Jared Kushner: Israel, Palestine, Hamas, Gaza, Iran, and the Middle East

00:00:00.000 | The following is a conversation with Jared Kushner,

00:00:03.120 | former senior advisor to the president

00:00:05.320 | during the Donald Trump administration

00:00:07.420 | and author of "Breaking History," a White House memoir.

00:00:11.280 | He's one of the most influential

00:00:13.840 | and effective presidential advisors in modern history,

00:00:16.960 | helping conduct negotiations

00:00:19.080 | with some of the most powerful leaders in the world

00:00:21.240 | and deliver results on trade, criminal justice reform,

00:00:25.360 | and historic progress towards peace in the Middle East.

00:00:29.880 | On Thursday, October 5th,

00:00:31.800 | we recorded a conversation on topics of war and peace,

00:00:34.560 | history and power in the Middle East and beyond.

00:00:37.840 | This was about a day and a half

00:00:40.000 | before the Hamas attack on Israel.

00:00:42.120 | And then we felt we must sit down again

00:00:45.040 | on Monday, October 9th,

00:00:46.920 | and add a discussion on the current situation.

00:00:50.160 | We opened the podcast with the second newly recorded part.

00:00:53.540 | My heart goes out to everyone

00:00:56.840 | who has and is suffering in this war.

00:01:00.520 | I pray for your strength

00:01:02.520 | and for the long-term peace and flourishing

00:01:05.120 | of the Israeli and Palestinian people.

00:01:08.520 | I love you all.

00:01:09.460 | This is Alex Friedman Podcast.

00:01:13.120 | And now, dear friends, here's Jared Kushner.

00:01:16.660 | We did a lot of this conversation

00:01:19.160 | before the Hamas attack on Israel,

00:01:21.360 | and we decided to sit down again

00:01:24.000 | and finish the discussion to address the current situation,

00:01:27.040 | which is still developing.

00:01:28.840 | If I may, allow me to summarize the situation

00:01:30.960 | as it stands today.

00:01:32.480 | It's morning, Monday, October 9th.

00:01:36.360 | On Saturday, October 7th, at 6.30 a.m. Israel time,

00:01:40.880 | Hamas fired thousands of rockets into southern Israel.

00:01:44.600 | The rocket attack served as cover

00:01:46.200 | for a multi-pronged infiltration of Israel territory

00:01:49.120 | by over 1,000 Hamas militants.

00:01:52.040 | This is shortly after, at 7.40 a.m.

00:01:55.860 | The Hamas militants went door-to-door in border towns,

00:01:58.840 | killing civilians and taking captives,

00:02:01.540 | including women and children.

00:02:03.920 | In response to this,

00:02:05.120 | Israeli Air Force began carrying out strikes in Gaza,

00:02:08.320 | also fighting on the ground in Israel

00:02:10.280 | to clear out Hamas militants from Israel territory,

00:02:13.040 | and preparing to mobilize Israeli troops

00:02:15.720 | for a potential ground attack on Hamas in Gaza.

00:02:18.560 | Now, of course, this is what it appears to be right now,

00:02:21.760 | and this, along with other things, might change,

00:02:25.240 | because the situation is still developing.

00:02:28.200 | The IDF is ordering civilian residents of Gaza

00:02:30.760 | to evacuate their homes for their safety.

00:02:33.160 | Benjamin Netanyahu declared war in several statements,

00:02:36.800 | and warned Israelis to brace themselves

00:02:38.680 | for a long and difficult war.

00:02:40.700 | Just today, Israeli ministers

00:02:42.680 | ordered a, quote, "complete siege of Gaza,"

00:02:45.920 | interrupting supplies of electricity, food, water, and fuel

00:02:49.360 | from Israel to Gaza.

00:02:51.280 | As of now, October 9th, the death toll is over 1,200 people,

00:02:56.040 | and over 130 hostages taken to Gaza by Hamas.

00:03:00.160 | So, as I said, the events are rapidly unfolding,

00:03:04.120 | so these numbers will sadly increase.

00:03:07.240 | But hopefully, our words here can at least, in part,

00:03:10.600 | speak to the timeless underlying currents of the history,

00:03:15.600 | and as you write about, the power dynamics of the region.

00:03:21.240 | So, for people who don't know,

00:03:22.880 | Gaza is a 25 miles long, six miles wide strip of territory

00:03:26.880 | along the Mediterranean Sea.

00:03:28.600 | It borders Israel on the east and north,

00:03:31.520 | and Egypt on the southwest.

00:03:34.480 | It's densely populated, about 2.3 million people,

00:03:38.240 | and there's been a blockade of Gaza by Israel and Egypt

00:03:42.320 | since 2007, when Hamas took power.

00:03:46.800 | I could just summarize that Hamas

00:03:48.560 | is a Palestinian militant group

00:03:50.360 | which rules the Gaza Strip.

00:03:52.760 | It originated in 1988, and it came to power in Gaza in 2006.

00:03:57.760 | As part of its charter,

00:03:59.080 | it's sworn to the destruction of Israel,

00:04:01.800 | and it is designated by the United States,

00:04:04.760 | European Union, UK, and, of course,

00:04:07.640 | Israel as a terrorist group.

00:04:10.200 | So, given that context, what are your feelings

00:04:12.320 | as a human being, and what is your analysis

00:04:15.640 | as the former senior advisor to the president

00:04:19.080 | under the Trump administration

00:04:21.000 | of the current situation in Israel and Gaza?

00:04:23.360 | - So, I think you did an excellent job

00:04:25.000 | of summarizing a lot of the context,

00:04:28.040 | but watching what's unfolded over the last 48 hours

00:04:31.640 | has been truly heartbreaking to see.

00:04:34.360 | We're still in the early stages of what's developing,

00:04:36.920 | but seeing the images on X of militants,

00:04:41.920 | terrorists going door to door with machine guns,

00:04:45.720 | gunning down innocent civilians,

00:04:48.120 | seeing beheaded Israeli soldiers,

00:04:50.120 | seeing young 20-year-olds at a rave dance party

00:04:55.120 | to celebrate peace with militants flying in

00:04:59.040 | and then shooting machine guns

00:05:01.000 | to kill people indiscriminately,

00:05:04.080 | seeing young children captive and held prisoner,

00:05:08.840 | seeing 80-year-old grandmothers, a Holocaust survivor,

00:05:12.120 | also being taken captive,

00:05:14.600 | these are just images and actions

00:05:18.840 | that we have not seen in this world since 9/11.

00:05:23.240 | This is a terror attack on the scale

00:05:26.520 | of which we have not seen,

00:05:28.340 | and it's been incredibly hard

00:05:30.420 | for a lot of people to comprehend.

00:05:32.520 | My heart goes out, obviously,

00:05:35.000 | to all of the families of the victims,

00:05:38.960 | to the families of those who are held in captive now,

00:05:43.640 | and to all of Israel,

00:05:45.540 | because one of the beautiful things

00:05:47.360 | about the state of Israel is that

00:05:49.520 | when one Israeli is hurting,

00:05:50.980 | the entire nation comes together.

00:05:53.320 | It's a shame that it's taking an action like this

00:05:55.960 | to unify the nation,

00:05:57.560 | but I have seen incredibly beautiful signs

00:06:01.800 | over the last 48 hours of a country coming together.

00:06:06.040 | The Jewish people have been under oppression before.

00:06:09.600 | The Jewish people know what it's like,

00:06:11.580 | and seeing people rally together

00:06:14.380 | to fight for their homeland,

00:06:16.380 | to try to reestablish safety,

00:06:18.900 | is a very beautiful thing to watch.

00:06:22.720 | I wish it wasn't something we had to watch, but it is.

00:06:26.040 | With that being said, though,

00:06:27.920 | the backdrop, I've been speaking to friends

00:06:29.600 | over the last couple of days.

00:06:31.460 | One friend I spoke with last night

00:06:33.780 | who was saying that,

00:06:35.620 | a good friend messaged him saying,

00:06:37.100 | I'm going in, we're gonna do some operations

00:06:39.440 | to try to free some of the hostages,

00:06:41.520 | held in one of the kibbutzes,

00:06:43.320 | messaged him the next morning.

00:06:44.600 | He was one of the first through the door

00:06:46.400 | to try to free these hostages,

00:06:48.480 | and he was killed by a Hamas militant.

00:06:50.440 | And sadly, we're gonna be hearing many, many more stories

00:06:54.600 | of brave Israeli soldiers

00:06:56.600 | trying to get these terrorists out of Israel,

00:07:00.120 | trying to free innocent civilians

00:07:02.520 | who unfortunately are risking their lives to do it.

00:07:05.900 | And they're all heroes,

00:07:08.600 | but some will have a less good fate than others, sadly.

00:07:12.840 | So it's a very, very heartbreaking moment.

00:07:16.640 | And I do think that it's very important

00:07:19.280 | at this moment in time for the entire world

00:07:21.440 | to stand behind Israel.

00:07:23.460 | I think that Hamas has shown the entire world

00:07:27.240 | who they really are.

00:07:28.720 | I think what their aim is, what they're willing to do.

00:07:32.120 | And all of the strong security that Israel's put in place

00:07:38.080 | over the last years,

00:07:39.280 | which in some instances was criticized,

00:07:42.120 | I think is now being validated

00:07:43.560 | that there was a real threat

00:07:45.800 | that they were looking to deter.

00:07:47.640 | So short answer is my heart is broken,

00:07:51.560 | praying for peace, praying for strength,

00:07:53.600 | praying for Israel to do what it needs to do

00:07:58.240 | to avoid being in this situation again,

00:08:01.260 | which is either eliminating

00:08:02.520 | or severely degrading Hamas's capabilities.

00:08:05.840 | There cannot be peace in Israel

00:08:07.720 | and in the Middle East while there is a terror group

00:08:11.000 | that is being funded by Iran,

00:08:12.520 | that is allowed to flourish

00:08:14.640 | and is allowed to plan operations

00:08:16.360 | that are gonna aim to kill innocent civilians.

00:08:19.780 | And so as somebody who was formerly in this position,

00:08:23.520 | who was intimately involved with Israel,

00:08:27.080 | with the strategies to minimize attacks from Hamas

00:08:31.440 | and to try to turn the region around.

00:08:34.080 | And I think we did do a very substantial job

00:08:36.800 | under President Trump.

00:08:38.320 | The Middle East went from one of the most chaotic regions

00:08:41.160 | in the world.

00:08:42.000 | You had ISIS in 2016.

00:08:45.160 | ISIS had a caliphate the size of Ohio.

00:08:47.520 | They're beheading journalists.

00:08:48.840 | They were killing Christians.

00:08:52.600 | They controlled 8 million people.

00:08:54.260 | They were planning attacks all over the world

00:08:58.200 | from their caliphate.

00:09:00.220 | They were using the internet to radicalize people.

00:09:04.720 | We had the San Bernardino shooting in America.

00:09:07.120 | We had the Pulse nightclub shooting in Orlando.

00:09:12.080 | And there was real threat.

00:09:13.340 | And then you had Iran,

00:09:14.840 | which was given $150 billion in a glide path

00:09:18.080 | to a nuclear weapon.

00:09:19.720 | And they were using their newfound riches

00:09:22.040 | to fund Hamas, Hezbollah, the Houthis,

00:09:25.640 | different rebels all over the region

00:09:28.160 | that were looking to destabilize further.

00:09:30.560 | Syria was in a civil war where 500,000 people were killed.

00:09:34.240 | Yemen was destabilized.

00:09:36.240 | Libya was destabilized.

00:09:38.200 | And it was just a mess.

00:09:39.120 | And all of America's allies had felt betrayed.

00:09:41.600 | President Trump came into power.

00:09:43.080 | We rebuilt the trust and the relationships

00:09:46.240 | with all of our traditional allies.

00:09:48.080 | We were able to eliminate ISIS, the territorial caliphate.

00:09:52.640 | And then we were able to project strength in the region,

00:09:56.020 | really go after Iran's wallet.

00:09:58.580 | We were able to stop through crushing sanctions

00:10:01.160 | a lot of their financial resources,

00:10:03.280 | which they were using to fund all these terror groups.

00:10:05.960 | And so we left the Middle East with six peace deals

00:10:09.000 | and a fairly peaceful world.

00:10:11.520 | So seeing what's happening,

00:10:13.280 | I think it was completely avoidable.

00:10:14.640 | I think it's horrible to see that it's occurring.

00:10:17.420 | And I pray that those in power will make the right decisions

00:10:20.620 | to restore safety,

00:10:23.880 | but also to potentially create a better paradigm

00:10:27.360 | for peace in the future.

00:10:28.840 | - So I have a lot of questions to ask you

00:10:31.760 | about the journey towards this historic progress

00:10:35.080 | towards peace with Abraham, of course,

00:10:36.960 | but first on the situation,

00:10:38.660 | to step back and some of the history,

00:10:41.280 | is there things about the history of Hamas in Gaza

00:10:44.320 | that's important to understand what is happening now?

00:10:48.040 | Just your comments, your thoughts,

00:10:50.120 | your understanding of Hamas.

00:10:51.840 | - I think you did an excellent job, Lex,

00:10:53.720 | of really giving the summary.

00:10:55.200 | Just a couple of things maybe I'll add to it

00:10:56.840 | is that Hamas was originally founded

00:10:59.680 | from the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt,

00:11:01.620 | which is a group that's caused a lot of issues

00:11:04.000 | in the region.

00:11:05.480 | They've attacked Israel many times in the past.

00:11:09.020 | There's a lot of discussion about how Israel

00:11:11.960 | is an occupying power.

00:11:13.200 | Well, in Gaza in 2005, they withdrew from all the land,

00:11:16.720 | and then they say Israel's an apartheid state.

00:11:18.760 | Well, Israel then gave governance of the region

00:11:21.020 | to the Palestinians.

00:11:22.440 | And then what's happened is the Palestinian people's lives

00:11:25.140 | have now gone down, not up since then.

00:11:27.800 | I will say that under Hamas's leadership in Gaza,

00:11:32.800 | the people who have suffered the most

00:11:34.940 | are the Palestinian people.

00:11:36.320 | And I see, I've watched cries throughout my time

00:11:40.540 | in government from people saying,

00:11:42.780 | "We wanna see the Palestinian people live a better life."

00:11:45.960 | I agree with those people.

00:11:47.140 | I think that the Palestinian people in Gaza

00:11:49.760 | are essentially hostages.

00:11:51.200 | In Gaza, you have basically 2.2 million people

00:11:56.240 | that are being held hostage by 30,000 Hamas terrorists.

00:12:00.480 | And that's really the problem.

00:12:02.120 | And I would just encourage people to push their attention

00:12:07.120 | and energy in this moment and their anger towards Hamas.

00:12:10.840 | Those are the people who are killing innocent civilians,

00:12:14.400 | who are murdering indiscriminately.

00:12:17.380 | And those are the people who have held back the Palestinians

00:12:20.760 | from having a better life.

00:12:23.160 | And just finally, what I would say is,

00:12:25.760 | what we saw with Hamas was that if you go back to 2007,

00:12:30.540 | they basically had just one plan that they did over and over.

00:12:33.640 | And we were very careful to try to monitor very closely

00:12:36.920 | and stop the Iranian money and the resources from coming in.

00:12:39.880 | And again, we took a little bit of criticism

00:12:42.360 | from the international community

00:12:43.640 | from keeping the border tight.

00:12:45.520 | But unfortunately,

00:12:46.360 | every time you'd allow construction materials

00:12:48.700 | to go into Gaza, they'd use them to build tunnels, not homes.

00:12:51.200 | You would have equipment that would come in to build pipes.

00:12:54.200 | They'd turn it into bombs.

00:12:55.240 | So it was very, very hard to figure out

00:12:57.960 | how do you get the resources into Gaza

00:13:00.120 | to help people have a better life,

00:13:02.000 | while at the same time, the leadership in Gaza

00:13:04.000 | was taking all of those resources

00:13:05.760 | and turning it into military equipment to attack Israel.

00:13:09.480 | - What role does Iran play in this war,

00:13:11.960 | in this connection to Hamas?

00:13:13.960 | Can you speak to the connection between Hamas and Iran

00:13:16.920 | that's important to understand,

00:13:18.280 | especially as this most recent attack unfolds?

00:13:22.440 | - Sure, so the correlation,

00:13:24.040 | I mean, there's reports that Iran is behind the attack.

00:13:27.360 | Hamas has thanked Iran for their support.

00:13:30.240 | And it's been very well known

00:13:33.000 | that Iran supports the destruction of the state of Israel.

00:13:36.240 | And I won't say Iran as a country.

00:13:37.760 | I'll talk about Iran in the leadership.

00:13:39.440 | There's actually a beautiful thing I saw on the internet

00:13:41.800 | where at one of the soccer games in Iran,

00:13:43.460 | they were trying to rally support

00:13:45.480 | for the Hamas terror attacks.

00:13:47.760 | And a lot of people in the crowds were chanting,

00:13:50.560 | F-U to the regime,

00:13:52.360 | because I think the Iranian people, the Persian people,

00:13:54.940 | generally are peace-loving people

00:13:56.960 | who don't wanna see this focus

00:13:58.580 | on destruction and annihilation.

00:14:00.300 | But you saw this in 2015, 2016,

00:14:04.200 | when the Iranian government had resources,

00:14:06.360 | the region was less safe.

00:14:07.940 | And since now there's been more resources allowed

00:14:11.880 | to go to the Iranian regime

00:14:13.760 | by lack of enforcement of sanctions.

00:14:15.840 | And as a result, Iran is funding Hezbollah, Hamas.

00:14:20.120 | They were funding the Houthis.

00:14:21.120 | Now there's a little bit of a detente

00:14:22.360 | between Saudi and Iran, which has led to that going down,

00:14:24.640 | which only further proves that Iran was behind the Houthis,

00:14:27.580 | which is what the Saudis had been saying for years

00:14:29.460 | and Iran was denying.

00:14:31.000 | So there's a very strong relationship between the two.

00:14:35.040 | And we always knew that the way that Iran fights wars

00:14:38.260 | or fights conflicts is never directly,

00:14:39.960 | it's usually through its proxies.

00:14:41.920 | And in this case, Hamas has been a proxy for Iran

00:14:46.800 | who wanted to obviously see the destruction of Israel,

00:14:49.700 | but also does not wanna see the Israelis and the Saudis

00:14:53.880 | come together for a peace agreement.

00:14:55.880 | - So the name of this operation,

00:14:57.840 | of the Hamas operation is Al-Aqsa Flood,

00:15:01.160 | referring to the Al-Aqsa Mosque.

00:15:04.200 | How much of this attack is about the Al-Aqsa Mosque?

00:15:06.800 | - In actuality, I don't think any of it is,

00:15:10.360 | but the Al-Aqsa Mosque is something

00:15:13.120 | that all of the Shia jihadists have used for years

00:15:18.880 | in order to justify their actions

00:15:21.460 | that are aggressive towards Israel.

00:15:22.800 | So this is something I'll maybe even take a step back

00:15:26.120 | and go through.

00:15:26.960 | When I was working initially in my first year

00:15:29.800 | on the peace plan, I was doing a lot of listening.

00:15:32.360 | And quite frankly, a lot of what people were saying to me

00:15:34.920 | didn't make sense.

00:15:36.920 | And the reason why I was trying to figure out,

00:15:39.760 | they were talking about sovereignty over Al-Aqsa Mosque.

00:15:42.520 | The Al-Aqsa Mosque is a mosque that's built

00:15:44.620 | in the holy of holies, the Haram al-Sharif in Israel,

00:15:47.600 | where the Jewish Beit Hamikdash, the holy temple,

00:15:50.960 | was built in a very religious place

00:15:52.780 | about after the temple was destroyed.

00:15:55.640 | Then there was a big mosque built there.

00:15:57.720 | And it's one of the more holy places in Islam now.

00:16:01.840 | So the big thing everyone was saying is,

00:16:06.000 | what do you do with this land where you have a mosque

00:16:08.540 | built over a very big Jewish site?

00:16:10.920 | And I was hearing all of the experts,

00:16:12.800 | and I always say experts with quotes,

00:16:15.160 | because only in Washington can you work on something

00:16:17.840 | for a decade and continue to fail,

00:16:19.720 | and then you basically leave and are considered an expert.

00:16:22.960 | But that's one of the problems with Washington,

00:16:24.400 | which maybe we could talk about later.

00:16:26.680 | But the notion here was I went and I said,

00:16:29.640 | let me try to understand what the issue is

00:16:32.360 | with the Israeli-Palestinian conflict with the people.

00:16:35.360 | I always felt the politicians were a little disconnected.

00:16:37.620 | So I commissioned several focus groups,

00:16:40.180 | one in Amman, one in Cairo, one in Dubai, and one in Ramallah.

00:16:44.160 | And I asked people, Muslims,

00:16:47.600 | what is the Israeli-Palestinian conflict about?

00:16:52.400 | And time and time again,

00:16:53.760 | the most popular thing that they said

00:16:55.360 | was that Israel was not allowing access to the mosque

00:16:58.720 | for Muslims to pray.

00:17:00.680 | And what was interesting was is that Israel's policy

00:17:03.360 | is to allow anyone who wants to come and pray peacefully

00:17:06.200 | at the sites to come and pray.

00:17:07.400 | Sometimes they have security issues

00:17:08.920 | when there's provocations.

00:17:10.840 | But by and large, since 1967,

00:17:12.880 | when Israel was able to take back Jerusalem

00:17:16.280 | in a defensive war, just to be very clear,

00:17:18.080 | they were attacked in the south

00:17:20.200 | and they were attacked from the east.

00:17:23.440 | And they basically were able to beat back the Jordanians

00:17:25.480 | and the Egyptians and then reconquer

00:17:28.000 | the old city of Jerusalem.

00:17:29.640 | And during that time,

00:17:31.560 | immediately after Israel then passed

00:17:33.520 | the Protection of Holy Places law,

00:17:35.480 | which was they basically took resources they didn't have

00:17:37.800 | and they said, we're gonna restore the Christian sites,

00:17:40.560 | the Muslim sites, the Jewish sites,

00:17:43.040 | and they've worked to allow everyone access to the mosque.

00:17:45.320 | So today, any Muslim who wants to come

00:17:48.440 | can come and pray at the mosque.

00:17:50.120 | The mosque is, Israel's acknowledged that King Abdullah,

00:17:54.080 | the King of Jordan, is the custodian of the mosque.

00:17:58.560 | And as long as people wanna come to the country

00:18:00.840 | and pray peacefully, they're able to do that.

00:18:03.040 | But if you look at a lot of the propaganda

00:18:04.800 | that's been used by ISIS or Iran

00:18:07.560 | to recruit terrorists or to justify their incursions,

00:18:12.560 | they often say they're doing it

00:18:14.880 | in the name of liberating the Al-Aqsa Mosque.

00:18:17.280 | But from an operational and pragmatic perspective today,

00:18:21.320 | any Muslim who wants to go to the mosque,

00:18:23.580 | you can book a flight to Israel now through Dubai

00:18:25.800 | because there's flights between Israel and Dubai.

00:18:28.200 | And as long as your country has relations with Israel

00:18:30.800 | and they'll accept your passport in there,

00:18:32.500 | you can come and pray and that's what Israel wants.

00:18:34.380 | Israel wants Jerusalem to be a place

00:18:36.720 | where all religions can come and celebrate together.

00:18:39.680 | But you have a lot of actors that look to find ways

00:18:43.360 | to use these religious tensions in order to sow division

00:18:46.800 | and justify violent behavior.

00:18:49.260 | - I wonder how it's possible to lessen the effectiveness

00:18:53.360 | of that propaganda message that a lot of the war,

00:18:57.480 | a lot of the attacks are about access to the Al-Aqsa Mosque.

00:19:01.560 | Is there something you can speak to

00:19:03.440 | why that message hasn't disseminated across the Arab world?

00:19:07.520 | - So Israel's good at a lot of things.

00:19:09.160 | They're not very good traditionally with public relations.

00:19:12.800 | You know, after the Abraham Accords,

00:19:14.920 | you know, we made the first Abraham Accords deal

00:19:17.480 | in August 2020 and then we made five other deals.

00:19:21.000 | We first did United Arab Emirates,

00:19:23.100 | then we did a deal with Bahrain,

00:19:24.680 | then we did a deal with Kosovo,

00:19:27.280 | then we did a deal with Sudan,

00:19:29.540 | then we did a deal with Morocco.

00:19:31.360 | And then we got the GCC deal done as well,

00:19:33.880 | the tension between Qatar, Saudi, UAE, Egypt, and Bahrain.

00:19:38.880 | And that was allowing us to create a pathway

00:19:41.760 | to then pursue the Israeli-Saudi normalization.

00:19:44.640 | So we had so much momentum then

00:19:46.040 | that the goal was just keep getting more countries

00:19:49.120 | to normalize relations with Israel.

00:19:51.560 | Once you create the connection between people

00:19:53.420 | and create the ability for people to do business together,

00:19:56.360 | the ability for flights to fly between,

00:19:58.760 | then you would just start naturally having people coming

00:20:01.040 | and everyone has a smartphone today

00:20:02.520 | so they can then post and combat the misinformation

00:20:06.160 | that's been out there.

00:20:07.120 | But this misinformation is not something that's new.

00:20:09.280 | You know, one of the characters who played a very big role

00:20:13.120 | in spreading the antisemitism and the violence in Israel

00:20:17.080 | in the 1920s was a guy named Haj Amin al-Husseini,

00:20:20.560 | who was known as the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem.

00:20:22.960 | He was very close with Hitler and Mussolini

00:20:25.600 | and he was working with them to try to get some claims

00:20:28.160 | to the Middle East once the Jewish people were annihilated.

00:20:31.040 | And what he did for a very long time

00:20:33.200 | was he did the same shtick,

00:20:34.360 | only it was before you had smartphones and YouTube,

00:20:36.560 | where he would say, "The mosque is under attack.

00:20:38.760 | "These imperialist Zionists are coming in

00:20:40.700 | "to try to destroy the mosque."

00:20:42.320 | And he would use that to raise money from Indonesia,

00:20:44.480 | from Pakistan, from all over the world,

00:20:46.840 | and then use that threat to justify recruiting

00:20:50.480 | groups of young, vulnerable Muslim men

00:20:52.520 | and then getting them in the name of religious rights

00:20:55.720 | to go and kill people,

00:20:56.640 | which really is more of a perversion of the religion

00:21:00.040 | than I think the true essence of what Islam is.

00:21:01.980 | I think Islam at its core is a peaceful religion

00:21:04.760 | and I think that's where a lot of the great leaders

00:21:06.840 | in Islam wanna take it.

00:21:08.240 | But the people who use Islam or the mosque

00:21:11.640 | or as a justification for violence,

00:21:13.880 | those are people who I think are really,

00:21:16.440 | they are disrespecting the Islam religion.

00:21:20.860 | - As you said, you helped make major strides

00:21:23.520 | towards peace in the Middle East with the Abraham Accords.

00:21:26.520 | Can you describe what it took to accomplish this?

00:21:30.120 | And maybe this will help us understand

00:21:33.240 | what broke down and led to the tragedy this week.

00:21:36.480 | - Yeah, so I always believed in foreign policy.

00:21:39.640 | I learned very quickly that the difference

00:21:41.680 | between a political deal and a business deal

00:21:44.240 | is that in a business deal, you have a problem set,

00:21:46.940 | you come to a conclusion,

00:21:48.480 | and then if you buy or sell something,

00:21:50.120 | you either have more cash or you have a company.

00:21:53.760 | So you have more to do, less to do.

00:21:55.960 | Political problem set is very different

00:21:57.840 | where the conclusion of a problem set

00:22:00.640 | is essentially the beginning of a new paradigm.

00:22:02.760 | So when I would think about

00:22:04.480 | how do you move pieces around the board,

00:22:07.820 | you couldn't say, let me just solve the problem.

00:22:09.680 | You have to think about what happens

00:22:11.200 | the day after the signing

00:22:12.960 | and how do you create a paradigm that has positivity to it.

00:22:16.600 | So the biggest piece of what President Trump did

00:22:19.840 | during his four years in office

00:22:22.440 | was he really strengthened the relationship with Israel.

00:22:25.920 | Number one.

00:22:27.320 | And he did things like recognizing Jerusalem

00:22:30.040 | as the capital of Israel.

00:22:31.560 | He moved the embassy to Jerusalem.

00:22:33.400 | He recognized the Golan Heights.

00:22:35.000 | He got out of the Iran deal.

00:22:37.340 | We did an economic conference in Bahrain

00:22:39.180 | where we brought Israelis to meet with Saudi and Emirati

00:22:42.880 | and Qatari businessmen, and everyone came together.

00:22:45.520 | And each one of these instances were unthinkable previously.

00:22:49.600 | And everyone said that if you did it,

00:22:51.120 | the world was gonna end.

00:22:52.120 | And every time President Trump did one,

00:22:54.120 | the next morning the sun rose, the next evening the sun set,

00:22:57.120 | and things moved on.

00:22:58.280 | And so by doing that, what President Trump did

00:23:01.000 | was he slaughtered a lot of the sacred cows

00:23:03.680 | of these false barriers that people had erected

00:23:07.480 | and showed people that the vast majority

00:23:10.280 | of the people in the Middle East,

00:23:11.420 | whether they're Jewish, Muslim, Christian,

00:23:13.320 | whatever religion they are,

00:23:15.280 | they just wanna live better lives.

00:23:16.840 | And so what we basically did was create a paradigm

00:23:19.960 | where the voices for peace, the voices for together

00:23:24.480 | now finally had a forum where they were able to do it.

00:23:28.240 | And we did that in the backdrop.

00:23:29.680 | The way we were able to be successful

00:23:31.080 | was we severely limited the resources of Iran,

00:23:34.200 | and they were focused more internally,

00:23:36.120 | and they couldn't cause the trouble

00:23:37.960 | that they were causing everywhere else.

00:23:39.840 | Since we've left, obviously the dynamics have changed,

00:23:42.240 | but the way you get to peace is obviously,

00:23:45.200 | number one, through strength,

00:23:46.760 | and number two, by finding a way for people

00:23:49.800 | to be better off tomorrow than they are today.

00:23:53.760 | And what I found was that most of the voices

00:23:55.920 | looking for violence or trouble

00:23:57.440 | were people who were just focused on

00:23:59.400 | what happened two years ago, 20 years ago,

00:24:01.840 | 70 years ago, 1,000 years ago.

00:24:04.320 | People who were trying to solve those problems

00:24:06.440 | in that context often were looking more

00:24:09.560 | to use those past grievances as a justification

00:24:14.560 | for their power and for the bad behavior

00:24:17.200 | that they were looking to perpetuate.

00:24:19.120 | - So managing, as we have talked about extensively,

00:24:22.400 | managing the power dynamics of the region

00:24:24.600 | and providing a plan.

00:24:26.320 | This is something you did with the economic plan

00:24:29.680 | titled "Peace to Prosperity,

00:24:31.360 | a Vision to Improve the Lives

00:24:32.840 | of the Palestinian and Israeli People."

00:24:35.180 | Can you first of all describe what's in the plan?

00:24:38.420 | - Sure, so this was something I took on.

00:24:41.800 | I was working on the political framework

00:24:43.680 | between the Israelis and the Palestinians

00:24:45.520 | and trying to understand what were the issues.

00:24:47.760 | And the issues were not very many.

00:24:49.320 | It basically was you had a land dispute,

00:24:52.280 | so you had to figure out

00:24:53.120 | where do you put borders ultimately.

00:24:54.880 | You had a security paradigm,

00:24:57.040 | which I was much more favorable to Israel's perspective on.

00:25:00.280 | And obviously the events of the past 48 hours

00:25:02.880 | have fully justified that bias.

00:25:06.980 | And then in addition to that,

00:25:09.200 | you had to deal with the religious sites.

00:25:10.480 | But I felt operationally that wasn't actually

00:25:12.440 | as complicated as people made it

00:25:14.200 | because you wanted to just leave it open for everybody.

00:25:17.160 | Then I went through and I felt that

00:25:19.520 | the Palestinian leadership was fairly disincentivized

00:25:22.400 | to make a deal because there was just this paradigm

00:25:26.040 | where they had billions of dollars coming in

00:25:28.720 | from the international community.

00:25:30.160 | And I think that they feared that if they made a deal,

00:25:33.200 | they would lose their relevancy internationally

00:25:35.500 | and the money would stop flowing into the country.

00:25:37.920 | So what I tried to do is to say,

00:25:40.680 | my approach when I would get into a hard problem,

00:25:42.680 | say, how do I understand all the different escape hatches?

00:25:46.020 | How do I try to eliminate them?

00:25:47.420 | And then build a golden bridge that becomes really the only,

00:25:51.160 | but also the most desirable pathway

00:25:53.600 | for the decision makers to walk through.

00:25:56.420 | And it wasn't always hard.

00:25:57.360 | And sometimes you have to go and hold their hand

00:25:59.160 | or you try to pick them up and walk them across.

00:26:00.840 | But a lot of these leaders are very reluctant to change.

00:26:04.960 | And the dynamics of the Palestinians also were such that

00:26:08.240 | I think they were fairly stuck where they were.

00:26:11.320 | So we developed a business plan for Gaza, the West Bank.

00:26:15.760 | We threw in some improvements for Jordan and Egypt as well.

00:26:19.720 | I based it off of the vision 2030

00:26:22.680 | that they did in Saudi Arabia,

00:26:23.840 | which I thought was a visionary document.

00:26:26.120 | I went back through this process

00:26:27.700 | and I studied basically every economic project

00:26:31.480 | in the post-World War II period.

00:26:32.920 | So we looked at what they did in South Korea,

00:26:35.120 | why it was successful with some strong industrial planning.

00:26:37.520 | We looked at Japan, we looked at Singapore,

00:26:39.920 | we looked at Poland, why it was successful.

00:26:41.700 | We spent a lot of time on the Ukraine plan for the country

00:26:44.820 | and why it wasn't successful.

00:26:46.120 | And that was mostly because of governance and corruption,

00:26:48.520 | which actually resembles a lot of what's gone wrong

00:26:51.120 | with the Palestinians where there's no property rights,

00:26:53.680 | there's no rule of law.

00:26:55.340 | And what we did is we built a plan to show,

00:26:57.560 | it's not that hard, right?

00:26:59.680 | In the sense that between the West Bank and Gaza,

00:27:02.080 | you had 5 million people.

00:27:03.760 | And we put together a plan,

00:27:06.200 | I think it was about $27 billion.

00:27:07.840 | We got together a conference, I had the head of AT&T,

00:27:11.160 | we had Steve Schwarzman from Blackstone came,

00:27:13.280 | which was very gracious of them.

00:27:14.820 | We had all the leading Arabic businessmen,

00:27:16.420 | the leading builders, leading developers.

00:27:18.500 | And the general consensus of that conference

00:27:23.500 | was that this is very doable.

00:27:25.860 | We think that for Gaza in particular,

00:27:27.540 | it would cost maybe seven to $8 billion

00:27:30.700 | to rebuild the entire place.

00:27:32.660 | We felt we could reduce the poverty rate in half,

00:27:34.680 | we can create over a million jobs there.

00:27:37.420 | The only thing that people said was holding it back

00:27:39.380 | wasn't Israel, what was holding it back was governance.

00:27:42.500 | And people wouldn't have confidence investing there

00:27:45.340 | with the rule that Hamas was perpetuating.

00:27:49.100 | So I encourage people actually to look at the plan,

00:27:51.660 | it was very thoughtful, it was 181 pages.

00:27:53.860 | We went project by project, each project is costed out.

00:27:58.360 | It's a real plan that could be implemented,

00:28:00.240 | but you need the right governance.

00:28:01.900 | And all of the different Arabic countries

00:28:03.600 | are willing to fund it,

00:28:04.440 | the international community is willing to fund it

00:28:06.180 | because they've just been throwing so much money

00:28:07.980 | at the Palestinians for years

00:28:10.020 | that's never been outcomes-based

00:28:11.500 | or conditions-based, it's just been entitlement money.

00:28:14.740 | And unfortunately, it hasn't really achieved any outcomes

00:28:18.300 | that have been successful.

00:28:19.220 | So it's a great business plan,

00:28:21.500 | it just shows too, rebuilding Gaza could be easy.

00:28:25.260 | But like I said, the problem that's held

00:28:27.460 | the Palestinian people back

00:28:28.940 | and that's made their lives terrible in Gaza

00:28:31.460 | has not been Israel, it's really been Hamas' leadership

00:28:34.760 | or lack of leadership and their desire to focus on

00:28:37.860 | trying to kill Israelis and start war with Israel

00:28:41.500 | over improving the lives of the Palestinian people.

00:28:44.740 | - And the current approach of Hamas,

00:28:46.780 | the more violence they perpetrate,

00:28:49.300 | the more they can hold onto power

00:28:52.220 | versus improving the lives of people.

00:28:56.020 | So as you said, maybe you can comment on,

00:28:58.740 | they do not propose an economics plan.

00:29:01.740 | - I mean, Hamas has been running it now for 16 years

00:29:05.540 | and they don't have a lot to show for it.

00:29:07.140 | And our posture with them was basically a very simple deal.

00:29:10.180 | And if you think about what's the end state in Gaza,

00:29:13.020 | it's actually not that complicated.

00:29:15.340 | There's no territorial disputes, right?

00:29:16.940 | The border is the border,

00:29:18.380 | there's no religious issues there as well,

00:29:20.700 | you're not dealing with Jerusalem.

00:29:22.540 | You're basically just dealing with the fact that,

00:29:25.500 | Israel wants to make sure that there's no threat from Gaza.

00:29:28.460 | So it's a demilitarization or some kind of security guarantee

00:29:31.780 | from a credible source where Israel doesn't feel

00:29:35.800 | like Gaza can be used to stage attacks into Israel

00:29:39.060 | or to fire rockets into Israel.

00:29:41.420 | And by the way, these are things I was saying,

00:29:43.260 | three, four years ago, that that was the objective

00:29:46.100 | and that was really the fear.

00:29:47.620 | Now that's been proven,

00:29:49.460 | unfortunately the fear has manifested.

00:29:52.500 | And in exchange, you can rebuild the place

00:29:55.300 | and you can give the people a much better life.

00:29:57.800 | But Hamas has not shown a desire for that

00:29:59.980 | or a capability for that.

00:30:01.340 | And I don't think there's enough trust

00:30:03.060 | to allow them to do that,

00:30:04.100 | which is why, under the current circumstances,

00:30:06.760 | if you do wanna have peace there,

00:30:08.440 | Hamas has to be either eliminated or severely degraded

00:30:12.160 | in terms of their military capabilities.

00:30:15.000 | - I would love to ask you about leadership,

00:30:17.280 | especially on the side of the United States.

00:30:19.780 | What has the current administration,

00:30:22.920 | the Biden administration done different

00:30:25.240 | than the Trump administration, as you understand,

00:30:28.580 | that may have contributed to the events we saw this week?

00:30:33.360 | - So all I can talk about are where we left them, right?

00:30:37.320 | We left them a place where they had tremendous momentum

00:30:39.520 | in the Middle East.

00:30:40.440 | I met with them during the transition and said,

00:30:42.840 | "Look, we even got the Qatar-Saudi conflict done,"

00:30:47.840 | which was a big, no peace between Israel and Saudi

00:30:51.000 | would have been possible without that.

00:30:52.320 | So we even got that done in our lame duck period.

00:30:56.120 | And they came in and they said,

00:30:58.800 | "Look, we wanna focus on the three Cs,

00:31:00.400 | which is COVID, climate change, and China."

00:31:02.600 | I said, "That's great."

00:31:03.640 | But the Middle East, we have an amazing place right now.

00:31:06.720 | It's stable, there's momentum.

00:31:08.500 | Iran is basically broke.

00:31:10.360 | We put such crippling sanctions on Iran

00:31:12.720 | that they went from about,

00:31:14.160 | I think it was 2.6 million barrels a day of oil

00:31:16.520 | they were selling to about 100,000 under Trump.

00:31:20.620 | So their foreign currency reserves were basically depleted

00:31:24.480 | and they were broke.

00:31:25.920 | Same with the Palestinians.

00:31:26.860 | We stopped the funding to UNRWA, the UN agency,

00:31:32.360 | which is totally corrupt.

00:31:34.160 | We've put $10 billion in there over time.

00:31:36.640 | I did a poll in the Middle East, in Gaza to say,

00:31:40.120 | "Okay, we've invested $10 billion here as a country.

00:31:43.240 | Are we popular?"

00:31:44.480 | Right?

00:31:45.320 | The US had a 7% approval rating.

00:31:47.000 | USAID had a 70% approval rating,

00:31:49.520 | but it just felt like a waste of our taxpayer dollars.

00:31:52.400 | And again, we wanted to make it conditions-based.

00:31:54.840 | The Biden administration came in,

00:31:57.200 | number one, they started insulting Saudi and Russia,

00:32:01.840 | oil prices went up.

00:32:02.920 | At the same time, what they did was

00:32:04.960 | they stopped domestic production of oil.

00:32:07.800 | They made it, they disincentivized

00:32:09.700 | a lot of oil and shale production with regulations.

00:32:14.040 | They stopped pipelines, oil prices went up.

00:32:17.600 | They stopped enforcing the sanctions against Iran,

00:32:19.600 | probably to get the oil prices lower,

00:32:21.280 | to make up for what they were doing.

00:32:23.120 | They ran to Iran to try to make a deal.

00:32:25.500 | They started funding the Palestinians again right away.

00:32:27.500 | And I even said, "If you're gonna fund them,

00:32:29.520 | if that's your policy, I respect that."

00:32:31.280 | Again, elections have consequences

00:32:33.040 | and you can take a different policy.

00:32:34.920 | But what I would recommend is get some conditions,

00:32:37.020 | make them do some reforms,

00:32:38.260 | make them give property rights to people,

00:32:40.440 | make them do real economic investments for people.

00:32:44.280 | But they just went right away.

00:32:45.240 | So they were funding the Palestinians,

00:32:47.080 | not enforcing the sanctions,

00:32:48.920 | and then overall just projecting a lot of weakness

00:32:52.000 | in the region.

00:32:52.840 | So one of the most embarrassing examples

00:32:56.360 | is what happened in the United Arab Emirates.

00:32:58.640 | Again, an amazing,

00:32:59.600 | probably one of America's best allies

00:33:01.760 | over the last 20, 30 years.

00:33:04.680 | They fought with us in Afghanistan.

00:33:06.380 | They were the first Muslim country to stand up and do that

00:33:09.200 | after 9/11 because they didn't want it to be a war

00:33:11.680 | of the West against the Muslim religion.

00:33:16.280 | So they joined the fight

00:33:17.380 | because they saw it as a fight between right and wrong.

00:33:20.400 | They have rockets shot into their country

00:33:22.480 | from the Houthis.

00:33:28.240 | And they basically don't get a call from the US for 17 days.

00:33:33.240 | They need their equipment that they buy from the US,

00:33:35.500 | which creates jobs in the US.

00:33:36.600 | They need it restocked, we don't call.

00:33:38.520 | So they've severely degraded the trust

00:33:40.680 | that we had to rebuild with our allies.

00:33:42.520 | I think they've been working now to get it back.

00:33:44.140 | They, after two years, started working with Saudi and Israel,

00:33:47.560 | which I think was good.

00:33:48.520 | I think that they realized after a stint

00:33:51.280 | that maybe the process that President Trump

00:33:53.680 | had created in the region was the right policy.

00:33:55.600 | And keep in mind,

00:33:56.680 | President Trump's policy that I was working on

00:34:00.040 | was very strongly criticized during the first three years

00:34:04.120 | before we were able to achieve the results

00:34:05.800 | because it was departure

00:34:07.300 | from the failed policies of the past.

00:34:08.960 | And so first there was return to those policies,

00:34:11.040 | appease Iran, let's criticize Saudi Arabia.

00:34:14.760 | Then they started embracing

00:34:16.020 | and working on the Israel-Saudi deal,

00:34:17.580 | which was really exciting.

00:34:19.520 | I think we're all very excited about it.

00:34:21.520 | But they did it in public.

00:34:23.400 | And I think that that also was something,

00:34:25.200 | and I didn't have access to their intelligence.

00:34:26.880 | So I assumed that by doing it so publicly,

00:34:29.280 | they thought that they'd either had a deal with Iran

00:34:31.760 | 'cause they were letting them get all this revenue

00:34:33.240 | or Iran wouldn't be a problem.

00:34:35.040 | But one of the reasons with the Abraham Accords,

00:34:36.740 | we kept it so quiet during the whole time

00:34:38.840 | was 'cause we always felt like the troublemakers

00:34:41.480 | in the region, particularly Iran,

00:34:43.160 | who we thought would be disadvantaged

00:34:45.720 | by having a UAE, Saudi, Israel all together.

00:34:48.820 | Israel's a nuclear power, you have other strong economies.

00:34:53.600 | Iran seeks instability.

00:34:55.500 | They seek looking to create a division in the region.

00:34:59.620 | And if you can create that economic sphere

00:35:01.840 | where you have security from Haifa to Muscat,

00:35:04.320 | from Israel to Oman, all the way through with Saudi,

00:35:06.900 | Jordan, UAE, Qatar, Egypt,

00:35:10.900 | that's an incredibly powerful block.

00:35:12.680 | If you can make it secure and then get economic integration,

00:35:15.720 | that really could be a Middle East that thrives.

00:35:18.400 | So Iran obviously wanted nothing to do with that.

00:35:21.760 | And that's why they've been working to disrupt.

00:35:23.480 | So I think the administration has,

00:35:25.480 | they took an incredibly stable situation with momentum.

00:35:28.560 | I think they underestimated

00:35:30.480 | the way that Iran would approach the region to undermine.

00:35:37.360 | I think they gave way too much rope to Iran.

00:35:40.040 | And I think that they didn't seize

00:35:41.840 | when they had an opportunity of strength

00:35:43.440 | with the Palestinians to try to drive to a conclusion

00:35:46.520 | that I believe could have prevented

00:35:48.080 | us being where we are today.

00:35:49.360 | Not to mention that, even just three weeks ago,

00:35:52.000 | I mean, it's a bad look that they just basically

00:35:55.160 | gave $6 billion to Iran in exchange for hostages.

00:35:58.880 | And then Iran's basically funding these terror attacks

00:36:01.360 | or killing American citizens in Israel.

00:36:04.880 | And it's just, it's a heartbreaking situation.

00:36:07.840 | Again, totally avoidable.

00:36:09.280 | And one that I think has been

00:36:11.000 | very badly mismanaged to date.

00:36:12.600 | - If Trump was currently president,

00:36:15.040 | you were still working with him on this part of the world,

00:36:18.040 | what actions would you take?

00:36:21.800 | What conversations would you have?

00:36:25.160 | What ideas would you be working with

00:36:27.680 | in order to unite the various allies

00:36:31.480 | that you mentioned in the Middle East over this tragedy?

00:36:35.000 | And not let it be a thing that divides the Middle East,

00:36:39.280 | but make it a thing that catalyzes progress towards peace,

00:36:44.280 | further progress towards peace?

00:36:47.400 | - So I wanna say one thing, Lex.

00:36:49.720 | I have a lot of friends who are fans of Trump,

00:36:52.080 | who are not fans of Trump.

00:36:53.040 | But one thing I wanna say with absolute certainty

00:36:55.320 | is that if President Trump was in office,

00:36:57.800 | this never would have happened.

00:36:59.200 | And when President Trump was in office,

00:37:01.920 | anyone who supports Israel or who wants to see

00:37:05.720 | Jewish people not be innocently slaughtered,

00:37:08.680 | he would never have allowed that to happen.

00:37:10.200 | It did not happen when he was in power.

00:37:12.000 | And I hope people recognize that

00:37:15.480 | as something that's very, very true.

00:37:17.480 | How I would play the ball where it lies right now,

00:37:21.680 | keep in mind, we transferred the ball, it was on the green.

00:37:24.520 | Now it's almost like it's gone back 150 yards

00:37:27.240 | and it's in a sand trap.

00:37:29.000 | I think the way that I would play the ball right now

00:37:31.000 | is number one is you have to show strength.

00:37:33.520 | I actually think President Biden's words

00:37:35.200 | were the right words.

00:37:36.040 | I see that they're moving aircraft carriers to the region.

00:37:39.240 | Again, the purpose of having a strong military,

00:37:42.200 | I believe obviously, if you get into a war,

00:37:45.360 | you wanna win the war,

00:37:46.300 | but the purpose of a very strong military

00:37:48.200 | primarily is to avoid a war.

00:37:50.640 | I don't know what kind of credibility

00:37:52.160 | the Biden administration has to show the strength,

00:37:55.080 | but right now you have to support Israel completely.

00:37:59.200 | You have to really let people in the region know

00:38:02.840 | that there'll be consequences if they try to escalate.

00:38:07.840 | Again, we saw a little bit of rocket skirmish

00:38:09.880 | from Lebanon, from Hezbollah,

00:38:12.120 | but again, this is the type of thing

00:38:13.320 | that they have to know there'll be severe consequences

00:38:15.840 | if they make this a multi-party fight.

00:38:18.560 | And I think sending a strong message to Iran,

00:38:20.600 | I think that they have to see some consequences from this

00:38:22.920 | and know that they're not gonna be allowed

00:38:25.040 | to have a free reign to cause instability

00:38:27.560 | and that Iran doesn't usually fight face-to-face,

00:38:30.520 | they usually do it through proxies,

00:38:32.880 | but let's just all be honest about where this is coming from

00:38:35.560 | and let them know that there will be a consequence

00:38:38.200 | if they instigate these actions.

00:38:41.840 | And again, at least with the Biden administration,

00:38:44.360 | they've had contact with Iran,

00:38:45.720 | they've been talking with Iran, but they've allowed Iran,

00:38:48.600 | I mean, again, the number I saw last year,

00:38:50.680 | I think under Trump,

00:38:51.520 | the number was maybe like four or $5 billion of oil revenue

00:38:54.880 | and in total, I think last year

00:38:56.240 | it was something like $45 billion in revenue.

00:38:58.840 | This year, I think there'll be even more,

00:39:00.240 | that's a combination of them driving up oil prices,

00:39:02.440 | but also allowing much more sales.

00:39:05.280 | You would think that they would find a way

00:39:06.920 | to get them to behave and allow them to have this happen,

00:39:10.120 | or if that's not the case, then be tough,

00:39:12.880 | go back to being tough, that's what you have to do.

00:39:15.520 | - Building off of Abraham Accords, as you mentioned,

00:39:18.600 | Israel-Saudi normalization,

00:39:20.840 | there's been a lot of promising progress towards this.

00:39:25.420 | What does it take to not allow this tragedy

00:39:29.840 | damage the progress towards Israel-Saudi normalization?

00:39:33.960 | - I think right now

00:39:35.600 | it's probably not the best to think about that.

00:39:37.360 | I think that we wanna think about that

00:39:39.720 | after whatever's gonna happen is gonna happen now.

00:39:41.960 | I think right now the number one priority for Israel

00:39:44.440 | has to be to fully regain security in the country,

00:39:48.720 | and then number two is to figure out

00:39:50.920 | how you can, like I said, eliminate or degrade

00:39:54.440 | the Hamas capability or other Iranian threats

00:39:57.280 | to make sure that you have your security apparatus.

00:39:59.960 | I think that the Israeli leadership right now

00:40:02.360 | should proceed with that,

00:40:04.200 | and I don't think that they should be thinking about

00:40:06.360 | a normalization with Saudi at this moment.

00:40:09.520 | My instinct, and I've been watching

00:40:11.080 | this Israeli-Saudi normalization play out,

00:40:13.840 | obviously just speaking with people

00:40:15.760 | and seeing what I've been reading,

00:40:17.860 | and watching with great excitement.

00:40:19.640 | I think it would be a game changer for the region.

00:40:21.880 | I think it's one of Iran's worst nightmares

00:40:24.360 | to have Israel and Saudi interlinked together.

00:40:27.960 | I think it'd be great for the Saudi people

00:40:29.600 | from a security perspective.

00:40:30.880 | What they're discussing with America would be very strong.

00:40:33.960 | The ability to get different elements across

00:40:37.340 | would be incredible.

00:40:38.180 | So what I would say with it is that

00:40:40.040 | the industrial logic held yesterday,

00:40:43.120 | and I think it will hold again tomorrow.

00:40:45.180 | So I always expect countries to act in their interests.

00:40:49.320 | I think that the deal that's on the table right now

00:40:53.040 | between Saudi, Israel, and America is in Saudi's interests,

00:40:57.420 | it's in America's interests,

00:40:58.880 | and it's in Israel's interests.

00:41:00.540 | What's gonna happen now, though,

00:41:01.980 | is the political dynamics are gonna shift,

00:41:04.940 | and I think that, as we've seen with political dynamics,

00:41:07.800 | they come and go.

00:41:08.640 | I think let's get through this moment,

00:41:11.480 | and then I hope at the right time

00:41:12.960 | that those talks will be able to resume

00:41:15.620 | and conclude in an appropriate way.

00:41:17.860 | And it's funny, Lex, when I was working

00:41:19.900 | on the US-Mexico agreement for the trade,

00:41:23.960 | we would have, every day there'd be a tweet

00:41:26.520 | that would go out, or there would be an issue.

00:41:28.180 | I mean, people forget how intense it was

00:41:30.520 | between America and Mexico,

00:41:32.940 | and I would speak to my counterpart in Mexico

00:41:34.680 | after a rough day, and we were working on something,

00:41:36.780 | we were making progress, it'd get blown up,

00:41:38.900 | and I'd speak to him and say, "You know what?

00:41:40.020 | "Look, they're not moving to America,

00:41:42.040 | "they're not moving to Mexico.

00:41:43.120 | "Let's just stop for today, let's pick up tomorrow,

00:41:45.940 | "and let's find a new way to bring this forward."

00:41:47.500 | So I would just encourage everyone working on that

00:41:50.000 | not to give up, to keep working hard at it,

00:41:52.820 | and to find a way, but like I said,

00:41:54.540 | I would take a little bit of a pause for the time being.

00:41:57.020 | Let's let the current situation play out,

00:41:59.500 | and then hopefully there'll be a way for it to move forward.

00:42:02.560 | - I just hope there's still people on the US side

00:42:04.620 | picking up the phone and calling UAE, Saudi Arabia,

00:42:09.620 | just as human beings, as friends, as allies,

00:42:13.100 | and just keeping that channel of communication going.

00:42:15.820 | 'Cause maybe you can correct me,

00:42:17.900 | but I just feel like there's just simple human dynamics

00:42:22.540 | that play out here, that divisions can form

00:42:25.700 | and just run away from you over simple misunderstandings,

00:42:29.780 | over just inability to see a tragedy

00:42:34.780 | from the same perspective,

00:42:39.700 | because of conversations that could've happened

00:42:42.940 | but didn't happen.

00:42:44.100 | - I think there'll definitely be communication,

00:42:46.020 | but words on phone calls is only worth so much.

00:42:49.540 | It's really trust between people and power.

00:42:52.620 | And obviously when you're in a position of power,

00:42:55.260 | you represent your country and your country's interests,

00:42:58.220 | but the ability to have trusting relationships

00:43:01.380 | where people feel like they're okay

00:43:03.100 | taking more risks to help each other,

00:43:06.220 | that's actually what's most important.

00:43:08.020 | So communication I hope for,

00:43:09.500 | but deepening and trusting relationships,

00:43:13.020 | that's what I believe makes progress and keeps people safe.

00:43:16.400 | - And we talk quite extensively

00:43:19.100 | about the value of trust and negotiation

00:43:21.220 | and just working with leaders,

00:43:22.900 | which I think is a fascinating conversation,

00:43:24.940 | and you've taught me a lot about that.

00:43:27.180 | Let me ask you about the end here.

00:43:31.020 | What are the various trajectories

00:43:32.300 | this war can take in your view?

00:43:34.560 | What are some of the end states, as you've said,

00:43:38.740 | which are desirable and are achievable?

00:43:43.100 | - I mentioned this earlier,

00:43:45.260 | but whenever I would get a problem set in government,

00:43:47.380 | I'd always think through,

00:43:48.500 | from a first principles perspective,

00:43:50.660 | what's the logical outcome, right?

00:43:52.740 | And forget about all the reasons why it can't happen.

00:43:54.740 | That's what everyone in government's

00:43:56.020 | always rushed to talk about.

00:43:57.700 | But I do think here, number one,

00:43:59.380 | Israel has to have a secure environment

00:44:01.500 | where they don't feel threatened from Gaza.

00:44:06.260 | And number two is the people in Gaza

00:44:08.140 | need to have an environment where they feel

00:44:11.100 | like they can live a better life and have opportunities.

00:44:13.620 | So that's the end state.

00:44:15.220 | And so I think that the international community

00:44:18.100 | should come together.

00:44:19.060 | I do think that the people who are usually

00:44:21.660 | putting blame on Israel should now realize

00:44:24.820 | that maybe they've been a little bit harsher

00:44:26.740 | and that Hamas has been as big a threat,

00:44:29.300 | if not an even bigger threat than Israel has been saying.

00:44:32.580 | And I do think that if the international community

00:44:35.500 | comes together and unites behind Israel

00:44:38.080 | and really forces Hamas and their Iranian backers

00:44:41.380 | to stop hostilities, to stop saber rattling,

00:44:44.740 | to stop misrepresenting the history

00:44:49.020 | in order to justify their violent behavior.

00:44:52.420 | And if they say instead,

00:44:53.820 | we wanna hold you accountable, no more money.

00:44:56.740 | And they all say that they're gonna stand behind

00:44:58.620 | Israel's efforts to eliminate

00:45:01.580 | their national security threats.

00:45:03.980 | And then we will all come together

00:45:05.420 | and only fund again into a framework

00:45:08.100 | that we believe can be a long-term solution

00:45:10.460 | where the Palestinian people really have a chance

00:45:12.780 | to live a better life.

00:45:14.060 | That's really the best way to get there.

00:45:15.660 | There's tons of complicated factors,

00:45:18.260 | but that's the end state that the global community

00:45:20.260 | should be looking to come together.

00:45:22.460 | And it's very achievable.

00:45:23.680 | It's very, very achievable.

00:45:25.540 | - So there's a, as we stand here today,

00:45:27.900 | there's a lot of different ways that this war can evolve.

00:45:31.500 | If a ground invasion happens by Israeli forces of Gaza,

00:45:36.500 | and if the number is correct of 100,000 Israeli soldiers,

00:45:41.700 | do you worry about various trajectories that can take

00:45:44.980 | of the consequences that might have

00:45:47.140 | of an unprecedented ground troop attack?

00:45:51.180 | - Yeah, so I think as a leader,

00:45:53.340 | you can't change yesterday,

00:45:54.660 | but you have the ability to change tomorrow.

00:45:57.540 | And that's a very important fundamental.

00:46:00.660 | I mean, that's true for all of us, not just leaders.

00:46:02.960 | But we saw with 9/11 how America was caught off guard

00:46:07.960 | by a terrorist attack.

00:46:09.480 | We acted somewhat rationally, somewhat emotionally,

00:46:13.840 | which led to a 20-year war with trillions of dollars lost.

00:46:18.460 | I think almost a million lives lost,

00:46:20.560 | not just American, but all lives.

00:46:22.820 | And it was a total tragedy what occurred.

00:46:25.140 | I think right now the temptation is to be strong.

00:46:28.260 | I think that that's a necessity.

00:46:30.180 | I do think eliminating risk is the right objective.

00:46:33.240 | I think the goal should be to stay very clear

00:46:35.020 | about what the objective is.

00:46:36.700 | But also this attack was very well planned,

00:46:39.940 | not to walk into another trap.

00:46:41.400 | I think you have to be very smart, very cautious.

00:46:43.380 | I've been happy to see that what they've been doing

00:46:46.300 | in retaliation so far has been somewhat measured,

00:46:49.560 | and they've taken their time to try to assess

00:46:51.860 | what's achievable.

00:46:52.860 | Again, I don't have access to the intelligence,

00:46:54.740 | and we're talking at a very early stage in this conflict.

00:46:58.180 | So a lot could happen even by the time this is published.

00:47:02.020 | But my hope is that they'll just stay very focused

00:47:07.380 | on what the objective is and try to make sure

00:47:09.560 | that they're acting appropriately in order to do that.

00:47:12.380 | And I will say this too, that this has been different

00:47:14.340 | than what I've seen in the past,

00:47:15.500 | in that the attacks were so heinous and so violent

00:47:20.500 | and so heinous and so disgusting

00:47:24.220 | that I've seen the international community

00:47:26.020 | rally around Israel more so than I ever have.

00:47:28.800 | And I hope that Israel continues

00:47:30.900 | to keep the moral high ground

00:47:33.100 | and continue to communicate what they're fighting for,

00:47:36.460 | why they're fighting.

00:47:37.580 | And I do hope that the international community

00:47:40.620 | supports the objective

00:47:41.740 | and they can work together to achieve it.

00:47:43.780 | - Benjamin and Yahoo, Bibi,

00:47:46.540 | somebody you've gotten to know well in negotiation,

00:47:49.540 | in conversation.

00:47:51.420 | He has made statements, he has declared war,

00:47:55.740 | he has spoken about this potentially being a long

00:47:59.780 | and difficult war.

00:48:00.960 | What have you learned about the mind of Benjamin and Yahoo

00:48:05.100 | that might be important to understand here

00:48:06.980 | in this current war?

00:48:08.740 | - Bibi is definitely a historic figure.

00:48:10.740 | You know, I meet with a lot of different world leaders

00:48:12.580 | and some of them I would say they're very, very special,

00:48:15.780 | transformational figures, and some I would say,

00:48:18.300 | how the hell is this person running a country?

00:48:20.600 | And Bibi is somebody who has done a lot

00:48:24.220 | for the state of Israel.

00:48:25.140 | He has a tremendous understanding of the security apparatus,

00:48:28.780 | he has tremendous global relations.

00:48:31.300 | So for a crisis like this,

00:48:32.980 | I think Bibi's the leader you want if you're Israel

00:48:36.260 | to be in that seat.

00:48:39.540 | I think he's ambitious in what he's gonna look to achieve.

00:48:45.220 | He understands his role in history as somebody

00:48:48.620 | who's helped strengthen Israel economically, militarily.

00:48:52.580 | And I don't think he wants to see his legacy

00:48:55.600 | be somebody who left Israel more vulnerable

00:49:01.180 | than it had to be.

00:49:02.580 | So I think in that regard, he'll be incredibly strong,

00:49:05.620 | but I also think that he'll hopefully be calculating

00:49:08.620 | in the risks that he takes

00:49:10.140 | and not create more risk than's needed.

00:49:13.480 | And that's easy to say, the two of us sitting here

00:49:16.020 | having a conversation when you're sitting in that chair

00:49:18.060 | as a leader in the fog of war,

00:49:20.620 | it's a very hard decision to make.

00:49:25.180 | He's been here before, he knows the weight of the situation,

00:49:30.180 | I'm sure he knows the moment,

00:49:31.820 | and I pray that he'll do what's right here

00:49:36.160 | to bring the best outcome possible.

00:49:38.580 | - I wonder if you can comment on the internal

00:49:42.300 | political turmoil that BBOE has been operating in

00:49:45.780 | and how that relates to the tragedy that we saw.

00:49:50.580 | - On the one hand, the political turmoil is,

00:49:54.600 | it's a sign of a vibrant democracy.

00:49:58.460 | I think it's been actually nice to see

00:50:01.580 | how people have fought for their country

00:50:03.260 | and their beliefs in a democratic way.

00:50:04.860 | You compare that to the Palestinians

00:50:07.060 | where there's no democracy, there's no free speech,

00:50:09.420 | there's no free press.

00:50:11.820 | You can't disagree with the leadership in Israel.

00:50:16.740 | If you wanna be homosexual,

00:50:20.020 | you can go to a parade and live your life.

00:50:24.380 | In Gaza, they'll throw you off a building and kill you.

00:50:27.600 | So in Israel, you have the freedoms

00:50:29.260 | which I think make it a special place

00:50:31.140 | and you have a very vibrant democracy.

00:50:33.540 | With that being said, the times in Jewish history

00:50:36.720 | where the Jewish people have been most vulnerable

00:50:39.660 | have been when there's been division,

00:50:41.160 | and that's when the temple was destroyed.

00:50:44.380 | But that's not just with the Jewish people and with Israel,

00:50:46.420 | that's in all societies.

00:50:47.700 | So I definitely believe that this division

00:50:50.420 | has left them less prepared for the situation than it would.

00:50:55.140 | I do think there's real lessons we should be taking

00:50:57.360 | from this here in America,

00:50:58.860 | where we're in a time where we're very divided,

00:51:01.320 | but I do think that it'd be very wise for our leaders

00:51:04.740 | to find the areas where we do agree

00:51:07.660 | and find ways to secure our southern border,

00:51:10.580 | to make sure that we know who's in our country,

00:51:12.780 | what risks we all face.

00:51:15.180 | And I do think that division

00:51:18.640 | definitely creates risk for countries.

00:51:20.940 | - Let me switch gears here and just zoom out

00:51:24.180 | and look at our society and our public discourse

00:51:28.020 | at the moment.

00:51:28.860 | What do you make of the scale and nature

00:51:30.500 | of the Palestinian support online

00:51:33.100 | in response to this situation?

00:51:34.700 | - This is something I've observed over the years

00:51:39.900 | since I got involved with the Israeli-Palestinian issue

00:51:43.380 | with a lot of interest.

00:51:46.300 | I think a lot of the people who are

00:51:48.460 | pledging support for the Palestinian people,

00:51:52.660 | I think that they wanna see the Palestinian people

00:51:55.580 | live a better life.

00:51:57.020 | And I actually agree with them in that regard.

00:51:59.420 | Unfortunately, I think many of them

00:52:01.580 | are incredibly ill-informed as to the facts on the ground.

00:52:05.820 | I think all of the people who are advocating online

00:52:08.900 | for the Palestinian people,

00:52:10.660 | who are going to these marches in support of them,

00:52:14.440 | I think they'd be best served

00:52:16.020 | if they really care about effectuating the outcome

00:52:18.560 | of joining with Israel right now

00:52:22.300 | and directing their anger towards the Hamas leadership.

00:52:27.300 | I think that it's very clear

00:52:29.020 | that the group that's responsible

00:52:31.380 | for the Palestinian people living the lives

00:52:34.340 | that all of these people are angry about is Hamas.

00:52:37.540 | And if they direct their anger towards Hamas

00:52:40.940 | and put the attention on the failings of Hamas

00:52:43.620 | and put forth a vision

00:52:44.740 | for what they'd like to see leadership in Gaza do,

00:52:48.100 | and they respect that there's a real fear that Israel has

00:52:51.540 | and any country would have

00:52:53.060 | of having a group of terrorists next to them

00:52:55.900 | that's calling for their destruction,

00:52:58.140 | I think that that recognition

00:52:59.820 | of finding a way for Israel to be secure

00:53:03.500 | and then having an opportunity for the Palestinian people

00:53:06.700 | to live a better life is the right pathway

00:53:09.100 | to try and pursue.

00:53:10.540 | - So to you, there's a clear distinction

00:53:12.380 | between Hamas and the Palestinian people

00:53:15.140 | in that Hamas is the enemy of progress

00:53:18.000 | and the flourishing of the Palestinian people.

00:53:21.460 | - 100%, it's very, very clear.

00:53:23.040 | And I think that if people were honest about the situation,

00:53:26.220 | if they spent the time to really understand it,

00:53:28.100 | again, if you follow the conference I did in Bahrain,

00:53:31.560 | we had all the leading businessmen there

00:53:33.000 | and they said, "We can rebuild Gaza very easily.

00:53:35.700 | "We all want to."

00:53:36.820 | The leading Arab businessmen,

00:53:37.940 | the leading American businessmen, everyone wants to.

00:53:40.240 | They're just held back by Hamas.

00:53:41.740 | And so I do think having an honest conversation about this

00:53:44.900 | at this point in time has really only one logical conclusion

00:53:49.140 | and my hope is that maybe this conflict leads

00:53:52.100 | to that conversation being had.

00:53:54.180 | And if it is, then maybe that brings more unity

00:53:56.480 | and understanding and we kind of get to a conclusion better

00:53:59.660 | that could improve the lives of the Palestinian people.

00:54:02.220 | - Pragmatic question about the future.

00:54:05.340 | Do you hope Donald Trump wins in 2024

00:54:08.380 | and how can his administration help bring peace

00:54:12.060 | to the Middle East?

00:54:13.220 | - I think when Donald Trump was president,

00:54:15.780 | we had a peaceful world.

00:54:17.540 | Everyone said if he was elected,

00:54:19.120 | we would have World War III.

00:54:20.980 | Meanwhile, he gets elected and he not only is

00:54:24.240 | the first president in decades to not start any wars,

00:54:27.460 | he's making peace deals, he's making trade deals,

00:54:30.220 | he's working with our allies,

00:54:31.500 | getting them to pay their fair share in NATO.

00:54:33.620 | He's having a dialogue with China, with Russia,

00:54:37.860 | he's weakening Iran.

00:54:39.580 | And so I do think that the job he did

00:54:41.580 | as a foreign policy president was tremendous.

00:54:43.780 | I think now more and more people are starting

00:54:47.100 | to recognize that.

00:54:48.460 | Again, under President Biden, this is the second war

00:54:50.700 | that's broken out in the world.

00:54:52.380 | And when you have a weak American leadership,

00:54:54.860 | the world becomes a less safe place.

00:54:57.340 | And so my hope and prayers are that President Trump

00:55:02.700 | is reelected and that he's able to then restore

00:55:06.740 | order and calm and peace and prosperity to the world.

00:55:10.420 | - From a place of strength.

00:55:12.540 | - That's the only way he knows how to do it.

00:55:15.460 | - What gives you hope about the future of this region,

00:55:19.060 | of Israel and of the Middle East?

00:55:23.140 | - The Middle East for 20 years was an area of conflict.

00:55:29.580 | They spent all their money on bullets and bombs.

00:55:32.500 | You have young leadership now in Saudi Arabia

00:55:36.500 | and UAE and Qatar.

00:55:38.500 | And there's a much more ambitious agenda now for the region

00:55:42.300 | to make it an economic superpower and hub of the world.

00:55:45.880 | Israel is one of the most burgeoning

00:55:47.780 | and exciting tech economies in the world.

00:55:50.980 | And if you think about it, it's almost like having

00:55:54.100 | Silicon Valley not connected to California.

00:55:56.820 | The thing that's held the region back for all these years

00:55:59.820 | has just been the conflict and the division

00:56:01.740 | and the lack of connectivity.

00:56:03.500 | But if you have that region, if it can all come together,

00:56:05.840 | if you can create a security architecture,

00:56:08.120 | you have an incredibly young population,

00:56:10.040 | you have a lot of wealth and resources

00:56:12.880 | and a lot of capabilities and know-how.

00:56:15.420 | And so I think that if it's managed correctly

00:56:19.700 | and if Iran is able to be restrained

00:56:22.540 | and suppressed with their ambitions

00:56:24.420 | to cause destabilization, I don't mean Iran the country,

00:56:27.860 | I mean the Iranian regime,

00:56:29.060 | because actually once you have this economic sphere,

00:56:32.700 | if you could bring Iraq into it,

00:56:33.980 | if you could bring Iran into it,

00:56:36.100 | that makes it even bigger and stronger.

00:56:37.740 | And the Persian people are incredibly entrepreneurial

00:56:40.300 | and incredibly industrious.

00:56:41.940 | So I do think that the region has tremendous potential.

00:56:44.580 | It's just been held back by bad policy,

00:56:47.340 | bad leadership, bad objectives.

00:56:49.660 | And again, when President Trump left office in 2010,

00:56:52.740 | in 2021, the Middle East was really

00:56:56.980 | on a very, very positive trajectory.

00:56:59.060 | And if the right things happen, it can continue to be so.

00:57:02.100 | So I'm praying at this moment in time

00:57:04.460 | that we navigate the current crisis,

00:57:06.960 | that the important objectives are achieved

00:57:09.640 | of eliminating the terrorists and their threats,

00:57:12.460 | and then allowing the leaders who are focused

00:57:15.500 | on giving their citizens and their neighbors

00:57:18.180 | the opportunity to live a better life,

00:57:20.040 | are able to work together

00:57:21.220 | and really dream and be ambitious,

00:57:25.460 | and find ways to create a paradigm

00:57:28.100 | where humans can flourish.

00:57:30.540 | - What is the best way to defeat hate in the world?

00:57:34.300 | - Hate is a very powerful force,

00:57:37.580 | and it's much easier to hate people you don't know.

00:57:41.360 | It's funny, when I was working on prison reform,

00:57:46.620 | one of the most interesting people I met was a reverend,

00:57:50.780 | actually down in Texas, who negotiated the first truce

00:57:54.900 | between the Bloods and the Crips,

00:57:56.980 | two of the notorious gangs in America in prison.

00:57:59.260 | And I was very excited to meet him.

00:58:00.780 | And when I met him, I said, "Well, how'd you do it?"

00:58:04.220 | And he said, "It was very simple."

00:58:05.340 | He says, "I got all the guys together,

00:58:08.420 | and I had a tremendous amount of barbecue brought in."

00:58:11.740 | He says, "And I got the meeting."

00:58:12.820 | He says, "No drinking."

00:58:13.660 | He says, "Drinking sometimes gets people

00:58:14.940 | a little bit more against each other."

00:58:17.260 | He says, "But I got a meeting,

00:58:18.300 | and they started sitting down together,

00:58:19.700 | and they started saying, 'You know what?

00:58:21.460 | You're just like me.'"

00:58:23.020 | And all of a sudden, they started finding areas

00:58:25.280 | where they were more together.

00:58:26.980 | Look, I've traveled all over the world now.

00:58:28.980 | I've been very fortunate to meet people

00:58:32.100 | from different states in America.

00:58:33.780 | I've different political persuasions,

00:58:35.660 | different ages, different classes.

00:58:38.380 | And what I found is that there's a fundamental driving

00:58:42.980 | amongst all of us where we all wanna live a better life.

00:58:46.940 | And people don't wanna fight naturally,

00:58:50.460 | but it's easy to fight when you feel wronged

00:58:52.660 | or you feel like somebody disrespected you

00:58:54.540 | or somebody did something from hatred,

00:58:57.700 | and hatred leads to more hatred,

00:58:59.780 | which sometimes just pushes that cycle further and further.

00:59:03.020 | So I believe that each and every one of us

00:59:05.980 | has the power to stop that cycle.

00:59:08.940 | And we don't do it by being on Twitter

00:59:10.980 | and yelling at people.

00:59:11.940 | We don't do it by just being critical.

00:59:14.900 | We do it by finding the people we disagree with,

00:59:17.540 | by listening to them, by asking questions,

00:59:19.600 | by sitting with them.

00:59:20.980 | And then if we each take responsibility

00:59:23.500 | to try to make the world better,

00:59:25.540 | then I think that there's no limits

00:59:27.740 | to the incredible place that this world can be.

00:59:30.740 | - So as you've said, you've traveled all across the world.

00:59:34.220 | Do you think most people are good?

00:59:38.660 | Most people have love in their heart?

00:59:41.800 | - I do believe that.

00:59:43.060 | Yeah, and you have some bad people.

00:59:44.260 | I mean, you have some real evil people.

00:59:45.780 | I mean, a big part of the work I did was on prison reform.

00:59:49.500 | And previously the mentality was,

00:59:52.460 | is that the prison should basically be a warehouse

00:59:54.580 | for human trash.

00:59:55.460 | And if you've made a mistake in this world,

00:59:57.740 | then we're gonna throw you out

00:59:59.460 | and we're gonna make the rest of your life

01:00:01.740 | incredibly difficult

01:00:03.500 | because you're gonna have a criminal record,

01:00:04.820 | you're not gonna have access to jobs.

01:00:06.940 | But what I found is when I would sit with people in prison,

01:00:08.980 | the people I've met through my father's experience

01:00:11.140 | and who I met along the way,

01:00:13.020 | is that people make mistakes.

01:00:15.620 | We're all human.

01:00:16.460 | I think it's the right thing from a religious perspective

01:00:18.460 | to give people second chances.

01:00:20.180 | I always believe you shouldn't judge people

01:00:22.780 | by the worst mistake they make in their life.

01:00:24.580 | Unfortunately, now in the era of social media,

01:00:26.380 | people will say one wrong thing,

01:00:28.300 | it sticks with them forever,

01:00:29.380 | they get canceled or they get put out.

01:00:31.580 | We're all humans.

01:00:32.420 | We grow from our mistakes.

01:00:33.640 | We learn from our mistakes.

01:00:35.380 | And I think that some people are just evil.

01:00:39.640 | There are some evil people,

01:00:41.200 | but I do think the vast, vast, vast majority of people

01:00:44.100 | are good.

01:00:45.600 | And I do think that people sometimes also can

01:00:48.180 | be in a bad place and then society can push them

01:00:51.600 | to a worse and worse place,

01:00:52.920 | but we all have the power to make them feel loved,

01:00:55.180 | make them feel heard.

01:00:56.700 | And I think there's also tremendous power

01:00:59.700 | that we have as people to help people get to a better place.

01:01:03.500 | And so, my wife and I,

01:01:05.460 | we've always tried to be a force for good.

01:01:07.120 | We've always tried to be,

01:01:10.140 | we've always tried to provide a place

01:01:11.480 | where people can discuss with each other.

01:01:12.960 | When we were in Washington,

01:01:14.320 | we would host dinners at our house all the time,

01:01:17.460 | or we would have Democrats and Republicans sitting together.

01:01:20.840 | We just had, I saw Senator Feinstein just passed away.

01:01:24.280 | We had a great dinner at her house

01:01:26.440 | when she was a Senator with her and her husband

01:01:28.440 | and Mark Meadows when he was on the Freedom Caucus.

01:01:30.960 | And we actually had a fascinating discussion about Iran.

01:01:33.840 | Mark was much more hardline than me.

01:01:35.840 | I had to actually bite my tongue.

01:01:37.120 | I was impressed at how much he did.

01:01:38.560 | Whereas Feinstein and her husband were like super into,

01:01:42.180 | they knew the Iranians well,

01:01:43.380 | they thought they were peace loving,

01:01:45.060 | and it was an incredibly robust and respectful debate.

01:01:47.540 | And so, I don't think we maybe concluded anything that night,

01:01:51.420 | but it was interesting for people to get together.

01:01:53.820 | Having a dinner at my house where I had Dick Durbin,

01:01:57.420 | the number two ranking Democrat in the Senate,

01:01:59.940 | Lindsey Graham and Stephen Miller,

01:02:01.340 | who's known to be a very hardline in immigration,

01:02:03.140 | discussing what an immigration reform could look like.

01:02:06.420 | I mean, they left that dinner saying,

01:02:08.300 | "Wow, we hadn't spoken to people on the other side,

01:02:11.360 | and we actually agree on like 85% of things.

01:02:13.680 | Like maybe something is possible."

01:02:15.320 | And so, I believe that we should always be trying to push

01:02:18.400 | to make the world a better place.

01:02:19.660 | And you only do that by listening to people

01:02:22.600 | and connecting with people and by respecting people.

01:02:26.120 | And finally, I'll just say on this is that,

01:02:28.180 | I meet people all the time who have so much confidence

01:02:33.360 | in their perspectives.

01:02:34.360 | And I'm very jealous that these people are able

01:02:38.460 | to be so confident about every single thing,

01:02:40.360 | because for me, I have some degree of confidence

01:02:44.040 | in the things that I've studied and what I've learned,

01:02:45.880 | but I'm always trying to find people who disagree

01:02:48.960 | to kind of sharpen my perspectives and to help me grow

01:02:51.600 | and to help me learn further.

01:02:52.720 | And so, I think that's kind of the beauty of the world

01:02:55.560 | is that the knowledge base continues to grow,

01:02:58.160 | the facts continue to change,

01:02:59.600 | and what's possible tomorrow continues to become different.

01:03:03.920 | And so, as humans, we have to continue to thrive,

01:03:07.480 | to learn and to grow and to connect.

01:03:09.600 | And if we do that, everything's possible.

01:03:11.640 | - Well, Jared, thank you for your compassion, first of all,

01:03:16.200 | but also your wisdom today on this very difficult,

01:03:18.760 | this tragic set of events,

01:03:21.520 | these difficult days for the world.

01:03:23.720 | It's a big honor to speak with you again.

01:03:28.440 | Every time I speak to you, I learn a lot about the world,

01:03:32.480 | and I deeply appreciate, like I said,

01:03:34.440 | your humility and your understanding of the details

01:03:39.200 | of all the complex power dynamics and human dynamics

01:03:43.880 | that are going on in the world.

01:03:45.360 | Once again, thank you for talking today.

01:03:48.400 | - Thank you.

01:03:49.240 | And Lex, if I could say just one final thing,

01:03:51.000 | which is that my thoughts and prayers

01:03:53.400 | are really with all of the people in Israel

01:03:55.400 | and the innocent civilians as well,

01:03:59.360 | from the Palestinian side,

01:04:00.600 | and my prayers are with the IDF soldiers

01:04:02.840 | that they should be safe

01:04:03.800 | and they should be really watched by God

01:04:07.120 | to accomplish whatever mission will enable

01:04:10.240 | to make the world a safer place.

01:04:11.840 | - Thank you for listening to this newly recorded segment

01:04:15.440 | of the conversation that addresses the current situation

01:04:18.840 | in Israel and Gaza.

01:04:20.200 | And now we'll go on to the second part of the conversation

01:04:24.560 | recorded on Thursday, October 5th.

01:04:27.000 | Given your experience in negotiating

01:04:30.120 | with some of the most powerful

01:04:31.200 | and influential leaders in the world,

01:04:33.480 | what's the key to negotiating difficult agreements

01:04:36.120 | in geopolitics?

01:04:37.400 | I start with a big question.

01:04:39.280 | - If I look back on the different negotiations I had

01:04:42.520 | when I was in government,

01:04:43.500 | either with leaders of countries,

01:04:46.360 | with representatives of leaders,

01:04:48.200 | or even with members of Congress to pass legislation,

01:04:51.500 | the most important thing I would draw back to

01:04:55.360 | would be trust.

01:04:57.000 | I think getting to know each other,

01:04:59.620 | understanding what was motivating the other party

01:05:03.700 | to get to the outcome,

01:05:05.360 | and making them feel like you weren't going to use

01:05:09.440 | whatever information they gave you

01:05:11.400 | to benefit yourself at the expense of them

01:05:15.420 | is probably what I would call table stakes

01:05:18.240 | to have a shot at accomplishing anything

01:05:21.780 | that was hard in negotiation.

01:05:24.800 | After that, I would say

01:05:27.540 | taking maybe a first principles approach

01:05:30.080 | to what the outcome of whatever problem

01:05:34.480 | you're looking to solve should be.

01:05:36.580 | Now, you have different kinds of negotiations.

01:05:38.540 | I always try to create a framework in the negotiation

01:05:41.640 | where it wasn't me against you.

01:05:43.960 | It was always, let's agree on what the outcome is

01:05:47.680 | that we're trying to accomplish.

01:05:49.360 | Let's all sit on the same side of the table and say,

01:05:52.240 | we want to get to this outcome.

01:05:54.040 | How do we get there?

01:05:55.280 | Really trying to create a roadmap.

01:05:56.720 | And so once you understand the destination

01:05:59.280 | you want to get to, the end point,

01:06:01.280 | then you'd have to work backwards

01:06:02.640 | and really try to put yourself in their shoes

01:06:05.040 | and try to understand what were their motivations macro.

01:06:09.400 | Most of the time, you have to assume

01:06:11.140 | that a leader's primary objective was to stay in power.

01:06:13.800 | And so all decisions made would be made

01:06:17.140 | through the framework of what it would take to do that

01:06:20.360 | and how it would impact their ability to do that.

01:06:22.900 | And then finally, I would just say that in any negotiation,

01:06:26.440 | you have to understand the power dynamics as well.

01:06:29.240 | And you have to then weight your approach

01:06:31.920 | in order to maneuver pieces to accomplish the objective.

01:06:35.560 | And so in areas where we had stronger power dynamics,

01:06:39.560 | I'd always look at it and say,

01:06:41.340 | what are the potential escape routes

01:06:42.980 | where a politician would say,

01:06:44.880 | this is just the reason why we can't get there.

01:06:46.920 | And I'd always think,

01:06:47.740 | how can you try to eliminate those escape routes

01:06:50.580 | or make them much harder to accomplish?

01:06:52.840 | And then ultimately think about what's the golden bridge

01:06:55.720 | that you wanna create for them

01:06:57.160 | in order to get to the other side

01:06:59.360 | where they were motivated to get there

01:07:01.660 | because it was in their self-interest to get there,

01:07:03.640 | but also because it helped

01:07:05.400 | accomplish the different objective.

01:07:07.080 | And I have many examples that I lived through with that,

01:07:09.840 | obviously negotiating in Congress for prison reform.

01:07:13.760 | I had to form a lot of trust with Democrats,

01:07:16.440 | whether it was Hakeem Jeffries or Dick Durbin,

01:07:19.120 | and then also on the Republican side with,

01:07:21.280 | I had Mike Lee, I had Lindsey Graham,

01:07:24.320 | I had Tim Scott, Senator Grassley,

01:07:27.240 | and then also Doug Collins in the House was tremendous.

01:07:30.000 | And every time we maneuvered something,

01:07:32.520 | we would get attacked either from the left,

01:07:35.040 | there was a time we were being attacked by Nancy Pelosi,

01:07:37.800 | John Lewis for not being inclusive enough.

01:07:41.320 | And then there were times that we maneuvered it,

01:07:43.160 | we'd be attacked from the right for maybe going too far.

01:07:46.040 | And ultimately we had to find just the right place

01:07:48.560 | where we can get it done.

01:07:49.440 | And the same thing happened with USMCA

01:07:52.200 | where we were negotiating the biggest trade deal

01:07:54.680 | in the history of the world,

01:07:55.760 | which was $1.3 trillion in annual trade

01:07:58.840 | between Mexico, Canada, the United States of America.

01:08:03.000 | And we were able to form good trust with the other side

01:08:06.540 | and try to say, how do we create win-win outcomes?

01:08:09.200 | And ultimately we were able to do something

01:08:11.280 | in a record time that people thought was very hard to do.

01:08:14.640 | And both of them in a divided time

01:08:16.400 | of the Trump administration were bipartisan wins

01:08:19.760 | with big, big votes in the Senate and the House.

01:08:23.080 | - You have a lot of stories of this kind.

01:08:24.800 | Sometimes a soft approach, sometimes a hard approach.

01:08:27.280 | Like there's, I think, a story where with Bibi,

01:08:30.840 | there was a potential, like a dramatic election coming up

01:08:34.400 | and you had to say no, no excuses, no delaying.

01:08:38.200 | You have to, we have to make this agreement.

01:08:40.120 | I know Bibi cares about Israel

01:08:41.400 | more than the particular dynamics of the election.

01:08:43.920 | Like you have to draw a hard line there.

01:08:46.400 | - Yeah, but in fairness to, like, you know, for him,

01:08:49.160 | during the time that we were dealing with him,

01:08:50.960 | he was always in election versus election and then election.

01:08:53.840 | And, you know, what he was saying wasn't wrong.

01:08:56.240 | And I think he was more expressing his concerns

01:08:59.480 | given the dynamics.

01:09:00.520 | And, you know, we never held those concerns against him.

01:09:03.360 | We just said, those are real concerns he had.

01:09:05.240 | We respected those concerns,

01:09:07.020 | but then we helped him prioritize

01:09:08.800 | to help accomplish the right things.

01:09:10.800 | And that's ultimately what the partnership is, right?

01:09:13.120 | My job was to represent America.

01:09:14.560 | His job was to represent Israel.

01:09:16.600 | And you had other parties representing their own interests.

01:09:18.640 | And as long as you assume that, you know,

01:09:20.640 | people were acting mostly in good faith,

01:09:23.360 | you were able to navigate areas where you didn't have,

01:09:25.720 | you know, complete overlap of priorities and objectives.

01:09:29.120 | - Just to go back to the trust thing,

01:09:31.200 | you sometimes see that with leaders,

01:09:32.880 | where they're kind of, it looks like they're trying

01:09:35.000 | to screw over the other person when they're talking.

01:09:37.960 | And so not having that,

01:09:41.040 | I think is a really powerful thing for earning trust.

01:09:44.760 | Like the people actually can believe

01:09:46.880 | that your results driven

01:09:48.640 | and are working towards a certain end.

01:09:51.680 | Is there like a skill to that?

01:09:53.480 | Like what, is that genetics?

01:09:55.880 | You're born with that?

01:09:56.840 | Or is that something like you develop?

01:09:59.800 | So basically it requires you to look at the game of politics

01:10:02.920 | and not have a kind of cynicism about it

01:10:05.060 | to where everybody's trying to manipulate you

01:10:07.280 | and actually just go in with a kind of open mind

01:10:11.320 | and open heart and actually speak truthfully to people,

01:10:15.880 | like on a basic human level.

01:10:17.720 | - I would say that I always would think about

01:10:20.280 | how can I be a partner to others?

01:10:21.840 | Like I would want somebody to be a partner to me.

01:10:24.600 | And a lot of it comes from just my different experiences

01:10:27.960 | in business.

01:10:28.780 | I've had great partners, I've had terrible partners.

01:10:31.720 | My father, you know, again, a lot of my childhood was,

01:10:35.040 | I was exposed to business.

01:10:36.040 | My father, you know, on Sundays he would take us

01:10:39.080 | to job sites and to the office with him

01:10:41.160 | instead of to football games,

01:10:42.280 | like my friends' fathers would do.

01:10:44.560 | And so we were exposed to business.

01:10:45.960 | And what he would say about his father,

01:10:47.440 | who was an immigrant to America,

01:10:49.560 | came over with nothing, had no formal education,

01:10:52.340 | but he would always say,

01:10:53.400 | "A good deal with a bad partner will always be a bad deal.

01:10:56.520 | And a bad deal with a good partner, you'll figure it out."

01:10:59.600 | And so going through some of the challenges

01:11:02.480 | that I had in my life early on,

01:11:03.920 | whether it was the issue with my father

01:11:07.520 | that I'm sure we'll talk about,

01:11:09.480 | or even going through some tougher financial times

01:11:12.280 | during the great financial crisis,

01:11:14.320 | I really learned a lot about partnership.

01:11:16.320 | And I always thought, how can I act in a way

01:11:19.760 | where I could be the type of partner or friend to others

01:11:23.320 | that I wish others would be to me?

01:11:25.200 | - So when you look for a good partner,

01:11:29.120 | don't you think there's the capacity

01:11:33.760 | for both good and bad in every person?

01:11:36.440 | So when you talk, when you negotiate with all these leaders,

01:11:39.600 | aren't there like multiple people

01:11:42.520 | you're speaking to inside one person

01:11:44.640 | that you're trying to encourage,

01:11:47.960 | catalyze the goodness in the human?

01:11:50.480 | - Yeah, so leaders are generally chosen by their country.

01:11:54.000 | And so my view was, is if I had an objective,

01:11:57.200 | I didn't get to choose who was the leader of other countries.

01:11:59.760 | My job was to deal with that leader,

01:12:02.000 | understand their strengths, understand their weaknesses,

01:12:04.280 | understand their power dynamics as well.

01:12:06.400 | One of my greatest takeaways when I grew up,

01:12:08.720 | I'd read the newspapers

01:12:09.720 | about all these powerful, famous people,

01:12:12.280 | and then as I got older and had the chance to meet them

01:12:15.600 | and do business with them,

01:12:16.680 | and then ultimately interact with them in government,

01:12:20.600 | is I realized that they're just like you and me.

01:12:22.880 | They wake up every morning, their kids are pissed at them,

01:12:25.280 | their wife doesn't wanna talk with them,

01:12:27.400 | and they've got a set of advisors around them.

01:12:29.400 | One's saying, let's go to war,

01:12:30.880 | one's saying, let's make peace,

01:12:32.040 | one's saying, do the deal,

01:12:33.040 | one's saying, don't do the deal.

01:12:34.720 | And they're all thinking, where do I get advice?

01:12:36.420 | How do I make decisions?

01:12:37.520 | And so understanding the true human nature of them

01:12:40.760 | and then the different power dynamics around them,

01:12:43.640 | I thought was very key.

01:12:45.280 | And so I didn't have a choice, do I deal with them or not?

01:12:47.400 | It was a function of how do you deal with them effectively

01:12:50.280 | in order to find areas where you have common interests

01:12:53.520 | and then work well together to pursue those common interests

01:12:57.560 | in order to achieve a certain goal.

01:12:59.960 | - First of all, you're incredibly well-read.

01:13:03.600 | I've gotten to know you and I've gotten to know Ivanka,

01:13:05.920 | and the book recommendation list is just incredible.

01:13:09.000 | So first of all, thank you for that.

01:13:10.920 | You told me about "The Guns of August" by Barbara Tuchman.

01:13:14.720 | It's a book on World War I,

01:13:17.160 | and I went down a whole rabbit hole there.

01:13:19.440 | She's like an incredible historian.

01:13:21.200 | But anyway, there's a bunch of stuff you learn from that,

01:13:23.600 | but one of the things you told me

01:13:24.800 | is it influenced your general approach to diplomacy

01:13:28.200 | of just picking up the phone and giving it a try.

01:13:32.640 | So as opposed to planning and strategizing,

01:13:37.040 | just pick up the phone.

01:13:38.440 | - Yeah, so this was a book I read way before

01:13:41.960 | the notion of serving in government

01:13:43.880 | was ever even on my mind or reality.

01:13:48.120 | And I remember thinking about it,

01:13:49.560 | reading it and thinking how World War I started,

01:13:52.220 | where you had somebody was assassinated

01:13:55.080 | and then you had all these different alliances

01:13:57.320 | that were created.

01:13:59.440 | And then in order to accomplish objectives,

01:14:03.040 | it triggered all of these people getting in bed

01:14:07.080 | with everyone else because of documents

01:14:09.300 | that were created without the intent

01:14:11.880 | of going to a massive war.

01:14:13.360 | And I think in the course of World War I,

01:14:14.960 | it was one of the greatest atrocities

01:14:17.400 | that we've seen as humanity.

01:14:18.600 | We've had 16 million people killed in that war.

01:14:21.280 | And as I was reading the book, I remember thinking to myself,

01:14:23.900 | even though things are set in a certain way,

01:14:27.320 | go sit with somebody, go talk to them and say,

01:14:29.360 | this doesn't make sense, this is wrong.

01:14:31.020 | How do we create a better pathway?

01:14:33.120 | And as a civilian, all my life,

01:14:35.160 | I would read the newspapers.

01:14:36.220 | I would observe how different leaders would act.

01:14:40.160 | But when we had the opportunity to serve in government

01:14:43.040 | and have the position, you realize you're not a civilian.

01:14:46.520 | You don't have the luxury of sitting back

01:14:48.640 | and letting the world happen the way it's happening.

01:14:51.360 | You have agency and you have the potential

01:14:55.560 | to influence the outcome of things.

01:14:57.180 | And one thing I've seen is,

01:14:58.800 | most political prognosticators are wrong.

01:15:00.880 | Anyone who tells you what's gonna happen

01:15:02.940 | really has no clue.

01:15:04.040 | And it's not because they're bad

01:15:05.340 | or they're not intelligent, it's because nobody knows.

01:15:08.360 | And at the end of the day, the outcomes in the world

01:15:11.140 | are usually driven by the decisions of humans.

01:15:13.940 | And if you're able to come together, form relationships,

01:15:16.560 | listen to each other, you can do that.

01:15:18.860 | And one of the great examples that I speak about in the book

01:15:21.680 | is with North Korea.

01:15:23.200 | Whereas if you remember in 2017, it was very intense.

01:15:27.000 | When President Obama was leaving office,

01:15:28.720 | he told President Trump that the single biggest fear

01:15:32.640 | that he had, and this is a time when the world was a mess,

01:15:34.920 | you had the Middle East was on fire,

01:15:37.180 | ISIS was beheading journalists and killing Christians,

01:15:40.100 | they had a caliphate the size of Ohio,

01:15:42.200 | Libya was destabilized, Yemen was destabilized,

01:15:44.520 | Syria was in a civil war where 500,000 people were killed,

01:15:48.040 | Iran was on a quiet path to a nuclear weapon.

01:15:50.480 | Yet the single biggest fear he had was North Korea.

01:15:54.120 | And then it got compounded by the fact

01:15:56.220 | that we get into office and President Trump

01:15:58.440 | brings his generals around and he's learning

01:16:00.680 | how to interact with all the generals and says,

01:16:03.360 | okay, what are my options?

01:16:04.680 | And they said, calm down, we've been using all

01:16:07.200 | of our ammunition in the Middle East.

01:16:08.880 | We don't have enough ammunition to go to war over there.

01:16:10.800 | And he says, let's not let that be too public,

01:16:13.720 | let's try to restock and come up with a plan.

01:16:16.360 | And at the time, there was a lot of banter back and forth.

01:16:19.120 | And I was able to, I got a call from a friend

01:16:23.060 | who was an old business contact who actually

01:16:25.960 | had done business in North Korea.

01:16:28.040 | And he said, I'd love to find a way to solve this.

01:16:31.160 | And I was getting calls from friends at the time

01:16:32.800 | saying, I'm trying to go to Hawaii for vacation.

01:16:35.160 | Should I not be going?

01:16:36.000 | Is it not safe?

01:16:36.820 | I mean, we forget the psychology

01:16:39.480 | of how intense that was at the time.

01:16:41.760 | And then through that interaction,

01:16:44.200 | he called some of his contacts in North Korea

01:16:46.560 | and then we were able with the CIA to open up a back channel

01:16:49.440 | that ultimately led to the de-escalation,

01:16:53.440 | the meeting between Trump and Kim Jong-un,

01:16:54.960 | which led to a de-escalation.

01:16:56.280 | So that was really the mindset,

01:16:58.000 | which was whenever there's a problem,

01:17:00.200 | just pick up the phone and try.

01:17:01.560 | And I think President Trump had a very similar approach,

01:17:04.400 | which was let's give it a shot.

01:17:06.160 | And he wasn't afraid to go after the hard ones too.

01:17:09.280 | And I'll say one final thing on this,

01:17:10.840 | which is that in politics,

01:17:13.360 | the incentive structure is just much different

01:17:17.160 | than in the real world, right?

01:17:18.840 | In the sense that you have a hard problem,

01:17:21.200 | then if you try to solve a hard problem,

01:17:23.440 | the likelihood of failure is great.

01:17:25.000 | Whereas in the business world,

01:17:25.920 | if you're going after a hard problem,

01:17:27.160 | we celebrate those people, right?

01:17:29.100 | We want our entrepreneurs and our great people

01:17:32.240 | to go after solving the big hard problems.

01:17:34.420 | But in politics, if you try to take on a hard problem,

01:17:37.200 | you have a high likelihood of failure.

01:17:38.980 | You'll get a lot of criticism on your pathway

01:17:41.600 | to trying to accomplish that if you fail.

01:17:44.160 | And then if you fail, it has a higher probability

01:17:46.300 | of leading to you losing your opportunity to serve.

01:17:50.220 | And so it's just one of these things

01:17:52.020 | where people wanna play it safe,

01:17:53.440 | which is not the notion that really was taken

01:17:56.820 | during the time that President Trump was in office.

01:17:59.300 | - Do you think it has to be that way?

01:18:00.900 | I think there's something in the human spirit,

01:18:04.140 | like in the public, that desires politicians

01:18:06.900 | to take on the big, bold problems, right?

01:18:11.900 | Like why is it the politician

01:18:14.660 | needs to be so afraid of failure?

01:18:16.540 | - I don't think it has to be that way.

01:18:18.060 | And that's, I think, one of the great lessons

01:18:20.700 | from the time of the Trump administration.

01:18:23.140 | He brought a lot of people

01:18:24.260 | from the business world into government.

01:18:26.540 | The business people have a much different mindset

01:18:29.100 | than government people, and there was a lot of resistance.

01:18:31.740 | And I think part of why there was so much resistance

01:18:34.340 | was because, I think about it from my personal sense,

01:18:38.220 | was that if I was successful

01:18:40.460 | with no traditional qualifications to do diplomacy,

01:18:43.420 | it meant that all the people

01:18:44.580 | with traditional qualifications in diplomacy

01:18:47.620 | didn't necessarily need those qualifications

01:18:49.380 | in order to be successful.

01:18:50.500 | And that same sentiment manifested itself

01:18:54.800 | in many areas in government.

01:18:56.140 | And I think that in the business world,

01:18:58.260 | it's outcome-oriented, it's results-oriented.

01:19:01.500 | And what we would see in New York is there,

01:19:04.020 | they would stab you in the eye,

01:19:05.020 | in DC, they would stab you in the back,

01:19:06.540 | and it just became a whole different dynamic

01:19:08.940 | of how you work through these different areas.

01:19:11.740 | So the answer is it doesn't have to be that way.

01:19:13.560 | You just need the right, courageous leader.

01:19:15.760 | And that's why I'm so optimistic

01:19:17.940 | about what the future of America and the world could be

01:19:20.860 | if you have the right people in power

01:19:22.380 | who are willing to take on the right challenges

01:19:25.780 | and do it in the right way.

01:19:27.020 | - So if we just linger on the North Korea

01:19:28.780 | and the de-escalation and the meeting,

01:19:30.380 | what's the trajectory from this could be

01:19:35.220 | the most catastrophic thing that destroys the world

01:19:38.300 | to you find back channels, you start talking

01:19:42.160 | and start arranging the meeting?

01:19:44.460 | Is there some insights you can give

01:19:46.020 | to how difficult that is to do in the North Korea case,

01:19:50.060 | which seems like to be one of the more

01:19:51.740 | closed-off parts of the world,

01:19:53.660 | and in the other cases that you worked on?

01:19:56.020 | - Yeah, it's always very challenging,

01:19:58.060 | and especially when you're going against the grain

01:20:00.940 | of what's established, right?

01:20:02.060 | We did something different to think

01:20:03.700 | that an old business contact that I had could then do it.

01:20:06.940 | I mean, that's the type of thing that, you know,

01:20:09.140 | if the press knew what we were doing,

01:20:10.960 | they would have derided it and criticized it

01:20:13.300 | in every which way, but that was one of the benefits

01:20:15.700 | of operating very much below the radar

01:20:17.700 | is that we were able to try all these different things.

01:20:20.060 | And not all of them worked, but some of them did.

01:20:22.040 | And, you know, but that is what's amazing

01:20:23.740 | about the world, right?

01:20:24.580 | This could be the biggest story on the front page

01:20:26.880 | of every paper, and they're inciting fear in everyone,

01:20:29.220 | and it's not a legitimate fear.

01:20:30.440 | I mean, there were missile tests, you know, over Japan.

01:20:33.980 | I mean, you had a lot of very big challenges with that file,

01:20:37.900 | and then all of a sudden we make contact,

01:20:39.860 | we go through negotiations to set a meeting.

01:20:41.960 | There's a meeting between President Trump and Kim Jong-un,

01:20:44.620 | and then all of a sudden there's a framework

01:20:46.820 | to try and move things forward.

01:20:50.760 | And again, I think that there's a lot of possibility there

01:20:53.340 | for what could happen if it's worked in the right way.

01:20:56.500 | - I just wanna know, like, how you word that first email

01:20:58.900 | or text message, like what emojis to use,

01:21:01.340 | like the hugging emoji.

01:21:03.100 | I think it's just personally, I've gotten to know

01:21:04.920 | a lot of powerful and rich people,

01:21:07.700 | and it's funny that they're all human,

01:21:09.300 | just like you're saying.

01:21:11.140 | And like, a lot of the drama, a lot of the problems

01:21:13.700 | can be resolved with just like a little camaraderie,

01:21:16.660 | a little kindness, a little like,

01:21:18.340 | just actually just reaching out.

01:21:19.980 | We're all human beings, and people wanna be successful,

01:21:22.860 | and people wanna be good, and you're right too,

01:21:25.380 | there's way more emojis involved in diplomacy

01:21:28.080 | than I ever would have expected.

01:21:29.860 | - And every leader, I'm sure, has their favorite emoji.

01:21:31.900 | This is also I learned about people that use,

01:21:34.100 | like everybody has their go-to emoji.

01:21:36.980 | Like I usually go to the heart very quickly, emoji.

01:21:39.860 | There's some people who go with the hugging,

01:21:41.820 | whatever that, what do you like, the hugging thing.

01:21:44.600 | Anyway, this conversation quickly turned to the ridiculous.

01:21:48.220 | But to do another book reference,

01:21:50.740 | you mentioned the book "13 Days in September"

01:21:52.980 | by Lawrence Wright, in discussing all the work you've done

01:21:57.220 | in Israel and the Middle East.

01:21:59.980 | I just wanna ask you sort of the interesting aspect

01:22:01.980 | of that book, which is the influence of the personalities

01:22:06.660 | and personal relationships on these negotiations.

01:22:09.720 | You kind of started to allude to that with the trust,

01:22:11.720 | but how much do the personalities matter in this?

01:22:14.980 | So going from North Korea to the Middle East here,

01:22:17.620 | to within Congress and all that kind of stuff.

01:22:20.180 | - Yeah, completely in every way.

01:22:21.540 | I mean, that's an incredible book,

01:22:23.180 | and it's a very entertaining read.

01:22:24.680 | It has obviously a lot of good historical context

01:22:28.580 | on some of the key players, whether it was Anwar Sadat

01:22:30.900 | or Menachem Begin or Jimmy Carter and Cy Vance,

01:22:34.820 | and a lot of the others who were involved

01:22:37.120 | with those negotiations.

01:22:38.580 | And the thing that I kind of took from that experience

01:22:42.560 | was just how personal it was.

01:22:44.220 | And again, one of my favorite stories from that book

01:22:46.600 | was how Anwar Sadat, who was a big, big leader,

01:22:49.960 | he had a mystic who was, according to this book,

01:22:52.500 | again, history, I like reading it,

01:22:54.340 | but I always realize that you have to notice

01:22:57.060 | that this is just the perspective of a given author

01:22:58.960 | that's writing it.

01:22:59.800 | But the way that they write this book

01:23:00.980 | was that he had an advisor who was a mystic,

01:23:03.260 | and the mystic was having a back channel with the Israelis.

01:23:06.420 | And the mystic told Sadat, "If you go to Israel

01:23:10.020 | "and you make a speech at the Knesset,

01:23:11.980 | "Begin is ready to give you the Sinai."

01:23:14.580 | And so he goes to Israel, they set this whole thing up,

01:23:18.840 | he goes and gives the Knesset,

01:23:19.920 | they go for their meeting after, and Sadat says,

01:23:21.540 | "Okay, well, are we gonna do this thing?"

01:23:23.400 | And Begin says, "What are you talking about?

01:23:24.980 | "I'm not giving you an inch of our land."

01:23:27.640 | And it was just one of these things

01:23:29.240 | where it was a miscommunication

01:23:31.240 | that brought about the symbolic visit

01:23:34.400 | of Anwar Sadat to Israel.

01:23:36.720 | And that was one of these notions

01:23:40.000 | that just made everyone think that something was possible

01:23:42.520 | that they thought was impossible a moment before.

01:23:45.620 | Actually, we had an example like that

01:23:47.200 | during our time in government

01:23:48.360 | when we did the Abraham Accords.

01:23:50.840 | The first step of the Accords was really a phone call

01:23:54.120 | between President Trump, Prime Minister Netanyahu,

01:23:57.200 | and Mohammed bin Zayed, who at that point

01:23:59.520 | was the crown prince and de facto ruler of the UAE.

01:24:02.380 | But all we had was a phone call

01:24:05.440 | and then a statement that was released.

01:24:08.000 | And what was interesting after that is we said,

01:24:09.780 | "Okay, well, how do we integrate countries?

01:24:11.220 | "Nobody's done this in a long time."

01:24:13.260 | And we were trying to figure out all the issues.

01:24:14.960 | And there's big miscommunications between Israel and UAE,

01:24:17.880 | and we were navigating through all the issues.

01:24:20.640 | And so after a couple of weeks, I said,

01:24:22.020 | "You know what, I've got to go over there

01:24:22.960 | "and try to sort through these issues.

01:24:24.380 | "So we make a plan to go to Israel,

01:24:25.600 | "then we can go to UAE."

01:24:27.080 | And then a young gentleman who worked with me

01:24:29.280 | named Avi Berkowitz says,

01:24:31.040 | "Well, if we're flying from Israel to UAE,

01:24:32.620 | "instead of flying on a government plane,

01:24:34.120 | "why don't we see if we can get an El Al plane

01:24:36.320 | "and we'll do the first official commercial flight?"

01:24:39.040 | And so I said, "That's a great idea.

01:24:40.940 | "Let's call Ambassador Al-Tayyiba Yusuf,"

01:24:43.840 | who was a tremendous player in the Abraham Accords,

01:24:46.760 | working behind the scenes, day and night,

01:24:49.080 | and was really a big catalyst.

01:24:51.300 | So he calls Yusuf and he said,

01:24:52.280 | "Sure, no problem, let's give it a shot."

01:24:53.720 | So we go and we do it.

01:24:55.880 | And he says, "If we can work out these issues,

01:24:57.160 | "what we'll do?"

01:24:58.000 | So we go to Israel, we do our meetings,

01:24:59.680 | we get everything back into a good place.

01:25:02.860 | We set up this trip over, we fly in an El Al plane.

01:25:06.440 | We fill it up, at the time it was during COVID,

01:25:08.360 | with a health delegation.

01:25:09.740 | We had the financial ministry

01:25:11.500 | because we had to open up banking relationships.

01:25:15.160 | They could wire money between countries.

01:25:17.560 | We wanted to get health partnerships.

01:25:19.380 | Then we just had a lot of legal things

01:25:20.700 | and national security things

01:25:21.740 | we wanted to start putting together.

01:25:24.560 | So we do this flight and we end up landing in UAE.

01:25:29.560 | And the picture of us coming off the plane,

01:25:32.100 | being greeted by Emiratis and Tobes,

01:25:36.240 | with an El Al plane with an Israeli flag on it,

01:25:39.220 | just captured everyone's imagination.

01:25:40.860 | And so it was one of these things where it's like,

01:25:42.980 | you work so hard on the details and the negotiation,

01:25:45.660 | I mean, hundreds of hours,

01:25:47.400 | to kind of make sure everything's perfect.

01:25:48.740 | And the one thing that you do kind of,

01:25:50.860 | "Yeah, let's give it a shot."

01:25:52.540 | That image ended up capturing everyone's heart.

01:25:54.960 | So going back to Sadat, that visit was very critical.

01:25:58.980 | And what was interesting was, is according to this book,

01:26:01.380 | it happened because of a miscommunication.

01:26:03.540 | That was the first part.

01:26:04.420 | The second part of the book, that's just amazing theater,

01:26:07.140 | and actually the book was based on a play,

01:26:08.620 | was just going back and forth

01:26:10.100 | with all of the different methodologies that they tried,

01:26:13.940 | that failed, but they kept trying at it.

01:26:16.820 | And then ultimately seeing how the personalities

01:26:18.860 | were able to find ways to make the compromise

01:26:22.020 | that ultimately was a very, very big thing

01:26:24.940 | for more stability in the Middle East.

01:26:27.540 | And so, amazing book, I would highly recommend it.

01:26:30.380 | A very entertaining read and something that

01:26:32.800 | at least gave me encouragement to keep going

01:26:35.380 | when the task I was pursuing seemed so large.

01:26:39.620 | - I mean, if we could just linger on the personalities,

01:26:43.100 | you write in the book that words matter,

01:26:45.060 | or you write in the context of saying,

01:26:48.460 | "In the diplomacy business, words matter."

01:26:50.940 | And then you said that, "We're in the results business."

01:26:53.860 | It's a badass line, but if we just stick

01:26:57.660 | to the diplomacy business and words mattering,

01:27:01.060 | it seems like one of the things you really highlight

01:27:03.580 | is that individual words can really have,

01:27:07.460 | like you can fight over individual words.

01:27:09.180 | So like, how do you operate in a world

01:27:11.180 | where like single words matter?

01:27:14.380 | - I think you have to be respectful to the craft

01:27:17.620 | that you're in where words matter,

01:27:19.120 | but then realize that they don't matter as much.

01:27:21.380 | And then also focus on the fact that, you know,

01:27:24.180 | the actions are actually what's gonna matter

01:27:25.900 | more than the words.

01:27:26.840 | And so you have a difference between leaders and politicians.

01:27:30.460 | You know, politicians are there to say the right thing

01:27:32.580 | and to hold the power.

01:27:33.960 | Leaders are people who are willing to do things

01:27:36.020 | that will be transformational from my perspective.

01:27:38.540 | And so when I would think about diplomacy,

01:27:42.440 | words without actions or without the threat of actions,

01:27:47.100 | and that was something that President Trump did very well,

01:27:49.620 | was that people knew that he was willing to take action.

01:27:52.780 | He was very unpredictable in how he would act,

01:27:55.500 | and that made our words much more effective

01:27:57.420 | in what they did.

01:27:58.260 | So it's all a combination, but, you know,

01:28:00.900 | coming from the private sector,

01:28:02.380 | we were all about results, right?

01:28:03.780 | If you're in government,

01:28:05.280 | you can work on something for 10 years and fail,

01:28:07.920 | and then retire and they consider you an expert.

01:28:09.780 | In the private sector,

01:28:11.420 | if you work on something for 10 weeks

01:28:13.140 | and you don't have a success, then you're unemployed.

01:28:15.860 | So it's a different kind of notion.

01:28:18.740 | And it was just understanding the mentality

01:28:21.540 | and trying to adjust and bridging the divides

01:28:24.420 | between the different trainings.

01:28:25.860 | - Is that the biggest thing you took

01:28:27.020 | from your business background?

01:28:28.660 | Is that just be really results-focused?

01:28:31.180 | - It was just the only way to be.

01:28:32.500 | I mean, if I was giving up a nice life in New York,

01:28:36.940 | and if I was giving up the stuff that I really enjoyed,

01:28:39.580 | the company that I'd helped build,

01:28:41.220 | and the life that I was enjoying in order to do government,

01:28:45.700 | I was going there to make a difference,

01:28:47.040 | and we had to focus on it.

01:28:48.740 | The other skill set, so there was a couple skill sets

01:28:50.880 | that I found were quite deficient in government.

01:28:53.760 | First of all, there was a ton of amazing people.

01:28:55.940 | I mean, people talk about the bureaucracy.

01:28:58.340 | What I found was is you had incredibly committed,

01:29:01.740 | passionate, intelligent, capable people

01:29:04.580 | all throughout the government.

01:29:05.820 | And what they were waiting for though was direction

01:29:09.240 | and then cover in order to get there.

01:29:12.060 | And so there were a lot of tasks that I worked on,

01:29:14.740 | whether it was building the wall at the Southern border,

01:29:17.220 | where I was able to work with Customs Border Patrol,

01:29:20.860 | Army Corps of Engineers, military, DHS professionals, DOD.

01:29:27.340 | We basically all came together,

01:29:28.620 | and then once we had a good project management plan,

01:29:31.220 | we were able to kind of move very, very quickly.

01:29:32.960 | I think we built about 470 miles of border barrier

01:29:36.460 | in about two years, basically.

01:29:38.700 | And that worked very well

01:29:41.820 | because we basically brought private sector

01:29:44.060 | project management skill sets,

01:29:45.580 | which were quite often missing in government.

01:29:49.740 | The second one is just,

01:29:50.900 | we spoke about negotiation earlier.

01:29:53.040 | I would say that most people in government,

01:29:54.980 | it's just a different form of negotiation

01:29:57.140 | than you see in the private sector

01:29:58.940 | and way less effective in that regard,

01:30:01.200 | which is why I think it's good,

01:30:02.780 | the more we can encourage more people

01:30:04.300 | with private sector experience to do a stint in government

01:30:07.500 | and to really try to contribute and serve their country.

01:30:10.260 | That's how our founders,

01:30:11.220 | I mean, George Washington and all the founding fathers,

01:30:14.260 | they were working on their farms.

01:30:15.600 | They left their farms serving government,

01:30:17.260 | then they went back to the farm.

01:30:18.240 | And that was kind of the design of

01:30:20.300 | the representative government.

01:30:21.420 | It wasn't a career political class.

01:30:23.220 | It was people coming in to show gratitude

01:30:27.260 | for the freedoms and liberties that they enjoyed

01:30:29.300 | and then do their best to kind of help others

01:30:32.700 | have those same opportunities that they had.

01:30:34.860 | And then they'd go back and live their lives.

01:30:36.460 | And so I think that there's a lot of opportunity

01:30:39.780 | with our government of people with more business mindsets

01:30:42.660 | who are gonna think about things

01:30:44.100 | from a solutions perspective, go and serve.

01:30:47.980 | - Is that one of the main problems here?

01:30:50.640 | So you also mentioned the book,

01:30:52.580 | The Great Degeneration by Neil Ferguson,

01:30:55.980 | an awesome historian who's been on this podcast.

01:30:58.260 | It helped you understand the inefficiencies

01:31:00.020 | of government regulation.

01:31:01.940 | I'd love it if you can give an insight

01:31:04.300 | into why government is so inefficient at times.

01:31:08.540 | Like when it is inefficient, when it doesn't work,

01:31:11.060 | why is that the case?

01:31:12.700 | The bureaucracy that you spoke to,

01:31:14.820 | the negative aspects of the bureaucracy.

01:31:17.100 | - So we don't have enough time on this podcast

01:31:19.220 | to go into it, but it's, look,

01:31:22.060 | there's a lot of aspects that work as well, right?

01:31:24.420 | But I do think we've gotten too big.

01:31:26.340 | Neil's book that you mentioned,

01:31:27.860 | one of the things that I took from that,

01:31:29.300 | I read it, I think in 2012, right?

01:31:31.780 | Kind of in the middle of the great financial crisis was,

01:31:34.660 | he was talking about how government regulation

01:31:37.680 | often was put in place to deal with old crises, right?

01:31:40.500 | So it was never gonna solve future problems.

01:31:42.500 | It was more to kind of create,

01:31:44.900 | to solve for problems that had happened in the past.

01:31:47.140 | And I remember thinking about that.

01:31:48.940 | One thing I was very proud of,

01:31:50.260 | of the work of the Trump administration was that

01:31:52.780 | you had four years consecutively

01:31:54.540 | where there was a net decrease in the cost of regulations.

01:31:57.540 | So to give you a context, in the last year of Obama in 2016,

01:32:01.460 | there were 6 million man hours spent by the private sector

01:32:04.980 | complying with new federal regulations.

01:32:07.180 | And that's not really what the intent

01:32:08.820 | of our government was, right?

01:32:10.080 | If we have rules or regulations,

01:32:11.700 | those should be legislated by Congress.

01:32:13.300 | They shouldn't be put in by bureaucrats

01:32:16.260 | who are basically saying, I wanna follow this objective.

01:32:18.740 | So using kind of the power of the pen in order to do that.

01:32:21.620 | So the deregulatory effort was actually very critical

01:32:25.260 | to Trump's economic success that happened

01:32:28.020 | at the beginning of the administration.

01:32:29.500 | And then what I saw with regulation was anytime

01:32:32.340 | either there was legislation or regulation coming,

01:32:34.900 | the people pushing for it were usually the people

01:32:37.780 | who would benefit from the regulatory captures.

01:32:39.820 | So you had these, you look at the great financial crisis

01:32:42.980 | where you had this big banking reforms.

01:32:45.260 | Well, what happened during the big banking reforms?

01:32:47.580 | Then you had a big reduction in the amount of banks

01:32:50.020 | that occurred and the big banks became even bigger.

01:32:52.820 | Whereas I don't think that was the intention

01:32:54.460 | of the legislation, but the people who were writing

01:32:56.860 | the legislation and influencing it had a lot

01:32:59.300 | of the constituencies from those larger institutions.

01:33:01.580 | And then what happened as a result of that?

01:33:03.580 | A lot of these smaller institutions didn't have the ability

01:33:06.540 | to be as competitive.

01:33:08.340 | They had more restrictions, more costs,

01:33:09.980 | they became less profitable, but these were the banks

01:33:12.440 | that were serving small business,

01:33:13.880 | which is the biggest creator of jobs in our country.

01:33:17.000 | And then as a result, the bigger banks got more powerful

01:33:20.100 | and what happened in the country as a result

01:33:21.900 | of the regulations that they put in place,

01:33:24.820 | the wealth gap in the country grew, it didn't shrink.

01:33:27.260 | And so I think oftentimes what they say these regulations

01:33:31.260 | are intended to be, the result often becomes the opposite.

01:33:35.060 | And so what President Trump did in his administration

01:33:38.580 | was they did a massive deregulatory effort.

01:33:40.840 | And I think they pledged that for every one regulation

01:33:45.020 | they put on, 'cause you do need some regulation

01:33:47.000 | in an economy and in a society, they would take off two.

01:33:50.240 | And in the first year, they limited eight regulations

01:33:53.000 | for every one.

01:33:53.840 | And so that was just something I took from it,

01:33:55.840 | which was, I thought, very interesting.

01:33:58.200 | And you had to really, I think you just have to think

01:34:01.000 | through what are the consequences gonna be

01:34:02.640 | of the different actions you take.

01:34:04.640 | And often government gets it wrong by taking an action

01:34:08.020 | that feels right, but has big negative consequences

01:34:10.560 | down the road.

01:34:11.720 | - Let's go to some difficult topics.

01:34:15.460 | You wrote in the book about your experience

01:34:19.260 | with some very low points in government.

01:34:21.260 | You've been attacked quite a bit.

01:34:24.980 | One of the ones that stands out is the accusations

01:34:27.440 | of collusion with Russia.

01:34:29.300 | And you tell in the book, in general, this whole story,

01:34:33.140 | this whole journey on a personal level,

01:34:34.600 | on a sort of big political level.

01:34:37.300 | Can you tell me some aspects of this story?

01:34:39.300 | - Sure, so to give the listeners some context,

01:34:42.860 | and people remember this now, it's been kind of swept away

01:34:46.760 | because it turned out not to be true,

01:34:48.400 | was that after President Trump won the election in 2016,

01:34:53.400 | instead of the media saying, "Oh, we were wrong,"

01:34:55.960 | 'cause again, everyone thought he had zero chance of winning,

01:34:59.300 | they said, "Okay, well, we couldn't have been wrong.

01:35:00.840 | "It must have been the Russians who worked with him."

01:35:03.640 | And so at first, when this started coming up,

01:35:06.200 | I thought this was ridiculous.

01:35:07.380 | I mean, I was very intimately involved

01:35:09.220 | with the operations of the campaign.

01:35:10.600 | I was running the finance of the campaign.

01:35:12.320 | I was running the digital media of the campaign.

01:35:14.060 | I was running the schedule for the campaign.

01:35:18.600 | And I knew that on most days we had trouble

01:35:21.320 | working, coordinating with ourselves,

01:35:23.520 | let alone collaborating with another government,

01:35:26.680 | and colluding, as they called it.

01:35:29.040 | And so we did a great job, I think,

01:35:33.220 | as an underdog campaign, very leanly staffed.

01:35:35.760 | And then they said that we were working with the Russians.

01:35:38.200 | And so at the time, I didn't take it too seriously

01:35:42.780 | because I knew there was no truth to it.

01:35:44.720 | But it was amazing to me to start seeing

01:35:46.720 | all of these institutions, whether it was CNN,

01:35:49.440 | The Washington Post, New York Times,

01:35:50.980 | these were news organizations that I grew up

01:35:52.760 | having a lot of respect for,

01:35:54.660 | taking these accusations so seriously,

01:35:57.200 | and then working themselves up

01:35:58.720 | in order to just cover it for two years.

01:36:02.760 | And then as a result, you had a special counsel,

01:36:04.420 | you had a House investigation, a Senate investigation.

01:36:07.760 | And I personally spent about, I think, over 20 hours

01:36:10.220 | just testifying before these different committees.

01:36:14.040 | Again, spent millions of dollars out of my own pocket

01:36:16.200 | on my legal fees to make sure I was well-represented.

01:36:19.400 | And the reason I did that was because I saw in Washington,

01:36:22.120 | it was like a sick game, right?

01:36:23.440 | It's almost like, even though there was no underlying

01:36:27.040 | problems to the accusation, I felt like this is one

01:36:31.280 | of those things where they're gonna try to catch you.

01:36:33.500 | And then if you step on the line,

01:36:34.720 | they catch you with one misrepresentation,

01:36:36.320 | they're gonna try to put you in jail or worst of,

01:36:38.200 | you know, bid, bid, bid.

01:36:39.240 | And so for me, that was a big concern.

01:36:42.560 | So, and it was amazing.

01:36:44.160 | I mean, my poor mom, I told her to stop reading whatever,

01:36:47.680 | I said, "I promise you, we didn't do anything wrong,

01:36:49.320 | it's good."

01:36:50.160 | But she'd call me and say, "Well, our friends were

01:36:52.880 | on the Upper East Side, we're talking with Chuck Schumer,

01:36:54.720 | he says, 'Jared's going to jail.

01:36:56.280 | We know for sure that he colluded with the Russians."

01:36:58.000 | And this is like a leading senator saying things like this.

01:37:00.520 | And so it was just interesting for me to see how

01:37:04.020 | the whole world could believe something and be talking

01:37:07.940 | about it that I knew with 1000% certainty

01:37:12.020 | was just not true.

01:37:13.500 | And so seeing that play out was very, very hard.

01:37:15.900 | Obviously, you know, I was accused of a lot of things.

01:37:18.300 | There were times in Washington, I was radioactive.

01:37:20.260 | I remember one weekend, you know, it was all over CNN,

01:37:24.340 | you know, the people, the panels on CNN,

01:37:26.380 | like the news organization that I grew up thinking

01:37:28.220 | was like the number one trusted name for news in the world,

01:37:31.780 | talking about how I'd committed treason

01:37:33.420 | because I met with an ambassador and said,

01:37:35.280 | "We'd like to hear your perspective on what you think

01:37:38.300 | the policy should be in Syria, where there was a big

01:37:41.420 | civil war happening and ISIS and a lot of different things."

01:37:45.020 | So it was quite a crazy time in that regard.

01:37:47.460 | But luckily, again, we were able to fight through it.

01:37:50.060 | It was a major distraction for our administration.

01:37:53.180 | I think we were able to kind of stay focused

01:37:54.780 | on the objectives and the policies, but it was a crazy time.

01:37:57.980 | I learned a lot from that experience.

01:38:00.740 | - It's crazy how just an accusation can be viral

01:38:03.420 | and can just go.

01:38:04.740 | One of the things that worries me is the effect

01:38:08.140 | on your mind, the psychology of it,

01:38:10.180 | to make sure it doesn't make you cynical.

01:38:11.780 | Like people that are trying to do stuff,

01:38:13.540 | those kinds of stories that can destroy their mind.

01:38:15.740 | So one of the things I'd love to sort of understand,

01:38:18.360 | you kind of rolled in from the business world

01:38:21.420 | and all of a sudden, the entire world, from CNN

01:38:25.300 | to everybody's accusing you of colluding with the Russians.

01:38:28.060 | Like what do you, like when you're sitting at home,

01:38:31.220 | how do you keep a calm mind, a clear mind,

01:38:34.580 | an optimistic one that doesn't become cynical

01:38:37.140 | and actually just keep trying to push on

01:38:38.700 | and do stuff in the world?

01:38:39.980 | - So it was a surreal experience.

01:38:42.040 | I would say number one is I felt very confident

01:38:45.260 | that I hadn't done anything wrong.

01:38:46.460 | So I'd always tell my lawyer, like, you know,

01:38:48.900 | the good news is I've got a good fact problem, right?

01:38:50.780 | Like I need a good lawyer to get me through it,

01:38:52.340 | but it's much easier to be a good lawyer

01:38:54.220 | if you have a very innocent client.

01:38:55.600 | And so, you know, the fact that I knew that I didn't have,

01:38:58.980 | I didn't believe that I had any legal liability

01:39:02.780 | helped me kind of intellectually separate

01:39:05.680 | the challenge I needed to do to fight through it from it.

01:39:08.540 | And then I just basically said, like, you know,

01:39:09.980 | I'd had hardship earlier in my life

01:39:11.460 | where I dealt with the situation with my father.

01:39:13.760 | And what I realized there is that

01:39:16.220 | you can't really spend energy

01:39:18.500 | on the things that you don't control.

01:39:20.740 | All you can do is spend your time and energy

01:39:22.780 | worrying about what you can control,

01:39:24.580 | and then how do you react to the things that you have there?

01:39:27.740 | And so it took a lot of discipline.

01:39:30.820 | It took a lot of strength.

01:39:32.180 | Then again, I give my wife, Ivanka,

01:39:34.540 | and even Donald a lot of credit

01:39:35.980 | for kind of having my back during that time

01:39:39.220 | and encouraging me just to kind of fight through it.

01:39:42.340 | And then I also had to make sure

01:39:43.960 | that I didn't allow that to distract me from my job.

01:39:46.180 | I felt like I had an amazing opportunity in the White House

01:39:49.220 | to make a difference in the world.

01:39:50.460 | And if I would have spent all my time playing defense,

01:39:53.040 | you know, in politics, it's a time duration game.

01:39:54.900 | In business, you have whatever duration

01:39:56.620 | you set for yourself.

01:39:58.060 | In politics, it's time duration.

01:39:59.420 | We had four years.

01:40:00.660 | Every day was sand through an hourglass.

01:40:03.420 | My mindset was I need to accomplish as much as I can

01:40:06.700 | in these four years.

01:40:08.140 | And I guess the traditional game that's played in Washington

01:40:10.820 | is whether it's the media, the opposition,

01:40:12.980 | their job is to distract you and then try to stop you

01:40:15.940 | from being as successful as you wanna be.

01:40:18.060 | And so just fought through it.

01:40:19.460 | And it wasn't always fun, but we got through.

01:40:23.180 | And thank God it's something people don't talk about.

01:40:26.140 | And it has been amazing to me,

01:40:27.540 | just the lack of self-awareness and reflection

01:40:31.080 | of a lot of the people who hyped this up for two years.

01:40:35.860 | They don't think there was anything wrong with it.

01:40:37.420 | And that's interesting, but my view is we got through it.

01:40:41.820 | It's good, so it's in the past.

01:40:43.140 | And then I started moving to the future,

01:40:45.040 | and that's really where I spent my time.

01:40:46.340 | - Yeah, but I wanna linger on it

01:40:47.700 | because to me that has a really discouraging effect

01:40:52.180 | on anyone who's trying to do positive in the world.

01:40:54.260 | Like these kinds of attacks are intense.

01:40:56.420 | - Yeah.

01:40:57.260 | - I mean, you say kind of one of the lessons you learned

01:40:59.380 | is that you really have to be perfect,

01:41:01.400 | but I hate that to be the lesson.

01:41:03.780 | Like I feel like you should be able to do stupid stuff,

01:41:06.460 | take big risks, and like people celebrate the big risks

01:41:10.820 | and not try to weave gigantic stories over nothing.

01:41:14.540 | I just wanna kind of understand the two aspects of this,

01:41:18.740 | how to not have such stories have so much legs,

01:41:23.740 | and the other is how to stay psychologically strong.

01:41:26.540 | So you kind of waved it off

01:41:27.580 | that you didn't have a fact problem,

01:41:29.900 | but it can just have an effect on your psyche.

01:41:32.580 | - Yeah.

01:41:33.420 | - You seem to be pretty stoic about the whole thing,

01:41:34.460 | but like how, I mean, just on the psychology side,

01:41:37.540 | how did you stay calm and not become cynical

01:41:43.540 | where you can continue to do stuff and take big risks?

01:41:47.300 | - I didn't have a choice.

01:41:48.780 | - What do you mean?

01:41:49.620 | - I mean, I could have spent every day feeling sorry

01:41:51.780 | for myself or complaining or saying things aren't fair,

01:41:54.440 | but the general way I looked at it was that in life,

01:41:58.500 | every opportunity has a cost, and you could look at it

01:42:01.940 | and say maybe this was a massive cost,

01:42:03.940 | either in dollars or in time or in reputation

01:42:06.820 | or in emotional drain, but you could also say

01:42:12.780 | that I had an opportunity to work in the White House

01:42:15.900 | and I had an opportunity to work

01:42:17.180 | on some of the hardest challenges.

01:42:18.980 | You talk about how that's not celebrated.

01:42:20.740 | That is something very different.

01:42:21.960 | In the private sector, when you take on big challenges,

01:42:24.360 | that is celebrated.

01:42:25.220 | In government, when you take on big challenges,

01:42:27.540 | people wanna see it fail or they wanna criticize

01:42:30.260 | those people who are trying to take that on,

01:42:32.340 | and I think that's wrong, and I think that as a country,

01:42:35.020 | we should be thinking big, we should be dreaming big,

01:42:37.140 | and we should be encouraging our politicians

01:42:39.340 | to try and to fail more and to go and to take on big things

01:42:43.660 | knowing that there's risk of failing.

01:42:44.740 | Obviously, we want them to succeed, not to fail,

01:42:46.580 | but let's take on the big things.

01:42:48.420 | Let's try to do that.

01:42:49.560 | So I think it's just very basic that you're in a situation.

01:42:55.280 | I've made decisions.

01:42:56.120 | I can't go back and change decisions in the past.

01:42:58.500 | I still felt very blessed to be in the position I was in,

01:43:01.580 | and I knew that I just had to work through it,

01:43:03.220 | and like I said, I was very lucky to have support

01:43:06.020 | from my wife and from my family and from good friends.

01:43:09.260 | Again, I think I'd chosen very good friends in life,

01:43:11.700 | and my friends were with me.

01:43:13.100 | I had one friend who, my lowest moment,

01:43:16.500 | got on the plane, he lived in Arizona,

01:43:18.100 | got on a plane and came just to have dinner with me

01:43:19.880 | to say, "Just pick your head up.

01:43:21.620 | "I know you're down now.

01:43:22.660 | "You're gonna be fine.

01:43:23.560 | "Just fight through."

01:43:25.100 | That meant a lot to me, and again, I always think

01:43:28.060 | in my life, you don't learn as much from your successes.

01:43:30.780 | You don't learn as much from your high points.

01:43:32.460 | You learn the most about who you wanna be

01:43:35.460 | and how the world works from your lowest moments,

01:43:37.620 | and at those lowest moments, it just, it made me better,

01:43:40.540 | and it taught me how to be a better friend

01:43:42.780 | to people who are in tough situations,

01:43:44.740 | and I tried to just get tougher,

01:43:47.960 | and I tried to just get better and work through it.

01:43:50.460 | - Yeah, you said that you and Ivanka,

01:43:52.340 | this intense time brought you two together

01:43:56.100 | and helped you kind of deal with the intensity

01:44:00.380 | of the chaos of it all.

01:44:01.700 | - So I think it was just number one,

01:44:03.440 | knowing that you had a partner and knowing

01:44:05.140 | that you had somebody who loved you and believed in you.

01:44:07.900 | I think that was definitely by far the biggest of anything.

01:44:10.940 | - Love is the answer.

01:44:12.060 | - Love is very important, but then there's also a lot

01:44:15.420 | that I've learned from her, always getting me

01:44:18.500 | to read different books or learn different things,

01:44:20.940 | which I love, but she's also, I think,

01:44:23.180 | an amazing role model, and I go through our time

01:44:25.760 | in Washington where there were so many people

01:44:28.860 | who were, I thought, very nasty to her unfoundedly,

01:44:33.900 | and I'm not talking about individually,

01:44:35.340 | 'cause again, most people interacted with her

01:44:37.620 | were super kind, but I would see people on Twitter

01:44:41.300 | or different places go after her,

01:44:42.580 | and she always stayed elegant,

01:44:43.700 | and I felt like that was something

01:44:46.000 | that she never stooped down to a lower level.

01:44:48.740 | She kept her elegance the whole time,

01:44:51.080 | and she really went to Washington

01:44:53.700 | wanting to be a force of good,

01:44:55.020 | and I see all the time that she follows her heart,

01:44:58.180 | she does what's right, and she has a very strong

01:45:03.020 | moral compass, and I feel very lucky

01:45:05.420 | to have her as a partner, and I respect her tremendously.

01:45:08.300 | - Yeah, she walks through the fire with grace,

01:45:10.500 | I would say, and she's recommended

01:45:13.260 | a bunch of amazing books to me,

01:45:14.460 | and she has an incredible, a fascinating mind,

01:45:17.540 | but one thing that jumped out to me

01:45:19.860 | is you both love diners, Jersey diners,

01:45:23.460 | so I lived in Philly for a while,

01:45:25.700 | and I've traveled quite a bit,

01:45:28.540 | and traveling from Boston down to Philly,

01:45:30.540 | maybe to DC, you can drive through Jersey.

01:45:33.060 | There's something about Jersey, I don't know what it is.

01:45:35.700 | - It's the best.

01:45:36.620 | - You listen to Bruce Springsteen,

01:45:38.660 | Louis C.K. has this bit where,

01:45:40.660 | I think it's part of criticizing cell phones today

01:45:44.100 | where people are too much on their phone,

01:45:45.500 | they don't just sit there, be bored,

01:45:48.180 | but he uses that story to tell where he's just driving,

01:45:51.900 | and a Bruce Springsteen song comes on,

01:45:54.340 | and he just wants to pull over to the side of the road

01:45:56.340 | and just weep for unexplainable reason,

01:46:00.340 | and I think that's true, 'cause life is difficult.

01:46:04.980 | Life is full of suffering or struggle or challenges,

01:46:07.820 | so sometimes, it's always Bruce Springsteen,

01:46:10.420 | but some kind of song like this

01:46:12.420 | can really make you reflect on life,

01:46:14.860 | that melancholy feeling,

01:46:16.180 | but that melancholy feeling is the other side

01:46:18.740 | of the happiness coin,

01:46:20.560 | where if you just allow yourself to feel that pain,

01:46:23.760 | you can also feel the highest joys,

01:46:27.860 | that's sort of the point Louis C.K. makes,

01:46:29.940 | and there's something about Jersey with the diners,

01:46:32.420 | often late at night,

01:46:33.760 | that there's several diner experiences, I should say, okay?

01:46:37.060 | There's the family-friendly, there's a nice waitress,

01:46:39.420 | and there's a sweetness, a kindness,

01:46:41.740 | like, "Hello, sweetheart," that kind of thing.

01:46:44.460 | There's also the 3 a.m. diner,

01:46:46.660 | where you're, the ones that are open 24 hours,

01:46:49.620 | that has a romantic element when you're a young man

01:46:52.320 | or young woman, you're traveling,

01:46:54.500 | the loneliness of that, just all of it.

01:46:57.440 | The American diner is like,

01:47:00.280 | from like Jack Kerouac on, represents something.

01:47:03.740 | I'm not sure what that is,

01:47:04.720 | but it's like a real beautiful experience,

01:47:08.040 | and the food itself too.

01:47:09.720 | - Oh, always fresh, yeah.

01:47:11.120 | The thing with diners, there's so much to love about 'em,

01:47:13.640 | and I grew up, obviously, in New Jersey,

01:47:15.640 | when I'd go with my father to business,

01:47:18.520 | he'd always stop, we'd eat at a diner,

01:47:20.600 | late night I'd be coming back with my friends,

01:47:22.200 | we'd stop at a diner,

01:47:23.240 | and it's a tradition that Ivanka and I love doing as well,

01:47:25.920 | and I think there's a notion of,

01:47:28.360 | it's very egalitarian in that,

01:47:30.400 | people from all places are there,

01:47:32.920 | you could order basically whatever you want,

01:47:34.640 | I mean, the menus at the diners look like the phone book,

01:47:37.880 | and it's amazing how they keep so much fresh ingredients

01:47:40.720 | to do it, at least the good ones do.

01:47:42.520 | I love, as a Jersey guy, that you get mozzarella sticks

01:47:45.160 | and an omelet at any hour of the day,

01:47:48.000 | 'cause most of 'em are open 24 hours,

01:47:49.580 | and that's basically, Ivanka, my go-to,

01:47:52.160 | we'll throw in a milkshake or two as well.

01:47:54.420 | But for me as a kid, my father would take me,

01:47:57.280 | sometimes I'd sit with him in the meeting,

01:47:58.760 | sometimes I'd be at the table next to him,

01:48:00.920 | he'd give me a bunch of quarters to put in the music machine

01:48:03.380 | that they would have on the wall,

01:48:05.360 | and it was always just a great experience doing it.

01:48:07.760 | In Jersey, and I joke that if you grew up in Jersey,

01:48:10.800 | you grew up with just enough of a chip on your shoulder

01:48:13.000 | that you have to go and make something of yourself in life,

01:48:15.080 | it's a special place, I had an amazing childhood there,

01:48:18.720 | and very, very proud to be from the state,

01:48:20.800 | and I will just give a little bit of a plug now,

01:48:22.840 | because the state has now actually turned the corner,

01:48:25.740 | and they had a $10 billion budget surplus for many years,

01:48:28.780 | it was a state that was basically bankrupt,

01:48:32.000 | and now actually under a pretty progressive

01:48:35.600 | Democrat governor, Phil Murphy,

01:48:38.060 | he's turned the state around,

01:48:39.140 | and it actually has a very bright future ahead,

01:48:41.900 | and it's probably one of the best places

01:48:44.540 | to raise a family in the country, right?

01:48:45.980 | It's got very low crime,

01:48:47.180 | one of the best public school systems in the country,

01:48:49.940 | pretty good healthcare system, a lot of green parks,

01:48:52.520 | people know the Turnpike, but it's got a lot to it,

01:48:55.060 | that's really great, so I'm a big, big fan of Jersey.

01:48:57.340 | - I like how this is a first for this particular podcast,

01:49:00.460 | you literally gave a plug to a state.

01:49:03.460 | So New Jersey, everybody.

01:49:04.940 | - It's where it's at.

01:49:07.300 | - There's South Jersey, there's North Jersey,

01:49:08.900 | I mean, there's all kinds of Jerseys too,

01:49:10.700 | I mean, the whole thing, it just, I--

01:49:13.980 | - And don't get me started on the Jersey Shore, Lex,

01:49:15.900 | that's-- - Jersey Shore is a whole thing.

01:49:16.740 | - And I'm not talking about the snooky part,

01:49:18.460 | I'm talking about the real nice parts,

01:49:20.220 | where you have great food, great people.

01:49:21.820 | - I mean, nice parts, it's all beautiful,

01:49:24.460 | the full range of human characters

01:49:27.740 | that are in New Jersey are all beautiful.

01:49:29.900 | - I agree with that.

01:49:30.740 | - And every time I travel across the world,

01:49:32.820 | there's always, I meet somebody from New Jersey

01:49:34.620 | and you kinda give a nod of deep understanding.

01:49:37.620 | It's the cradle of civilization, okay.

01:49:39.980 | So back, I don't know how we got there,

01:49:41.900 | oh, all right, going back to the low points,

01:49:45.020 | you mentioned your father, if we could just return there,

01:49:48.300 | even just the personal story of your father

01:49:53.300 | that you write about, that other betrayal

01:49:58.100 | that happened in his life,

01:49:59.180 | and then how he responds to that betrayal,

01:50:01.420 | and he was, after that, arrested,

01:50:03.780 | can you just tell the story?

01:50:05.740 | - Sure, so my father is an amazing person,

01:50:08.940 | and we grew up in New Jersey,

01:50:11.020 | my father was a big developer, a great entrepreneur,

01:50:14.440 | built an amazing business.

01:50:16.900 | He got into a dispute with two of his siblings,

01:50:20.500 | and through that dispute,

01:50:21.980 | they basically took all of the documents in his company,

01:50:24.900 | went to the US Attorney's Office,

01:50:26.960 | and turned from a civil dispute

01:50:31.420 | into a real public dispute.

01:50:33.900 | My father did something wrong in that process,

01:50:36.900 | and when he got arrested for that,

01:50:39.580 | he basically said, "You know what, what I did was wrong,"

01:50:41.660 | and he took his medicine, and he did it like a man,

01:50:44.940 | and he said, "I'm gonna go to prison,"

01:50:46.380 | and he did that for a year.

01:50:47.860 | And so, for me, that was a very challenging time

01:50:52.380 | in the family, obviously.

01:50:54.100 | It was a shock, it was a total change.

01:50:57.400 | I mean, I grew up, my childhood was,

01:50:59.820 | I think, a very nice childhood.

01:51:01.300 | My parents always said, "Do good in school, work hard."

01:51:04.700 | I was very focused on my athletics,

01:51:07.460 | I was captain of the basketball team,

01:51:08.780 | I was captain of the hockey team,

01:51:10.980 | I ran a marathon with my father,

01:51:12.300 | and it was always about pursuing.

01:51:13.500 | Went to Harvard, graduated with honors,

01:51:15.940 | and then was in NYU pursuing a law degree

01:51:18.460 | and a business degree.

01:51:20.180 | And I was working at the Manhattan District

01:51:21.420 | Attorney's Office at the time,

01:51:22.620 | actually thinking I wanted to go into public service,

01:51:25.940 | 'cause my father always taught us,

01:51:27.100 | we were always surrounded by politicians,

01:51:28.860 | and he always said, "My parents came to America,

01:51:32.180 | "they lived in the land of opportunity,

01:51:34.660 | "and they had these opportunities

01:51:36.520 | "because this is the best country in the world,

01:51:38.680 | "and so you should be successful, work hard,

01:51:41.580 | "don't ever let your opportunities

01:51:43.780 | "become your disadvantages,

01:51:45.040 | "because you have advantages in life,

01:51:46.560 | "you have to work harder."

01:51:47.500 | And that's what he instilled in myself and my brother,

01:51:49.480 | and he always pushed us to make the most of ourselves.

01:51:52.640 | And when we did that,

01:51:55.220 | everything changed overnight when my father got arrested.

01:51:59.860 | Obviously, it's very embarrassing for a family

01:52:01.900 | when you're on the front page of the papers.

01:52:03.460 | I would see the newspapers writing all these things

01:52:06.240 | about my father that I didn't think were representative

01:52:09.580 | of the person that I knew.

01:52:12.660 | It was a big change for our family.

01:52:15.680 | And I was angry, I was angry.

01:52:17.480 | I said I could be angry at the prosecutor,

01:52:19.800 | I could be angry at my father's brother,

01:52:22.360 | I could be angry at my father's lawyers,

01:52:24.000 | I could be angry at my father for making this mistake.

01:52:27.680 | And then I said, "That's not gonna change anything."

01:52:31.040 | And I had a real shift, and I do think

01:52:33.680 | that that was a turning point in my life

01:52:35.360 | where I basically said,

01:52:37.260 | "Let me focus on the things I can control,

01:52:39.420 | "let me focus on the positive things I can do."

01:52:42.040 | And from that moment forward, I said,

01:52:43.400 | "How can I be a great son to my father?

01:52:45.100 | "How could I be a great older brother/substitute father

01:52:49.120 | "for my two sisters and my younger brother?

01:52:51.560 | "How could I be there for my mother?

01:52:52.860 | "How could I be there for my father's business?"

01:52:55.220 | And I just went into battle mode,

01:52:57.360 | and I put my armor on and I just ran into it.

01:53:01.800 | And for the next two years, every day was painful.

01:53:05.060 | I mean, I was dealing with banks,

01:53:06.020 | I was dealing with the company who still had subpoenas.

01:53:08.060 | I was still in law school.

01:53:08.960 | I tell my father I wanted to drop out

01:53:10.880 | of law school and business school,

01:53:11.920 | but he said, "Please don't."

01:53:12.880 | So I would basically go to law school one day a week,

01:53:16.040 | or maybe I'd skip it most days,

01:53:17.480 | and I'd go to his office every day.

01:53:18.720 | And my friends would joke

01:53:20.080 | that if my professors wanted to fail me,

01:53:21.920 | the law professor would have to give me a test

01:53:24.660 | that had four pictures and say,

01:53:25.940 | "Circle who your professor is."

01:53:27.560 | But I would basically take a week off,

01:53:28.880 | I'd read the books, and I did well, and I got my degrees.

01:53:32.260 | And it was just a very, very challenging time.

01:53:34.600 | But like I said to you before,

01:53:36.380 | is that you learn the most about life,

01:53:38.920 | and you learn the most about humanity and yourself

01:53:42.240 | when you're in your most challenging periods.

01:53:44.000 | And I'll say that that experience also changed

01:53:48.320 | the people I interacted with.

01:53:49.720 | Spending weekends with my father

01:53:51.260 | down in a prison in Alabama,

01:53:52.960 | I met the other inmates, I met their families.

01:53:56.120 | I spent time then trying to advise

01:53:58.800 | the children of other people

01:53:59.960 | who were going through the same experience

01:54:01.520 | that I'd gone through on how to navigate it correctly.

01:54:05.320 | And you just learn a lot about the world,

01:54:06.920 | and you see that in life,

01:54:09.200 | everything could get taken from you,

01:54:10.560 | your status, your money, your friends.

01:54:12.560 | I saw that certain people were very disloyal

01:54:16.160 | to my father at the time, who he thought were friends.

01:54:18.480 | It was only a handful, but again,

01:54:20.500 | I learned from those people,

01:54:21.480 | how can I be a true friend to people?

01:54:23.420 | How can I be better?

01:54:25.040 | And I learned a tremendous amount through that experience.

01:54:29.080 | - You write that your father told you,

01:54:30.960 | while being humble, I'd love to ask you about this,

01:54:33.880 | that in life sometimes we get so powerful

01:54:36.000 | that we start to think we're the dealers of our own fate.

01:54:39.960 | We're not the dealers, God is the dealer.

01:54:42.480 | Sometimes we have to be brought back down to earth

01:54:44.520 | to get perspective on what is really important.

01:54:47.000 | What do you think he meant by that?

01:54:48.400 | What did you learn from that experience?

01:54:51.080 | - The way I interpreted it at the time,

01:54:52.600 | and those were very, very memorable words,

01:54:54.680 | and it occurred, I was down,

01:54:56.520 | after I picked up my father from the arraignment,

01:54:58.920 | I drove him down, I drove the car,

01:55:00.960 | and my father and I were very, very close,

01:55:03.400 | and he didn't say a word for the whole time.

01:55:05.280 | And I think he was processing, number one,

01:55:08.720 | what was happening to him, and I couldn't even imagine,

01:55:12.180 | but I actually think the bigger pain for him,

01:55:14.240 | because my father is such a committed person to the family,

01:55:17.600 | is like, did I let my family down?

01:55:19.400 | Did I let my kids down?

01:55:20.560 | And I do think he felt at that moment

01:55:22.640 | like his life was over.

01:55:24.140 | He couldn't really see past

01:55:25.920 | what this challenge was gonna bring,

01:55:28.720 | and if there would be a life for him after it.

01:55:30.840 | So I could see that he had a lot of fear,

01:55:33.360 | and he really wasn't saying much.

01:55:34.640 | And then I didn't know what to do,

01:55:36.800 | and so I just stood by him and stood close.

01:55:39.640 | And later that day, or the next day,

01:55:44.640 | he got up and started walking.

01:55:46.240 | He had an ankle monitor.

01:55:47.200 | For whatever reason, the prosecutor was so aggressive,

01:55:50.240 | he was a flight risk,

01:55:51.080 | so they made him wear an ankle monitor.

01:55:52.440 | They were very, very aggressive and nasty.

01:55:54.120 | And at the time, my father was the biggest donor

01:55:56.360 | to Democrats, the prosecutor was a Republican.

01:55:58.480 | It was a very political thing.

01:56:00.480 | And what happened was is he was walking around the pool,

01:56:04.720 | and I just started walking with him.

01:56:05.880 | And he said to me, "Jared, in life,

01:56:07.960 | "sometimes we get so powerful

01:56:09.560 | "that we believe that we're the dealer."

01:56:12.280 | He says, "But we're not the dealer.

01:56:13.120 | "God's the dealer, and we have to come down to earth

01:56:15.960 | "to understand," like you said.

01:56:17.320 | So what I took from that was that my father,

01:56:20.200 | with all of his success, had started to believe

01:56:23.840 | that maybe certain rules didn't apply to him.

01:56:28.200 | And I think that that's where he made a mistake.

01:56:30.600 | And I think he had a lot of regret that he made the mistake.

01:56:32.840 | And my father is a very humble person.

01:56:35.080 | He's a very moral person.

01:56:37.280 | For me, with my humility, my brother and I joke

01:56:39.740 | that we give our credit for being humble,

01:56:41.600 | number one, to being Mets fans,

01:56:42.880 | because every year you have a lot of promise,

01:56:45.200 | and then it never ends up paying off,

01:56:46.640 | although now with Steve Cohen,

01:56:47.660 | hopefully we're on a different trajectory.

01:56:49.680 | But the other thing is also our mother.

01:56:51.240 | Our mother really raised us to be very humble,

01:56:57.880 | and we knew we had a lot, but every Sunday morning,

01:57:00.120 | my mom was there clipping the coupons.

01:57:01.640 | The cereal we ate in our house was based on,

01:57:04.600 | it was based on what was on sale versus what we liked.

01:57:08.400 | When we would have a problem with our teachers in school,

01:57:10.480 | and I'd say, "Well, the teacher doesn't like me,"

01:57:12.120 | she'd say, "Well, I'm not calling them.

01:57:13.300 | "It's your job to make the teacher like you."

01:57:15.440 | And so my mother gave us a lot of that.

01:57:18.040 | My father gave us a lot of the grounding.

01:57:20.720 | And I think during that time, my father was just realizing

01:57:24.960 | that maybe he had gotten disconnected

01:57:28.160 | from the grounding and the values.

01:57:31.980 | And again, I think he also accepted,

01:57:33.960 | maybe he could have blamed others

01:57:35.920 | for acting inappropriately,

01:57:37.200 | but I respect the fact that he took responsibility himself

01:57:40.760 | and said, "I can't control the actions of other people.

01:57:43.640 | "I can't control what they do is right and wrong.

01:57:46.060 | "I can just control my actions."

01:57:47.980 | And as I go on the next journeys in my life,

01:57:51.500 | and I go to government, I go to Washington,

01:57:53.420 | I mean, I even think through the craziness

01:57:55.400 | of going from visiting my father in a prison

01:57:58.160 | to 10 years later, sitting in the office in the White House

01:58:01.200 | next to the President of the United States.

01:58:03.280 | And I think about that story

01:58:05.720 | and that it's a story that only God could write.

01:58:08.240 | And I really believe that you have to have a lot of faith

01:58:10.880 | because the lows and the highs are both so extreme

01:58:15.880 | and unbelievable that I feel like those low moments

01:58:20.320 | in some ways allowed me to keep my grounding

01:58:22.520 | and to understand what was truly important in life

01:58:25.700 | for when I ended up going through those other moments.

01:58:28.500 | - Your father was betrayed, perhaps over money by siblings.

01:58:32.220 | Is there some deeper wisdom you can draw from that?

01:58:37.060 | Have you seen money or perhaps power

01:58:39.140 | cloud people's judgment?

01:58:41.060 | - Oh, 100%, 100%.

01:58:43.920 | - Is there some kind of optimistic thing you can take

01:58:48.920 | from that about human nature of how to escape

01:58:52.580 | that clouding of judgment when you're talking about leaders,

01:58:56.780 | when you're talking about government, even business?

01:59:01.520 | 'Cause you mentioned there's a power dynamics at play always

01:59:04.460 | when you're negotiating.

01:59:06.340 | Is there a way to see the common humanity

01:59:09.740 | and not see the sort of will to power in the whole thing?

01:59:13.300 | - Definitely, you mentioned about power, money corrupting.

01:59:17.340 | There's a great quote I heard a friend of mine say.

01:59:19.480 | It's a guy, Michael Harris, who was one of the founders

01:59:22.440 | of Death Row Records.

01:59:23.400 | And he was being interviewed recently

01:59:26.000 | and they asked him about what happened with Shook Knight.

01:59:28.720 | And his line was, "Money just makes you more

01:59:32.040 | "of what you already are,"

01:59:33.560 | which I thought was a very elegant way of saying it.

01:59:35.800 | And I would see this time and time again in the White House

01:59:39.440 | where you had people who were now given

01:59:41.440 | a lot of responsibility and power and it went to their head

01:59:44.840 | and they acted very crazily and maybe didn't act in a way

01:59:49.840 | that I thought was always conducive to the objective.

01:59:53.580 | So I think it's a very big problem that you have.

01:59:57.460 | Whether it's something that's solvable,

01:59:59.440 | I think it's about having the right leaders

02:00:01.020 | and hopefully for the leaders, having good friends.

02:00:03.100 | I mean, I'm still friends with a lot of the people

02:00:05.180 | I interacted with when I was in government.

02:00:06.900 | And the number one thing I try to be to them

02:00:09.540 | is just a good friend.

02:00:10.380 | I try to be somebody who they can talk about things with.

02:00:13.420 | I don't go in trying to tell them what to do

02:00:15.080 | on different things.

02:00:16.080 | And I think that that's a big thing

02:00:19.600 | is that people just need friends and they need conversation.

02:00:22.240 | And if they have that, then hopefully that allows them

02:00:24.360 | to keep their head in the right place.

02:00:26.920 | - I think this is a good place to ask

02:00:30.480 | about one aspect of the fascinating work you've done,

02:00:34.000 | which is on prison reform.

02:00:35.940 | Can you take me through your journey

02:00:37.340 | of helping the bipartisan bill get passed?

02:00:42.120 | Just working on prison reform in the White House in general,

02:00:44.960 | how you made that happen, how you help make that happen.

02:00:47.720 | - Sure.

02:00:48.600 | So we passed a law called the First Step Act,

02:00:52.220 | which was the largest prison and criminal justice reform bill

02:00:56.320 | that's been done maybe in 30, 40, 50 years in the US.

02:00:59.760 | And so what it basically did was two things.

02:01:02.840 | Number one is it took the prison system

02:01:05.780 | and it took a certain class of offenders

02:01:08.200 | and allowed them to become eligible for earlier release

02:01:11.600 | if they go through the certain trainings

02:01:14.280 | that will allow them to have a lower probability

02:01:17.120 | of going back.

02:01:17.960 | So stepping back, you look at the prison system,

02:01:21.080 | you say, what's the purpose?

02:01:22.160 | Is it to punish?

02:01:23.680 | Is it to warehouse?

02:01:24.800 | Is it to rehabilitate?

02:01:26.400 | And I do think that we're a country

02:01:28.040 | that believes in second chances.

02:01:29.400 | I saw firsthand when my father was a client of the system,

02:01:33.680 | how inefficient it was and how much better it could be.

02:01:36.840 | And when my father got out,

02:01:38.880 | we didn't run from that experience.

02:01:40.520 | We started hiring people from Rikers Island

02:01:42.680 | and different prisons into the company

02:01:45.560 | into a second chance program,

02:01:47.600 | which we're very, very proud of doing.

02:01:49.440 | And what we saw through our micro experience

02:01:51.800 | was that if you give people mentorship,

02:01:54.360 | if you give them job training,

02:01:56.260 | a lot of people leave, they have addiction issues

02:01:59.720 | and they can't find housing.

02:02:00.800 | And so people leave prison with a criminal record

02:02:04.520 | and they're less likely to go back

02:02:07.400 | and reintegrate in society without help

02:02:10.280 | from different institutions that can help them do that.

02:02:15.240 | So we modeled the reforms off of what they did in Texas

02:02:17.800 | and Georgia and other states

02:02:19.560 | where they basically put a lot of job training,

02:02:21.560 | alcohol and addiction treatment programs in the prisons

02:02:25.120 | as a way to incentivize the prisoners to work on themselves

02:02:28.900 | while they're there in order to allow them

02:02:31.040 | to reenter society.

02:02:32.920 | It's turned out to be very successful so far.

02:02:34.620 | They just had a report that showed that

02:02:36.760 | the general population has had a 47% recidivism rate,

02:02:41.200 | meaning that people who leave federal prison,

02:02:43.280 | half of them go back

02:02:44.640 | and people who have now taken this program,

02:02:46.480 | only 12% of them go back.

02:02:48.020 | So number one, you're making communities safer

02:02:50.600 | because if people are gonna now get a job

02:02:52.800 | and enter society instead of committing future crimes,

02:02:55.040 | you're avoiding future crimes.

02:02:56.760 | And number two, you're giving people a second chance at life.

02:03:00.680 | And so that was the first part of it.

02:03:02.240 | The second thing we did was there was a rule passed

02:03:05.180 | in the '90s that basically penalized crack cocaine

02:03:10.180 | at a hundred times the penalty of what regular cocaine was.

02:03:14.780 | And I think a lot of the motivations

02:03:16.700 | what people say in retrospect

02:03:18.560 | was that crack was more of a black drug

02:03:20.660 | and cocaine was more of a white drug.

02:03:22.560 | And so there was a really racial disparity

02:03:24.840 | in terms of what the application of these sentences were.

02:03:28.020 | So they then revised that to make it 18 to one.

02:03:32.400 | And what we did in this bill

02:03:33.720 | is we allowed it to go retroactive

02:03:35.540 | to allow people who were in prison with sentences

02:03:38.820 | under what we thought was the racist law

02:03:41.860 | to be able to make an application to a judge

02:03:43.920 | in order to be dismissed.

02:03:44.980 | And it was based on good behavior,

02:03:46.680 | being rehabilitated and the fact

02:03:50.020 | that they would have a low probability

02:03:51.420 | of offending in the future.

02:03:52.880 | And so that was really the meat of it.

02:03:54.300 | And there was a couple other things in there we did as well,

02:03:56.260 | which were also quite good.

02:03:58.300 | So we did it, worked very closely

02:04:01.300 | with the Democrats, Republicans to do it.

02:04:03.920 | At first, President Trump was a little bit skeptical of it

02:04:06.200 | because he's a big, strong law and order supporter,

02:04:09.480 | but he made me work very hard

02:04:11.000 | to put together a coalition of Republicans and Democrats

02:04:14.480 | and law enforcement.

02:04:15.480 | We had the support from the policemen,

02:04:19.680 | we had the support from the ACLU,

02:04:21.560 | and ultimately we were able to get it together.

02:04:23.320 | And it was an amazing thing.

02:04:24.880 | We ended up getting 87 votes in the Senate.

02:04:28.240 | This happened for me at a time,

02:04:31.060 | while the Russia investigation stuff was still happening,

02:04:34.980 | a new chief of staff came in, John Kelly,

02:04:36.940 | he basically marginalized me and the operations.

02:04:39.840 | So I had kind of less day-to-day responsibilities

02:04:42.220 | in the White House.

02:04:43.300 | And so for me, this effort became

02:04:45.140 | one of my full-time efforts

02:04:46.380 | along with negotiating the Mexico trade deal

02:04:49.300 | and along with the Middle East efforts.

02:04:51.500 | And the reason why that was great

02:04:52.980 | was because it didn't have a lot of support

02:04:55.700 | from the Republican caucus originally,

02:04:57.980 | and people thought there was no way it would happen.

02:05:00.300 | So I really was able to be the chief executive,

02:05:03.680 | the middle executive, the low executive, the intern.

02:05:06.540 | And through that process, I really got an education

02:05:09.740 | on how Congress works, on how to pass legislation.

02:05:12.500 | I was negotiating texts, I was negotiating back and forth,

02:05:15.620 | and I built a lot of trust.

02:05:16.760 | Again, I would deal with, whether it's Hakeem Jeffries

02:05:18.860 | or Cedric Richmond, we built a lot of trust.

02:05:21.460 | We'd speak three times a day.

02:05:23.080 | These guys had my back, the ACLU.

02:05:25.740 | Again, I never thought they were suing our administration

02:05:27.700 | every day or every other day on something,

02:05:29.460 | but for whatever reason, we built trust

02:05:31.540 | and we were able to work together.

02:05:33.240 | And then also with the real conservative groups,

02:05:36.500 | because there was a lot, a big part of the conservative base

02:05:39.280 | that felt like we should be giving people a second chance.

02:05:42.420 | And in addition to that, this will keep our country safer

02:05:45.700 | and it will reduce the cost of what we spend on prisons.

02:05:47.980 | And so it was a great effort, and I was very, very proud

02:05:51.340 | that we were able to get it done under President Trump.

02:05:53.860 | - How'd you convince the Republicans?

02:05:55.580 | So they were skeptical at first.

02:05:57.540 | Are we talking about like just phone conversations,

02:06:00.060 | going out to lunch, just back to the emojis or what?

02:06:03.820 | - Hand-to-hand combat, meetings.

02:06:05.740 | You know, like the cool thing about this is,

02:06:07.220 | so everyone always says, I always get frustrated

02:06:09.820 | when I hear a lawmaker say, "Oh, the Senate's not

02:06:11.980 | "what it used to be," or "Congress isn't what it used to be.

02:06:14.880 | "Things are broken today."

02:06:16.220 | I don't think that's true.

02:06:17.380 | I think, you know, going through the process,

02:06:19.960 | I think that our founders were totally genius

02:06:22.820 | in the way that they designed our system of government.

02:06:25.940 | And what I saw is you just have to work it.

02:06:27.620 | So everyone knows the power of their vote.

02:06:29.960 | Some would give it to me easily,

02:06:31.220 | some wouldn't give it to me easily,

02:06:32.380 | some would trade it for other things,

02:06:33.740 | some would withhold it because they were pissed

02:06:35.180 | about other things, and it was just hand-to-hand combat.

02:06:37.780 | So it was just making calls, using the phone,

02:06:39.940 | going, walking the halls, going to lunches,

02:06:41.900 | you know, hosting dinners at my house.

02:06:43.340 | It was just, it was a nonstop lobbying effort.

02:06:46.380 | And by the way, it was also adjudicating issues

02:06:48.100 | and making people feel like they were heard,

02:06:50.280 | hearing their issues, and then trying to find solutions

02:06:53.180 | that you don't put something in that then tips off

02:06:56.180 | where you lose, you know, a whole coalition.

02:06:58.100 | So it was really a balancing act,

02:06:59.540 | but it was an amazing thing.

02:07:01.380 | And I worked very closely on that with Van Jones

02:07:04.260 | and Jessica Jackson, who also gave me a lot of help

02:07:06.860 | on the left, and it was an amazing thing.

02:07:10.020 | Had a great team, too.

02:07:11.220 | - So you mentioned the importance of trust

02:07:12.980 | at the very beginning of the conversation.

02:07:15.080 | From the outsider perspective,

02:07:18.180 | just maybe a dark question,

02:07:20.780 | which is like how much trust is there in Washington?

02:07:25.060 | How much, the flip side of that,

02:07:27.500 | how much backstabbing is there?

02:07:29.780 | Can you form like long-term relationships with people

02:07:34.620 | on a basic human level where you know

02:07:39.780 | you're not going to be betrayed, screwed over,

02:07:43.260 | manipulated for, again, going back to the old money and power?

02:07:47.260 | - The answer is yes, and the answer is no.

02:07:50.340 | So I made some incredible friends, lifelong friends,

02:07:53.980 | through my time in Washington.

02:07:55.860 | But the way I think about it from politics,

02:07:58.900 | and I think in geopolitics as well,

02:08:00.500 | is I would say that politicians

02:08:02.660 | really don't have friends, politicians have interests.

02:08:05.620 | And as long as you kind of follow that rule,

02:08:08.140 | you should be able to know how to rate

02:08:11.980 | where your relationship with a given person falls

02:08:15.140 | in the spectrum.

02:08:16.040 | But I do think I was the exception.

02:08:17.460 | I did make some tremendous friends,

02:08:19.580 | and again, I'd go back to what I said about negotiation,

02:08:23.180 | where when you're in a situation

02:08:26.180 | where there's really nothing in it

02:08:27.780 | for any of you personally,

02:08:29.940 | but you're in a foxhole together,

02:08:31.260 | and nobody in Washington

02:08:32.340 | can get anything done by themselves.

02:08:33.860 | So you have people coming from all different backgrounds,

02:08:35.900 | all different experiences, all different geographies,

02:08:38.800 | coming together, agreeing on an objective,

02:08:41.500 | creating a plan, and then every day rowing together

02:08:44.500 | in order to get it done.

02:08:45.940 | It's a beautiful thing,

02:08:46.860 | and you really learn what people are about.

02:08:48.660 | And so when you go through an experience like that,

02:08:51.740 | you learn who's in it for themselves,

02:08:53.120 | you learn who's in it for the cause.

02:08:54.520 | And for every thing you read about in the press,

02:08:57.660 | if a fight I had with somebody because we were at odds,

02:09:00.860 | I have about 100 people who have become lifelong friends

02:09:04.200 | because I respect the way

02:09:06.220 | that when we were under fire together,

02:09:07.820 | they got better, they were competent,

02:09:09.700 | and they were there to serve for the right reason.

02:09:11.400 | And so I guess the answer is yes, it is possible.

02:09:15.740 | You have to be careful

02:09:16.620 | because there are a lot of mercurial people there.

02:09:20.100 | I always say the politicians are like gladiators.

02:09:22.540 | I didn't have as much respect for politicians

02:09:25.460 | till I got there, but if you think about it,

02:09:26.900 | everyone who's got a congressional seat or a Senate seat,

02:09:30.100 | there's 25 people back at home who want their job,

02:09:32.540 | who think they're smarter than them,

02:09:33.700 | who are trying to backstab them.

02:09:35.500 | And so I always say that the political dynamic,

02:09:38.540 | it's like in the private sector,

02:09:40.700 | you're standing on flat ground.

02:09:42.260 | You choose which fights you take on,

02:09:44.300 | when you take them on, how you fight them.

02:09:46.660 | In politics, it's like you're standing on a ball.

02:09:49.140 | And what you have to realize is that

02:09:51.140 | there's maybe like 10 things that you have to do,

02:09:53.620 | but there's a potential cost to taking on each one

02:09:56.260 | that might destabilize you.

02:09:57.980 | You fall off the ball,

02:09:59.140 | and then you lose your opportunity to pursue those.

02:10:01.660 | You have to always be kind of marking everything to market

02:10:05.500 | and going through your calculations

02:10:07.600 | to make sure you can accomplish what you want to

02:10:10.020 | without falling off the ball

02:10:11.860 | and losing your opportunity to make a difference.

02:10:14.460 | - I guess people like power.

02:10:16.020 | And I just feel like to be a good politician,

02:10:20.980 | you should be willing, like good meaning good for humanity,

02:10:24.780 | be willing to let go of power.

02:10:26.420 | You know, try to do the right thing.

02:10:29.280 | If there's somebody back home

02:10:31.220 | that does manipulative stuff,

02:10:32.460 | screws you over and takes power from you, it's okay.

02:10:35.660 | I feel like that kind of humility

02:10:39.820 | is required to be a great leader.

02:10:42.340 | And I feel like that's actually a good way

02:10:44.060 | to have long-term power

02:10:45.820 | because karma has a viral aspect to it.

02:10:49.620 | Just doing good by others, I feel like is a--

02:10:53.620 | - I'd like to say that's true, Lex.

02:10:55.580 | I think it's just way more complicated.

02:10:58.700 | I mean, you look what happened this week

02:10:59.960 | with Kevin McCarthy, right?

02:11:01.620 | He did what he thought was morally right.

02:11:03.900 | He thought, you know, he did a bipartisan deal.

02:11:07.500 | He was told that they would have his back

02:11:09.660 | and then the moment things got tough, they cut him loose.

02:11:12.060 | So again, I don't know if that was the right thing

02:11:15.660 | or the wrong thing, right?

02:11:16.500 | I've also seen leaders on the other end say,

02:11:19.100 | I'm gonna do things that are short-term or selfish,

02:11:23.220 | but the way they justify to themselves is to say,

02:11:26.420 | I believe that myself staying in power

02:11:29.020 | is existential to the greater good,

02:11:31.940 | so I will do things that maybe are not

02:11:33.900 | in the greater good now

02:11:35.140 | because I believe that my maintaining power is.

02:11:39.740 | And so it's complicated.

02:11:41.780 | In an idealized world, I'd love to believe that's the case,

02:11:44.140 | but it's just way more complicated than that.

02:11:46.820 | - Yeah.

02:11:48.220 | - I wish it wasn't, but it is.

02:11:50.300 | - Yeah.

02:11:51.140 | I mean, I do just wish people zoomed out,

02:11:56.060 | people in politics zoomed out a bit

02:11:57.540 | and just asked themselves, what are we all doing this for?

02:12:00.560 | You know, like sometimes you can get like a little bit lost

02:12:03.800 | in the game of it.

02:12:05.540 | If you zoom out, you realize like integrity

02:12:07.700 | is way more important than like little gains in money

02:12:12.180 | or little gains in power in the long-term.

02:12:15.660 | It's when you look at yourself in the mirror

02:12:17.140 | at the end of the day,

02:12:18.860 | and also how history remembers you.

02:12:21.380 | I just feel like people do some dark stuff

02:12:26.380 | when they're like in that moment when they're losing power

02:12:29.820 | and they try to hold on a little too hard.

02:12:32.540 | This is when they can do really dark things,

02:12:36.060 | like bring out the worst in themselves.

02:12:38.620 | And it's just sad to see,

02:12:40.500 | and I wish there was a kind of machinery of government

02:12:43.580 | would inspire people to be their best selves

02:12:46.860 | in their last days versus their worst selves.

02:12:49.940 | - When that system gets invented,

02:12:51.780 | you know, you'll share with me what it is,

02:12:53.620 | but it's, look, let me give you another way to frame it,

02:12:56.500 | which is, and this was kind of the revelation

02:12:58.980 | we spoke before about, you know,

02:13:00.860 | kind of when I was getting my butt kicked

02:13:02.260 | by the Russia investigation and all the different areas,

02:13:05.780 | but kind of the basic framework I looked at was I said,

02:13:07.940 | "Okay, you know, this all feels tough,"

02:13:10.460 | but I said, "The game's the game.

02:13:11.460 | "The game's been here way longer, you know,

02:13:14.320 | "but way before I came,

02:13:15.380 | "and it'll be here way long after I leave."

02:13:18.420 | And so I have two choices.

02:13:19.860 | I can complain that the game's tough, it's not fair,

02:13:22.060 | it's not moral, or I can go and I can try to play the game

02:13:24.860 | as hard as possible.

02:13:25.980 | And I think that there's two different things, right?

02:13:28.420 | You have people who are willing to kind of sit in the stands

02:13:30.780 | and they're willing to yell at the players

02:13:32.660 | or make their points known,

02:13:37.620 | or you have people who are willing to suit up

02:13:39.020 | and get in the arena and go play.

02:13:40.500 | And I have a lot of respect for the people

02:13:42.980 | who suit up and go play.

02:13:44.540 | And again, some of them, you know,

02:13:46.340 | I wish they would play for different means,

02:13:48.020 | but the fact that they're willing to put their name

02:13:49.460 | on the ballot, make the sacrifice,

02:13:51.620 | and go put on the pads and get hit and hit others,

02:13:54.300 | I think that you need those people.

02:13:56.020 | And I wish more people who had maybe the moral wiring

02:13:59.060 | that you discussed would be putting on a helmet

02:14:01.740 | and going to play, 'cause it's hard, it's hard.

02:14:04.060 | - I agree with you.

02:14:05.140 | I just would love to fix the aspect

02:14:07.260 | of the Russia collusion accusation,

02:14:09.420 | the virality, the power of that,

02:14:10.740 | 'cause that's a really discouraging thing for people.

02:14:14.140 | Maybe it's the way it has to be,

02:14:15.260 | but it seems like a disincentive to people to participate.

02:14:20.140 | - It is, but I'll give you again an optimistic side of it,

02:14:23.060 | is that, you know, what you're seeing now with social media

02:14:26.020 | is I do think with what's happening at X,

02:14:29.540 | there is now more of a reversion

02:14:31.700 | towards more egalitarian, right?

02:14:33.460 | And egalitarianism of information.

02:14:37.080 | And so for many years,

02:14:39.140 | the media publications were the gate holders,

02:14:42.060 | they were the gatekeepers.

02:14:43.660 | And then you had these social media companies that grew,

02:14:46.220 | they became so powerful,

02:14:47.960 | but then they were tilting the scales,

02:14:49.580 | why they were doing it, you know,

02:14:52.180 | we can go through long explanations for that.

02:14:54.680 | But if there truly is a real forum

02:14:56.700 | and a democratization of information,

02:14:58.820 | then you would think that the marketplace of ideas

02:15:00.820 | would surface the real ones and discredit the non-real ones.

02:15:04.060 | And I think that as a society,

02:15:05.300 | we're starting to kind of come to grips with the fact

02:15:07.860 | that the power dynamic is changing

02:15:10.420 | and that some of these institutions

02:15:12.440 | that we used to have a lot of faith in

02:15:14.300 | don't deserve our faith.

02:15:15.400 | And some of them, you know,

02:15:16.460 | will actually reform and maybe re-earn our faith.

02:15:18.620 | So I think that there could be an optimistic tone.

02:15:22.220 | Again, the years of Trump,

02:15:23.500 | I think that, you know, he was an outsider

02:15:27.160 | and, you know, he represented something

02:15:29.280 | that was existential to the system, right?

02:15:31.400 | You think about for the 30 years before,

02:15:33.800 | you were either part of, you know,

02:15:34.860 | the Clinton dynasty or the Bush dynasty.

02:15:37.480 | I think a lot of people in the country felt like

02:15:40.520 | that whole class,

02:15:41.760 | whether you were wearing a red shirt or a blue shirt,

02:15:43.440 | wasn't representing them.

02:15:45.520 | And Trump represented a true outsider to that system.

02:15:49.100 | And I do think that as he went in there,

02:15:51.200 | there was a lot of norms that were broken

02:15:53.680 | to try to stop him from

02:15:55.520 | changing the traditional power structure.

02:15:57.440 | So I think that we're at a time where

02:16:00.480 | maybe there will be an optimistic breakthrough

02:16:04.560 | where you'll have institutions that will allow

02:16:06.640 | for a lot more transparency into what truth really is.

02:16:11.180 | - I'd love to go back and talk to you about the Middle East

02:16:15.080 | 'cause there's so many interesting components to this.

02:16:17.960 | Let's talk about Saudi Arabia.

02:16:19.760 | And first, let me ask you about MBS,

02:16:22.880 | Mohammed bin Salman, the Crown Prince.

02:16:25.120 | So you've gotten to know him pretty well.

02:16:26.560 | You've become friends with him.

02:16:28.320 | What's he like as a human being,

02:16:29.640 | just on a basic human level?

02:16:31.200 | What's he like?

02:16:32.040 | - So for the listeners,

02:16:33.880 | Mohammed bin Salman is now the Crown Prince of Saudi Arabia.

02:16:37.800 | He has risen to that position

02:16:40.080 | over the last couple of years.

02:16:41.460 | And he's been a tremendous reformer for the country.

02:16:44.640 | He's gone in and he's really modernized the economy.

02:16:48.160 | He's put a lot more investment into the country.

02:16:50.880 | He's marginalized the religious police

02:16:54.360 | and he's really done a good job

02:16:55.880 | to bring modernization and a lot of reform.

02:16:58.520 | So he's been a great reformer.

02:17:00.480 | What he's like as a person is he's very high energy.

02:17:05.160 | He's got a tremendous candle power, very, very smart,

02:17:09.720 | incredibly well-read.

02:17:10.720 | When he was younger, his father would give him a book a week

02:17:14.040 | and make him report on it on the weekend.

02:17:16.980 | He was trained as a leader and as a politician

02:17:19.960 | really by his father.

02:17:21.880 | He's not Western educated.

02:17:23.120 | So he grew up in the Saudi culture

02:17:25.840 | and he's a real Saudi nationalist.

02:17:27.440 | He loves their history, loves their heritage,

02:17:30.480 | has a deep understanding of the tribal nature of the region.

02:17:35.380 | And his father was actually known

02:17:37.740 | to be a tremendous politician.

02:17:39.400 | So when he was governor of Riyadh,

02:17:41.760 | people who I speak to today about him say that

02:17:44.300 | if they had a full election,

02:17:45.600 | he would have won in a landslide.

02:17:46.920 | He's every time somebody went to the hospital,

02:17:48.680 | he was the first person to call.

02:17:50.540 | Anytime there was a funeral,

02:17:51.700 | he was the first person to show up.

02:17:53.640 | He's a very, very beloved leader.

02:17:55.440 | Mohammed bin Salman, he was a businessman

02:17:59.720 | before he got into Crown Prince.

02:18:01.760 | So he thinks really with a business mindset

02:18:05.280 | about how he runs the country.

02:18:07.540 | And he's brought, I think, a different mindset and energy

02:18:10.840 | to the Middle East.

02:18:12.560 | One thing I'll say that maybe that comes to mind here

02:18:15.240 | is that I remember early on talking with him

02:18:19.280 | about all the different initiatives he was taking on.

02:18:22.040 | He's building a big city called Neom in the desert

02:18:25.120 | in a place where there really was nothing on the Red Sea.

02:18:27.600 | And a lot of people were criticizing

02:18:28.940 | the ambition of the plan.

02:18:30.160 | And I was sitting with him one night and I said,

02:18:31.880 | "Why are you taking on all these things?

02:18:34.440 | You've got a lot of different programs,

02:18:36.480 | but what most politicians do is they set lower expectations

02:18:40.240 | and then they exceed the expectations."

02:18:41.780 | And he looked at me without hesitation.

02:18:43.260 | He says, "Jared, the way I look at it

02:18:46.640 | is that in five years from now, if I set five goals

02:18:49.660 | and I achieve five goals, I'll achieve five things.

02:18:52.180 | If I set 100 goals and I fail at 50 of them,

02:18:55.260 | then five years I'll accomplish 50 things."

02:18:57.260 | And so it's a very different mindset as a leader.

02:19:00.820 | The way I got to work with him was,

02:19:02.840 | Saudi Arabia was a big topic in the campaign.

02:19:06.420 | President Trump was basically saying during the campaign

02:19:09.180 | that they've got to pay for their fair share,

02:19:12.380 | they haven't been a great partner in the region.

02:19:14.620 | He's very critical of Saudi.

02:19:16.900 | And then during the transition,

02:19:19.220 | I was asked by several friends to meet

02:19:20.760 | with a representative of Saudi Arabia.

02:19:22.180 | I said, "I don't wanna meet with them."

02:19:24.060 | But I came over and I met and they said,

02:19:25.620 | "Well, we wanna make changes."

02:19:26.940 | And I said, "Well, you have to make changes

02:19:29.820 | to how you treat women."

02:19:30.860 | Then women couldn't drive, they had guardianship laws.

02:19:33.060 | So you gotta start working with Israel.

02:19:35.740 | You have to be paying more of your fair share

02:19:37.420 | and you have to be stopping the Wahhabism

02:19:39.740 | that's being spread.

02:19:41.660 | Again, I had no knowledge.

02:19:42.780 | These were just kind of the traditional talking points

02:19:44.820 | about Saudi Arabia.

02:19:45.740 | So the guy I was with basically said,

02:19:48.140 | is a guy Fadal Tunzi,

02:19:49.620 | who's a very respected minister there.

02:19:52.180 | He says, Jared, he says,

02:19:54.380 | "You don't know much about Saudi Arabia, do you?"

02:19:56.020 | I said, "No, no, no, I don't.

02:19:57.100 | It's just really what I've kind of been told or what I read."

02:20:01.340 | And he says, "Okay, let me do this.

02:20:03.200 | We wanna be great allies with America.

02:20:06.220 | We've traditionally been great allies with America.

02:20:09.260 | Can I come back to you with a proposal

02:20:10.880 | on ways that we can make progress

02:20:12.460 | on all of the different areas where we have joint interests?"

02:20:15.180 | And keep in mind at that point in time,

02:20:16.620 | the Middle East was a mess

02:20:17.740 | and probably the single biggest issue we had

02:20:20.900 | after ISIS was the ideological battle.

02:20:23.580 | If you remember in 2016,

02:20:25.860 | there was the Pulse nightclub shooting in Orlando,

02:20:28.420 | you had the San Bernardino shooting

02:20:30.380 | and people were being radicalized online with the extremism.

02:20:34.820 | And then there was a lot of crimes

02:20:36.060 | that were happening because of that.

02:20:38.300 | And it was a big topic in the campaign.

02:20:40.580 | And so that, when I was thinking about,

02:20:42.800 | talking to different generals

02:20:43.920 | and what capabilities the US had to really combat

02:20:47.280 | the extremism and the ideological battle,

02:20:49.480 | what we realized was that Saudi Arabia

02:20:51.320 | is the custodian of the two holiest sites in Islam,

02:20:54.080 | the Mecca, Medina,

02:20:56.360 | that that would be the best partner to work with

02:20:58.320 | if they were willing to.

02:20:59.160 | But for years, they really hadn't been willing

02:21:00.960 | to kind of lean into this fight.

02:21:03.200 | So I said, "Sure, give a proposal."

02:21:05.400 | So they come back, give a proposal.

02:21:06.560 | And they said, "Look, if you make President Trump's

02:21:08.520 | first trip to Saudi Arabia,

02:21:10.160 | we will do all these different things.

02:21:14.100 | We'll increase our military spending and cooperation.

02:21:16.500 | We'll counter all the terror financing."

02:21:18.820 | Unbelievable layer.

02:21:20.740 | So I took the proposal.

02:21:21.900 | I went to the national, then it was General Flynn.

02:21:23.720 | I said, "If Saudi Arabia did these things,

02:21:27.660 | would this be considered a big,

02:21:29.660 | unbelievable, but it will never happen?"

02:21:31.140 | I said, "Well, they're telling me

02:21:32.300 | they wanna do these things."

02:21:33.340 | Again, having no foreign policy experience,

02:21:35.260 | I'm just saying I've got somebody telling me

02:21:36.700 | they wanna do it.

02:21:37.520 | And that's kind of where we started.

02:21:40.540 | Again, to office, I don't think much more about it.

02:21:43.220 | And then I think it was like maybe a month in,

02:21:45.220 | President Trump has a call with King Salman.

02:21:49.400 | And before the call, we're in the Oval Office.

02:21:52.240 | And the President's basically saying,

02:21:54.460 | "Well, this is what we wanna go through."

02:21:57.500 | And I have Secretary Mattis and Secretary Tillerson,

02:22:01.440 | the Minister of Defense and the Secretary of State

02:22:03.580 | basically saying, "You have to deal with MBN."

02:22:07.600 | MBN is the guy who's been our partner for all these years.

02:22:10.620 | He's the head of intelligence and he's been a great partner.

02:22:12.500 | I said, "Well, if he's been a great partner,

02:22:13.820 | then why do we have all these problems

02:22:15.580 | that you guys are complaining about with Saudi?"

02:22:17.500 | I said, "I've been told that we have this proposal

02:22:19.420 | from MBS, who's the deputy crown prince,

02:22:22.260 | and that's who we should be dealing with on this."

02:22:24.640 | And so the phone call starts,

02:22:27.140 | and President Trump listened to both of us.

02:22:29.360 | And on the phone call with King Salman,

02:22:32.940 | President Trump says, "Okay,

02:22:33.860 | we'll go through all these things.

02:22:34.820 | These are the things we wanna get done."

02:22:36.580 | And he says, "Well, who should we deal with?"

02:22:38.340 | And King Salman says, "Deal with my son,

02:22:41.140 | the deputy crown prince, MBS."

02:22:42.980 | And so President Trump's on the phone,

02:22:44.820 | have him deal with Jared,

02:22:46.460 | because I think he knew that if he put him

02:22:48.340 | with the other guys, they were not believers

02:22:50.560 | in what he had the ability to do.

02:22:52.540 | And that's how I got assigned to work with him.

02:22:54.660 | I get back to my office after that,

02:22:55.980 | have an email from him, spoke to him for the first time.

02:22:58.700 | And then we just went to work.

02:22:59.820 | And a lot of people were betting against that trip.

02:23:02.660 | They thought it wasn't gonna be successful.

02:23:04.620 | And they've been betting against him.

02:23:06.100 | And he's been underestimated,

02:23:08.400 | but he's been doing an incredible job.

02:23:10.600 | And the whole Middle East is different today

02:23:12.580 | because of the work that he's done.

02:23:14.940 | - Maybe it's instructive to go through the mental journey

02:23:17.460 | that you went on from the talking points,

02:23:20.380 | the basic narratives, the very basic talking points,

02:23:23.660 | understanding of Saudi Arabia,

02:23:26.220 | to making that human connection with MBS,

02:23:31.820 | and making the positive connection

02:23:33.500 | that it's actually possible to solve problems.

02:23:35.020 | Like, what was that journey like?

02:23:37.180 | Why was it so difficult to take for others?

02:23:39.340 | And why were you effective in being able

02:23:42.140 | to take that journey yourself?

02:23:43.660 | - Maybe some of it came from my inexperience,

02:23:46.620 | but my desire to listen and hear people.

02:23:50.360 | So, I had this proposal.

02:23:52.460 | I was told that all of these things were good.

02:23:54.900 | Then we're trying to schedule this trip.

02:23:56.820 | And the National Security Council calls a meeting

02:23:59.180 | where we're in the situation room,

02:24:00.500 | and we have Homeland Security,

02:24:03.460 | Secretary of Defense, Secretary of State,

02:24:05.660 | and everyone's saying, "This is gonna be a disaster."

02:24:07.660 | They said, "If we go to Saudi Arabia,

02:24:09.140 | "the Saudis never keep their promises."

02:24:11.240 | And our Secretary of State at the time

02:24:13.220 | was a gentleman named Rex Tillerson,

02:24:15.300 | who'd been the CEO of Exxon.

02:24:17.480 | So, he dealt with all these people very extensively.

02:24:20.860 | And he basically said, "In my experience,

02:24:22.840 | "the Saudis won't come through.

02:24:24.060 | "And Jared, you don't know what you're doing.

02:24:25.340 | "You're wasting your time."

02:24:27.060 | And I basically was at a point where I said,

02:24:28.560 | "Look, guys, but they're saying

02:24:30.720 | "they wanna do all these things.

02:24:31.820 | "Shouldn't we at least give 'em a chance to try to do it?

02:24:34.620 | "Why do we wanna predetermine their direction

02:24:39.540 | "by not giving them a chance to change?

02:24:41.200 | "Just because things in the past

02:24:42.460 | "haven't gotten the way you want them to,

02:24:44.260 | "that doesn't mean they can't go that way in the future."

02:24:47.060 | So, we fought the battle.

02:24:48.380 | They basically deferred and let me go through with it.

02:24:51.100 | But when I do the planning meetings for the trip,

02:24:53.080 | nobody would show up,

02:24:54.060 | because they all thought

02:24:54.900 | it was gonna be an absolute disaster.

02:24:56.660 | And by the way, they probably weren't wrong to think that,

02:24:58.380 | 'cause I'd never planned a foreign trip before,

02:24:59.980 | and I'd never done any foreign policy before.

02:25:02.540 | So, during the planning, I'd speak to MBS almost every day,

02:25:06.020 | and I'd go through all the different details

02:25:07.700 | and the things that would be coming up.

02:25:09.800 | And I said, "Look, I really need

02:25:10.640 | "to get these things in writing."

02:25:11.840 | He sent over a guy, Dr. Masada Aiban,

02:25:14.900 | who's a tremendous diplomat for them.

02:25:17.420 | And he came to Washington, stayed for three weeks,

02:25:19.500 | and we worked through all the different details

02:25:21.620 | of what we needed,

02:25:22.920 | and we ended up coming to an arrangement

02:25:24.800 | on what it should be.

02:25:25.640 | So, I think about now, in retrospect,

02:25:28.620 | why I was so focused on getting things like this done,

02:25:32.580 | and why I even believed that they could be possible.

02:25:36.200 | But the answer is, is really,

02:25:38.080 | the people I was talking to on the other end

02:25:40.960 | were telling me that these things were possible.

02:25:42.800 | And so, just because they hadn't been done before,

02:25:45.720 | and just because others around me

02:25:47.600 | didn't believe that they could be done,

02:25:49.840 | I wasn't willing to just say, "Well, let's not try."

02:25:52.360 | It just seems like that cynicism that takes over

02:25:55.480 | is paralyzing.

02:25:57.760 | And you sent me a great essay from Paul Graham,

02:26:01.040 | I'm a big fan of,

02:26:02.760 | that I think explains a lot of your success.

02:26:05.760 | The essay's called "How to Do Great Work."

02:26:07.840 | And people should go definitely read the full essay.

02:26:10.360 | There's a few things I could read from it.

02:26:13.240 | Some quotes, "Having new ideas is a strange game,

02:26:15.620 | "because it usually consists of seeing things

02:26:17.740 | "that were right under your nose.

02:26:19.600 | "Once you've seen a new idea, it tends to seem obvious.

02:26:22.740 | "Why did no one think of this before?

02:26:25.260 | "Seeing something obvious sounds easy,

02:26:28.920 | "and yet empirically, having new ideas is hard.

02:26:31.880 | "And the steps you took seem trivial,

02:26:35.420 | "and yet, nobody was taking them,

02:26:37.640 | "or at least in the past, they weren't successful."

02:26:39.800 | So the successes you've had

02:26:41.880 | were as simple as essentially picking up the phone,

02:26:44.280 | or trying.

02:26:45.100 | There's a lot of interesting things here

02:26:48.720 | to talk about this aspect of doing the seemingly simple

02:26:53.720 | that seems to be so hard to do.

02:26:56.360 | It, as Paul describes,

02:26:57.920 | requires a willingness to break rules.

02:27:00.600 | There are two ways to be comfortable breaking rules,

02:27:03.240 | to enjoy breaking them, and to be indifferent to them.

02:27:06.360 | That's an interesting distinction.

02:27:07.960 | I call these two cases being aggressively

02:27:10.060 | and passively independent-minded.

02:27:12.340 | So again, that's to enjoy breaking the rules,

02:27:14.760 | or to be indifferent to the rules.

02:27:17.120 | The aggressively independent-minded

02:27:18.600 | are the naughty ones.

02:27:19.920 | Rules don't merely fail to stop them.

02:27:23.100 | Breaking rules gives them additional energy.

02:27:25.520 | For this sort of person,

02:27:26.480 | delight at the sheer audacity of a project

02:27:28.540 | sometimes supplies enough activation energy

02:27:30.760 | to get it started.

02:27:31.980 | The other way to break the rules

02:27:33.040 | is not to care about them at all,

02:27:34.560 | or perhaps even to know they exist.

02:27:37.640 | This is why novices and outsiders

02:27:39.740 | often make new discoveries.

02:27:41.860 | Their ignorance of a field,

02:27:43.840 | ignorance, maybe in quotes,

02:27:45.640 | of a field's assumptions

02:27:46.960 | act as a source of temporary

02:27:48.840 | passive independent-mindedness.

02:27:51.060 | Aspies also seem to have a kind of immunity

02:27:53.800 | to conventional beliefs.

02:27:55.040 | Several I know say that this helps them

02:27:57.560 | to have new ideas.

02:27:59.400 | So the aggressive and the passive,

02:28:01.760 | it's such an interesting way of looking at it.

02:28:04.800 | Perhaps some aspect of this,

02:28:07.240 | at least in the story you tell,

02:28:08.240 | there's some passive aspect,

02:28:09.680 | where you're like not even acknowledging,

02:28:13.560 | not even caring that there was rules,

02:28:15.560 | just kind of asking the simple question

02:28:18.160 | and taking the simple action.

02:28:19.600 | - I think that is funny.

02:28:21.720 | That was an essay I read,

02:28:23.080 | and we're doing just a snippet of it,

02:28:24.700 | but I would encourage anyone listening

02:28:26.120 | to go and find it and read the entire thing,

02:28:28.020 | because it's something that really spoke to me

02:28:31.120 | as I was transitioning into my new career now,

02:28:34.480 | and I just loved it.

02:28:35.400 | But when we were talking about

02:28:37.280 | why certain people

02:28:39.200 | who don't have traditional qualifications

02:28:41.220 | are able to come in and do incredible work

02:28:43.960 | and solve complex problems,

02:28:46.140 | it made me think of that essay,

02:28:47.220 | which is why I shared it.

02:28:48.340 | And I think that in the context

02:28:50.840 | of the work that I was doing here,

02:28:53.040 | perhaps not having the historical context

02:28:57.400 | became an advantage,

02:28:58.780 | and obviously went back and then tried to study it.

02:29:01.180 | But if you go into a problem,

02:29:03.160 | I always find that,

02:29:04.160 | especially in the political realm,

02:29:06.160 | my favorite political issues

02:29:08.440 | are ones where they're contrarian by being obvious.

02:29:11.920 | And sometimes they feel very intuitive,

02:29:14.120 | and so you take them on.

02:29:15.560 | There's always a lot of resistance

02:29:16.980 | when you go against something that's been accepted

02:29:19.440 | as the way that you're supposed to do things.

02:29:23.640 | And I came to learn over the course

02:29:25.840 | of my time in government

02:29:26.840 | that when everyone was agreeing with what I was doing,

02:29:30.120 | then it actually made me more nervous,

02:29:32.060 | because I felt like you have these problems,

02:29:34.640 | they haven't been solved for a long time,

02:29:36.800 | and then if you take the same approach as others,

02:29:38.960 | you're gonna fail just like they did.

02:29:40.420 | So taking a different approach

02:29:42.400 | doesn't mean you're gonna succeed,

02:29:43.800 | but at least if you fail,

02:29:45.280 | you're gonna fail in an original way.

02:29:47.640 | And so I did like this a lot,

02:29:50.260 | and I think that what I saw

02:29:53.760 | was the people who were very good at getting things done

02:29:56.360 | that hadn't been done before

02:29:58.300 | were people who came with different qualifications,

02:30:00.600 | different perspectives,

02:30:02.120 | and they came in and really worked the problem

02:30:04.360 | in untraditional ways.

02:30:05.480 | And so I think in the Middle East,

02:30:07.400 | I came in with a very different approach

02:30:09.640 | than people before me,

02:30:10.980 | not because I came in deliberately

02:30:12.520 | trying to do it differently,

02:30:13.680 | but because I came in trying to listen and understand

02:30:17.400 | from people why the problem hadn't been solved,

02:30:20.360 | and then think from a first principles perspective

02:30:23.000 | on what's the right perspective today,

02:30:25.320 | not based on what happened 50 years ago,

02:30:27.160 | or not based on what somebody's feelings who were hurt,

02:30:29.560 | but what's the right thing to make people's lives better,

02:30:31.880 | to make the world a safer

02:30:34.000 | and more prosperous place tomorrow.

02:30:37.000 | - So if we can go back to MPS for a little bit,

02:30:40.520 | from the person to the vision,

02:30:42.880 | there's something called Vision 2030

02:30:45.040 | about his vision for Saudi Arabia in the future.

02:30:47.920 | Can you maybe look from his perspective,

02:30:50.560 | what is his vision for the region?

02:30:53.480 | - Sure, so it's funny,

02:30:54.960 | we were talking before about how we wish leaders

02:30:58.740 | would set big audacious goals and take on big things.

02:31:01.760 | Well, that's what he did with Vision 2030.

02:31:04.880 | When he was young, and again,

02:31:05.840 | this is something that was derided,

02:31:07.520 | and a lot of people were very skeptical of it,

02:31:09.640 | but the people who actually picked it up and read it

02:31:11.840 | said this is a very thoughtful plan that's very achievable.

02:31:15.160 | So he studied his country and said,

02:31:16.720 | "What's our place in the world?

02:31:19.120 | "What are our advantages?

02:31:20.200 | "What are our disadvantages?"

02:31:21.880 | And then he set publicly KPIs

02:31:24.880 | that he wanted to hold his country to,

02:31:26.680 | and then put in place plans and committees,

02:31:28.520 | and really worked hard to push things in that direction,

02:31:31.100 | which was pretty remarkable.

02:31:33.240 | I think that it's something, when I saw it,

02:31:34.780 | I thought it was very refreshing.

02:31:37.020 | I said, "Wait, in America, why don't we all have set goals?

02:31:40.160 | "Why don't we have KPIs?"

02:31:41.880 | And I do think that it's something that most countries,

02:31:43.800 | if not all countries, should have, right?

02:31:45.700 | One of my favorite quotes was from "The Alice in Wonderland"

02:31:49.040 | where the Cheshire Cat says,

02:31:51.680 | "If you don't know where you're going,

02:31:52.760 | "it doesn't matter which path you take."

02:31:54.680 | And so I think that that's something

02:31:56.680 | that really helped set them on a good path,

02:31:59.520 | and they've been very successful with it.

02:32:01.440 | One of the things he told me about putting that together

02:32:04.600 | was he said, "My father's generation,

02:32:06.900 | "they created this country from almost nothing.

02:32:09.120 | "They came here, they were a poor country,

02:32:11.020 | "they were Bedouins in the desert,

02:32:12.840 | "and then they look back

02:32:13.780 | "and see what they've done over 50 years,

02:32:15.560 | "and they say it's absolutely remarkable."

02:32:18.060 | He said, "His generation, they come in and they say,

02:32:20.120 | "we're very grateful for everything that's been done today,

02:32:23.280 | "but we have so much opportunity

02:32:25.900 | "that we're not taking advantage of."

02:32:27.420 | And so he's now empowered the next generation

02:32:30.400 | to be ambitious and think big and grow with it.

02:32:33.080 | What that means for his vision for the Middle East

02:32:35.240 | is that the general architecture that should exist,

02:32:39.040 | and now there's excitement in the discussions with Israel

02:32:41.520 | that have advanced, was the general view

02:32:43.820 | of what we thought from a Trump perspective

02:32:45.960 | should be the new Middle East

02:32:47.320 | is having an economic and security corridor

02:32:50.860 | all the way from Haifam to Muscat, from Oman to Israel,

02:32:55.040 | where basically you go through,

02:32:56.400 | and if you can create a security area

02:33:00.680 | where people can live free of fear of terrorism

02:33:03.480 | and of conflict, the Middle East for the last 20 years

02:33:06.200 | has been a sinkhole for arms, for death, for terrorism.

02:33:10.680 | It's been awful.

02:33:11.880 | It's been a big national security threat for America,

02:33:14.880 | a big place where our treasure is gone.

02:33:18.440 | We've had a lot of our young, amazing American soldiers

02:33:21.920 | killed in action there,

02:33:23.800 | and the same thing for the Arab countries as well.

02:33:26.220 | So if we can create a security architecture for that region,

02:33:29.640 | and then we can create economic integration

02:33:31.860 | between all of the different countries,

02:33:33.380 | I mean, the amount of innovation happening in Israel

02:33:35.800 | is unbelievable.

02:33:36.680 | Think of it like Silicon Valley's

02:33:38.560 | not connected to the rest of California.

02:33:40.700 | You have a very young population,

02:33:42.220 | a very digital savvy population.

02:33:44.120 | You have a lot of resources.

02:33:45.800 | And so if you can get that whole set,

02:33:48.120 | the potential for it is unbelievable.

02:33:50.000 | I do think that that's his ultimate vision

02:33:52.040 | is to become a really strong country economically,

02:33:54.920 | and then to become a place

02:33:56.040 | where you could be funding advancements in science,

02:33:58.320 | advancements in humanity,

02:33:59.440 | advancements in artificial intelligence,

02:34:01.480 | and think about ways to be a positive influence

02:34:04.160 | in the world.

02:34:05.580 | - So a difficult question,

02:34:07.480 | one big source of tension between the United States and Saudi

02:34:12.480 | is the case of Jamal Khashoggi.

02:34:15.880 | I was wondering if you can comment

02:34:18.080 | on what MBS has said about it to you.

02:34:20.400 | You've spoken to him about it,

02:34:21.600 | and what MBS has said about it publicly

02:34:23.760 | on "60 Minutes" and after.

02:34:25.320 | - Yeah, so what he said to me was no different

02:34:27.760 | than what he ultimately said on "60 Minutes,"

02:34:29.540 | which was, you know, as somebody helping lead this country,

02:34:34.320 | I bear responsibility,

02:34:35.480 | and I'm gonna make sure that those who were involved

02:34:38.680 | are brought to justice,

02:34:39.720 | and I'm gonna make sure that we put in place reforms

02:34:43.400 | to make sure things like this don't happen again.

02:34:45.200 | It was a horrible situation that occurred.

02:34:48.440 | What I saw from him after that was just a doubling

02:34:51.420 | and a tripling down on the positive things he was doing,

02:34:54.880 | figuring out ways to kind of continue to modernize society,

02:34:58.520 | build opportunity in the kingdom,

02:35:00.840 | and to continue to be a better ally

02:35:02.440 | to all the different countries

02:35:04.000 | that wanted to be aligned with them.

02:35:06.200 | - One thing I learned from this case

02:35:09.280 | is how one particular situation, a tragedy,

02:35:13.380 | can destroy so much progress and the possibility of progress

02:35:17.520 | and the possibility of connection between the bridges

02:35:21.240 | that are built between different nations.

02:35:24.480 | And how narratives around that can take off

02:35:28.040 | and take such a long time to repair.

02:35:31.880 | And you've worked with this in the Middle East

02:35:34.080 | with Israel and so on, how the history,

02:35:36.940 | the narratives, the stories,

02:35:40.440 | they kind of have this momentum that's so hard to break,

02:35:44.560 | even when you have new leaders, new blood,

02:35:47.960 | new ideas that come in.

02:35:51.040 | And it's just sad to see that, yes,

02:35:53.900 | this tragedy happens,

02:35:57.880 | but it doesn't mean that you can't make progress.

02:36:01.200 | I don't know if you have kind of lessons from that,

02:36:05.400 | just how much of a dramatic impact it had

02:36:08.520 | on creating tension between the United States and Saudi,

02:36:12.080 | and in general in the Middle East,

02:36:13.800 | that somehow Saudi's not a friend,

02:36:19.120 | but is against the ideals and the values

02:36:22.760 | of the United States.

02:36:24.200 | - Yeah, so it definitely created massive tension,

02:36:26.700 | and it became a very high-profile action

02:36:30.120 | that actually overshadowed a lot of the good work

02:36:32.400 | that was being done in the region

02:36:33.880 | and a lot of the progress we were making.

02:36:36.800 | But when you think about this,

02:36:38.120 | or you think about the other issues

02:36:40.360 | that we've gone through today,

02:36:42.840 | I think the general framework

02:36:44.360 | that I always try to approach things with

02:36:46.200 | is you can't change what happened yesterday,

02:36:49.520 | you can only learn from it,

02:36:51.020 | and then you can change how you deal with tomorrow.

02:36:54.040 | And when I think about the people in power,

02:36:57.200 | what do I hope that they're spending their time focused on?

02:36:59.720 | Number two basic things.

02:37:01.380 | Number one is how do I create safety and security

02:37:04.720 | for my people and for the world?

02:37:08.160 | And then how do I give people the opportunity

02:37:10.260 | to live a better life?

02:37:11.680 | And so when things like this happen,

02:37:14.220 | obviously there are certain reactions that are appropriate,

02:37:18.760 | but ultimately you have to think through

02:37:21.380 | how do you not allow the paradigm

02:37:23.180 | that you're creating in the world

02:37:24.800 | to lead to worse outcomes than would happen otherwise?

02:37:28.580 | And so when I would think about foreign policy in general,

02:37:31.120 | one of the differences between foreign policy and business

02:37:34.620 | is that in business, the conclusion of a problem said,

02:37:37.300 | you finish a deal, you either have a company or a property,

02:37:41.160 | or if you sell it, you have less to do and more capital,

02:37:44.420 | hopefully if it's successful, right?

02:37:46.680 | In a political deal, it's always about paradigms.

02:37:50.140 | So the end of a problem set

02:37:51.440 | is always the beginning of a new paradigm.

02:37:53.580 | And you're always thinking through

02:37:54.980 | how do you create an environment that leads to

02:37:58.300 | hopefully the best amount of positive outcomes

02:38:01.680 | that could occur versus creating a paradigm

02:38:04.780 | that will lead to negative outcomes.

02:38:06.500 | So bad things happen a lot in the world

02:38:10.860 | and you have to make sure that when those happen,

02:38:13.580 | people are held accountable for it,

02:38:15.420 | but you also don't wanna make sure that in the process

02:38:18.000 | of making sure that there's accountability for these actions,

02:38:21.140 | you don't set a lot of progress

02:38:23.480 | that the world is making back

02:38:24.920 | that will lead to worse off situation for many more people.

02:38:29.840 | - If we can go back to the incredible work

02:38:33.660 | with Abraham Accords and Israel in the Middle East,

02:38:36.580 | first, the big question about peace.

02:38:41.500 | Why is it so difficult to achieve peace

02:38:44.020 | in this part of the world?

02:38:45.560 | Between Israel and Palestine

02:38:46.900 | and between Israel and the other countries

02:38:48.500 | in the Middle East or any sort of peace-like agreements?

02:38:52.740 | - If I had to give you the most simple answer,

02:38:54.340 | I would say that it's structural.

02:38:56.100 | And if you go back to the incentive structure

02:38:59.140 | of different leaders, this whole peace process

02:39:01.560 | between Israel and the Palestinians,

02:39:04.220 | and again, I've gotten criticized for saying this,

02:39:07.440 | but it's what I believe, so I'm gonna say it,

02:39:09.140 | is that the incentive structure was all wrong.

02:39:11.820 | And when I went before the United Nations Security Council

02:39:14.820 | to discuss the peace plan that I proposed,

02:39:16.940 | which again, was more of an operational plan

02:39:19.140 | and it was a pragmatic plan.

02:39:20.340 | It was over 180 pages in detail.

02:39:22.860 | In politics, people don't like putting forward detail

02:39:26.020 | because it just gives a lot of places

02:39:27.780 | for you to get criticized on.

02:39:29.500 | Nobody actually criticized the detail of my plan.

02:39:32.300 | They just criticized the fact that it was coming from us

02:39:35.720 | and didn't want to debate the merits

02:39:38.060 | of the operational pieces of it.

02:39:40.220 | So I created a slide where I showed from the Oslo Accords

02:39:45.220 | till the day I was there,

02:39:46.700 | all the different peace discussions.

02:39:48.140 | I put a dove in the slide for those.

02:39:50.260 | And then I put a tank for every time there was a war

02:39:52.420 | 'cause there was always skirmishes

02:39:53.420 | between Hamas and Hezbollah and the Palestinians.

02:39:56.940 | And then I showed two lines and they both went

02:39:58.660 | from the bottom of the page all the way up like this.

02:40:02.300 | One of the lines was Israeli settlements.

02:40:04.820 | So every time a negotiation failed,

02:40:07.580 | Israel was able to get more land.

02:40:09.620 | And then the other one was money to the Palestinians.

02:40:12.740 | And I said, every time a negotiation failed,

02:40:15.000 | the Palestinians would get more money.

02:40:17.460 | The problem with that money though

02:40:18.740 | was that it wasn't going to the people.

02:40:21.340 | Some of it would make its way down,

02:40:22.660 | but most of it was going to the politicians.

02:40:24.360 | You had leadership of the Palestinians

02:40:26.620 | who was basically, I think at that point,

02:40:28.180 | it was in like the 16th year of a four-year term.

02:40:30.240 | So it wasn't democratically elected.

02:40:32.300 | And a lot of what I tried to show

02:40:33.740 | was that there was no rule of law.

02:40:36.040 | There was no judicial system.

02:40:37.680 | There were no property rights.

02:40:39.360 | And there was no opportunity or hope

02:40:41.460 | for the people to live a better life.

02:40:42.980 | And so all of the envoys to date

02:40:47.140 | were basically trained to go and do the same things.

02:40:49.960 | And again, I got massively criticized

02:40:52.060 | by all the previous envoys

02:40:53.740 | for not doing it the same way they did.

02:40:55.840 | But I thought the problem structurally

02:40:57.740 | just didn't make sense.

02:40:59.100 | And so I felt like the incentive structure was all wrong

02:41:02.460 | and I took a different approach.

02:41:04.620 | - And so what's the different approach?

02:41:07.060 | - I started writing down a document.

02:41:08.780 | These are the 11 issues,

02:41:10.820 | but there's really only three issues that matter.

02:41:13.800 | I said, just tell me what you think the compromise is

02:41:16.700 | that you think the other side could live with

02:41:18.340 | that you would accept.

02:41:19.760 | And it was very hard to get them talking about this.

02:41:21.940 | Oh, you have to go back to 1972.

02:41:23.420 | You have to go back to 1982.

02:41:24.620 | You have to go back to 2001.

02:41:26.020 | You have to go to camp.

02:41:26.860 | And I was just like, I don't need a headache

02:41:28.460 | and I don't need a history lesson.

02:41:29.540 | Just I want a very simple thing.

02:41:30.820 | Here today in 2017, what's the outcome that you would accept?

02:41:35.460 | And I was dealing with their negotiators,

02:41:38.260 | their back channel secret negotiators,

02:41:39.860 | their double secret.

02:41:40.780 | And I was just like, this whole thing is like,

02:41:43.040 | it's a process created where nobody wants to talk about

02:41:45.880 | the actual solution.

02:41:48.700 | So coming from the business world, I said, okay,

02:41:51.100 | let me just write down a proposed solution

02:41:53.260 | that I think is fair.

02:41:54.700 | And let me have each side react.

02:41:56.060 | Like, don't tell me about theoretical things.

02:41:57.880 | Like tell me, I want to move the line from here to here.

02:42:00.780 | I want to change this word.

02:42:01.700 | So I tried to make it much more tactical.

02:42:04.480 | And what I realized was like, the Palestinians,

02:42:08.360 | they'd worked so hard to get the Arab world

02:42:11.320 | to stay with the line of the Arab Peace Initiative.

02:42:14.320 | And so I went back and I read the Arab Peace Initiative.

02:42:17.080 | It was 10 lines and it didn't have any detail.

02:42:18.840 | So it was a concept.

02:42:20.040 | And so they liked that concept

02:42:21.500 | because it allowed them to reject everything.

02:42:23.560 | They kept getting more money.

02:42:24.600 | I mean, Bibi Netanyahu, who runs

02:42:27.080 | one of the most incredible economies in the world,

02:42:29.040 | who runs an incredible superpower militarily

02:42:32.420 | for the size of their country,

02:42:34.580 | he would fly to Washington to meet us

02:42:36.240 | and he'd be taking a commercial El Al plane.

02:42:39.080 | Abbas, who runs a refugee organization,

02:42:42.100 | a refugee group, right,

02:42:43.440 | that claims that they don't have a state

02:42:45.220 | that gets billions of dollars in aid every year

02:42:47.920 | from the global community,

02:42:48.760 | would fly in a $60 million Boeing BBJ.

02:42:51.680 | So the whole thing was just very corrupt and off.

02:42:55.240 | And I do think that that's why it,

02:42:57.920 | I don't think people were incentivized to solve it,

02:43:01.020 | to be honest.

02:43:02.140 | - What do you think an actual plan on that part,

02:43:05.120 | if you can, just before we talk about Abraham Accords,

02:43:09.920 | if there is a peace plan that works

02:43:11.920 | between Israel and Palestine,

02:43:13.200 | what do you think it looks like?

02:43:15.440 | - You have to separate it into two different issues.

02:43:17.660 | And I think that that's actually how we came

02:43:19.440 | to the Abraham Accords is that,

02:43:21.180 | I tell the story in the book

02:43:24.120 | and it was one of my favorite experiences

02:43:26.400 | during my time in diplomacy

02:43:27.760 | where I went to meet with Sultan Qaboos,

02:43:30.320 | who was the Sultan of Oman.

02:43:32.300 | And we fly out there

02:43:33.820 | because he'd had a secret meeting with Bibi.

02:43:36.060 | And I thought maybe he was open to normalizing with Israel.

02:43:39.260 | So after he meets with Bibi,

02:43:40.380 | he calls me and says, "I want you to come see me."

02:43:42.780 | So I go over to see him.

02:43:44.740 | And again, I tell the story,

02:43:46.080 | it was a crazy night and all these different areas.

02:43:48.780 | But when I was talking to him,

02:43:51.060 | he basically says to me,

02:43:53.020 | "I feel badly for the Palestinian people

02:43:55.220 | that they carry with them the burden of the Muslim world."

02:43:58.660 | And that line just like stuck with me.

02:44:00.180 | And a couple of days later, I was thinking about it.

02:44:02.700 | And I said, "Wait a minute,

02:44:04.060 | who elected the Palestinian people

02:44:07.580 | to represent the Muslim world on the Al-Aqsa Mosque?"

02:44:10.880 | And so the reason why I felt like it had never been solved

02:44:14.520 | was it was a riddle, A,

02:44:15.480 | that I believed was designed to not be solved.

02:44:18.160 | But B, you were conflating two separate issues.

02:44:20.360 | You had the issue between Israel and the Muslim world,

02:44:23.320 | which really was the issue of the Al-Aqsa Mosque.

02:44:25.740 | And then you had just a territorial dispute,

02:44:28.100 | which throughout history,

02:44:29.380 | you have lots of territorial disputes

02:44:30.900 | and they're usually resolved in different ways.

02:44:33.340 | So if you go back to the Israeli-Palestinian issue,

02:44:36.480 | there's just a couple of components you need to solve.

02:44:38.860 | Number one is territorial contiguity, right?

02:44:41.300 | You need to figure out where do you draw the lines?

02:44:43.320 | And that's something that,

02:44:45.220 | you can talk about what people were owed 70 years ago,

02:44:48.260 | but it's much more productive to say,

02:44:50.140 | "This is what you can make work today."

02:44:52.860 | And that's kind of what we did.

02:44:54.340 | We literally spent months and months drawing a map

02:44:56.460 | and we put something out,

02:44:57.500 | probably change a couple of lines here and there,

02:44:59.000 | but by and large, it was a very pragmatic solution

02:45:02.260 | that I think could work.

02:45:03.100 | And I think it could work for the safety

02:45:04.460 | and security of Israel, which was number one.

02:45:07.280 | So first issue is drawing a map.

02:45:09.080 | Second issue is security.

02:45:10.620 | Again, Israel, and again, this is one issue

02:45:14.460 | we were incredibly sympathetic with Israel,

02:45:16.300 | which is you can't expect a prime minister of Israel

02:45:19.660 | to make a deal where he's gonna make his people

02:45:21.580 | less secure than before.

02:45:23.220 | So we worked very closely with them on a security apparatus.

02:45:25.580 | We laid something out that I think

02:45:27.280 | would keep the whole area safer

02:45:29.700 | and it would make sure Israel was safe

02:45:31.260 | and also keep the Palestinian issue safe.

02:45:33.020 | So you need security.

02:45:34.500 | Number three was the religious sites.

02:45:36.140 | And that was one that was actually always made

02:45:39.140 | much more complicated by people, the Al-Aqsa Mosque,

02:45:42.580 | because you basically have Haram al-Sharif,

02:45:44.300 | which is a place where the mosque was built

02:45:46.000 | in the seventh or eighth century.

02:45:47.640 | But originally it was where the Holy of Holies were

02:45:51.260 | and the Beit Hamigdash for the Jewish people.

02:45:52.980 | So, and then, compounding by the fact

02:45:55.040 | that you have all of the Christian holy sites in Jerusalem,

02:45:57.340 | it's a city that should be bringing everyone together,

02:46:00.940 | but in fact has become a place where you have wars

02:46:03.940 | and hatred and a lot of different conflicts

02:46:07.380 | that have arisen because of it.

02:46:08.900 | But what I said was instead of fighting over concepts

02:46:11.060 | of sovereignty, which is interesting how I got to the notion

02:46:14.180 | that this wasn't really the big issue,

02:46:16.260 | I basically just operationally,

02:46:17.460 | why don't we just make it simple?

02:46:18.540 | Let everyone come and be able to worship

02:46:20.620 | as long as they're being able to worship peacefully.

02:46:23.140 | So that's really the contours of it.

02:46:26.760 | And what the Palestinians have done is they've kind of

02:46:29.320 | deflected from a lot of their own shortcomings.

02:46:31.460 | And a lot of the Arab leaders did that as well,

02:46:33.360 | kind of in the pre-Abraham Accord days,

02:46:35.600 | by kind of allowing this issue to be so prevalent.

02:46:37.760 | So one thing I'll say on the Palestinians is that,

02:46:40.920 | what we tried to do by laying out a plan was we said,

02:46:44.640 | okay, what are the reasons why the Palestinian people

02:46:49.480 | are not having the lives that they deserve?

02:46:52.120 | And I'll give you a couple of things.

02:46:53.080 | One is I studied the economies of Jordan,

02:46:57.460 | West Bank, Gaza, Egypt, Morocco.

02:47:00.860 | This was numbers from like 2019.

02:47:03.200 | But what was interesting was the GDP per capita

02:47:05.940 | of somebody living in the West Bank

02:47:08.560 | was actually the same as Jordan.

02:47:10.180 | And it was actually more than somebody living in Egypt.

02:47:12.860 | And the debt of GDP that the Palestinians had

02:47:16.260 | was like 30, 40% compared to Egypt,

02:47:18.880 | which is at like 130% and Jordan, which was at 110%.

02:47:22.500 | And Lebanon, which is at 200%.

02:47:24.420 | And so, you're in a situation where a lot of this stuff

02:47:28.240 | didn't make sense, but if you draw lines,

02:47:30.880 | create institutions where Palestinian people

02:47:33.260 | can now feel like they have property rights

02:47:34.860 | and have ownership over their place

02:47:36.260 | and let the money flow past the leadership ranks

02:47:39.020 | to the people, let them have jobs,

02:47:41.500 | let them have opportunity,

02:47:43.100 | and then let all Muslims from throughout the world

02:47:45.300 | have access to the mosque and Israel,

02:47:48.920 | making sure that they can control the security,

02:47:50.660 | which I think the Jordanians and a lot of others

02:47:52.460 | want Israel to have strong security control there

02:47:55.420 | to prevent the radicalists and the extremists from coming,

02:47:58.220 | you could have peace there very easily.

02:48:00.780 | - So, there's a lot of things to say here.

02:48:02.900 | One is just to emphasize Al-Aqsa Mosque.

02:48:06.540 | So, this is a holy place,

02:48:08.660 | and this is something in our conversations

02:48:11.140 | and in my own travels, I've seen the importance

02:48:15.620 | of sort of frictionless access to those sites

02:48:20.060 | from the entirety of the Muslim world,

02:48:21.620 | and that's what Abraham, of course, took big leaps on.

02:48:25.380 | Okay, so we'll talk about that a little bit more,

02:48:27.820 | but that's kind of a religious component,

02:48:30.740 | that's a dignity in the religious practice

02:48:34.100 | and faith component.

02:48:35.600 | But then the other thing you mentioned so simply,

02:48:38.600 | which is you have money flow past the leadership ranks.

02:48:45.820 | How do you have money flow past the leadership ranks

02:48:48.740 | in Palestine?

02:48:51.580 | So, make sure that the money that's invested in Palestine,

02:48:56.020 | the West Bank, gets to the people.

02:48:58.780 | - So, to date, all of the aid that's been given

02:49:01.380 | to the Palestinians has been an entitlement.

02:49:03.420 | It's not conditions-based.

02:49:04.700 | It's always just we give the money

02:49:06.100 | and there's no expectations.

02:49:08.020 | It's very simple.

02:49:08.860 | You make the aid conditions-based,

02:49:10.100 | you fight for transparency,

02:49:11.300 | you do it through institutions other than the PA,

02:49:14.220 | or you put reformers into the PA

02:49:16.340 | that will allow it to go down that way.

02:49:18.660 | - PA being the Palestinian Authority,

02:49:20.500 | which is the leadership.

02:49:21.340 | - It's not hard to do.

02:49:22.340 | It just takes people who actually wanna do it.

02:49:24.580 | But I think that the mindset of the international community

02:49:27.900 | has not been let's solve this problem.

02:49:29.500 | It's like, let's just throw a little bit of money.

02:49:31.340 | The money's Novocain.

02:49:32.460 | Let's put a little Novocain on the problem

02:49:34.180 | and let's not have to deal with it.

02:49:35.860 | But nobody's ever said, oh, let's do an accounting

02:49:38.060 | of the $20 billion we've given them

02:49:39.980 | and see how many jobs it's done and where it's gone.

02:49:42.260 | That just hasn't happened.

02:49:43.580 | Again, it's an incredibly corrupt organization.

02:49:46.780 | You think about the post-World War II dynamic.

02:49:49.260 | You had a lot of refugees.

02:49:50.260 | My grandparents were refugees post-World War II.

02:49:53.140 | Every other refugee class has been resettled

02:49:55.180 | and you only have one permanent refugee organization

02:49:57.880 | ever created.

02:49:59.060 | Why was this done?

02:49:59.900 | It was done to perpetuate the conflict

02:50:01.820 | so that a lot of Arab leaders could basically deflect

02:50:04.220 | from a lot of their shortcomings at home.

02:50:06.780 | And so I think for Israel,

02:50:08.400 | they view all these things as existential.

02:50:10.180 | They value their safety.

02:50:11.120 | They've been under attack for a long time.

02:50:13.300 | I do think having a deal where we can say,

02:50:16.500 | how do the Jews and the Muslims come together?

02:50:19.380 | I think King Abdullah from Jordan's

02:50:20.860 | been an incredible custodian for the mosque.

02:50:22.860 | I think everyone in my travels recognized

02:50:25.700 | that he's the right guy for that,

02:50:27.240 | that the King of Jordan should be the custodian

02:50:28.940 | of the mosque.

02:50:30.820 | We should have some kind of framework

02:50:32.220 | to make sure everyone has access.

02:50:33.380 | The more countries that have diplomatic relations

02:50:35.860 | with Israel, the more Muslims and Arabs

02:50:38.620 | that should be able to come and visit.

02:50:40.580 | And by the way, the more you have these normalizations,

02:50:43.100 | think about what that will do to the economy

02:50:45.100 | of the West Bank, where they'll have great hotels,

02:50:47.540 | hospitality, tremendous tourism industry

02:50:50.220 | because of all the Christian, Muslim,

02:50:52.620 | and Jewish holy sites that they have there.

02:50:54.280 | So there's a lot of potential there.

02:50:56.340 | We just have to get unstuck.

02:50:58.260 | I believe that it's so possible

02:51:01.980 | if the leaders wanna make tomorrow better that they can.

02:51:05.780 | And unfortunately, the people who suffer the most

02:51:08.820 | are really, are just the Palestinian people.

02:51:11.780 | And I think that in Gaza, they're hostages to Hamas,

02:51:15.220 | and in the West Bank, they're just held back

02:51:18.520 | because their leadership just is afraid

02:51:22.500 | or too self-interested to give them the opportunity

02:51:26.460 | to change their paradigm and pursue the potential

02:51:31.300 | of what they have.

02:51:32.140 | And by the way, it's an incredibly well-educated population.

02:51:35.300 | It's an incredibly capable population.

02:51:37.860 | And they're right next to Israel, where the economy,

02:51:39.740 | they need everything.

02:51:41.620 | And so the potential should be incredible

02:51:43.500 | if you can just move some of these pieces.

02:51:45.940 | But again, there's still a lot of emotion and hatred

02:51:48.940 | you have to work through as well.

02:51:50.580 | But I do believe that you're not gonna solve that

02:51:52.580 | by litigating the past.

02:51:53.820 | You're only gonna solve that by creating

02:51:56.340 | an exciting paradigm for the future

02:51:58.380 | and getting everyone to buy in and then move towards that.

02:52:01.740 | - And maybe increase the chance of being able

02:52:04.340 | to establish an economy where the entrepreneurs can flourish

02:52:08.100 | in the West Bank and so on in Palestine.

02:52:10.820 | Once the relationship across the Arab world is normalized.

02:52:15.820 | - So one thing on that, which is very interesting,

02:52:19.260 | is when I got into my job in the Middle East,

02:52:23.620 | all the conventional thinkers said to me,

02:52:26.220 | the separation in the Muslim world

02:52:28.100 | is between the Sunnis and the Shias.

02:52:29.980 | And that's really the big divide.

02:52:32.020 | And as I was traveling,

02:52:32.980 | I didn't think there was any divide in that regard.

02:52:36.100 | The divide that I saw was between leaders

02:52:38.700 | who wanted to give a better opportunity for their people

02:52:42.380 | and create economic reforms and opportunity,

02:52:44.660 | and leaders who wanted to use religion or fear

02:52:47.980 | to keep their stronghold on power.

02:52:50.140 | And so if you think about who's not creating

02:52:51.820 | the opportunity for their people,

02:52:53.500 | is the Palestinian leadership and the Iranian leadership.

02:52:56.380 | All the other Arab countries were focused on

02:52:58.500 | how do we give opportunity for our people

02:53:00.720 | to live a better life.

02:53:02.420 | - And there is a big foundation

02:53:05.140 | on which that framework can succeed,

02:53:07.400 | which I think is the, in general,

02:53:11.500 | the idea of Arab-Israeli normalization.

02:53:15.500 | So that's where Abraham Accords come in.

02:53:18.220 | Can you tell the story of that?

02:53:20.740 | - Sure, so it's an amazing thing.

02:53:23.220 | And I sit here today, somebody not in government,

02:53:26.140 | and every day I see another flight that goes between,

02:53:30.260 | or I see an Israeli student studying

02:53:32.580 | at a university in Dubai,

02:53:34.620 | or a new synagogue opening up in Abu Dhabi,

02:53:37.860 | and it just gives me such, or Bahrain,

02:53:41.100 | it gives me such tremendous pride

02:53:43.420 | to see all of the progress that's been made.

02:53:46.140 | How it occurred, part of why I wrote the book

02:53:49.540 | was to put this down for history's sake,

02:53:51.740 | to go through all the different intentional,

02:53:54.100 | unintentional, circumstantial things that occurred.

02:53:56.820 | It's funny, we left government,

02:53:59.540 | there's a lot of people saying,

02:54:00.380 | "Well, this is why I did that."

02:54:01.200 | I said, "I was kind of at the middle of it,

02:54:03.240 | "and I couldn't even perfectly articulate why it happened,"

02:54:06.140 | because it was an evolution of a lot of things.

02:54:09.660 | And I joke that we made peace on Plan C,

02:54:13.780 | but only because we went through the alphabet three times,

02:54:16.700 | failing at every letter, and by the time,

02:54:18.940 | but we didn't give up, and we kept going,

02:54:20.340 | and we got it done.

02:54:21.300 | - And maybe this is a good place to also step back and say,

02:54:24.700 | what is Arab-Israeli normalization?

02:54:27.260 | - Sure.

02:54:28.100 | - What is the state of things,

02:54:29.740 | for people who may not be aware,

02:54:31.460 | before the progress you made?

02:54:33.640 | - That's probably the best place to start.

02:54:35.320 | So what we did is we made a peace deal

02:54:37.960 | between Israel and the United Arab Emirates,

02:54:40.760 | and then Israel and Bahrain.

02:54:42.560 | Then we did a deal with Israel and Sudan,

02:54:44.800 | then Israel and Kosovo, Israel and Morocco,

02:54:47.820 | where basically countries

02:54:49.000 | that didn't recognize each other before,

02:54:50.820 | ended up recognizing each other.

02:54:52.960 | All of these were Muslim-majority countries,

02:54:55.000 | and getting them to integrate with Israel

02:54:57.480 | was a very big thing.

02:54:59.520 | The traditional thinking had always been,

02:55:01.740 | was that Muslim Arab countries

02:55:03.580 | would not make peace with Israel

02:55:05.780 | until the Israeli-Palestinian issue was solved.

02:55:10.020 | And what we were able to do is separate the issues,

02:55:12.360 | and then make these connections,

02:55:15.780 | which are leading to amazing interaction

02:55:18.060 | between Jews and Muslims.

02:55:19.260 | So when I think about,

02:55:21.060 | obviously you have national security,

02:55:22.660 | you have emotional benefits from these things,

02:55:26.060 | but the single biggest benefit that I've seen

02:55:29.180 | from the accords is that if you were an Arab or a Muslim,

02:55:34.180 | and you were willing to say positive things about Israel

02:55:39.300 | or the Jews before this came out,

02:55:41.660 | you would've been viciously attacked by the media

02:55:44.500 | or the hordes of influencers

02:55:46.140 | or the extremists in these different countries.

02:55:49.740 | What this did was it brought out into the public

02:55:52.380 | the fact that Jews and Muslims can be together,

02:55:55.300 | and they can be respectful,

02:55:57.580 | they can have meals together,

02:55:59.300 | and that the cultures can live together in peace.

02:56:02.180 | - So just to linger on this,

02:56:03.640 | it's like a once subtle and in another sense,

02:56:10.100 | like transformative.

02:56:12.380 | So normalization means you're allowed to travel

02:56:15.260 | from one place to the other.

02:56:16.860 | That has a kind of ripple effect

02:56:20.020 | of that you can now start talking

02:56:21.940 | in a little bit more accepting way.

02:56:24.400 | You can start integrating, traveling,

02:56:28.720 | communicating, doing business with, socializing.

02:56:32.040 | So the cultures mix, conversations mix, all of this.

02:56:36.560 | And this kind of has a ripple effect

02:56:38.720 | on the basic connection

02:56:41.760 | between these previously disparate worlds.

02:56:45.400 | I don't know if there's a nice way

02:56:49.500 | to kind of make clear why these agreements

02:56:53.040 | have such a transformative effect,

02:56:55.160 | especially in the long term.

02:56:56.920 | - I would say the simplest form is it's just a mindset.

02:57:00.040 | And it's almost like you're taught all your life,

02:57:02.900 | we're enemies or we can't be friends with that tribe

02:57:07.400 | on the other side of the fence.

02:57:10.480 | And then like one day the leaders get up and say,

02:57:12.400 | no, it's okay now.

02:57:13.820 | And there was never an issue between the people.

02:57:16.260 | The people were just taught different things

02:57:18.000 | and they were separated from each other.

02:57:19.400 | But again, one of the things that I respect

02:57:21.800 | about the work you do is you believe

02:57:24.160 | in the power of conversation

02:57:25.520 | and the power of human interaction.

02:57:27.120 | And these issues and gaps between us feel so big

02:57:32.120 | when we think about them, when we're told about them,

02:57:34.840 | when we read about them.

02:57:36.320 | But when we go and sit with each other,

02:57:38.280 | all of a sudden we realize maybe we have a lot more

02:57:40.440 | in common than we have that divides us.

02:57:43.200 | For me, what I've seen about it

02:57:45.480 | that's made the biggest difference is I've seen people

02:57:48.360 | who wouldn't have the ability to be together,

02:57:51.320 | be together, and that's now forming a nucleus

02:57:55.120 | of togetherness, which is a restoration.

02:57:57.240 | So you think about the modern Middle East

02:57:59.800 | from post-Holocaust to now, again, in 1948

02:58:04.800 | after that war of independence,

02:58:07.880 | you had Jews living in Baghdad and Cairo.

02:58:12.120 | Then they became so anti-Jewish

02:58:14.880 | that they then expelled all of the Jews

02:58:16.960 | from all these capitals of those cities.

02:58:19.160 | So you think about the Jewish history in Baghdad.

02:58:22.080 | I mean, I think the Talmud was written in Baghdad.

02:58:23.960 | It was a place where in Babylon

02:58:26.160 | where the Jewish people thrived.

02:58:27.880 | I think in 570 BCE when Nebuchadnezzar conquered Jerusalem,

02:58:32.320 | he took about 10,000 Jews back with him to Babylon

02:58:35.280 | because he thought it'd be good for his economy.

02:58:36.680 | And during that place, the Jews actually flourished

02:58:39.800 | and had a good life there.

02:58:41.240 | So for a thousand years before the Second World War,

02:58:45.520 | the Jews and the Muslims lived very peacefully together.

02:58:48.960 | So people say that what we're doing now is an aberration.

02:58:52.080 | I actually think it's not an aberration.

02:58:53.520 | I think it's actually a return to the time

02:58:55.900 | where people can live together culturally.

02:58:58.280 | And so this is the beginning

02:58:59.800 | of the end of the Arab-Israeli conflict.

02:59:02.120 | And it's the beginning of togetherness,

02:59:03.920 | which again, you think about how much war,

02:59:05.960 | how much provocation, how much terrorism

02:59:08.320 | has been made in the name of religious conflict.

02:59:11.860 | This is, I think, the start of the process

02:59:14.040 | of religious respect and understanding.

02:59:17.360 | - We've talked about you being attacked in the press

02:59:20.080 | for the Russian collusion and other topics.

02:59:22.880 | One of the most recent set of attacks comes on the topic

02:59:25.540 | of Saudi Public Investment Fund giving $2 billion

02:59:29.000 | to your investment firm after you left government.

02:59:33.200 | So that includes a 1.25% asset management fee

02:59:37.200 | of $25 million a year.

02:59:39.320 | Can you respond to these recent set of attacks?

02:59:42.480 | - Sure.

02:59:43.300 | So I left government, obviously worked for four years.

02:59:46.360 | It was a very action-packed time.

02:59:49.680 | That's why I wrote the book.

02:59:50.560 | I wanted to put down all those experiences.

02:59:53.280 | I started thinking like, what do I wanna do next?

02:59:56.240 | So my previous career, I'd been in real estate.

02:59:59.160 | I'd worked with my brother on some technology businesses

03:00:02.260 | that I'd started, and then I got into government.

03:00:05.960 | So I kinda had a career shift.

03:00:07.600 | In my previous career, obviously, it was very successful.

03:00:11.560 | The New York Times, they violated

03:00:14.400 | and they published my financial statements.

03:00:18.780 | They showed I was making about $50 million a year

03:00:21.000 | in the private sector before I went to government.

03:00:22.840 | I went into government and I volunteered.

03:00:26.440 | I didn't take a salary.

03:00:27.440 | I paid for my own health insurance for four years,

03:00:29.380 | my wife and I.

03:00:30.480 | And then we went and I was thinking,

03:00:31.600 | should I go back to my old company

03:00:33.760 | or should I start something new?

03:00:35.600 | And my thinking was is that through my time in government,

03:00:40.480 | I'd met so many people.

03:00:41.600 | I'd learned so much about the world.

03:00:43.040 | I had a big understanding now

03:00:44.640 | for how the macroeconomic picture worked.

03:00:47.560 | And I did feel like there was a lot more that I could do

03:00:50.440 | than just going back to real estate.

03:00:52.440 | In the meantime, I was getting a lot of calls

03:00:54.120 | from different CEOs and companies saying,

03:00:56.920 | can you help me with this company?

03:00:58.240 | Can you help me with that company?

03:00:59.480 | Your knowledge could be helpful to help this company

03:01:03.520 | navigate this challenge or to expand internationally.

03:01:06.440 | And so I said, you know what?

03:01:07.320 | Maybe I should create a business to do an investment firm

03:01:10.080 | where I can do something different,

03:01:12.080 | where I'm putting together geopolitical expertise

03:01:15.760 | and traditional private equity and growth investing

03:01:18.560 | and figure out how to do that,

03:01:19.840 | where I can do something differentiated,

03:01:21.800 | where I can invest in growing things

03:01:23.760 | and help with my navigation skills and relationships.

03:01:27.400 | So that was kind of the thesis of what I thought

03:01:29.440 | could make sense as kind of a next step.

03:01:32.440 | I called different friends.

03:01:34.040 | They were very excited to back the effort.

03:01:36.820 | Obviously, this was coming off the success

03:01:38.800 | that I just had in the Middle East

03:01:40.040 | where I did six peace deals there.

03:01:43.400 | And one of the notions I wanted to be able to do

03:01:45.680 | with the firm was to be able to take money from the Gulf

03:01:48.720 | and then to be able to invest it in Israel

03:01:50.880 | to continue to build the economic links

03:01:53.000 | between the countries.

03:01:53.960 | Again, if countries have more economic ties,

03:01:56.080 | I think war and fighting is less likely.

03:01:59.960 | And then in addition to that,

03:02:01.400 | I wanted to figure out how do you bring

03:02:03.680 | the entrepreneurs together from both of those countries?

03:02:06.560 | So that was really the mission of what I set out to do.

03:02:09.120 | So far, I've been enjoying it.

03:02:10.640 | It's been a lot of fun.

03:02:11.480 | I've been learning a ton.

03:02:12.920 | I think we're doing very well with it.

03:02:15.000 | In terms of the criticisms,

03:02:17.120 | I think that I've been criticized in every step

03:02:19.760 | of everything I've always done in my life.

03:02:21.360 | And so what I would say is,

03:02:23.960 | this business is actually an objective metric business.

03:02:26.880 | It's about returns.

03:02:27.720 | So in three, four years from now, five years from now,

03:02:30.560 | see how I do.

03:02:31.380 | Hopefully I'll do very well and judge me based on that.

03:02:34.320 | In terms of any of the nefarious things,

03:02:38.040 | I haven't been accused of violating any laws.

03:02:41.920 | And I haven't violated any of the ethics rules either.

03:02:44.920 | When I was in government,

03:02:45.840 | I every year submitted all my financials

03:02:49.200 | to the Office of Government Ethics.

03:02:50.640 | They certified it every year.

03:02:52.160 | And I followed every rule and every law possible.

03:02:54.440 | So to my critics, I'll say, criticize me before,

03:02:58.600 | you'll criticize me now.

03:03:00.040 | I'm gonna keep doing me and gonna keep pursuing things

03:03:03.200 | that I think are worthwhile.

03:03:04.880 | And I'm very excited about this chapter of my career.

03:03:08.200 | - Maybe this is a good place to ask,

03:03:10.000 | in working closely with Donald Trump,

03:03:14.040 | what in your sense, looking into the mind of the man,

03:03:17.880 | what's the biggest strength of Donald Trump as a leader?

03:03:21.960 | - I would say his unpredictability.

03:03:24.560 | I think that as a leader,

03:03:27.080 | he consumes a ton of information.

03:03:30.880 | He doesn't like to be managed

03:03:33.440 | or have his information filtered.

03:03:35.080 | So he'll speak to a lot of people

03:03:36.780 | to draw his information himself.

03:03:39.320 | He's very pragmatic.

03:03:40.400 | I don't see him as terribly ideological.

03:03:42.720 | I see him as somebody who's about results.

03:03:45.400 | I think he wants to deliver results.

03:03:48.180 | And I think ultimately, I mean, he's an incredible fighter.

03:03:52.600 | He's a big counter puncher,

03:03:55.160 | but he also wants to get along with people.

03:03:56.840 | And that's probably the biggest surprise

03:03:58.780 | that people found with him.

03:04:01.520 | I mean, you look at even situations like,

03:04:04.800 | I would always tell people, if you disagree with him,

03:04:07.240 | don't go on television and criticize him,

03:04:09.600 | pick up the phone and call him and go see him.

03:04:12.200 | And he'll talk to you about it.

03:04:13.320 | He may not agree with you,

03:04:14.780 | but again, that's what Kim Kardashian did

03:04:16.520 | when she had a case of clemency

03:04:19.120 | with a woman, Alice Johnson, that she felt strongly about.

03:04:22.440 | We went through the case.

03:04:23.320 | I wouldn't have had her call

03:04:24.240 | if I didn't think it was a legitimate case.

03:04:25.760 | So we spent about eight months

03:04:27.720 | quietly working through the case,

03:04:29.240 | working through the details

03:04:30.880 | to make sure that it really was a worthy case.

03:04:33.180 | I brought it to President Trump,

03:04:35.600 | said, "She'd like to come meet with you

03:04:37.120 | to talk about this case."

03:04:39.140 | And he said, "How recommend?"

03:04:40.660 | So she came in, we went through the case,

03:04:42.320 | and President Trump ultimately granted the clemency

03:04:45.280 | to Alice Johnson, who was a woman

03:04:48.000 | who was accused of being part of a drug ring.

03:04:51.220 | She had basically a life sentence for doing it.

03:04:53.880 | She'd served 22 years in prison.

03:04:55.920 | While in prison, I mean, she basically was a grandmother,

03:04:58.240 | and she was putting on the prison plays.

03:05:01.600 | She was mentoring young women in prison,

03:05:03.640 | somebody who, again, there's always a risk,

03:05:06.440 | but by and large had a very, very, very low risk

03:05:08.960 | of committing a crime in the future.

03:05:11.800 | And then it goes back to the notion of,

03:05:13.400 | are we gonna judge people

03:05:15.480 | by the worst decision they make in their life?

03:05:17.320 | And so President Trump was willing

03:05:20.080 | to grant the clemency, and it went.

03:05:21.280 | And I think that it just goes to the notion of,

03:05:24.320 | maybe this goes back to his unpredictability

03:05:26.040 | in a positive way, which is,

03:05:27.640 | if you go sit with him and you make your case,

03:05:29.680 | he'll hear you, he'll listen to you,

03:05:31.360 | and he's not afraid to act,

03:05:32.760 | and he's not afraid to be controversial,

03:05:35.060 | which I think is a good thing.

03:05:36.040 | So from a foreign policy point of view in particular,

03:05:39.360 | his unpredictability just meant

03:05:41.000 | that everyone was always on their back foot.

03:05:43.340 | People were afraid to kind of cross America.

03:05:46.560 | And what I would tell people who don't like Trump

03:05:48.360 | is I would say, think about how crazy he's making you

03:05:50.640 | and his enemies.

03:05:51.840 | He did that to the enemies of America.

03:05:53.960 | And yeah, so he was a very, very strong president,

03:05:57.160 | and I think did a great job.

03:05:58.560 | - So in some of these agreements

03:05:59.840 | that we've been talking about,

03:06:01.080 | and speaking with leaders,

03:06:02.880 | how do you think the unpredictability helps?

03:06:05.520 | - So in all the agreements that I was negotiating,

03:06:08.760 | I wasn't doing it as a principal.

03:06:10.520 | I was doing it on behalf of President Trump.

03:06:12.960 | And people knew that I had access to President Trump,

03:06:15.840 | and they knew that I could say,

03:06:18.560 | you may say this that we don't like,

03:06:20.380 | but I'm gonna have to take it back to him,

03:06:21.740 | and then we'll see what he does.

03:06:23.160 | And one of the biggest instances

03:06:24.620 | was on the USMCA trade deal,

03:06:26.460 | where that deal happened because Mexico

03:06:31.280 | was legitimately concerned, and smartly so,

03:06:34.120 | that President Trump was going to impose tariffs

03:06:36.880 | on the car industry,

03:06:37.880 | which would have been decimating to their economy.

03:06:40.560 | And by the way, he was ready to do it.

03:06:42.280 | We were holding him back from doing it

03:06:43.680 | with every ounce of strength that we could,

03:06:45.880 | so it wasn't a bluff.

03:06:46.800 | I mean, that one was actually real,

03:06:48.620 | but they were smart to read that it was real.

03:06:51.400 | And ultimately, we created a great win-win deal.

03:06:56.160 | I'll tell you a funny story,

03:06:57.000 | it just popped into my mind from the tariffs,

03:06:59.240 | is we did also, we used a 232 national security exemption

03:07:03.720 | to protect our steel industry,

03:07:05.240 | and we put tariffs on steel and aluminum.

03:07:07.640 | And again, I thought about this,

03:07:09.060 | 'cause we also negotiated them with Canada.

03:07:11.560 | And there was a very funny phone call

03:07:12.920 | where Trudeau was calling Trump,

03:07:15.200 | and again, they got along decently well.

03:07:17.900 | And Trudeau's calling and saying,

03:07:20.440 | you can't put national security tariffs on us in Canada.

03:07:23.440 | We're your NATO ally, we fought wars with you,

03:07:26.360 | we do military together.

03:07:28.200 | And Trump says to him,

03:07:29.440 | "Didn't you burn the White House down in 1812?"

03:07:32.040 | And Trudeau says, "That was the French."

03:07:33.200 | He says, "No, it was the Canadians."

03:07:35.520 | And so it was just, like I said,

03:07:37.640 | he's always keeping everyone on their toes.

03:07:39.740 | But he took very calculated risks.

03:07:44.600 | And like I said, everyone was outraged all the time

03:07:49.480 | with everything, but if you look at his body of work,

03:07:52.120 | people said if he was elected,

03:07:53.520 | he would start World War III.

03:07:54.720 | Meanwhile, we inherited a world filled with wars,

03:07:57.600 | no new wars, right?

03:07:59.460 | Three years, he made peace deals, no new wars.

03:08:02.200 | He was tough, he was strong.

03:08:03.920 | People respected him, he built relationships,

03:08:06.760 | and got trade deals done, got peace deals done.

03:08:09.760 | The economy was rocking.

03:08:11.440 | His body of work, I think, was pretty strong as president.

03:08:14.120 | - Like you said, no new wars.

03:08:15.300 | This makes me think, if Donald Trump won the presidency,

03:08:19.080 | what the current situation in Ukraine would look like.

03:08:22.280 | But let me just ask you, zoom out and ask you broadly,

03:08:25.360 | do you think the war in Ukraine could have been avoided?

03:08:29.760 | And what do you think it takes to bring it to an end?

03:08:33.040 | - I think 100%, it would have been avoided, not 99%.

03:08:36.920 | President Trump, for four years,

03:08:39.600 | had no problems with Russia.

03:08:41.440 | We were arming Ukraine, but we were working with Russia.

03:08:45.120 | And again, the first two years,

03:08:47.200 | we had a little bit of issue working with Russia

03:08:48.920 | because they were accused of colluding with us

03:08:51.440 | since we had to go through that investigation.

03:08:54.040 | But in the second two years,

03:08:56.020 | we were trying to focus Russia on what are the areas

03:08:59.240 | where we can collaborate together.

03:09:00.920 | I think Russia, we thought it was in their strategic

03:09:03.640 | advantage to play US and China against each other

03:09:07.880 | because of the way that everything was done before.

03:09:10.440 | They were stuck with China, but not getting a lot for it.

03:09:13.880 | Under Bush, they took Georgia.

03:09:15.340 | Under Obama, they took Crimea.

03:09:17.200 | Under Trump, there was no problems.

03:09:19.320 | And then under Biden, unfortunately,

03:09:22.280 | I think they misplayed a couple of things,

03:09:24.120 | which I think provoked Russia to go forward.

03:09:28.600 | Still no excuse to do what they did.

03:09:30.240 | I think that the invasion was a terrible thing

03:09:32.240 | and should not have occurred.

03:09:34.320 | But with that being said, I think 100%,

03:09:38.240 | if Trump was president,

03:09:39.280 | there would not be a war in Ukraine today.

03:09:41.260 | - Coming to the table and negotiating a peace,

03:09:46.040 | whether it's Donald Trump, whether it's Biden,

03:09:48.320 | whether it's anybody, what do you think it takes?

03:09:51.320 | Do you think it's possible?

03:09:53.320 | And if you're in a room, if Jared Kushner is in the room

03:09:57.440 | with Vladimir Putin and Vladimir Zelensky,

03:10:00.760 | what does it take to have a productive conversation?

03:10:04.220 | And what does it take for that conversation to fail?

03:10:07.000 | Like what are the trajectories

03:10:08.560 | that lead to success and failure?

03:10:10.480 | - I think we go back to negotiations.

03:10:12.420 | Number one is trust, right?

03:10:13.760 | Both leaders have to have the ability

03:10:16.400 | to communicate what an off-ramp is

03:10:20.780 | without fearing it's gonna leak to the public.

03:10:22.640 | So if you go to the posture of Zelensky right now,

03:10:26.400 | and by the way, President Zelensky,

03:10:27.760 | I have a lot of respect for the courage he showed,

03:10:30.560 | especially initially.

03:10:32.400 | You saw what Ghani did in Afghanistan.

03:10:34.480 | They were getting attacked by the Taliban.

03:10:36.200 | He took the cash and got the hell out of there.

03:10:38.240 | Staying in Kiev when he did, how he did it,

03:10:41.040 | was one of the most brave things we've seen in a long time.

03:10:44.040 | And he has a ton of my respect

03:10:45.560 | and admiration for doing that.

03:10:47.440 | But now he's promising his people,

03:10:49.640 | we're gonna win the war.

03:10:51.120 | And the military action has not necessarily

03:10:55.360 | coincided with that sentiment.

03:10:57.800 | And so there has to be some form of off-ramp,

03:11:01.120 | but he can't say that publicly.

03:11:02.680 | So for him to be able to work privately

03:11:05.480 | with somebody who can help create a new paradigm

03:11:08.020 | where both leaders can say,

03:11:09.480 | we're gonna stop the bloodshed,

03:11:10.720 | we're gonna stop the risk of nuclear war for the world,

03:11:13.200 | we're gonna stop what's happening,

03:11:16.880 | that's really what it will take.

03:11:18.360 | How that occurs, again, it's not something

03:11:21.000 | I'm involved in now, so I don't know

03:11:23.120 | who the right broker is or how to put that together.

03:11:26.000 | But essentially, they need somebody in between them

03:11:28.760 | who can figure out how do you create a landing zone

03:11:32.040 | that works, 'cause neither party's gonna jump

03:11:34.640 | until the pool is filled with water.

03:11:36.640 | And you have to outline what the go forward looks like,

03:11:40.160 | because you can't just stop it

03:11:42.240 | for then it to get worse for both parties.

03:11:44.280 | You have to move it forward into what happens next

03:11:48.360 | that hopefully can start to turn the tide

03:11:51.480 | to benefit both sides where they can focus on the future

03:11:55.200 | instead of being stuck into the old paradigm

03:11:58.860 | of who started what, who's to blame for what,

03:12:01.080 | who did what to who.

03:12:02.420 | It's just a lot of tough stuff now that's occurred

03:12:06.480 | that's gonna be hard to walk back.

03:12:08.460 | And it's a big task to get it done,

03:12:10.600 | but for the sake of the world, it'd be amazing

03:12:13.200 | if we were able to reach a conclusion to that conflict.

03:12:16.520 | - Just going back to your earlier mention of North Korea,

03:12:21.100 | what do you think it takes to bring Vladimir Putin

03:12:24.000 | and Vladimir Zelensky to the table together?

03:12:26.840 | - Leadership.

03:12:27.680 | - So you're saying it has to be a US president?

03:12:33.340 | - It has to be somebody who's willing

03:12:36.280 | to put themself on the line to go and do it.

03:12:39.160 | And again, if you're the US president

03:12:41.660 | and you're the most powerful nation in the world,

03:12:44.000 | you should be trying.

03:12:45.480 | But I do think, again, the posture that the US has taken

03:12:48.180 | has probably been in a place where they,

03:12:51.260 | it would be very hard for them to get the trust of Russia

03:12:54.180 | based on the way that they've played their moves to date.

03:12:58.460 | I always thought from the beginning

03:12:59.580 | that Putin would try to bring in President Xi in China

03:13:03.020 | to resolve it, to basically give a big screw you

03:13:05.500 | to America to say, "China's now the one in charge of this."

03:13:09.820 | But that hasn't seemed to manifest itself to date either.

03:13:14.060 | But it takes leadership.

03:13:15.660 | The leaders have to get in and say,

03:13:17.140 | "Let's get everyone together and let's try to get this done

03:13:19.380 | "because every day it goes on, A, more people are dying,

03:13:23.000 | "and B, we do risk a nuclear war for the world,

03:13:27.080 | "which is not a good situation."

03:13:29.460 | - Let me ask, since you helped set up phone calls

03:13:32.660 | between Donald Trump, Putin, and the King of Saudi Arabia,

03:13:36.140 | if I were to interview Putin, what advice would you give

03:13:38.940 | on how to get a deep understanding of the human being?

03:13:45.020 | - Yeah, so I didn't deal with Russia a ton,

03:13:48.700 | but in my interaction with Putin and with Russia,

03:13:52.660 | I would kind of point out a couple of things.

03:13:55.780 | Number one is when America was hit with COVID

03:13:58.740 | and New York was looking like we were gonna run

03:14:00.900 | out of ventilators and masks,

03:14:02.780 | Russia was the second country that sent us

03:14:04.940 | a plane load of supplies.

03:14:06.620 | And they didn't send that because they hate America,

03:14:08.580 | they sent that because we were starting

03:14:10.540 | to make progress together as countries,

03:14:12.300 | and they thought that they wanted to show goodwill

03:14:14.900 | to figure out how can we start working together.

03:14:17.840 | And again, people may attack me for saying

03:14:19.580 | that that sounds naive.

03:14:21.180 | Again, the past 15 years may show that that's not the case,

03:14:24.300 | but I don't believe that countries have permanent enemies,

03:14:27.060 | and I don't believe countries have permanent allies.

03:14:29.340 | Again, you think about the US and Russia in World War II,

03:14:32.260 | we worked together to defeat the Nazis, right?

03:14:35.300 | And now we're great allies with Germany,

03:14:37.020 | who basically was our great enemy in World War II.

03:14:40.260 | We're great allies with Japan,

03:14:41.500 | who was our great enemy in World War II.

03:14:42.980 | So it goes back to the notion we discussed earlier

03:14:46.420 | of you shouldn't condemn tomorrow to be like yesterday

03:14:50.940 | if you're unhappy with yesterday.

03:14:52.460 | So number one is I would definitely ask him about that.

03:14:56.500 | The phone call that you mentioned was after we did

03:14:58.720 | a pretty intense negotiation to create the largest oil cut

03:15:01.980 | in the history of oil production.

03:15:03.800 | So during COVID, demand just shut off like crazy,

03:15:07.660 | and it was stopping very quickly.

03:15:10.300 | Saudi and Russia at that time were having a conflict,

03:15:13.240 | they created this thing called OPEC+,

03:15:15.340 | which goes back, again, history between the two countries

03:15:17.780 | where they had conflicts, and then all of a sudden,

03:15:20.700 | they were working together to try to stabilize

03:15:22.820 | the oil markets, but they couldn't agree on the cuts,

03:15:25.380 | so Saudi actually increased production.

03:15:28.660 | So you had two things hitting at once,

03:15:30.280 | where Saudi and Russia were both increasing production

03:15:32.960 | and demand was dropping.

03:15:34.100 | So you were headed for a real crisis,

03:15:35.840 | and I was starting to get calls from a lot of the

03:15:38.000 | oil industry executives here in America saying,

03:15:40.300 | "You don't understand, we can't just flip a switch

03:15:42.060 | "and turn off our oil wells,

03:15:43.040 | "like we're running out of storage here."

03:15:45.300 | And I said, "Look, President Trump likes low oil prices,

03:15:48.960 | "so he's not upset about what's happening.

03:15:51.180 | "You have to call him, and if he gives me permission

03:15:53.600 | "or the instruction, then I can try to intervene,

03:15:55.480 | "but right now, he's not inclined to intervene."

03:15:59.440 | After a little bit, he said, "You know what, it's time.

03:16:01.700 | "Get involved, go do it."

03:16:03.720 | It was right over Passover, this was during COVID.

03:16:05.860 | I spent three days nonstop on the phone

03:16:08.120 | with Kirill Dmitriev from Russia and with MBS directly,

03:16:12.040 | and I was dealing with Dan Burlett,

03:16:13.200 | who was our energy minister, going back and forth,

03:16:16.280 | and it was like, it was crazy.

03:16:18.200 | I mean, it was just one of the craziest negotiations.

03:16:20.140 | We ended up agreeing on the largest oil cut

03:16:23.360 | in the history of the world,

03:16:24.820 | but the story you went to before, which was pretty funny,

03:16:27.000 | was finally make the deal, and we set up a call

03:16:31.320 | between King Salman, Vladimir Putin,

03:16:34.120 | and President Trump to announce the deal.

03:16:37.240 | I'm like, "Oh, this is great."

03:16:39.080 | So President Trump gets on, says, "Congratulations,

03:16:41.120 | "we have a deal," and then King Salman says,

03:16:43.180 | "We don't have a deal.

03:16:44.580 | "Mexico hasn't agreed to their cuts."

03:16:46.840 | And he's saying, "What do you mean?"

03:16:47.680 | And so they were part of the OPEC Plus,

03:16:50.680 | and so I get a note saying, "You gotta go call Mexico."

03:16:52.600 | So I'm calling Mexico, and we're dealing,

03:16:54.080 | they're saying, "We're not doing any cuts."

03:16:55.360 | I said, "Why?"

03:16:56.200 | I said, "We're hedged at $55."

03:16:57.040 | He said, "Why didn't you tell us that in the beginning?"

03:16:59.180 | So I'm telling the Saudis,

03:17:00.680 | so we were working through this whole thing.

03:17:02.960 | So meanwhile, we were trying to find

03:17:04.580 | the compromise with Mexico.

03:17:06.440 | I set up a call with Trump and Putin

03:17:08.560 | so they can kind of talk this through,

03:17:10.680 | and he was always trying to play the game

03:17:12.440 | of how do we get Russia away from China.

03:17:15.080 | He always thought that that was not the right

03:17:17.120 | strategic framework for US interests,

03:17:20.040 | and again, we had no problems with them during that time.

03:17:24.600 | What I would say is that for Zelensky and Putin,

03:17:28.600 | any conversation with both of them

03:17:30.200 | is about understanding their perspective.

03:17:33.080 | I think with Putin, he's a student of history

03:17:35.560 | from the things that I saw with him.

03:17:37.960 | If you look at Russia over the last 500 years,

03:17:40.280 | I think they were attacked by the Polish in early 1600.

03:17:44.600 | I think they were attacked by the Swedes in the 1700s.

03:17:48.280 | I think they were attacked by Napoleon in the 1800s,

03:17:51.200 | and then in the 1900s, they were attacked by Germany twice.

03:17:54.480 | And so from his perspective, there is,

03:17:59.040 | in the early days of Russia,

03:18:00.660 | they were attacked by the Mongols.

03:18:03.520 | They were very vulnerable,

03:18:04.820 | and a lot of the geography of Russia today

03:18:07.720 | is really designed for defensive purposes,

03:18:09.720 | that they have natural barriers

03:18:11.160 | that makes them easier to defend.

03:18:12.560 | And Russia's a massive landmass.

03:18:14.040 | It's twice the size of America.

03:18:15.320 | They have 11 time zones in the country.

03:18:17.800 | And so I do think that for Vladimir Putin,

03:18:21.560 | his biggest concern is how do we create a security paradigm

03:18:26.480 | in the west of his country that won't be a creep?

03:18:29.840 | And I think that there's two different parts of the mindset.

03:18:32.360 | The people who are most cynical of Putin will say,

03:18:34.960 | well, he's just trying to recreate the USSR.

03:18:37.040 | He's being expansionist.

03:18:38.720 | And the people who wanna be sympathetic to him will say,

03:18:41.520 | well, if you think about it,

03:18:43.160 | the Russian perception of the NATO arrangement

03:18:46.680 | was that they wouldn't be expanding westward.

03:18:48.600 | Over the last years,

03:18:50.320 | they've included all these countries that they said,

03:18:52.320 | they promised they wouldn't include,

03:18:54.520 | who knows what the promises were or weren't.

03:18:58.080 | But what I do know from his perspective

03:19:00.200 | is allowing Ukraine into NATO was always a red line,

03:19:04.160 | and that's why we never offered it.

03:19:05.480 | We never provoked it.

03:19:06.800 | We never brought it up.

03:19:07.640 | We said, we're gonna arm 'em,

03:19:08.520 | and we basically said, just calm down.

03:19:10.080 | We don't want any conflicts there.

03:19:11.100 | We have bigger issues

03:19:12.000 | and bigger opportunities to work from.

03:19:14.280 | So I do think you have to think through

03:19:15.840 | what's a paradigm that he can accept.

03:19:17.880 | And I do think that he'll give the justification

03:19:22.880 | for why he's done what he's done.

03:19:25.140 | And then I think the framework for a solution

03:19:27.480 | is about how do we move both parties forward.

03:19:31.400 | Tough job.

03:19:32.240 | I hope you get the opportunity to do it

03:19:33.560 | because I think it's a conversation

03:19:35.080 | that will only help the world

03:19:38.040 | hopefully find a pathway forward.

03:19:40.320 | - And I should mention, 'cause you mentioned geography,

03:19:42.760 | one of the many books you've recommended to me

03:19:45.400 | that gives a very interesting perspective on history.

03:19:48.520 | It's called "Prisoners of Geography" by Tim Marshall.

03:19:51.760 | And it has a very interesting perspective

03:19:56.120 | on the geopolitical conflicts and perspective of Russia

03:20:01.120 | from a geography perspective.

03:20:04.100 | And also for China in the second chapter.

03:20:08.120 | And there's a lot of understanding

03:20:09.520 | of why the expansion of NATO is such a concern for Russia.

03:20:13.640 | Because geography still, even in the 21st century,

03:20:16.920 | less and less so because of technology and so on,

03:20:19.440 | but it still plays a major role

03:20:21.400 | in conflicts between nations, rivers, mountains.

03:20:25.360 | - And understanding the DNA of countries.

03:20:27.360 | It was one of the most phenomenal books

03:20:29.120 | and I just found it on Amazon randomly,

03:20:31.240 | but I loved every minute of it.

03:20:32.840 | The chapter on America is also incredible.

03:20:34.680 | Going through the evolution of how we became

03:20:37.880 | the country we are, the different acquisitions,

03:20:39.920 | the different changes,

03:20:40.760 | why we have all these geographic advantages.

03:20:43.440 | And it's an unbelievable book

03:20:45.520 | for anyone who's interested in geopolitics.

03:20:48.360 | - So I have to ask on several aspects of China.

03:20:51.640 | First on the president, the meeting.

03:20:55.400 | You helped set up a first call and first meeting

03:20:57.280 | between Donald Trump and Xi Jinping.

03:21:00.240 | Can you tell the story of that?

03:21:01.360 | Because that's also interesting.

03:21:02.320 | Again, that first phone call, the reaching out,

03:21:04.800 | the forming the human connection,

03:21:07.720 | which ultimately leads to the connection between nations

03:21:10.560 | and the possibility of collaboration.

03:21:12.400 | - So during the transition,

03:21:13.840 | President Trump took a call from the head of Taiwan

03:21:17.280 | and that sent the Chinese into a real tailspin.

03:21:21.800 | And he didn't do it, I think, to be provocative to them

03:21:24.480 | as much as just as a businessman,

03:21:26.280 | he felt you answer your call.

03:21:27.760 | Somebody wants to speak to you, you speak to him like you.

03:21:29.760 | You wanna have conversations, hear their point of view.

03:21:32.200 | But it was taken as a very big insult

03:21:34.240 | and it was against tradition and norm.

03:21:36.120 | And so that was something that set us off

03:21:40.240 | in a wrong direction.

03:21:42.320 | My view at the time was that,

03:21:44.040 | we are kind of entering a G2 world,

03:21:47.120 | whether people want to admit it or not.

03:21:49.440 | And that a lot of these countries

03:21:52.240 | in what I call the middle market countries

03:21:54.280 | were basically playing, this one China was being aggressive

03:21:56.480 | with their one belt, one road.

03:21:57.520 | They were basically playing US and China against each other.

03:22:00.960 | And I thought that by the two leaders coming together,

03:22:04.480 | there were some things they wouldn't agree on,

03:22:07.240 | but there was a lot that they probably could agree on,

03:22:09.200 | which could lead to resolutions

03:22:12.920 | to a lot of issues in the world.

03:22:15.080 | That was like my most optimistic view.

03:22:17.360 | My most more pragmatic view was that President Trump

03:22:21.360 | had very big issues on trade

03:22:23.280 | that he wanted to get to with China.

03:22:24.760 | He felt like China, their trade practices were unfair.

03:22:27.760 | They weren't following all the global rules of trade.

03:22:30.680 | He was a little bit nervous

03:22:31.640 | that they would be provocative with Taiwan.

03:22:33.360 | And I felt like the two of them getting together

03:22:35.600 | would be the best way to try and resolve that.

03:22:38.080 | So the Chinese are very proud and a lot of it is about face.

03:22:42.120 | And so in order to negotiate for that first call,

03:22:46.920 | we basically agreed on what would happen in the call.

03:22:48.960 | So not let's just have a call, say hi, nice to meet you,

03:22:51.080 | it was a question of President Trump basically agreed

03:22:53.960 | that he would acknowledge the one China policy,

03:22:55.880 | which he didn't see as a big concession

03:22:57.880 | because you could always unacknowledge it the next day.

03:22:59.640 | So yeah, I'll acknowledge it and then we'll go.

03:23:01.440 | And in exchange, President Xi was gonna come over to the US

03:23:05.240 | for a visit so they could sit together.

03:23:07.320 | And they want to do it outside the White House.

03:23:08.960 | And so we agreed on Mar-a-Lago,

03:23:10.240 | which I also thought was good

03:23:11.680 | 'cause President Trump always felt much more comfortable

03:23:13.920 | when he was hosting at his properties

03:23:16.320 | and he just felt at home.

03:23:17.440 | And so he liked having people as his guests

03:23:19.400 | and he loved it.

03:23:20.600 | He always felt really relaxed and it was great.

03:23:23.840 | So that was really what we did.

03:23:25.000 | Then the Chinese come over, very much anticipated visit

03:23:29.600 | and it was incredible.

03:23:30.440 | So they were supposed to sit together for 15 minutes

03:23:33.520 | and they sent about an hour and a half together.

03:23:36.120 | And during that meeting, President Trump, they said,

03:23:37.640 | "Look, let's just set some ground rules

03:23:39.080 | to this relationship.

03:23:40.160 | Like, let's just not talk about Taiwan.

03:23:41.520 | Like, just don't do anything I don't want on the table.

03:23:43.800 | If it does, I'm gonna have to do harsh things.

03:23:45.920 | I still want this to be a problem for four years.

03:23:47.440 | We got bigger issues."

03:23:49.000 | They basically just, again,

03:23:50.560 | you notice four years of Trump administration,

03:23:52.400 | no Taiwan talk whatsoever.

03:23:53.880 | It was a non-issue.

03:23:55.560 | Started talking about the trade issues.

03:23:57.080 | They spent a lot of time on North Korea.

03:23:59.320 | President Trump was trying to get the perspective

03:24:01.240 | from President Xi about North Korea

03:24:03.880 | because that was, again, considered from Obama,

03:24:06.400 | the biggest national security issue

03:24:07.840 | that we faced at the time.

03:24:09.760 | And they just had a good feeling for each other.

03:24:13.120 | It also helped that, you know, my wife and I,

03:24:16.600 | we actually had a Chinese nanny and teacher in our house

03:24:20.160 | and our kids learned fluent Mandarin.

03:24:22.720 | And our daughter actually opened

03:24:24.960 | when President Xi and President Trump were together

03:24:27.760 | with Melania and with Madam Peng.

03:24:32.840 | My daughter actually sang them a couple of Chinese songs.

03:24:35.480 | And I thought that was a nice way to show,

03:24:38.160 | you know, we're tough, but we respect your culture.

03:24:40.040 | 'Cause the Chinese have an incredible culture

03:24:41.680 | that goes back thousands of years.

03:24:43.160 | They're very proud in how they do it.

03:24:46.120 | And I think that sign of respect also set things off

03:24:48.320 | in a very warm way for President Trump

03:24:50.560 | saying my granddaughter speaks Chinese

03:24:52.560 | and we're showing you the respect,

03:24:55.100 | which I think is very important.

03:24:57.120 | And he did have respect for them.

03:24:59.160 | The next part about the visit, I mean,

03:25:00.720 | obviously we had a lot of discussions on trade,

03:25:02.640 | but the part that was probably most impactful to me

03:25:05.280 | was President Xi basically did an hour monologue at lunch

03:25:10.120 | where he just went through Chinese history

03:25:13.760 | from his perspective.

03:25:14.760 | And he talked about, with particular emphasis

03:25:18.560 | on kind of the Treaty of Unequals

03:25:20.560 | and then the 100 Years of Humiliation.

03:25:23.080 | And then you go through from Mao all the way to today

03:25:26.640 | and you had, you know, China coming back and rising.

03:25:29.720 | And you could tell that he was,

03:25:31.960 | learned the lessons from the past

03:25:33.960 | and was very committed to kind of seeing China go through.

03:25:36.400 | So that was a different time, right?

03:25:37.740 | So China today is different than it was in 2017.

03:25:41.600 | In 2017, I remember President Xi was at Davos

03:25:45.740 | and he was vetted by all the top business people

03:25:47.800 | in the world as the, you know,

03:25:49.400 | Donald Trump was the threat to the global world order.

03:25:52.000 | President Xi was the champion of free trade

03:25:54.400 | and the biggest champion of environmentalism

03:25:57.040 | and fighting for climate change.

03:25:58.920 | And what occurred was President Trump came in

03:26:02.800 | and basically said, like,

03:26:03.640 | "I think China has not been following

03:26:05.360 | "the rules-based order."

03:26:07.120 | Took very, very drastic approaches with tariffs.

03:26:09.500 | Every time he would do the tariffs, again,

03:26:11.520 | you know, I had Mnuchin, our treasury secretary,

03:26:13.880 | come to Vankama House, "If he does this,

03:26:15.480 | "this is gonna crash the whole economy."

03:26:16.960 | I mean, these, and by the way, he believed it.

03:26:19.280 | I mean, these were things that people were telling him

03:26:21.680 | would be very tough to do.

03:26:23.480 | You know, President Trump had a gentleman named

03:26:25.280 | Ambassador Lighthizer, Robert Lighthizer.

03:26:27.720 | He was really the tip of the spear

03:26:29.440 | on all of our trade negotiations.

03:26:31.600 | He worked very well with Secretary Mnuchin.

03:26:33.680 | And they ended up, we ended up increasing tariffs

03:26:36.000 | to numbers that hadn't even been thought could happen.

03:26:41.000 | So we did the first round of tariffs.

03:26:43.040 | Then, you know, the Chinese came back

03:26:44.960 | and retaliated very surgically,

03:26:46.560 | trying to hit us in all the areas

03:26:48.480 | that politically would have been difficult.

03:26:49.920 | And what Trump did was instead of backing down,

03:26:52.480 | he took some of the revenue from the tariffs,

03:26:55.160 | gave it to the farmers and said,

03:26:56.300 | "I know that this is gonna hurt your business,

03:26:57.700 | "but I'm gonna make sure you guys are made whole."

03:26:59.600 | And then he doubled down and basically went back

03:27:02.080 | at the Chinese with even more tariffs.

03:27:03.600 | So what we watched over a year and a half

03:27:05.200 | was probably the biggest hand of poker that was ever played.

03:27:09.200 | And it was an amazing experience to be a part of it.

03:27:12.580 | And the role I played was really working

03:27:14.400 | for Secretary Mnuchin and Ambassador Lighthizer

03:27:17.120 | as a back channel with the Chinese

03:27:19.120 | to make sure we can just deescalate things

03:27:21.920 | and get to solutions in the best way possible.

03:27:25.720 | And so, anyway, it was a fascinating time.

03:27:29.360 | But if you think about the global awareness

03:27:31.840 | of the bad practices that China was putting in place today

03:27:35.760 | versus what they were in 2016,

03:27:38.220 | I think one of President Trump's most successful policies

03:27:41.040 | was shifting the way the entire world

03:27:44.280 | understood the threat of China

03:27:46.840 | and then putting in place the beginning of a regime

03:27:50.380 | to try and rebalance the world

03:27:53.280 | so that we could have more economic parity.

03:27:55.600 | - So you mentioned to me the book,

03:27:56.880 | "The 100-Year Marathon" by Michael Pillsbury

03:27:59.720 | when we discussed China.

03:28:02.180 | And I've got a chance to read parts of it.

03:28:07.200 | And I'd highly recommend people read it

03:28:08.840 | 'cause there's a few,

03:28:10.440 | it's definitely an eye-opening perspective.

03:28:13.060 | I don't know if I agree with all of it.

03:28:15.440 | I don't know if you agree with all of it,

03:28:16.640 | but it certainly opens,

03:28:18.640 | it gives a very intense perspective on China.

03:28:20.880 | And you said it was instructive to how you thought,

03:28:24.680 | how Donald Trump thought about China.

03:28:26.580 | Can you describe the main thesis of the book

03:28:30.440 | and maybe with a hopeful view

03:28:32.640 | how it's possible to have a trajectory

03:28:35.040 | of these two superpowers working together in 21st century

03:28:39.080 | versus fighting against each other?

03:28:42.760 | - Perfect, so it's a very, very big book.

03:28:45.360 | And I think it's a book definitely worth reading.

03:28:47.840 | Michael is tremendous.

03:28:51.120 | He speaks fluent Mandarin.

03:28:52.880 | So he spent a lot of time researching to do the book.

03:28:56.120 | So I highly recommend it to everyone.

03:28:57.720 | And it was considered more of a fringe perspective in 2016,

03:29:02.000 | but it really, I think,

03:29:03.440 | came to represent the underpinning

03:29:05.000 | of what the collective thought was

03:29:07.480 | of the Trump administration.

03:29:09.480 | And maybe you could argue that it was even more cynical.

03:29:12.760 | The whole thesis of the book was that

03:29:15.280 | China from 1949 to 2049

03:29:18.000 | was working to reclaim their position

03:29:20.800 | as the global leader, right?

03:29:22.300 | So you had the Chinese empire.

03:29:24.080 | One of the things, I don't know if it's from this book

03:29:26.920 | or a different book that I read

03:29:28.040 | that spoke about how in the late 1700s,

03:29:30.720 | basically the emperor of China

03:29:32.480 | was offered some of the industrial capability from England,

03:29:36.360 | which was basically now becoming an industrial,

03:29:39.080 | the industrial revolution.

03:29:40.220 | And basically, no, we're fine.

03:29:41.280 | We're the great Chinese empire.

03:29:42.440 | We don't need any of these things.

03:29:44.560 | We're better than that.

03:29:46.280 | And by rejecting that, the rest of the world got stronger.

03:29:48.840 | China remained weaker.

03:29:50.760 | Then you had the opium wars.

03:29:53.140 | The Chinese had big opium problems

03:29:55.100 | through all the trade back and forth.

03:29:57.100 | And then China from about 1840 to 1940,

03:30:00.620 | at 100 years, where they really,

03:30:02.420 | after all these treaties,

03:30:05.060 | were really a second-class country.

03:30:07.460 | And so then you have the People's Revolution that comes in.

03:30:10.460 | And he talks about how China, very strategically,

03:30:13.100 | as a very, very poor country,

03:30:14.700 | would fight their way back and build brick by brick.

03:30:18.780 | And he proffers in the book

03:30:20.360 | that Nixon didn't go to China and open China.

03:30:22.400 | It was China that actually went to Nixon

03:30:24.080 | and was able to use Nixon in order to open up.

03:30:26.760 | And then they talk about how under Carter,

03:30:28.160 | they were able to get the US to contribute

03:30:30.360 | to a lot of their,

03:30:31.960 | they were able to kind of start borrowing the US know-how

03:30:34.680 | from our university systems, from our medical,

03:30:36.600 | from our science, from our research.

03:30:38.360 | And the whole notion that was the conventional thinking

03:30:40.700 | of American leaders was that

03:30:43.840 | the more we help China advance,

03:30:45.360 | the more they would become a free-market economy

03:30:47.720 | and it was a great market.

03:30:48.660 | The only difference was,

03:30:49.580 | was that they weren't allowing us access.

03:30:51.680 | They were making our companies basically give them

03:30:54.360 | all of their technical knowledge.

03:30:55.680 | They were stealing our intellectual property.

03:30:58.000 | They were doing espionage to steal a lot of the patents.

03:31:01.540 | They were just ignoring our patents

03:31:03.240 | and they weren't following any of the rules

03:31:05.000 | of international trade.

03:31:06.520 | Then they started becoming the world's manufacturing hub.

03:31:09.560 | They basically became the world's factory.

03:31:11.040 | And then they started this whole initiative

03:31:12.680 | called the Belt and Road Initiative

03:31:14.440 | in order to start locking in their lines of trades.

03:31:17.040 | They were buying up all the ports everywhere.

03:31:18.660 | They were building railways,

03:31:20.260 | thinking how do we lock in our distribution

03:31:23.180 | so that we can maintain the dominance

03:31:24.780 | as the world's global factory.

03:31:26.760 | And so it was a brilliant long-term plan

03:31:28.500 | that they were doing.

03:31:30.260 | And by raising awareness, by putting the tariffs,

03:31:33.300 | Trump slowed them down a lot.

03:31:34.760 | The real question is,

03:31:37.380 | is if they actually did achieve this full objective

03:31:40.060 | of becoming the world dominant country,

03:31:43.440 | what they would have done with it,

03:31:44.460 | whether they would have been nefarious or not.

03:31:46.260 | I think from my perspective,

03:31:47.580 | even with some of the divisions and issues

03:31:49.380 | we have now in America,

03:31:50.940 | I still would rather an American-led world order

03:31:53.480 | than a Chinese-led world order.

03:31:55.140 | But the notion was is that they were playing

03:31:58.060 | a very zero-sum game and really going to be

03:32:00.740 | the dominant leader in this new world order.

03:32:03.340 | So that really framed the perspective.

03:32:06.500 | And it wasn't necessarily,

03:32:07.780 | and the Chinese were always fearing,

03:32:11.460 | is Trump trying to stop our rise?

03:32:13.300 | And you have a great book also by Graham Allison

03:32:15.180 | that he writes about,

03:32:16.740 | are we destined for war between US and China?

03:32:19.260 | And he goes through different historical times

03:32:21.500 | where you have a power and a rising superpower.

03:32:24.660 | And I think more than half the time

03:32:27.100 | it ends up leading to war.

03:32:28.180 | So the question is, is what's gonna happen here?

03:32:31.020 | And I do think that Trump's perspective,

03:32:33.540 | and this is my interpretation,

03:32:34.820 | because everything was always tactical day-to-day

03:32:36.660 | and he was unpredictable to the Chinese,

03:32:39.120 | which they couldn't deal with.

03:32:40.140 | And he was unpredictable even to his team sometimes

03:32:42.340 | because he was playing it day-by-day

03:32:44.880 | and issue-by-issue and always changing and adjusting,

03:32:47.580 | which is how an entrepreneur thinks.

03:32:49.980 | He respected the job they did by building their country.

03:32:53.720 | They moved 300 million people out of poverty

03:32:55.620 | into the middle class.

03:32:56.460 | They did it at the expense of a lot of other countries

03:32:59.400 | throughout the world, especially America.

03:33:01.620 | But Trump says, look, stupid politicians made deals.

03:33:04.580 | I respect China for doing what they did.

03:33:06.740 | But what I wanna do is I wanna change the paradigm

03:33:09.500 | so that for the next 20 years

03:33:11.420 | we can maintain our advantage over them.

03:33:13.580 | We can maintain our competitive dynamic.

03:33:16.100 | And his general view was that America

03:33:18.460 | is the best private sector in the world.

03:33:20.040 | We have a lot of the best minds in the world.

03:33:23.540 | And if we can just have a level playing field

03:33:26.220 | with set rules, then America should be able to outperform.

03:33:29.740 | And so that's really what we were trying to do.

03:33:32.620 | We were trying to kind of get rid

03:33:33.860 | of some of their state subsidies,

03:33:35.720 | get rid of, make them follow

03:33:36.800 | some of these international rules of trade,

03:33:39.180 | and not allowing them to do predatory investments

03:33:43.700 | that then undercut different industries that we had

03:33:47.180 | so that they can have global market dominance

03:33:49.020 | or monopolies on different industries

03:33:50.480 | and then have pricing power, but also geopolitical power.

03:33:54.700 | So like one of the examples that people talk about now

03:33:57.460 | is China for the last 20 years was very advanced

03:34:00.660 | on seeing this electrification trend.

03:34:03.460 | They went, they subsidized solar panels.

03:34:06.700 | A lot of the American solar panel players

03:34:09.040 | were put out of business.

03:34:09.940 | So now I think it's like 90 plus percent

03:34:12.320 | of solar panels in the world are manufactured in China.

03:34:15.680 | Then all the rare earths that you need

03:34:17.360 | in order to make these solar panels

03:34:20.400 | and to make these electric vehicles,

03:34:22.420 | China's bought up most of them

03:34:23.860 | and a lot of the refining capacities in China.

03:34:25.760 | So thinking through strategically,

03:34:28.220 | how do we create an even playing field

03:34:29.940 | so that we're not at the mercy of them

03:34:32.180 | and how you can have a rules-based world order,

03:34:35.100 | that was really kind of the thought

03:34:36.740 | of what we were trying to work towards.

03:34:39.860 | - So there's this SNL skit where Jimmy Fallon plays you

03:34:44.860 | and you're walking into the Oval Office looking cool,

03:34:49.020 | wearing shades and a bulletproof vest

03:34:52.660 | to the song "Unbelievable" by EMF.

03:34:55.380 | I don't know if you've seen it, but it's pretty epic.

03:34:57.580 | And then Trump says that you've traveled the world

03:35:00.700 | representing the administration,

03:35:02.400 | but no one has ever heard you speak.

03:35:04.560 | So there's a lot of questions I can ask about that

03:35:06.540 | but one of them is, can you introspect

03:35:08.940 | why you choose this low-key approach

03:35:11.020 | of kind of operating behind the scenes

03:35:14.860 | and not speaking much to the public, at least at the time?

03:35:17.780 | You've spoken a little bit more

03:35:19.460 | and today you've spoken for a really long time,

03:35:22.020 | which I deeply appreciate.

03:35:23.700 | - No, it's been a pleasure to do this

03:35:25.220 | and thank you for the opportunity

03:35:26.620 | to talk about these things.

03:35:28.460 | And so that was a really funny skit.

03:35:31.020 | And it's funny, the thing I got made fun of the most for that

03:35:35.900 | was the wardrobe.

03:35:36.940 | And that came from after three months in the administration,

03:35:40.500 | we were having dinner with all the generals

03:35:42.620 | and they were saying, updating us on the war with ISIS.

03:35:46.120 | And General Dunford said to me after,

03:35:47.780 | "Look, the president can't come

03:35:48.860 | "to see how we're fighting this war,

03:35:50.700 | "but I'd like to invite you to come with me to Iraq

03:35:53.040 | "and come see, and would you come with me?"

03:35:55.100 | I said, "No, that's great, I always learned in business

03:35:57.580 | "that you can't make decisions from just an ivory tower.

03:36:00.340 | "You have to go to the front lines

03:36:01.540 | "and see what's actually happening."

03:36:03.700 | So I said, "No problem, I'd love to go."

03:36:05.820 | Meanwhile, two days before I'm about to go,

03:36:07.420 | the doc from the White House stops by my office and says,

03:36:09.760 | "We need to get your blood type."

03:36:10.780 | So what do you mean my blood type is?

03:36:11.860 | You're going to an active war zone.

03:36:13.060 | I'm like, okay, so I guess I'll go to a war zone.

03:36:15.500 | I didn't really think this thing fully through.

03:36:17.880 | So I get on the plane with Dunford and we land in Iraq

03:36:22.100 | and he looks like GI Joe, he's a great general,

03:36:25.900 | he's very, very well-respected in the military.

03:36:28.620 | And we go in and we get on Black Hawk helicopter.

03:36:32.900 | They said, "You know what, today's a nice day,

03:36:33.920 | "let's take the sides off."

03:36:36.340 | And so I get on the plane and there's a guy,

03:36:39.660 | a military service officer who then takes a machine gun,

03:36:44.300 | locks it into a thing, takes the bullets,

03:36:46.420 | puts them into the gun and is sitting there saying,

03:36:48.380 | "We're ready to go."

03:36:49.340 | And then I'm looking out

03:36:50.180 | and there's like three other helicopters with guys.

03:36:52.260 | One was an Osprey with a guy buckled in,

03:36:55.300 | also with a machine gun looking out.

03:36:56.860 | We take off and we're flying over Baghdad

03:36:59.300 | from the airport to the embassy.

03:37:02.480 | And as we're going, I'm sitting in an open air helicopter

03:37:06.380 | with the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff,

03:37:08.880 | guys with machine guns everywhere.

03:37:10.740 | - This is a new experience for you.

03:37:12.380 | You haven't experienced this previously.

03:37:13.220 | - I would say slightly.

03:37:14.040 | I mean, I was doing real estate like three months ago,

03:37:15.900 | you know, and now I'm flying over Iraq

03:37:18.100 | and the chairman says, "That's Saddam Hussein's palace."

03:37:21.100 | And I look down, there's like a big bomb

03:37:22.660 | right through the middle.

03:37:23.500 | Then you see the area with the two swords in the hands.

03:37:26.340 | I'm saying to myself, like, "How the hell did I get here?

03:37:28.140 | "Like, what is happening?"

03:37:30.060 | So meanwhile, we ended up going to the front lines

03:37:32.560 | to be with the service, the Iraqi military,

03:37:34.680 | which the US military was working closely with.

03:37:37.120 | And I had a meeting that night with the president of Iraq.

03:37:39.040 | And so I wore, what do you wear to the front lines

03:37:41.520 | in a battle zone?

03:37:42.360 | And also me and the president.

03:37:43.880 | So I put a sports jacket on.

03:37:45.720 | We land at the front line and they give me a bulletproof vest

03:37:49.760 | that says Kushner on it.

03:37:50.800 | I tape it.

03:37:51.920 | I just, I put it on, I go out and I cover the NER.

03:37:55.640 | So it just said Kush.

03:37:57.120 | And I went and I didn't realize they were taking pictures.

03:37:59.920 | And so-

03:38:00.760 | - I think the picture looks pretty epic.

03:38:01.580 | You with sunglasses.

03:38:02.620 | I think I love it.

03:38:03.580 | - So anyway, so that was the funny story behind that.

03:38:05.720 | And then actually my brother was at some society event

03:38:09.040 | in New York and he ran into Jimmy Fallon.

03:38:11.700 | So the two of them took a selfie together.

03:38:13.400 | And Josh writes me, he says,

03:38:16.220 | hanging out with my older brother in New York.

03:38:18.020 | (laughing)

03:38:18.860 | You know, I'm trying to explain to him

03:38:20.020 | what your voice sounds like.

03:38:21.180 | So it was good.

03:38:22.760 | So that was a funny one.

03:38:23.620 | But I think just being behind the scenes for me

03:38:27.800 | just gave me more maneuverability

03:38:29.340 | in the sense that, you know, again,

03:38:31.220 | it goes back to trust and people knowing

03:38:32.900 | that I wasn't gonna try to publicize

03:38:35.100 | the things they were telling me.

03:38:36.620 | I think it just gave me more ability to operate that way.

03:38:40.120 | And I also realized too, like,

03:38:42.020 | communicating is a very important skill.

03:38:44.620 | Luckily in Washington,

03:38:45.740 | there's no shortage of amazing communicators.

03:38:47.820 | I think there were a lot of people

03:38:49.460 | who are much better at me than being communicators.

03:38:51.660 | So I was very happy that they were willing to do it

03:38:54.640 | 'cause it wasn't something

03:38:55.580 | that I had a lot of experience with

03:38:57.460 | or necessarily I thought I was very good at.

03:39:00.140 | And so I kind of just did my job

03:39:01.940 | and just focused on getting things done.

03:39:04.420 | - So let me ask you, you have a very interesting life.

03:39:10.460 | If you were to give advice to young folks

03:39:13.860 | on how to have such an impactful life,

03:39:17.260 | what would you say?

03:39:18.220 | Career and life.

03:39:21.420 | How to have a successful career and a successful life.

03:39:25.280 | - Number one is I would say,

03:39:27.080 | you just have to work hard at everything you do.

03:39:30.900 | Number two, I would say, never stop learning

03:39:35.140 | and always try to say yes more than you should.

03:39:38.300 | Go out of your comfort zone.

03:39:39.740 | And I think just you gotta work hard at everything you do.

03:39:44.780 | And if you're gonna take something on,

03:39:47.020 | do it the best you can.

03:39:48.700 | One of the lessons I write about in the book from my father

03:39:50.980 | was, I remember I was going for a job interview

03:39:53.700 | and he asked me, he says, "Well, what time

03:39:56.080 | "are you leaving to the job interview?"

03:39:57.480 | It was at nine o'clock.

03:39:58.320 | I said, "I'll leave at eight o'clock."

03:39:59.240 | He said, "Well, what if there's traffic?"

03:40:00.400 | I said, "Dad, I've done this drive a thousand times.

03:40:02.760 | "There's never traffic."

03:40:03.960 | He said, "What if there's an accident?"

03:40:05.080 | I said, "I can't control that."

03:40:06.680 | He said, "Jared, the only excuse you ever have

03:40:08.460 | "for being late is that you didn't leave early enough."

03:40:11.360 | And I just think it's something where

03:40:13.320 | if you wanna accomplish something,

03:40:15.520 | a lot of people I hear they complain

03:40:17.080 | about what other people do or why it's hard

03:40:19.120 | or why it's impossible.

03:40:20.480 | And again, I say this as somebody who's been so blessed

03:40:22.960 | with so many things in life, but when I've had challenges

03:40:26.860 | or things I've wanted to achieve,

03:40:28.980 | I just focus and say, "What can I do?"

03:40:31.700 | And I'll read everything I can get my hands on.

03:40:34.720 | If I fail at one, the door closes, I'll try the window.

03:40:37.720 | If the window closes, I'll try the chimney.

03:40:39.160 | If the chimney closes, I'll try to dig a tunnel.

03:40:40.720 | It's just, if you wanna accomplish something,

03:40:42.760 | you just have to go at it.

03:40:43.860 | And I think the most important thing I'll say,

03:40:46.740 | sorry, I'm kind of thinking my way into this answer,

03:40:49.420 | is just do the right thing.

03:40:51.820 | I think that's also right.

03:40:53.140 | And I saw that in my career, be good to people,

03:40:56.260 | be honest, do the right thing.

03:40:58.260 | And if you do that, I think long-term, it does pay off.

03:41:03.180 | Maybe not in politics, but in the world at large, it does.

03:41:06.540 | And my hope is in politics, it will as well.

03:41:08.860 | - I wonder if you can comment on your process of learning

03:41:11.660 | in general, 'cause you took on so many new,

03:41:13.460 | interesting problems and approached them

03:41:17.100 | with a first principles kind of approach.

03:41:20.060 | So what was your source of information?

03:41:22.980 | 'Cause you didn't seem to be listening

03:41:24.740 | to the assumptions of the prior experts.

03:41:29.060 | You were just taking on the problem

03:41:32.180 | in a very pragmatic perspective.

03:41:35.260 | So what was, how'd you learn about the Middle East?

03:41:38.700 | How did you learn about China?

03:41:40.980 | How did you learn about Mexico?

03:41:42.300 | How did you, like all of these prison reform,

03:41:45.380 | all of this that you've taken on

03:41:47.020 | and were extremely effective at?

03:41:48.860 | - It really started with just talking to people.

03:41:51.540 | I would try to reach out to people

03:41:53.660 | who had been involved in different things

03:41:55.900 | and ask them what they did, what they thought of the problem,

03:41:59.460 | who they thought was smart on it,

03:42:00.980 | what they read that helped them get a better understanding,

03:42:04.300 | why they think something had failed.

03:42:06.740 | And then I would just read voraciously on every topic.

03:42:11.020 | Washington, it was harder to get advice from humans

03:42:13.540 | because I found humans had this weird tendency

03:42:16.300 | to talk to the media.

03:42:17.300 | And so I talked to somebody and I'd ask advice.

03:42:20.060 | And then the next thing I'd know

03:42:21.020 | is the Washington Post would call and say,

03:42:22.660 | "Jared's an idiot, doesn't know what he's doing,

03:42:24.020 | "and he's even going to this person to get advice."

03:42:25.540 | I'm like, "Yeah, I'm asking everyone."

03:42:26.940 | So books really became an amazing guide for me.

03:42:31.940 | Ivanka, she's an incredible researcher.

03:42:34.860 | She's just voracious.

03:42:36.260 | And so she gave me some of my best books

03:42:38.420 | and some incredible advice as well.

03:42:40.620 | But that was really the process.

03:42:42.160 | And then I think that was kind of the first stage.

03:42:44.780 | And then the second stage was just constant iteration

03:42:47.340 | and readjusting plan as you continue to get more learning.

03:42:50.180 | And one story I tell in the book as well

03:42:52.240 | is that on my first trip to the Middle East,

03:42:54.820 | where I met with Mohammed bin Zayed,

03:42:56.820 | who I spoke about earlier, the ruler of UAE,

03:42:59.940 | I spent two hours with him asking him questions

03:43:02.740 | and really going through the Israeli-Palestinian issue,

03:43:05.940 | the Israeli-Arab issue.

03:43:07.700 | And he said to me at the end of the meeting,

03:43:09.260 | he says, "Jared, I think you're gonna make peace

03:43:11.340 | "here in the Middle East."

03:43:13.060 | And I was shocked because, I mean, first of all,

03:43:14.900 | he was, at the time, I think,

03:43:16.700 | some of the most respected leaders in the region,

03:43:19.540 | somebody who I found to be very wise

03:43:21.360 | and super thoughtful and experienced.

03:43:23.740 | And I said to him, "Why do you say that?"

03:43:26.020 | I was flattered, obviously,

03:43:27.140 | but not certain why he was saying that

03:43:30.700 | based on the fact that I didn't know what my plan was.

03:43:32.580 | I didn't know what I was gonna do

03:43:33.420 | and I had no pathway to make peace.

03:43:35.280 | And he said, "Well, the US usually sends

03:43:38.380 | "one of three different kinds of people to come see me."

03:43:41.220 | He says, "The first are people who come

03:43:42.920 | "and they fall asleep in meetings."

03:43:44.820 | He said, "The second are people who come

03:43:46.900 | "and they basically read me notes

03:43:48.500 | "but have no ability to interact

03:43:51.300 | "on the message they're there to convey.

03:43:53.280 | "And then the third have been people

03:43:54.900 | "who have come to convince me to do things

03:43:57.320 | "that aren't in my interests."

03:43:59.300 | He says, "You're the first person who's ever come here

03:44:01.820 | "and has just asked questions."

03:44:03.740 | He says, "Why have you done that?"

03:44:05.900 | I said, "Because I figure this problem's

03:44:08.420 | "been going on for a long time.

03:44:09.940 | "You live here, I'll be gone at some point.

03:44:12.000 | "You're gonna have to live with the consequences

03:44:13.860 | "of whatever my work is and the US has a lot of power.

03:44:17.240 | "And my question is, what would you do if you were me?

03:44:21.340 | "And how would you approach this?

03:44:22.920 | "And help me think about it."

03:44:24.700 | And again, I wasn't gonna then take his plan

03:44:26.500 | and then execute it, but I thought it'd be very provocative

03:44:29.720 | to understand from the people in the region

03:44:32.020 | and instructive how they would use the resource

03:44:35.420 | and the power that the US had to solve the problems

03:44:38.580 | that were having significant impact on their lives.

03:44:42.540 | - Yeah, there's a lot of power to the simplicity

03:44:45.880 | of that human approach where you're just listening.

03:44:53.580 | - Yeah, and one of my wishes for society

03:44:55.900 | is I leave government.

03:44:57.500 | I was living on the Upper East Side

03:45:00.400 | in a very liberal echo chamber.

03:45:02.740 | I then traveled the country.

03:45:03.960 | I met so many people who I never would have met otherwise

03:45:07.340 | on the conservative side, on the independent side,

03:45:09.480 | on so many different issues.

03:45:11.140 | I think that people benefit

03:45:12.580 | if you have such a strong point of view.

03:45:14.540 | I would follow the John Stuart Mill marketplace of ideas

03:45:18.020 | and find people who disagree with you

03:45:20.380 | and don't call them names, don't say they're a bad person.

03:45:23.000 | Say, "I wanna understand why you feel the way you do.

03:45:25.740 | "Let's have conversations in this country."

03:45:28.100 | And I think that that's probably gonna be our best way

03:45:30.900 | to work through the issues that we have currently.

03:45:34.620 | - When you zoom out and look at the 21st century

03:45:37.940 | from a human history perspective,

03:45:39.900 | across the time scale of many decades, maybe centuries,

03:45:43.460 | what gives you hope about human civilization?

03:45:46.580 | Everything you've seen.

03:45:47.820 | You've traveled the world,

03:45:49.440 | you've talked to some of the most powerful

03:45:50.700 | and influential people, and you look at the future.

03:45:54.180 | What gives you hope about this little planet of ours?

03:45:57.200 | - What gives me the most hope is that anything's possible.

03:45:59.940 | If there's one lesson that I took from my time in government

03:46:03.860 | it's that people coming together

03:46:06.300 | to try to make tomorrow different than yesterday can succeed.

03:46:10.340 | And if the right people in the right places

03:46:12.500 | focus on the right ideas,

03:46:13.980 | I think the advancement that we can have for human history

03:46:17.540 | and for society can be tremendous.

03:46:19.340 | And I think that right now I see we're at a place in society

03:46:22.800 | where there's a lot of what I call squabbles

03:46:25.060 | between countries, which are really man versus man issues.

03:46:28.940 | And those are as old as time, right?

03:46:31.700 | We've been fighting about borders or religion

03:46:34.620 | or who wronged somebody 100 or a thousand years ago.

03:46:38.620 | And these are what I call more tribal battles.

03:46:41.180 | But I do think that as we advance

03:46:43.320 | with artificial intelligence, as energy becomes cheaper

03:46:46.600 | and it's more readily available,

03:46:48.940 | I think we're gonna have massive industrialization.

03:46:50.980 | I think we're gonna have massive advancement.

03:46:52.920 | I think in medical and science,

03:46:54.820 | we're gonna have cures for diseases.

03:46:57.660 | We have the potential in 10, 20 years from now

03:47:00.140 | to enter a dawn for humanity that could be incredible.

03:47:03.180 | We could become multi-planetary.

03:47:05.620 | We can explore the wonders of the world.

03:47:07.900 | We can find things we didn't know.

03:47:10.900 | So I think that if we put our energy

03:47:15.700 | towards finding these advancements

03:47:17.560 | that will improve the lives of everyone on this planet,

03:47:22.560 | instead of figuring out ways

03:47:24.120 | to have these tensions between us,

03:47:26.300 | that for me is the most optimistic case for what's possible.

03:47:29.340 | And the reason why I believe it's possible

03:47:30.980 | is because somebody with no experience,

03:47:34.460 | somebody who all I really had was the faith of a leader,

03:47:39.460 | and I had the courage to try,

03:47:43.060 | and I went out there with other people

03:47:44.540 | and we took on some of the most hopeless

03:47:46.560 | and possible problems and we succeeded.

03:47:49.220 | And if we were able to do that,

03:47:50.780 | then everyone else should be able to do that as well.

03:47:53.660 | - Well, Jared, thank you for having the courage to try.

03:47:57.180 | Thank you for your friendship, for your kindness,

03:47:59.740 | most importantly for your book recommendations.

03:48:02.660 | And thank you for talking today.

03:48:04.420 | This was fascinating, eye-opening.

03:48:06.220 | I hope to have many more conversations like this.

03:48:08.260 | - Thank you very much, Lex.

03:48:10.420 | - Thank you for listening to this conversation

03:48:12.100 | with Jared Kushner.

03:48:13.520 | To support this podcast,

03:48:14.700 | please check out our sponsors in the description.

03:48:17.220 | And now, let me leave you with some words

03:48:19.300 | from Mahatma Gandhi.

03:48:20.500 | An eye for an eye will only make the whole world blind.

03:48:26.820 | Thank you for listening.

03:48:28.020 | I hope to see you next time.

03:48:29.940 | (upbeat music)

03:48:32.520 | (upbeat music)

03:48:35.100 | [BLANK_AUDIO]

Jared Kushner: Israel, Palestine, Hamas, Gaza, Iran, and the Middle East | Lex Fridman Podcast #399

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