nobody says that, right? Sure. The answer has to be yes, I wish I spent less time with my kids. Nobody says that, right? Sure.

The answer has to be yes, I wish I spent more time with my kids. But I don't know if they would have been much better. I mean, what would they have done that I'm not happy with? They turned out, okay, I would say they're, you know, nobody's perfect, but I think they've done a pretty good job of creating lives for themselves without depending on me. But I'm sure everybody wishes they spend more time with their kids. The writing rule or the the the axiom in writing is that every kid you have is a book that you won't write, but I feel like that's a pretty good trade. Well, I guess Elon Musk is not going to be writing a lot of books, right?

not going to be writing a lot of books, right? Yes. I think three is three is a is a number that's too big for me, but anything above three starts to make me uncomfortable. Yeah, I mean, there are people obviously have a lot of kids and sometimes you have families of eight, nine, ten kids and they turn out okay, but you know, obviously if you have that many kids, you really need to have some money, I think, to be able to raise them reasonably well. But there's nobody that's raised kids perfectly. Everybody has their challenges and everybody's frustrated at times with doing it. Well, that is the quirk of modern developed nations is that the wealthier societies seem to be the fewer kids they have. I wonder if that's an evolutionarily investment strategy that we don't really know that we're making.

Well, it used to be that people had large numbers of kids because one, they died in childbirth or they died young. And then also, you needed them to help do the farm or the chores around the house, the house you had or whatever. Now, people don't need to do, have kids that kind of work at the house. And so that's a factor. Secondly, people have their own careers now that take them away from their home. And they probably don't have the feeling they need as many kids as they maybe they did before because they know the time for it. But in the end, China had a one-child policy for a long time for population reasons.

Now, they got rid of it. I'd say in our society, I think in the United States, the average family has what 2.2 children or something like that. Yeah. And that's probably norm for wealthy developed societies. But yeah, I think the reasoning is that parents concentrate their increased resources more directly on fewer kids.

So instead of spreading it out over four kids, they're highly investing in two kids because they want them to go to Harvard or yeah, because they think the world is so competitive, they're concentrating their forces. Maybe in some parts of the world, people have staggering amounts of kids. I think Osama bin Laden's father, I think, had 51 children. Yes, that tends to be in, yes, I'll, that, that is a different society, I guess. Yeah, but you do get people that, you know, Orthodox Jews are producing lots of kids as well. So, you know, some types of people really think it's good to have more kids. What else do you feel like if you could pass like if you were passing along to your children

was I'm sure I know you were one of the original signers of the of the giving pledge but as as your kids are when you leave this world your kids will have significant resources. It it what are one or two sort of principles that you have tried to instill in them from an investing in a financial stewardship perspective? Well, you're assuming I'm giving my money to my kids, I'm not having said I'm doing that. Well, not all of it, but I'm sure they're not going to end up on the streets somewhere as what I'm saying.

Oh, they're going to have their own good careers, so probably they'll make a lot of money. They won't need mine. But look, the most important thing is to try to feel that you're doing something useful with your life. If you're feeling you're doing something that's meaningless and not useful for society, that's not a good thing. So try to find something that you enjoy

and that you feel is meaningful. And you can't do great things in the world if you don't enjoy what you're doing. Nobody want to know they'll be all prize hating what they do. They have to love what they're doing. And so I try to get my kids to find something that they like doing. And now my kids are all very happy with what they're doing. And yeah, that's what I mean. I guess, like, as far as money goes, we should one find the ways of investing that are interesting and exciting to them or is your point more like find a way to automate it, not even think about it so you're spending

more of your time on what you actually like doing. In their case, they're trying to build their own companies and businesses. So that's part of the pleasure of building something from scratch. Obviously, with my last name, it may be an advantage they've had, but they have to do the work and you just can't just rely on my last name or my network or something. So I think they're building something and I think they're doing a pretty good job of it.

In the end, they have to come up and decide what makes them the happiest. In the end, everybody has their own ideas about what makes them happy and you can't tell your kids to do this or do that because you'll be happy you're doing it. They have to come to it themselves. Mm, that makes sense. Last question for you. So you own like rare copies of the 13th amendment

in the Emancipation Proclamation and Constitution. That must be incredible. And also talking about long-termism preserving these things for future generations is incredible. But what does it feel like to hold one of those things? I know you don't carry it around, but I met George Ravling who owns the, I have a dream speech, Martin Luther King gave it to him. And I'm just fascinated what it feels like to touch something like that. Well, like the Magna Carta is 800 years old. So, you know, it's a very valuable document. But, you know, basically people like me are just custodians for these

documents. I'm I'm just preserving them so other people can see them and then hopefully benefit from seeing them. You know, we can look at what's in the words of the Magnet Carter Declaration and Appendants on a computer slide, but seeing it in reality makes people think more about it and learn more about it. That's why it's still a good idea to preserve them. And I like to talk about it and give speeches, hopefully, a people will listen to about why these documents are meaningful. Yeah, it feels like when you get up close with them, it is indisputable that a human being made this by hand. That it didn't just come down from the mountaintop.

This was the result of human ingenuity and painstaking work and thinking. And I think about that line, I forget which of the founders was talking about how each of their hands trembled as they signed the Constitution believing that or the declaration of independence thinking they may have been signing their own death warrant. Well, they did. They did think they were committing treason in fact, for that reason, they didn't reveal their signatures for about three or four months later. But look, it's not like the 10 commandments came down from one high theoretically. And that's different. Yeah, they're carved into stone. And this is written on parchment and fragile parts. I guess it also reminds us of the fragility and the ephemerality of

these documents potentially that they aren't, they aren't this fact. They are a thing that has to be preserved. I think the point is that we know what's in the Declaration of Independence, why preserve the documents. We know what's in it. The reason is that when you go see the original, you're more likely to learn about it and therefore maybe learn more about American history, which is the whole point of it. The learn more about American history, so we can have more informed citizens.

Yes, yes. And I think particularly with the emancipation proclamation, I don't know which version of it you have, but it's weird to think like he wrote it and then he kept it, like just that the document existed for several months, I guess, once two months in this kind of limbo of not re not written, but not in effect is so fascinating. What he did is he showed it to his cabinet. They told him the wait a while, wait for a military victory. He draped at a preliminary one in September of 1862 and revealed that that he would have a final one in January of next year.

Many people weren't sure he would actually do it, but it was revealed. There's only one real official copy, which is signed in January one of 1863. He signed 47 souvenir copies of which there probably 10 left and I own a couple of them. Wow. Yeah, that's so, yeah, that's just such an incredible piece of history and a moment in time in which something pivots and changes everything. Yeah, I mean, he freed the slaves, but on the other hand, he did it in a way that required us to have a constitutional memo because he was using his military powers as commander and chief. But once the war was over, those powers lapsed.

So it wasn't clear whether he meant the patient proclamation really was still binding. Yes. And to go back to where we started, we were talking about Carter, I'm also writing in the new book about, you know, and obviously the Spielberg movie is specifically about this, but Lincoln's, Lincoln realizing that, you know, there's certainly never been a cause more just

than the freeing of the slaves, and yet he didn't have the votes, and he had to horse trade and break some legs. And he had to will that constitutional amendment into existence through raw political power. These things don't just happen because they are correct. The movie Lincoln was about only five pages in Darsk Kern's Goodwin's book about the ratification,

about the approval of the constitutional amendment in the House. It already passed the Senate many months earlier. But Lincoln really wanted to get it done. Why did he want to get it done? Because he wanted to show the Southern states who had not yet capitulated that even if, even if they cut a deal with him, he couldn't overturn a constitutional amendment and the constitutional amendment was freeing the slaves. That's why he wanted to get it done so quickly because he wanted to make sure the South wouldn't

think that they could cut a deal with him and then the slaves would remain as slaves. Yeah, there's a great book by William Lee Miller called Lincoln's virtues and then another one called President Lincoln, which we think of Lincoln as this brilliant moral figure. We don't think of him as a politician, but he was a politician. There's that's like the Kennedy quote that parents want their kids to grow up to be president, but they don't want them to be politicians. But those are inseparable roles. Right. Well, look, Lincoln's had more books written about him than any American ever, and more than any human,

I think other than Jesus Christ. But, you know, he's a very admired person, for sure. Yeah. Well, this was amazing. I love the book and it's been an honor to talk and I appreciate all the work that you do. All right. Thanks a lot. Thank you. Bye. All right, bye.

Thanks for listening to the Daily Stoke Podcast. Just a reminder, we've got signed copies of all my books in the Daily Stoke Store. You can get them personalized. You can get them sent to a friend. The app goes away. You go as the enemy. Still, this is the key.

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