♪ ♪ GRAHAM: Good evening and welcome to 'P&P Live'.

I'm Brad Graham, the co-owner of Politics and Prose along with my wife, Lissa Muscatine.

And thanks for joining us here online where we've been holding all our author talks since last spring, when the pandemic forced a stop to in-person events.

For this evening's featured book, "How To Lead," by David Rubenstein.

David Rubenstein of course knows a thing or two himself about leading.

He's co-founder and co-executive chairman of a very successful private equity firm, The Carlyle Group.

He's also an extremely generous philanthropist.

It's as head of the Economic Club that David started taking on another role that of public interviewer.

It turns out he's pretty natural at it and he fell into the practice of conducting almost monthly interviews with prominent business, government, and cultural leaders.

His new book, "How to Lead," draws on 30 of his other interviews with influential figures, from a range of fields.

The conversations are filled not only with illuminating details about the life stories of these accomplished individuals, but also reflections on what enabled them to succeed.

Now, turning the tables a bit on David this evening and asking the questions will be another David, David Gregory, who no doubt also is familiar to many of you as a broadcast journalist, David spent 20 years at NBC News that included time as chief White House correspondent and then moderator for six years of "Meet the Press".

For the past four years, he's been serving as a political analyst on CNN.

So, the two David's, the screen is yours.

GREGORY: David, it's good to see you.

I'm not envious that you're a, you know, private equity king.

I never thought I could do that.

But in the realm of being curious at being an interviewer, you really distinguished yourself and I, I'm, I'm really fascinated about how that came to be, how you came to be someone in your field who now has taken on this role of interviewing people and, and probing areas like, like leadership or the American story.

RUBENSTEIN: Well, it came about by serendipity really.

Um, I became the president of the Economic Club of Washington and my job was to get speakers to come in.

And I realized after a while many of the speakers, although famous people, they were boring speakers.

So I decided I would maybe, uh, make it a little more lively by doing interviewing and interspersing some humor in the interviews it worked and then Bloomberg decided they would like it and put it on TV.

And it's just something that I enjoy.

It's, you know, I don't play golf.

I'm not a very good athlete.

I don't have a lot of outside hobbies.

So this is something that I regard as a, as a pleasure for me.

GREGORY: But you've always been curious about leadership, about what makes a great leader.

And I'm very curious about that as well.

And so how has that taken root for you?

How does that manifest itself, you know, with all the people you interact with?

RUBENSTEIN: Well, when I went through these, uh, interviews, I realized that there was a common theme that many people had, that, how they had risen up from sometimes modest circumstances, sometimes lower income circumstances, and they persisted through failures.

They persisted through other, uh, problems they might've had, and ultimately they turn out to be successful.

And when you look at the qualities of leadership that I think are important, I kind of distilled in the book, the ones that I thought were important and among them were having a desire to be a leader, learning how to communicate, learning, how to share the credit, being ethical, being willing to learn continuously, to learn and things like that.

And in the end, uh, all leaders are different and all leaders don't have the same qualities.

I admire people who are humble and have humility.

Warren Buffett, I think has a great deal of humility.

I'm sure Napoleon, if I interviewed him, wouldn't be that humble.

Maybe Alexander The Great wouldn't have been that humble.

If your last name is The Great, you probably aren't humble.

You can be a great leader without being humble, but those are some of the things that I admired.

And in the book, one point I would like to make about it is, I probably have tried to rationalize my own failure as a young person to be a leader.

As a young person, I was not a student body leader.

I wasn't a great athlete.

I wasn't anything anybody thought would amount to anything.

And so I kind of divided life into thirds.

The first third is when you're at a student body leader, Supreme Court clerk, these are the superstars in the early ages.

Many times, those people don't become the superstars in the second-third or third-third of life because maybe they petered out.

They're tired of being a leader or whatever happens.

So, many times, people like me who weren't that famous or prominent as a youth, they just keep persisting like the tortoise and the hare.

And eventually in the second-third and third-third of life, you get luckier and something good can happen to you.

GREGORY: And you, you recall in the book that you would often interact with people, maybe it was socially or more casually and start to ask them questions about, Hey, what, what makes you go?

What makes you a good leader?

Um, so you you've had a lot of curiosity about this.

RUBENSTEIN: Yes.

I mean, I, it may have been off putting to a lot of my friends or people I'd meet.

I could sit down to have dinner and have dinner and just started interviewing them, asking questions.

Um, there's an old, a Yiddish word for that maybe called yenta.

And that, which means you're always asking questions.

You want to know everything that's going on.

And so my mother would say, "Don't ask people so many questions.

"Let them talk a bit about what they want to talk about."

But I always was interested in other people and see how, what made them tick.

And I guess maybe that led to this.

GREGORY: But you know, I'm curious about that because that, I mean, knowing you personally and my interactions with you, and even in a situation that maybe calls for small talk, you'll always ask about five probing questions on, about, you know, life or about something I'm doing or, or my profession.

And I'm wondering what you've taken away from that about listening.

It's not just, as your mother might've pointed out good manners to ask other people questions, but, but as a leader to listen and take that in, how important is that?

RUBENSTEIN: Well, in this book, I interviewed Oprah Winfrey who I knew a little bit before the interview and when I interviewed her and really when you interview Oprah Winfrey, it's like a master class on how to do an interview.

She's just knows everything about it, she's great.

But she said, she's not a great interviewer or asker of questions.

She's very good at listening.

And that's the trick.

You have to learn how to listen.

And that's that to be a good interviewer, you have to learn what somebody says.

I often see that when let's say the FBI or other people come to interview, interview me on background checks for somebody, they have a list of 10 questions.

And I can say after question number two, the person's actually an ax murderer.

They don't pay attention to what I say.

They go into the third question because they're just not listening.

And so, uh, you know, I think it's important to listen to what people say and then pivot based on what you, uh, you hear.

So I, when I do an interview, I have questions prepared in my mind.

And then I listen to what they say and I might have to pivot, otherwise uh, you know, it won't be as interesting to the person I'm interviewing.

GREGORY: So let me, let's come back to in a minute to leadership.

What makes great leaders, and let me ask you as a leader about the moment we're in.

I mean, what, what, what do you make about the leadership challenges we're facing as we go into the fall with fears about the pandemic, the economy, our political future, et cetera, RUBENSTEIN: Complicated situation, for sure.

And I don't know that anybody has the answers, uh, how to solve these problems, take the pandemic.

Uh, I don't know if anybody could have solved this problem that easily.

In fact, in many other countries, uh, they've suffered from it as well.

So I don't know that any one easy answer, and I don't think we're going to solve this problem uh, as soon as we get a vaccine, even a vaccine, we're still going to have a lot of challenges of getting the vaccine distributed and, and make sure it's effective and so forth.

On the economy, the economy is in difficult shape and in many respects, the stock market's reasonably good shape except for maybe today.

But the underlying economy is not good.

It's not good because a lot of people have lost their jobs and those jobs are not coming back.

Many of the CEOs I've interviewed have said, look, I don't want to lay off people now permanently, but in time I'm going to lay off people because I don't need them as much as before.

And also, I don't need as many people in my office.

I can do much, many more things remotely.

Think the economy is going to struggle for a couple of years.

GREGORY: And political leadership is such an important question without getting into a, an ideological conversation.

It seems to be in, in talking to you over the years and in reading what you've written, you've been heavily influenced by political leadership, by presidential leadership.

RUBENSTEIN: Yes.

GREGORY: What is unique about that, that is both inspirational and you think influential on how you've led yourself?

RUBENSTEIN: Well, David you're much younger than me, so you weren't alive when this happened, but in 1961, John Kennedy was inaugurated as president and my sixth grade teacher went through that speech with me and my classmates.

And I realized that was really poetry in prose form.

It was a brilliant speech and I was inspired to want to go into government by John Kennedy's call to do so.

And ultimately I did go into government.

Now, my service may not have been as welcomed by the American people as I wanted it to be because we didn't do as good a job as I wish we had done in many respects.

But on the other hand, I really wanted to serve my country.

And since that time, I've gotten to know many people who have been president of the United States.

I think since Jimmy Carter had met virtually all the presidents and gotten to know many of them reasonably well, and now you have different styles of leadership, everybody's different.

If you'd look, asked me, who is the greatest of all the presidents whose leadership do I most admire?

There's no doubt that we have one president above everybody else and there's nobody even close, and that's Abraham Lincoln.

He held the country together under great sacrifice, gave his life for it in the end.

And, uh, he, you know, today, uh, while we have political disputes with the Democrats and Republicans, it's not the same as we had in the Civil War when we had 650,000 people or so die in a civil war and, uh, and the country was really torn asunder.

So it's bad today in many respects, but nothing like the Civil War.

GREGORY: So what is the leadership lesson of Lincoln that resonates even today?

RUBENSTEIN: Well, I think it is that you have to look at the country as a whole.

You have to put yourself, um, in the place of the whole country, not just one part of the country.

You have to have certain principles you fight for, you have to articulate what you're doing.

Lincoln was an incredibly articulate person, even though he didn't get more than more than a second grade education, his writing style was, was the best anybody's ever seen in terms of his ability to say something so succinctly the Gettysburg address is 272 words, but it says everything about the country that you need to know.

So he's a, he's the kind of person who really led by example.

The most effective way to lead is not by being a great speaker, that's helpful or not by being a great writer, that's helpful, but it's leading by example.

And when people admired his modesty, his humility and so forth.

Had he lived and he had a second term at the end of that second term, I don't think he would've said, you know, I won the Civil War and I mean, I deserve some credit for that.

That's not his style, probably.

GREGORY: But you know, the, the only part of history that kind of breaks down for me as I look at our current political climate, and I talk to so many people who, who are more centrist in their thinking and who wished there was a leader who could somehow transcend our political divisions.

And yet we have a media structure, um, that is set up that's, that's so partisan and so divided.

It doesn't seem so easy to, to think of the country, uh, as one whole today as it might've been in Lincoln's era.

So what is the... RUBENSTEIN: Well... GREGORY: The leadership attributes that are needed for today?

RUBENSTEIN: I'd like to remind people that under Lincoln's era um, Lincoln didn't think he was going to get reelected.

He thought he was not going to win.

Uh, the country was torn and it would countries always had big divisions, even from the very beginning.

Um, you know, I always think we had 55 white Christian men who came together, property men, and they created the Constitution, which we still live under with 27 amendments.

If we were going to have a new constitution today who would be there, who would be the people you'd want to send to a constitutional convention, it probably wouldn't be just politicians because the best people in our country today don't often go into politics.

They go into other areas.

They might go on to be a university president foundation president, and nonprofit leader of other type.

They might do other kinds of things and so figuring out who the people are that we admire today, we'd have to look at beyond just politicians, because as you know firsthand, from covering many politicians, it's, it's not every, it's not something everybody wants to go in today because it's a difficult, difficult, uh, occupation.

GREGORY: One of the interviews I really enjoyed in the book, uh, was with former Presidents Clinton and Bush, Bush 43.

Um, and you know, they, they have, since the presidency, you know, gone on a kind of speaking tour and, and have a show of contrast where they, you know, they've become quite friendly.

And I know from speaking to former President Bush, that, uh, you know, he plays off of President Clinton very well, well.

What do you take away from that time you spent with them and their leadership examples?

RUBENSTEIN: I think it's a good thing when former presidents get together, because they can really help bind the country in many ways.

And for a long time, we've had, uh, you know, in recent years we've had four or five living ex-presidents, which has been good.

We don't have a formal role for ex-presidents, but I think when they can come together, they can really unify the country in some ways.

This one is very unusual in the sense that Bill Clinton beat very badly uh George Herbert Walker Bush in the 1992 election.

And all of a sudden they later became friends.

And then George W. Bush became friends with Bill Clinton.

So it's not something you might've expected, but, but it did come about.

And I think it's a good thing when it happens.

GREGORY: And that, that conversation with them was at times uh, funny.

Um, but you know, one of the points you mentioned there, I mean, former President Bush said one of the reasons that the relationship between his father and Bill Clinton was so strong is that Bill Clinton handled himself with grace after beating his father and didn't lord it over him.

RUBENSTEIN: That's true.

And it's also interesting that, um, when I asked them, are they happy with their life now?

And I've often said the best job in the world is being a former president, no responsibilities, everybody gives you, um, you know, kudos and you have Secret Service protection for life and so forth.

But they actually said they both miss being president because when you're a president, you can change the country for the better.

And that's what they really miss is not being able to have that kind of power.

And so you realize when you're President of the United States, you have a limited period of time to do things that can really make the country better.

GREGORY: The last one on presidential leadership, you worked for President Carter, a one term president, um, and I'm reading a book right now, "Reaganland" about the rise of Reagan and the, the Carter presidency.

So it's by Rick Pearlstein, which is kind of top of mind for me.

What are the leadership lessons of President Carter's presidency that may be leadership failures?

RUBENSTEIN: Yes.

Well, President Carter like President Ford and President George Herbert Walker Bush, because they weren't reelected.

They're considered a bit of a failure because in our country, if you get reelected, you're considered a success, even though you might've done a good things in your four years and you just didn't get reelected.

Harry Truman was very unpopular when he left office.

Today we lionize him.

Uh, Jimmy Carter, uh, you know, is still not as popular as I wish he would be.

But my former boss, Stuart Eizenstat has written an excellent book on the Carter presidency and pointed out all the things that we did in four years and it's dizzying.

And when you realize how many things we try to take on.

So in hindsight, I think Carter's mistakes were probably that he had tried to do too many things.

He didn't prioritize quite enough.

He didn't, I actually, I have as strong, a political base as he needed to get some things through.

And I think in some cases he probably didn't surround himself with as many experienced people as he probably should have, including me.

GREGORY: You, you, you talk about different types of leadership.

And one of the things that I always think about are who are the visionaries, people who take us someplace that we didn't know we needed to go, right?

I mean, that was the experience of, of Steve jobs.

We didn't know that we needed one of these until he showed us that we did.

Bill Gates is one of those.

Talk a little bit about what you take away from the leadership lessons of visionaries in our society.

RUBENSTEIN: Visionaries are people like the two you've just mentioned Steve Jobs and Bill Gates, but also I'd say Jeff Bezos.

They had an idea that we needed software.

We needed personal computers and we needed packages delivered to our home, uh, through e-commerce.

And when people made fun of them, they didn't stop and say, you know, you're right.

I made a mistake.

They just persisted.

And the people that really build great companies and really change the world are people that persist.

Even if you're criticized.

And if you have failures along the way, you keep persisting.

And so one of the great lessons of leadership is you've got to persist.

Now, not to the point where you're doing something that's so stupid that everybody in the world agrees it's not a good idea, but generally persistence helps.

And I think that's what you see with visionaries.

And also visionaries in the business world are not driven by money.

Money is a byproduct, but Bill Gates and Jeff Bezos, it's not their main thing.

Their main thing is to prove their concept is right and make the world a better place in the areas that they, they, they they're focused on.

Later they, they focus on philanthropy and giving away the money as Bill Gates is doing now.

But really money is not the most important thing.

And I, one thing I've wanted to point out in the book, and I've said before is money is a funny thing.

I didn't have any growing up.

I didn't really think it was that big a deal.

I was never driven to make money.

When I worked in the White House, I didn't really care about money.

When I got into the business world because I had to do something, I wasn't a good lawyer.

I started making money.

I can't say that making money made me happier, giving it away has made me a lot happier.

And many of the tortured souls I know who are very wealthy are tortured because they don't know what to do with their money.

They don't know how to give it away.

They just think that they can accumulate more material possessions.

It'll make them healthy, happy, I should say, but it doesn't.

In the end, uh, the happiest people I've met are the people that don't have a lot of money, but feel they're doing something useful.

And in the end, Thomas Jefferson said in our Declaration of Independence, that the pursuit of happiness is one of the most important things we want to do for our country.

He never defined how you get to be happy.

And we don't know how to get to be happy.

It's the most elusive thing in life.

But I think personal happiness comes about by helping other people.

And that's what many of the people in this book are really about.

GREGORY: I'm interested too, when you talk about persistence, because I feel like it's something we can all identify with.

You know, I remember, I think it was Jimmy Connors who said about tennis in his era that people who would come watch him would say, "Oh yeah, I mean, I could do that.

I could hit that overhead smash."

The problem with the modern era of tennis is nobody's watching Vidal, or Djokovic or Federer and saying, "Oh, I could do that."

RUBENSTEIN: Right.

GREGORY: When you're with somebody like Bezos, Bill Gates.

Um, is it obvious why they're great leaders?

I mean, can you tell in five minutes that, oh my gosh, this person is clearly a great leader because when you talk about persistence, it makes it seem like it's a little bit more approachable than this kind of bolt of genius that makes someone a great leader.

RUBENSTEIN: Um, I don't, I wouldn't say anybody you can tell in five minutes is a great leader.

I would say you have to spend more time with them, but you can tell that people that have a vision and they know where they want to go, they know what they're trying to do.

Those people can turn out to be great leaders.

Now, sometimes people along the way, um, you know, make mistakes and it, and it keeps their ability to build a company or do something great from happening.

But generally, generally, people that persist have a good idea and know how to share the credit.

Ronald Reagan famously said, there's no limit to what humans can accomplish if they're willing to share the credit.

Even Bill Gates or Jeff Bezos, they will tell everybody there were many other people made it possible for them to do what they did.

Nobody can do anything by themselves.

Nobody.

GREGORY: The... Phil Knight, the founder of Nike and wrote a wonderful memoir about, um, uh, you know, that path, uh, what was remarkable to you about him as someone who you describe as a, as a builder, what makes him a builder and not a, not a visionary leader?

RUBENSTEIN: Well, Phil Knight is very shy, very low key.

I got to know him for the Brookings Board and he comes to the meetings and very often uses his sunglasses.

I can't tell if he's sleeping or not.

And he wears his Nike shoes, not with socks usually.

And so, you know, he's very low key and different, but you wouldn't know that he built one of the greatest companies in the world, but he would say it was because he surrounded himself with good people.

Many of the really great people in the world who are secure in what they've done, give the credit to other people.

And I think they're right, no one person could build a company by themselves.

Jeff Bezos now has about 800,000 people working for him.

And he would no doubt be the person who, who put it all together, but he would say, he'd be the first person to say he had many other people that helped make it possible.

GREGORY: Tim Cook is an interesting example too, and I'm interested in him because, um, he was a successor to a visionary.

You know, you say, how do you, how do you succeed?

How do you be the, the, the, the leader uh, after Steve Jobs?

And yet he has, he's catapulted Apple.

How do you think he's done that?

Both the leadership qualities and then the actual facts on the ground of Apple?

RUBENSTEIN: Well, you're from Los Angeles.

And so, you know, there was a famous basketball coach out there named John Wooden.

And he was at the time, the greatest basketball coach in the history of college basketball.

And then somebody had to succeed him.

And that person lasted about two years.

Succeeding a legend's not easy.

And so succeeding Steve Jobs was not easy, but I think what Tim Cook decided to do is not try to be the charismatic, visionary, not the person who has the, the, uh, enormous allure that Steve Jobs had and not try to be the genius that Steve was.

He tried to function by doing other things that Steve wasn't as strong at.

And it worked out when, when, when Tim Cook took over, many people said, this guy is not going to last just like Wooden's successor didn't last.

The market capitalization of the company then was 350 billion.

Today it's 2 trillion.

So he's obviously done a very good thing by using a different style of leadership.

And Tim Cook is very low key, and very modest.

If you had a dinner with him, you might not know from the first half hour that he was the CEO of Apple, because he's so low key and not bragging about what he's done.

GREGORY: Well, and that's the contrast that I'm so interested in as well, you know, because you, you, you talk about, uh, commanders in the book, you know, so that, that speaks to a president, you know, a Commander in Chief, someone who's leading a huge organization like the United States government, or you might be leading the Defense Department, or you might be a leader of men in battle.

Um, what are the leadership characteristics that are so important when, when you're leading people on that order of magnitude?

RUBENSTEIN: Of course, military leaders, they have to be extremely precise because if they make a mistake, people's lives are going to be lost.

So that's why military leaders are a little bit different.

They have to be a little bit tougher and more precise and maybe more of a commander than a politician might be.

On the other hand, what you need to do in any case is give people a vision of where you're going and you can't get people to follow you if they don't know where you're going.

And so the most effective presidents, the most effective leaders, governors have a vision of where they want to go, where they want people to follow them.

And I think that's a, that's the most important thing.

Now, how do you get people to follow you?

You can be a great orator, Martin Luther King.

You can be a great a writer, Thomas Jefferson, Abraham Lincoln.

But the most effective thing by far is to lead by example.

So when George Washington was with his troops in Valley Forge in 1777, he could have stayed at the Ritz-Carlton down the street, but no, he stayed with his troops because he wanted to show them that he was one of them.

And it was very effective as a way to bond with his troops.

So I do think that, uh, you can lead by many different ways, but giving a vision of where you want to go and leading by example are the two most important things you can probably do in that kind of role.

GREGORY: What is your advice to younger leaders, um, today in this climate where we're facing the economy, the way we are, uh, the, uh, the impact on work of the pandemic and questions about the future of work, the social upheaval in the country, um, around race, uh, it makes leadership very difficult.

It makes it different.

What, what's your advice to leaders going through that?

RUBENSTEIN: Well, of course, if I had really great advice about how to solve all those problems, I would have been in Iowa, New Hampshire or something like that, but it's not that easy.

I do think that young leaders who want to become older leaders and become the leaders of the world need to perfect certain skills, which is listening to people, learning how to communicate with people, learning how to, um, set examples for people, learning how to take chances and being willing to fail.

Also take blame from when things go wrong.

Remember John Kennedy in the Bay of Pigs, the Bay of Pigs was a disaster.

John Kennedy didn't go and say, well, it's somebody else's fault.

He went on TV and said, "I made the mistake.

It's my fault."

His popularity went up.

So I do think the leaders should own up to mistakes and, and, and take responsibility when it's appropriate.

I also think honesty is very important and, um, I think leaders need to be honest with people and, and, and people need to perceive that they're honest.

GREGORY: What about questions of diversity, you know, in your industry, at your company and other companies where you, you, you have, uh, in many cases, employees who are questioning a vision of a particular company or an organization, how do you deal with that?

Because there's humility, there's being a good listener.

There's, you know, being adaptable, all those things that you write about, um, still really hard to navigate through it.

RUBENSTEIN: Look, the country was born with a birth defect, slavery, and we are still living with the aftereffects of that.

Even when we eliminated slavery with the 13th amendment, we had the Jim Crow laws and then all kinds of anti... uh, discriminatory kinds of things.

And we have not solved that problem today.

And I don't think in my lifetime we're going to completely solve it.

I do think that people now recognize it's a different world and diversity helps companies.

It helps the country.

When Jimmy Carter ran for election in 1976 the first time, he did not get a majority of the white vote, but the vote then was 90% of the voters were then white.

Today it's about 68%.

So the country's changing.

And if you don't reflect that in your company or in your leadership, you're not going to be an effective leader.

The country is diverse.

It's not all white anymore.

GREGORY: You talked to Indra Nooyi and, and other, um, leaders in business who are women.

Um, what insights did you get about their leadership styles that was unique to them?

And in some cases, unique to being women in, in, in areas that are dominated by men?

RUBENSTEIN: Well, there are very few women CEOs today in the Fortune 500 and very few African Americans, for sure.

In Indra Nooyi's case, she had a double disadvantage.

She was an immigrant as well as a woman.

And there very few at the time, I think he was the only immigrant woman who was running a Fortune 500 company.

Uh, and, and, and in the book, uh, we talk about her life and how she came here and made a new life for herself.

And she pointed out a very good technique, which I haven't used.

She would write letters to her employees' parents, telling them I'm giving you a report card on how your son and daughter is doing.

Well, it's a very good way to bond with your employees because if your mother gets a letter from your boss saying, you're doing a good job.

You're really gonna like that boss.

So it was a very effective technique.

I should use it myself.

GREGORY: Ruth Bader Ginsburg is another one who has been trailblazing and, and then has to employ, uh, leadership techniques, um, in collaboration, right, in partnership where it's not singular vision, right, but it's how do you work with others to, to reach consensus, which we don't always get to see inside unless there's great books written about what those deliberations are like on the Supreme Court?

RUBENSTEIN: Well, she's an interesting person.

She's the only rock star who's ever been a member of the Supreme Court.

I mean, she can draw 20,000 people wherever she goes, standing ovations all the time.

And you think about it.

We've had about 115 people be on the Supreme Court over in our country's history.

She's probably the only real rock star who can draw people to an event just like, like a regular politician could.

But she was first in her class at Harvard law school, first in her class at Columbia law school and couldn't get a job.

And it shows you the kind of discrimination she, she faced.

She's now uh, revered, but she's revered I think because of three things.

One, she overcame a lot of discrimination.

Two, she is, um, a leader in women's rights and really fought very hard for the right of women to have certain rights they didn't otherwise have.

And three, I think people admire the fact she's overcome four bouts of cancer.

She's 87 years old.

She's now, and exercising every day.

And she's determined, I think, to stay on that court for as long as she physically and mentally can.

So people admire her for all those reasons.

And I admire her for those reasons as well.

GREGORY: I'm curious David, about in your own life and your own career, a couple of areas that I know leaders deal with all the time.

One is that you have to decide, you have to make decisions.

One of the things that my wife says, who, you know, as, you know, is a, is a trial lawyer, she's like, just because it's hard, this is something she learned, because she was in the military, just because it's hard, doesn't mean you don't have to decide, you know, you still have to make decisions.

And so often, even leaders are in positions where they work around having to make the tough decision.

How have you handled that in the course of your career?

RUBENSTEIN: Well, I wouldn't say I'm perfect at it because I make decisions and then I often look back and say, I made the wrong decision.

So, uh, some people, one of, some of my partners, they, they make decisions and they don't look back.

I don't have that trait.

Maybe it's because I'm Jewish.

I'm always looking back and saying, I should have done something better.

I'm not quite sure what it is, but I always wish I had not made certain mistakes.

And, uh, yes, you have to make decisions.

And sometimes if you don't make the decision until, you have to make them.

It's not often a good idea to make them prematurely, but whenever you're making a decision, anytime, any kind of a situation, particularly a president of the United States, you don't have perfect information.

The problem with presidents often have, is they have to make these decisions, but they don't really know all the facts because they can't know all the facts at any given time.

And that's true of anybody making decisions.

So you do the best you can.

And in the end, if you make a mistake, I think it's important to say, look, I made a mistake.

I learned from this and I don't blame other people, blame yourself if that's in fact appropriate.

GREGORY: What about so many leaders deal with, uh, they have problems, you know, maybe it's a personnel problem.

Maybe they feel they have to somebody who's underperforming, they have to fire them.

Maybe there's conflict between employees, maybe, uh, um, you know, just other unforeseen circumstances.

And then there's a temptation to work around problems rather than directly face them.

What have you learned over time about how to get better at directly facing problems that need to be dealt with?

RUBENSTEIN: Well, when it comes to firing, I've learned I used my partners for that because they're better at that than me.

If somebody would come in, I was supposed to fire, I wound up promoting them.

So I usually gave that assignment to somebody else.

And someone, one of my old partners was better at that, but I, I do think you have to make tough decisions from time to time and everybody can't make tough decisions and everybody isn't going to be a great leader.

But what you have to do is convince somebody that you're doing something that is in the best interest of an organization and in the end will be in their best interest.

So if in fact you truly have to fire somebody, you'd have to tell them, it's not that they're terrible, it's just the organization doesn't really appreciate their skills and there's some other thing they could do with their career, their career that might be better for them.

But, it's not easy.

And nobody likes to make tough decisions.

Of course, presidents of United States wait until the last minute to make a decision because they don't want to make tough decisions either.

GREGORY: Um, I want to ask you a couple of things about our community.

One is I know how much you care about the arts.

You're of course, Chairman of the Board of the Kennedy Center.

What's going to happen with the arts and at the Kennedy Center here, as we move into the Fall.

RUBENSTEIN: Well, throughout the United States and really out throughout the world, the performing arts and all cultural institutions have really been hurt.

Um, many cultural institutions in this city, um, have federal government support.

So they're not in as financially as much trouble as maybe you could argue something like the Kennedy Center might be.

And I'll explain the reason.

The Smithsonian gets about, um, a large percentage of its, of its budget from the federal government.

And we don't, we don't depend on admission, uh, for revenue there.

Uh, we have a fair amount of philanthropy as well.

The Kennedy Center gets about 50 to 55% of its revenue from ticket sales.

Well we don't have any events, so we don't have ticket sales.

So we had to lay people off and furlough people.

Um, I do think we are going to try to bring some events back in The Reach, the new part of the Kennedy Center, in the Fall.

And we will in January, hopefully go back to our full program.

You and your wife have been big patrons and big supporters of the Kennedy Center, which we're very appreciative, but we recognize that when you don't have a lot of events, you can't get people to appreciate all the things that the Kennedy Center does.

So our philanthropy is down a bit and we're going to have to go out and raise some more money and we're going to also have to, uh, recognize it's not going to come back overnight.

When we start in January again, the place isn't going to be filled completely.

Because people are still going to be nervous.

I think this is going to be a problem in all performing arts organizations around the country for quite some time.

It's going to be two or three years before we're back to where we once were.

GREGORY: I know you think about Broadway, you know, and, and all of the, you know, the economy that is derivative of... RUBENSTEIN: Right, well take Broadway.

Somebody on our board is a very prominent, uh, Broadway producer, Daryl Roth.

And I was in communication with her the other day and she said it could take quite a while before people come back to being comfortable going to theaters and Broadway.

Remember, they're very crowded, uh, little theaters, generally.

In addition, many of the people that service those theaters who work there, backstage people, they can't wait for another year or so.

They've had to go find new careers, new jobs.

And so it's going to be hard to really, um, get this back to where it was.

It's been a really bad problem for the performing arts and the art scene in our country.

GREGORY: What about our community, and in Washington, in the District, Maryland and Virginia, if you look at the, uh, the local economy.

Businesses, a lot of retail closing down, what do you see in our immediate area?

RUBENSTEIN: Well, because the federal government is still, um, able to print money and we're printing a lot of it.

Uh, the federal government has supported this area better than let's say it has other areas.

So we're not in as bad shape as certain other parts of the United States.

On the other hand, retail is down.

Um, and, and there's no doubt that people aren't out shopping as much.

There's no doubt that restaurants are down.

Restaurants have been closed.

Movie theaters are closed so forth.

So we have suffered, I would say, not quite as much as other areas of the country, but when you walk in downtown Washington, DC as I've done a couple of times recently, you see there's no activity there.

Everything is pretty much closed.

So I think it's going to take a while before we get back to anything approaching normal, normal kind of lifestyle, it could take two or three years before we kind of are past this.

GREGORY: And our education in our area, public education.

If you look at the huge divide between North West and East of the river, um, you've been very supportive of Martha's Table and I'm on the board of Martha's Table, which is working in the community east of the river.

You see the huge digital divide.

You see, uh, families, uh, who aren't able to get back to work if they're in service professions.

And if their kids are still at home, it's an extra burden.

RUBENSTEIN: You're right.

Before this happened, before this happened, I think we had a growing income inequality problem.

And we also had a growing social mobility problem, which is to say, not just the income inequality, but people at the bottom didn't think they could rise to the top and they gave up trying to do what I did, which was try to work your way up.

Many people think it wasn't possible.

The system was stacked against them.

It's worse now, it's what I've called the COVID crater.

People who don't have access to the Internet.

People that have jobs and small businesses that have been laid off.

These people are not coming back in those jobs, they're not going to be able to sustain the lifestyle they once had.

And they're kind of falling into a crater and it's really a sad situation.

And when the federal government isn't able to provide enough additional support, it's going to get worse.

So right now, um, I'm really worried about what's going to happen to people at the bottom rungs of society, because they're going to be much greater despair than there was before because the federal government eventually won't be able to provide all the money it's providing now.

And there's going to be a real gap between people that have Internet access, people that know how to maneuver around the Internet and people that know how to get an education.

And I do think public education is going to suffer a fair bit as well.

GREGORY: And what about, what about colleges and universities?

I mean, I've talked to a lot of people who talk about a huge comeuppance for public universities who are building huge endowments, uh, and yet are not able to educate kids in, in person are not cutting tuition in a lot of cases.

And if so, only doing so, uh, modestly.

What's the future of education in this country?

RUBENSTEIN: Well, it's interesting that we have the, we are the envy of the world in higher education.

By far, we have of the 20 best universities of the world, probably 15 or 16 or 17 are in the United States.

However, all of these universities are suffering because they aren't going to get the research grants that they had before.

They aren't going to get the tuition that they got because some students are taking gap years, they're not coming in.

There's not going to be as much scholarship money because there's not going to be as much, uh, philanthropic support.

So it's gonna be a problem.

I don't think our universities are going to be able to get through this without a lot of problems.

And I'm involved with a number of the universities and I know that they expect to lose enormous sums of money this year.

Some small colleges will not survive.

Um, obviously Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Stanford they'll survive.

There'll be hurt a bit, but the small colleges, the small liberal arts colleges, many of them are just not going to survive because they won't have the endowment.

The support, uh, the costs that are now going to have to be borne in, I think they're going to close up.

GREGORY: It's, uh, it's sad to hear that and it's, but it's a tremendous, uh, challenge.

Let me go to a few of our questions that we have, uh, that have been submitted.

This is from Joe Proctor.

"There are many leaders, especially financial organizations, where it seems to me as an outsider, that it's their ability to make money that attracts their following rather than leadership.

In other words, it's shaking hands with greed, or how can I make money?

So I could argue that one can accumulate money to be seen as a leader or like Lincoln or Obama, really be a leader.

What's the difference between the two egos?"

I guess, between those two kinds of leaders, someone who's very successful financially, um, and versus, uh, you know, a leader of society.

RUBENSTEIN: Well, there's no doubt in the business world, you get on the merry-go-round of making money and you measure your success to some extent by how much money you've made and, and, you know, the Forbes 400 list and all of these things kind of perpetuate this.

I do think that the best business leaders I have met never talk about money.

They never talk about how much money they've made and they're giving away most of their money.

And that I think is admirable.

In the political world, you want political power and that's the, that's the, uh, the, the, the, the engine that really moves things forward there.

Political leaders are different though, because they're not as driven by making money.

They're driven by other kinds of things.

As a general rule of thumb.

There's obviously exceptions, but I do think that the best leaders in our country have been people that are driven by things, not related to material possessions.

Again, material possessions, having a lot of them is never gonna make you happy.

GREGORY: And you go back to political leadership, it's so hard.

I think about, um, you know, revisionism, right?

If you, after 9/11, you look at the threat from Al Qaeda and why didn't previous administrations do more?

And even the Bush administration before the attacks, do more?

And I always remember, you know, it's very hard as a, as a president to build the political will in the country to do something if it doesn't seem like it's a crisis... RUBENSTEIN: Right.

GREGORY: At that moment.

Um, you know, that's certainly true of our leaders in war.

I mean, FDR, um, what do you do to transcend that?

As a leader, what do you do to be visionary enough, to put something on the agenda and lead people to where you think they ought to go if it doesn't seem like a crisis?

RUBENSTEIN: Well, the truth is we don't get much done in our government unless there's a crisis.

Winston Churchill famously said the United States government will consider every option.

Eventually they'll do the right thing, but it takes a long time to get there.

Um, many leaders have tried to do things.

My former boss would talk about issues, Jimmy Carter, and it, because it wasn't a crisis he couldn't get people to really be as interested in, let's say energy at the time or the economy or certain other things that he thought were very important.

So it does take a crisis to get things done.

There's no doubt about it, and I wish it were different, but that's just the way the world operates.

I think our government's too complicated to get some things done because of a vision of something it's, it doesn't work that way anymore.

GREGORY: Now to our questions.

This is interesting in Jeff Bezos interview, our anonymous attendee asks, he said, "Most of our regrets, are acts of omission, it's the path untraveled.

Those are the things that haunt us.

Excluding business deals, this person asks, what is it, the untraveled path that haunts you, David Rubinstein?"

RUBENSTEIN: Well, I wish I had done many different things in life that I didn't do.

Um, I wish I had, um, you know, been a better student.

I wish I had been a better athlete.

I wish I had started giving away money earlier in life, I had been more involved in philanthropy.

At the latter part of my life I'm really doing it.

I, I wish like every parent I'd spent more time with my children.

Everybody says that, but in the end you realize when your children are living elsewhere, that you wish you had spent more time with them when you were younger.

Um, and in the whole, I wish I had, um, you know, probably started my company earlier and therefore it had the money to give away a lot sooner.

Um, but on the whole, I don't have that many regrets.

I, I, uh, I think of the Frank Sinatra song, you know, "I have regrets," but not, you know, "too few to mention."

So I'm very happy with where I am relative to where I started from.

And the biggest thing that it's given me a thrill over the years was that my parents lived to see what happened to me.

Uh, my parents lived to be 85 and 86 respectively.

And they basically saw that I, you know, I came from very modest circumstances.

I was their only child.

They didn't really know what to expect of me.

And when they saw that I was successful, I think it gave them a great pride.

And interestingly, when my mother died, I went through all of her possessions.

She didn't have any of the news clips about my business success.

She had all the clips about my money, the money that I'd given away.

And she used to call me and say, I'm really proud of you because you're giving away your money.

You're doing something useful.

And she didn't really care about the business success.

So I guess, uh, making her happy was, uh, was one of the great pleasures of my life.

GREGORY: What flipped the switch for you on that, to where you, you, you know, you signed the pledge and started giving money away?

RUBENSTEIN: It's a very interesting phenomenon because when you're, when you have no money and you start out with no money, all of a sudden you're making money, you say, wow, I got money now.

And I can do the things I couldn't do before.

And then you realize at some point it doesn't buy you happiness and happiness comes from other things.

So when Bill Gates came to my office for lunch, we talked about the giving pledge.

I said, you know, you're right.

I don't need all this money.

Um, giving my children a staggering sum of money is not going to make them better human beings.

And so give your children love, unconditional love, attention, and a good education.

And they should be able to prosper on their own.

Most of the people who are great leaders that are written about in this book did not come from very wealthy families.

Uh, it's very rare that somebody who was born in a "Forbes 400" family, turned out to be a great leader.

It can happen, but generally people come from lower income families because that gives them the drive.

And as you know, as being the father of three children, uh, raising children is a complicated thing.

Jackie Kennedy famously said, if you mess up raising your children, nothing else in life matters.

And she was right.

And so the hardest thing in life is probably raising children.

They're the ultimate legacy.

If you're from a wealthy or prosperous family, and you're obviously from a prosperous family and well known, raising children in that environment is not easy because if they succeed, people will say, well, your mother or your father made it possible for you to succeed.

So it's very difficult to not, to have the resources to help your children and not give them too much because you want them to succeed on their own.

GREGORY: We were talking about President Carter before and, and, um, Ed who's watching us, uh, asked, "What leadership skills you admire in President Carter?"

RUBENSTEIN: President Carter was really selfless.

He really cared about the country.

He didn't care about material possessions.

He also had a vision.

He knew where he wanted to take the country.

He couldn't communicate it well enough in some cases to get everybody to follow him.

But I do think he was a Renaissance man, that kind of skills he has were when we didn't really quite appreciate.

I do think, had he had a second term, he would have accomplished a lot more, but think of what he's done as a former president, he set the role model for what a former president should do.

He was president for four years and a former president for 40 years.

And, in his 40 years, he's accomplished as much as he accomplished in those four years as president where all the power is because he did so many great things.

Eliminating river blindness, Guinea worm among other things, and doing all the election work around the world.

So I admire what he's done around the world as president, but also what he's done as a former president.

GREGORY: When you think about the current president, President Trump, and I'm not asking you to make a political judgment about this election or anyone, but, but there are leadership qualities, the fact that he could be, uh, you know, come, he was on the radar, of course, in a much different sort of way.

And then to, to, uh, become elected president, to be elected president the way he was when so many people doubted him, what do you think it is about President Trump?

We, we know, and we watch the news find out why he's so polarizing.

What is it that you think has propelled him this level that a lot of people didn't think he'd get to?

RUBENSTEIN: Well, you know, I'm thinking about the other day, of the 45 people who have been president of the United States, who were the two most unlikely people to have ever become present United States?

And they were, I think, Barack Obama, because he was African American and nobody ever thought that would happen, at least not in our lifetime.

And secondly, somebody who had never served in government one day, and it was a business person from New York City, that was extremely unlikely.

Um, his leadership style is different than some of the people I've written about, but obviously it works for some people.

He has a very consistent support of 35%, 40%, maybe 45%, and people who want, who walk through walls for him.

So while some people that let's say in Nantucket or in Martha's Vineyard, or the Hampton's may not find his style pleasing, there are a lot of people in Texas or Mississippi and Alabama who think he walks on water.

So he does have a style.

He knows how to connect with people in ways that sometimes people don't understand fully his skills.

GREGORY: And isn't it, don't you think it's true, one of the stories to me about the 2016 election is that Republicans came home to vote for him in a way that people didn't expect.

And that includes a lot of people that you work around, who are in the corporate world, uh, who are, who are probably defined themselves as conservative, certainly as fiscally conservative, who are willing to vote for him.

And I wonder if you still think those people are there for him.

They may not agree with everything he says or his style, but whether you see, cause I hear this a lot among conservatives and business people that they fear the left, they fear what Democrats in power would do.

RUBENSTEIN: Well.

Uh, when I worked in the Carter White House, I said, how can we possibly get reelected?

Let's run against an old man who is 69 years old.

I then thought that was old Ronald Reagan, who was so conservative, I thought nobody would elect him.

And I misread the Reagan revolution.

And I think many people in Washington misread the Trump revolution.

You know, John Kenneth Galbraith famously said that the conventional wisdom in Washington is almost always wrong.

And the conventional wisdom in Washington then was that Hillary Clinton was gonna win.

And that Donald Trump just had no chance.

And I think today the conventional wisdom probably is that Trump has a very difficult, uh, reelection effort ahead of him, but that conventional wisdom could be wrong.

I just don't, I wouldn't put any bets on what's going to happen.

I just, I just don't know what's going to happen, but I think you shouldn't underestimate either candidate because a lot of them have, both candidates have a lot of support out there.

I think people living in the East Coast may not really appreciate some of the reasons people support Donald Trump.

GREGORY: Yeah.

I mean, it goes to your point about listening to people and really understanding, you know, where they're coming from.

This question is also interesting from our attendees about what capabilities do you think future leaders will have to be successful that are different from leaders today?

RUBENSTEIN: Well, I think in the future, they'll probably have better technical skills to be able to know how to do things on Zoom and other things.

But I do think, uh, people need to, um, I, I think in the future, they're going to have to, um, I think, figure out how to bring the country together because the country has such diversity now.

And you just can't speak to just one part of the country and think you can lead the country.

You can't just appeal to whites or blacks or youth, you have to find a way to kind of meld these, this diverse country together.

This country's demography has changed so dramatically.

But again, to me, the most important thing in this area is getting good people to go into government service.

The most talented people that I know do not often want to go into government service.

They want to be in academic life or business life or hedge funds or tech funds or so forth tech startups.

I just think that we're losing the opportunity to find really good ways to get our best talented people to go into public service.

GREGORY: And why do you think that is David?

Because I think it's kind of facile to say that the country is so divided or the media is so difficult.

I mean, the truth is you can read about the Reagan revolution.

You can read about the Lincoln era.

I mean, we we've gone through these convulsions before it's been worse or in some cases it's been very similar and, and yet we find, you know, fewer and fewer people attracted to public service.

RUBENSTEIN: Let me give you three reasons that wouldn't be the only three, but number one, the compensation is ridiculous.

The compensation for members of Congress, hasn't gone up in 10 years, it's probably around $180,000.

So if you have to support two homes and a family on $180,000 a year, I think it's difficult to do given the expectations what those members have to do.

I realize that's above the average income, but we haven't increased compensation for government officials.

Secondly, you have to spend enormous amount of your time raising money.

Um, 100 years ago, you didn't have to spend this much time raising money.

It's an incredible campaign season we have.

Um, I just did an interview of a prime minister of Singapore.

His campaign was six days.

That's the campaign period in Singapore.

Here it's like six years.

It never ends.

So you have to raise enormous amounts of money.

And third, the vilification is staggering because of the Internet, the social media, everybody can criticize you and everybody does.

And the result is very good people just say, "I don't really want to have my entire life ruined."

For example, let's say David, in your case, Um, let's suppose the next president of the United States said, "David, I'd like you to come into the administration."

Well, you'd say, "Okay, now I've got to go get all my accounting done and spend a fortune to get my tax returns, to be available to everybody to see, then I'm going to be vilified by every enemy I've ever made in my life."

And then you might not get the job.

And so, you know, why do people want to put themselves through that?

It's a very bad process now.

GREGORY: I think this is probably a good place to conclude because it's top of mind for so many people during the camp, uh this pandemic and that is crisis management.

And in this book, you talk to Anthony Fauci who has been vilified in some quarters, but certainly between the AIDS crisis and now, uh COVID, has a great deal of leadership experience, trying to lead people on the psychology of the country, uh, during a pandemic, which is, which is so difficult.

What, what have you taken away from him and your conversations?

RUBENSTEIN: I've known him for a very long time and I've always admired him.

And in fact, I did two interviews of him for this book, one pre-COVID and one post-COVID.

I admire his willingness to stick to his principles.

He hasn't diverted.

He's obviously worked with many presidents, they're all different.

Um, he's tried to do the best he can in a difficult situation.

I admire him sticking up for what he thinks is right.

And I do think that he's a national hero in many respects.

And let me just conclude by saying, David, I want to thank you for doing this.

And I would say that the purpose of this book is to get, to let people know what are the qualities that make leaders really work.

But I really want to inspire younger people to read about this, and maybe they'll be inspired to be leaders as well.

And all the proceeds that I would get from this book are going to Johns Hopkins Children's Center, which is a great cause.

It's a great children's hospital that I've been affiliated with for a number of years.

So David, thank you very much for doing this from Nantucket.

I hope to see you in Nantucket sometime in the not too distant future when I get up there again.

GREGORY: Likewise, David, thank you.

Thank you for the book and for all these great interviews.

Um, it is a lot for people to learn and I look forward to seeing you.

Bradley back to you.

GRAHAM: Thanks David and David, for a really engaging and informative discussion about what makes great, great leadership, especially in these challenging times.

Clearly the two of you are leaders and knowing how to carry on a conversation worth listening to.

Again, the title of David Rubinstein's book is "How to Lead."

And to everyone watching.

Thanks again for tuning in.

From all of us here at Politics and Prose, stay well and well-read.

ANNOUNCER: Books by tonight's authors are available at Politics and Prose bookstore locations, or online at www.politics-prose.com.