Senator George Mitchell was president of the club and we had 288 members. They were all the rage. And the world war ii memorial dedicated, and Major League Baseball returned to washington as though washington nationals. For 15 years and David Rubenstein is back. David as we all know is cofounder and coexecutive chairman of the karloff group and chairman of the board. And the performing arts, a Strong Institution at the council on foreign relations. And engaged in many many other philanthropic activities. The patriotic philanthropy, generous financing, great historical landmarks, including the Washington Monument, the Lincoln Memorial. The us marine corps. And monticello, and the arlington house. And purchased rare copies of historic documents like the declaration of independence, the emancipation proclamation, and magna carta to ensure they are publicly displayed at the smithsonian and national archives. At the Economic Club, the insightful revealing and entertaining interview were, at signature events and since 2016 and bloomberg television, the David Rubenstein show, and quite the television star. A lifelong enthusiast following the first with master historian, and to the nation, donate book royalties to the library of Congress Literacy awards. [applause] in his 12 year, Economic Club president , david has completed 133 interviews for a club that has 900 members. We would say without exaggeration the Economic Club would not be what it is without david at the helm. With a hearty round of welldeserved recognition and applause lets welcome david to the stage as our extraordinary leader. Thank you. Thank you very much. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you very much for the standing ovation. Carla is going to interview me in a few moments. I thank everybody for coming this evening and i am not as famous as the people we brought in for interviews and thank you for giving us your evening. My experience with the club, i was asked by and dexter who worked with me in the white house if i would speak and i said okay but i dont know what it is. At the time it was small, for how many years was it . Thank you, i have wondered it myself many times. Like many elections, that are smokefilled. What actually happened, when i come and see them in new york, i will lock the door, make use it here until you are the president of economic level washington. It is not a problem. He is a very persuasive person and you know these people and, you will say yes. I said yes. And takes care of everything. And she does. [applause] what actually happened, he said all you have to do is get one businessperson a quarter, you invite them, you know them, let them come in and come up with members and read the cards, the questions and that is it. I started doing that and realized most Business People i knew were relatively boring speakers and people were falling asleep, looking at their watches and slipping out when nobody was looking and the question came up, these are old members and the questions werent very good so i pretended i was reading the questions that i was making them up as i was going along and they were funnier so i went to the interview format and had a lot of them. Let me talk about 3 strands, when is interviewing, second is my interest in philanthropy which i want to talk about tonight and third is my interest in history so first on interviewing. I had a little background in it. Im not a professional interviewer. Andrea mitchell is a professional interviewer among other things and thank you for coming, andrea. What happened was drawing people to our events i wanted to have bigname speakers, nobody wanted to hear David Rubenstein speak a long time ago, maybe not even now. I would get former secretaries of state, former president of the United States, they would come and we pay them big fees, 250,000 to speak as they were not that great, people were falling asleep. Eventually i said what about if i just interview them and make it easier and livelier and wouldnt be people falling asleep . I would go and say why dont i just interview them and the agent would say at the same fee . I would say yes. Same fee, we dont care. I would interview them and it would be livelier and so forth. When i got to the Economic Club of washington a year or 2 or tweet later i felt comfortable doing some of the interviews and it is fun to do and try to make it with some humor and so forth and it is the kind of thing that led to the bloomberg show. Some of you may have seen it, somebody was a member of the club said to me why dont you do this on television for bloomberg. Hes in charge of the bloomberg thing, justin smith. I talked to them and they said we are going to put it on and it is not 60 minutes, it doesnt have that big of viewing but they do replay it 20 times a week. It is everywhere all over the world. What is the name of the show . They said we will call it the David Rubenstein show. I dont know if age long jewish name is going to work and Michael Bloomberg said it is not a problem. It will work out. That is what we do. I started doing this and began doing these interviews. I enjoy it and it is fun and people ask how i do it. I do read a lot and prepare and i write down the questions and i dont use notes. I dont use them because i feel when i do it it is better to do it without notes but a lot of great interviewers do it with notes so no problem. It worked out pretty well. That is how i came to be interviewer. Mostly carlisle and then here and other places and when i go around the world people come up to me and they only know me for interviewing, some children or college kids are business kids they see me and only think i do interviews. Let me talk about philanthropy. I started carlisle with a couple other people in 1987 and it turned out we got lucky and i will tell you what happened. We were not qualified to start the firm. We didnt have a background in this area but i was propelled to do it. I read about two things that propels me to do it. I read a man named bill simon, secretary of the treasury in the ford administration, he left when carter became president. He did something called a leveraged buyout and he bought a Company Called gibson greeting cards, put 1 million in and two years later he made 80 million and i read about that and said that is better than practicing law which i was doing. I went down the street to bill miller who was secretary of the treasury in the carter years and said your predecessor did a leveraged buyout of 80 million and you must know what they are, i will do legal work for you and start a leveraged buyout firm in washington. He said no. I asked a couple other people, we got it together and raised 5 million starting in 1987. I was thrilled to do it then because i read an average entrepreneur would start his First Company between the age of 28, and 37. I read that at 37. If i dont do it now my chances are limited. We started the firm and made a lot of mistakes in the beginning but we grew to be one of the largest in the world because we had a good track record but it was really this. We came up with an idea that changed private equity. The reason we are one of the largest private equity firms with this idea we had. Private equity was a mom and pop business. The rjr deal only had 7 people in the firm, we are very small firms because you spend 100 of your time managing a fund you might have raised, you spend all your time on that so we raise a 100 million fund, i told my partners you do this, you manage that fund and i will do something else. I will not ask my investors for permission to do this, we will ask forgiveness later on. It is easier to get forgiveness than permission. I will spend 100 of my time on that fund and create with my partners a fidelity of private equity which is to say the buyout funds, the Growth Capital funds, venture fund the Real Estate Fund and take the brand name and fill a Large Organization in different areas and go overseas and have european and asian, that was the novelty that enable us to grow so that is how we grew the firm and the Magazine Article about my partner pointing out our net worth which was preby everybodys standards except bill gates and jeff bezos. When you have a lot of money what are you going to do with it . I give you 100 billion tomorrow you will laugh for a moment and you have 100 billion was in his you have 100 billion you are going to buy a plane, a boat, a couple houses and artwork and have 99 and left. What are you going to do . That is the problem bill gates had and others. What are you going to do with this amount of money . When you have this amount of money you can only do a limited number of things with it. I dont have as much is bill gates but the same dilemma. You can basically do what the pharaohs did, you could be buried with it, take your wealth and be buried with your wealth but thats not a great idea. Second thing is you give it to your children which is what most people historically have done. One of my children saying that is a good idea. There is no evidence that a child inheriting 1 billion goes on to win a nobel prize but maybe they do, you never know. You can give it away or you can give it away later on. I am in a place with what the executor is doing. I would give it away relatively soon and bill gates called one day and that he didnt know me then, can i come to your office and he came and we had lunch and he said he would start giving the pledge and i will be happy to one of the first people joining 40 of us at the beginning and historically what you do when you have money, most people give it away to educational institutions for medical research and cultural institutions and i have done that. One thing happened by happenstance. They are the best things. If i hired mackenzie and said what do i do with my money other than educational institutions, and what happened by happenstance, heres what happened. As you heard, i was flying back from london to new york and i saw i was invited to a viewing of the magna carta. The magna carta must be in london, what is he doing in new york. I got there to go to the viewing of it and there were 17 next and copies of the magna carta, the first ones were done in 1215 is a couple other versions, 1297. Of the 17 next and copies one is in the Australian Parliament and 15 in but institutions were British Government and one was bought by ross perot in the 1980s for british family that had in its possession roughly 500 years. They give up their land or give up the magna carta, ross perot send his lawyer, he bought it from Million Dollars or something, he rolled it up and goes back through and the customization says what is in that . The magna carta, go ahead through. They didnt get an export license but that happened and in the archives, ross perot decided to sell it and i was told that day by the curator it probably sold through somebody that was from overseas and the magna carta was the inspiration for the declaration of independence. The magna carta had so many things that led to the declaration of independence, no taxation without representation which led to the british. One of these copies in the United States, i went back and resolved, i would buy it the next night and it is presumptuous to that will by the magna carta the next night and not tell anybody. I went back, wasnt really a person who did that. They put you in a little room and said okay, you come here and in a telephone and start bidding. If you have ever been to an auction you get carried away and i started bidding and eventually they said sold. The head of celebes said who are you . We have never seen you before. You just bought the magna carta, do you have the money for this . You can slip out the side door and nobody will know, you tell these reporters, i dont mind, i went out and say i came from maddest circumstances, my parents didnt graduate college icicle, my father worked in the post office his entire life, a lowly paid worker and i got lucky in my business career, as a down payment on my obligation to give back to the country. I did that and that night went to dinner and said had to buy the magna carta. I am sorry i didnt take you seriously, no one has ever come to my house before. And what happened was this. I got one too. I got lots of calls but there was no other one. I started being asked to buy other rare copies, the declaration of independence, emancipation proclamation and i realized if you put these on display the human brain is not yet so involved that it wont look at these things differently than it looks on a computer slide. You see a copy of the magna carta on a computer slide you might just go to the next slide but if you go and visit the real magna carta you are probably going to be propelled to spend some time preparing for it by learning more about it and after you see you might be propelled to learn more about it. By having historic documents on display i thought it would be a good idea to do this because people would learn more about history and similarly what happened was the earthquake we had affected the Washington Monument, the head of the park service, i asked how much it would cost to fix it and how long it would take, it would take a long time to get money from congress. Dont worry about the bureaucrats, and he called me back and said congress, a share of credit. We fixed it and it is now open and i realized the same is true with historic monuments. The Washington Monument or the Lincoln Memorial or other things as they fall and need some repair. If they are in better shape more people will go to see them and prepare by learning more about that or more after words and why is this important. This is the sad situation. We stopped teaching children civic very much and stopped teaching them history. We dont teach them as much. And we dont have history courses as much as we used to and you can graduate any college in the United States today without taking an American History course, you can graduate from any college in the United States as a history major without having taken American History course and the results are these. Right now three quarters of americans cannot name the 3 branches of government. One third of americans cannot name one branch of government. Amazingly, 20 of americans think Larry Summers was the first treasury secretary. 10 of American College graduates think judge judy is a member of the Supreme Court which is not the case. A survey, any naturalized americans in his audience . If youre a naturalized american you take a citizenship test, you live in this country for 5 years and then take a test. The test is 100 questions, you pass 60 of them your naturalized american citizen and get sworn in. 91 of people that take the test today past, the same test was given by Woodrow Wilson foundation to the citizens who are native born in all 50 states recently. In 49 of 50 states a majority of nativeborn americans who took the test failed. Only one state, vermont, past, which shows you people dont know as much about history and so forth and they dont know much about history, you run into the problem that if you dont know as much about history or about your past you might be likely to repeat the mistakes of the past. One thing i do is educate people a little more about history, do this through my philanthropy, and the library of congress, if she would come up and talk about how this led to the book because a combination of interest and interviewing and interest in history and philanthropy that led to what we are going to talk about and that is in the book. [applause] let me add to that by saying carla was born in florida and later became a librarian in the city of chicago and became the chief librarian of my Hometown Library which he was for 22 years and when president obama was looking for somebody to replace jim billington, selected car landed a spectacular job as librarian of congress. [applause] okay . First you tell everyone that one of the secrets and you are a superstar. I have the article, superstar. It doesnt work the best interviewers have notes. How about that . Thank you because we have worked together. I dont know if many people know when you were in baltimore. I was the director and i heard jim had some difficulty as a child waiting to check out books. My parents werent able to go by a bunch of books. And a mile and a half from my house, when youre 6 years old you could go and get a library card. You could take out 12 books a week and i would take out the 12 books and read them that day and i had to wait a week to go back, i didnt know how to game the system so i would read 12 books a week and then i would have to wait the next week to get more books. You are still legendary for that. I dont know but i read a lot of books. Your interest in literacy. What you have done at the library of congress, you sponsored the literacy award and that was mentioned, to help adults read but you feel strongly about the economic impact. One of the great pleasures of my life is reading and reading books, i came from modest circumstances and many of you have as well. You can be exposed to so many things. The reading exposed me to so many things and reading books concentrate the mind in ways that reading tweets or newspapers or magazines, it is good to read anything but this focus is your brain a bit but heres the problem we have in this country. Of this is hard to believe but 14 of adults in this country are functionally illiterate meaning they cant read past the fourth grade level. If you are functionally illiterate you have a good chance of bein