Jared Kushner: Israel, Palestine, Hamas, Gaza, Iran, and the Middle East | Lex Fridman Podcast #399
- 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 open 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 Fridman 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 AM Israel time, Hamas fired thousands of
rockets into Southern Israel. The rocket attacks served
as cover for a multi-pronged infiltration of Israel
territory by over 1000 Hamas militants, this is
shortly after at 7:40 AM. The Hamas militans 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 militans from Israel territory
and preparing to mobilize Israeli troops for a potential
ground attack on Hamas and 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 1200
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, a dance party to celebrate
peace with militants flying in, and then, you know, shooting machine guns to kill people indiscriminately, seeing young children captive,
and then 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. 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 kibbutz," 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, you know, 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 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' capabilities. There cannot be peace in
Israel and in the Middle East, while there's 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
formally 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, and 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 to caliphate the size of Ohio. They were beheading journalists. They were killing Christians. They controlled 8 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're 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 piece 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 and 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, 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, is the Palestinian people's
lives have now gone down, not up since then. I will say that under Hamas'
leadership in, in Gaza, the people who have suffered the most are the Palestinian people. I've watched cries throughout
my time in government from people saying, "We wanna 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, you know, 2 million people that are
being held to 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, you know, 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, you know, 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 for keeping the border tight. But unfortunately, every time you'd allow
construction materials to go into Gaza, they'd use 'em 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 live a better life, while at the same, time
the leadership in Gaza was taking all 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 one of the soccer games
in Iran, they were trying to, you know, rally support for
the Hamas terror attacks. And a lot of people in
the crowds were chanting, FU to the regime, because
I think the Iranian people, the Persian people generally
are peace-loving people, who don't wanna 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
deante 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, a Hamas has been a proxy for Iran who
wanted to obviously see the destruction of Israel, but also does not wanna 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 ash-Sharif in Israel, where the Jewish beam ash, the holy temple was built
in a very religious place. 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 you know, 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, right? I always felt the politicians
were a little disconnected, so I commissioned several
focus groups, one in Oman, 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 re-conquer 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
acknowledge that King Abdullah, the king of Jordan is the
custodian of the mosque. And as long as people want to
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 if 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. You know, after the
Abraham Accords, you know, 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 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 the way this misinformation
is not something that's new. You know, 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 Hajj 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
yet 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, you know, 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 as core,
is a peaceful religion, and I think that's where a lot
of the great leaders in Islam wanna take it. But the people who use Islam or the mosque as a justification for violence, those are people who I
think are, are really, they're 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, you know, 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, you know, more cash or you have a company. So a bit 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're 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 are trying to
so solve those problems in that context, often
we're 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. It 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 have 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,
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, you know, my approach when I would get
into a hard problem and 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 'em
up and walk 'em across. But, 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, you know, 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 Schwarzman
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. You know, we think that
for Gaza in particular, it would cost maybe maybe
seven to 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 eople wouldn't have
confidence investing there with the role that 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 are willing to fund it. The international community's
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, you
know, 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, you know, could be easy. But like I said, you know, 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'
leadership, or lack of leadership, and their desire to focus
on trying to kill Israelis, and start war with Israel over improving the lies
of the Palestinian people. - And the current approach of Hamas, the more violence they perpetrate, the more they can hold onto 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 you know, our posture with them was basically a very simple deal. You know, if you think about
what's the end state in Gaza, it's actually not that complicated. You know, 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, you know, 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, you know, 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 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, you know, under the current circumstances, if you do wanna have peace there, Hamas has to be either
eliminated or severely degraded, in terms of their military capabilities. - I would love to ask 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, right? We left them a place where
they had tremendous momentum in the Middle East. I met with them during the
transition and said, you know, look, you know, we even got
the Qatar-Saudi conflict done, no peace between Israel and Saudi would've been possible without that. So we even got that done
in our lame duck period. And they came in and they said, "Look, we wanna focus on the three Cs, which is COVID, climate change, and China. And I said, "That's great,
but you know, 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 to ra 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? Right? 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, they started insulting,
you know, 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, you know,
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, you know, 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 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 job 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, you know, 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
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're 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, 'cause they were letting 'em
get all this revenue where 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 'cause we always felt
like the troublemakers in the region, particularly
Iran, who we thought would be disadvantaged by having UAE, Saudi, Israel, altogether. Israel's a nuclear power. You have, you know,
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 thrive. 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,
they just basically gave $6 billion to Iran in
exchange for hostages. And then Iran's basically
funding these terror attacks are killing American
citizens you have in Israel. And 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 wanna say one thing, Lex, I have a lot of friends
who are fans of Trump, who are not fans of Trump. But one thing I wanna say with
absolute certainty is that if President Trump was in office, this never would've happened. And when President Trump was in office, anyone who supports Israel or
who wants to see, you know, 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, we transferred the ball, it was on the green, now it's
almost like it's gone back, you know, 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, you know,
if you get into a war, you wanna 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. 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
in that, you know, 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, I mean, 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 it'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, you know, get different elements
across would be incredible. So what I would say with it
is that the industrial logic held yesterday, and I think
it will hold again tomorrow. So, you know, 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 interest. What's gonna happen now though, is the political dynamics are gonna shift. And I think that, you know, 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. And you know, it's funny, Lex, when I was working on the
US-Mexico agreement for the trade, you know, we would have,
every day there'd be a tweet that would go out, or
there would be an issue. I mean, people forget how intense it was between America and Mexico. And I would speak to my
counterpart of Mexico, after a rough day and you know, we were
working on something, we were making progress,
it'd get blown up, and I'd speak to 'em and say, "You know what, look,
they're not moving America. They're not moving Mexico. Let's just, 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. 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 you know, words on phone
calls is worth so much. It's really, you know, 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 you know, 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 principle's 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 their 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 wanna hold you
accountable, no more money." And they all say that
they're gonna 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. - 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 know, 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, you know, 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 you know, 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. - BBenjamin 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 mind in Benjamin Netanyahu that might be important to understand here in this current war? - Bibi is definitely a historic figure. You know, I'd meet with a lot
of different world leaders, and some of 'em, 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's 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 risks that he takes
and not create more risk than is needed, and that's
easy to say, you know, 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 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 Bibi 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 know, you can't disagree
with the leadership. You know, in Israel, if you wanna be homosexual, you can have a 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, you know, 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 is 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, you know, 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 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, you know, if you follow the
conference I did in Bahrain, we had all 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, you know, 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. - [Lex] 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, and 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, is, 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, you know, when President Trump left office in 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 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 them meeting." He says, "No drinking." 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 wanna live a better life. And, you know, people don't
wanna 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, 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, you know, 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, you know, 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 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 'em to a worse and worse place, but we all have the
power to make them feel loved, make them feel heard. And and I think there's also
tremendous power that we have as people to help people
get to a better place. And so, you know, my wife and I, we've always tried to be a force for good. We've always tried to be, you know, 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. I saw a Senator Feinstein
just passed away. We had a great dinner at her
house when she was 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, you know,
Feinstein and her husband were like super into, you know,
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, you know, the number two
ranking Democrat in the Senate, Lindsey Graham, and Steven Miller, who's known to be a very
hard line on immigration, discussing what an immigration
reform could look like. I mean, 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. 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, you know, 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, you know, 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, you know, 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 learned 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 will 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 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? 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 try 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 endpoint, 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 had 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 wait 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 wanna 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 you know, every time
we maneuvered something, we would get attacked
either from the left. There's a time we were being
attacked by Nancy Pelosi, John Lewis, for not being,
you know, 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're 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. There's, I think a story where would Bibi, there was a potential, like,
a dramatic election coming up, and you have to say, no, no excuses, no delaying, we
have to make this agreement." I know Bibi caress about
Israel more than the particular dynamics of the election. Like you have to draw a hard line there. - But in fairness too,
like, you know, for him, during the time that we
were dealing with him, he was always an election versus election, and then election and you know, what he was saying wasn't wrong. And I think he was more
expressing his concerns, given the dynamics. And you know, 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, you know, 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 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. People actually can
believe that results driven 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, like, on 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, you know, again,
a lot of my childhood was I was exposed to business. My father, on Sundays he
would take us 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,
had 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, good partner,
you'll figure it out." And so, going through
some of the challenges, and 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 of these leaders, aren't there like multiple
people you're speaking to inside one person that you're
trying to encourage, catalyze, like, 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. You know, 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, you know, interact with them in government, as 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 Tuckman. It's a book on World War I, and I went down a whole rabbit hole there. She's, like, an incredible historian. But anyway, there's a bunch of
stuff you learned 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 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 I was reading the book, I remember thinking to
myself, even though, you know, 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, you know, 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, you know, 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 glide path
to a nuclear weapon. Yet the single biggest fear
he had was North Korea. And 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." And he says, "Let's not
let that be too public. Let's try to restock,
and come up with a plan." 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, 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, than 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 wanna 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? Why is it that 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 and 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 and 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 you know, what we would
see in New York, is there, they would stab you in the eye, in DC they would stab you in the back, and it just became a whole different-
- Good line. - 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. - If we just linger on the
North Korea and the deescalation 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, you know, if the press knew what we were doing, they would've 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 everyone, and it's not illegitimate fear. I mean, there were
missile tests over Japan. You had a lot of very big
challenges with that file. And then all of a sudden we make contact, we go through a 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 wanna know how
you worded that first email or text message, like
what emojis to use, like, the hugging emoji. It's just personally I've
gotten to know a lot of powerful and rich people and just, it's
funny that they're all human, just like you're saying. - And a lot the drama,
a lot of the problems can be resolved with just
like a little comradery, a little kindness, a little, like, just actually
just reaching out and talk. - We're all human beings, and people wanna be successful,
and people wanna be good. And and you're right too. there's way more emojis involved
in diplomacy than I ever would've expected, but-
- And every leader I'm sure has their favorite emoji. This is what I learned about people, everybody has their go-to emoji. 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
"Thirteen Days in September" by Lawrence Wright in
discussing all the work you've done in in Israel
and the Middle East. I just wanna 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 Manam , or Jimmy Carter and, and, and Sance and, 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, you know, 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, bacon 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 Vegas 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
Anmar 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. And 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 Mohamed 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 weeks,
I said, "You know what? I've gotta 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 LL plane, and we'll do the first
official commercial flight?" And so I said, "That's a great idea." Let's call, you know,
ambassador Otaiba Yousef, 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 Yussef and he
says, "Sure, no problem. Let's give it a shot." So we go and we do it and he says, "If we can work at these
issues, we'll do it." 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 on an LL 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, you
know, banking relationships, they 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 Thobs with a LL 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, you know, "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. It was just going back=and-forth with all of the 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, so large. - I mean, if you 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, like, how do you operate in a world where like 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, you know, the actions are actually
what's gonna matter more than the words. And so you have a difference between leaders and politicians. You know, 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
and how he would act. And that made our words
much more effective in what they did. So it's all a combination, but you know, 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. You know? 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. I mean, if I was giving up, you know, a nice life in New York, and if I was giving up the
stuff that I really enjoyed, the company that I'd help build, and the life that I was enjoying in order to do government. I was going there to make a difference, and, you know, we had to focus on it. The other skillset, so there was a couple skill
sets that I found were quite deficient in government. First of all, there was
a ton of amazing people. I mean, 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 kind of
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, you know, 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, the founding fathers, they're 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, you know, people coming in to, you know, 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 Niall Ferguson, an awesome historian,
he'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, right? But I do think we've
gotten too big, you know? Niall's book that you mentioned, you know, 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 was 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 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 he regulations that they put in place? The wealth gap in the country
grew, it didn't shrink. And so I think you'll oftentimes, what they say these
regulations are intended to be, the result often becomes the opposite. And so, you know 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 two. And in the first year they
eliminated eight regulations for everyone. And 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 as the accusations of collusion with Russia. And you tell in the book in
general, this whole story, this whole journey 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." 'Cause 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, like, working, coordinating
with ourselves, let alone collaborating with another government, or 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. And 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 outta 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 worst of, you know? And so for me, that was a big concern. So, you know, it was amazing. I mean, my poor mom, I told
her to stop reading whatever. I said, "Ma, I promise you,
we didn't do anything wrong, it's good." But, you know, she'd
call me and say, "Well, our friends were on the Upper East Side we're talking with Chuck Schumer, says, "Jared's going to jail. You know, 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 1000%
certainty was just not true. And so seeing that play
out was very, very hard. Obviously, you know, I was
accused of a lot of things. There were times in
Washington, I was radioactive. I remember one weekend, you
know, it was all over CNN. The people, they had 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, and 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, like 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 world, and all of a sudden, the
entire world from CNN to everybody's accusing you of
colluding with the Russians. Like, 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? - Yeah. So it was a surreal experience. I would say number one,
is I felt very confident that I hadn't done anything wrong. I'd always tell my lawyer like, "The good news is I've got
a good fact problem," right? Like, 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 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 like, you know, 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, and even Donald, a lot of credit for, you know, 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've spent all
my time playing defense, you know, 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 wasn't always fun, but we got through and, 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, you know, 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 spend my time.
- Yeah, but I wanna linger on it because to me, that has
a really discouraging effect on anyone who's trying to
do positive in the world. Like, these kinds of attacks are intense. - Yeah.
- I mean, you you say kind of 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 wanna kind of understand
the two aspects of this, how not to have such
stores have 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 a effect in your psyche. You seem to be pretty stoic
about the whole thing, but how, I mean, 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 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 know, you could look at it and say,
maybe this was a massive cost, either in dollars, or in
time, or in reputation, or an emotional drain. But you could also say that, you know, 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 wanna see it fail or
they want to criticize those 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 know, 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, you know, 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, you know, my lowest moment, you
know, got on the plane, he lived in Arizona, got on a plane, and came just have dinner with me to say, "Just pick your head up. I know you're down now,
you're gonna be fine. Just fight through." That meant a lot to me. And again, I always think
in my life, you know, 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 wanna 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. 'cause again, you know, most people interacted
with her, were super kind. But I would see people, you know, on Twitter or different
places go after her. And she always stayed elegant. 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, 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 in 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 dunno what it is.
- It's the best. - You listen to Bruce Springsteen. Lucy K 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, be bored, but he's 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
no unexplainable reason. And I think that's true,
'cause life is difficult. Life is full of suffering,
or struggle, or challenges. 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 sort of the
point Lucy came makes. And there's something about
Jersey with the diners, often late at night. There's several diner
experiences, I should say. Okay. There's like 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 3:00 AM diner, the ones that are open 24 hours, that has a romantic element
when you're a young man or young woman, you're traveling,
the loneliness of that. It'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.
- 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. We'd eat at a diner. Late night, I'd be come
back with my friends, we'd stop at a diner. And it's a tradition that Ivanka and I had loved doing as well. And I think there's a notion of, it's very egalitarian in that, you know, people from all places are there. You could order basically
whatever you want. I mean, the, the menus at the diners look like the phone book.
- That's great. - And it's amazing how they keep so much fresh ingredients to do it. At least the good ones do. I'd love as a jersey guy,
you get mozzarella stick, and an omelet, at any hour of the day, 'cause most of 'em are open 24 hours. And that's basically
my Ivanka and my go-to, we'll throw in a milkshake or two as well. Nice.
- But for me as a kid, you know, 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, you know,
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. You know, 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, right? It's got very low crime, one of the best public school
systems in the country. 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. - [Jared] It's where it's at. - There's South Jersey,
there's North Jersey. I mean there all, there's
all kinds of jerseys too. I mean, the whole thing, it just, I- - [Jared] And don't get me started on the "Jersey Shore," Lex. - "Jersey Shore" is a whole thing- - And I'm not talking
about the Snooki part, I'm talking about the real nice parts, where there's great food, great people. - What do 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
some from New Jersey, and you kind of give a
nod of deep understanding. It's the cradle of civilization many ways. So, 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, of the betrayal that happened
in his life and then how he responded 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 US attorney's office, and turned into, 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, "You know what? What I did was wrong." And he, 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. You know, it was a shock. It was a total change. I grew up, my childhood was I think a very nice childhood. You know, my parents always
said, "Do good in school. Work hard." I was very, very focused on my athletics. I was captain of the basketball team, 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 I 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. 'cause my father always taught us, we were always surrounded by politicians. And he always said, you know,
"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, you know, 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, you know, I was angry. I was angry. I said, you
know, 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 kind of said, that's
not gonna change anything. And I had a real shift. 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 and 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, you know, ran into it. And for the next two years,
it was, every day was painful. I mean, I was dealing with banks. The company still had subpoenas.
I was still in law school. I did 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 gimme a test that had four pictures and say, "Circle who your professor is," you know? 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, you know,
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're right, that your father told
you about being humble. I'd love to ask you about this, that in life sometimes you 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 at
the time, and those were very, very memorable words. After I picked up my father
from the arraignment, I drove him down, I drove the car. And my father and I are very, very close. And he didn't say a
word for the whole time. 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 that 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, you know, later that
day, or the next day, he got up and started walking. He had an ankle monitor
for whatever reason, the prosecutor was such a, so aggressive, he was a flight risk. So they made him wear an ankle monitor. 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, "You know, 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 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 you know, my father
is a very humble person. He's a very moral person. You know, 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, you know, our mother really raised
us to be very humble. 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, it was based on what was on
sale versus what we liked. You know, 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 like, I think about
that story and that it's a story that only God could write. And I really believe 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, because 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 know, you mentioned about
power, money corrupting. There's a great quote I
heard a friend of mine say, he's a guy, Michael Harris, who was one of the founders
of Death Row Records. He was being interviewed
recently and they asked him about what happened with Suge 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 objectives. 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 you know, 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, you know, 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 you know, 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 'em 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 'em 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 100 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 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 the, 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, you know, 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 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. You know, this happened for me at a time, it was while the Russia
investigation stuff was still happening, 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 text, I was negotiating back and forth, and I built a lot of trust. Again, I would 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, 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 lot, 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'll reduce the cost of what we spend on prisons. And so it was a great
effort and I was very, very proud that we're able to get it done under President Trump. - How'd you con convince the Republicans, so they were skeptical at first? Are we talking about like
just phone conversations, going out to lunch? Just back to the emojis or what? - Hand-to-hand combat, meetings. The cool thing about this,
so everyone always says, I always get frustrated when
I hear a lawmaker 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, you know, 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, walk in the halls, going
to lunches, you know, hosting dinners at my house. 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, you know, a whole coalition. So it was really a balancing act. But it's an amazing thing, and 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. - You mentioned the importance of trust at the very beginning of the conversation. From the outsider perspective,
just maybe a dark question, which is like how much trust
is there in Washington, to 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, you know, when you're in a situation where there's really nothing in it for any of you personally, but you're in a foxhole together
and nobody in Washington can get anything done by themselves. So 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 you know, for every, thing you read
about in the press of a fight I had with somebody
because we were at odds, you know, 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 back stab 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, you know, try to do the right thing. If there's somebody back home
that does manipulative stuff, screws you over and takes
power from you, it's okay. I feel like that kinda 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. - 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 he did a bipartisan deal. He was told that, you know, they would have his
back, and then the moment things got tough, they,
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. Yeah.
- I wish it wasn't, but it is. - Yeah. I do just wish people zoomed out, and people in politics zoomed out a bit, and just asked themselves, "What are we all doing this for?" Like, sometimes, you can
get like a little bit lost in the game of it. If you zoom out, you realize
like integrity is way more important than like
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 like 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 is 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 their worst selves, right? - When that system gets
invented, you'll share with me what it is. But, look, let me give you
another way to frame it, which is, and this was
kind of the revelation we spoke before about, you know, kind of when I
was getting my butt kicked by the Russian investigation
and all the different areas, but kind of the basic framework
I looked at was I said, "Okay, you know, this all feels tough." But I said, "The game's, the game. The game's been here way longer, way before I came, and it'll
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 'em, you know, 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, 'cause 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's seems like a disincentive
to people to participate. - It it is, but I'll give you again, a an optimistic side of
it is that, you know, 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 egalitarian, right? And 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, you know, 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, you know, 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, you know, he was an outsider and you know, he represented something
that was existential to the system, right? 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 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 'cause there's so many
interesting components to this. Let's talk about Saudi Arabia. And 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, 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 steep understanding of the tribal nature of the region. And you know, 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've won in a landslide. They say 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. Muhammed, 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. You know, 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 Neo 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 know, you've got a
lot of different programs, but you know 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, you know, 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 achieved five things. If I set 100 goals and
I fail at 50 of 'em, th in IN five years, I'll
accomplish 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 they've gotta 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 wanna meet with them." But I came over and I
met and they said, "Well, we wanna 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. I said, "You gotta start
working with Israel. You have to be paying
more of your fair share, and you have stopping the Wahhabism that that's being spread. And again, I'd no knowledge, these were just kind of the
traditional talking points about Saudi Arabia. So the guy I was with basically
said is a guy fa Alto, he's a very respected minister there. "Jared," he says, "You don't know much about
Saudi Arabia, do you?" I said, "No, no, I don't." It's just really what I
really I've kind of been told or what I read. And he says, "Okay, lemme do this. We wanna 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. And so that when I was
thinking about, you know, talking to different generals
and what capabilities the US 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 deal?" "Unbelievable, but it'll never happen." I said, "Well, they're
telling me they wanna do these things." Again, I having no
foreign policy experience, I'm just saying I've got
somebody telling me they want do it, and that's kind of where we started. We get into office, I don't
think much more about it. And then I think it was like
a 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, you know, 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 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 said on the phone, "Have him deal with Jared," because I think he knew
that if he would've 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, you know, 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
like 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 policy 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, you know, 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, you know, 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 CEO of Exxon. So he dealt with all these
play 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
want to do all these things, shouldn't we at least give
him a chance to try to do it?" Why do we want to
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, you know, they basically deferred and,
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, 'cause 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. Musaad Al Aiban, 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, you know, 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, it's 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 now you send me a great
essay from, 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." 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. - [Jared] Mm-hm. - There's a lot of interesting
things here to talk about. This aspect of doing the
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 to 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 of audacity of a project sometimes applies 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 may be in quotes, but 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
is such an interesting way of looking at it. Perhaps some aspect of this, at least in the story you
tell this some passive aspect where you're like not even acknowledging, not even caring that there was rules, just kinda asking the simple question, and taking the simple action. - 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 you know, 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 you know, 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, 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
principle's 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 and more prosperous place tomorrow. - So if we can go back
to MBS 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, you know, it's funny, we were talking before
about how we wish leaders would set big audacious
goals and take on big things. Well, that's what he did with Vision 2030, you know, 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,
you know, 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, right? 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, you know, 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, you know, 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 Haifa to
Muscat, from Oman 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, you know, awful. It's been a big national
security threat for America. A big place where our treasure has 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
between 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, "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 kind
of have this momentum that's so hard to break, even when you have new leaders, new blood, new ideas that come in. It's just sad to see that
yes, this tragedy happens, but it doesn't mean that
you can't make progress. I dunno if you have kind
of lessons from that, just how much of a dramatic
impact it had on creating tension between the
United States and Saudi, and in general and the Middle East, like, that somehow, Saudi's not a friend, but is against the ideals and the values of the United States. - Yeah. So it did 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, you
know, 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, you know, 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, you know, a company or a property,
or if you sell it, you have less to do and, 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, and 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. 'cause 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 like 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." 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 just 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, lemme 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 wanna 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 details. 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 LL plane, a boss who runs a refugee
organization, a refugee group, right, that claims that
they don't have a state, that gets billions of dollars
in aid ever 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, you know, I tell the story in the book,
and it was one of my, like, 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 Bibi, and I thought maybe he was open to normalizing with Israel. So after he meets with
Bibi, he calls me and says, "I want you to come see me." So I go over to see him, again, I tell the story,
it was a crazy night, and 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 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, 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
components you need to solve. Number one is territorial
continuity, right? You need to figure out
where do you draw the lines? And that's something that, you know, 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 change a couple
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, you know, a prime minister of Israel to make a deal where he's gonna 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 sure Israel was safe, and also keep the Palestinian issue safe. She needs 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 Bet ha-Midrash for the Jewish people. So, and then, compounding by the fact that you have all 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, you know, wars and, 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 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, you know, what we tried to do by laying
added 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 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 of GDP that the
Palestinians had was like 30, 40% compared to Egypt,
which was at like 130%. In Jordan, which was at 110%, then Lebanon, which is about 200%. And so, you know, 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
pass 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 holy place, and this is something in our
conversations and in my own travels, I've seen the
importance of sort of frictionless access to those sites from the entirety of the Muslim world. And that's what Abraham
Accords 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 them 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 wanna do it. But I think 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, UNRWA. 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. And so 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, "The Jews, and the Muslims,
Christians, come together. I think King Abdullah from
Jordan's been an incredible custodian for the mosque. I think everyone in my travels
recognize 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 wanna make tomorrow better, that they can. And unfortunately, the people who suffer the most are really, are just the Palestinian people. And I think that, you know, 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 gonna solve that by litigating the past. You're only gonna 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, 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,
in, in, 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 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, unintentional, 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 in 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, Morocco, where basically countries that
didn't recognize each other before ended up recognize 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 a foreign place together. - That has a kinda 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, 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 like 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 you know, 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 of these capitals of those cities. So you think about the Jewish
history in Baghdad, I mean, I think the Talmud was written in Baghdad. It was a place where in Babylon, where the Jewish people thrived, I think in five 570 BC, 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, 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 wanna do next?" Right? So my previous career,
I'd been in real estate. I 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, 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 to government. I went into government, 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 I'd, 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, you know, different friends. They were very excited
to, 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, you know, 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, you know, this business is actually an
objective metric business. Right? It's about returns. So, you know, 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, you know, I haven't been accused of
any of violating any laws. And, you know, I haven't violated any of
the ethics rules either. When I was in government,
every year submitted all my financial 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 I'm 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, "Have her come in." 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, I mean, she
basically was a grandmother. And she 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 like, 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 is 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, as I would say, "Think about
how crazy he's making you, and his enemies. He did that to the enemies of America." So he was a very, very strong president, and I think did a, a great job. - So in some of these agreements I'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, you know, 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've 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, 'cause we also negotiated
them with Canada, and there was a very funny
phone call where Trudeau is calling Trump. And again, they got along,
you know, decently well. And Trudeau's calling and saying, "You can't put national security
tariffs on us in Canada. We're, 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 Trudeau says, "That was the French." He says, "No, it was the Canadians." And so it was just, you know, like I said, he's always keeping
everyone on their toes. He took very calculated risks. And like I said, you know, 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 a 100% it would've
been avoided, not 99%, You know, President Trump for four years had no problems with Russia. You know, 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, you know, 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 piece, 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, with Vladimir Putin
and Volodymyr 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 leak 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 outta there. Staying in, in Kiev when he did, how he did it, was 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 that works? 'cause neither party's
gonna jump until the pool is filled with water. And it, 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 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 Volodymyr Zelenskyy
to the table together? - Leadership. - So you're saying like 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 'em
to get the trust of Russia, based on the way that they've
played their moves to date. And 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, you know, 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, you know, we do risk
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 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,
with Putin and with Russia, you know, 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, you know, 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, right? Again, you think about the US
and Russia and World War II, we worked together to
defeat the Nazis, right? 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's 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, 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 conflict. They created this thing called OPEC+, 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 like 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 Caril Demetria from Russia and with, with MBS directly. And I was dealing with Dan Brouillette who was our energy minister,
going back-and-forth. And it was, like, 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 this." so President Trump gets
on, says, "Congratulations. We have a deal. And then King Salman says,
"We don't have a deal. Mexico hasn't agreed to their cuts." He's said, "What do you mean?" And so they were part of the OPEC+. And so I get a note saying,
"You gotta go call Mexico." So I'm calling Mexico, they're saying "We're not doing any cuts." I said, "Why? I said, "We're hedged at $55." I said, "Why didn't you tell
us that at 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, A, 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 Zelenskyy 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, there is, you know, 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's a massive landmass, it's twice the size of America. They have 11 times 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 like
two different parts of the mindset, you know 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 wanna 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 gonna arm 'em." And we basically said, "Just calm down. We don't want any conflicts there. We have bigger issues
and bigger opportunities to work from." So I do think you have to
think through what's a paradigm that he can accept. And I do think that, you know, 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, 'cause
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, and mountains. - And understanding the DNA of countries. It was one of the most phenomenal books. 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, you know, 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 wanna 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, you know, we are kind of entering a G2 world, whether people wanna admit it or not. And that a lot of these countries, in what I call the
middle market countries, were basically playing, this is 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's about face. And so we, 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
un-acknowledge 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, 'cause 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, 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 sat about an
hour and a half together. And during that meeting,
President Trump, said, "Look, let's just set some ground
rules to this relationship. Let's just not talk about Taiwan. 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 just don't 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, 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 Peng, is 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. So Chinese have an incredible
culture that goes back thousands of years. They're very proud in
how and 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
particularly emphasis on kind of the treaty of unequals, and then 100 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 vetted 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's 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 Vanka's house. If he does this, this is
gonna crash the whole economy. I mean, and by the way, he believed it. I mean, these were things
that people were telling him would be very tough to do. You know, President Trump had a gentleman named Ambassador Lighthizer, Robert Lighthizer, he was
really the, tip of the spear on all of our, our trade negotiations. He worked very well as Secretary Mnuchin. 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've 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, anyways, 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 gotten a chance
to read parts of it, and I'd highly recommend people read it, 'cause it's a definitely
an eyeopening perspective. I don't know if I agree with all of it. I dunno if you agree with all of it, but it's 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 the hopeful view how it's possible to have
a trajectory of these two superpowers working
together in the 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. You know, one of the things, I dunno 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 they said, "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 to to 1940, 100 years, where they really, after
all these treaties, were really second class a country. And so then you have the people's
revolution that comes in. And he talks about how China
very strategically is a very, very poor country, you know,
would fight their way back, and build brick by brick. And you know, 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 knowhow 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 helped 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 came 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, is if they actually did
achieve this full objective of becoming the world dominant country, what they would've done with it, whether they would've
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, you know, and the Chinese were always fearing, "Is Trump trying to stop our rise, right?" And you have a great book
also by Graham Allison that he writes about. You know, 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, you know, more than half the time
it ends up leading to war. So the question is, 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 you know, 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 you know, 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 could 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 kind of get
rid of some of their state subsidies, 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, you know, geopolitical power. So like 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 outta 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 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 dunno 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 clip. But 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 you know, 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, you know, 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 type," I said, "Why do you mean my blood type?" He says "You're going
to an active war zone. I'm like, "Okay, I guess
I'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 is very, very well
respected in the military. And we go in, and we get
on Black Hawk helicopter, they said, you know, "Today's a nice day. Let's take the, the sides off." And so I get on the plane
and there's a guy, you know, military service officer who
then takes a machine gun, locks it into 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 experience previously? - I would say slightly. I mean, I was doing real
estate like three months ago, you know, and now I'm flying over Iraq, and the chairman says, "That's
Saddam Hussein's palace." And I look down, there's like a big bomb
right through the middle. 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 end up
going to the front lines to be with the service,
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 meet the president? So I put a sports jacket on, we land at the 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
N-E-R, so it just said, Kush. - Kush, yeah.
- And, I went, and I didn't realize they
were taking pictures. - I think the picture looks pretty epic, you with sunglasses, I love it. - So anyway, so that was
the funny story behind that. And then actually my brother
was at a some society event in New York and he ran into Jimmy Fallon. So the two of 'em took a selfie
together and Josh writes me, he says, "Hanging out with my
older brother in New York." You know, 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, you know, 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, like, 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, 'cause 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 and just focused
on getting things done. - So let me, let me ask, 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 outta 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. You know, 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 at 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 1,000 times." Like there's never traffic. He said, "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. He said "You didn't leave early enough. And I just think it's
something where if you wanna accomplish something, you know, 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, with so many things in life, but you know, 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. I'll 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 chose,
I'll try to dig a tunnel. It's just, if you wanna
accomplish something, you just have to go at it. And, you know, 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.
You know, 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, 'cause you took on so many new, interesting problems and
approached them with a first principles kind of approach. So what was your source of information? 'Cause 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. 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, you know, 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, you know, read voraciously on every topic. You know, Washington, it was
harder to get advice from humans because I found humans
had this weird tendency to talk to the media. And so, you know, 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, she's an
incredible researcher. She, 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, 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
gonna make peace here in the Middle East." And I was shocked because I
mean, first of all, he was, you know, at the time I think some, 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 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 gonna 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? Why have you done that?" I said, "Because I figure, you know, this problem's been going
on for a long time." You live here, I'll be gone at some point. You're gonna 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 gonna 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 that human
approach where you're just listening. - Yeah. And one of my
wishes for society as I leave government, you know, 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've 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, you know, the John Stewart 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 wanna understand why
you feel the way you do. Let's have conversations in this country." And I think that that's probably
gonna 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. If 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? You know, we've been
fighting about borders or religion or, you know, or, 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, we can explore
the wonders of the world. We can find things we didn't know. So I think that if, if we, we put our energy towards
finding these advancements that will improve the lives of,
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, was the faith of a leader. And I had the 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 Mahat Gandhi. "An eye for an eye will only
make the whole world blind." Thank you for listening and
hope to see you next time.