The American Dream Is Built, Not Promised | David Rubenstein

months, you're where it's going to cost $300 and we're like operating the same exact life

“on thinner and thinner margins every day. If you just look at the wealthiest people in the country,”

they're doing fine, but the people in the middle class and the lower income classes, they are not in good shape. The wealth that people have made in recent years by buying and selling sports franchises has made people think that sports is now an investment class. It's a way you can make a fair amount of money. If you don't have a thick skin, you shouldn't own a sports thing.

Where I wanted to start and we can take this any direction that you want to go, but

I guess what enamored me to, I was watching Instagram and then I reached out to

your rep at Simon & Shuster and just said, "Hey, I'd love to have David on the show." I'm very interested as to this amnesia that some 45 years old, I feel like my generation or the people within maybe a standard deviation of my age have some feel for the history of this country, but I was just an Italy and I had a tour guide in Vatican and she kept bringing up, "Do you know and then she to insert someone who was like, "Famous beyond belief, Julius Caesar." She's just bringing up these

names and she'd say, "Well, have you heard of them?" And after about 10 minutes, I stopped her and I said, "I mean, this would no disrespect. You don't have to keep prefacing it. Do you know this person?" Like, I know at least, a decent amount about history, I said, "Are there really people that don't know some of these famous individuals?" And she said, "Oh, yeah, my tour that I had yesterday." And I said, "Please tell me they weren't from America." And she was like, "Yeah." They were

Americans. And I was kind of taken and she said, "Americans tend to have the least her perception." Does it? Does it means true? The least understanding or at least caring about history and some regard is what she had to say. I guess my question for you was just, "Why do you believe? Do you believe?" And if so, why do you believe? There's seemingly is an amnesia of the history of this country that it's very tough to deal with. Let me try to explain. When I was an undergraduate

about 50 years ago, about 9% of undergraduate to the United States were history majors. That percentage is now down to about 1%. And that's because today, people are afraid if you're not a STEM major in college, you won't get a job at Google or Facebook or Goldman Sachs. So parents have obsessed about getting their kids to be STEM majors. The result is people know less about history. It turns out that Americans know less about our history than people overseas. For example,

“if you want to be a citizen in this country and you're not born here and you become a naturalized”

citizen, you have to take up an effect of history tests that citizen chip tests. And 91% of the people that take it past. The same test was given to people born in this country, not long ago, and in 49 out of 50 states, a majority failed the history test. So the result is we don't have people that know history very much. And why is that a problem? Because the theory of history is that those people that don't remember the past are condemned to relive it in the future.

The theory behind stunning history is you figure out what was done wrong and don't do it again in the future. But we don't have that love of history so much in our country. In Europe, for example, which is much older than United States, people teach history much more. It's considered a part of their DNA of the part of their fabric. In this country, even though we're celebrating this semi-quincentennial, many people might know Thomas Jefferson or the Declaration of Penis. But y'all not, they don't really

know very much about our history sadly. It's very difficult to have conversations about what's happening today if we don't have an understanding of the past. And do you see that? Do you think that

this is part of why we have, I mean, obviously this course has always been polarized, but seemingly

today it feels exceptionally polarized. Do you think this plays a big role in why we can't

“have like logical honest conversations with each other? Well, there are many reasons for it. I think”

one of the principal phenomena right now is the money that is involved in politics. You go aloud to raise unlimited amount of money. And in politics, you raise money by appealing to the far left or the far right. And nobody, it raises money by saying I'm going to be right down the middle. I'm going to go to Washington and do what's right for the country, I'm whether it's left or right. No, you're either raised money on the left or on the right.

In general, far left or far right. And so money has taken over our political situation.

worked on Capitol Hill, if you were a great legislator, you were thought to be bipartisan. Today,

“if somebody calls you bipartisan, it's a curse word. Because Democrats are Republicans don't want”

bipartisan people. They want people that will be part of their own church pew. So it's a sad situation. It's not going to change overnight. The semi-quince Centennial was designed among other things to help Americans celebrate their history and remember it. But as I make talks around the country about the Declaration of Independence or American Revolution, very few people really seem to be that interested in it or really beyond a surface knowledge. They don't know much

about it. So I try to do what I can. I put copies of the Declaration of Independence all over the place. I had reproductions of my rare copies of Declaration given to every governor to put in the state house, every majorly baseball stadium, every NBA stadium, and many other establishes around the country and every American embassy. So the people that go into these stadiums or embassies or or state houses can see and maybe reflect upon the Declaration of Independence. But I'm just

“to drop in the bucket and we have a long way to go before people really understand history as much as I think”

they should. I actually have the Declaration of Independence by copy, I mean, obviously it's a copy. I don't know one of the originals. But just a framed version of the Declaration of Independence that sits right next to my door. So every day when my kids have to leave or come in the house, it literally sits right there and then I have like I have a little corner and then Teddy Roosevelt's the portion of his speech that really is known as the man in the arena kind of sits kitty corner there

as a reminder of kind of how lucky we are to live in a bend-borne in this country and then how much we have to keep working for it. Yeah, I agree. Look, think about this. This country when we

had the Declaration of Independence had 3 million people in the country. Two and a half million white

people, 500,000 slaves. When we won the Revolutionary War in fact, ended in 1783, nobody thought

“we would necessarily survive to be that bigger country because we're only 3 million people.”

And without a lot of wealth. However, over the next 250 years, we came to wealthiest, most successful, most powerful country in the face of the earth. How do we do that? We did it by one thing among other things. We had immigration. Large numbers of people were very talented with left their own country. So we have today 55 million immigrants in this country. Some of them are the most talented business or cultural leaders. We're now squeezing that down a bit. So

I don't think we're going to have as much immigration in the future and that's going to be a problem for our country because we're not reproducing enough and therefore our population is going down not up. And historically when populations go down in a country, their GDP goes down and the country's civilization is not as vibrant as it once was. The reproduction thing is very interesting to me. It seems derivative of upstream problems. And when I talk to some of

the younger professionals and the businesses that I work for, even as old as like 35,

it's like this, they don't always know how to articulate it, but it's this idea of feeling

stuck, they're still in an apartment, they're still, you know, they've been maybe fiancee or engaged for years. You know what I mean? Well, they're right. It seems like we're extending these things and they're just stuck. And for any population, anywhere in the world to stay the same in terms of its size, just the same. Women of child-bearing age need to have 2.1 children on average, 2.1 on average. The United States number now is 1.6. So our women of child-bearing age

are reproducing 1.6 children on average. So that would mean that our population is going down. We don't we're not reproducing ourselves. And unless we have immigration, we won't grow the population. That's a big challenge. Another challenge is that we have an older and older population. And as you have an older and older population, the younger people have to work to support the older population through contribution to social security and other kind of

social and safety net programs. So it's a problem, but it's not only here. In some countries in the world, the reproduction rate is not 1.6. It's 0.6 in Japan and Korea, for example, women are not even reproducing at the level of 1.1 on average from 1 child per woman of child-bearing age. So we we have a problem, but it's not as bad as other countries. When I really want to get to is like to live in an Albany, I'm staring down the river at New York City. And you know,

just this, it's shocking me, shocking the wrong word because logically I understand how

attacking it from multiple angles, democratic socialists, socialists, you know, all these kinds of things. You know, now I for people starting to use the word co-op as a way of seemingly shielding these ideas. And as someone is 45, as a 12 and 10-year-old kid who's trying to set them up and do whatever he can through this podcast, talking to people through being a capitalist myself and trying to engage in the society, like how worried should I be about what they're going to

launch into in 10 years. Every generation throughout history is always worried that the next

generation won't be as good as the current generation. That's one phenomenon. Another phenomenon is that our current generation, your age, my age, think that maybe the world is going further south away from the United States. The values the United States has are not going to be the values that our children have 10 or 20 or 30 years from now. So every parent should always worry,

“you know, the best thing to do is to try to educate your parents, your children,”

giving them the best values you can. But there's sometimes there's social factors that are beyond what you can do. And in the case of the Democratic Socialist, it's now a growing part of the Democratic Party, which if a kid can use to grow, I think we'll keep the Democratic Democrats from getting elected because I don't think it's strong enough to overcome the Republicans in many ways that their Republicans are united. But you know, we've had the Democratic Socialist

movements before they've often frittered out. But this time there seems to be some real electoral success. You saw what happened in New York City. You see what's happened in the Michigan Democratic primary for Senate. So I do think it's something to think seriously about. But in the end,

the most important thing you can do is give the children your own values and, you know, hopefully,

you know, they'll stick. You know, raising children is among the most complicated things in human existence. You know, you spend the amount of time with your children. And then you never know what they're going to turn out to be. Some, you know, parents who have four or five children, sometimes sometimes, sometimes out to be a liberal, sometimes to be conservatives, sometimes turn out to be actors, some turn out to be business people. You just never know what you're going to get.

“And the best thing you can do is just give them as much time and attention as you can when they're”

younger because once they get the teenage years, they're not going to listen very much. I use my mom as a bellweather for like what's starting to hit the zeitgeist, you know, what's starting to hit, people who kind of, I classify her and I mean, it's with no disrespect. She kind of just lives her life. And it's not like she's seeking out this information. She's not on X, you know, trying to figure out what the latest political thing that's happening or, or economic thing. And she actually brought

up, I mean, she knew about my time and whatever, but she brought up recently that she's like, tell me about what's going on with this democratic social thing. And my question is more, is this, do you think if, if you're trying to run a small business, you're trying to live your life, you're trying to, to kind of manifest the American dream and whatever that is today, how concerned should you be? Like is this something that you should be thinking about? Is it

“something you need to be protecting yourself for, or is for most people? Is this seemingly going to”

flare up and flare away over a period of time? And it's not something we need to waste brain cycles on? Well, the country is very bitterly divided. It's not as bitterly divided as it was during this civil war. But clearly, there's real skills in some of the country. And sometimes politicians have helped fulfillment that. But at the moment, there's clearly an interest by some people in the democratic party of supporting the democratic socialist because they're not happy

with what's going on in Washington or not happy with going in their state governments. And it's clearly excites younger people. Younger people traditionally are not conservative. Younger people want to try new things, want to experiment. And therefore, you find the democratic socialist appealing very often to younger people, younger voters because they're the ones we're willing to experiment, we're willing to try different things. I don't think in this country, the communist and socialist

movements have been tried over many, many decades and never really gotten anywhere. So I don't think

they're going to take over our country. But I do think that more and more people will pay attention to them if they win these elections as they seem to be doing. I get questions all the time just from doing this show and I don't know how to answer them. I'm a marketing guy, I'm a podcast guy, I like to ask questions and I'm curious. There are things I know about, but I certainly don't know about like here in the greater Albany area where I live, not a lot of houses for sale, houses that are

seemingly are well overpriced. They're struggling from the standpoint of every day. It seems like,

months, you're worried it's going to cost $300 and we're like operating the same exact life on

“thinner and thinner margins every day. Yeah, obviously, look, in the end, the economy in the United”

States is growing very well for people who are in the upper income categories. If you're an investor and anthropic or or SpaceX, you're probably pretty happy person. But the average person is not doing as well and therefore, you see statistics that show that they cost a living is not keeping up. I mean, the cost of living is going up higher than the average wage is going up and as a result, people feel squeezed. Now, if you just look at the wealthiest people in the country, they're doing fine.

But the people in the middle class and the lower income classes, they are not in good shape.

We still have a very large homeless, very large poverty section in our country,

and it's not going away if anything. It's increasing. So that would be called K-shaped economy, right? Just for the audience if they have that term. Okay. And, you know, I was listening to a podcast the other day on the all-in-pocass. I don't know if you're familiar with that podcast, a few different investors. And they were talking about here's four guys who are

“I think one of which is worth eight figures, the other three are worth nine figures and they're”

talking about what we can do. And I'm listening to them talk as a seemingly regular every day American facing problems that someone who isn't worth eight or nine figures has. And it was

shocking to me how disconnected their argument was for why people are frustrated and scared

and nervous and don't know how to re-position their lives to be successful like they saw their parents were and kind of what's promised you when you're growing up in the 80s, 90s and early 2000s. So how does someone not feel frustrated? If they're listening to this and they own a small business, it's a lot of small business owners listening to the show. And they're grinding every day, they're making enough money to put food on the table, have a house, their kids aren't,

you know, have clothes in their back. But you hear the people who seemingly are dictating the conversation or making the decisions and it just seems like there's nobody advocating for what they're actually experiencing. How do they work through that? How do you position your life to get rid of some of that or at least feel like you can get back on that road and start climbing them out and again? Well it's difficult. Obviously the democratic socialists are appealing

to those people who feel frustrated, feel that the people in Washington are not listening to them and feel that in the end the income distribution this country is not fair. Now capitalism is said to be the greatest economic system ever developed and it has great wonders and virtues, but it does sometimes have income inequality and right now the income inequality in our 90s states is growing quite high and we also have a very high lack of social mobility. You know those

sack of social mobility means people in the bottom take they can get to the top and actually do get to the top. Right now there's a large perception of people at the bottom of the social economic structure that they can't get to the top and therefore there for something called the American Dream is dissipating. More people believe in the American Dream who come to this country from overseas because they believe in the American Dream than people born in this

country believe in the American Dream. Increasingly people in lower social economic classes don't believe in the American Dream anymore that you work hard you can get to the top. That's a sad situation. Do you spend any time on X? Do you ever go on X in? I am not a big social media person, so which is perfectly fine. I'm sure it's great, but no, I don't really do it, but I assume we do. We do probably better for your mental health and your daily workout put.

But that's it. It does. But if you bear with 30 seconds of context, I wanted to support what you said about people who come to this country believing in the American Dream in capital is more than people are born here and there's an account of Japanese man who brought his family here and he's kind of just telling stories as he learns about the country and I was shocked like reading a lot of the other you see a lot of people who want to tear the country down and talk about like every negative

thing, not like there's not negative things everywhere in the world. And this guy,

“he just so he articulates what I believe the American Dream is in a way that I don't know”

that I've heard Americans talk about and I was like this, it was so refreshing to me to hear him talk

the you know comes and the tip culture and how it makes this dynamic that you just don't get in Japan and it was like I opening to me and it made me kind of so happy that people who come in see it and it seems like when the world cup was here there was a lot of that as well people came to

“America and saw what we have here. How do I start to change the conversation for Americans?”

The phrase American Dream was really developed or invented by a writer in the 1930s and it was designed to illustrate the kind of heracial algebra stories that you come from nothing and you work your way to the top. Sadly people don't believe in it so much anymore and therefore you often see more immigrants coming here believing in it than people born here. I think in the end

you know the country is pretty stable and not likely to have revolutionary kind of actions

but I do think that we are probably losing a lot of the American entrepreneurial spirit and a lot of the feeling that we can conquer any problem and we're also increasingly having a country of halves and halves nuts. The people at the bottom have less than they used to have and the people at the top have more than they used to have and that's not a prescription for success in the end of

“our country. Well I want to switch the conversation over to your new book inside the owner's box.”

My understanding of owning sports franchises for most of my life has been that they were like a vanity purchase for someone who had made it in their life but it seems very much like in the last five or ten years that has really that's changed the value of sports franchises is going up the level of investment in sports franchises is going up and why own a sports franchise in the first place of all businesses. I mean I know it's not the only business you've had but like

why and then what makes them unique? Well historically people who bought sports franchises were interested in the sport and they liked the sport so in the 1920s or 30s or 40s people might buy these teams but they weren't really wealthy people in the traditional sense the wealthiest people in the United States were not buying sports teams because they were not at all that profitable

“it was aggravating people criticize you all of those kind of things as it was a lot of of this”

in 1972 with a New York Yankees the greatest baseball franchise of them all perhaps when they were sold nobody really wanted to buy them a young businessman in Cleveland named George Steinbriller bought

it but he only had $250,000 of the $8.8 billion purchase price so he syndicated it but the

wealthiest people in the United States in 1972 didn't say I want to buy a baseball team I want to buy the Yankees today that's changed because the wealth that people have made in recent years by buying and selling sports franchises has made people think that that sports is now an investment class it's not just a vanity thing or it's not thing for people that just like sports or like their hometown it's a way you can make a fair amount of money and as we've seen some of the

prices recently of the Los Angeles Lakers the Seattle Superhawks a Seahawks the Boston Celtics prices are staggering compared to what people used to think you used to be able to buy an NFL

started the franchise a copy cost a couple hundred thousand dollars now they cost ten ten billion

dollars when the Baltimore Orioles a team I bought when it came to Baltimore in 1954 the purchase price was 2.2 million I paid 1.7 billion so the prices have gone up a fair bit people are buying them because they do like sports but they also think it's an investment category now and they'll make money on it so I suspect they're common you know occurrences in my own case I bought the Baltimore Orioles because I'm from Baltimore and I saw as a philanthropic gesture to help

revive Baltimore Baltimore is a city that has a lot of challenges and I've tried to think that if I could revive the Orioles and make them more successful the downtown area of Baltimore might get revived revitalized it would be good for Baltimore that was my million main motivation are you seeing that start to manifest takes a long time so first of all the team hasn't done as well on the field as I would have liked and that therefore makes people less interested in

going to games than than they might otherwise be secondly redeveloping downtown Baltimore is not easy when the camp in yours was built in the early 1980s people thought then for 1990s when people thought then that it would revitalize the downtown area but it really hasn't and so we've got to put more effort into it and with the cooperation the governor and the mayor

but it takes time yeah I was there about a month ago with my son he played in a baseball

tournament at Rippgen Park the yeah and as part of the experience we brought the team down that a game and oh we had a great time to me and I actually used to live in DC for five years and would go to games in Baltimore all the time because they still played the national still played in RFK which was not a great place to watch a game so I still love going up to the camp yard to watch games but it has it has been interesting how this I mean I think it's one of the

beautiful most beautiful parks in all of baseball and it has become in my mind like a like a Fenway or a ringley in terms of you know just having this unique structure and feel and experience when you think about a sports franchise as a business it's different than an investment firm or a you know you're pumping out you know widgets out of a manufacturing plan or something what are some of the core drivers of how you actually grow a business like that like what are the

“metrics that you have to focus on a sports franchise that are different from some of the other”

more maybe traditional businesses that people are used to well I've been in the private equity business for almost 40 years and there when you buy companies you're looking to increase earnings and you want to typically increase them fairly regularly and when your companies go public you want to have increased earnings every quarter because you're measured on whether you're increasing every quarter in the sports world you don't tend to reveal your numbers every year or if at all

and you don't have to reveal quarterly numbers and so the focus on increasing quarterly earnings is not really there what you're trying to do in the business world in the baseball world is

basically build a team on the field that will draw people into the stadiums the people come to

the stadiums you're going to have higher TV ratings ultimately you're going to get more sell more food you sell more merchandise more parking a ticket prices will probably you know go up a bit as well if the team is very popular and so forth so you're looking to put a better team on the field and you know it's not easy to do so you've got 26 players on a team and then he given time as the girls have seen you can have a lot of them injured so only one team is going to win the world

series every year but they're 29 others who are trying desperately to do so it's not easy and it's much more competitive than than than in the private equity world in the private equity world you might buy a company but you might have two or three or four competitors in baseball you have 29 other competitors or in the same as true in NFL or NBA a lot of competitors who are trying to to beat you every day and whereas you don't have to have that as much in the business world

“so how do you develop a better team like is it do you feel like you need to get hands”

in do you need to have like say or is it trust the general manager trust the trust the manager on the field and and let them kind of run the app well the different approaches when short-time runner owned the Yankees he would sign players that didn't even tell his general manager about or he would negotiate contracts that the general manager might not have known today that doesn't usually happen usually you have owners who are pretty skilled business people and they

generally generally tend to delegate the baseball operations to two people one does the business side one does the baseball side the business side does sells corporate sweets season tickets

those advertising promotions those kind of things and ultimately try to get as much revenue

and as possible the baseball side really figures out who to who to draft who to trade for who to manage this should be and and so forth so they're different sides and most of the owners and again there are 30 major baseball teams most of them are not going into club house and giving people lectures and how to hit better they generally don't do that they leave that to the managers in my own case you know I go into club house from time to time to cheer the team when they

“want to game or something but I think the generally the owners stay out of the club houses because”

that's the players kind of private sanctuary and most of the owners are not all that personally close to the players because they realize they're negotiating with these guys for contracts where you authenticate produce a problem if you're too close to them and secondly you might trade them so I think owners know some of their players pretty well but generally mostly the owners are not spending a lot of time socializing with the players let's say a general man who wants to make a trade

do they is there a level at which they can make that trade a certain type of player where you're say hey maybe it's the 26th guy on the roster it's left handed you know middle reliever and hey we want to move this guy and we need a piece here or is everything pitched to you and like maybe or how does that work right okay so when I bought the team I bought in a partner

he knows baseball extremely well he and I are in regular communication with our president of

“business operation a bit baseball operations Mike Elias who we inherited and we think he's very good”

he was rated voted the major league executive of the year a number of years ago he has a call with us once a week and with emails almost every day about players injuries or possible trades or draft picks so he would not trade a player or a draft a major player without telling us what he was going to do now if we didn't support what he wanted to do generally he might say well

if you're never going to support me maybe I'll do something else so generally we we support what he

wants to do he does explain it to us we ask questions but that's true a most you know most baseball organization the general manager the head of business the baseball operations is really making the data data decisions on players very few owners have that kind of expertise is it almost a good thing that you kind of separate uh church and state in that regard like if you got your hands in all his decisions does it it would probably muddy the waters I mean you saw that with Stein

Brenner and you know then the mess I mean as much as the Yankees had success occasionally I mean for in large part most of his tenure was a mess I would say he had some successes he had some failures but in the end he did win some world series but you had a lot of controversies and fired

“managers and fired players and and all the things but you know in the end I think he probably was”

a plus for the sport uh today the owners are probably less colorful um and they tend to be more restrained in their public statements and they tend to be unwilling to you know criticize their people in public I don't think you see that anymore it had to be a wild feeling to be on that team I mean you think you know you said you go down so you know the guys at least a little bit but you you you head down you you're get out of the shower you sit down and now you got to

answer a question from a reporter about your the owner and the owner's box you know tearing you apart or belittling you and you know then you're supposed to go out and hit a baseball the next day it does not seem like a good relationship with headsets challenges today the owners uh I think are generally of the the mindset that the players really are are best judged by the the experts and therefore very few uh owners are really uh doing actively uh involved in the trades they

they they will certainly be informed and they'll no doubt give their consent and they will be informed

about the major players being drafted but they rarely are in a second guest the general manager

because the general matters are just there's some breeze baseball and those are much better than the owners do can you maybe explain for the audience the relationship of uh your minor league teams and how how involved do you get in the cultivation of the players because baseball in particular is unique in its farm system and and how many players are involved there so uh put it this way um in college basketball and college football if you're drafted to play in the NFL or the NBA

uh you're almost certainly gonna make the team if you're one of the early drafts remember the NBA

“I think only has two rounds of drafts now it used to be 30 or 40 now it's only two rounds”

and so if you're drafted in the as number one or number two first round you're almost certainly gonna make the NFL or the NBA in baseball it's not quite that way first of all you don't go directly into the major league uh you typically go into the minor leagues for two years so even the best hot college or high school prospects are not coming into the major leagues right away and the ability to to guess who is gonna be a superstar is is more complicated in baseball

there are many people who are the first draft picks of the major league baseball who never made

that the major league baseball never made it into the major leagues uh that wouldn't happen in football or basketball somebody that's the number one pick every year in the NFL or the number one pick in the NBA is gonna be almost certainly a star in that league it's not the case in baseball it's more complicated um so you know you do the best you can you pick a lot of players and you try to sign them up but you send them into minor leagues for two years to see if they really can hit

major league baseball pitching or if they're pitchers or they can really strike people out or get people out it's a more challenging endeavor and it's harder to predict who's gonna be a superstar. How much of your time or how involved do you get in that process because 64 rounds am I correct in 64 or 62? I don't know if it's that many but uh but there's a fair number of rounds and um you know obviously owners in all of the teams are probably informed by their

general manager of the 35 or six or seven people they want to draft beyond that it's it's uh probably most owners are not that involved because if you're drafting 20 by somebody in the 20th round the chance that person's really gonna help them agely is modest they might happen but it's

books are likely to be and then you just you know wait and see we we just drafted our first draft pick

this year with somebody we had decided we really wanted and we we have the seventh overall draft pick and we and we took him as name as Eric Booth from um from Alabama. How do you handle um like player negotiations for salary because I know like I said there's a lot of small business owners that listen to the show and they have to deal with similar but different conversations with their

“own team members and I think just being that these individuals we watch them on TV we have my”

kids got their sports cards upstairs on the table um you know how how do these things go? Everybody knows what everybody's salary is pretty much these days there's no secrets because everything is pretty much publicly available um if you have a major contract which uh you know could be these days of ten-year contract or a five-year contract that's a large amount of money and therefore the owner

is always gonna be involved and deeply involved and saying yes I'll spend the money or no I won't

if you're just signing a one-year contract or you're signing a minor league contract with somebody the owner probably not that deeply involved but if you're you know if you're Steve Cohen and you're going to try to get uh one-soto and your team and you're going to pay them over seven hundred million dollars obviously uh Steve made the final decision on that uh the same is true and when they signed uh uh Otoni at the Dodgers obviously the ownership there was deeply involved um I am informed

about what our guy is going to do we talked them all the time in terms of how much we want to offer and what we think is realistic or not but you know in the end um you know the the general manager or the head of basing bait business opera baseball operations will ultimately you know have to negotiate out the details of the contract but generally you're spending a lot of money in these

“kind of situations and when you're doing long-term contracts you have to recognize that very often”

you're going to be signing a player who might not be playing for many of the years that you signed them up for so for example if somebody gets a 10-year contract and he is you know 28 years old that means he's going to have the play to be 38 um very few players at the age of 38 or as good as they were at 28 I think for baseball it is said by some I haven't really you know studied it deeply but something like the age of 27 28 maybe 29 is the peak uh for most players now some players

are doing better in their 30s than they did in their 20s but as a general rule thumb the late 20s probably is the peak of athletic performance from most athletes do you get to set philosophy on how you how we bring in players or how you bring in players like the like the soda deal right like obviously the Yankees were trying to get him to they were unwilling to pay the same amount uh there's different reasons for that but I mean that deal was

fairly highly criticized just for bringing him in and is it the right part for him and there's like I guess I guess my question is you know this is more just as a sports fan when you're watching like sometimes you look at a situation you're like are they just buying jerseys like is that it's just buying jerseys sales like doesn't seem like the right player for the ballpark for the team

it's an incredible amount of money and you're like as a fan I don't understand I wasn't involved

in that we weren't trying to design him up so I can't speak to that particular one but I would say as a general rule thumb what owners want to do is put the best team on the field and if they can make a profit doing that they'd be happy to do that most baseball teams are not profitable

“I think that's not a secret most on an operating basis don't make money they make money when they”

sell the team perhaps but not on the operating basis that's probably true of some other sports as well that the NFL is in a league by itself in terms of profitability you know I think somebody is going to sign one one sodo the owner is going to be deeply involved in that case Steve Cohen said that he was involved and met with the one sodo and his family and I think it's probably helpful you know generally what happens in the case of the Orioles is we've signed a number of

players the longer term contracts the ownership has agreed to the price but ultimately we have the general manager work out or not the general manager he's not that sense on his title the present of business of baseball operations is the person who works out the details of it with the agent up for the player yeah that makes a lot of sense so you're you're you're informed you're understanding you're buying into the to the concept in the idea but it's not like your hands

it's like your red line in contracts in between pop really I I can say not not so I don't think any owners doing that anyway but the owners are deeply involved and look in the old days 30 years ago 40 years ago 50 years ago we've made it been harder to communicate with people across the country or around the world but today through the internet you can communicate with people and

the question is is it worth the money or not people you know have their debates on it you know

“when when Alex Rodriguez was signed I think it was a $250 million contract for 10 years he had been”

on the Seattle Mariners and went to the Texas Rangers people were really critical of the Texas

Rangers spending that much money $25 million a year then was like a equivalent of $100 million a year today so you know you're always going to get some criticism and if you don't have a thick skin you shouldn't own a sports team because while the oils for example are a nice team the revenue is far less than the revenue of you know probably five or six dozen firms that Carlisle might private equity firm owns you know we might own a team a company that has three billion of revenue

“it's a large chemical company nobody ever asked me about it the oils might be a you know a”

couple hundred million in terms of revenue but people are talking about it all the time it's just a

different phenomenon you know when I buy a team for Carlisle or a company for Carlisle no eight year old boy comes up and asked for my autograph because I now own a chemical company but with baseball you know I've got eight year old boys and girls coming up and saying can I have your autograph and I keep saying look I'm not really a player and I don't know why the parents are telling them they should get my autograph but it's easier to just sign it then explain that it's not

really that useful is it fun now is it fun getting to talk sports and being around people it's the fun part for me has been that I reconnected with Baltimore I moved out of Baltimore when I went to college haven't really spent much time there though I you know my parents grew up there married there they're buried there I'll be buried there so I have a real connection with Baltimore but I hadn't spent as much time there as I did in the nation's capital I've lived in Washington

for the last 40 plus years but I reconnected with my friends from high school in fact this weekend I'll be spending time with about 10 of my friends from high school to gather for the weekend I've seen people that I hadn't seen in 60 years once I'm about good old baseball game one time somebody said David David I hadn't seen this guy in 60 years it was a neighbor of mine and I didn't know what happened to him and then I have people even from I was a part of better than my book a young girl in my

sixth grade class when I hadn't seen her since the sixth grade she wrote me a letter saying hey

guess who I am and I like to meet with you now and here's what happened in the last 60 years

with my life and so I did have lunch with her and you know so it's a good way to reconnect with people and I reconnect with the city of Baltimore so it's it's fun but you know it's more fun when you win them when you lose yeah I get that big basket of blue crabs and a picnic table is at the well that's Baltimore for sure and I grew up eating crabs and you know I know how to open I'm pretty quickly well David I appreciate your time thank you very much and congratulations

on your success and hopefully your success as a father right yes well thank you and and I appreciate it and I and I probably don't need to hear this but man my the kids on my son's baseball team just had a phenomenal time and the people in your park I mean just a general afternoon culture was phenomenal

“so I come again just let me know if you want to come again just the email me and we'll make sure”

it happens again okay I appreciate it so much all the best success on the book and just thank you for being able to tell in this story man thank you next time I'll make sure they get on the field okay