The following is a conversation with Jared Kushner,
former senior advisor to the president
during the Donald Trump administration
and author of Breaking History, a White House memoir.
He's one of the most influential
and effective presidential advisors in modern history,
helping conduct negotiations
with some of the most powerful leaders in the world
and deliver results on trade, criminal justice reform,
and historic progress towards peace in the Middle East.
On Thursday, October 5th,
we recorded conversation on topics of war and peace,
history and power in the Middle East and beyond.
This was about a day and a half
before the Hamas attack on Israel.
And then we felt we must sit down again
on Monday, October 9th,
and add a discussion on the current situation.
We opened the podcast with a second newly recorded part.
My heart goes out to everyone
who has and is suffering in this war.
I pray for your strength
and for the long-term peace and flourishing
of the Israeli and Palestinian people.
I love you all.
This is the Lex Friedman Podcast.
And now, dear friends, here's Jared Kushner.
We did a lot of this conversation
before the Hamas attack on Israel,
and we decided to sit down again
and finish the discussion to address the current situation,
which is still developing.
If I may allow me to summarize the situation
as it stands today.
It's morning, Monday, October 9th.
On Saturday, October 7th, at 6.30 a.m. Israel time,
Hamas fired thousands of rockets into southern Israel.
The rocket attack served as cover
for a multi-pronged infiltration of Israel territory
by over 1,000 Hamas militants.
This is shortly after, at 7.40 a.m.
The Hamas militants went door-to-door in border towns,
killing civilians and taking captives,
including women and children.
In response to this, Israeli Air Force
began carrying out strikes in Gaza,
also fighting on the ground in Israel
to clear out Hamas militants from Israel territory
and preparing to mobilize Israeli troops
for a potential ground attack on Hamas in Gaza.
Now, of course, this is what it appears to be right now
and this, along with other things, might change
because the situation is still developing.
The IDF is ordering civilian residents of Gaza
to evacuate their homes for their safety.
Benjamin Netanyahu declared war in several statements
and warned Israelis to brace themselves
for a long and difficult war.
Just today, Israeli ministers ordered a, quote,
"'complete siege of Gaza,' interrupting supplies
of electricity, food, water, and fuel from Israel to Gaza."
As of now, October 9th, the death toll is over 1,200 people
and over 130 hostages taken to Gaza by Hamas.
So, as I said, the events are rapidly unfolding,
so these numbers will sadly increase,
but hopefully our words here can at least in part speak
to the timeless underlying currents of the history
and, as you write about, the power dynamics of the region.
So, for people who don't know, Gaza is a 25-miles-long,
six-miles-wide strip of territory
along the Mediterranean Sea.
It borders Israel on the east and north
and Egypt on the southwest.
It's densely populated, about 2.3 million people,
and there's been a blockade of Gaza by Israel and Egypt
since 2007, when Hamas took power.
I could just summarize that Hamas is a Palestinian
militant group which rules the Gaza Strip.
It originated in 1988, and it came to power in Gaza in 2006
as part of its charter.
It's sworn to the destruction of Israel,
and it is designated by the United States,
European Union, UK, and, of course,
Israel as a terrorist group.
So, given that context, what are your feelings
as a human being, and what is your analysis
as the former senior advisor to the president
under the Trump administration
of the current situation in Israel and Gaza?
So, I think you did an excellent job
of summarizing a lot of the context,
but watching what's unfolded over the last 48 hours
has been truly heartbreaking to see.
We're still in the early stages of what's developing,
but seeing the images on X of, you know,
militants, terrorists going door-to-door with machine guns,
gunning down innocent civilians,
seeing beheaded Israeli soldiers,
seeing young 20-year-olds at a rave dance party
to celebrate peace with the militants flying in
and then, you know, shooting machine guns to kill people
indiscriminately, seeing young children captive
and held prisoner, seeing 80-year-old grandmothers,
a Holocaust survivor, also being taken captive.
These are just images and actions
that we have not seen in this world since 9-11.
This is a terror attack on the scale
of which we have not seen, and it's been incredibly hard
for a lot of people to comprehend.
My heart goes out, obviously,
to all of the families of the victims,
to the families of those who are held in captive now,
and to all of Israel, because one of the beautiful things
about the state of Israel is that when one Israeli
is hurting, the entire nation comes together.
It's a shame that it's taking an action like this
to unify the nation, but I have seen incredibly
beautiful signs over the last 48 hours
of a country coming together.
The Jewish people have been under oppression before.
The Jewish people know what it's like,
and seeing people rally together
to fight for their homeland, to try to reestablish safety,
is a very beautiful thing to watch.
I wish it wasn't something we had to watch, but it is.
With that being said, though, the backdrop,
I've been speaking to friends over the last couple days.
I have one friend I spoke with last night
who was saying that, a good friend messaged him,
saying, I'm going in, we're gonna do some operations
to try to free some of the hostages
held in one of the kibbutzes, messaged him the next morning.
He was one of the first through the door
to try to free these hostages,
and he was killed by a Hamas militant.
And sadly, we're gonna be hearing many, many more stories
of brave Israeli soldiers trying to get these terrorists
out of Israel, trying to free innocent civilians
who unfortunately are risking their lives to do it.
And they're all heroes, but some will have
a less good faith than others, sadly.
So it's a very, very heartbreaking moment,
and I do think that it's very important at this moment
in time for the entire world to stand behind Israel.
I think that Hamas has shown the entire world
who they really are, I think what their aim is,
what they're willing to do, and all of the strong security
that Israel's put in place over the last years,
which in some instances was criticized,
I think is now being validated that there was a real threat
that they were looking to deter.
So short answer is my heart is broken, praying for peace,
praying for strength, praying for Israel
to do what it needs to do to avoid being
in this situation again, which is either eliminating
or severely degrading Hamas's capabilities.
There cannot be peace in Israel and in the Middle East
while there is a terror group that is being funded by Iran
that is allowed to flourish and is allowed
to plan operations that are gonna aim
to kill innocent civilians.
And so as somebody who was formerly in this position,
who was intimately involved with Israel
with the strategies to minimize attacks from Hamas
and to try to turn the region around,
I think we did do a very substantial job
under President Trump.
The Middle East went from one of the most chaotic regions
in the world.
You had ISIS in 2016.
ISIS had a caliphate the size of Ohio.
They were beheading journalists.
They were killing Christians.
They controlled eight million people.
They were planning attacks all over the world
from their caliphate.
They were using the internet to radicalize people.
We had the San Bernardino shooting in America.
We had the Pulse nightclub shooting in Orlando,
and there was real threat.
And then you had Iran, which was given $150 billion
in a glide path to a nuclear weapon.
And they were using their newfound riches
to fund Hamas, Hezbollah, the Houthis,
different rebels all over the region
that were looking to destabilize further.
Syria was in a civil war where 500,000 people were killed.
Yemen was destabilized.
Libya was destabilized, and it was just a mess.
And all of America's allies had felt betrayed.
President Trump came into power.
We rebuilt the trust and the relationships
with all of our traditional allies.
We were able to eliminate ISIS, the territorial caliphate.
And then we were able to project strength in the region,
really go after Iran's wallet.
We were able to stop through crushing sanctions,
a lot of their financial resources,
which they were using to fund all these terror groups.
And so we left the Middle East with six peace deals
and a fairly peaceful world.
So seeing what's happening,
I think it was completely avoidable.
I think it's horrible to see that it's occurring.
And I pray that those in power
will make the right decisions to restore safety,
but also to potentially create a better paradigm
for peace in the future.
So I have a lot of questions to ask you
about the journey towards this historic progress
towards peace with Abraham, of course.
But first, on this situation,
to step back and some of the history,
is there things about the history of Hamas in Gaza
that's important to understand, what is happening now?
Just your comments, your thoughts,
your understanding of Hamas.
I think you did an excellent job, Lex,
of really giving the summary.
Just a couple things maybe I'll add to it
is that Hamas was originally founded
from the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt,
which is a group that's caused a lot of issues
in the region.
They've attacked Israel many times in the past.
There's a lot of discussion about how Israel
is an occupying power.
Well, in Gaza in 2005, they withdrew from all the land,
and then they say Israel's an apartheid state.
Well, Israel then gave governance of the region
to the Palestinians.
And then what's happened is the Palestinian people's lives
have now gone down, not up since then.
I will say that under Hamas's leadership in Gaza,
the people who have suffered the most
are the Palestinian people.
And I've watched cries throughout my time in government
from people saying we want to see the Palestinian people
live a better life.
I agree with those people.
I think that the Palestinian people in Gaza
are essentially hostages.
In Gaza, you have basically 2.2 million people
that are being held hostage by 30,000 Hamas terrorists,
and that's really the problem.
And I would just encourage people to push their attention
and energy in this moment and their anger towards Hamas.
Those are the people who are killing innocent civilians,
who are murdering indiscriminately,
and those are the people who have held back
the Palestinians from having a better life.
And just finally, what I would say is,
what we saw with Hamas was that if you go back to 2007,
they basically had just one plan that they did
over and over, and we were very careful
to try to monitor very closely and stop the Iranian money
and the resources from coming in.
And again, we took a little bit of criticism
from the international community
from keeping the border tight,
but unfortunately, every time you'd allow
construction materials to go into Gaza,
they'd use them to build tunnels, not homes.
You would have equipment that would come in to build pipes,
they'd turn it into bombs.
So it was very, very hard to figure out
how do you get the resources into Gaza
to help people have a better life,
while at the same time, the leadership in Gaza
was taking all of those resources
and turning it into military equipment to attack Israel.
What role does Iran play in this war,
in this connection to Hamas?
Can you speak to the connection between Hamas and Iran
that's important to understand,
especially as this most recent attack unfolds?
Sure, so the correlation, I mean,
there's reports that Iran is behind the attack.
Hamas has thanked Iran for their support,
and it's been very well known that Iran supports
the destruction of the state of Israel,
and I won't say Iran as a country.
I'll talk about Iran in the leadership.
There's actually a beautiful thing I saw on the internet,
where at one of the soccer games in Iran,
they were trying to rally support
for the Hamas terror attacks,
and a lot of people in the crowds were chanting,
you know, F-you to the regime,
because I think the Iranian people, the Persian people,
generally are peace-loving people
who don't want to see this focus
on destruction and annihilation.
But you saw this in 2015, 2016,
when the Iranian government had resources.
The region was less safe.
And since now, there's been more resources
allowed to go to the Iranian regime
by lack of enforcement of sanctions,
and as a result, Iran is funding Hezbollah, Hamas.
They were funding the Houthis.
Now there's a little bit of a detente
between Saudi and Iran, which has led to that going down,
which only further proves that Iran was behind the Houthis,
which is what the Saudis had been saying for years,
and Iran was denying.
So there's a very strong relationship between the two,
and we always knew that the way that Iran fights wars
or fights conflicts is never directly.
It's usually through its proxies,
and in this case, Hamas has been a proxy for Iran,
who wanted to obviously see the destruction of Israel,
but also does not want to see the Israelis and the Saudis
come together for a peace agreement.
So the name of this operation, of the Hamas operation,
is Al-Aqsa Flood, referring to the Al-Aqsa Mosque.
How much of this attack is about the Al-Aqsa Mosque?
In actuality, I don't think any of it is,
but the Al-Aqsa Mosque is something
that all of the Shia jihadists have used for years
in order to justify their actions
that are aggressive towards Israel.
So this is something I'll maybe even take a step back
and go through.
When I was working initially in my first year
on the peace plan, I was doing a lot of listening,
and quite frankly, a lot of what people were saying to me
didn't make sense.
And the reason why I was trying to figure out,
they were talking about sovereignty over Al-Aqsa Mosque.
The Al-Aqsa Mosque is a mosque that's built
in the Holy of Holies, the Haram al-Sharif in Israel,
where the Jewish Beit Hamikdash, the Holy Temple,
was built in a very religious place
about after the temple was destroyed.
Then there was a big mosque built there,
and it's one of the more holy places in Islam now.
So the big thing everyone was saying is,
what do you do with this land
where you have a mosque built over a very big Jewish site?
And I was hearing all of the experts,
and I always say experts with quotes,
because only in Washington can you work on something
for a decade and continue to fail,
and then you basically leave and are considered an expert.
But that's one of the problems with Washington,
which maybe we could talk about later.
But the notion here was I went and I said,
let me try to understand what the issue is
with the Israeli-Palestinian conflict with the people.
I always felt the politicians were a little disconnected,
so I commissioned several focus groups,
one in Amman, one in Cairo, one in Dubai,
and one in Ramallah.
And I asked people, Muslims,
what is the Israeli-Palestinian conflict about?
And time and time again, the most popular thing
that they said was that Israel was not allowing access
to the mosque for Muslims to pray.
And what was interesting was is that Israel's policy
is to allow anyone who wants to come and pray peacefully
at the sites to come and pray.
Sometimes they have security issues
when there's provocations.
But by and large, since 1967, when Israel was able
to take back Jerusalem in a defensive war,
just to be very clear, they were attacked in the south
and they were attacked from the east,
and they basically were able to beat back
the Jordanians and the Egyptians
and then reconquer the old city of Jerusalem.
And during that time, immediately after Israel
then passed the Protection of Holy Places Law,
which was they basically took resources they didn't have
and they said, we're gonna restore the Christian sites,
the Muslim sites, the Jewish sites,
and they've worked to allow everyone access to the mosque.
So today, any Muslim who wants to come
can come and pray at the mosque.
The mosque is, Israel's acknowledged that King Abdullah,
King of Jordan, is the custodian of the mosque,
and as long as people wanna come to the country
and pray peacefully, they're able to do that.
But if you look at a lot of the propaganda
that's been used by ISIS or Iran to recruit terrorists
or to justify their incursions,
they often say they're doing it in the name
of liberating the Al-Aqsa Mosque,
but from an operational and pragmatic perspective today,
any Muslim who wants to go to the mosque,
you can book a flight to Israel now through Dubai
because there's flights between Israel and Dubai,
and as long as your country has relations with Israel
and they'll accept your passport in there,
you can come and pray, and that's what Israel wants.
Israel wants Jerusalem to be a place
where all religions can come and celebrate together,
but you have a lot of actors that look to find ways
to use these religious tensions in order to sow division
and justify violent behavior.
I wonder how it's possible to lessen the effectiveness
of that propaganda message that a lot of the war,
a lot of the attacks are about access to the Al-Aqsa Mosque.
Is there something you can speak to,
why that message hasn't disseminated across the Arab world?
So Israel's good at a lot of things.
They're not very good traditionally with public relations.
After the Abraham Accords,
we made the first Abraham Accords deal in August 2020,
and then we made five other deals.
We first did United Arab Emirates,
then we did a deal with Bahrain,
then we did a deal with Kosovo,
then we did a deal with Sudan,
then we did a deal with Morocco,
and then we got the GCC deal done as well,
the tension between Qatar, Saudi, UAE, Egypt, and Bahrain,
and that was allowing us to create a pathway
to then pursue the Israeli-Saudi normalization.
So we had so much momentum then
that the goal was just keep getting more countries
to normalize relations with Israel.
Once you create the connection between people
and create the ability for people to do business together,
the ability for flights to fly between,
then you would just start naturally having people coming,
and everyone has a smartphone today,
so they can then post and combat
the misinformation that's been out there.
But this misinformation is not something that's new.
One of the characters who played a very big role
in spreading the antisemitism and the violence,
in Israel in the 1920s,
was a guy named Haj Amin al-Husseini,
who was known as the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem.
He was very close with Hitler and Mussolini,
and he was working with them to try to get some claims
to the Middle East once the Jewish people were annihilated.
And what he did for a very long time
was he did the same shtick,
only it was before he had smartphones and YouTube,
where he would say, the mosque is under attack,
these imperialist Zionists are coming in
to try to destroy the mosque,
and he would use that to raise money from Indonesia,
from Pakistan, from all over the world,
and then use that threat to justify
recruiting groups of young, vulnerable Muslim men,
and then getting them in the name of religious rights
to go and kill people,
which really is more of a perversion of the religion
than I think the true essence of what Islam is.
I think Islam at its core is a peaceful religion,
and I think that's where a lot of the great leaders
in Islam want to take it.
But the people who use Islam or the mosque
or as a justification for violence,
those are people who I think are really,
they are disrespecting the Islam religion.
As you said, you helped make major strides
towards peace in the Middle East with the Abraham Accords.
Can you describe what it took to accomplish this?
And maybe this will help us understand
what broke down and led to the tragedy this week.
Yeah, so I always believed in foreign policy.
I learned very quickly that the difference
between a political deal and a business deal
is that in a business deal, you have a problem set,
you come to a conclusion,
and then if you buy or sell something,
you either have more cash or you have a company,
so more to do, less to do.
Political problem set is very different,
where the conclusion of a problem set
is essentially the beginning of a new paradigm.
So when I would think about
how do you move pieces around the board,
you couldn't say, let me just solve the problem.
You have to think about what happens
the day after the signing,
and how do you create a paradigm that has positivity to it?
So the biggest piece of what President Trump did
during his four years in office was
he really strengthened the relationship with Israel,
number one, and he did things like recognizing Jerusalem
as the capital of Israel.
He moved the embassy to Jerusalem.
He recognized the Golan Heights.
He got out of the Iran deal.
We did an economic conference in Bahrain
where we brought Israelis to meet with Saudi and Emirati
and Qatari businessmen, and everyone came together,
and each one of these instances
were unthinkable previously,
and everyone said that if you did it,
the world was gonna end,
and every time President Trump did one,
the next morning, the sun rose.
The next evening, the sun set, and things moved on,
and so by doing that, what President Trump did was
he slaughtered a lot of the sacred cows
of these false barriers that people had erected
and showed people that the vast majority
of the people in the Middle East,
whether they're Jewish, Muslim, Christian,
whatever religion they are,
they just wanna live better lives,
and so what we basically did was create a paradigm
where the voices for peace, the voices for together
now finally had a forum where they were able to do it,
and we did that in the backdrop.
The way we were able to be successful
was we severely limited the resources of Iran,
and they were focused more internally,
and they couldn't cause the trouble
that they were causing everywhere else.
Since we've left, obviously, the dynamics have changed,
but the way you get to peace is obviously,
number one, through strength,
and number two, by finding a way for people
to be better off tomorrow than they are today,
and what I found was that most of the voices
looking for violence or trouble
were people who were just focused on
what happened two years ago, 20 years ago,
70 years ago, 1,000 years ago,
people who were trying to solve those problems
in that context often were looking more
to use those past grievances as a justification
for their power and for the bad behavior
that they were looking to perpetuate.
So managing, as we have talked about extensively,
managing the power dynamics of the region
and providing a plan.
This is something you did with the economic plan
titled Peace to Prosperity,
a vision to improve the lives of the Palestinian
and Israeli people.
Can you first of all describe what's in the plan?
Sure, so this was something I took on.
I was working on the political framework
between the Israelis and the Palestinians
and trying to understand what were the issues,
and the issues were not very many.
Basically was you had a land dispute,
so you had to figure out where do you put borders.
Ultimately, you had a security paradigm,
which I was much more favorable to Israel's perspective on,
and obviously, the events of the past 48 hours
fully justified that bias.
And then in addition to that,
you had to deal with the religious sites,
but I felt operationally that wasn't actually as complicated
as people made it because you wanted
to just leave it open for everybody.
Then I went through and I felt that the Palestinian
leadership was fairly disincentivized to make a deal
because there was just this paradigm where for,
they had billions of dollars coming in
from the international community,
and I think that they feared that if they made a deal,
they would lose their relevancy internationally,
and the money would stop flowing into the country.
So what I tried to do is to say,
my approach when I would get into a hard problem,
say, how do I understand all the different escape patches?
How do I try to eliminate them
and then build a golden bridge that becomes really
the only but also the most desirable pathway
for the decision makers to walk through?
And it wasn't always hard.
And sometimes you have to go and hold their hand
or you try to pick them up and walk them across,
but a lot of these leaders are very reluctant to change.
And the dynamics of the Palestinians also were such
that I think they were fairly stuck where they were.
So we developed a business plan for Gaza, the West Bank.
We threw in some improvements for Jordan and Egypt as well.
I based it off of the vision 2030
that they did in Saudi Arabia,
which I thought was a visionary document.
I went back through this process and I studied,
basically every economic project
in the post World War II period.
So we looked at what they did in South Korea,
why it was successful with some strong industrial planning.
We looked at Japan, we looked at Singapore,
we looked at Poland, why it was successful.
We spent a lot of time on the Ukraine plan for the country
and why it wasn't successful.
And that was mostly because of governance and corruption,
which actually resembles a lot of what's gone wrong
with the Palestinians, where there's no property rights,
there's no rule of law.
And what we did is we built a plan to show,
it's not that hard, right?
In the sense that between the West Bank and Gaza,
you had 5 million people and we put together a plan,
I think it was about $27 billion.
We got together a conference, I had the head of AT&T,
we had Steve Schwartzman from Blackstone came,
which was very gracious of them.
We had all the leading Arabic businessmen,
the leading builders, leading developers.
And the general consensus of that conference
was that this is very doable.
We think that for Gaza in particular,
it would cost maybe seven to $8 billion
to rebuild the entire place.
We felt we could reduce the poverty rate in half,
we can create over a million jobs there.
The only thing that people said was holding it back
wasn't Israel, what was holding it back was governance.
And people wouldn't have confidence investing there
with the rule that Hamas was perpetuating.
So I encourage people actually to look at the plan.
It was very thoughtful, it was 181 pages.
We went project by project.
Each project is costed out.
It's a real plan that could be implemented,
but you need the right governance.
And all of the different Arabic countries
were willing to fund it,
the international community is willing to fund it
because they've just been throwing so much money
at the Palestinians for years
that's never been outcomes-based or conditions-based.
It's just been entitlement money.
And unfortunately, it hasn't really achieved any outcomes
that have been successful.
So it's a great business plan.
It just shows too, rebuilding Gaza could be easy.
But like I said, the problem that's held
the Palestinian people back
and that's made their lives terrible in Gaza
has not been Israel.
It's really been Hamas's leadership or lack of leadership
and their desire to focus on trying to kill Israelis
and start war with Israel over improving the lives
of the Palestinian people.
And the current approach of Hamas,
the more violence they perpetrate,
the more they can hold on to power
versus improving the lives of people.
So they, as you said, maybe you can comment on,
they do not propose an economics plan.
I mean, Hamas has been running it now for 16 years
and they don't have a lot to show for it.
And our posture with them was basically a very simple deal.
If you think about what's the end state in Gaza,
it's actually not that complicated.
There's no territorial disputes, right?
The border's the border.
There's no religious issues there as well.
You're not dealing with Jerusalem.
You're basically just dealing with the fact that
Israel wants to make sure that there's no threat from Gaza.
So it's a demilitarization or some kind of security guarantee
from a credible source where Israel doesn't feel
like Gaza can be used to stage attacks into Israel
or to fire rockets into Israel.
And by the way, these are things I was saying
three, four years ago that that was the objective
and that was really the fear.
Now that's been proven, unfortunately,
the fear has manifested.
And in exchange, you can rebuild the place
and you can give the people a much better life.
But Hamas has not shown a desire for that
or a capability for that and I don't think
there's enough trust to allow them to do that,
which is why under the current circumstances,
if you do want to have peace there,
Hamas has to be either eliminated or severely degraded
in terms of their military capabilities.
I would love to ask you about leadership,
especially on the side of the United States.
What has the current administration,
the Biden administration done different
than the Trump administration, as you understand,
that may have contributed to the events we saw this week?
So all I can talk about are where we left them.
We left them a place where they had tremendous momentum
in the Middle East.
I met with them during the transition and said,
look, we even got the Qatar-Saudi conflict done,
which was a big, no peace between Israel and Saudi
would have been possible without that,
so we even got that done in our lame duck period.
And they came in and they said, look,
we want to focus on the three Cs,
which is COVID, climate change, and China.
And I said, that's great, but the Middle East,
we have an amazing place right now.
It's stable, there's momentum.
Iran is basically broke.
We put such crippling sanctions on Iran
that they went from about,
I think it was 2.6 million barrels a day of oil
they were selling to about 100,000 under Trump.
So their foreign currency reserves were basically depleted
and they were broke.
Same with the Palestinians.
We stopped the funding to UNRWA, the UN agency,
which is totally corrupt.
We've put $10 billion in there over time.
I did a poll in the Middle East, in Gaza, to say,
okay, we've invested $10 billion here as a country.
Are we popular?
The US had a 7% approval rating.
USAID had a 70% approval rating,
but it just felt like a waste of our taxpayer dollars.
And again, we wanted to make it conditions-based.
The Biden administration came in.
Number one, they started insulting Saudi and Russia.
Oil prices went up.
At the same time, what they did was
they stopped domestic production of oil.
They disincentivized a lot of oil
and shale production with regulations.
They stopped pipelines.
Oil prices went up.
They stopped enforcing the sanctions against Iran,
probably to get the oil prices lower
to make up for what they were doing.
They ran to Iran to try to make a deal.
They started funding the Palestinians again right away.
And I even said, if you're gonna fund them,
if that's your policy, I respect that.
Again, elections have consequences
and you can take a different policy.
But what I would recommend is get some conditions,
make them do some reforms,
make them give property rights to people,
make them do real economic investments for people.
But they just went right away.
So they were funding the Palestinians,
not enforcing the sanctions,
and then overall just projecting a lot of weakness
in the region.
So one of the most embarrassing examples
is what happened in the United Arab Emirates.
Again, an amazing, probably one of America's best allies
over the last 20, 30 years.
They fought with us in Afghanistan.
They were the first Muslim country
to stand up and do that after 9-11
because they didn't want it to be a war of the West
against the Muslim religion.
So they joined the fight
because they saw it as a fight between right and wrong.
They have rockets shot into their country
from the Houthis.
And they basically don't get a call from the US for 17 days.
They need their equipment that they buy from the US,
which creates jobs in the US.
They need it restocked.
We don't call.
So they've severely degraded the trust
that we had to rebuild with our allies.
I think they've been working now to get it back.
They, after two years, started working with Saudi and Israel,
which I think was good.
I think that they realized after a stint
that maybe the process that President Trump
had created in the region was the right policy.
And keep in mind, President Trump's policy
that I was working on was very strongly criticized
during the first three years
before we were able to achieve the results
because it was departure
from the failed policies of the past.
And so first there was a return to those policies,
appease Iran, let's criticize Saudi Arabia.
Then they started embracing
and working on the Israel-Saudi deal,
which was really exciting.
I think we were all very excited about it.
But they did it in public.
And I think that that also was something,
and I didn't have access to their intelligence,
so I assumed that by doing it so publicly,
they thought that they'd either had a deal with Iran
because they were letting them get all this revenue
or Iran wouldn't be a problem.
But one of the reasons with the Abraham Accords,
we kept it so quiet during the whole time
was because we always felt like the troublemakers
in the region, particularly Iran,
who we thought would be disadvantaged
by having UAE, Saudi, Israel all together.
Israel's a nuclear power.
You have other strong economies.
Iran seeks instability.
They seek looking to create division in the region.
And if you can create that economic sphere
where you have security from Haifa to Muscat,
from Israel to Oman, all the way through
with Saudi, Jordan, UAE, Qatar, Egypt,
that's an incredibly powerful block.
If you can make it secure and then get economic integration,
that really could be a Middle East that thrives.
So Iran obviously wanted nothing to do with that,
and that's why they've been working to disrupt.
So I think the administration has,
they took an incredibly stable situation with momentum.
I think they underestimated
the way that Iran would approach the region to undermine.
I think they gave way too much rope to Iran.
And I think that they didn't seize
when they had an opportunity of strength
with the Palestinians to try to drive to a conclusion
that I believe could have prevented us
being where we are today.
Not to mention that, you know, even just three weeks ago,
I mean, it's a bad look that they just, you know,
basically gave $6 billion to Iran
in exchange for hostages.
And then Iran's basically funding these terror attacks.
They're killing American citizens in Israel.
And it's just, it's a heartbreaking situation.
Again, totally avoidable, and one that I think
has been very badly mismanaged to date.
If Trump was currently president,
you were still working with him on this part of the world.
What actions would you take?
What conversations would you have?
What ideas would you be working with
in order to unite the various allies that you mentioned
in the Middle East over this tragedy?
And not let it be a thing that divides the Middle East,
but make it a thing that catalyzes progress towards peace,
further progress towards peace.
So I want to say one thing, Lex.
I have a lot of friends who are fans of Trump
or not fans of Trump, but one thing I want to say
with absolute certainty is that if President Trump
was in office, this never would have happened.
And when President Trump was in office,
anyone who supports Israel or who wants to see
Jewish people not be innocently slaughtered,
he would never have allowed that to happen.
It did not happen when he was in power.
And I hope people recognize that
as something that's very, very true.
How I would play the ball where it lies right now,
keep in mind, we transferred the ball.
It was on the green.
Now it's almost like it's gone back 150 yards
and it's in a sand trap.
I think the way that I would play the ball right now
is number one is you have to show strength.
I actually think President Biden's words
were the right words.
I see that they're moving aircraft carriers to the region.
Again, the purpose of having a strong military,
I believe obviously if you get into a war,
you want to win the war,
but the purpose of a very strong military primarily
is to avoid a war.
I don't know what kind of credibility
the Biden administration has to show the strength,
but right now you have to support Israel completely.
You have to really let people in the region know
that there'll be consequences if they try to escalate.
Again, we saw a little bit of rocket skirmish
from Lebanon, from Hezbollah,
but again, this is the type of thing
that they have to know there'll be severe consequences
if they make this a multi-party fight.
And I think sending a strong message to Iran,
I think that they have to see some consequences from this
and know that they're not gonna be allowed
to have a free reign to cause instability
and that Iran doesn't usually fight face-to-face.
They usually do it through proxies,
but let's just all be honest about where this is coming from
and let them know that there will be a consequence
if they instigate these actions.
And again, at least with the Biden administration,
they've had contact with Iran.
They've been talking with Iran, but they've allowed Iran.
Again, the number I saw last year, I think under Trump,
the number was maybe like four or $5 billion
of oil revenue in total.
I think last year it was something
like $45 billion in revenue.
This year, I think there'll be even more.
That's a combination of them driving up oil prices,
but also allowing much more sales.
You would think that they would find a way
to get them to behave and allow them to have this happen,
or if that's not the case, then be tough.
Go back to being tough.
That's what you have to do.
Building off of Abraham Accords, as you mentioned,
Israel-Saudi normalization,
there's been a lot of promising progress towards this.
What does it take to not allow this tragedy
damage the progress towards Israel-Saudi normalization?
I think right now it's probably not the best
to think about that.
I think that we want to think about that
after whatever's gonna happen is gonna happen now.
I think right now the number one priority for Israel
has to be to fully regain security in the country,
and then number two is to figure out how you can,
like I said, eliminate or degrade the Hamas capability
or other Iranian threats to make sure
that you have your security apparatus.
I think that the Israeli leadership right now
should proceed with that,
and I don't think that they should be thinking
about normalization with Saudi at this moment.
My instinct, and I've been watching
this Israeli-Saudi normalization play out,
obviously just speaking with people
and seeing what I've been reading,
and watching with great excitement.
I think it would be a game changer for the region.
I think it's one of Iran's worst nightmares
to have Israel and Saudi interlinked together.
I think it'd be great for the Saudi people
from a security perspective.
What they're discussing with America would be very strong.
The ability to get different elements across
would be incredible.
What I would say with it is that the industrial logic
held yesterday, and I think it will hold again tomorrow.
I always expect countries to act in their interests.
I think that the deal that's on the table right now
between Saudi, Israel, and America is in Saudi's interests,
it's in America's interests,
and it's in Israel's interests.
What's gonna happen now, though,
is the political dynamics are gonna shift,
and I think that, as we've seen with political dynamics,
they come and go.
I think, let's get through this moment,
and then I hope at the right time that those talks
will be able to resume and conclude in an appropriate way.
It's funny, Lex, when I was working on the US-Mexico
agreement for the trade, we would have,
every day there'd be a tweet that would go out,
or there would be an issue.
People forget how intense it was between America and Mexico,
and I would speak to my counterpart of Mexico
after a rough day.
We were working on something,
we were making progress, it'd get blown up,
and I'd speak to him and say,
you know what, look, they're not moving America,
they're not moving Mexico, let's stop for today,
let's pick up tomorrow,
and let's find a new way to bring this forward.
So I would just encourage everyone working on that
not to give up, to keep working hard at it,
and to find a way, but like I said,
I would take a little bit of a pause for the time being,
let's let the current situation play out,
and then hopefully there'll be a way for it to move forward.
I just hope there's still people on the US side
picking up the phone and calling UAE, Saudi Arabia,
just as human beings, as friends, as allies,
and just keeping that channel of communication going.
Because maybe you can correct me,
but I just feel like there's just simple human dynamics
that play out here, that divisions can form
and just run away from you over simple misunderstandings,
over just the inability to see a tragedy
from the same perspective,
because of conversations that could have happened,
but didn't happen.
I think there'll definitely be communication,
but words on phone calls is only worth so much.
It's really trust between people and power.
And obviously when you're in a position of power,
you represent your country and your country's interests,
but the ability to have trusting relationships
where people feel like they're okay taking more risks
to help each other,
that's actually what's most important.
So communication I hope for,
but deepening and trusting relationships,
that's what I believe makes progress and keeps people safe.
And we talk quite extensively about the value of trust
and negotiation and just working with leaders,
which I think is a fascinating conversation.
And you've taught me a lot about that.
Let me ask you about the end here.
What are the various trajectories this work can take
in your view?
What are some of the end states, as you've said,
which are desirable and are achievable?
I mentioned this earlier,
but whenever I would get a problem set in government,
I'd always think through
from a first principles perspective,
what's the logical outcome, right?
And forget about all the reasons why it can't happen.
That's what everyone in governments
always rush to talk about.
But I do think here, number one,
Israel has to have a secure environment
where they don't feel threatened from Gaza.
And number two is the people in Gaza
need to have an environment where they feel
like they can live a better life and have opportunities.
So that's the end state.
And so I think that the international community
should come together.
I do think that the people
who are usually putting blame on Israel
should now realize that maybe
they've been a little bit harsh here
and that Hamas has been as big a threat,
if not an even bigger threat than Israel has been saying.
And I do think that if the international community
comes together and unites behind Israel
and really forces Hamas and the Iranian backers
to stop hostilities, to stop saber rattling,
to stop misrepresenting the history
in order to justify their violent behavior.
And if they say instead,
we want to hold you accountable, no more money,
and they all say that they're going to stand behind
Israel's efforts to eliminate their national security
threats, and then we will all come together
and only fund again into a framework
that we believe can be a long-term solution
where the Palestinian people really have a chance
to live a better life.
That's really the best way to get there.
There's tons of complicated factors,
but that's the end state that the global community
should be looking to come together.
And it's very achievable.
It's very, very achievable.
So there's, as we stand here today,
there's a lot of different ways that this war can evolve.
If a ground invasion happens by Israeli forces of Gaza,
and if the number is correct of 100,000 Israeli soldiers,
do you worry about various trajectories that can take
of the consequences that might have
of an unprecedented ground troop attack?
Yeah, so I think as a leader, you can't change yesterday,
but you have the ability to change tomorrow.
And that's a very important fundamental.
I mean, that's true for all of us, not just leaders,
but we saw with 9-11 how America was caught off guard
by a terrorist attack.
We acted somewhat rationally, somewhat emotionally,
which led to a 20-year war with trillions of dollars lost,
I think almost a million lives lost,
not just American, but all lives.
And it was a total tragedy what occurred.
I think right now the temptation is to be strong.
I think that that's a necessity.
I do think eliminating risk is the right objective.
I think the goal should be to stay very clear
about what the objective is,
but also this attack was very well planned,
not to walk into another trap.
I think you have to be very smart, very cautious.
I've been happy to see that what they've been doing
in retaliation so far has been somewhat measured
and they've taken their time to try to assess
what's achievable.
Again, I don't have access to the intelligence
and we're talking at a very early stage in this conflict,
so a lot could happen even by the time this is published.
But my hope is that they'll just stay very focused
on what the objective is and try to make sure
that they're acting appropriately in order to do that.
And I will say this too, that this has been different
than what I've seen in the past
in that the attacks were so heinous
and so disgusting that I've seen
the international community rally around Israel
more so than I ever have.
And I hope that Israel continues
to keep the moral high ground and continue to communicate
what they're fighting for, why they're fighting.
And I do hope that the international community
supports the objective and they can work together
to achieve it.
Benjamin Netanyahu, Bibi, somebody you've gotten to know
well in negotiation, in conversation,
he has made statements, he has declared war,
he has spoken about this potentially being
a long and difficult war.
What have you learned about the mine and Benjamin Netanyahu
that might be important to understand here
in this current war?
Bibi is definitely a historic figure.
I meet with a lot of different world leaders
and some of them I would say they're very, very special
transformational figures and some I would say,
how the hell is this person running a country?
And Bibi is somebody who has done a lot
for the state of Israel.
He has a tremendous understanding of the security apparatus.
He has tremendous global relations.
So for a crisis like this, I think Bibi's the leader
you want if you're Israel to be in that seat.
I think he's ambitious in what he's gonna look to achieve.
He understands his role in history as somebody
who's helped strengthen Israel economically, militarily
and I don't think he wants to see his legacy
be somebody who left Israel more vulnerable
than it had to be.
So I think in that regard, he'll be incredibly strong
but I also think that he'll hopefully be calculating
in the risk that he takes and not create more risk
than is needed.
And that's easy to say, the two of us sitting here
having a conversation when you're sitting in that chair
as a leader in the fog of war.
It's a very, very, it's a very hard decision to make.
He's been here before, he knows the weight of the situation.
I'm sure he knows the moment and I pray
that he'll do what's right here
to bring the best outcome possible.
I wonder if you can comment on the internal
political turmoil that BBOE has been operating in
and how that relates to the tragedy that we saw.
On the one hand, the political turmoil is,
it's a sign of a vibrant democracy.
I think it's been actually nice to see how people
have fought for their country and their beliefs
in a democratic way.
You compare that to the Palestinians
where there's no democracy, there's no free speech,
there's no free press.
You can't disagree with the leadership in Israel.
If you wanna be homosexual, you can go to a parade
and live your life.
In Gaza, they'll throw you off a building and kill you.
So in Israel, you have the freedoms which I think
make it a special place and you have
a very vibrant democracy.
With that being said, the times in Jewish history
where the Jewish people have been most vulnerable
have been when there's been division.
And that's when the temple was destroyed.
But that's not just with the Jewish people and with Israel.
That's in all societies.
So I definitely believe that this division has left them
less prepared for the situation than it would.
I do think there's real lessons we should be taking
from this here in America where we're in a time
where we're very divided.
But I do think that it'd be very wise for our leaders
to find the areas where we do agree
and find ways to secure our southern border,
to make sure that we know who's in our country,
what risks we all face.
And I do think that division definitely creates risk
for countries.
Let me switch gears here and just zoom out
and look at our society and our public discourse
at the moment.
What do you make of the scale and nature
of the Palestinian support online
in response to this situation?
This is something I've observed over the years
since I got involved with the Israeli-Palestinian issue
with a lot of interest.
I think a lot of the people who are pledging support
for the Palestinian people,
I think that they wanna see the Palestinian people
live a better life.
And I actually agree with them in that regard.
Unfortunately, I think many of them
are incredibly ill-informed
as to the facts on the ground.
I think all of the people who are advocating online
for the Palestinian people,
who are going to these marches in support of them,
I think they'd be best served
if they really care about effectuating the outcome
of joining with Israel right now
and directing their anger towards the Hamas leadership.
I think that it's very clear
that the group that's responsible
for the Palestinian people living the lives
that all of these people are angry about is Hamas.
And if they direct their anger towards Hamas
and put the attention on the failings of Hamas
and put forth a vision
for what they'd like to see leadership in Gaza do,
and they respect that there's a real fear that Israel has
and any country would have
of having a group of terrorists next to them
that's calling for their destruction,
I think that that recognition
of finding a way for Israel to be secure
and then having an opportunity
for the Palestinian people to live a better life
is the right pathway to try and pursue.
So to you, there's a clear distinction
between Hamas and the Palestinian people
in that Hamas is the enemy of progress
and the flourishing of the Palestinian people.
100%, it's very, very clear.
And I think that if people were honest about the situation,
if they spent the time to really understand it,
again, if you follow the conference I did in Bahrain,
we had all of the leading businessmen there,
and they said, we can rebuild Gaza very easily.
We all want to.
The leading Arab businessmen,
the leading American businessmen, everyone wants to.
They're just held back by Hamas.
And so I do think having an honest conversation about this
at this point in time
has really only one logical conclusion.
And my hope is that maybe this conflict leads
to that conversation being had.
And if it is, then maybe that brings more unity
and understanding.
And we kind of get to a conclusion better
that could improve the lives of the Palestinian people.
Pragmatic question about the future.
Do you hope Donald Trump wins in 2024
and how can his administration help bring peace
to the Middle East?
I think when Donald Trump was president,
we had a peaceful world.
Everyone said, if he was elected,
we would have World War III.
Meanwhile, he gets elected
and he not only is the first president in decades
to not start any wars,
he's making peace deals, he's making trade deals,
he's working with our allies,
getting them to pay their fair share in NATO.
He's having a dialogue with China, with Russia,
he's weakening Iran.
And so I do think that the job he did
as a foreign policy president was tremendous.
I think now more and more people
are starting to recognize that.
Again, under President Biden,
this is the second war that's broken out in the world.
And when you have a weak American leadership,
the world becomes a less safe place.
And so my hope and prayers are that President Trump
is reelected and that he's able to then restore
order and calm and peace and prosperity to the world.
From a place of strength.
That's the only way he knows how to do it.
What gives you hope about the future of this region,
of Israel and of the Middle East?
The Middle East for 20 years
was an area of conflict.
They spent all their money on bullets and bombs.
You have young leadership now in Saudi Arabia
and UAE and Qatar.
And there's a much more ambitious agenda now for the region
to make it an economic superpower and hub of the world.
Israel is one of the most burgeoning
and exciting tech economies in the world.
And if you think about it,
it's almost like having Silicon Valley
not connected to California.
The thing that's held the region back for all these years
has just been the conflict and the division
and the lack of connectivity.
But if you have that region, if it can all come together,
if you can create a security architecture,
you have an incredibly young population,
you have a lot of wealth and resources
and a lot of capabilities and know-how.
And so I think that if it's managed correctly
and if Iran is able to be restrained
and suppressed with their ambitions
to cause destabilization,
I don't mean Iran the country, I mean the Iranian regime,
because actually, once you have this economic sphere,
if you could bring Iraq into it,
if you could bring Iran into it,
that makes it even bigger and stronger.
And the Persian people are incredibly entrepreneurial
and incredibly industrious.
So I do think that the region has tremendous potential.
It's just been held back by bad policy,
bad leadership, bad objectives.
And again, when President Trump left office
in 2000, 2021, the Middle East was really
on a very, very positive trajectory.
And if the right things happen, it can continue to be so.
So I'm praying at this moment in time
that we navigate the current crisis,
that the important objectives are achieved
of eliminating the terrorists and their threats,
and then allowing the leaders who are focused
on giving their citizens and their neighbors
the opportunity to live a better life
are able to work together and really dream and be ambitious
and find ways to create a paradigm
where humans can flourish.
What is the best way to defeat hate in the world?
Hate is a very powerful force,
and it's much easier to hate people you don't know.
It's funny, when I was working on prison reform,
one of the most interesting people I met
was a reverend, actually down in Texas,
who negotiated the first truce
between the Bloods and the Crips,
two of the notorious gangs in America in prison.
And I was very excited to meet him.
And when I met him, I said, well, how'd you do it?
And he said, it was very simple.
He says, I got all the guys together,
and I had a tremendous amount of barbecue brought in.
He says, and I got the meeting.
He says, no drinking.
He says, drinking sometimes gets people
a little bit more against each other.
He says, but I got a meeting,
and they started sitting down together,
and they started saying, you know what?
You're just like me.
And all of a sudden, they started finding areas
where they were more together.
Look, I've traveled all over the world now.
I've been very fortunate to meet people
from different states in America.
I have different political persuasions,
different ages, different classes.
And what I found is that there's a fundamental driving
amongst all of us where we all want to live a better life.
And people don't want to fight naturally,
but it's easy to fight when you feel wronged
or you feel like somebody disrespected you
or somebody did something from hatred,
and hatred leads to more hatred,
which sometimes just pushes that cycle further and further.
So I believe that each and every one of us
has the power to stop that cycle.
And we don't do it by being on Twitter
and yelling at people.
We don't do it by just being critical.
We do it by finding the people we disagree with,
by listening to them, by asking questions,
by sitting with them.
And then if we each take responsibility
to try to make the world better,
then I think that there's no limits
to the incredible place that this world can be.
So as you've said, you've traveled all across the world.
Do you think most people are good?
Most people have love in their heart.
I do believe that.
Yeah, and you have some bad people.
I mean, you have some real evil people.
I mean, a big part of the work I did was on prison reform.
And previously the mentality was is that the prison
should basically be a warehouse for human trash.
And if you've made a mistake in this world,
then we're gonna throw you out
and we're gonna make the rest of your life
incredibly difficult
because you're gonna have a criminal record.
You're not gonna have access to jobs.
But what I found is when I would sit with people in prison,
the people I've met through my father's experience
and who I met along the way,
is that people make mistakes.
We're all human.
I think it's the right thing from a religious perspective
to give people second chances.
I always believe you shouldn't judge people
by the worst mistake they make in their life.
Unfortunately, now in the era of social media,
people will say one wrong thing.
It sticks with them forever.
They get canceled or they get put out.
We're all humans.
We grow from our mistakes.
We learn from our mistakes.
And I think that some people are just evil.
There are some evil people,
but I do think the vast, vast,
vast majority of people are good.
And I do think that people sometimes also
can be in a bad place
and then society can push them to a worse and worse place,
but we all have the power to make them feel loved,
make them feel heard.
And I think there's also tremendous power
that we have as people to help people get to a better place.
And so, my wife and I,
we've always tried to be a force for good.
We've always tried to be,
we've always tried to provide a place
where people can discuss with each other.
When we were in Washington,
we would host dinners at our house all the time
or we would have Democrats and Republicans sitting together.
We just had, I saw Senator Feinstein just passed away.
We had a great dinner at our house
when she was a Senator with her and her husband
and Mark Meadows when he was on the Freedom Caucus.
And we had actually a fascinating discussion about Iran.
Mark was much more hard-line than me.
I had to actually bite my tongue.
I was impressed at how much he did,
whereas Feinstein and her husband were super into,
they knew the Iranians well,
they thought they were peace-loving,
and it was an incredibly robust and respectful debate.
And so, I don't think we maybe concluded anything that night
but it was interesting for people to get together.
Having a dinner at my house where I had Dick Durbin,
the number two ranking Democrat in the Senate,
Lindsey Graham and Stephen Miller,
who's known to be a very hard line on immigration,
discussing what an immigration reform could look like.
They left that dinner saying,
wow, we hadn't spoken to people on the other side
and we actually agree on like 85% of things,
like maybe something is possible.
And so, I believe that we should always be trying to push
to make the world a better place.
And you only do that by listening to people
and connecting with people and by respecting people.
And finally, I'll just say on this is that
I meet people all the time
who have so much confidence in their perspectives.
And I'm very jealous that these people
are able to be so confident about every single thing
because for me, I have some degree of confidence
in the things that I've studied and what I've learned,
but I'm always trying to find people who disagree
to kind of sharpen my perspectives and to help me grow
and to help me learn further.
And so, I think that's kind of the beauty of the world
is that the knowledge base continues to grow,
the facts continue to change,
and what's possible tomorrow continues to become different.
And so, as humans, we have to continue to thrive,
to learn and to grow and to connect.
And if we do that, everything's possible.
Well, Jared, thank you for your compassion, first of all,
but also your wisdom today on this very difficult,
this tragic set of events,
these difficult days for the world.
It's a big honor to speak with you again.
Every time I speak to you, I learn a lot about the world
and I deeply appreciate, like I said,
your humility and your understanding of the details
of all the complex power dynamics and human dynamics
that are going on in the world.
Once again, thank you for talking today.
Thank you.
And Lex, if I could say just one final thing,
which is that my thoughts and prayers
are really with all of the people in Israel
and the innocent civilians as well from the Palestinian side
and my prayers are with the IDF soldiers
that they should be safe
and they should be really watched by God
to accomplish whatever mission
we'll enable to make the world a safer place.
Thank you for listening
to this newly recorded segment of the conversation
that addresses the current situation in Israel and Gaza.
And now we'll go on to the second part of the conversation
recorded on Thursday, October 5th.
Given your experience in negotiating
with some of the most powerful
and influential leaders in the world,
what's the key to negotiating
difficult agreements in geopolitics?
I start with a big question.
If I look back on the different negotiations I had
when I was in government,
either with leaders of countries,
with representatives of leaders,
or even with members of Congress to pass legislation,
the most important thing I would draw back to would be trust.
I think getting to know each other,
understanding what was motivating the other party
to get to the outcome,
and making them feel like you weren't going to use
whatever information they gave you to benefit yourself
at the expense of them
is probably what I would call table stakes
to have a shot at accomplishing anything
that was hard in negotiation.
After that, I would say,
taking maybe a first principles approach
to what the outcome of whatever problem
you're looking to solve should be.
Now, you have different kinds of negotiations.
I always tried to create a framework in the negotiation
where it wasn't me against you.
It was always, let's agree on what the outcome is
that we're trying to accomplish.
Let's all sit on the same side of the table and say,
we want to get to this outcome.
How do we get there?
Really trying to create a roadmap.
And so once you understand the destination
you want to get to, the end point,
then you'd have to work backwards
and really try to put yourself in their shoes
and try to understand what were their motivations macro.
Most of the time, you have to assume
that a leader's primary objective was to stay in power.
And so all decisions made would be made
through the framework of what it would take to do that
and how it would impact their ability to do that.
And then finally, I would just say that in any negotiation,
you have to understand the power dynamics as well.
And you have to then weight your approach
in order to maneuver pieces to accomplish the objective.
And so in areas where we had stronger power dynamics,
I'd always look at it and say,
what are the potential escape routes
where a politician would say,
this is just the reason why we can't get there?
And I'd always think,
how can you try to eliminate those escape routes
or make them much harder to accomplish?
And then ultimately think about what's the golden bridge
that you want to create for them
in order to get to the other side
where they were motivated to get there
because it was in their self-interest to get there,
but also because it helped accomplish
the different objective.
And I have many examples that I lived through with that.
Obviously, negotiating in Congress for prison reform,
I had to form a lot of trust with Democrats,
whether it was Hakeem Jeffries or Dick Durbin.
And then also on the Republican side with,
I had Mike Lee, I had Lindsey Graham,
I had Tim Scott, Senator Grassley,
and then also Doug Collins in the House was tremendous.
And every time we maneuvered something,
we would get attacked either from the left,
there was a time we were being attacked
by Nancy Pelosi, John Lewis,
for not being inclusive enough.
And then there were times that we maneuvered it,
we'd be attacked from the right for maybe going too far.
And ultimately we had to find just the right place
where we can get it done.
And the same thing happened with USMCA,
where we were negotiating the biggest trade deal
in the history of the world,
which was $1.3 trillion in annual trade
between Mexico, Canada, the United States of America.
And we were able to form good trust with the other side
and try to say, how do we create win-win outcomes?
And ultimately we were able to do something
in a record time that people thought was very hard to do.
And both of them in a divided time
of the Trump administration were bipartisan wins
with big, big votes in the Senate and the House.
You have a lot of stories of this kind,
sometimes a soft approach, sometimes a hard approach.
Like there's, I think the story where with Bibi,
there was a potential, like a dramatic election coming up
and you have to say, no, no excuses, no delaying.
You have to, we have to make this agreement.
I know Bibi cares about Israel
more than the particular dynamics of the election.
Like you have to draw a hard line there.
Yeah, but in fairness too, like for him,
during the time that we were dealing with him,
he was always in election versus election and then election.
And what he was saying wasn't wrong.
And I think he was more expressing his concerns
given the dynamics.
And we never held those concerns against him.
We just said, those are real concerns he had.
We respected those concerns,
but then we helped him prioritize
to help accomplish the right things.
And that's ultimately what the partnership is, right?
My job was to represent America,
his job was to represent Israel
and you had other parties representing their own interests.
And as long as you assume that,
people were acting mostly in good faith,
you were able to navigate areas where you didn't have,
complete overlap of priorities and objectives.
Just to go back to the trust thing,
you sometimes see that with leaders where they're kind of,
it looks like they're trying to screw over the other person
when they're talking.
And so not having that,
I think is a really powerful thing for earning trust.
That people actually can believe that your results driven
and are working towards a certain end.
Is there a skill to that?
Is that genetics?
You're born with that?
Or is that something you develop?
So basically it requires you to look at the game of politics
and not have a kind of cynicism about it
to where everybody's trying to manipulate you
and actually just go in with a kind of open mind
and open heart and actually speak truthfully to people,
that kind of basic human level.
I would say that I always would think about
how can I be a partner to others?
Like I would want somebody to be a partner to me.
And a lot of it comes from just my different experiences
in business.
I've had great partners.
I've had terrible partners.
My father, again, a lot of my childhood was,
I was exposed to business.
My father, on Sundays, he would take us to job sites
and to the office with him instead of to football games
like my friends' fathers would do.
And so we were exposed to business.
And what he would say about his father,
who was an immigrant to America,
came over with nothing and no formal education.
But he would always say,
a good deal with a bad partner will always be a bad deal.
And a bad deal with a good partner, you'll figure it out.
And so going through some of the challenges
that I had in my life early on,
whether it was the issue with my father
that I'm sure we'll talk about,
or even going through some tougher financial times
during the great financial crisis,
I really learned a lot about partnership.
And I always thought, how can I act in a way
where I could be the type of partner or friend to others
that I wish others would be to me?
So when you look for a good partner,
don't you think there's the capacity
for both good and bad in every person?
So when you talk, when you negotiate with all these leaders,
aren't there multiple people you're speaking to
inside one person that you're trying to encourage,
catalyze the goodness in the human?
Yeah, so leaders are generally chosen by their country.
And so my view was, if I had an objective,
I didn't get to choose who was the leader
of other countries, my job was to deal with that leader,
understand their strengths, understand their weaknesses,
understand their power dynamics as well.
One of my greatest takeaways when I grew up,
I'd read the newspapers about all these
powerful, famous people.
And then as I got older and had the chance to meet them
and do business with them,
and then ultimately interact with them in government
is I realized that they're just like you and me.
They wake up every morning, their kids are pissed at them,
their wife doesn't want to talk with them.
And they've got a set of advisors around them,
one saying, let's go to war, one saying, let's make peace,
one saying, do the deal, one saying, don't do the deal.
And they're all thinking, where do I get advice?
How do I make decisions?
And so understanding the true human nature of them,
and then the different power dynamics around them,
I thought was very key.
And so I didn't have a choice, do I deal with them or not?
It was a function of how do you deal with them effectively
in order to find areas where you have common interests
and then work well together to pursue those common interests
in order to achieve a certain goal.
First of all, you're incredibly well read.
I've gotten to know you and I've gotten to know Ivanka
and the book recommendation list is just incredible.
So first of all, thank you for that.
You told me about the Guns of August by Barbara Tuchman.
It's a book on World War I
and I went down a whole rabbit hole there.
She's like an incredible historian.
Anyway, there's a bunch of stuff you learn from that,
but one of the things you told me is
it influenced your general approach to diplomacy,
of just picking up the phone and giving it a try.
So as opposed to planning and strategizing,
just pick up the phone.
So this was a book I read way before
the notion of serving in government
was ever even on my mind or reality.
And I remember thinking about it, reading it,
and thinking how World War I started,
where you had somebody who was assassinated
and then you had all these different alliances
that were created.
And then in order to accomplish objectives,
it triggered all of these people getting in bed
with everyone else because of documents
that were created without the intent
of going to a massive war.
And I think in the course of World War I,
it was one of the greatest atrocities
that we've seen as humanity.
We've had 16 million people killed in that war.
And as I was reading the book, I remember thinking to myself,
even though things are set in a certain way,
go sit with somebody, go talk to them and say,
this doesn't make sense, this is wrong.
How do we create a better pathway?
And as a civilian, all my life,
I would read the newspapers.
I would observe how different leaders would act.
But when we had the opportunity to serve in government
and have the position, you realize you're not a civilian.
You don't have the luxury of sitting back
and letting the world happen the way it's happening.
You have agency and you have the potential
to influence the outcome of things.
And one thing I've seen is,
most political prognosticators are wrong.
Anyone who tells you what's gonna happen really has no clue.
And it's not because they're bad or they're not intelligent.
It's because nobody knows.
And at the end of the day, the outcomes in the world
are usually driven by the decisions of humans.
And if you're able to come together, form relationships,
listen to each other, you can do that.
And one of the great examples that I speak about
in the book is with North Korea.
Whereas if you remember in 2017, it was very intense.
When President Obama was leaving office,
he told President Trump that the single biggest fear
that he had, and this is a time when the world was a mess.
The Middle East was on fire.
ISIS was beheading journalists and killing Christians.
They had a caliphate the size of Ohio.
Libya was destabilized.
Yemen was destabilized.
Syria was in a civil war where 500,000 people were killed.
Iran was on a quiet path to a nuclear weapon.
Yet the single biggest fear he had was North Korea.
Then it got compounded by the fact that we get into office
and President Trump brings his generals around
and he's learning how to interact with all the generals
and says, okay, what are my options?
And they said, calm down.
We've been using all of our ammunition in the Middle East.
We don't have enough ammunition to go to war over there.
ISIS, let's not let that be due public.
Let's try to restock and come up with a plan.
And at the time, there was a lot of banter back and forth.
I got a call from a friend who was an old business contact
who actually had done business in North Korea.
And he said, I'd love to find a way to solve this.
And I was getting calls from friends at the time
saying I'm trying to go to Hawaii for vacation.
Should I not be going?
Is it not safe?
I mean, we forget this psychology
of how intense that was at the time.
And then through that interaction,
he called some of his contacts in North Korea.
And then we were able with the CIA to open up a back channel
that ultimately led to the deescalation,
the meeting between Trump and Kim Jong-un,
which led to a deescalation.
So that was really the mindset,
which was whenever there's a problem,
just pick up the phone and try.
And I think President Trump had a very similar approach,
which was let's give it a shot.
And he wasn't afraid to go after the hard ones too.
And I'll say one final thing on this,
which is that in politics,
the incentive structure is just much different
than in the real world, right?
In the sense that you have a hard problem.
Then if you try to solve a hard problem,
the likelihood of failure is great.
Whereas in the business world,
if you're going after a hard problem,
we celebrate those people, right?
We want our entrepreneurs and our great people
to go after solving the big, hard problems.
But in politics, if you try to take on a hard problem,
you have a high likelihood of failure.
You'll get a lot of criticism on your pathway
to trying to accomplish that if you fail.
And then if you fail, it has a higher probability
of leading to you losing your opportunity to serve.
And so it's just one of these things
where people want to play it safe,
which is not the notion that really was taken
during the time that President Trump was in office.
Do you think it has to be that way?
I think there's something in the human spirit,
like in the public that desires politicians
to take on the big, bold problems, right?
Like why is it the politicians
need to be so afraid of failure?
I don't think it has to be that way.
And that's, I think, one of the great lessons
from the time of the Trump administration.
He brought a lot of people
from the business world into government.
The business people have a much different mindset
than government people, and there was a lot of resistance.
And I think part of why there was so much resistance
was because, I think about it from my personal sense,
was that if I was successful
with no traditional qualifications to do diplomacy,
it meant that all the people
with traditional qualifications in diplomacy
didn't necessarily need those qualifications
in order to be successful.
And that same sentiment manifested itself
in many areas in government.
And I think that in the business world,
it's outcome-oriented, it's results-oriented.
And what we would see in New York is there,
they would stab you in the eye.
In D.C., they would stab you in the back.
And it just became a whole different dynamic
of how you work through these different areas.
So the answer is it doesn't have to be that way.
You just need the right, courageous leader.
And that's why I'm so optimistic
about what the future of America and the world could be
if you have the right people in power
who are willing to take on the right challenges
and do it in the right way.
So if we just linger on the North Korea
and the de-escalation and the meeting,
what's the trajectory from,
this could be the most catastrophic thing
that destroys the world, to you find back channels,
you start talking and start arranging the meeting.
Is there some insights you can give
to how difficult that is to do in that,
in the North Korea case,
which seems like to be one of the more closed off parts
of the world and in the other cases that you worked on?
Yeah, it's always very challenging.
And especially when you're going against the grain
of what's established, right?
We did something different to think
that an old business contact that I had could then do it.
I mean, that's the type of thing
that if the press knew what we were doing,
they would have derided it
and criticized it in every which way.
But that was one of the benefits
of operating very much below the radar
is that we were able to try all these different things.
And not all of them worked, but some of them did.
But that is what's amazing about the world, right?
This could be the biggest story
on the front page of every paper
and they're inciting fear in every one.
And it's not illegitimate fear.
I mean, there were missile tests over Japan.
I mean, you had a lot of very big challenges with that file.
And then all of a sudden we make contact,
we go through negotiations to set a meeting.
There's a meeting between President Trump and Kim Jong-un.
And then all of a sudden there's a framework
to try and move things forward.
And again, I think that there's a lot of possibility there
for what could happen if it's worked in the right way.
I just want to know how you word that first email
or text message, what emojis to use, the hugging emoji.
I think it's just personally,
I've gotten to know a lot of powerful and rich people.
It's funny that they're all human, just like you're saying.
And a lot of the drama, a lot of the problems
can be resolved with just a little camaraderie,
a little kindness, a little,
just actually just reaching out.
We're all human beings and people want to be successful
and people want to be good.
And you're right too, there's way more emojis
involved in diplomacy than I ever would have expected.
And every leader I'm sure has their favorite emoji.
This is also what I learned about people.
Everybody has their go-to emoji.
Like I usually go to the heart very quickly, emoji.
There's some people who go the hugging,
whatever that, where you're like doing the hugging thing.
Anyway, this conversation quickly turned to the ridiculous.
But to do another book reference,
you mentioned the book 13 Days in September
by Lawrence Wright in discussing all the work
you've done in Israel and the Middle East.
I just want to ask you sort of the interesting aspect
of that book, which is the influence of the personalities
and personal relationships on these negotiations.
You kind of started to allude to that with the trust,
but how much do the personalities matter in this?
So going from North Korea to the Middle East here
to within Congress and all that kind of stuff.
Yeah, completely in every way.
I mean, that's an incredible book
and it's a very entertaining read.
It has obviously a lot of good historical context
on some of the key players,
whether it was Anwar Sadat or Menachem Begin
or Jimmy Carter and Cy Vance and a lot of the others
who were involved with those negotiations.
And the thing that I kind of took from that experience
was just how personal it was.
And again, one of my favorite stories from that book
was how Anwar Sadat, who was a big, big leader,
he had a mystic who was, according to this book,
again, history, I like reading it,
but I always realize that you have to notice
that this is just the perspective
of a given author that's writing it.
But the way that they write this book
was that he had an advisor who was a mystic
and the mystic was having a back channel with the Israelis.
And the mystic told Sadat, if you go to Israel
and you make a speech at the Knesset,
Begin is ready to give you the Sinai.
And so he goes to Israel, they set this whole thing up,
he goes and gives the Knesset,
they go for their meeting after and Sadat says,
okay, well, are we gonna do this thing?
And Begin says, what are you talking about?
I'm not giving you an inch of our land.
And it was just one of these things
where it was a miscommunication
that brought about the symbolic visit
of Anwar Sadat to Israel.
And that was one of these notions
that just made everyone think that something was possible
that they thought was impossible a moment before.
Actually, we had an example like that
during our time in government
when we did the Abraham Accords.
The first step of the Accords was really a phone call
between President Trump, Prime Minister Netanyahu
and Mohammed bin Zayed, who at that point
was the crown prince and de facto ruler of the UAE.
But all we had was a phone call
and then a statement that was released.
And what was interesting after that is we said,
okay, well, how do we integrate countries?
Nobody's done this in a long time.
And we were trying to figure out all the issues
and there's big miscommunications between Israel and UAE.
And we were navigating through all the issues.
And so after a couple of weeks, I said,
you know what, I've got to go over there
and try to sort through these issues.
So we make a plan to go to Israel, then we can go to UAE.
And then a young gentleman who worked with me
named Avi Berkowitz says,
well, if we're flying from Israel to UAE,
instead of flying on a government plane,
why don't we see if we can get an EL AL plane
and we'll do the first official commercial flight?
And so I said, that's a great idea.
Let's call Ambassador Otaiba Yousif,
who was a tremendous player in the Abraham Accords
working behind the scenes day and night
and was really a big catalyst.
So he calls Yousif and he said, sure, no problem.
Let's give it a shot.
So we go and we do it.
And he says, if we can work out these issues,
what we'll do?
So we go to Israel, we do our meetings,
we get everything back into a good place.
We set up this trip over, we fly in an EL AL plane.
We fill it up at the time,
it was during COVID with a health delegation.
We had the financial ministry
because we had to open up banking relationships
that could wire money between countries.
We wanted to get health partnerships.
Then we just had a lot of legal things
and national security things
we wanted to start putting together.
So we do this flight and we end up landing in UAE.
And the picture of us coming off the plane,
being greeted by Emiratis and Tobes
with an EL AL plane with an Israeli flag on it
just captured everyone's imagination.
And so it was one of these things where it's like,
you work so hard on the details
and the negotiation, I mean, hundreds of hours
to kind of make sure everything's perfect.
And the one thing that you do kind of,
yeah, let's give it a shot.
That image ended up capturing everyone's heart.
So going back to Sadat, that visit was very critical.
And what was interesting was, is according to this book,
it happened because of a miscommunication.
That was the first part.
The second part of the book that's just amazing theater,
and actually the book was based on a play,
was just going back and forth
with all of the different methodologies that they tried
that failed, but they kept trying at it.
And then ultimately seeing how the personalities
were able to find ways to make the compromise
that ultimately was a very, very big thing
for more stability in the Middle East.
And so, amazing book, I would highly recommend it.
A very entertaining read and something
that at least gave me encouragement to keep going
when the task I was pursuing seemed so large.
I mean, if we could just linger on the personalities.
You write in the book that words matter,
or you write in the context of saying,
in the diplomacy business, words matter,
and then you said that we're in the results business,
is a badass line, but if we just stick
to the diplomacy business and words mattering,
it seems like one of the things you really highlight
that individual words can really have,
like you can fight over individual words.
So how do you operate in a world
where single words matter?
I think you have to be respectful to the craft
that you're in where words matter,
but then realize that they don't matter as much.
And then also focus on the fact that the actions
are actually what's gonna matter more than the words.
And so, you have a difference
between leaders and politicians.
Politicians are there to say the right thing
and to hold the power.
Leaders are people who are willing to do things
that will be transformational from my perspective.
And so, when I would think about diplomacy,
words without actions or without the threat of actions,
and that was something that President Trump did very well,
was that people knew that he was willing to take action,
he was very unpredictable in how he would act,
and that made our words much more effective
in what they did.
So it's all a combination,
but coming from the private sector,
we are all about results, right?
If you're in government, you can work on something
for 10 years and fail, and then retire
and they consider you an expert in the private sector.
If you work on something for 10 weeks
and you don't have a success, then you're unemployed.
So it's a different kind of notion.
And it was just understanding the mentality
and trying to adjust and bridging the divides
between the different trainings.
Is that the biggest thing you took
from your business background?
Is that just be really results-focused?
It was just the only way to be.
If I was giving up a nice life in New York
and if I was giving up the stuff that I really enjoyed,
the company that I'd helped build
and the life that I was enjoying in order to do government,
I was going there to make a difference
and we had to focus on it.
The other skillset, so there was a couple skillsets
that I found were quite deficient in government.
First of all, there was a ton of amazing people.
People talk about the bureaucracy.
What I found was is you had incredibly committed,
passionate, intelligent, capable people
all throughout the government.
And what they were waiting for, though, was direction
and then cover in order to get there.
And so there were a lot of tasks that I worked on,
whether it was building the wall at the southern border
where I was able to work with Customs Border Patrol,
Army Corps of Engineers, military, DHS professionals, DOD.
And we basically all came together.
And then once we had a good project management plan,
we were able to move very, very quickly.
I think we built about 470 miles of border barrier
in about two years, basically.
And that worked very well
because we basically brought private sector
project management skillsets,
which were quite often missing in government.
The second one is just, we spoke about negotiation earlier.
I would say that most people in government,
it's just a different form of negotiation
than you see in the private sector
and way less effective in that regard,
which is why I think it's good
the more we can encourage more people
with private sector experience
to do a stint in government
and to really try to contribute and serve their country.
That's how our founders, I mean, George Washington
and all the founding fathers,
they were working on their farms.
They left their farms serving government,
then they went back to the farm.
And that was kind of the design
of the representative government.
It wasn't a career political class.
It was people coming in to show gratitude
for the freedoms and the liberties that they enjoyed
and then do their best to kind of help others
have those same opportunities that they had.
And then they'd go back and live their lives.
And so I think that there's a lot of opportunity
with our government of people with more business mindsets
who are gonna think about things
from a solutions perspective, go and serve.
Is that one of the main problems here?
So you also mentioned the book,
The Great Degeneration by Neil Ferguson,
an awesome historian who's been on this podcast.
It helped you understand the inefficiencies
of government regulation.
I'd love it if you can give an insight
into why government is so inefficient at times.
Like when it is inefficient, when it doesn't work,
why is that the case?
The bureaucracy that you spoke to,
the negative aspects of the bureaucracy.
So we don't have enough time on this podcast to go into it,
but it's, look, there's a lot of aspects that work as well.
But I do think we've gotten too big.
Neil's book that you mentioned,
one of the things that I took from that,
I read it I think in 2012,
right kind of in the middle of the great financial crisis
was he was talking about how government regulation
often was put in place to deal with old crises, right?
So it was never gonna solve future problems.
It was more to kind of create,
to solve for problems that had happened in the past.
And I remember thinking about that.
One thing I was very proud of,
of the work of the Trump administration
was that you had four years consecutively
where there was a net decrease in the cost of regulations.
So to give you a context,
in the last year of Obama in 2016,
there were 6 million man hours spent by the private sector
complying with new federal regulations.
And that's not really what the intent
of our government was, right?
If we have rules or regulations,
those should be legislated by Congress.
They shouldn't be put in by bureaucrats
who are basically saying, I wanna follow this objective.
So using kind of the power of the pen in order to do that.
So the deregulatory effort
was actually very critical to Trump's economic success
and that happened at the beginning of the administration.
And then what I saw with regulation
was anytime either there was legislation
or regulation coming,
the people pushing for it were usually the people
who would benefit from the regulatory captures.
You had these, you look at the great financial crisis
where you had this big banking reforms.
Well, what happened during the big banking reforms?
Then you had a big reduction in the amount of banks
that occurred and the big banks became even bigger.
Whereas I don't think that was the intention
of the legislation,
but the people who were writing the legislation
and influencing it had a lot of the constituencies
from those larger institutions.
And then what happened as a result of that?
A lot of these smaller institutions
didn't have the ability to be as competitive.
They had more restrictions, more costs.
They became less profitable,
but these were the banks that were serving small business,
which is the biggest creator of jobs in our country.
And then as a result, the bigger banks got more powerful.
And what happened in the country
as a result of the regulations that they put in place,
the wealth gap in the country grew, it didn't shrink.
And so I think oftentimes what they say
these regulations are intended to be,
the result often becomes the opposite.
And so what President Trump did in his administration
was they did a massive deregulatory effort.
And I think they pledged that for every one regulation
they put on, because you do need some regulation
in an economy and in a society, they would take off too.
And in the first year they limited eight regulations
for every one.
So that was just something I took from it,
which was, I thought, very interesting.
And you had to really, I think you just have to think
through what are the consequences gonna be
of the different actions you take.
And often government gets it wrong
by taking an action that feels right,
but has big negative consequences down the road.
Let's go to some difficult topics.
You wrote in the book about your experience
with some very low points in government.
You've been attacked quite a bit.
One of the ones that stands out
is the accusations of collusion with Russia.
And you tell in the book, in general, this whole story.
So on a personal level, on a sort of big political level,
can you tell me some aspects of this story?
Sure, so to give the listeners some context,
and people remember this now, it's been kind of swept away
because it turned out not to be true,
was that after President Trump won the election in 2016,
instead of the media saying, oh, we were wrong,
because again, everyone thought he had zero chance
of winning, they said, okay,
well, we couldn't have been wrong.
It must have been the Russians who worked with him.
And so at first, when this started coming up,
I thought this was ridiculous.
I mean, I was very intimately involved
with the operations of the campaign.
I was running the finance of the campaign.
I was running the digital media of the campaign.
I was running the schedule for the campaign.
And I knew that on most days, we had trouble
working, coordinating with ourselves,
let alone collaborating with another government,
and colluding, as they called it.
And so we did a great job, I think,
as an underdog campaign, very leanly staffed.
And then they said that we were working with the Russians.
And so at the time, I didn't take it too seriously
because I knew there was no truth to it.
But it was amazing to me to start seeing
all of these institutions, whether it was CNN,
The Washington Post, New York Times,
these were news organizations that I grew up
having a lot of respect for,
taking these accusations so seriously,
and then working themselves up
in order to just cover it for two years.
Then as a result, you had a special counsel,
you had a House investigation, a Senate investigation.
And I personally spent about, I think, over 20 hours
just testifying before these different committees,
again, spent millions of dollars out of my own pocket
on my legal fees to make sure I was well-represented.
And the reason I did that was because I saw
in Washington, it was like a sick game, right?
It's almost like, even though there was no underlying
problems to the accusation, I felt like
this is one of those things where they're gonna try
to catch you, and then if you step on the line,
they catch you with one misrepresentation,
they're gonna try to put you in jail, or worse,
and so for me, that was a big concern.
So it was amazing, I mean, my poor mom,
I told her to stop reading whatever,
I said, well, I promise you, we didn't do anything wrong,
it's good, but she'd call me and say,
well, our friends were on the Upper East Side,
we're talking with Chuck Schumer,
he says, Jared's going to jail.
We know for sure that he colluded with the Russians,
and this is like a leading senator saying things like this.
And so it was just interesting for me
to see how the whole world could believe something
and be talking about it that I knew
with 1,000% certainty was just not true.
And so seeing that play out was very, very hard,
obviously, I was accused of a lot of things,
there were times in Washington I was radioactive,
I remember one weekend, it was all over CNN,
the people, the panels on CNN,
like the news organization that I grew up thinking
was like the number one trusted name for news in the world,
talking about how I'd committed treason
because I met with an ambassador and said,
we'd like to hear your perspective
on what you think the policy should be in Syria,
where there was a big civil war happening
and ISIS and a lot of different things.
So it was quite a crazy time in that regard,
but luckily, again, we were able to fight through it,
it was a major distraction for our administration.
I think we were able to kind of stay focused
on the objectives and the policies,
but it was a crazy time,
and I learned a lot from that experience.
It's crazy how just an accusation can be viral
and can just go.
One of the things that worries me
is the effect on your mind, the psychology of it,
to make sure it doesn't make you cynical.
People that are trying to do stuff,
those kinds of stories that can destroy their mind.
So one of the things I'd love to sort of understand,
you kind of rolled in from the business floor,
and all of a sudden, the entire world,
from CNN to everybody,
is accusing you of colluding with the Russians.
What do you, when you're sitting at home,
how do you keep a calm mind, a clear mind?
An optimistic one that doesn't become cynical,
and actually just keep trying to push on
and do stuff in the world?
So it was a surreal experience.
I would say number one is I felt very confident
that I hadn't done anything wrong.
So I would always tell my lawyer,
the good news is I've got a good fact problem.
I need a good lawyer to get me through it,
but it's much easier to be a good lawyer
if you have a very innocent client.
And so the fact that I knew that I didn't have,
I didn't believe that I had any legal liability
helped me kind of intellectually separate
the challenge I needed to do to fight through it from it.
And then I just basically said,
I'd had hardship earlier in my life
where I dealt with the situation with my father.
And what I realized there is that
you can't really spend energy
on the things that you don't control.
All you can do is spend your time and energy
worrying about what you can control,
and then how you react to the things that you have there.
And so it took a lot of discipline.
It took a lot of strength.
And again, I give my wife, Ivanka,
and even Donald a lot of credit
for kind of having my back during that time
and encouraging me just to kind of fight through it.
And then I also had to make sure
that I didn't allow that to distract me from my job.
I felt like I had an amazing opportunity
in the White House to make a difference in the world.
And if I would have spent all my time playing defense,
in politics, it's a time duration game.
In business, you have whatever duration
you set for yourself.
In politics, it's time duration.
We had four years.
Every day was sand through an hourglass.
My mindset was I need to accomplish
as much as I can in these four years.
And I guess the traditional game
that's played in Washington
is whether it's the media, the opposition,
their job is to distract you and then try to stop you
from being as successful as you want to be.
And so just fought through it.
And it wasn't always fun, but we got through.
And thank God, it's something people don't talk about.
And it has been amazing to me,
just the lack of self-awareness and reflection
of a lot of the people who hyped this up for two years.
They don't think there was anything wrong with it.
And that's interesting, but my view is we got through it.
It's good, so it's in the past.
And then I started moving to the future
and that's really where I spent my time.
Yeah, but I want to linger on it because to me,
that has a really discouraging effect
on anyone who's trying to do positive in the world.
These kinds of attacks are intense.
You say one of the lessons you learned
is that you really have to be perfect,
but I hate that to be the lesson.
I feel like you should be able to do stupid stuff,
take big risks, and people celebrate the big risks
and not try to weave gigantic stories over nothing.
I just want to understand the two aspects of this,
how to not have such stories of so much legs.
And the other is how to stay psychologically strong.
So you kind of waved it off
that you didn't have a fact problem,
but it can just have an effect on your psyche.
You seem to be pretty stoic about the whole thing,
but just on the psychology side,
how did you stay calm and not become cynical
where you can continue to do stuff and take big risks?
I didn't have a choice.
What do you mean?
I could have spent every day feeling sorry for myself
or complaining or saying things aren't fair,
but the general way I looked at it
was that in life, every opportunity has a cost.
And you could look at it and say,
maybe this was a massive cost,
either in dollars or in time or in reputation
or in an emotional drain.
But you could also say that,
I had an opportunity to work in the White House
and I had an opportunity to work
on some of the hardest challenges.
And you talk about how that's not celebrated.
That is something very different.
In the private sector, when you take on big challenges,
that is celebrated.
In government, when you take on big challenges,
people want to see it fail
or they want to criticize the people
who are trying to take that on.
And I think that's wrong.
And I think that as a country, we should be thinking big,
we should be dreaming big,
and we should be encouraging our politicians
to try and to fail more and to go and to take on big things,
knowing that there's risk of failing.
Obviously, we want them to succeed, not to fail,
but let's take on the big things.
Let's try to do that.
So I think it's just very basic
that you're in a situation, I've made decisions,
I can't go back and change decisions in the past.
I still felt very blessed to be in the position I was in
and I knew that I just had to work through it.
And like I said, I was very lucky to have support
from my wife and from my family and from good friends.
Again, I think I'd chosen very good friends in life
and my friends were with me.
I had one friend who, my lowest moment,
got on the plane, he lived in Arizona,
got on a plane and came just to have dinner with me
to say, just pick your head up.
I know you're down now, you're going to be fine,
just fight through.
That meant a lot to me.
And again, I always think in my life,
you don't learn as much from your successes,
you don't learn as much from your high points,
you learn the most about who you want to be
and how the world works from your lowest moments.
And at those lowest moments, it made me better
and it taught me how to be a better friend
to people who are in tough situations.
And I tried to just get tougher
and I tried to just get better and work through it.
Yeah, you said that you and Ivanka,
this intense time brought you two together
and helped you kind of deal with the intensity
of the chaos of it all.
So I think it was just number one,
knowing that you had a partner
and knowing that you had somebody who loved you
and believed in you.
I think that was definitely by far the biggest of anything.
Love is the answer.
Love is very important.
But then there's also a lot that I've learned from her,
always getting me to read different books
or learn different things, which I love.
But she's also, I think, an amazing role model.
And I go through our time in Washington
where there were so many people who were,
I thought, very nasty to her unfoundedly.
And I'm not talking about individually
because again, most people interacted with her,
were super kind, but I would see people on Twitter
or different places go after her
and she always stayed elegant.
And I felt like that was something
that she never stooped down to a lower level.
She kept her elegance the whole time
and she really went to Washington
wanting to be a force of good.
And I see all the time that she follows her heart,
she does what's right,
and she has a very strong moral compass.
And I feel very lucky to have her as a partner
and I respect her tremendously.
Yeah, she walks through the fire with grace, I would say.
And she's recommended a bunch of amazing books to me
and she has an incredible, a fascinating mind.
But one thing that jumped out to me is you both love diners,
Jersey diners.
So I lived in Philly for a while
and I traveled quite a bit
and traveling from Boston down to Philly, maybe to DC.
You can drive through Jersey.
There's something about Jersey.
I don't know what it is.
It's the best.
You listen to Bruce Springsteen.
Lucy Kay has this bit where I think
it's part of criticizing cell phones today
where people are too much on their phone.
They don't just sit there and be bored,
but he uses that story to tell where he's just driving
and Bruce Springsteen's song comes on
and he just wants to pull over to the side of the road
and just like weep for an unexplainable reason.
I think that's true because life is difficult.
Life is full of suffering or struggle or challenges.
So sometimes it's always Bruce Springsteen,
but some kind of song like this can really
make you reflect on life, that melancholy feeling.
But that melancholy feeling is the other side
of the happiness coin,
where if you just allow yourself to feel that pain,
you can also feel the highest joys.
That's the point Lucy Kay makes.
And there's something about Jersey
with the diners, often late at night.
There's several diner experiences, I should say.
There's the family-friendly, there's a nice waitress
and there's a sweetness, a kindness,
like hello, sweetheart, that kind of thing.
There's also like the 3 a.m. diner,
the ones that are open 24 hours,
that has a romantic element when you're a young man
or young woman, traveling, the loneliness of that.
There's all of it.
The American diner is like,
from like Jack Kerouac on, represents something.
I'm not sure what that is,
but it's like a real beautiful experience
and the food itself too.
Oh, always fresh, yeah.
The thing with diners, there's so much to love about it.
When I grew up, obviously in New Jersey,
when I'd go with my father to business,
he'd always stop when he'd eat at a diner.
Late night, I'd be coming back with my friends,
we'd stop at a diner, and it's a tradition
that Ivanka and I love doing as well.
I think there's a notion of, it's very egalitarian
in that people from all places are there.
You could order basically whatever you want.
I mean, the menus at the diners look like the phone book.
And it's amazing how they keep so much fresh ingredients
to do it, at least the good ones do.
I love, as a Jersey guy, that you get mozzarella sticks
and an omelet at any hour of the day,
because most of them are open 24 hours.
And that's basically, by Ivanka, my go-to,
we'll throw in a milkshake or two as well.
But for me as a kid, my father would take me.
Sometimes I'd sit with him in the meeting.
Sometimes I'd be at the table next to him.
He'd give me a bunch of quarters
to put in the music machine
that they would have on the wall.
And it was always just a great experience doing it.
In Jersey, and I joke that if you grow up in Jersey,
you grow up with just enough of a chip on your shoulder
that you have to go and make something of yourself in life.
It's a special place.
I had an amazing childhood there,
and very, very proud to be from the state.
And I will just give a little bit of a plug now,
because the state has now actually turned the corner,
and they had a $10 billion budget surplus for many years.
It was a state that was basically bankrupt.
And now actually under a pretty progressive
Democrat governor, Phil Murphy,
he's turned the state around,
and it's actually has a very bright future ahead.
And it's probably one of the best places
to raise a family in the country.
It's got very low crime,
one of the best public school systems in the country,
a pretty good healthcare system,
a lot of green parks.
People know the Turnpike, but it's got a lot to it.
That's really great.
So I'm a big, big fan of Jersey.
I like how this is a first for this particular podcast.
You literally gave a plug to a state.
So New Jersey, everybody.
It's where it's at.
There's South Jersey, there's North Jersey.
There's all kinds of jerseys too.
The whole thing, it just...
And don't get me started on the Jersey Shore, Lex.
Jersey Shore is a whole thing.
And I'm not talking about the snucky part.
I'm talking about the real nice parts
where you have great food, great people.
You mean nice parts.
It's all beautiful.
The full range of human characters
that are in New Jersey are all beautiful.
I agree with that.
And every time I travel across the world,
there's always to meet somebody from New Jersey,
and you give a deep understanding.
It's the cradle of civilization in many ways.
Okay, so I'm back.
I don't know how we got there.
Oh, all right, going back to the low points.
You mentioned your father, if we could just return there.
Even just the personal story of your father
that you write about,
that all the betrayal that happened in his life,
and then how he responds to that betrayal,
and he was, after that, arrested.
Can you just tell the story?
Sure, so my father is an amazing person,
and we grew up in New Jersey.
My father was a big developer, a great entrepreneur,
built an amazing business.
He got into a dispute with two of his siblings,
and through that dispute,
they basically took all of the documents in his company,
went to the U.S. Attorney's Office,
and turned from a civil dispute
into a real public dispute.
My father did something wrong in that process,
and when he got arrested for that,
he basically said, what I did was wrong,
and he took his medicine, and he did it like a man,
and he said, I'm gonna go to prison,
and he did that for a year.
And so, for me, that was a very challenging time
in the family.
Obviously, it was a shock.
It was a total change.
I mean, I grew up, my childhood was,
I think, a very nice childhood.
My parents always said, do good in school, work hard.
I was very focused on my athletics.
I was captain of the basketball teams,
captain of the hockey team.
I ran a marathon with my father,
and it was always about pursuing,
went to Harvard, graduated with honors,
and then was in NYU pursuing a law degree
and a business degree.
And I was working at the Manhattan District Attorney's Office
at the time, actually thinking I wanted
to go into public service,
because my father always taught us.
We were always surrounded by politicians,
and he always said, my parents came to America.
They lived in the land of opportunity,
and they had these opportunities
because this is the best country in the world.
And so, you should be successful, work hard.
Don't ever let your opportunities become your disadvantages
because you have advantages in life.
You have to work harder,
and that's what he instilled in myself and my brother,
and he always pushed us to make the most of ourselves.
And when we did that, everything changed overnight.
When my father got arrested,
obviously, it's very embarrassing for a family.
When you're on the front page of the papers,
I would see the newspapers writing all these things
about my father that I didn't think were representative
of the person that I knew.
It was a big change for our family, and I was angry.
I was angry.
I said, I could be angry at the prosecutor.
I could be angry at my father's brother.
I could be angry at my father's lawyers.
I could be angry at my father for making this mistake.
And then I said, that's not gonna change anything.
And I had a real shift,
and I do think that that was a turning point in my life
where I basically said,
let me focus on the things I can control.
Let me focus on the positive things I can do.
And from that moment forward,
I said, how can I be a great son to my father?
How could I be a great older brother
slash substitute father for my two sisters,
my younger brother?
How could I be there for my mother?
How could I be there for my father's business?
And I just went into battle mode,
and I put my armor on, and I just ran into it.
And for the next two years, every day was painful.
I mean, I was dealing with banks.
I was dealing with the company who's still at subpoenas.
I was still in law school.
I tell my father I wanted to drop out
of law school and business school, but he said, please don't.
So I would basically go to law school one day a week,
or maybe I'd skip it most days,
and I'd go to his office every day.
And my friends would joke
that if my professors wanted to fail me,
the law professor would have to give me a test
that had four pictures and say,
circle who your professor is.
But I would basically take a week off.
I'd read the books, and I did well, and I got my degrees.
And it was just a very, very challenging time.
But like I said to you before,
is that you learn the most about life,
and you learn the most about humanity and yourself
when you're in your most challenging periods.
And I'll say that that experience also changed
the people I interacted with.
Spending weekends with my father
down in a prison in Alabama, I met the other inmates.
I met their families.
I spent time then trying to advise
the children of other people
who were going through the same experience
that I'd gone through on how to navigate it correctly.
And you just learn a lot about the world.
And you see that in life,
everything could get taken from you,
your status, your money, your friends.
I saw that certain people were very disloyal
to my father at the time, who he thought were friends.
It was only a handful.
But again, I learned from those people,
how can I be a true friend to people?
How can I be better?
And I learned a tremendous amount through that experience.
You write that your father told you,
while being humble, I'd love to ask you about this,
that in life sometimes we get so powerful
that we start to think we're the dealers of our own fate.
We're not the dealers, God is the dealer.
Sometimes we have to be brought back down to earth
to get perspective on what is really important.
What do you think he meant by that?
What did you learn from that experience?
The way I interpreted it at the time,
and those were very, very memorable words,
and it occurred, I was down after I picked up my father
from the arraignment, I drove him down,
I drove the car, and my father and I were very, very close,
and he didn't say a word for the whole time.
And I think he was processing, number one,
what was happening to him, and I couldn't even imagine.
But I actually think the bigger pain for him,
because my father is such a committed person to the family,
is like, did I let my family down?
Did I let my kids down?
And I do think he felt at that moment like his life was over.
He couldn't really see past what this challenge
was gonna bring and if there would be a life for him
after it, so I could see that he had a lot of fear.
And he really wasn't saying much.
And then I didn't know what to do,
and so I just stood by him and stood close.
And later that day, or the next day,
he got up and started walking.
He had an ankle monitor.
For whatever reason, the prosecutor was so aggressive
he was a flight risk, so they made him wear
an ankle monitor.
And they were very, very aggressive and nasty.
And at the time, my father was the biggest donor
to Democrats, the prosecutor was a Republican.
It was a very political thing.
And what happened was is he was walking around the pool
and I just started walking with him.
And he said to me, Jared, in life,
sometimes we get so powerful that we believe
that we're the dealer.
He says, but we're not the dealer, God's the dealer,
and we have to come down to earth to understand,
like you said.
So what I took from that was that my father,
with all of his success, had started to believe
that maybe certain rules didn't apply to him.
And I think that that's where he made a mistake.
And I think he had a lot of regret that he made the mistake.
And my father is a very humble person.
He's a very moral person.
For me, with my humility, my brother and I joke
that we give our credit for being humble, number one,
to being Mets fans, because every year you have
a lot of promise and then it never ends up paying off,
although now with Steve Cohen hopefully
we're on a different trajectory.
But the other thing is also our mother.
Our mother really raised us to be very humble,
to be, we knew we had a lot, but every Sunday morning
my mom was there clipping the coupons.
The cereal we ate in our house was based on,
was based on what was on sale versus what we liked.
When we would have a problem with our teachers in school
and I'd say, well, teacher doesn't like me,
she'd say, well, I'm not calling them.
It's your job to make the teacher like you.
And so my mother gave us a lot of that.
My father gave us a lot of the grounding.
And I think during that time, my father was just realizing
that maybe he had gotten disconnected
from the grounding and the values.
And again, I think he also accepted maybe he could have
blamed others for acting inappropriately,
but I respect the fact that he took responsibility himself
and said, I can't control the actions of other people.
I can't control what they do is right and wrong.
I can just control my actions.
And as I go on the next journeys in my life
and I go to government, I go to Washington,
I mean, I even think through the craziness
of going from visiting my father in a prison
to 10 years later sitting in the office in the White House
next to the President of the United States.
And I think about that story
and that it's a story that only God could write.
And I really believe that you have to have a lot of faith
because the lows and the highs
are both so extreme and unbelievable
that I feel like those low moments in some ways
allowed me to keep my grounding
and to understand what was truly important in life
for when I ended up going through those other moments.
Your father was betrayed perhaps over money by siblings.
Is there some deeper wisdom you can draw from that?
Have you seen money or perhaps power
cloud people's judgment?
Oh, 100%, 100%.
Is there some kind of optimistic thing
you can take from that about human nature
of how to escape that clouding of judgment
when you're talking about leaders,
when you're talking about government, even business?
You mentioned there's a power dynamics at play always
when you're negotiating.
Is there a way to see the common humanity
and not see the sort of will to power in the whole thing?
Definitely, you mentioned about power, money corrupting.
There's a great quote I heard a friend of mine say.
It's a guy, Michael Harris,
who was one of the founders of Death Row Records.
And he was being interviewed recently
and they asked him about what happened with Shook Knight.
And his line was,
money just makes you more of what you already are,
which I thought was a very elegant way of saying it.
And I would see this time and time again in the White House
where you had people who were now given
a lot of responsibility and power
and it went to their head and they acted very crazily
and maybe didn't act in a way
that I thought was always conducive to the objective.
So I think it's a very big problem that you have.
Whether it's something that's solvable,
I think it's about having the right leaders
and hopefully for the leaders having good friends.
I mean, I'm still friends with a lot of the people
I interacted with when I was in government.
And the number one thing I try to be to them
is just a good friend.
I try to be somebody who they can talk about things with.
I don't go in trying to tell them what to do
on different things.
And I think that that's a big thing
is that people just need friends and they need conversation.
And if they have that,
then hopefully that allows them
to keep their head in the right place.
I think this is a good place to ask
about one aspect of the fascinating work you've done,
which is on prison reform.
Can you take me through your journey
of helping the bipartisan bill get passed,
just working on prison reform
in the White House in general,
how you made that happen, how you help make that happen?
Sure, so we passed a law called the First Step Act,
which was the largest prison and criminal justice reform bill
that's been done maybe in 30, 40, 50 years in the US.
And so what it basically did was two things.
Number one is it took the prison system
and it took a certain class of offenders
and allowed them to become eligible for earlier release
if they go through the certain trainings
that will allow them to have a lower probability
of going back.
So stepping back, you look at the prison system,
you say, what's the purpose?
Is it to punish?
Is it to warehouse?
Is it to rehabilitate?
And I do think that we're a country
that believes in second chances.
I saw firsthand when my father was a client of the system
how inefficient it was and how much better it could be.
And when my father got out,
we didn't run from that experience.
He started hiring people from Rikers Island
and different prisons into the company,
into a second chance program,
which we're very, very proud of doing.
And what we saw through our micro experience
was that if you give people mentorship,
if you give them job training,
a lot of people leave, they have addiction issues
and they can't find housing.
And so people leave prison with a criminal record
and they're less likely to go back
and reintegrate in society without help
from different institutions that can help them do that.
So we modeled the reforms of what they did in Texas
and Georgia and other states
where they basically put a lot of job training,
alcohol and addiction treatment programs in the prisons
as a way to incentivize the prisoners
to work on themselves while they're there
in order to allow them to reenter society.
It's turned out to be very successful so far.
They just had a report that showed
that the general population has had a 47% recidivism rate,
meaning that people who leave federal prison,
half of them go back
and people who have now taken this program,
only 12% of them go back.
So number one, you're making communities safer
because if people are gonna now get a job and enter society,
instead of committing future crimes,
you're avoiding future crimes.
And number two,
you're giving people a second chance at life.
And so that was the first part of it.
The second thing we did was there was a rule passed
in the 90s that basically penalized crack cocaine
at a hundred times the penalty of what regular cocaine was.
And I think a lot of the motivations,
what people say in retrospect
was that crack was more of a black drug
and cocaine was more of a white drug.
And so there was a really racial disparity
in terms of what the application of these sentences were.
So they then revised that to make it 18 to one.
And what we did in this bill
is we allowed it to go retroactive
to allow people who were in prison with sentences
under what we thought was the racist law
to be able to make an application to a judge
in order to be dismissed.
And it was based on good behavior, being rehabilitated,
and the fact that they would have a low probability
of offending in the future.
And so that was really the meat of it.
And there was a couple other things in there we did as well,
which were also quite good.
So we did it, worked very closely
with the Democrats, Republicans to do it.
At first, President Trump was a little bit skeptical of it
because he's a big, strong law and order supporter,
but he made me work very hard to put together a coalition
of Republicans and Democrats and law enforcement.
We had the support from the policemen,
we had the support from the ACLU,
and ultimately we were able to get it together.
And it was an amazing thing.
We ended up getting 87 votes in the Senate.
This happened for me at a time
while the Russia investigation stuff was still happening.
A new chief of staff came in, John Kelly,
he basically marginalized me in the operations.
So I had kind of less day-to-day responsibilities
in the White House.
And so for me, this effort became one of my full-time
efforts along with negotiating the Mexico trade deal
and along with the Middle East efforts.
And the reason why that was great was because
it didn't have a lot of support
from the Republican caucus originally,
and people thought there was no way it would happen.
So I really was able to be the chief executive,
the middle executive, the low executive, the intern.
And through that process, I really got an education
on how Congress works, on how to pass legislation.
I was negotiating texts, I was negotiating back and forth,
and I built a lot of trust.
Again, I deal with whether it's Hakeem Jeffries
or Cedric Richmond that we built a lot of trust.
We'd speak three times a day.
These guys had my back, the ACLU.
Again, I never thought they were suing our administration
every day or every other day on something,
but for whatever reason, we built trust
and we were able to work together.
And then also with the real conservative groups,
because there was a big part of the conservative base
that felt like we should be giving people a second chance.
And in addition to that, this will keep our country safer
and it will reduce the cost of what we spend on prisons.
And so it was a great effort, and I was very, very proud
that we were able to get it done.
How'd you convince the Republicans?
So they were skeptical at first.
We were talking about just phone conversations,
going out to lunch, just back to the emojis or what?
Hand-to-hand combat, meetings.
The cool thing about this is, so everyone always says,
I always get frustrated when I hear lawmakers say,
oh, the Senate's not what it used to be,
or Congress isn't what it used to be,
things are broken today.
I don't think that's true.
I think going through the process,
I think that our founders were totally genius
in the way that they designed our system of government.
And what I saw is you just have to work it.
So everyone knows the power of their vote.
Some would give it to me easily.
Some wouldn't give it to me easily.
Some would trade it for other things.
Some would withhold it because they were pissed
about other things.
And it was just hand-to-hand combat.
So it was just making calls, using the phone,
going, walking the halls, going to lunches,
hosting dinners at my house.
It was just, it was a nonstop lobbying effort.
And by the way, it was also adjudicating issues
and making people feel like they were heard,
hearing their issues and then trying to find solutions
that you don't put something in that then tips off
where you lose a whole coalition.
So it was really a balancing act,
but it was an amazing thing.
And I worked very closely on that with Van Jones
and Jessica Jackson,
who also gave me a lot of help on the left.
And it was an amazing thing, had a great team too.
So you mentioned the importance of trust
at the very beginning of the conversation.
From the outsider perspective,
maybe a dark question,
which is like how much trust is there in Washington?
How much did the flip side of that?
How much backstabbing is there?
Can you form like long-term relationships with people
on a basic human level where you know,
you're not going to be betrayed, screwed over,
manipulated for, again,
going back to the old money and power.
The answer is yes and the answer is no.
So I made some incredible friends, lifelong friends
through my time in Washington.
But the way I think about it from politics,
and I think in geopolitics as well,
is I would say that politicians really don't have friends,
politicians have interests.
And as long as you kind of follow that rule,
you should be able to know how to rate
where your relationship with a given person falls
in the spectrum.
But I do think I was the exception.
I did make some tremendous friends.
And again, I'd go back to what I said about negotiation,
where when you're in a situation
where there's really nothing in it for any of you personally,
but you're in a fox all together
and nobody in Washington
could get anything done by themselves.
You have people coming from all different backgrounds,
all different experiences, all different geographies,
coming together, agreeing on an objective, creating a plan,
and then every day rowing together
in order to get it done.
It's a beautiful thing.
And you really learn what people are about.
And so when you go through an experience like that,
you learn who's in it for themselves,
you learn who's in it for the cause.
And for every thing you read about in the press,
of a fight I had with somebody because we were at odds,
I have about 100 people who have become lifelong friends
because I respect the way
that when we were under fire together, they got better,
they were competent,
and they were there to serve for the right reason.
And so I guess the answer is yes, it is possible.
You have to be careful
because there are a lot of mercurial people there.
I always say the politicians are like gladiators.
I didn't have as much respect for politicians
till I got there.
But if you think about it,
everyone who's got a congressional seat or a Senate seat,
there's 25 people back at home who want their job,
who think they're smarter than them,
who are trying to backstab them.
And so I always say that the political dynamic,
it's like in the private sector,
you're standing on flat ground.
You choose which fights you take on,
when you take them on, how you fight them.
In politics, it's like you're standing on a ball.
And what you have to realize is that
there's maybe like 10 things that you have to do,
but there's a potential cost to taking on each one
that might destabilize you.
You fall off the ball,
and then you lose your opportunity to pursue those.
You have to always be kind of marking everything to market
and going through your calculations
to make sure you can accomplish what you want to
without falling off the ball
and losing your opportunity to make a difference.
I guess people like power.
And I just feel like to be a good politician,
you should be willing,
like good meaning good for humanity,
be willing to let go of power.
Try to do the right thing if there's somebody back home
that doesn't manipulate,
if stuff screws you over and takes power from you, it's okay.
I feel like that kind of humility
is required to be a great leader.
And I feel like that's actually a good way
to have long-term power
because karma has a viral aspect to it.
Just doing good by others, I feel like is a-
I'd like to say that's true, Lex.
I think it's just way more complicated.
I mean, you look what happened this week
with Kevin McCarthy, right?
He did what he thought was morally right.
He thought, you know, he did a bipartisan deal.
He was told that they would have his back.
And then the moment things got tough, they cut him loose.
So again, I don't know if that was the right thing
or the wrong thing, right?
I've also seen leaders on the other end say,
I'm gonna do things that are short-term more selfish,
but the way they justify to themselves is to say,
I believe that myself staying in power
is existential to the greater good.
So I will do things that maybe are not
in the greater good now
because I believe that my maintaining power is.
And so it's complicated.
In an idealized world, I'd love to believe that's the case,
but it's just way more complicated than that.
Yeah.
I wish it wasn't, but it is.
Yeah.
I mean, I do just wish people zoomed out
and people in politics zoomed out a bit
and just ask themselves, what are we all doing this for?
You know, like sometimes you can get
a little bit lost in the game of it.
If you zoom out, you realize integrity
is way more important than little gains in money
or little gains in power in the long-term.
So when you look at yourself in the mirror
at the end of the day,
and also how history remembers you.
I just feel like people do some dark stuff
when they're in that moment when they're losing power
and they try to hold on a little too hard.
This is when they can do really dark things,
like bring out the worst in themselves.
And it's just sad to see.
And I wish there was a kind of machinery of government
would inspire people to be their best selves
in their last days versus the worst selves.
When that system gets invented,
you'll share with me what it is, but it's,
look, let me give you another way to frame it,
which is, and this was kind of the revelation
we spoke before about kind of when I was getting my butt
kicked by the Russia investigation
and all the different areas.
But kind of the basic framework I looked at was I said,
okay, this all feels tough.
But I said, the game's the game.
The game's been here way longer,
but way before I came and it will be here
way long after I leave.
And so I have two choices.
I can complain that the game's tough.
It's not fair, it's not moral.
Or I can go and I can try to play the game
as hard as possible.
And I think that there's two different things, right?
You have people who are willing to kind of sit in the stands
and they're willing to yell at the players
or make their points known.
Or you have people who are willing to suit up
and get in the arena and go play.
And I have a lot of respect for the people
who suit up and go play.
And again, some of them,
I wish they would play for different means,
but the fact that they're willing to put their name
on the ballot, make the sacrifice,
and go put on the pads and get hit and hit others,
I think that you need those people.
And I wish more people who had maybe the moral wiring
that you discussed would be putting on a helmet
and going to play, because it's hard, it's hard.
I agree with you.
I just would love to fix the aspect
of the Russia collusion accusation, the virality,
the power of that,
because that's a really discouraging thing for people.
Maybe it's the way it has to be,
but it seems like a disincentive to people to participate.
It is, but I'll give you, again, an optimistic side of it,
is that what you're seeing now with social media
is I do think with what's happening at X,
there is now more of a reversion
towards more egalitarianism of information.
And so for many years,
the media publications were the gate holders,
they were the gatekeepers.
And then you had these social media companies that grew,
they became so powerful,
but then they were tilting the scales.
Why they were doing it,
we can go through long explanations for that.
But if there truly is a real forum
and a democratization of information,
then you would think that the marketplace of ideas
would surface the real ones and discredit the non-real ones.
And I think that as a society,
we're starting to kind of come to grips with the fact
that the power dynamic is changing
and that some of these institutions
that we used to have a lot of faith in
don't deserve our faith.
And some of them will actually reform
and maybe re-earn our faith.
So I think that there could be an optimistic tone.
Again, the years of Trump,
I think that he was an outsider
and he represented something
that was existential to the system.
You think about for the 30 years before,
you were either part of the Clinton dynasty
or the Bush dynasty.
I think a lot of people in the country felt like
that whole class,
whether you're wearing a red shirt or a blue shirt,
wasn't representing them.
And Trump represented a true outsider to that system.
And I do think that as he went in there,
there was a lot of norms that were broken
to try to stop him from changing
the traditional power structure.
So I think that we're at a time where
maybe there will be an optimistic breakthrough
where you'll have institutions that will allow
for a lot more transparency into what truth really is.
I'd love to go back and talk to you about the Middle East
because there's so many interesting components to this.
Let's talk about Saudi Arabia.
First, let me ask you about MBS,
Mohammed bin Salman, the crown prince.
So you've gotten to know him pretty well.
You've become friends with him.
What's he like as a human being?
Just on a basic human level, what's he like?
So for the listeners,
Mohammed bin Salman is now the crown prince of Saudi Arabia.
He has risen to that position over the last couple of years
and he's been a tremendous reformer for the country.
He's gone in and he's really modernized the economy.
He's put a lot more investment into the country.
He's marginalized the religious police
and he's really done a good job
to bring modernization and a lot of reform.
So he's been a great reformer.
What he's like as a person is he's very high energy.
He's got tremendous candle power, very, very smart,
incredibly well-read.
When he was younger, his father would give him a book a week
and make him report on it on the weekend.
He was trained as a leader and as a politician,
really by his father.
He's not Western educated.
So he grew up in the Saudi culture
and he's a real Saudi nationalist.
He loves their history, loves their heritage,
has a deep understanding of the tribal nature of the region.
And his father was actually known
to be a tremendous politician.
So when he was governor of Riyadh,
people who I speak to today about him say that
if they had a full election,
he would have won in a landslide.
This, every time somebody went to the hospital,
he was the first person to call.
Anytime there was a funeral,
he was the first person to show up.
He's a very, very beloved leader.
Mohammed bin Salman, he was a businessman
before he got into Crown Prince.
So he thinks really with a business mindset
about how he runs the country.
And he's brought, I think, a different mindset and energy
to the Middle East.
One thing I'll say that maybe that comes to mind here
is that I remember early on talking with him
about all the different initiatives he was taking on.
He's building a big city called Neom in the desert
in a place where there really was nothing on the Red Sea.
And a lot of people were criticizing
the ambition of the plan.
And I was sitting with him one night and I said,
why are you taking on all these things?
You've got a lot of different programs,
but what most politicians do is they set lower expectations
and then they exceed the expectations.
And he looked at me without hesitation.
He says, Jared, the way I look at it
is that in five years from now, if I set five goals
and I achieve five goals, I'll have achieved five things.
If I set 100 goals and I fail at 50 of them,
then five years I'll have accomplished 50 things.
And so it's a very different mindset as a leader.
The way I got to work with him was Saudi Arabia
was a big topic in the campaign.
President Trump was basically saying during the campaign
that they've got to pay for their fair share.
They haven't been a great partner in the region.
He's very critical of Saudi.
And then during the transition,
I was asked by several friends
to meet with a representative of Saudi Arabia.
I said, I don't want to meet with them.
But I came over and I met and they said,
well, we want to make changes.
And I said, well, you have to make changes
to how you treat women.
Then women couldn't drive.
They had guardianship laws.
So you got to start working with Israel.
You have to be paying more of your fair share
and you have to be stopping the Wahhabism
that's being spread.
I had no knowledge.
These were just the traditional talking points
about Saudi Arabia.
So the guy I was with basically said,
is a guy, Fad Al-Tunzi,
who's a very respected minister there.
He says, Jared, he says,
you don't know much about Saudi Arabia, do you?
I said, no, no, no, I don't.
It's just really what I have been told or what I read.
And he says, okay, let me do this.
We want to be great allies with America.
We've traditionally been great allies with America.
Can I come back to you with a proposal
on ways that we can make progress
on all of the different areas where we have joint interests?
And keep in mind at that point in time,
the Middle East was a mess.
And probably the single biggest issue we had
after ISIS was the ideological battle.
If you remember in 2016,
there was the Pulse nightclub shooting in Orlando.
You had the San Bernardino shooting
and people were being radicalized online
with the extremism.
And then there was a lot of crimes
that were happening because of that.
And it was a big topic in the campaign.
When I was thinking about talking to different generals
and what capabilities the U.S. had
to really combat the extremism and the ideological battle,
what we realized was that Saudi Arabia
is the custodian of the two holiest sites in Islam,
the Mecca Medina,
that that would be the best partner to work with
if they were willing to.
But for years, they really hadn't been willing
to kind of lean into this fight.
So I said, sure, give a proposal.
So they come back, give a proposal.
And they said, look, if you make President Trump's
first trip to Saudi Arabia,
we will do all these different things.
We'll increase our military spending and cooperation.
We'll counter all the terror financing.
Unbelievable layer.
So I took the proposal.
I went to the national, then it was General Flynn.
I said, if Saudi Arabia did these things,
would this be considered a big unbelievable,
but it will never happen?
I said, well, they're telling me
they want to do these things.
Again, I'm having no foreign policy experience.
I'm just saying I've got somebody telling me
they want to do it.
And that's kind of where we started.
Again, to office, I don't think much more about it.
And then I think it was like maybe a month in,
President Trump has a call with King Salman.
And before the call, we're in the Oval Office.
And the president's basically saying,
well, this is what we want to go through.
And I have Secretary Mattis and Secretary Tillerson,
the Minister of Defense and the Secretary of State
basically saying, you have to deal with MBN.
MBN is the guy who's been our partner for all these years.
He's the head of intelligence
and he's been a great partner.
I said, well, if he's been a great partner,
then why do we have all these problems
that you guys are complaining about with Saudi?
I said, I've been told that we have this proposal from MBS,
who's the deputy crown prince,
and that's who we should be dealing with on this.
And so the phone call starts
and President Trump listened to both of us.
And on the phone call with King Salman,
President Trump says, okay,
we'll go through all these things.
These are the things we want to get done.
And he says, well, who should we deal with?
And King Salman says,
deal with my son, the deputy crown prince, MBS.
And so President Trump's on the phone,
have him deal with Jared,
because I think he knew that
if he put him with the other guys,
they were not believers in what he had the ability to do.
And that's how I got assigned to work with him.
I get back to my office after that,
have an email from him, spoke to him for the first time.
And then we just went to work.
And a lot of people were betting against that trip.
They thought it wasn't gonna be successful.
And they've been betting against him.
And he's been underestimated,
but he's been doing an incredible job.
And the whole Middle East is different today
because of the work that he's done.
Maybe it's instructive to go through the mental journey
that you went on from the talking points,
the basic narratives,
the very basic talking points,
understanding of Saudi Arabia,
to making that human connection with MBS
and making the positive connection
that it's actually possible to solve problems.
What was that journey like?
Why was it so difficult to take for others?
And why were you effective
in being able to take that journey yourself?
Maybe some of it came from my inexperience,
but my desire to listen and hear people.
So I had this proposal.
I was told that all of these things were good.
Then we're trying to schedule this trip.
And the National Security Council calls a meeting
where we're in the situation room
and we have Homeland Security,
Secretary of Defense, Secretary of State,
and everyone's saying, this is gonna be a disaster.
They said, if we go to Saudi Arabia,
the Saudis never keep their promises.
And our Secretary of State at the time
was a gentleman named Rex Tillerson,
who'd been the CEO of Exxon.
So he dealt with all these people very extensively.
And he basically said, in my experience,
the Saudis won't come through.
And Jared, you don't know what you're doing.
You're wasting your time.
And I basically was at a point where I said,
look, guys, but they're saying
they wanna do all these things.
Shouldn't we at least give them a chance to try to do it?
Why do we wanna predetermine their direction
by not giving them a chance to change?
Just because things in the past
haven't gotten the way you want them to,
that doesn't mean they can't go that way in the future.
So we fought the battle.
They basically deferred and let me go through with it.
But when I do the planning meetings for the trip,
nobody would show up,
because they all thought
it was gonna be an absolute disaster.
And by the way, they probably weren't wrong to think that,
because I'd never planned a foreign trip before,
and I'd never done any foreign policy before.
So during the planning, I'd speak to MBS almost every day,
and I'd go through all the different details
and the things that would be coming up.
And I said, look, I really need to get these things
in writing.
He sent over a guy, Dr. Masada Laban,
who's a tremendous diplomat for them.
And he came to Washington, stayed for three weeks.
And we worked through all the different details
of what we needed.
And we ended up coming to an arrangement
on what it should be.
So I think about now in retrospect,
why I was so focused on getting things like this done
and why I even believed that they could be possible.
But the answer is really the people I was talking to
on the other end were telling me
that these things were possible.
And so just because they hadn't been done before,
and just because others around me
didn't believe that they could be done,
I wasn't willing to just say, well, let's not try.
It just seems like that cynicism that takes over
is paralyzing.
And you sent me a great essay from Paul Graham,
I'm a big fan of,
that I think explains a lot of your success.
The essay is called How to Do Great Work.
And people should go definitely read the full essay.
There's a few things I could read from it.
Some quotes, having new ideas is a strange game
because it usually consists of seeing things
that were right under your nose.
Once you've seen a new idea, it tends to seem obvious.
Why did no one think of this before?
Seeing something obvious sounds easy
and yet empirically having new ideas is hard.
And the steps you took seem trivial
and yet nobody was taking them,
or at least in the past they weren't successful.
So the successes you've had were as simple
as essentially picking up the phone or trying.
There's a lot of interesting things here
to talk about this aspect of doing this seemingly simple
that seems to be so hard to do.
It, as Paul describes, requires a willingness
to break rules.
There are two ways to be comfortable breaking rules,
to enjoy breaking them and to be indifferent to them.
That's an interesting distinction.
I call these two cases being aggressively
and passively independent minded.
So again, that's to enjoy breaking the rules
or be indifferent to the rules.
The aggressively independent minded are the naughty ones.
Rules don't merely fail to stop them.
Breaking rules gives them additional energy.
For this sort of person, delight at the sheer audacity
of a project sometimes supplies enough activation energy
to get it started.
The other way to break the rules is not to care
about them at all or perhaps even to know they exist.
This is why novices and outsiders
often make new discoveries.
Their ignorance of a field, ignorance maybe in quotes,
of a field's assumptions act as a source
of temporary passive independent mindedness.
Aspies also seem to have a kind of immunity
to conventional beliefs.
Several I know say that this helps them to have new ideas.
So the aggressive and the passive.
This is such an interesting way of looking at it.
Perhaps some aspect of this, at least in the story
you tell, there's some passive aspect
where you're like not even acknowledging,
not even caring that there was rules,
just kind of asking the simple question
and taking the simple action.
I think that it's funny, that was an essay I read
and we're doing just a snippet of it,
but I would encourage anyone listening
to go and find it and read the entire thing
because it's something that really spoke to me
as I was transitioning into my new career now.
And I just loved it.
But when we were talking about why certain people
who don't have traditional qualifications
are able to come in and do incredible work
and solve complex problems, it made me think of that essay,
which is why I shared it.
And I think that in the context of the work
that I was doing here, perhaps not having
the historical context became an advantage
and obviously went back and then tried to study it.
But if you go into a problem, I always find that,
especially in the political realm,
my favorite political issues are ones
where they're contrarian by being obvious.
And sometimes they feel very intuitive
and so you take them on.
There's always a lot of resistance
when you go against something that's been accepted
as the way that you're supposed to do things.
And I came to learn over the course of my time
in government that when everyone was agreeing
with what I was doing, then it actually made me more nervous
because I felt like you have these problems,
they haven't been solved for a long time.
And then if you take the same approach as others,
you're gonna fail just like they did.
So taking a different approach doesn't mean
you're gonna succeed, but at least if you fail,
you're gonna fail in an original way.
And so I did like this a lot.
And I think that what I saw was the people
who were very good at getting things done
that hadn't been done before were people
who came with different qualifications,
different perspectives, and they came in
and really worked the problem in untraditional ways.
And so I think in the Middle East,
I came in with a very different approach
than people before me, not because I came in deliberately
trying to do it differently,
but because I came in trying to listen and understand
from people why the problem hadn't been solved
and then think from a first principles perspective
on what's the right perspective today,
not based on what happened 50 years ago
or not based on what somebody's feelings who were hurt,
but what's the right thing to make people's lives better,
to make the world a safer
and more prosperous place tomorrow.
So if we can go back to MPS for a little bit,
from the person to the vision,
there's something called Vision 2030
about his vision for Saudi Arabia in the future.
Can you maybe look from his perspective,
what is his vision for the region?
Sure, so it's funny, we were talking before
about how we wish leaders would set big, audacious goals
and take on big things.
That's what he did with Vision 2030.
When he was young, and again,
this is something that was derided
and a lot of people were very skeptical of it,
but the people who actually picked it up and read it said,
this is a very thoughtful plan that's very achievable.
So he studied his country and said,
what's our place in the world?
What are our advantages?
What are our disadvantages?
And then he set publicly KPIs
that he wanted to hold his country to
and then put in place plans and committees
and really worked hard to push things in that direction,
which was pretty remarkable.
I think that it's something, when I saw it,
I thought it was very refreshing.
I said, wait, in America, why don't we all have set goals?
Why don't we have KPIs?
And I do think that it's something that most countries,
if not all countries, should have.
One of my favorite quotes was from the Alice in Wonderland
where the Cheshire Cat says,
if you don't know where you're going,
it doesn't matter which path you take.
And so I think that that's something
that really helped set them on a good path
and they've been very successful with it.
One of the things he told me about putting that together
was he said, my father's generation,
they created this country from almost nothing.
They came here, they were a poor country,
they were Bedouins in the desert.
And then they look back
and see what they've done over 50 years
and they say, it's absolutely remarkable.
He said, his generation, they come in and they say,
we're very grateful for everything that's been done to date,
but we have so much opportunity
that we're not taking advantage of.
And so he's now empowered the next generation
to be ambitious and think big and grow with it.
What that means for his vision for the Middle East
is that the general architecture that should exist,
and now there's excitement in the discussions with Israel
that have advanced, was the general view
of what we thought from a Trump perspective
should be the new Middle East
is having an economic and security corridor
all the way from Haifam to Muscat, from Amman to Israel,
where basically you go through
and if you can create a security area
where people can live free of fear of terrorism
and of conflict, the Middle East for the last 20 years
has been a sinkhole for arms, for death, for terrorism.
It's been awful.
It's been a big national security threat for America,
a big place where our treasure is gone.
We've had a lot of our young, amazing American soldiers
killed in action there.
And the same thing for the Arab countries as well.
So if we can create a security architecture
for that region, and then we can create economic integration
between all the different countries.
I mean, the amount of innovation happening in Israel
is unbelievable.
Think of it like Silicon Valley's not connected
to the rest of California.
You have a very young population,
a very digital savvy population.
You have a lot of resources.
And so if you can get that whole set,
the potential for it is unbelievable.
I do think that that's his ultimate vision
is to become a really strong country economically
and then to become a place where you could be funding
advancements in science, advancements in humanity,
advancements in artificial intelligence,
and think about ways to be a positive influence
in the world.
So a difficult question.
One big source of tension in the United States and Saudi
is the case of Jamal Khashoggi.
I was wondering if you can comment
on what MBS has said about it to you.
You've spoken to him about it and what MBS has said
about it publicly on 60 Minutes and after.
Yeah, so what he said to me was no different
than what he ultimately said on 60 Minutes,
which was, you know, as somebody helping lead this country,
I bear responsibility and I'm gonna make sure
that those who are involved are brought to justice
and I'm gonna make sure that we put in place reforms
to make sure things like this don't happen again.
It was a horrible situation that occurred.
What I saw from him after that was just a doubling
and a tripling down on the positive things he was doing,
figuring out ways to kind of continue to modernize
his society, build opportunity in the kingdom,
and to continue to be a better ally
to all the different countries
that wanted to be aligned with them.
One thing I learned from this case
is how one particular situation, a tragedy,
can destroy so much progress and the possibility of progress
and the possibility of connection between the bridges
that are built between different nations.
And how narratives around that can take off
and take such a long time to repair.
And you've worked with this in the Middle East,
with Israel and so on, how the history,
the narratives, the stories, they kinda have this momentum
that's so hard to break, even when you have new leaders,
new blood, new ideas that come in.
And it's just sad to see that, yes, this tragedy happens,
but it doesn't mean that you can't make progress.
I don't know if you have kinda lessons from that,
just how much of a dramatic impact it had
on creating tension between the United States and Saudi
and in general in the Middle East,
like that somehow Saudi's not a friend,
but is against the ideals and the values
of the United States.
So it definitely created massive tension
and it became a very high profile action
that actually overshadowed a lot of the good work
that was being done in the region
and a lot of the progress we were making.
But when you think about this or you think about
the other issues that we've gone through today,
I think the general framework that I always try
to approach things with is you can't change
what happened yesterday.
You can only learn from it and then you can change
how you deal with tomorrow.
And when I think about the people in power,
what do I hope that they're spending their time focused on?
Two basic things.
Number one is how do I create safety and security
for my people and for the world?
And then how do I give people the opportunity
to live a better life?
And so when things like this happen, obviously,
there are certain reactions that are appropriate,
but ultimately, you have to think through
how do you not allow the paradigm
that you're creating in the world to lead to worse outcomes
than would happen otherwise.
And so when I would think about foreign policy in general,
one of the differences between foreign policy and business
is that in business, the conclusion of a problem set,
you finish a deal, you either have a company or a property,
or if you sell it, you have less to do and more capital,
hopefully, if it's successful, right?
In a political deal, it's always about paradigms.
So the end of a problem set is always the beginning
of a new paradigm, and you're always thinking through
how do you create an environment that leads to, hopefully,
the best amount of positive outcomes that could occur
versus creating a paradigm
that will lead to negative outcomes.
So bad things happen a lot in the world,
and you have to make sure that when those happen,
people are held accountable for it,
but you also don't wanna make sure that in the process
of making sure that there's accountability
for these actions, you don't set a lot of progress
that the world is making back
that will lead to worse-off situation for many more people.
If we can go back to the incredible work
with Abraham Accords in Israel and the Middle East,
first, the big question about peace.
Why is it so difficult to achieve peace
in this part of the world between Israel and Palestine
and between Israel and the other countries
in the Middle East, or any sort of peace-like agreements?
If I had to give you the most simple answer,
I would say that it's structural.
And if you go back to the incentive structure
of different leaders, this whole peace process
between Israel and the Palestinians,
and again, I've gotten criticized for saying this,
but it's what I believe, so I'm gonna say it,
is that the incentive structure was all wrong.
And when I went before the United Nations Security Council
to discuss the peace plan that I proposed,
which again, was more of an operational plan,
and it was a pragmatic plan.
It was over 180 pages in detail.
In politics, people don't like putting forward detail
because it just gives a lot of places
for you to get criticized on.
Nobody actually criticized the detail of my plan.
They just criticized the fact that it was coming from us
and didn't want to debate the merits
of the operational pieces of it.
So I created a slide where I showed,
from the Oslo Accords till the day I was there,
all the different peace discussions.
I put a dove in the slide for those,
and then I put a tank for every time there was a war,
because there was always skirmishes
between Hamas and Hezbollah and the Palestinians.
And then I showed two lines,
and they both went from the bottom of the page
all the way up like this.
One of the lines was Israeli settlements.
So every time a negotiation failed,
Israel was able to get more land.
And then the other one was money to the Palestinians.
And I said, every time a negotiation failed,
the Palestinians would get more money.
The problem with that money, though,
was that it wasn't going to the people.
Some of it would make its way down,
but most of it was going to the politicians.
You had leadership of the Palestinians,
who was basically, I think at that point,
it was in the 16th year of a four-year term,
so it wasn't democratically elected.
And a lot of what I tried to show
was that there was no rule of law,
there was no judicial system,
there were no property rights,
and there was no opportunity or hope
for the people to live a better life.
And so all of the envoys to date
were basically trained to go and do the same things.
And again, I got massively criticized
by all the previous envoys
for not doing it the same way they did,
but I thought the problem structurally
just didn't make sense.
And so I felt like the incentive structure was all wrong,
and I took a different approach.
And so what's the different approach?
I started writing down a document.
These are the 11 issues,
but there's really only three issues that matter.
I said, just tell me what you think the compromise is
that you think the other side could live with
that you would accept.
And it was very hard to get them talking about this.
Oh, you have to go back to 1972,
you have to go back to 1982,
you have to go back to 2001,
you have to go to Camp Day.
And I was just like, I don't need a headache
and I don't need a history lesson,
just I want a very simple thing.
Here today in 2017,
what's the outcome that you would accept?
And I was dealing with their negotiators,
their back channel secret negotiators,
their double secret, and I was like,
this whole thing is like,
it's a process created where nobody wants to talk about
the actual solution.
So coming from the business world, I said,
okay, let me just write down a proposed solution
that I think is fair,
and let me have each side react.
Like, don't tell me about theoretical things,
like tell me I want to move the line from here to here,
I want to change this word.
So I tried to make it much more tactical.
And what I realized was like, the Palestinians,
they'd worked so hard to get the Arab world
to stay with the line of the Arab Peace Initiative.
And so I went back and I read the Arab Peace Initiative.
It was 10 lines and it didn't have any detail.
So it was a concept.
And so they liked that concept
because it allowed them to reject everything.
They kept getting more money.
I mean, Bibi Netanyahu,
who runs one of the most incredible economies in the world,
who runs an incredible superpower militarily
for the size of their country,
he would fly to Washington to meet us
and he'd be taking a commercial EL AL plane.
Abbas, who runs a refugee organization,
a refugee group that claims that they don't have a state
that gets billions of dollars in aid every year
from the global community,
would fly in a $60 million Boeing BBJ.
So the whole thing was just very corrupt and off.
And I do think that that's why it,
I don't think people were incentivized to solve it,
to be honest.
What do you think an actual plan on that part,
if you can, just before we talk about Abraham Accords,
if there is a peace plan that works
between Israel and Palestine,
what do you think it looks like?
You have to separate it into two different issues.
And I think that that's actually
how we came to the Abraham Accords,
is that I tell the story in the book
and it was one of my favorite experiences
during my time in diplomacy,
where I went to meet with Sultan Qaboos,
who was the Sultan of Oman.
And we fly out there
because he'd had a secret meeting with BB.
And I thought maybe he was open to normalizing with Israel.
So after he meets with BB, he calls me and says,
I want you to come see me.
So I go over to see him.
And again, I tell the story.
It was a crazy night in all these different areas.
But when I was talking to him,
he basically says to me,
I feel badly for the Palestinian people
that they carry with them the burden of the Muslim world.
And that line just like stuck with me.
And a couple of days later, I was thinking about it.
And I said, wait a minute,
who elected the Palestinian people
to represent the Muslim world on the Al-Aqsa Mosque?
And so the reason why I felt like it had never been solved
was it was a riddle, A, that I believed
was designed to not be solved,
but B, you were conflating two separate issues.
You had the issue between Israel and the Muslim world,
which really was the issue of the Al-Aqsa Mosque.
And then you had just a territorial dispute,
which throughout history,
you have lots of territorial disputes
and they're usually resolved in different ways.
So if you go back to the Israeli-Palestinian issue,
there's just a couple of components you need to solve.
Number one is territorial contiguity, right?
You need to figure out where do you draw the lines?
And that's something that,
you can talk about what people were owed 70 years ago,
but it's much more productive to say,
this is what you can make work today, right?
And that's kind of what we did.
We literally spent months and months drawing a map
and we put something out,
probably changed a couple of lines here and there,
but by and large, it was a very pragmatic solution
that I think could work.
And I think it could work
for the safety and security of Israel, which was number one.
So first issue is drawing a map.
Second issue is security.
Again, Israel, and again, this is one issue,
we were incredibly sympathetic with Israel,
which is you can't expect a prime minister of Israel
to make a deal where he's going to make his people
less secure than before.
So we worked very closely with them on a security apparatus.
We laid something out
that I think would keep the whole area safer
and it would make sure Israel was safe
and also keep the Palestinian issue safe.
So you need security.
Number three was the religious sites.
And that was one that was actually
always made much more complicated by people,
the Al-Aqsa Mosque,
because you basically have Haram al-Sharif,
which is a place where the mosque was built
in the seventh or eighth century.
But originally it was where the Holy of Holies were
in the Beit Hamikdash for the Jewish people.
So, and then compounding by the fact
that you have all of the Christian holy sites in Jerusalem,
it's a city that should be bringing everyone together,
but in fact has become a place
where you have wars and hatred
and a lot of different conflicts
that have risen because of it.
But what I said was,
instead of fighting over concepts of sovereignty,
which is interesting how I got to the notion
that this wasn't really the big issue,
I basically said just operationally,
why don't we just make it simple?
Let everyone come and be able to worship
as long as they're being able to worship peacefully.
So that's really the contours of it.
And what the Palestinians have done
is they've kind of deflected
from a lot of their own shortcomings,
and a lot of the Arab leaders did that as well,
kind of in the pre-Abraham Accord days,
by kind of allowing this issue to be so prevalent.
So one thing I'll say on the Palestinians
is that what we tried to do by laying out a plan
was we said, okay, what are the reasons
why the Palestinian people
are not having the lives that they deserve?
And I'll give you a couple of things.
One is I studied the economies of Jordan,
West Bank, Gaza, Egypt, Morocco.
This was numbers from like 2019.
But what was interesting was the GDP per capita
of somebody living in the West Bank
was actually the same as Jordan.
And it was actually more than somebody living in Egypt.
And the debt to GDP that the Palestinians had
was like 30, 40% compared to Egypt,
which was at like 130%,
and Jordan, which was at 110%,
and Lebanon, which was at 200%.
And so you're in a situation
where a lot of this stuff didn't make sense.
But if you draw lines, create institutions
where Palestinian people can now feel
like they have property rights
and have ownership over their place
and let the money flow past the leadership ranks
to the people, let them have jobs,
let them have opportunity,
and then let all Muslims from throughout the world
have access to the mosque,
and Israel making sure that they can control the security,
which I think the Jordanians and a lot of others
want Israel to have strong security control there
to prevent the radicalists and the extremists from coming.
You could have peace there very easily.
So there's a lot of things to say here.
One is just to emphasize Al-Aqsa Mosque.
So this is a holy place,
and this is something in our conversations
and in my own travels,
I've seen the importance of frictionless access
to those sites from the entirety of the Muslim world,
and that's what Abraham, of course, took big leaps on.
Okay, so we'll talk about that a little bit more.
But that's kind of a religious component.
That's a dignity in the religious practice
and faith component.
But then the other thing you mentioned so simply,
which is you have money flow past the leadership ranks.
How do you have money flow past the leadership ranks
in Palestine?
So make sure that the money that's invested in Palestine,
the West Bank, gets to the people.
So to date, all of the aid that's been given
to the Palestinians has been an entitlement.
It's not conditions-based.
It's always just we give the money
and there's no expectations.
It's very simple.
You make the aid conditions-based.
You fight for transparency.
You do it through institutions other than the PA,
or you put reformers into the PA
that will allow it to go down that way.
PA being the Palestinian Authority,
which is the leadership.
It's not hard to do.
It just takes people who actually want to do it.
But I think that the mindset of the international community
has not been let's solve this problem.
It's like, let's just throw a little bit of money.
The money's novocaine.
Let's put a little novocaine on the problem,
and let's not have to deal with it.
But nobody's ever said,
oh, let's do an accounting
of the $20 billion we've given them
and see how many jobs it's done and where it's gone.
That just hasn't happened.
Again, it's an incredibly corrupt organization, Anra.
You think about the post-World War II dynamic.
You had a lot of refugees.
My grandparents were refugees post-World War II.
Every other refugee class has been resettled,
and you only have one permanent refugee organization
ever created.
Why was this done?
It was done to perpetuate the conflict
so that a lot of Arab leaders could basically deflect
from a lot of their shortcomings at home.
I think for Israel,
they view all these things as existential.
They value their safety.
They've been under attack for a long time.
I do think having a deal where we can say,
how do the Jews and the Muslims, Chris, come together?
I think King Abdullah from Jordan's
been an incredible custodian for the mosque.
I think everyone in my travels recognized
that he's the right guy for that,
that the King of Jordan should be
the custodian of the mosque.
We should have some kind of framework
to make sure everyone has access.
The more countries that have diplomatic relations
with Israel, the more Muslims and Arabs
that should be able to come and visit.
And by the way, the more you have these normalizations,
think about what that will do to the economy
of the West Bank, where they'll have great hotels,
hospitality, tremendous tourism industry
because of all the Christian, Muslim,
and Jewish holy sites that they have there.
So there's a lot of potential there.
We just have to get unstuck.
I believe that it's so possible
if the leaders want to make tomorrow better
that they can.
And unfortunately, the people who suffer the most
are really just the Palestinian people.
And I think that in Gaza, they're hostages to Hamas
and in the West Bank, they're just held back
because their leadership just is afraid
or too self-interested to give them the opportunity
to change their paradigm and pursue the potential
of what they have.
And by the way, it's an incredibly well-educated population.
It's an incredibly capable population.
And they're right next to Israel where the economy,
they need everything.
And so the potential should be incredible
if you can just move some of these pieces.
But again, there's still a lot of emotion and hatred
you have to work through as well.
But I do believe that you're not going to solve that
by litigating the past.
You're only going to solve that by creating
an exciting paradigm for the future
and getting everyone to buy in and then move towards that.
And maybe increase the chance of being able
to establish an economy where the entrepreneurs
can flourish in the West Bank and so on in Palestine
once the relationship across the Arab world is normalized.
So one thing on that which is very interesting
is when I got into my job in the Middle East,
all of the conventional thinkers said to me,
the separation in the Muslim world
is between the Sunnis and the Shias.
And that's really the big divide.
And as I was traveling, I didn't think there was any divide
in that regard.
The divide that I saw was between leaders
who wanted to give a better opportunity for their people
and create economic reforms and opportunity
and leaders who wanted to use religion or fear
to keep their stronghold on power.
And so if you think about who's not creating the opportunity
for their people is the Palestinian leadership
and the Iranian leadership.
All the other Arab countries were focused on
how do we give opportunity for our people
to live a better life.
And there is a big foundation on which that framework
can succeed which I think is the,
in general the idea of Arab-Israeli normalization.
So that's where Abraham Accords come in.
Can you tell the story of that?
Sure, so it's an amazing thing.
And I sit here today, somebody not in government
and every day I see another flight that goes between
or I see an Israeli student studying at a university
in Dubai or a new synagogue opening up in Abu Dhabi.
And it just gives me such, or Bahrain,
it gives me such tremendous pride to see
all of the progress that's been made.
How it occurred, part of why I wrote the book
was to put this down for history's sake,
to go through all the different intentional,
circumstantial things that occurred.
It's funny, we left government.
There's a lot of people saying,
well, this is why I said I was kind of at the middle of it
and I couldn't even perfectly articulate why it happened
because it was an evolution of a lot of things.
And I joke that we made peace on plan C
but only because we went through the alphabet three times,
failing at every letter.
And by the time, but we didn't give up
and we kept going and we got it done.
And maybe this is a good place to also step back and say,
what is Arab-Israeli normalization?
What is the state of things for people who may not be aware
before the progress you made?
That's probably the best place to start.
So what we did is we made a peace deal
between Israel and the United Arab Emirates
and then Israel and Bahrain.
Then we did a deal with Israel and Sudan,
then Israel and Kosovo, Israel and Morocco,
where basically countries that didn't recognize
each other before ended up recognizing each other.
All of these were Muslim majority countries
and getting them to integrate with Israel
was a very big thing.
The traditional thinking had always been
was that Muslim Arab countries would not make peace
with Israel until the Israeli Palestinian issue was solved.
And what we were able to do is separate the issues
and then make these connections
which are leading to amazing interaction
between Jews and Muslims.
So when I think about kind of,
obviously you have national security,
you have emotional benefits from these things,
but the single biggest benefit that I've seen
from the Accords is that if you were an Arab or a Muslim
and you were willing to say positive things about Israel
or the Jews before this came out,
you had been viciously attacked by the media
or the hordes of influencers or the extremists
in these different countries.
What this did was it brought out into the public
the fact that Jews and Muslims can be together
and they can be respectful, they can have meals together,
and that the cultures can live together in peace.
So just to linger on this,
it's like a once subtle and in another sense,
like transformative.
So normalization means you're allowed to travel
from one place to the other.
That has a kind of ripple effect
of that you can now start talking
in a little bit more accepting way.
You can start integrating, traveling, communicating,
doing business with, socializing,
so the cultures mix, conversations mix, all of this.
And this kind of has a ripple effect
on the basic connection
between these previously disparate worlds.
I don't know if there's a nice way
to kind of make clear why these agreements
have such a transformative effect,
especially in the long term.
I would say the simplest form is it's just a mindset.
And it's almost like you're taught all your life
we're enemies or we can't be friends with that tribe
on the other side of the fence.
And then one day the leaders get up and say,
no, it's okay now.
And there was never an issue between the people.
The people were just taught different things
and they were separated from each other.
But again, one of the things that I respect
about the work you do is you believe
in the power of conversation
and the power of human interaction.
And these issues and gaps between us
feel so big when we think about them,
when we're told about them, when we read about them.
But when we go and sit with each other,
all of a sudden we realize maybe we have a lot more in common
than we have that divides us.
For me, what I've seen about it
that's made the biggest difference
is I've seen people who wouldn't have the ability
to be together, be together.
And that's now forming a nucleus of togetherness,
which is a restoration.
So you think about the modern Middle East
from post-Holocaust to now.
Again, in 1948, after that war of independence,
you had Jews living in Baghdad and Cairo.
Then they became so anti-Jewish
that they then expelled all of the Jews
from all these capitals of those cities.
So you think about the Jewish history in Baghdad.
I think the Talmud was written in Baghdad.
It was a place in Babylon where the Jewish people thrived.
I think in 570 BCE, when Nebuchadnezzar conquered Jerusalem,
he took about 10,000 Jews back with him to Babylon
because he thought it'd be good for his economy.
And during that place, the Jews actually flourished
and had a good life there.
So for 1,000 years before the Second World War,
the Jews and the Muslims lived very peacefully together.
So people say that what we're doing now is an aberration.
I actually think it's not an aberration.
I think it's actually a return to the time
where people can live together culturally.
And so this is the beginning
of the end of the Arab-Israeli conflict.
And it's the beginning of togetherness,
which, again, you think about how much war,
how much provocation, how much terrorism
has been made in the name of religious conflict.
This is, I think, the start of the process
of religious respect and understanding.
We've talked about you being attacked
in the press for the Russian collusion and other topics.
One of the most recent set of attacks
comes on the topic of Saudi Public Investment Fund
giving $2 billion to your investment firm
after you left government.
So that includes a 1.25% asset management fee
of $25 million a year.
Can you respond to these recent set of attacks?
Sure.
So I left government, obviously worked for four years.
It was a very action-packed time.
That's why I wrote the book.
I wanted to put down all those experiences.
I started thinking like, what do I want to do next, right?
So my previous career, I'd been in real estate.
I'd worked with my brother on some technology businesses
that I'd started, and then I got into government.
So I kind of had a career shift, right?
In my previous career, obviously, it was very successful.
The New York Times, they violated
and they published my financial statements.
They showed I was making about $50 million a year
in the private sector before I went into government.
I went into government and I volunteered.
I didn't take a salary.
I paid for my own health insurance for four years,
my wife and I, and then we went and I was thinking,
should I go back to my old company
or should I start something new?
And my thinking was is that through my time in government,
I'd met so many people.
I'd learned so much about the world.
I had a big understanding now
for how the macroeconomic picture worked,
and I did feel like there was a lot more that I could do
than just going back to real estate.
In the meantime, I was getting a lot of calls
from different CEOs and companies saying,
can you help me with this company?
Can you help me with that company?
Your knowledge could be helpful to help this company
navigate this challenge or to expand internationally.
And so I said, you know what?
Maybe I should create a business to do an investment firm
where I can do something different,
where I'm putting together geopolitical expertise
and traditional private equity and growth investing
and figure out how to do that,
where I can do something differentiated,
where I can invest in growing things
and help with my navigation skills and relationships.
So that was kind of the thesis of what I thought
could make sense as kind of a next step.
I called different friends.
They were very excited to back the effort.
Obviously, this was coming off the success
that I just had in the Middle East,
where I did six peace deals there.
And one of the notions I wanted to be able to do
with the firm was to be able to take money from the Gulf
and then to be able to invest it in Israel
to continue to build the economic links
between the countries.
Again, if countries have more economic ties,
I think war and fighting is less likely.
And then in addition to that,
I wanted to figure out how do you bring
the entrepreneurs together from both of those countries.
So that was really the mission of what I set out to do.
So far, I've been enjoying it.
It's been a lot of fun.
I've been learning a ton.
I think we're doing very well with it.
In terms of the criticisms,
I think that I've been criticized in every step
of everything I've always done in my life.
And so what I would say is,
this business is actually an objective metric business.
It's about returns.
So in three, four years from now,
five years from now, see how I do.
Hopefully I'll do very well and judge me based on that.
In terms of any of the nefarious things,
I haven't been accused of violating any laws.
And I haven't violated any of the ethics rules either.
When I was in government,
every year submitted all my financials
to the Office of Government Ethics.
They certified it every year.
And I followed every rule and every law possible.
So to my critics, I'll say, criticize me before.
You'll criticize me now.
I'm gonna keep doing me and gonna keep pursuing things
that I think are worthwhile.
And I'm very excited about this chapter of my career.
Maybe this is a good place to ask,
in working closely with Donald Trump,
what in your sense, looking into the mind of the man,
what's the biggest strength of Donald Trump as a leader?
I would say his unpredictability.
I think that as a leader,
he consumes a ton of information.
He doesn't like to be managed
or have his information filtered.
So he'll speak to a lot of people
to draw his information himself.
He's very pragmatic.
I don't see him as terribly ideological.
I see him as somebody who's about results.
I think he wants to deliver results.
And I think ultimately, I mean, he's an incredible fighter.
He's a big counter puncher,
but he also wants to get along with people.
And that's probably the biggest surprise
that people found with him.
I mean, you look at even situations like,
I would always tell people, if you disagree with him,
don't go on television and criticize him.
Just pick up the phone and call him and go see him.
And he'll talk to you about it.
He may not agree with you.
But again, that's what Kim Kardashian did
when she had a case of clemency with a woman, Alice Johnson,
that she felt strongly about.
We went through the case.
I wouldn't have had her call
if I didn't think it was a legitimate case.
So we spent about eight months quietly
working through the case, working through the details
to make sure that it really was a worthy case.
I brought it to President Trump,
said she'd like to come meet with you
to talk about this case.
And he said, Herkman?
So she came in, we went through the case,
and President Trump ultimately granted the clemency
to Alice Johnson, who was a woman who was accused
of being part of a drug ring.
She had basically a life sentence for doing it.
She'd served 22 years in prison while in prison.
She basically was a grandmother,
and she was putting on the prison plays.
She was mentoring young women in prison,
somebody who, again, there's always a risk,
but by and large had a very, very, very low risk
of committing a crime in the future.
And then it goes back to the notion
of are we gonna judge people
by the worst decision they make in their life?
And so President Trump was willing
to grant the clemency, and it went.
And I think that it just goes to the notion
of maybe this goes back to his unpredictability
in a positive way, which is if you go sit with him
and you make your case, he'll hear you,
he'll listen to you, and he's not afraid to act,
and he's not afraid to be controversial,
which I think is a good thing.
So from a foreign policy point of view in particular,
his unpredictability just meant that everyone
was always on their back foot.
People were afraid to kind of cross America.
And what I would tell people who don't like Trump
is I would say think about how crazy he's making you
and his enemies.
He did that to the enemies of America.
And yeah, so he was a very, very strong president,
and I think did a great job.
So in some of these agreements that we've been talking about
and speaking with leaders,
how do you think the unpredictability helps?
So in all the agreements that I was negotiating,
I wasn't doing it as a principle.
I was doing it on behalf of President Trump.
And people knew that I had access to President Trump,
and they knew that I could say,
you may say this that we don't like,
but I'm gonna have to take it back to him.
And then we'll see what he does.
And one of the biggest instances was on the USMCA trade deal
where that deal happened because Mexico
was legitimately concerned and smartly so
that President Trump was going to impose tariffs
on the car industry,
which would have been decimating to their economy.
And by the way, he was ready to do it.
We were holding him back from doing it
with every ounce of strength that we could,
so it wasn't a bluff.
I mean, that was actually real,
but they were smart to read that it was real
and ultimately we created a great win-win deal.
Tell you a funny story just popped into my mind
from the tariffs is we did also,
we used a 232 national security exemption
to protect our steel industry
and we put tariffs on steel and aluminum.
And again, I thought about this
because we also negotiated them with Canada
and there was a very funny phone call
where Trudeau was calling Trump.
And again, they got along decently well
and Trudeau's calling saying,
you can't put national security tariffs on us in Canada.
We're your NATO ally.
We fought wars with you.
We do military together.
And Trump says to him,
didn't you burn the White House down in 1812?
And Trump says, that was the French.
He says, no, it was the Canadians.
And so it was just, like I said,
he's always keeping everyone on their toes,
but he took very calculated risks.
And like I said, everyone was outraged all the time
with everything, but if you look at his body of work,
people said if he was elected, he would start World War III.
Meanwhile, we inherited a world filled with wars,
no new wars, right?
Three years, he made peace deals, no new wars.
He was tough, he was strong.
People respected him, he built relationships
and got trade deals done, got peace deals done.
The economy was rocking.
His body of work I think was pretty strong as president.
Like you said, no new wars.
This makes me think if Donald Trump won the presidency,
what the current situation in Ukraine would look like.
But let me just ask you, zoom out and ask you broadly,
do you think the war in Ukraine could have been avoided?
And what do you think it takes to bring it to an end?
I think 100%, it would have been avoided, not 99%.
President Trump for four years had no problems with Russia.
We were arming Ukraine, but we were working with Russia.
And again, the first two years,
we had a little bit of issue working with Russia
because they were accused of colluding with us
and so we had to go through that investigation.
But in the second two years,
we were trying to focus Russia on what are the areas
where we can collaborate together.
I think Russia, we thought it was in their strategic
advantage to play US and China against each other
because of the way that everything was done before.
They were stuck with China, but not getting a lot for it.
Under Bush, they took Georgia.
Under Obama, they took Crimea.
Under Trump, there was no problems.
And then under Biden, unfortunately,
I think they misplayed a couple of things,
which I think provoked Russia to go forward.
Still no excuse to do what they did.
I think that the invasion was a terrible thing
and should not have occurred.
But with that being said, I think 100%,
if Trump was president,
there would not be a war in Ukraine today.
Coming to the table and negotiating a peace.
Whether it's Donald Trump, whether it's Biden,
whether it's anybody, what do you think it takes?
Do you think it's possible?
And if you're in a room, if Jared Kushner is in the room,
Vladimir Putin and Vladimir Zelensky,
what does it take to have a productive conversation?
And what does it take for that conversation to fail?
Like what are the trajectories
that lead to success and failure?
I think we go back to negotiations.
Number one is trust, right?
Both leaders have to have the ability
to communicate what an off-ramp is
without fearing it's gonna lead to the public.
So if you go to the posture of Zelensky right now,
and by the way, President Zelensky,
I have a lot of respect for the courage he showed,
especially initially.
You saw what Ghani did in Afghanistan.
They were getting attacked by the Taliban.
He took the cash and got the hell out of there.
Staying in Kiev when he did how he did it
is one of the most brave things we've seen in a long time.
And he has a ton of my respect and admiration for doing that.
But now he's promising his people,
we're gonna win the war.
And the military action has not necessarily
coincided with that sentiment.
And so there has to be some form of off-ramp,
but he can't say that publicly.
So for him to be able to work privately
with somebody who can help create a new paradigm
where both leaders can say,
we're gonna stop the bloodshed,
we're gonna stop the risk of nuclear war for the world,
we're gonna stop what's happening,
that's really what it will take.
How that occurs, again,
it's not something I'm involved in now,
so I don't know who the right broker is
or how to put that together,
but essentially they need somebody in between them
who can figure out how do you create a landing zone
that works,
because neither party's gonna jump
until the pool is filled with water.
And you have to outline what the go-forward looks like,
because you can't just stop it
for them to get worse for both parties.
You have to move it forward into what happens next
that hopefully can start to turn the tide
to benefit both sides,
where they can focus on the future
instead of being stuck into the old paradigm
of who started what, who's to blame for what,
who did what to who.
It's just a lot of tough stuff now that's occurred
that's gonna be hard to walk back.
And it's a big task to get it done,
but for the sake of the world,
it'd be amazing if we were able to reach a conclusion
to that conflict.
Just going back to your earlier mention of North Korea,
what do you think it takes to bring Vladimir Putin
and Von Miselewski to the table together?
Leadership.
So you're saying it has to be a US president.
It has to be somebody who's willing
to put themself on the line
to go and do it.
And again, if you're the US president
and you're the most powerful nation in the world,
you should be trying.
But I do think, again, the posture that the US has taken
has probably been in a place where they,
it would be very hard for them to get the trust of Russia
based on the way that they've played their moves to date.
I always thought from the beginning
that Putin would try to bring in President Xi in China
to resolve it, to basically give a big screw you to America
to say, China's now the one in charge of this,
but that hasn't seemed to manifest itself to date either,
but it takes leadership.
The leaders have to get it and say,
let's get everyone together and let's try to get this done
because every day it goes on, A, more people are dying,
and B, we do risk a nuclear war for the world,
which is not a good situation.
Let me ask, since you helped set up phone calls
between Donald Trump, Putin, and the King of Saudi Arabia,
if I were to interview Putin, what advice would you give
on how to get a deep understanding of the human being?
Yeah, so I didn't deal with Russia a ton,
but in my interaction with Putin and with Russia,
I would kind of point out a couple of things.
Number one is when America was hit with COVID
and New York was looking like we were gonna run out
of ventilators and masks, Russia was the second country
that sent us a plane load of supplies,
and they didn't send that because they hate America.
They sent that because we were starting
to make progress together as countries,
and they thought that they wanted to show goodwill
to figure out how can we start working together,
and again, people may attack me for saying
that that sounds naive.
Again, the past 15 years may show that that's not the case,
but I don't believe that countries have permanent enemies,
and I don't believe countries have permanent allies.
Again, you think about the US and Russia.
In World War II, we worked together to defeat the Nazis,
and now we're great allies with Germany,
who basically was our great enemy in World War II.
We're great allies with Japan,
who was our great enemy in World War II.
So it goes back to the notion we discussed earlier
of you shouldn't condemn tomorrow to be like yesterday
if you're unhappy with yesterday.
So number one is I would definitely ask him about that.
The phone call that you mentioned
was after we did a pretty intense negotiation
to create the largest oil cut
in the history of oil production.
So during COVID, demand just shut off like crazy,
and it was stopping very quickly.
Saudi and Russia at that time were having a conflict.
They created this thing called OPEC Plus,
which goes back, again, history between the two countries
where they had conflicts, and then all of a sudden,
they were working together to try to stabilize
the oil markets, but they couldn't agree on the cuts,
so Saudi actually increased production.
So you had two things hitting at once
where Saudi and Russia were both increasing production
and demand was dropping.
So you were headed for a real crisis,
and I was starting to get calls
from a lot of the oil industry executives here in America
saying, you don't understand.
We can't just flip a switch and turn off our oil wells.
We're running out of storage here.
And I said, look, President Trump likes low oil prices,
so he's not upset about what's happening.
You have to call him, and if he gives me permission
or the instruction, then I can try to intervene,
but right now, he's not inclined to intervene.
After a little bit, he said, you know what?
It's time, get involved, go do it.
It was right over Passover.
This was during COVID.
I spent three days nonstop on the phone
with Kirill Tometrev from Russia and with MBS directly,
and I was dealing with Dan Berlet,
who was our energy minister, going back and forth,
and it was crazy.
I mean, it was just one of the craziest negotiations.
We ended up agreeing on the largest oil cut
in the history of the world,
but the story you went to before, which was pretty funny,
was finally make the deal,
and we set up a call between King Salman, Vladimir Putin,
and President Trump to announce the deal.
And I'm like, oh, this is great.
So President Trump gets on us, congratulations,
we have a deal, and then King Salman says,
we don't have a deal.
Mexico hasn't agreed to their cuts.
And he's saying, what do you mean?
And so they were part of the OPEC Plus,
and so I get a note saying, you gotta go call Mexico,
so I'm calling Mexico, and they're saying,
we're not doing any cuts.
So why?
I said, we're hedged at $55.
He said, why do you tell us that in the beginning?
So I'm telling the Saudis.
So we were working through this whole thing.
So meanwhile, we were trying to find
the compromise with Mexico.
I set up a call with Trump and Putin
so they can kind of talk this through,
and he was always trying to play the game
of how do we get Russia away from China.
He always thought that that was not
the right strategic framework for US interests.
And again, we had no problems with them during that time.
What I would say is that for Zelensky and Putin,
any conversation with both of them
is about understanding their perspective.
I think with Putin, he's a student of history
from the things that I saw with him.
If you look at Russia over the last 500 years,
I think they were attacked by the Polish in early 1600.
I think they were attacked by the Swedes in the 1700s.
I think they were attacked by Napoleon in the 1800s.
And then in the 1900s, they were attacked by Germany twice.
And so from his perspective, in the early days of Russia,
they were attacked by the Mongols.
They were very vulnerable.
And a lot of the geography of Russia
today is really designed for defensive purposes
that they have natural barriers that
makes them easier to defend.
And Russia is a massive landmass.
It's twice the size of America.
They have 11 time zones in the country.
And so I do think that for Vladimir Putin,
his biggest concern is, how do we
create a security paradigm in the west of his country
that won't be a creep?
And I think that there's two different parts of the mindset.
The people who are most cynical of Putin will say,
well, he's just trying to recreate the USSR.
He's being expansionist.
And the people who want to be sympathetic to him
will say, well, if you think about it,
the Russian perception of the NATO arrangement
was that they wouldn't be expanding westward.
Over the last years, they've included all these countries
that they said they promised they wouldn't include.
Who knows what the promises were or weren't?
But what I do know from his perspective
is allowing Ukraine into NATO was always a red line.
And that's why we never offered it.
We never provoked it.
We never brought it up.
We said, we're going to arm them.
And we basically said, just calm down.
We don't want any conflicts there.
We have bigger issues and bigger opportunities to work for them.
So I do think you have to think through
what's a paradigm that he can accept.
And I do think that he'll give the justification
for why he's done what he's done.
And then I think the framework for a solution is about
how do we move both parties forward?
Tough job.
I hope you get the opportunity to do it
because I think it's a conversation
that will only help the world,
hopefully, find a pathway forward.
And I should mention, because you mentioned geography,
one of the many books you've recommended to me
that gives a very interesting perspective on history.
It's called Prisoners of Geography by Tim Marshall.
And it has a very interesting perspective
on the geopolitical conflicts and perspective of Russia
from a geography perspective.
And also for China in the second chapter.
And there's a lot of understanding of why
the expansion of NATO is such a concern for Russia.
Because geography still, even in the 21st century,
less and less so because of technology and so on,
but it still plays a major role
in conflicts between nations.
Rivers, mountains.
And understanding the DNA of countries.
It was one of the most phenomenal books
and I just found it on Amazon randomly,
but I loved every minute of it.
The chapter on America is also incredible.
Going through the evolution of
how we became the country we are,
the different acquisitions, the different changes,
why we have all these geographic advantages.
And it's an unbelievable book
for anyone who's interested in geopolitics.
So I have to ask on several aspects of China.
First on the president, the meeting.
You helped set up a first call and first meeting
between Donald Trump and Xi Jinping.
Can you tell the story of that?
Because that's also interesting.
Again, that first phone call, the reaching out,
the forming the human connection,
which ultimately leads to the connection between nations
and the possibility of collaboration.
So during the transition,
President Trump took a call from the head of Taiwan
and that sent the Chinese into a real tailspin.
And he didn't do it, I think, to be provocative to them.
As much as just as a businessman,
he felt, you answer your call.
Somebody wants to speak to you.
You speak to him like you.
You want to have conversations, hear their point of view.
But it was taken as a very big insult
and it was against tradition and norm.
And so that was something that set us off
in a wrong direction.
My view at the time was that we are kind of entering
a G2 world, whether people want to admit it or not.
And that a lot of these countries in what I call
the middle market countries were basically playing this
when China was being aggressive with their one belt,
one road, they were basically playing US and China
against each other.
And I thought that by the two leaders coming together,
there were some things they wouldn't agree on,
but there was a lot that they probably could agree on,
which could lead to resolutions to a lot of issues
in the world.
That was like my most optimistic view.
My most more pragmatic view was that President Trump
had very big issues on trade
that he wanted to get to with China.
He felt like China, their trade practices were unfair.
They weren't following all the global rules of trade.
He was a little bit nervous
that they would be provocative with Taiwan.
And I felt like the two of them getting together
would be the best way to try and resolve that.
So the Chinese are very proud and a lot of it is about face.
And so in order to negotiate for that first call,
we basically agreed on what would happen in the call.
So not let's just have a call, say hi, nice to meet you.
It was a question of President Trump basically agreed
that he would acknowledge the one China policy,
which he didn't see as a big concession
because you could always unacknowledge it the next day.
So yeah, I'll acknowledge it and then we'll go and exchange.
President Xi was gonna come over to the US for a visit
so they could sit together.
And they wanted to do it outside the White House
and so we agreed on Mar-a-Lago,
which I also thought was good
because President Trump always felt much more comfortable
when he was hosting at his properties
and he just felt at home.
And so he liked having people as his guests and he loved it.
He always felt really relaxed and it was great.
So that was really what we did.
Then the Chinese come over, very much anticipated visit
and it was incredible.
So they were supposed to sit together for 15 minutes
and they said about an hour and a half together.
And during that meeting, President Trump,
they said, look, let's just set some ground rules
to this relationship.
Like, let's just not talk about Taiwan.
Like, you know, just don't do anything.
I don't want it on the table.
If it does, I'm gonna have to do harsh things.
I still want this to be a problem for four years.
We got bigger issues.
They basically just, again, you notice four years
of Trump administration, no Taiwan talk whatsoever.
It was a non-issue.
Started talking about the trade issues.
They spent a lot of time on North Korea.
President Trump was trying to get the perspective
from President Xi about North Korea
because that was, again, considered from Obama
the biggest national security issue
that we faced at the time.
And they just had a good feeling for each other.
It also helped that, you know, my wife and I,
we actually had a Chinese nanny and teacher in our house
and our kids learned fluent Mandarin.
And our daughter actually opened
when President Xi and President Trump were together
with Melania and with Madame Pang.
My daughter actually sang them a couple of Chinese songs.
And I thought that was a nice way to show, you know,
we're tough, but we respect your culture.
Because the Chinese have an incredible culture
that goes back thousands of years.
They're very proud in how they do it.
And I think that sign of respect also set things off
in a very warm way for President Trump to say,
my granddaughter speaks Chinese
and we're showing you the respect,
which I think is very important.
And he did have respect for them.
The next part about the visit, I mean,
obviously we had a lot of discussions on trade,
but the part that was probably most impactful to me
was President Xi basically did an hour monologue at lunch
where he just went through
Chinese history from his perspective.
And he talked about with particular emphasis
on kind of the treaty of unequals
and then the hundred years of humiliation.
And then you go through from Mao all the way to today
and you had China coming back and rising
and you could tell that he was,
learned the lessons from the past
and was very committed to kind of seeing China go through.
So that was a different time, right?
So China today is different than it was in 2017.
In 2017, I remember President Xi was at Davos
and he was feted by all the top business people in the world
as the, you know, Donald Trump was the threat
to the global world order.
President Xi was the champion of free trade
and the biggest champion of environmentalism
and fighting for climate change.
And what occurred was President Trump came in
and basically said,
like, I think China has not been following
the rules-based order.
Took very, very drastic approaches with tariffs.
Every time he would do the tariffs again,
you know, I had Mnuchin, our treasury sector,
come to Ivanka in my house.
If he does this, this is gonna crash the whole economy.
I mean, these, and by the way, he believed it.
I mean, these were things that people were telling him
would be very tough to do.
President Trump had a gentleman named Ambassador Lighthizer,
Robert Lighthizer.
He was really the tip of the spear
on all of our trade negotiations.
He worked very well with Secretary Mnuchin
and they ended up, we ended up increasing tariffs
to numbers that hadn't even been thought could happen.
So we did the first round of tariffs.
Then, you know, the Chinese came back and retaliated,
very surgically trying to hit us in all the areas
that politically would have been difficult.
And what Trump did was instead of backing down,
he took some of the revenue from the tariffs,
gave it to the farmers and said,
I know that this is gonna hurt your business,
but I'm gonna make sure you guys are made whole.
And then he doubled down and basically went back
at the Chinese with even more tariffs.
So what we watched over a year and a half
was probably the biggest hand of poker that was ever played.
And it was an amazing experience to be a part of it.
And the role I played was really working
for Secretary Mnuchin and Ambassador Lighthizer
as a back channel with the Chinese
to make sure we can just deescalate things
and get to solutions in the best way possible.
And so, anyway, it was a fascinating time,
but if you think about the global awareness
of the bad practices that China was putting in place today
versus what they were in 2016,
I think one of President Trump's most successful policies
was shifting the way the entire world
understood the threat of China
and then putting in place the beginning of a regime
to try and rebalance the world
so that we could have more economic parity.
So you mentioned to me the book,
The Hundred Year Marathon by Michael Pillsbury
when we discussed China.
And I've got a chance to read parts of it,
and I highly recommend people read it
because there's a few,
it's definitely an eye-opening perspective.
I don't know if I agree with all of it.
I don't know if you agree with all of it,
but it certainly opens,
it gives a very intense perspective on China.
And you said it was instructive to how you thought,
how Donald Trump thought about China.
Can you describe the main thesis of the book
and maybe with a hopeful view,
how it's possible to have a trajectory
of these two superpowers working together in 21st century
versus fighting against each other?
Perfect.
So it's a very, very big book.
And I think it's a book definitely worth reading.
Michael is tremendous.
He speaks fluent Mandarin.
So he spent a lot of time researching to do the book.
So I highly recommend it to everyone.
And it was considered more of a fringe perspective in 2016,
but it really, I think,
came to represent the underpinning
of what the collective thought was
of the Trump administration.
And maybe you could argue that it was even more cynical.
The whole thesis of the book was that
China from 1949 to 2049
was working to reclaim their position
as the global leader, right?
So you had the Chinese empire.
One of the things,
I don't know if it's from this book
or a different book that I read
that spoke about how in the late 1700s,
basically the emperor of China
was offered some of the industrial capability from England,
which was basically now becoming
the industrial revolution.
And basically, no, we're fine.
We're the great Chinese empire.
We don't need any of these things.
We're better than that.
And by rejecting that, the rest of the world got stronger.
China remained weaker.
Then you had the Opium Wars.
The Chinese had big opium problems
through all the trade back and forth.
And then China from about 1840 to the 1940 at 100 years,
where they really, after all these treaties,
were really a second-class country.
And so then you have the People's Revolution that comes in.
And he talks about how China very strategically
as a very, very poor country
would fight their way back and build brick by brick.
And he proffers in the book
that Nixon didn't go to China and open China.
It was China that actually went to Nixon
and was able to use Nixon in order to open up.
And then they talk about how under Carter,
they were able to get the US to contribute
to a lot of their,
they were able to kind of start borrowing the US know-how
from our university systems, from our medical,
from our science, from our research.
And the whole notion that was the conventional thinking
of American leaders was that
the more we help China advance,
the more they would become a free market economy.
And it was a great market.
The only difference was,
was that they weren't allowing us access.
They were making our companies
basically give them all of their technical knowledge.
They were stealing our intellectual property.
They were doing espionage to steal a lot of the patents.
They were just ignoring our patents.
And they weren't following any of the rules
of international trade.
Then they started becoming the world's manufacturing hub.
They basically became the world's factory.
And then they started this whole initiative
called the Belt and Road Initiative
in order to start locking in their lines of trades.
They were buying up all the ports everywhere.
They were building railways, thinking,
how do we lock in our distribution
so that we can maintain the dominance
as the world's global factory?
And so it was a brilliant long-term plan
that they were doing.
And by raising awareness, by putting the tariffs,
Trump slowed them down a lot.
The real question is,
if they actually did achieve this full objective
of becoming the world-dominant country,
what they would have done with it,
whether they would have been nefarious or not.
I think from my perspective,
even with some of the divisions and issues
we have now in America,
I still would rather an American-led world order
than a Chinese-led world order.
But the notion was is that they were playing
a very zero-sum game and really going to be
the dominant leader in this new world order.
So that really framed the perspective.
And it wasn't necessarily,
people asked me, and the Chinese were always fearing,
is Trump trying to stop our rise?
And you have a great book also by Graham Allison
that he writes about,
are we destined for war between US and China?
And he goes through different historical times
where you have a power and a rising superpower.
And I think more than half the time,
it ends up leading to war.
So the question is, what's gonna happen here?
And I do think that Trump's perspective,
and this is my interpretation,
because everything was always tactical day-to-day,
and he was unpredictable to the Chinese,
which they couldn't deal with,
and he was unpredictable even to his team sometimes
because he was playing it day-by-day and issue-by-issue
and always changing and adjusting,
which is how an entrepreneur thinks.
He respected the job they did by building their country.
They moved 300 million people out of poverty
into the middle class.
They did it at the expense of a lot of other countries
throughout the world, especially America.
But Trump says, look, stupid politicians made deals.
I respect China for doing what they did.
But what I wanna do is I wanna change the paradigm
so that for the next 20 years,
we can maintain our advantage over them.
We can maintain our competitive dynamic.
And his general view was that America
is the best private sector in the world.
We have a lot of the best minds in the world.
And if we can just have a level playing field
with set rules, then America should be able to outperform.
And so that's really what we were trying to do.
We were trying to get rid of some of their state subsidies,
get rid of, make them follow
some of these international rules of trade
and not allowing them to do predatory investments
that then undercut different industries that we had
so that they can have global market dominance or monopolies
on different industries and then have pricing power,
but also geopolitical power.
So one of the examples that people talk about now
is China for the last 20 years was very advanced
on seeing this electrification trend.
They went, they subsidized solar panels.
A lot of the American solar panel players
were put out of business.
So now I think it's like 90 plus percent of solar panels
in the world are manufactured in China.
Then all the rare earths that you need
in order to make these solar panels
and to make these electric vehicles,
China's bought up most of them
and a lot of the refining capacities in China.
So thinking through strategically,
how do we create an even playing field
so that we're not at the mercy of them
and how you can have a rules-based world order,
that was really kind of the thought
of what we were trying to work towards.
So there's this SNL skit where Jimmy Fallon plays you
and you're walking into the Oval Office looking cool,
wearing shades and a bulletproof vest
to the song Unbelievable by EMF.
I don't know if you've seen it, but it's pretty epic.
And then Trump says that you've traveled the world
representing the administration,
but no one has ever heard you speak.
So there's a lot of questions I can ask about that.
One of them is, can you introspect
why you choose this low key approach
of kind of operating behind the scenes
and not speaking much to the public, at least at the time?
You've spoken a little bit more.
And today you've spoken for a really long time,
which I deeply appreciate.
No, it's been a pleasure to do this.
And thank you for the opportunity to talk about these things.
And so that was a really funny skit.
And it's funny, the thing I got made fun of the most
for that was the wardrobe.
And that came from after three months in the administration,
we were having dinner with all the generals
and they were saying, updating us on the war with ISIS.
And General Dunford said to me after,
look, the president can't come
to see how we're fighting this war,
but I'd like to invite you to come with me to Iraq
and come see, and would you come with me?
I said, you know what, that's great.
I always learned in business
that you can't make decisions from just an ivory tower.
You have to go to the front lines
and see what's actually happening.
So I said, no problem, I'd love to go.
Meanwhile, two days before I'm about to go,
the doc from the White House stops by my office
and says, we need to get your blood types.
What do you need my blood types for?
He goes, you're going to an active war zone.
I'm like, okay, so I guess we'll go to a war zone.
I didn't really think this thing fully through.
So I get on the plane with Dunford and we land in Iraq.
And he looks like GI Joe.
He's a great general.
He's very, very well respected in the military.
And we go in and we get on Black Hawk helicopter.
They said, you know what, today's a nice day.
Let's take the sides off.
And so I get on the plane and there's a guy,
military service officer, who then takes a machine gun,
locks it in to a thing, takes the bullets,
puts them into the gun,
and is sitting there saying, we're ready to go.
And then I'm looking out
and there's like three other helicopters with guys.
One was an Osprey with a guy.
Buckled in also with a machine gun, looking out.
We take off and we're flying over Baghdad
from the airport to the embassy.
And as we're going, I'm sitting in an open air helicopter
with the chairman of the joint chiefs of staff,
guys with machine guns everywhere.
This is a new experience for you.
You haven't experienced this.
I would say slightly.
I mean, I was doing real estate like three months ago,
now I'm flying over Iraq.
And the chairman says, that's Saddam Hussein's palace.
And I looked down,
there's like a big bomb right through the middle.
And then you see the area with the two swords in the hands.
I'm saying to myself, like, how the hell did I get here?
Like, what is happening?
So meanwhile, we ended up going to the front lines
to be with the Iraqi military,
which the US military is working closely with.
And I had a meeting that night with the president of Iraq.
And so I wore,
what do you wear to the front lines in a battle zone?
And also knew the president.
So I put a sports jacket on.
We land at the front line
and they give me a bulletproof vest
that says Kushner on it.
I tape it.
I put it on, I go out and I cover the NER.
So it just said, Kushner.
And I went and I didn't realize they were taking pictures.
And so-
I think the picture looks pretty epic.
You with sunglasses, I think I love it.
So anyway, so that was the funny story behind that.
And then actually my brother
was at some society event in New York
and he ran into Jimmy Fallon.
So the two of them took a selfie together
and Josh writes me, he says,
hanging out with my older brother in New York.
I'm trying to explain to him what your voice sounds like.
So it was good.
So that was a funny one.
But I think just being behind the scenes for me
just gave me more maneuverability
in the sense that, again, it goes back to trust
and people knowing that I wasn't gonna try to
publicize the things they were telling me.
I think it just gave me more ability to operate that way.
And I also realized too,
communicating is a very important skill.
Luckily in Washington,
there's no shortage of amazing communicators.
I think there were a lot of people
who were much better at me than being communicators.
So I was very happy that they were willing to do it
because it wasn't something
that I had a lot of experience with
or necessarily I thought I was very good at.
And so I kind of just did my job
and just focused on getting things done.
So let me ask you, you have a very interesting life.
If you were to give advice to young folks
on how to have such an impactful life, what would you say?
Career and life.
How to have a successful career and a successful life.
Number one is I would say,
you just have to work hard at everything you do.
Number two, I would say, never stop learning
and always try to say yes more than you should,
go out of your comfort zone.
And I think just you gotta work hard at everything you do.
And if you're gonna take something on,
do it the best you can.
One of the lessons I write about in the book from my father
was I remember I was going for a job interview
and he asked me, he says,
well, what time are you leaving to the job interview?
Is that nine o'clock?
I said, I'll leave at eight o'clock.
He says, well, what if there's traffic?
I said, dad, I've done this drive a thousand times.
Like there's never traffic.
So what if there's an accident?
I said, I can't control that.
He said, Jared, the only excuse you ever have for being late
is that you didn't leave early enough.
And I just think it's something
where if you want to accomplish something,
a lot of people, I hear they complain
about what other people do
or why it's hard or why it's impossible.
And again, I say this as somebody who's been so blessed
with so many things in life,
but when I've had challenges
or things I've wanted to achieve,
I just focus and say, what can I do?
And I'll read everything I can get my hands on.
If I fail at one, the door closes, I'll try the window.
If the window closes, I'll try the chimney.
If the chimney closes, I'll try to take a tunnel.
It's just, if you want to accomplish something,
you just have to go at it.
And I think the most important thing I'll say,
sorry, I'm kind of thinking my way into this answer,
is just do the right thing.
I think that's also right.
And I saw that in my career,
be good to people, be honest, do the right thing.
And if you do that, I think long-term, it does pay off.
Maybe not in politics, but in the world at large, it does.
And my hope is in politics, it will as well.
I wonder if you can comment on your process of learning
in general, because you took on
so many new, interesting problems
and approached them with first principles kind of approach.
So what was your source of information?
Because you didn't seem to be listening
to the assumptions of the prior experts.
You were just taking on the problem
in a very pragmatic perspective.
So what was, how'd you learn about the Middle East?
How did you learn about China?
How did you learn about Mexico?
Like all of these, prison reform,
all of this that you've taken on
and were extremely effective at.
It really started with just talking to people.
I would try to reach out to people
who had been involved in different things
and ask them what they did,
what they thought of the problem,
who they thought was smart on it,
what they read that helped them get a better understanding,
why they think something had failed.
And then I would just read voraciously on every topic.
In Washington, it was harder to get advice from humans
because I found humans had this weird tendency
to talk to the media.
And so I talked to somebody and I'd ask advice.
And then the next thing I know
is the Washington Post would call and say,
Jared's an idiot, doesn't know what he's doing.
And he's even going to this person to get advice.
I'm like, yeah, I'm asking everyone.
So books really became an amazing guide for me.
Ivanka, she's an incredible researcher.
She's just voracious.
And so she gave me some of my best books
and some incredible advice as well.
But that was really the process.
And then I think that was kind of the first stage.
And then the second stage was just constant iteration
and readjusting plan as you continue to get more learning.
And one story I tell in the book as well
is that on my first trip to the Middle East
where I met with Mohammed bin Zayed,
who I spoke about earlier, the ruler of UAE,
I spent two hours with him asking him questions
and really going through the Israeli-Palestinian issue,
the Israeli-Arab issue.
And he said to me at the end of the meeting, he says,
Jared, I think you're going to make peace
here in the Middle East.
And I was shocked because I mean, first of all,
he was, at the time, I think one of the most respected
leaders in the region, somebody who I found to be very wise
and super thoughtful and experienced.
And I said to him, why do you say that?
I was flattered, obviously,
but not certain why he was saying that
based on the fact that I didn't know what my plan was.
I didn't know what I was going to do
and I had no pathway to make peace.
And he said, well, the US usually sends
one of three different kinds of people to come see me.
He says, the first are people who come
and they fall asleep in meetings.
He said, the second are people who come
and they basically read me notes but have no ability
to interact on the message they're there to convey.
And then the third have been people who have come
to convince me to do things that aren't in my interests.
He says, you're the first person who's ever come here
and has just asked questions.
He says, why have you done that?
I said, because I figure,
this problem's been going on for a long time.
You live here, I'll be gone at some point.
You're going to have to live with the consequences
of whatever my work is.
And the US has a lot of power.
And my question is, what would you do if you were me?
And how would you approach this and help me think about it?
And again, I wasn't going to then take his plan
and then execute it, but I thought it'd be very provocative
to understand from the people in the region and instructive
how they would use the resource and the power
that the US had to solve the problems
that were having significant impact on their lives.
Yeah, there's a lot of power to the sort of,
the simplicity of the human approach
where you're just listening.
And one of my wishes for society is I leave government.
I was living on the Upper East Side
in a very liberal echo chamber.
I then traveled the country.
I met so many people who I never would have met otherwise
on the conservative side, on the independent side,
on so many different issues.
I think that people benefit.
If you have such a strong point of view,
I would follow the John Stuart Mill marketplace of ideas
and find people who disagree with you
and don't call them names, don't say they're a bad person.
Say, I want to understand why you feel the way you do.
Let's have conversations in this country.
And I think that that's probably going to be our best way
to work through the issues that we have currently.
When you zoom out and look at the 21st century
from a human history perspective,
across the timescale of many decades, maybe centuries,
what gives you hope about human civilization?
Everything you've seen.
You've traveled the world,
you've talked to some of the most powerful
and influential people, and you look at the future.
What gives you hope about this little planet of ours?
What gives me the most hope is that anything's possible.
There's one lesson that I took from my time in government.
It's that people coming together
to try to make tomorrow different than yesterday can succeed.
And if the right people in the right places
focus on the right ideas,
I think the advancement that we can have for human history
and for society can be tremendous.
And I think that right now,
I see we're at a place in society
where there's a lot of what I call
squabbles between countries,
which are really man versus man issues.
And those are as old as time, right?
We've been fighting about borders or religion
or who wronged somebody 100 or 1,000 years ago.
And these are what I call more tribal battles.
But I do think that as we advance
with artificial intelligence, as energy becomes cheaper
and it's more readily available,
I think we're gonna have massive industrialization.
I think we're gonna have massive advancement.
I think in medical and science,
we're gonna have cures for diseases.
We have the potential in 10, 20 years from now
to enter a dawn for humanity that could be incredible.
We could become multi-planetary.
We can explore the wonders of the world.
We can find things we didn't know.
So I think that if we put our energy
towards finding these advancements
that will improve the lives of everyone on this planet,
instead of figuring out ways
to have these tensions between us,
that for me is the most optimistic case for what's possible.
And the reason why I believe it's possible
is because somebody with no experience,
somebody who all I really had was the faith of a leader.
And I had the courage to try.
And I went out there with other people
and we took on some of the most hopeless,
impossible problems and we succeeded.
And if we were able to do that,
then everyone else should be able to do that as well.
Well, Jared, thank you for having the courage to try.
Thank you for your friendship, for your kindness,
most importantly, for your book recommendations.
And thank you for talking today.
This was fascinating, eye-opening.
I hope to have many more conversations like this.
Thank you very much, Lex.
Thank you for listening to this conversation
with Jared Kushner.
To support this podcast,
please check out our sponsors in the description.
And now, let me leave you with some words
from Mahatma Gandhi.
An eye for an eye will only make the whole world blind.
Thank you for listening and I hope to see you next time.