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Hi everybody and welcome to In Good Company and today I'm here with David Rubenstein.

David is the founder and chairman of the Carlisle Group, one of the biggest private equity firms.

And he also hosts the David

Rubenstein Show, where he interviews prominent leaders in business and so on. And earlier this

year, I had the pleasure of being on your show. So this is like revenge time, actually, David.

Well, thank you for inviting me and you were great on my show. And anytime you want to come back,

please let me know.

You were an advisor in the White House at age 27, and now you were here.

Just what are the highlights in your life since then?

I mean, briefly.

Well, briefly, I came from very modest stock.

My parents were not graduates of college or high school.

They both dropped out of high school.

They were married young.

I was their only child. So I grew up in a blue collar setting. And, you know, so if you grow up

in that setting, you have to make it on your own. So there's a plus about that. My own children

have had some advantages that I didn't have. But I was only interested in politics and government at the time and I was young. I had no interest in making money. In the days of the 1960s or so, there were no hedge funds, private equity funds, tech startups. There were no billionaires. And you didn't aspire to be a billionaire. And my family was Jewish. If you were Jewish and you wanted to go into business, you wanted your family's business.

If you didn't have a family business, you became a lawyer, a doctor, or dentist, and that's what your mother, my mother, aspired me to be.

And you became a lawyer.

I became a lawyer because I wasn't that good in sciences, and I thought I was interested in politics. And being a lawyer, you could go into politics. And my role model was John Kennedy's advisor.

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