🚨BILLIONAIRE DAVID RUBENSTEIN WARNS: AMERICA’S IS $100 TRILLION IN DEBT—ONLY THING TO SAVE US!

0:00 A country spending more interest on debt than defense spending usually goes down in terms of its world power. And that's what we're doing now. Currently, we have $ 40 trillion of debt.

0:08 Is there any way out of it?

0:09 The only way we're going to get out of this, and honestly, is paying it off in devalued dollars. There's no other way out unless you want to do something dramatic like increase taxes dramatically or cut spending. And people don't want to do that.

0:21 Have you seen anything like the moment that we're currently living in terms of the economy?

0:25 People always like to say this time is different. And those are the most dangerous words in the investment world because history repeats itself. In the end, nobody really knew which companies were going to make it and which companies were not.

0:34 When do you think another bear market is going to come?

0:37 Well, if I knew, I would be probably shorting the market from right now. This uncertainty and these wars are very expensive and I think don't help the global economy.

0:45 You said your biggest financial regrets were investments you passed on, including Meta and Amazon. What have those moments taught you?

0:52 In the case of Meta, he told me they were trying to raise $ 30, 000, so I didn't put in the $ 30, 000. One of Mark Zuckerberg's roommates did do it, and I think that $ 30, 000 he put in is now worth about $ 50 billion. I regret that. It reminds me how lacking in intelligence I am in judging some things.

1:08 What have you learned about leadership in this time in sports that you probably brought over from your career in private equity?

1:15 If you can't take losing and you can't take the fans complaining about you, you shouldn't buy a sports team because fans are not going to praise you.

1:20 If you want somebody to praise you, buy a dog. All right, guys, welcome back. EYL special episode. We have David Rubenstein. Thank you for joining us.

1:29 My pleasure to be here. Thanks for having me.

1:30 Co-founder of the Carlyle Group, one of the largest private investment firms, 485 billion assets under management.

1:36 That's correct.

1:38 Yes. And you are also the owner of the Baltimore Orioles.

1:42 That's correct.

1:43 That's what we're going to talk about today.

1:45 I'm happy to talk about that.

1:47 He's going to be a New York Times bestselling author.

1:50 He's already a New York Times.

1:51 Again.

1:51 He's already a bestselling author. And you got the President Medal of Freedom Award.

1:57 Presidential Medal of Freedom was given to me by President Biden, yes.

2:01 Congratulations.

2:02 Thank you.

2:03 That's a first for us.

2:04 Well, it's nice to get. I mean, it's the highest civilian honor you can theoretically get, but I'm happy to get it. But I'm sure there are other people who deserved it more than me that didn't get it yet. Yes.

2:15 So we're going to talk about you owning the Oreos. We're going to talk about the book. But before, let's just give some background for the audience. Okay. So- You started, you were in the Carter White House.

2:27 That's correct.

2:27 Right?

2:28 That was 1970?

2:29 77. Carter started January 20th, 77. I was the deputy domestic policy advisor to the president. I was only 27. I didn't know what I was doing, but in some ways, nobody else knew what they were doing either.

2:41 So when you went from working in government to starting the Carlyle Group, how did that transition happen? And what was the early days of starting the Carlyle Group? Okay.

2:52 Well, I worked in the White House for four years for President Carter. We lost the election overwhelmingly to Ronald Reagan. So people used to tell me how great and smart I was when they wanted something from me when I was in the White House. All of a sudden, they wouldn't call me back when I need a job after we lost the election.

3:07 What was your position in the White House?

3:08 I was the deputy domestic policy advisor.

3:11 And what exactly does that do?

3:12 Well, my boss was the domestic policy advisor in charge of all domestic policy, non-foreign policy things. And I was his deputy. We had a big staff. And we basically advised Carter on everything from agriculture to civil rights to anything else that was not foreign policy. When we lost the election, I had to go back and practice law, which is the only skill I really had. I'm a lawyer by training. I wasn't that great a lawyer. If I was a good lawyer, I would be practicing law.

3:39 But I wasn't that good. My clients reminded me of that. And so I decided to start an investment firm in 1987. And it grew to be one of the larger private equity firms in the world.

3:49 That's an interesting year. When did you start in 87? Because most people know 87 for being Black Monday in September.

3:56 That's correct. We started about a month before.

3:59 Talk about that for a second.

4:01 Well, in October of 1987, the stock market crashed by a large amount. At the time, it was the biggest crash since the Great Depression and really depressed the markets. I think the markets went down, what, 500 points or so, which was a big amount in those days. You know, we said maybe we started the wrong time. It wasn't good.

4:23 But we did start it and we overcame it. And ultimately, the market came back. But it was a little disconcerting when you're a month into your business and all of a sudden you have the biggest stock market crash in 50 years.

4:34 I wonder, as you look at the space now, obviously going through that to start the tech boom of the 90s, pullbacks, obviously, in 01 with September 11th and the housing crisis. Now that's AI revolution. Have you seen anything like the moment that we're currently living in in terms of the economy?

4:52 Well, people always like to say this time is different. And those are the most dangerous words in the investment world when somebody says this time is different because history repeats itself. Right now, we are in a complicated situation where the United States is going through a transition in many ways from a non-AI economy to an AI economy.

5:10 AI is going to revolutionize the way we live and think and do everything else. Right now, we don't know what the full impact of AI is going to be. Some people are saying it's going to end humanity as we know it. Other people are saying it's going to make life better for everybody. Who knows? Nobody really knows.

5:25 Just like when the internet came along, nobody really knew what the impact would be. And some people were right when they said it would be transformative of our lives, and it has been. But in the end, nobody really knew which companies were going to make it and which companies were not. AI is the same situation. AI will change our lives, but nobody really knows whether it's going to make it better or worse or how it's going to impact us directly.

5:46 When building the Carlyle Group, what was the hardest part? Was it client acquisition? Was it navigating from different investments to know the trends that's coming?

5:56 Well, the hardest part was I was based in Washington, D.C., and most of the firms that were in the private equity world were in New York, so we weren't taken seriously because we were in Washington. Secondly, I didn't have an investment background. I was a lawyer, so I had to get people convinced I actually knew what I was doing.

6:11 And then my partners and I had not worked together before we kind of assembled to build this firm. but we didn't have a track record. In the investment world, everybody wants a track record, and we didn't have a track record, so we had to do deals one at a time and just kind of get some credibility after the deals worked out, and then we could go out and raise more capital. It took a while. The firm is now almost 40 years old. It took a long time to be credible. We were one of the largest firms in the private equity world for a long time, and now we're still one of the biggest ones, managing just about $ 500 billion.

6:42 Did you use your relationships from the White House and from government to as your early initial first clients?

6:51 Well, of course, Carter was out of the White House then. So my relationships were not that valuable, but I had contacts on Capitol Hill. I had contacts around the country that I'd made while I worked in the White House, but they were not really that valuable. I had to start all over again. And when you start your career all over again, you just have to make fresh contacts.

7:08 So if you've ever started your career all over again, you were in the financial world before, And when you started this, you decided to start all over again. And sometimes their contacts are useful. Sometimes they're not.

7:18 Do you think that Jimmy Carter had gotten a bad rap in history as far as how people remember his presidency?

7:25 Well, I do. Obviously, I'm biased. Jimmy Carter won in an upset. Nobody really took him seriously when he started running for president. Nobody ever heard of him. They called him Jimmy Who. And then he won, and he beat an incumbent president, Gerald Ford. In four years, though, inflation became very high. Gas lines were very long. And we had the hostages in Iran. So Carter lost unceremoniously to Ronald Reagan, a gigantic loss. And then he kind of went back and rebuilt his life and became a Nobel Peace Prize winner as a result of some of the things he did after the presidency. I think Jimmy Carter is not considered to be a great president by historians.

8:03 But I think many of the things he did post-presidency are greatly admired. And now people are seeing that some of the things he did as president were probably better than people gave him credit for.

8:13 You brought up track record, which is vital. I mean, it's vital, especially in private equity. Everybody remembers the ones that changed the trajectory of the company. Can you think back to the companies that you were investing in at that time that really changed and created a belief system around what you guys were building?

8:31 Well, at the time, what we were trying to do was we were trying to say that private equity investments can make companies better. And that was a novelty at the time. Today, most people would say that private equity firms do have a big impact. Now, some people still don't like private equity. But in the end, you have to admit that the United States economy has been fairly transformative over the last 20, 30, 40 years. We're the envy of the world. We have the biggest GDP in the world. We have the greatest productivity of major economies.

8:58 To some extent, I think that's because of the techniques that private equity firms have used to make their companies more valuable. And many of these private equity techniques are now used by public companies. They see what private equity firms have done to make companies more valuable, and they've used some of the same techniques, even though they're not involved with private equity. So I think private equity has gotten a bad rap in some respects. In the end, I think it's been very good for the U.S. economy.

9:20 Speaking of the U.S. economy, what is your view on the national debt? And are you extremely concerned that this is something that is going to be a hindrance for us in the future?

9:31 Currently, we have $ 40 trillion of debt. $ 40 trillion is about 125% of our GDP, which is a number that makes us comparable to countries like Lebanon or Italy, which is not necessarily role models. But that's really modest compared to the real debt. The real debt is the unfunded Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security liabilities. If you were to take that into account, we would have much more than $ 40 trillion of debt. So it's a serious problem. If you go through history, and you take a look at other countries that have had this kind of problem, generally they have not survived as well as they would like, and particularly when you pay more interest on your debt than you're spending on your defense spending. When a country is spending

10:11 more interest on debt than defense spending, it usually goes down in terms of its world power, and that's what we're doing now. Right now we're spending more interest on our debt than we are spending on defense spending, and we have a big defense budget. So I think it's a serious problem, and it's not going to be addressed anytime soon because nobody wants to raise taxes, nobody wants to cut spending.

10:30 Is there any way out of it?

10:31 The only way we're going to get out of this, and honestly, is paying it off in devalued dollars. Your grandchildren and great-grandchildren are going to be paying off this debt in dollars that are worth less than the dollars that we borrowed at the time that I'm alive. In other words, we're basically devaluing our currency. And that's how we're going to pay it off. There's no other way out unless you want to do something dramatic like increase taxes dramatically or cut spending. And people don't want to do that. 85% of the budget is defense spending, interest on the debt, and entitlements. Nobody wants to cut any of that. So it's very difficult to do. And I don't think anything pleasant is going to happen anytime soon.

11:09 But we can ride it out in the sense that we just basically live with it. And in the end, we devalue our currency and we pay off the debt and devalue dollars. That's essentially what we're doing now.

11:19 You said history repeats itself.

11:21 I'm sorry?

11:22 I said you said history repeats itself.

11:23 It does.

11:24 It's what we're doing right now.

11:26 For example, under President Obama, there was a commission appointed to figure out how we could deal with this. But it basically came up with a conclusion that we had to cut Social Security, cut Medicare, Medicaid. It was so unpopular that President Obama didn't even want to have a picture taken with the commission heads. they were very popular people of Senator Simpson and and Bowles. And and but President Trump, President Obama said, I don't want to be photographed with him at the time. And, you know, we didn't really implement any of their recommendations. So nobody has a solution for this that's going to solve the problem.

11:59 It's just there's no it's politically too difficult.

12:02 Yeah, I was going to the point of the time that we're in. Right. Like if we look at historically how September's have performed, how the summer months have performed. how the market has performed during midterm years. It feels like there's something different happening this year. Should we follow that trend or say, let's go based on history, how these markets perform during these current times to see where we're headed?

12:25 During a midterm election year, historically, the stock market, the S & P 500 is up about 5% on average. But the year after a midterm election, the markets are up about 14%. So no matter what happens in the midterm elections, probably the markets will go up because there's less uncertainty. Markets don't like uncertainty. Right now, we don't know who's going to control the Congress. And if we knew, markets would probably go up. Right now, the markets are uncertain about where the future is going to be. And I can't tell you today whether Democrats are going to control the Congress or Republicans are going to control. Nobody really knows, but it's obviously going to be very important what happens. I suspect today that the Republicans are not

13:02 feeling as good as they were maybe six months ago.

13:05 Yeah. I wonder how you feel about the idea of circular financing. That's been like a key phrase over the past few years in private equity companies, like anthropic companies, like open AI, still private, but still raising funds, getting money from publicly traded companies that are going to benefit those publicly traded companies in the future. What are your thoughts around that?

13:26 This is what you're maybe referring to is that NVIDIA, for example, is very profitable.

13:32 Correct.

13:33 And what it has cleverly done is it's funded a lot of its customers, right? In other words, ensure that customers can buy things from NVIDIA. NVIDIA invests in those companies. Time will tell whether that's a good thing or not. Nobody really knows. As long as NVIDIA is worth $ 5 trillion plus, they can probably afford to do it. Whether that can continue forever, I don't know. What do you call circular financing? It's generally not worked throughout history very well because sometimes these companies at the very top that are paying for everything, ultimately their values go down. If NVIDIA's value went down by half of where it is today, it wouldn't be able to afford to do all this.

14:07 But we just don't know yet.

14:09 Um, so I came into business in 2008 and that was obviously the great recession, but we haven't really had a stock market, a bear market since then, almost 18 years. We had one during COVID, but that was a very short lived, one of the shortest that might've been the shortest ever. When do you think another bear market is going to come?

14:31 Well, if I knew I would be probably shorting the market right now, but I would say this, um, You're correct. Generally, in this country, we've had since in the 20th century and the 21st century recessions every seven years on average. We haven't had one except for a technical recession during COVID. We really haven't had a recession for more than 10 years.

14:51 And I think there's a concern that eventually history will repeat itself and we'll have another recession. Nobody really knows when a recession is going to come. People always like to say a recession is coming and then they're wrong and they kind of go away. Right now, nobody is predicting a recession anytime soon. Though, if you read newspaper reports, President Trump is worried that if we were to have constraints on AI, which is fueling our economy, that could produce a recession. Apparently, according to newspaper reports, he's worried that if you regulate AI and AI therefore goes down in value, people are less worried, less ebullient about AI, that could produce a recession. It's maybe possible. Right now,

15:30 what's happening in the Middle East could produce a recession. Oil prices are at record heights. And at some point, it's going to filter into the economy. And I think they're going to slow down the economy. But whether it produces a recession, nobody really knows. And I can't say that it will yet.

15:43 At this level of your career, and I wonder if maybe it was the same then, I know you are known for rationally looking at investments. How do you go about looking at companies that you're potentially going to invest in? Like, what are the metrics that you guys look at?

15:57 For an investment for private equity or something? Well, in private equity, what you do is you tend to Look for companies in the areas you have some expertise in. See whether there's a likelihood that if you inject capital into the company, either minority stake or control, you're likely to be able to improve the value of the company to get a rate of return that you want. The investors that invest with us want rates of return, let's say, in the mid-teen rates of return area. So 15%, 16%, 17%.

16:24 If you think you can improve a company and get those kind of rates of return, then it looks like an attractive investment. Typically, in Carlisle and other communities, Firms like ours, KKR, Blackstone, Apollo, we tend to take six months or more to analyze a company before what's called due diligence. And we analyze the company and say, yes, can we inject money here and get the kind of return our investors want? Sometimes you're right. Sometimes you're wrong.

16:46 Sometimes you get deals that are much better than you thought. You didn't think they'd be so great. Sometimes deals don't work out. So I would say to analyze a company appropriately in the private equity world probably takes three to six months before you know if you want to do it or not.

17:00 How.

17:01 Concerned are you about the Middle East conflict? You mentioned that, but this war in Iran seems to be spiraling out of control. Saudi Arabia and Yemen now. So what do you see as far as the global markets?

17:15 Well, the global markets are waiting to see how these wars turn out. There are three principal things that people are focused on. One, Russia-Ukraine, when is that going to end? It's gone on now for five years, longer than World War II in many ways. Iran is a war that the market wasn't expecting. Now, we don't know how long it's going on for, but it's clearly not going to be resolved anytime soon based on everything I can see.

17:38 And then you don't know what's going to happen in China, Taiwan. China's coming to visit the President of the United States this week. People have been worried for a long time that China might invade Taiwan and produce another war. I don't know if that's going to happen. It doesn't appear like it's happening anytime soon. But this uncertainty and these wars are very expensive. And and I think don't help the global economy. Oil prices are at record heights because of what's going on in Russia, Ukraine, and what's going on in the Middle East. So I don't know what will ultimately happen, but I suspect the markets are not happy with what they see right now.

18:12 I wonder your outlook on a domestic issue that can't span the global, which is energy, specifically when we talk about data centers and how we're going to power them and the political effects that could have on the thoughts around it. How are you viewing data centers in terms of the overall build of the future of AI?

18:31 Well, as a general rule of thumb, people would say, I need more technology, more technology is good. As a general rule of thumb, some people are not in favor of technological improvements. But data centers have become something where people wanted them for a while in their backyard. They thought they produced jobs. Now people don't want them in their backyards. And in fact, recently there was a survey that said more people are willing to have a nuclear power plant in their backyard than than a data center.

18:56 And as a result, many politicians are now saying, I don't want any data centers. And then the data centers have to be somewhere if you're going to have all these AI computing power. So at some point, we'll have to find some place where nobody lives and we can build a data center because right now people don't want them because they think it's going to be destructive to the environment. It's going to cost a lot of money.

19:16 And in the end, they're nervous about it.

19:19 Okay. Let's talk about sports. So you're the owner of the Baltimore Orioles.

19:24 I'm the control owner.

19:25 Yes.

19:26 What does that mean, control owner?

19:28 Well, every sports team probably has more than one person who's the owner. And the way that Major League Baseball works, if you own a certain percentage, I think it's more than 15%, you are the control partner, which means if something goes wrong, you're blamed. If something goes right, maybe you get the credit for it. But when you have a Major League Baseball owners meetings, you have control partners typically go to the meetings as the ones who are responsible for it. But I have other partners I brought in.

19:52 And if I were to drop dead tomorrow, the team will be fine. They'll have other people that can replace me.

19:56 Okay.

19:57 Well, you're the control owner.

19:58 I'm the control owner. Correct.

20:02 Okay.

20:02 So $ 1. 7 billion, that's what you purchased?

20:04 That's correct. We paid $ 1. 7 billion. When the team first came to Baltimore in 1954, the purchase price was $ 2. 2 million. We paid $ 1. 7 billion. And as we've just seen, the New York Yankees are just valued at now, you know, $ 13, $ 14 billion.

20:19 The Lakers sold for $ 10 billion.

20:21 They sold and they resold for $ 12. 5 billion.

20:24 Six months later.

20:25 So, you know, it's been going up. Now, I don't know how long it's going to continue this way. Smaller cities don't have those kind of price values. We're in Baltimore. Baltimore is a smaller city by baseball standards. And therefore, You know, a price of $ 1. 7 billion from Baltimore is a big price. The team was sold several times before I bought it. Once for, as I mentioned, $ 2. 2 million in 1954. Edward Bennett Williams bought it for $ 12 million in the early 80s. And then later his estate sold it for $ 75 million. Then it was sold in bankruptcy court to Peter Angelos for about $ 155 million. And so I paid $ 1. 7 billion with my partner. So for those people that held on from the original investment, they did

21:06 pretty well.

21:08 Talk about Baltimore. This is just not a random team that you said, I want to have this in a portfolio. Baltimore means something to you.

21:17 I grew up in Baltimore. My parents grew up in Baltimore. I went to public schools there. Many of my relatives still live in Baltimore. So Baltimore is my hometown. And while I've spent much of my career in New York and or Washington, I still feel an affinity for Baltimore. And I have friends from high school, friends from grade school that I'm still in touch with. And so I wanted to do something to make Baltimore better than maybe it had been. I thought if I bought the Orioles, I could re-energize the Orioles and maybe re-energize the downtown Baltimore.

21:48 And I saw it more as a philanthropic gesture. I've given away a fair amount of money in my life, but a lot of that is to universities that I've been associated with or to things in the Washington area, things I've called patriotic philanthropy. But I could have done more in Washington, in Baltimore perhaps, and I thought this was a way of doing more for Baltimore. So, okay.

22:07 Why do you think sports franchises have climbed so much over the last 50 years? I mean, you look at NFL, you look at the NBA, you look at the NBL. Why has this increase in sports prices gone up so dramatically?

22:21 There are many reasons for it. One, the population's gone up. When I was growing up in Baltimore, the population of the United States was under 200 million people. Now it's 340 million people. You have more people, more eyeballs, more people that can buy tickets, more people that will watch. Secondly, we have more franchises. And when 1960, for example, the NHL, the National Hockey League had six teams. That's it. The NBA in 1960 had eight teams. That's it. So now you have 30 or 32 franchises in each of these major sports. So there are more people who are rooting for people and therefore more people buying streaming services or watching on television and buying products that are advertised on television.

23:01 There's also the international market. More and more of our sports are becoming international. People are watching us overseas in baseball. The Japanese have a big affinity for our baseball. And then we in this country are very interested in sports overseas, like soccer in England. And that's been a big factor.

23:18 And then you have the whole betting thing going on. People love to bet. It's been going on for thousands of years and probably going on for thousands of years. And now betting is more or less legal with some constraints. And that has attracted more and more people. So all these things have produced more revenue for the sports franchises, more TV revenue, more ticket revenue, and as a result, the franchise values have gone up.

23:40 Is it a profitable business? Because most people, obviously, we're in New York. Yankees, Dodgers, for sure. The Cubs, for sure. But then you think about smaller markets, you know, Oakland, where, you know, they had to move to Vegas. Florida has a tough time, right? The Marlins have a tough time attracting crowds. Kansas City. From that standpoint, if you're looking at the investment, I think most people think major markets, but the smaller markets, is it a profitable business?

24:06 Well, it depends on your definition of profitability. So if you say operating profit, very few baseball teams of the 30 baseball teams, very few have operating profits, which means to say the money they take in every year is greater than the money they spend on salaries and other expenses. Very few. The Dodgers are probably on an operating basis profitable because they sell a lot of equipment, and not equipment, but a lot of merchandise in Japan. Mm-hmm. They have a big following in Japan. I don't know if the Yankees are profitable or not, but the teams are all privately owned, so we don't really know the answer. But I would say baseball teams are not on an operating basis all that profitable. NFL teams on an operating basis

24:46 probably are because NFL is a cash cow unlike anything we've ever seen in professional sports before. And I think the NBA is increasingly moving towards profitability on an operating basis. I don't know about some of the other sports, but we also see now a lot of new sports are coming along. Because everybody says, well, I can't own an NFL franchise, but maybe I can own a pickleball franchise.

25:06 Or I could buy a Padel franchise. So people are spending more and more time in it. And then women's sports have become a bigger thing. You know, before the Title IX, women were not playing sports in the way they are now. Now you have professional sports leagues that are just for women, and they are doing pretty well financially.

25:23 I wonder, as you look out, I mean, we grew up in the Steinbrenner era here. Right. Contrary to you in Baltimore, we're Yankee fans. Right. when you look at how Steinbrenner approached ownership, and now I'm looking at how Mark Walters and the Guggenheim Group are, what they're doing with the Dodgers in terms of salaries and deferring it.

25:42 I wonder, how do you view that approach? Because it feels like they're doing it and it's successful. How come other major markets aren't doing it? Do you think it's sustainable?

25:52 Well, you know, when you enter into a long-term contract with a player, let's say 10 years or 15 years, You realize that you're overpaying because almost certainly the player at the end of the contract is not going to be as good as the player was in the beginning. But you recognize this will be maybe helpful to your franchise for a time. Right now, I think these long-term contracts have some controversy associated with them. We'll see whether they continue. Sometimes I think shorter ones work out. We entered in one with somebody who came from New York, Pete Alonzo. We have a five-year contract with him. We're very happy with him. He's done a terrific job for us. But, you know, when you get in the 10-year contracts or

26:32 20-year contracts, you know, you realize you're paying a lot more for the upfront part of the contract than in the back because in the back you're not likely to get as much value out of it. But I don't think that's a big problem. I think the biggest challenge you have in professional sports right now, I'd say, among other things, is you have to make sure that the smaller cities can compete with the bigger cities. Everybody wants to think that their team has a chance of winning. Otherwise, why would they show up at a game? And if people in Baltimore or Milwaukee or other small cities think they have no chance of beating the Dodgers or the Yankees, they're not going to show up and they're not going

27:05 to participate in the whole economics of the system isn't going to work. So what we're trying to do in baseball is make sure that everybody has a chance to win and everybody thinks that everybody has a chance to win. And clearly in the last couple of years, a team that had the biggest payroll won the championship twice in a row. And what we want to do is show that just having the biggest payroll doesn't guarantee a success.

27:26 Do you think?

27:27 I'm sorry.

27:28 Do you think a salary cap will ever happen in major league baseball?

27:32 You know, I've been trained by the commissioner of baseball to say that these are matters working, uh, being worked on by major league baseball and the commissioner. And I'm not really going to comment on that. Well done. Well done.

27:42 So the NFL and the NBA small markets do thrive because you have OKC, even Kansas city chiefs, right? Kansas city is a relatively small market. Um, And they have salary caps there. But they have rev share. Their collective bargaining agreement is a little different as well, right?

28:00 That's correct. You know, they have the NFL, the NHL, and the NBA all have some form of revenue sharing and salary caps. Major League Baseball does not, and we'll see what happens. So as far as baseball, right, are you optimistic? I mean, you're obviously optimistic because you purchased a team. But when you look at, the players get paid the most, but they're like number three. The league is number three, right? And a lot of, you could watch a game and it could be completely empty. I watch a Cleveland game and it's like 10 people in the stands. So just from a basic mathematical standpoint, right?

28:41 Like it doesn't seem like it's sustainable when players are getting billion dollar contracts almost. And I think obviously the major league baseball believes it would be better if we had some changes in the way the system works, for sure. And the NFL and the NBA are much more financially successful because of the things they've done that we haven't done.

29:03 But Major League Baseball will resolve all that at the end of the season because the contract with the players ends at the end of the season. I think it ends in December. And then there are negotiations before spring training. So we'll see what happens. It's too early to say.

29:16 Also, the second part to that is, do you think it's a grassroots problem as far as when you growing up, I'm pretty sure kids were playing stickball even, right? Like at a grassroots level, AAU basketball, football, and now soccer, less kids are playing baseball. You have in the Dominican Republic and Japan, you know, a lot but in america do you think it's a grassroots youth problem with kids playing baseball.

29:44 Well baseball when i was growing up that was the sport that people played in little league baseball was a big thing today you have basketball being a very attractive and then you have soccer being attractive and then football and um you know i would say uh it's changed from what it was. Also, let's say in the African-American community, um, we have relatively smaller percentage of African-American baseball players than we did 20 years ago. And as a result, you have a smaller number of African-American fans than you did 20 years ago. Um, young African-American boys, um, are often want to play basketball. And, um, that's a sport that, uh, you know, has a large percentage of people who succeed in it, who are African-Americans. Um, In baseball, it's different. Therefore,

30:30 you don't see as many role models for young Afro-American boys in baseball as you do in basketball or even football. So the world has changed. And obviously, we want to reverse it to some extent. We want to appeal more to minorities. We want to appeal more to people that aren't now currently seeing the Major League Baseball as appealing to them. As you mentioned, we have a lot of players in Major League Baseball who are from the Caribbean area.

30:54 And that's an area where we recruit a lot of people. But the population of the United States isn't as reflective of the population as it is of the players. In other words, you have sometimes higher percentage of Latino players than you have Latino in your population to some extent. We also, you know, we've got things we can do and we're working to do that. Yes, it's a bit of a challenge. You've been extremely successful in private equity.

31:23 When you took over the team, Well, prior to you taking over, the Orioles had 103 wins. 2025, obviously the wins went down.

31:32 This year has been a struggle. What have you learned about leadership in this time in sports that you probably brought over or you've had to change from your career in private equity?

31:43 Well, I've learned it's not as easy as I would like it to be. I've learned that a lot of other owners are smarter than me. It takes a while to build a team and rebuild a team. So you have to be patient. If you're not patient, you shouldn't be in professional sports. Very rarely does somebody buy a sports team and it wins a championship when nobody expected to do so, and that championship tenure continues for some time.

32:08 You have ups and downs in baseball. There are a lot of very talented owners in baseball who have not won a World Series. There are a lot of very talented managers who haven't won a World Series. So it's not as easy as you would like to think it would be. When I bought the team, they were in first place. Now I've managed a team that's not doing as well. So it's frustrating at times, but life is frustrating.

32:29 And if you can't take the heat, get out of the kitchen. If you can't take losing and you can't take the fans complaining about you, you shouldn't buy a sports team because fans are not going to praise you. If you're waiting for praise, as Harry Truman once said, you want somebody to praise you, buy a dog. But, you know, you can't expect sports fans to say the owner is wonderful and shouldn't make any changes. He or she is doing a great job. You're not going to get that in professional sports.

32:54 So.

32:55 Why the book? And yeah, why now for the book?

33:00 Well, when I was thinking about do I want to buy a sports team or not, I had avoided the temptation to do so. One of my friends in private equity bought sports teams. I made fun of them saying, you know, you're going to worry about your investors. How do you have time for sports? But it turned out they did pretty well and they made a fair amount of money. Eventually, I decided when the opportunity came along, maybe I should look at it. And then I did.

33:22 And then I wanted to put a book out. that would explain why people buy sports teams. By interviewing other owners, I think I can do that, and I think I did it. And then I want to explain my own story, why I bought a team. Why did somebody who didn't know much about professional sports decide to come back to his hometown, buy a team, and what has he learned from that? And that's why I did it.

33:41 Who did you interview? What other owners did you interview?

33:43 Well, I interviewed a lot of owners, but the ones that you probably would know very well is Bob Kraft, who's the owner of the New England Patriots. I interviewed... the owner of the Tony Ressler, the owner of the Atlanta Hawks. Interviewed Michelle Kang, who's the owner of the Washington Spirit, which is the women's soccer team. I interviewed the owner of the Chicago Cubs. I interviewed people in different sports and interviewed Rick Hendricks, who's a big sports car person in NASCAR. So I interviewed a lot of sports owners, and they all said consistently the same thing.

34:20 Winning is everything. That's what they really want to do. And they don't focus on the money as much as they'd focus on winning.

34:26 What type of owner are you? Hands on, right? Like you brought up Peter Lonzo, that deal. That was a big free agent signing for you guys. How hands on are you in the decision making?

34:37 I would say from reading in the newspapers and so forth, George Steinbrenner was more hands on than I am.

34:42 Maybe.

34:44 I would say. You know, I have other things I'm doing. Some owners have nothing else they're doing. This is their only thing they're doing. There's nothing wrong with that. And some owners go to every single game. This is a full-time job. I still have other jobs I'm doing. So I don't go to as many games as some of the owners. And I don't claim to be a baseball expert.

35:02 I've got people that I think know what they're doing, and I rely on them. So in the Pete Alonzo case, the person who serves effective is a general manager, but really his title is President of Baseball Operations, Mike Elias, he called me about it and we discussed it and we went ahead and did it. But, I mean, I'm not the person negotiating the deals with people like Peter Alonzo's agent, but I was aware of any financial matter, of any contract, of any substance, you know, the owner will get involved and I do get involved. But I'm not, you know, spending eight hours a day on it.

35:38 I'll bring up two names, Sam Kroenke, Josh Harris. I bring them up because they not only own sports franchises, but they own sports franchises in different leagues. Now that you've seen what it is to be an owner of a baseball team, does that entice you to say, let me explore maybe some other leagues as well?

35:58 Josh Harris bought a basketball team when he was still a very active person at Apollo. Then he later bought a hockey team. Now he owns a football team. He has a soccer team in England. He's marvelous at what he's been able to do, and teams have done okay under his leadership. And I think he's built a really good organization. I'm older than he was when he got into it. I think baseball is probably what I'm focused on right now. I want to see if I can turn the Orioles around before I decide to do anything else.

36:27 From a political standpoint, so you're like a lifelong Democrat, right?

36:31 I'm a registered independent. I worked in the White House for President Carter, but I don't make political contributions anymore. I abstain from that completely because I don't want to be labeled If I give money to a politician, he does something I don't like, I'm going to be blamed for it. So I don't give money to politicians, and I'm registered for many, many years as an independent. But go ahead.

36:50 Okay.

36:51 Well, what's your take on the political wave that's happening now with the Democratic Socialists, even in New York City, Mayor Mondani? And across, he's the leader, but there's this movement of Democratic Socialism.

37:03 I've been surprised at how much success it's had. but remember, we've had a small turnout in some of these elections that have occurred. I think the turnout for some of the primaries was 7% or so. In the United States, in a presidential election, you typically will have 65% of eligible voters voting. If you've got only 7%, you're probably going to have a different outcome than you would have if more people voted. But there's no doubt that the Democrats have to deal with this issue because if the Democrats gain control of the House, it's not clear that Hakeem Jeffries, who will be the Speaker of the House, is going to be able to control his caucus completely if he's got a few members who are members of

37:41 the Democratic Socialists. And then he's got AOC, who is a kind of power base unto herself. And so it won't be easy to be the Speaker of the House if your Democrats are in control, for sure.

37:54 But what does it say about America when the wealth disparity has gotten so large. I think that's really fueling a lot of it, right? It's like people can't buy homes. People are struggling to pay rent. And it's speaking to millions of Americans that are fed up with the system that we currently have in place as far as a lot of people think capitalism has run amok.

38:15 Capitalism is not a perfect system and it has its flaws for sure. Capitalism in Europe is operated much differently. There's a much bigger social safety net than we have here. higher taxes, but higher social safety net. Our country has gone for a different type of capitalism where the social safety net isn't quite as great as it is in Europe or other countries. Clearly, there's a lot of disaffection with people who are very wealthy in our country, but that's been true throughout the ages. No country has had a lot of wealthy people, and people who are not wealthy are in love with those people. It's never happened to be the case. There are a lot of very wealthy people now, and the income disparity in our country

38:54 is getting greater But another problem that's getting greater is the social mobility. It's one thing to be at the bottom of the social network and fabric and then think you can rise to the top. There's a phenomenon invented or coined the phrase in 1936 called the American Dream, where you believe that if you work hard, you can get to the top. I believe that when I was a boy and I got lucky and I worked hard and I got to the top. But many people don't believe it anymore, particularly in lower socioeconomic classes. Many people do not believe in the American Dream anymore. The people that tend to believe in the American dream now are people who are immigrants to this country. We have 55 million immigrants in this country, and they came here because

39:32 they thought the American dream was realistic. Many of them have been very successful. But people born here, particularly in lower socioeconomic classes, they very often give up, and they don't have a view that they can rise to the top. And we have one of the biggest problems that we don't address is illiteracy. we have roughly 19% of adults in this country can't read.

39:54 At all.

39:54 At all. And I don't mean they're immigrants who can't read. They can't read their native language either. They can't read at all. 80% of the people in the juvenile delinquency system in our country are functionally illiterate. And 67% or two-thirds of the people in our federal prison system are functionally illiterate. If you can't read, you have very little chance of succeeding in our society. And one of the ways that children learn how to read is their parents reading to them. And if a parent can't read, how that parent can't read to the child, the child is probably going to continue the cycle of illiteracy. It's a big problem, and it's something that I wish I had a solution for. Did I be in New Hampshire or Iowa?

40:33 But I don't have the answer for it. It's not easy to solve that problem.

40:36 It's getting worse because of artificial intelligence.

40:38 I was going to go there, but go ahead.

40:39 Artificial intelligence, I saw that it's actually getting worse because people don't even need to read anymore, or they're just— Things that they actually were required to read, now they're not reading. So the literacy rates are actually increasing. And some people say the artificial intelligence is the reason why it's actually increasing.

41:02 Artificial intelligence, as with the internet, there are one to two billion people on the face of the earth who don't have access to the internet. Those people are being left behind. And if you don't have access to and able to use artificial intelligence, you're going to be left behind. And I'm afraid we're going to have the same phenomenon we have with the Internet, which is some people don't have access to or knowledge of artificial intelligence. They're going to be left way behind. It's a problem.

41:26 I wanted to just touch on sports really quickly and get your thoughts because private equity has now come into professional sports and ownership specifically. Today, we heard 16% stake from Apollo Management into the Yankees, which is owned by the Steinbrenner family. Here in New York, we have the Morrow family that owns the Giants. There's some talks that private equity might step in there, or they may have.

41:50 What are your thoughts around that? Because people just think because people own a team that they, you know, obviously when they see the valuation of the team, they assume that the family has made money. But if they never sell shares of the team, you know.

42:04 Some families bought teams when they were very, very inexpensive. George Hallis' family bought a team, I think, when George Hallis... helped start the NFL for maybe $ 1, 000. And then his family, still 100 years later, still owns a piece of it. But that doesn't mean they're necessarily wealthy unless they were to sell stakes in the team. A lot of people don't have as much cash as you might think. When you have these reports in the Forbes, other places, of people's net worth, it doesn't say what their cash is.

42:33 And therefore, and it's harder to know that, but a lot of people have high net worths, but they don't have a lot of cash. And so in the case of sports ownerships, Some people have higher values for their ownership of their teams than they thought they'd ever be. And now they'd like to get some cash. They're selling minority stakes. And you're seeing more and more of that.

42:48 And private equity firms are going to increasingly probably buy stakes in professional sports teams.

42:54 I was going to say, do we predict that we'll see so many more teams having private equity stakes?

42:59 Well, if the values get higher and higher, you know, somebody who doesn't have a lot of cash who's an owner would say, maybe I'll take some money off the table. They're not selling control necessarily. Um, interestingly, when George Steinbrenner bought the New York Yankees, he only.

43:13 Put in $ 250, 000.

43:13 That was it. The purchase price was 8.8 million, but he didn't have a lot of, he didn't have $ 8. 8 million, I guess. So he put in $ 250, 000 and he syndicated it. Now the value of the team has worked much more, but his family went from time to time when they want to get some liquidity, they sell a piece. And that's exactly what happened with Apollo, the Apollo deal. The family, I guess, is selling up some piece of it, or maybe not the family, but other people who are investors in the Yankees. or selling some pieces to get some liquidity.

43:41 Speaking of like the Forbes list and how they list billionaires, we recently interviewed John Morgan from Morgan & Morgan. He's a billionaire and you're a billionaire. So he had an interesting perspective. Billion isn't what it used to be, but okay, go on. A billion isn't what it used to be. Well, let's stay there. So what is a billion now?

44:00 Well, I'm saying that facetiously because obviously when the Forbes list first came out in 19, I think 81, to be on the Forbes 400 list, it took a net worth of $ 125 million. There were hardly any billionaires then. Today, I think to be on the list, you probably need a net worth of three or four billion. So obviously gotten a lot more wealth associated with it. But anyway, your question is?

44:22 So he said, there's only 20 billionaires in America because in order to be a real billionaire, you have to have a billion dollars of liquid assets. He doesn't count a billionaire as far as your company is worth a billion dollars and that makes you a billionaire. What is your thoughts on that?

44:40 I hadn't thought about that before, but it's a point that is well worth making. You know, there are very few people who tomorrow can write a check for a billion dollars without having to sell something before they write that check. So there are people who could do it, but even the wealthiest people probably don't keep a billion dollars in cash in their bank account. They probably have it in stocks or in treasury bills or some other things. But, you know, there probably are There probably are very few people can write a billion dollar check tomorrow and without having to call up and say, sell this or sell that for sure.

45:14 Every December, there's something that we call the winter meetings. Well, in Major League Baseball, they call the winter meetings. Owners meet there. I wonder, as you know, you've probably seen that from the outside. I heard about it from the outside. Now you're inside those meetings. Is it do do guys get along at that level? Like how how does that?

45:34 feel inside those rooms?

45:34 Well, there's always a sense that when you're not on the inside of something, something important is happening on the inside that you don't know about. But when you get on the inside, you say, hey, there's nothing happening. That's not interesting.

45:44 FOMO. FOMO.

45:46 It's just, you know, so, you know, I'll always, you know, when I said, oh, I want to get invited to this party or that party or that event. And then when I finally get invited to them, I say, wow, what's the big deal? Why did I get invited? That's not that big a deal. So when you're in major league baseball meetings and There are very serious meetings. We have a commissioner that's done it for quite a while.

46:04 He's very well regarded by the owners. All the owners are, they get along. Yeah, I mean, I don't know that each other's best friends, but you don't see people yelling or screaming or anything like that. They don't have the kind of people in baseball anymore that yell or scream. Maybe they were there a long time ago, but not now.

46:19 So people tend to have their debates and they argue and we have votes. And generally, it's fairly unanimous when we decide to do something.

46:26 Not always.

46:27 But so I think all professional sports are probably that way The owners, the time you get to be an owner, you've made a lot of mistakes. You've learned how to get along with other people. You realize yelling and screaming doesn't probably carry the day. And so people tend not to do that. So you don't see people yelling or screaming.

46:44 I haven't seen it. If you're going to yell and scream, you probably do it out of sight and people aren't going to see you.

46:50 I want to go back to something because that billion isn't the same billion. That's an interesting commentary that you made because even if you look at the stock market, right, it took 80 years- to have a first trillion dollar company. And now there's, how many trillion dollar companies is there?

47:05 Eight? 13? 13?

47:07 In five years. And as you said, before there was a couple of billionaires, now there's thousands of billionaires.

47:13 Right.

47:15 We have a trillion, we had a trillionaire, it kind of fluctuates. The devaluation of money, right? How concerning is this as far as how rapidly it's happening? Like how rapidly- We go from having no trillion-dollar companies to having 13 trillion-dollar companies, having a couple of billionaires to having thousands of billionaires. How rapid is the value of money actually decreasing?

47:40 Well, I think that's not our biggest social problem. It's a problem, but not the biggest problem. The biggest problem is we don't have enough people at the bottom. We have too many people at the bottom who don't have any money at all. That's the bigger social problem, and we have to obviously figure out a way to get more people who have wealth They kind of figure out how they can contribute more to the bottom of society.

48:00 Societies don't rot because there are too many billionaires. They rot because there aren't enough people who have money and can get along and make the societies thrive. You've never seen a revolution because there are too many billionaires at the top. You see revolutions occur when there's dysfunction in government, when people at the bottom don't feel they're adequately taken care of. And that's the bigger problem in all societies.

48:27 It's an interesting quote. You said your biggest financial regrets were investments you passed on, including Meta and Amazon. What have those moments taught you?

48:39 Well, it reminds me how lacking in intelligence I am in judging some things. In the case of Meta now, or it was then Facebook, my now son-in-law was at Harvard and he was a classmate of Mark Zuckerberg's and he was a classmate of his in prep school as well. He told me about this company and he told me they were trying to raise $ 30, 000 or something. And as he described it to me, it was a company that was going to help people get dates at Harvard. And then they were expanded to Yale and Princeton. It was really a dating service for people at elite schools. And I said, look, I've seen that in the 1960s. There were dating companies. They're not going to survive. So I didn't put in the $ 30, 000. One of Mark's Zuckerberg's roommates,

49:21 Eduardo Saverin, did do it. And I think that $ 30, 000 he put in, or maybe it's $ 15, 000 he put in, is now worth about $ 50 billion. So I regret that.

49:33 What about the Amazon?

49:34 I didn't do it.

49:34 What's the Amazon story?

49:36 When Amazon, what happened was we owned the biggest book distributor in the United States called Baker and Taylor. And it turns out a young guy came to our Baker and Taylor salespeople and said he was going to sell books over the internet, but he needed a bibliography of books on the internet, a bibliography of books in print in order to sell books over the internet. So our salesman said, well, we don't give it out. And they said, well, I'd like to rent it from you. And he said, well, I don't have any cash. And he said, I'll give you, I think it was 20% of the company I'm starting in return for letting me use the bibliography. And our guy turned him down. But eventually our guy said, look, pay us $ 100, 000 a year for five years and we'll

50:17 rent it to you. And then Jeff Bezos did it. Later, I heard about this and said, geez, maybe we should have taken a piece of the company. So I flew out to see Jeff Bezos when he was starting his company. He was in a little warehouse in Seattle. And I said, look, our guy took $ 100, 000 a year for five years. I'll take the stock deal, 20%. But he said, well, David, that was two years ago. I don't really need you as much, but I'll give you some stock. I think he gave us 1% of the company, which of the IPO we then sold. So if I'd held on to it, it'd be worth many billions of dollars. So I've made a lot of mistakes like that. What can I say?

50:53 Who would have thought that Amazon, remember Jeff Bezos was only going to sell books over the internet. We ended up selling everything and then doing other things. That was not the original concept, but I wish I was smarter.

51:06 What's the best investment that you made or some of the best investments that you actually made?

51:09 The best investment was putting in money into getting Carlisle off the ground because it turned out to be pretty good and I'm pretty happy with it. Hopefully my best investment will be the Baltimore Orioles. There you have it.

51:21 Yes, despite us being Yankee fans. My last question is this. Obviously you have a network of people that have high net worth. Would you advise them to look into investing in sports franchises?

51:36 I would say if you know what you're doing, if you do it because you enjoy the sport and you do it at a reasonable valuation and you kind of recognize you're not going to necessarily get your money back with a profit in the short term, yeah, I'd say it's an interesting thing to do. But remember, if you're buying a minority stake in a team, it's different than you're buying the control. A minority stake in the team, sometimes you're a very expensive season ticket holder, but you're not really controlling the players or anything. But if you really want to buy control of something, that's a more complicated issue. I would say to most people, you know, if you really love sports, you really want to make

52:14 a contribution to society, it's a good way to do so. But if you don't love sports and you're not really interested in some philanthropic gesture to your community, probably it's not for you.

52:23 Before we leave, a couple more just geopolitical questions. China. How do you view China in this AI race as a political force, as a military force? Like, what is your thoughts on China?

52:36 Well, China was a country that we largely ignored in the West after Mao Zedong took over China and made it communist. Not until Richard Nixon went there, after Henry Kissinger had previously gone there, that we kind of reopened China to the world. And then under President Clinton, we allowed them to become members of the WTO. Now China is the United States' biggest rival in almost everything, technology, economy, all kinds of things. I think China is a country that is probably going to, you know, it's a bigger, more population than we have. It has a bigger economy than we do if you measure by purchase price parity as opposed to GDP. I think it's a mistake to think that we can ignore what China is doing. China

53:23 is our biggest rival. When Russia was our biggest rival many, many years ago, there was a rival on geopolitical issues and military issues. But China is a rival on economic issues. It's a rival on technological issues, much more complicated rival and more significant rival than Russia was. So I think China will be, for the next 50 years or so, are the main rival of the United States in almost everything.

53:46 Does that make Taiwan probably the most important geopolitical risk going forward? Obviously, from a tech standpoint, what they produce?

53:55 Well, you know, leaders of the Communist Party in China want to be significant. The most significant was Mao Zedong, and he recapture China for the communist party. And then, uh, Deng Xiaoping made it the most, uh, much more significant economy. I think Xi Jinping would like to be a significant great leader. And generally under the communist party charter, um, Taiwan is part of China. So he would like to recapture it at some point, but he may not have to do it militarily. He may do it for economic or other reasons, but I think right now Xi Jinping's view is I can't speak for him. I've met him, but I can't speak for him. Um, I would say, you know, one time I met him and I made a little joke. I said, there's an old saying in

54:38 China that a trip of a thousand miles begins with a fortune cookie. And he said, no, that's an American fortune. I'm sorry, I got it wrong. The trip of a thousand miles begins with a first step. And he said, no, no, no, that's not an old Chinese saying. That's an American fortune cookie saying. But I would say Xi Jinping is now among the most respected leaders in the world because he hasn't invaded any country. His economy is doing reasonably well.

55:07 He's pretty well respected. He's touring the world now. He's in the United States soon. And I think he's a very well-respected person. There are some issues now about his health, but I think China is a country that the United States is going to have to deal with for quite some time.

55:20 What are you most optimistic about as far as investments in the next 20 years? Is it AI?

55:26 Is it crypto?

55:27 Is it?

55:28 What are you, international?

55:29 Well, it's hard to say. In 20 years down the road, it's so hard to predict. I would say, I would think technology will continue to be a very important thing for the United States to be a leader in. Among the things I think will be important in the future will be something like CRISPR technology, things that can enable you to make genetic changes. I think that will be very important. I think fusion will be very important, which is enable you to have energy that's let's say, cleaner and in many ways safer than what we have now in some areas and without some of the problems that we currently have with energy. And then I would say also certain types of computers, new types of computer technology will probably advance over the kind of computer technology we

56:17 have now.

56:19 In terms of retail investing, I know in December, the NASDAQ is going to be, you're going to be able to trade for 23 hours a day tokenized equities. What's your thoughts around all this new craze around retail?

56:34 Well, there's an old saying, money never sleeps, right?

56:38 No, it doesn't.

56:39 And so I guess right now markets, we have to get used to markets basically being open all the time and you have to get used to it. So I suspect that we'll get used to it. It won't be that big a change in the end, but people can get in and out of markets whenever they want to. That's probably a good idea. What's your thoughts on crypto?

56:56 I'm sorry?

56:56 Cryptocurrency.

56:58 I missed that. When crypto came along, I didn't think it would be taken seriously, but I was wrong, as I often am. And now crypto, I think with the current administration, has been very, very supportive of crypto. If the Democrats were to regain control of the government, I think crypto might be more challenged because I think they're not as supportive of crypto as maybe the current administration has been, which has its own cryptocurrency, I think, or something like it. So I would say crypto... you have to really be certain of what you're doing and make sure that you prepare to lose a fair bit of what you have in crypto because it can change very quickly.

57:36 But right now, I've been wrong on crypto. I didn't think Bitcoin would get as high as it has been, but a lot of my friends who bought Bitcoin are doing quite well.

57:47 Inside the owner's box, I'll leave you on a baseball question. The greatest non-Oreo player that you've seen?

57:55 There's no doubt. The greatest baseball player I've ever seen was Willie Mays. Now, when I grew up in Baltimore, you couldn't see him except in World Series and or All-Star games. And as Ted Williams said, Willie Mays was made for All-Star games. He used to have two All-Star games a year for a couple of years. And he was the greatest player ever I ever saw. I'd say right after him, probably Hank Aaron was the second greatest player I ever saw. Not counting any Orioles, of course.

58:22 But I would say. Willie Mays was worth the price of admission to see him, in my view. Just an incredible athlete in his peak. Okay.

58:31 Well, thank you for your time. And who should get the book? Who is the book designed for?

58:36 The book is designed for people that want to understand why people buy sports teams and what the owners of sports teams are like and kind of gives them their personality and talks a little bit about why I bought a team and maybe people care about why people buy sports teams might enjoy the book. It's Kind of an easy read, and I think you don't need to have artificial intelligence to be able to read this book.

59:00 We got to promote literacy. That's very important.

59:02 Okay. Well, thank you all very much. Appreciate it.

59:04 We appreciate you.

59:05 Thank you.

59:06 All right. There you have it, guys.