Tom Barrack | وراء الوجوه - مقابلة مع توم برّاك

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[Music] [Music] so thank you for being with us tonight it's a pleasure to have you uh you're the chairman and chief executive officer of colony inc your field of business is really state investment and management firms you had a key role in the reagan campaign and you served in the oregon administration as deputy under secretary of interior colony what an interesting name for a real estate company you have already invested all over the states europe and several islands do you plan to financially colonize the whole world one of those days no actually quietly quite the opposite um our our investment strategy has been based on a lebanese philosophy actually of adaptability so we invest in places with people and asset classes and categories that most institutional investors are nervous about investing so my personal investment philosophy is to find places that others don't like to go and go first this is a philosophy acquired with time yes this is the the philosophy acquired out of practice and a desire to find life at the edge and i think there's a great cowboy american cowboy poet who said that we all live life by the tune of a drummer which beat lies just over the edge but we can't really hear the music or dance to the rhythm until our toes are dangling right on the ledge so we like to be on the ledge tomorrow before trying to dig in and to go deeper into your businesses worldwide businesses i'd like to go back to sally 70 years ago your father as i said at the beginning of the introduction had the grocery shop his name was abdullah al-barak what took him to the states what were the circumstances that led him to leave lebanon and to start a new life and establish it over there yeah an amazing story and i think our story is just one of the of the simple threads in in a quilt which was the the fabric of of lebanon at the turn of the century of how these these young boys and and young girls uh left their homes and their families in lebanon at the hands of their weeping mothers who were putting them on ships with unknown names sailing to places of unknown identity and at dolo when he left with joseph at the age of nine years old was put on a ship that was intended to go to south america and in those days of course no one knew whether the ships were going to south america south africa or america and he ended up coming through the statue of liberty and ellis island at the age of nine of course knowing no one because he was getting off the ship in the wrong place and the rest of the story is a story of passion and love and intense desire that's typically lebanese of taking this young boy at nine who in every desert would create a little and every bad situation would find something good and who built a life for his new family as a baker from nothing in america and i often tell my children that this is an amazing intersection of civilization where you take the texture of a lebanese heart adaptability and desire mix it with the freedom of a place like america and in two generations my father can leave in the belly of a cargo ship going to nowhere and i can come back in the cabin of my own airplane quite remarkable quite remarkable and and the tribute i think is this dna this genealogy of lebanese all over the world they have a fantastic ability to create and survive how much of your father is still living in you it's a it's a great question and i i hope that he continues to live and thrive inside and as a as a young as a young man i think my experience is typical of most or many of the lebanese immigrants we grow up in countries outside of lebanon always knowing that there's something in us that's different that there's some quality there's some characteristic there's some drive that makes us unique most of us cannot work for anybody i often joke with my friend saying i had to be where i am because i couldn't keep a job it was impossible to work for somebody else and every lebanese all over the world when you ask them what do they do they're a businessman but that this flexibility of of thought of personality of point of view is is the greatest gift and adaptability the the patience the ferocity the tenacity the boldness that the lebanese have all over the world is is a gift and i hope that i borrowed from him those characteristics and married them with a discipline of a of a profession but the part that i'm most proud of are those characteristics that i borrowed from that lebanese pool of dna is your father with mr rise oh yes um my father's an incredible man that lacked the financial education and discipline but by far was the smartest man that uh that i've ever known never lost his humility never lost his footing never allowed me to lose my humility or footing and as a young man said it's it's it's really very simple that either you're the number one smartest person in the world at what you do and then you can survive or you need to be prepared and people need to like you and if you're not prepared and if people don't like you you won't be successful so it was this it was a lesson that i early understood and that i still try and practice preparation in life is 95 of the panel when you stare at the glass but you see i always see the glass as half full i never see the glass as half empty and what i've learned in staring at the glass is what's interesting for me is not what's in the glass it's the process of staring at the glass nice answer so it's not really the trophy but the race it's not really the quarry but the chase where we all find that intersection of passion is the chase once we arrive at the goal we just move the goal line further and we start again throughout our speech i'm facing a very calm man and throughout our discussion i'm discovering somebody who's always on the go as if i'm seeing a volcano living deep inside of you how are you able to reconciliate those two aspects uh it's an interesting perspective my my attitude quite honestly is that i would pay to do the job that i do but it's it really is a gift and that i have the opportunity to learn things to meet amazing new people the opportunity to be frustrated the opportunity to have my expectations not met but that passion of keeping the discipline of understanding that that is the purpose the purpose is the adventure that the result is relatively unimportant so i've never really focused on worrying about the particular outcome of a circumstance i focused about the integrity of the moment and found that as long as i can keep that moment straight and characteristic the rest of it all falls into place so that's my business philosophy what do you think your missionary life is is it to make money is it to perpetuate money it's is it to multiply your fortune is it to spread beauty is it to create job opportunities what is your task what is your mission in life i think my mission in life is very simple it's to push myself beyond all known comfort barriers and with that to drag as many people through those comfort barriers of their own as i can so as an entrepreneur hiring thousands of people around the world my task is not to provide the economics or wealth of their life my job is to challenge them to go to that next level that inhibits them that intimidates them that blocks them from moving and show them that they can just destroy those walls of comfort and on the other side they'll somehow find peace of mind you said something very important in this part of the interview that the lebanese immigrant leaves in the belly of a cargo and it turns either in a private jet or in the first class cabin of airplane how did you make it it's an important question we're talking today to the giant tom barack but we'd like to go deeper and know how he made it how he was able to build this empire and i was able to become what he is today i think the simple answer is the grace of god for all of us really at the end of the day life is is good fortune but the pieces of the answer i actually see every day on the streets in lebanon is the paradox of life and if you go to america if you go to canada if you go to places in asia and ask them what their view of lebanon is it's it's very confused because it's a country of paradox and when i come here and you fly in over the lights of tyre and sidon and you land in beirut and you hear the salah going off in the mosque and on the midday afternoon walk into la plage and as you pass the woman in the hijabs have men in three thousand dollar brioni suits smoking cohiba cigars the most beautiful women in the world sitting around the pool waiters who speak five languages and make a hundred and fifty dollars a week businessmen that speak seven languages and they come back to recreate on the weekends the christians the muslims the jews the palestinians the hezbollah the syrians the americans this this melange this mixture of civilization which creates a texture and that texture inside of the lebanese gives them this amazing cultural sixth sense and i think that the attribute that i have that gives me a competitive advantage in a marketplace such as america and europe is this cultural sixth sense this ability that the lebanese have to find the walls of civilization wherever they are put them in the middle of west africa and all of a sudden you feel a civilization you find this cultural middle man that knows how to marry the barbaric with the future and and this is nothing any of us can take credit for it's the dna of 11 000 years of having the milieu and the melange of the world i think this is the key this texture this osmosis of communities or this blend of communities you just raised muslims christians jewish different political parties why do you think that outside lebanon or abroad we never talk about them the lebanese outside is only lebanese but the lebanese in lebanon is categorized or is put in a specific category i think that as lebanese this is one of our greatest assets and attributes outside and it's also our damnation which is lebanese that leave lebanon where they go they become that place and we're very bad at organizing because you put a hundred of us in a room you have a hundred different opinions on exactly the same issue we look at this cup of coffee and we all see a different cup a different texture yet when we are in a different culture we become that culture that adaptability that ability to just amorphous eyes into that culture we lose we give up a bit of our own identity so when we come back we're starved for that identity yet when we go out it becomes diluted it becomes non-effective and we've learned that in order for us to be effective the less dominating we are the less lebanese we are the better we adapt to the environment which we're in so unlike other cultures that when they go to a country organize stick together plan plot for the culture we do the opposite and as a result we're probably more successful but we dilute a little bit of of that individuality that we feel when we're here tamarack effectively our cups of coffee are so different we're gonna stop for a break have another coffee and they'll get back to you great thank you tonight behind faces with a giant tomarak stay with us we'll get back to you after this break [Music] i'm trying to get one word in arabic ah is it so difficult no no no no no no the interview in arabic and be very short one of your latest achievements for the purchase of starwood's cost esmelda holdings from the agakon for 340 million dollars hoping to develop the coast your enterprise started as a love story of a virgin place that you are planning to construct now aren't you afraid that your business ambitions will finally end up by disfiguring sardinia's most beautiful beaches yeah actually my my business ambitions are exactly the opposite this is uh one of those times where passion and taste translates into business good sense by concentrating on scarcity sardinia for me is a great adventure in senseless elegance it's not about volumetry it's not about concrete it's actually about what's not there the the beauty of sardinia is this intersection of strength and power and tumultuousness sardinia is a very strong place uh in ancient times fourteen thousand years ago they viewed it as a seventh continent so in an average week in sardinia you will experience every weather condition every wind condition every sunset every sunrise imaginable and i've often analogized it to the personality of a gorgeous woman at that moment that you become comfortable she will do something to make you uncomfortable and at that intersection of beauty and volatility you find passion so my goal is to be a steward of what god naturally put there the aga khan did a great job 40 years ago at creating a concept of building a petite sauvage island that had an architecture which was invented because along that coastline in sardinia there really hadn't been a historic architecture phoenicians had actually populated cal yeti thousands of years before as they had sicily but along this coastline it was relatively desolate so the essence of sardinia is to afford all of us an opportunity to experience scarcity not volumetry so the coastline will not change it won't become marbella it won't become mallorca you won't have high-rise condominium buildings coming up on the sea i view my job as a steward in a long chain of ownership of this beautiful necklace and my job is to leave it a little bit better than i found it not to tarnish it not to destroy it what do you want to concur and whom do you want to conquer actually the opposite rather rather than conquest um i would like to become a participant and my goal is to participate more in things that i don't understand and i found that the conquest in life that we really glean fulfillment is the conquest of our own egos and the people that i'm most impressed in my life with are those that i find agendalist those that i'm searching for their ego not those that present their ego as they shake my hand so my goal is actually quite the opposite do you think that life concurred you or you did concur life yourself i learned that it's impossible to conquer life so that as long as you choose to go where life wants to take you you'll be quite happy and to the extent that you don't you'll be quite unhappy and life deals us all moments of bliss and moments of agony and compassion with each other in those moments of bliss and moments of agony and an understanding that we're not really responsible for either i think uh khalil gibran in in the prophet had a series of of of amazing moments and amazing phrases but he had one that related to our children and that the children were like arrows that are drawn against a beautiful bow that we had something to do with the creation of the bow and something to do with the creation of the arrow but once that arrow fires we can't take credit for whether it hits the target or misses it it has its own life and i think that this is true with all of us you're calm outspoken good communicator good diplomat but you abandon politics and the question is why did you drop politics and dedicate yourself exclusively to business i was a terrible politician i had no i had no patience for politics i was i was privileged to be able to serve in the reagan administration and the essence to politics is consensus to be a good politician my belief is you have to be able to engineer the lowest common denominator so to give you an example the efficacy of any decision as a politician is to weigh a divergence of point of views and come up with a point of view that's acceptable to everybody in that i find mediocrity the process of coming up with a political solution is the process of engaging in mediocrity and i find the most frustrating part of my life being mediocrity so as a young man i decided that i would be an abject failure as a politician but that if i didn't have to abide by consensus if i could raise everybody's common denominator rather than lower people's common denominator that i could find at least my own internal happiness so the political process is an important one it takes unbelievable leaders unbelievable visionaries you have them here i think all of the microcosms of the political situation in lebanon which have really great leaders on all sides and the lebanese love to complain about everything political but actually we have some of the most brilliant political leaders here right in our own confines such as such as uh all of them i think if you took all of the segments of your political regime um from the president to the prime minister to the leader of the house to the leader of every religious segment they're mental with courage i think you're being very diplomatic here i i don't think so i think i think somebody who sacrifices their own personal privacy for the sake of a cause is courageous you can agree with them or you cannot agree with them but it's that constant tension that produces the right answer sometimes we don't like the answer but it's that knocking on each other's door which ultimately provides the correct answer i don't have that kind of courage i don't have that kind of interest in finding that common denominator so i found that my comfort level is trying to become a visionary creating jobs leading lives but doing it by raising the common denominator but i guess when somebody's trying to defend the cause or to work for the cause a noble one and when he tries to use it as a tool for his own cause i think it changes a lot absolutely and i think the process eventually will erode that person's ability to lead and consequently do you think that big businessmen need to be in a politically sphere or need a political sphere as they mean to succeed in business or not only to succeed but to make the business proliferate and look more and become easier it's a it's an excellent question and my answer is that it's different in different places that in many third world or emerging markets it's helpful to have a business background because the politician has a real understanding of the economic basis of what will drive that economy first in more developed environments and more developed countries we find that there's professional politicians who really have no business experience so if we took france as an example of a great professional diplomatic national political union as a young person if you go to polytechnique you will be trained in the art of being a politician you won't be trained in the art of being a businessman yet in a third world environment or an emerging market nation many of the political leaders were born out of the business environment because their exposure to the rest of the world came from business at some point in time in the development of those places a professional political environment ensues and those business interests have to be separately defined separately constrained and separately understood because they can always present the appearance of a conflict of interest for somebody who's been given the responsibility to lead the people but i think that's something that that happens over time and of course if we look around the world it hasn't seemed to work well anywhere ralph lander who's also a lebanese-american businessman seems to have chosen the opposite way and never wanted to abandon politics do you consider you'll ever come back to this field one day for me no i really have no interest in in the political world other than helping to influence decisions and processes by being a small businessman on the outside who can shed some practical light on the experience for other politicians to lead so morocco we're going to have another commercial break and then we get back to you thank you stay with us [Music] [Music] you've been very close if not part of the jet set society for years how do you look at this world i look at it as a a voyeur of life that that the so-called jet set is merely in search of an experience which they've not yet had and as they engage in more experiences around the world it becomes more and more difficult for them to find this unique experience that gives them an emotion that gives them an adventure that gives them a sense of being that they that they haven't had so i don't really view it as a participant i view it as watching the participants and i analogize it to a roller coaster in an amusement park you can either choose to be in the front car of the roller coaster as you're going up the hill and down and you then share that exhilaration as you go up and that fright as you go down or you can view it as standing back in the parking lot and watching everybody else going in the roller coaster and i've chosen to stand in the parking lot and watch the roller coaster you found today a more and more arab businessman in this circle yes absolutely um you know the world is uh is a paradox in every essence that relates to the middle east and at a time where the world is searching for an understanding of a very complex arena 50 oil creates another set of problems within the arab world which is a massive redeployment of their own wealth at a time where the arab world becomes more suspect of the west and the west is already more suspect of the east and breeding tolerance and understanding out of both of those intersections is is quite a challenge so i think that the arab businessman always led by a lebanese someplace for every fifty dollar barrel of oil there's twenty dollars of that barrel being invested somewhere in the world and some lebanese making two dollars off of that twenty dollars someplace in the world and that cultural sixth sense that that middle man that lebanon has always served in being the place where east meets west starts to create an education on both sides the east has to become more adept at dealing with the west the west has to be more tolerant and understanding of dealing with the east and the natural intersection for that to happen within is business if you think of the oil business oil is produced in the middle east but it's not consumed in the middle east so the ironic coincidence of aggravation between west and east is one out of necessity because it's the west who's consuming all the resources that the east is harvesting and as generations proceed i think the challenge is really that the arab businessman the american businessman the asian businessman have to invest more in the education of the future generations and out of that will come a political tolerance and a religious tolerance just as they found the intersection for business tolerance and this is happening now out of the next generation of air businessmen and we've gone from phoenicians trading up and down the world across the spice road being the intersection to the then known world to globalization and globalization is today whether you invest in dollars whether you invest in rials whether you invest in lebanese pounds whether you invest in japanese yen it's an instantaneous and everybody has access to that world market and the challenge for the arab world is to find and be comfortable with what the place within that global structure is and you can also invest in human talents such as you did with the lebanese architect nursery nakib when you joined him from new york to sardinia one of the best in new york another great example of of your fantastic culture and the exporting of talent and the return of town we have scattered friends all over the world among them palestinian businessmen hebrew israelis european asians russians chinese how do you pick and select your friends integrity is at this point in my life i choose to be with only people that i like to be with people of all nationalities have great contributions have varied interests are fun to be with but at the end of the day what we all need is trust and reliability and the most frustrating things in life is when our expectations of that trust or that reliability are not met so i've just chosen to not be frustrated by not associating myself with people that i find untrustworthy and that's the common factor that i find throughout the world in every culture tom rock what brings you to your homeland desire of what of finding myself amazingly enough i'm not smart enough to do business in lebanon all my american friends say well this is great so you're going back to lebanon to do business and i say are you crazy these people are so smart that i am like an anchovy on a caesar salad come on come on i would be consumed so quickly trying to attempt to do business with lebanese in lebanon in their own backyard but what i do find is myself and in the in the midst of the mountain villages sitting on the balcony of elmo near and brumanna in the summer and looking at the valleys and thinking that that's the way my grandfather would come from rumana to beirut watching the the intersection of of life in the streets the the the kids smoking at giles at three in the morning and solid air the abject poverty of of bullet-ridden buildings next to five million dollar condominiums the rolls-royce corniches next to a beggar in the middle of the street this constant paradox this constant paradigm i somehow find peace and contentment which is frightening that in the midst of the chaos i find a bit of myself so my reason to be here is a an adventure to return my soul to my own body in a way you mentioned the word desire of finding yourself what are you looking for are you searching for your identity for your roots or for something else i think i i think we're all looking for our roots i'm looking for that formula to the elixir which was the magic of allowing me to have the life i have and what i'm feeling constantly as as i return to this place and these people it's like unwrapping an onion each time i take another layer off the onion each time i find a little more of myself in the confusion of what's in front of me and it's calming it's peaceful it's enlightening it's humbling you once said that the lebanese are generous they will welcome you they'll feed you they'll open their wallet for you but they'll most likely end up by getting your wallet did this happen with you uh no it never it never has happened with me i i think if you ask most international business people what their perception or what their experience at the intersection with a lebanese businessman we have a negative connotation and the negative connotation is and i've said before to friends is that a lebanese will give you their shirt give you their wallet give you their time and ultimately will probably end up with yours but this is the art of life it's the way that society here has been dealt with because we're not living off natural resources of the place the natural resources the people for the for the people to exist and survive it's always it always has been this cultural middleman and through 20 years of war and tumultuousness and volatility and the resurgence of all the bright young people in lebanon some of them going out some of them coming back some of them being educated some of them not the resourcefulness of the people has been to survive and without making an ethical or cultural judgment standards are are different so i think the the challenge has been that business gets done differently in the middle east than it does other places it gets done differently in asia the naivete of an american businessman walking into a foreign jurisdiction and saying i don't speak the language i don't understand the culture i don't understand the business practices but i want to dictate on this culture my way of doing business is very naive and very presumptuous and it's why americans have traditionally been very bad at moving through the world doing business so you adapt to the culture that you're in and i just understand that the lebanese businessmen here are very smart and they're very good in their own work they're much smarter than me they understand their market much better so in a competitive sense i have no advantage so my advantage is to take advantage of the place of the people of the poetry at dinner of the music and the evenings of the taste of the air even with the pollution and the grayness i find a bit of myself and not frustrate myself by throwing myself into a competitive environment in which i'm destined to fail you know through your words and speech i'm seeing somebody who is deeply in love with lebanon and i'm wondering how you're able to be raised and to be fed with that love and between records you always call lebanon mother lebanon how come it's it's how i feel i think uh and and thanks to my parents and our culture that when when they left and went to a strange land which was always a strange land to them my grandfather used to always lament as he would sit on his swing in his backyard eating kibby nye every sunday and drinking attic with my father that the blessing was that he would die in a country of freedom in which he was able to create a life for his children and the agony was he would never know his neighbors i never understood what he meant until i came back here he died not knowing his neighbors on either side of his own house when i first came to lebanon i went to my aunt's house and i started to understand no one would ever think of calling and saying can i come over and have a cup of coffee are you home can i come and see you and this this this this ability of of community and identity and and ease was what he was talking about so it never left he had it in his heart my father had it in his heart and i've been given the gift of being able to rediscover a bit of it tomorrow have you tried to get to lebanese passport well i i feel my my lebanese nationality is carried with me around the world by who i am and what my attitude towards the country is and that's really the most important part of it to me that's how you spread it yeah i i spread it when people feel a bit of lebanese hospitality they never forget it they never forget it so my contribution and spreading the word is to try and let them have an insight into who the people are which will then give them a little scintilla of interest of trying to understand what the place is this is all i can do there is also a definition part in you which reflects the lebanese identity too don't you think so yeah no for sure i i often tell that to my wife when she complains that i'm never home i said look our ancestors would have said honey i'll be home in seven years i'm sailing from aleppo to gibraltar call me when the children get to college and would never take any abuse have you maintained close relations with the lebanese abroad yes more and more what's very interesting is i think that there's a resurgence in the second and third generation lebanese if you if you look at the at the immigration of the lebanese at the at the turn of the century the the first wave that left many of them left in trauma during a difficult period of time so they raised families with the thought that they would probably never go back then that second generation which was born in those foreign countries australia brazil argentina colombia north america started established lives in those countries with some interest and some connection to what happened in lebanon then as the war broke out and many of your youth left to go elsewhere during the the interim of this war that second generation was exposed again the young lebanese who were immigrating into those markets once again and started to get this curiosity about you know what is my home what are these roots and i think that what you find now as you do traveling all over the world is these lebanese wherever they are have been successful whether they're artists whether they're poets whether they're business people they've evolved in these communities and now at this point in their life at the end of the second generation or the beginning of the third generation are all starting to be interested in their roots once again so i find a sense of community amongst we immigrants who have not really experienced lebanon to be a constant topic and i think it's a it's a great tribute to all of you and it's also a resource that i think eventually can be tapped that will help luck enough the last break before we end up this interview with tomarak stay with us [Music] [Music] [Music] himself himself i think the lesson that i've learned from having the opportunity or the privilege of being with dealing with observing powerful men is that as they become more powerful they tend to become more insecure more more fearful of others intentions less willing not more willing to experiment of themselves the fear that that formula of success was really luck and every powerful person around the world whether they admit it or not is constantly challenged with that dilemma did i do it or did the cosmos do it do you hear temptations no i succumb to temptations you have the power you have the money you have the connections you have the faith what do you want more besides the the hope of things that we all want this health for our children tolerance in the world this intersection of understanding on a personal basis i want to keep challenging people to push beyond their comfort barriers i think that the ability that i have the niche that i have the gift that i have been given is to torment as many people as i can to find their own natural talent by shattering that wall in front of them that we all have of not wanting to extend beyond the confines of what's easy for them and and i find that spot exciting you know something i've noticed an important thing tonight that you are very idealistic in your answers and there is a big utopia in what you're saying when i've talked when i've asked you about your success story and how you made it you're extremely idealistic don't give me a concrete answer and then you talked about the clashes of the different lebanese groups and communities also you looked at it in a positive way without even mentioning the word clash which effectively exists tombarak are trying to escape from the answer by giving another one a substitute which will please people and which gives a positive opinion about yourself the answer to your question is i hope i'm trying to give people a positive opinion about myself because i would be a fool to give an interview in which my objective was to give a negative opinion by myself so i think your question in that regard is absolutely correct the simple answer is if you took an example of an investment and i look at an investment and say i'm going to buy this company i have two choices in evaluating my decision i cannot discuss this with anyone or i can go to five of the smartest people that i know who have the opposite point of view that i have and i can say i want you to test this idea for me here's my point of view if i go to five people who have exactly my point of view i've just drank lukewarm coffee i've received nothing i have no value i've got no input and the efficacy of my decision doesn't get better because i've learned nothing if i go to five people who have the opposite point of view i can accept it i can reject it i can be strong enough to take the criticism from my own point of view and have it challenged and out of that i will end up with a better decision my own decision will be better being challenged my own decision will not be better in consensus so my personal belief is that over time the agony and the trauma of all of these contentious points of view produces a better product it certainly does in business ultimately i believe that it will in politics and religion is an impossibility because of the nature of religion we're never going to find consensus agreement so rather than avoidance i found the tool is a little bit like the art of war is you want to take your enemy and put him on your hip with your arm around him embracing him warmly and your friends you can live a little farther away with you don't want your enemy far away you need to understand your enemy who's your enemy the enemy in a proverbial sense is always that situation that we're dealing with complex facts as as people i try not to have enemies who is your opponent i mean in in a business sense the opponents are a multitude and we're in a competitive environment so money in an efficient market finds its natural level very quickly so the world is an opponent as far as the competitive nature for investment um i i think the the biggest opponent is being confused about what my own expectations are how important is money to you well the truth is of course money is important so i can say that now it's not important it's it's important but it's like everything in life i never had money as my objective and as a consequence money came very easily to me i wasn't born with money my father was a grocer he lived an incredible life i grew up in a very modest home in a very modest circumstance but i didn't realize it but what i found is exactly as in martial arts exactly as in extreme sports if you're concentrating on winning the race you won't run the race well the way to run the race well is to forget about the victory and concentrate on the moment and as a tool that's what i try and do i'm not concerned with money i'm concerned with money as an ingredient to say were you successful or were you not there's no way to escape this there's no confusion at the end of the day there's black and there's white you did it or you didn't do it tomorrow i think we've tried to dwell upon many different issues but we haven't spoken about your family i know that you have four kids yes you have one daughter her name is jody she's the only member of the family who works with you and you have three boys jr brett and nicholas jr is three years old he's into arts brett is 24. he's that's at college for the moment and nicholas is eight years old and the youngest one how are they raised yeah you try to to feed them with how do you try to implement in their personality how do you try to help in shaping their personality a combination of discipline because discipline is the key to being able to reach down into your shoes at that moment you need help and find it humility i didn't have that problem i grew up as the son of a grocer i had humility my father never let me escape from having humility my children your children all of our children have a different challenge for them to understand that the shoes they're walking in are borrowed that are not theirs i think is critical and to follow their own passion whatever it is to not be a product of an insane madman father globetrotting around the world but to find the passion that grabs them and live it flat to the floor to consume it and i try and teach them that the goal in life is not preserving the goal in life is to use up every ounce of the skin on your body so that when you've died the man looking at this body is about to bury it says i have nothing left to work with it's gone this is what i hope my gift to them is you spend 24 hours in the plane you keep on traveling do you think that you succeeded as a father were you able to allocate time for your kids um time in the traditional sense no but i think what i succeed in it is they will know what the measure of a man is there's no confusion in their mind who or what i am they can like it they cannot like it they know who i am this is all i can do tombarak thank you for having me with us tonight it was a pleasure to discover you and to present you to the lebanese and arab audience all over the world i'd like you to end up this interview on your own way by concluding it by addressing the audience who's watching us tonight and before that i'd like to wish you a merry christmas and all the best for 2005. number one you're a brilliant and a gifted interviewer and and i appreciate it and and the people all that i would really like to say is that at a moment in which the world is challenged for a point of view and misunderstanding succumbs us that the lebanese have a pulse beat all over the world that gives people a taste a smell a sense of what this part of the world is about and as the only occidental experiment in history in which diverse religious sects and cultures have lived side by side for thousands of years thank all of you for the great example and the immigrants like myself around the world find a bit of ourselves our heart our souls here one thing is sure this interview will be remembered for a long time thank you to alex majeed
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Channel: Ricardo Karam
Views: 640
Rating: 4.4285712 out of 5
Keywords: Tom Barrack, Ricardo Karam, Waraa Al Wojooh, وراء الوجوه, توم براك, investor, colony capital, america, Wara2a Al Woojooh, Waraa Woujouh, Wara'a Al Woujouh, ريكاردو كرم, Tom Barack, Tom Barrak, Tom Barak
Id: 4rFzk1D7lsw
Channel Id: undefined
Length: 61min 31sec (3691 seconds)
Published: Fri Mar 26 2021
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