Lex Fridman Podcast: #399 – Jared Kushner: Israel, Palestine, Hamas, Gaza, Iran, and the Middle East
Lex Fridman 10/11/23 - Episode Page - 3h 55m - PDF Transcript
Themes
Abraham Accords, Iran's actions, Middle East stability, Israel, consequences for Iran, Accusations of collusion with Russia, Media coverage, Investigations, Legal fees, Arab-Israeli normalization agreements, peace deals, cultural exchange, religious respect, Challenges, Positive mindset, Support, Encouragement, Risk of failure, China's dominance, global market, rules-based world order, visit to Iraq, building trust, operating behind the scenes, China's rise as a global power, Belt and Road Initiative, intellectual property theft, international trade rules, Conflict in Ukraine, Mediation, Leadership, Risk of nuclear war, Diplomacy, Results-oriented approach, Business background
Discussion
- Jared Kushner, former senior advisor to the president, discusses the recent conflict between Israel and Hamas, providing background information on Gaza, Hamas, and the power dynamics in the region.
- The podcast also discusses the history of Hamas, its connection to Iran, and the role of Iran in funding militant groups.
- The guest highlights the importance of creating connections and promoting business opportunities for peace in the Middle East.
- The podcast features a discussion on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, emphasizing the importance of economic development and opportunities for the Palestinian people.
- The conversation explores the challenges of achieving peace in the Middle East and the potential for economic growth through increased diplomatic relations with Israel.
Takeaways
- Addressing territorial contiguity, security, religious site access, economic development, and aid transparency are crucial for resolving the Israeli-Palestinian issue and improving the lives of Palestinians.
- Building personal relationships and trust is crucial in diplomatic negotiations.
- Challenging periods in life can provide opportunities for personal growth and learning.
- Engaging in conversations with people who hold different viewpoints can lead to a better understanding of complex issues and potential solutions.
- The Arab-Israeli normalization agreements have the potential to foster peace, understanding, and cultural exchange between Jews and Muslims.
Jared Kushner, former senior advisor to the president, discusses the recent conflict between Israel and Hamas, providing background information on Gaza, Hamas, and the power dynamics in the region. The speaker expresses their heartbreak over the recent events and emphasizes the need for the world to stand behind Israel and address the threat posed by Hamas. The podcast also discusses the history of Hamas, its connection to Iran, and the role of Iran in funding militant groups. The guest highlights the importance of creating connections and promoting business opportunities for peace in the Middle East.
- 00:00:00 Jared Kushner, former senior advisor to the president, discusses war and peace, history and power in the Middle East. The conversation was recorded before the Hamas attack on Israel, and a follow-up discussion was added later. The host expresses sympathy for those affected by the conflict.
- 00:05:00 The podcast discusses the recent conflict between Israel and Hamas, providing a summary of the events that have taken place. It highlights the rocket attacks by Hamas, the Israeli response, and the current situation. The discussion also provides background information on Gaza, Hamas, and the power dynamics in the region.
- 00:10:00 The speaker expresses their heartbreak over the recent events in Israel and Gaza, describing the acts of violence and terrorism that have taken place. They emphasize the need for the world to stand behind Israel and address the threat posed by Hamas. They also mention their involvement in strategies to minimize attacks from Hamas during the Trump administration.
- 00:15:00 The podcast discusses the history of Hamas and the current situation in Gaza. It highlights how Hamas was founded from the Muslim Brotherhood and has attacked Israel multiple times. The podcast also emphasizes that the Palestinian people in Gaza are suffering under Hamas's leadership and encourages focusing anger towards Hamas. The connection between Hamas and Iran is mentioned, with reports suggesting Iran's support for Hamas and its goal of destroying Israel.
- 00:20:00 The podcast discusses the relationship between Iran and Saudi Arabia, highlighting Iran's funding of Hezbollah, Hamas, and the Houthis. It also explores the role of the al-Aqsa Mosque in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and the propaganda surrounding it. The guest emphasizes that Israel allows Muslims to pray at the mosque and aims for Jerusalem to be a place of religious harmony. However, certain actors exploit religious tensions for their own divisive and violent agendas.
- 00:25:00 The guest discusses the Abraham Accords and the efforts made to achieve peace in the Middle East. They highlight the importance of creating connections between people and promoting business opportunities as a pathway to normalization. They also mention the role of misinformation and historical figures in perpetuating violence. The guest emphasizes the need for a paradigm shift and a focus on the future to achieve lasting peace.
The guest discusses their work on a political framework between Israelis and Palestinians, focusing on resolving land disputes, establishing borders, and addressing security concerns. They also highlight the importance of governance and economic planning in improving the lives of Palestinians. The guest criticizes the Biden administration for weakening relationships with allies and reversing certain policies implemented during the Trump administration. The speaker suggests that the international community should unite behind Israel and hold Hamas accountable for their violent behavior.
- 00:30:00 The guest discusses their work on a political framework between Israelis and Palestinians, focusing on resolving land disputes, establishing borders, and addressing security concerns. They also highlight the importance of governance and economic planning in improving the lives of Palestinians. The guest emphasizes that Hamas's leadership and focus on violence have hindered progress in Gaza.
- 00:35:00 The podcast discusses the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and the role of Hamas in preventing peace. It also touches on the leadership of the United States and the impact of the Biden administration's policies in the Middle East. The guest criticizes the Biden administration for weakening relationships with allies and reversing certain policies implemented during the Trump administration.
- 00:40:00 The speaker discusses the Abraham Accords and the potential for a stable and thriving Middle East if countries like UAE, Saudi Arabia, Israel, and others can form a strong economic and security alliance. They criticize the current administration for underestimating Iran's disruptive actions and giving them too much leeway. They also mention recent incidents involving Iran and emphasize the need for strength and consequences in dealing with Iran's actions.
- 00:45:00 The speaker discusses the importance of Israel focusing on regaining security and eliminating threats before considering normalization with Saudi Arabia. They believe that Israeli-Saudi normalization would be a game changer for the region and beneficial for both countries. However, they emphasize the need for political dynamics to shift and for trust and communication to be established between nations.
- 00:50:00 The speaker suggests that the international community should unite behind Israel and hold Hamas accountable for their violent behavior. They emphasize the importance of stopping hostilities and misrepresentations of history to achieve a long-term solution for the Palestinian people. The potential consequences of a ground invasion by Israeli forces are also discussed.
- 00:55:00 The conversation discusses the internal political turmoil in Israel and its relation to the recent tragedy. It also highlights the importance of unity and division in societies, drawing parallels to the situation in America. The distinction between Hamas and the Palestinian people is emphasized, with the hope that a conversation about peace and progress can be had. The question of whether Donald Trump's administration can contribute to peace in the Middle East is raised.
The speaker discusses President Trump's foreign policy achievements, including peace deals and trade agreements. They express hope for his reelection and discuss the potential for economic growth in the Middle East. Jared Kushner emphasizes compassion, respectful debate, and understanding. The importance of trust, open-mindedness, and truthful communication in politics and leadership is highlighted. The podcast also discusses the challenges of diplomatic negotiations and the role of personal relationships and trust in successful outcomes.
- 01:00:00 The speaker discusses the foreign policy achievements of President Trump, highlighting his efforts to establish peace deals, make trade deals, and work with allies. They express hope that President Trump will be reelected to restore order and peace to the world. The speaker also discusses the potential for economic growth and cooperation in the Middle East if the region can overcome conflicts and divisions.
- 01:05:00 Jared Kushner discusses his belief that most people are good and deserve second chances, emphasizing the importance of compassion and understanding. He also highlights the power of respectful debate and connecting with others to make the world a better place. Kushner expresses his thoughts and prayers for the people in Israel and Palestine.
- 01:10:00 The key to negotiating difficult agreements in geopolitics is building trust and understanding the motivations of the other party. It is important to create a framework where both sides agree on the desired outcome and work together to find a solution. Power dynamics and understanding the motivations of leaders are also crucial in negotiations.
- 01:15:00 The podcast discusses the importance of trust in politics and leadership, emphasizing the need for open-mindedness and truthful communication. The guest shares personal experiences and lessons learned about partnership and dealing with leaders. They highlight that leaders are human and face similar challenges and decision-making processes as everyone else.
- 01:20:00 The speaker reflects on their experience in government and the importance of taking action and influencing outcomes. They discuss the unpredictability of political prognosticators and highlight the role of human decisions in shaping the world. They also share an example of how diplomatic efforts led to de-escalation with North Korea. The speaker suggests that politicians should be more willing to take on difficult problems and not be afraid of failure.
- 01:25:00 The podcast discusses the challenges of diplomatic negotiations, particularly in closed-off regions like North Korea. It highlights the importance of personal relationships and trust in successful negotiations. The conversation also touches on the influence of personalities in diplomatic efforts.
The podcast features Jared Kushner discussing his diplomatic trip from Israel to UAE and the importance of actions over words in diplomacy. He emphasizes the significance of private sector project management skills in government and the negative consequences of government regulation. Kushner also addresses the accusations of collusion with Russia and the challenges he faced in the White House. He highlights the importance of staying focused, maintaining a positive mindset, and celebrating individuals who take on big challenges.
- 01:30:00 The transcript discusses a diplomatic trip from Israel to UAE, highlighting the significance of the first official commercial flight between the two countries. It also mentions the importance of actions over words in diplomacy and the author's focus on results due to their business background.
- 01:35:00 The guest discusses the importance of private sector project management skills in government and encourages individuals with business mindsets to serve in government. They also mention the inefficiencies of government regulation and the negative consequences of certain regulations. The Trump administration's deregulatory efforts are highlighted as a critical factor in their economic success.
- 01:40:00 The guest discusses the accusations of collusion with Russia that arose after President Trump won the 2016 election. They express their initial disbelief and frustration at the media's coverage of the accusations, which they knew to be untrue. Despite the personal and financial toll of investigations and legal fees, they maintained confidence in their innocence and focused on staying resilient and pushing forward.
- 01:45:00 The podcast guest discusses their experience in the White House and the challenges they faced. They emphasize the importance of staying focused, not allowing distractions to hinder progress, and maintaining a positive mindset. They also highlight the need for society to celebrate and encourage individuals who take on big challenges, even if there is a risk of failure.
- 01:50:00 The podcast hosts discuss their admiration for a role model and their shared love for diners in New Jersey. They reflect on the elegance and moral compass of their role model and the nostalgic experiences of visiting diners late at night. They also highlight the egalitarian nature of diners and the positive transformation of New Jersey under a progressive governor.
- 01:55:00 The guest shares the personal story of their father's arrest and the impact it had on their family. They discuss how they dealt with the situation and focused on the things they could control. The experience taught them valuable lessons about life and humanity.
The speaker reflects on the importance of humility and recognizing that God is in control, influenced by their parents. The guest discusses the impact of money on behavior and the importance of good friends and leaders. They also talk about their involvement in prison reform and the passage of the First Step Act. The podcast emphasizes the challenges of being a politician and the need for humility, ethical decisions, and long-term thinking. It also touches on social media, power dynamics, and Jared Kushner's meeting with Saudi Arabia.
- 02:00:00 The speaker discusses a personal experience with their father, who faced legal challenges and reflected on the importance of humility and recognizing that God is in control. They also mention the influence of their parents in teaching them humility and values. The speaker acknowledges that money and power can cloud judgment and emphasizes the need to see the common humanity in leadership and business.
- 02:05:00 The guest discusses the impact of money on people's behavior, citing examples from his experience in the White House. He emphasizes the importance of having the right leaders and good friends to keep individuals grounded. The conversation then shifts to the guest's involvement in prison reform, specifically the passage of the First Step Act, which aimed to provide offenders with opportunities for rehabilitation and reintegration into society. The act included measures such as job training and addiction treatment programs in prisons, as well as retroactive revisions to address racial disparities in sentencing for crack cocaine offenses.
- 02:10:00 The speaker discusses their efforts to pass legislation with the support of the ACLU and various conservative groups. They also highlight the importance of trust and relationships in Washington, acknowledging that politicians prioritize their interests over personal connections. However, they emphasize the value of working together towards a common objective and forming lifelong friendships in the process.
- 02:15:00 The podcast discusses the challenges and complexities of being a politician, highlighting the constant need to balance power, integrity, and the pursuit of the greater good. It emphasizes the importance of politicians having humility, making ethical decisions, and considering the long-term impact of their actions. The conversation also touches on the negative aspects of power struggles and the need for a system that inspires politicians to be their best selves.
- 02:20:00 The podcast discusses the potential for social media to promote egalitarianism of information and the changing power dynamics in society. It also explores the leadership and reforms of Mohammed bin Salman, the Crown Prince of Saudi Arabia.
- 02:25:00 Jared Kushner discusses his initial meeting with a representative of Saudi Arabia and the subsequent proposal for cooperation between the two countries. He highlights the importance of addressing issues such as women's rights, terrorism financing, and ideological extremism. Despite skepticism from others, Kushner's willingness to listen and his inexperience may have contributed to his success in forging a positive connection with Saudi Arabia.
The podcast features a discussion on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, emphasizing the importance of economic development and opportunities for the Palestinian people. It highlights the need for a different approach to finding a solution, addressing territorial contiguity, security, religious site access, and economic development. The speaker also criticizes the corrupt nature of the Palestinian leadership and emphasizes the importance of creating a positive future paradigm. The conversation explores the challenges of achieving peace in the Middle East and the potential for economic growth through increased diplomatic relations with Israel.
- 02:30:00 The speaker recounts their experience of planning a foreign trip and facing skepticism from others. They emphasize the importance of not being deterred by cynicism and being willing to try new ideas. They reference an essay by Paul Graham on breaking rules and the distinction between aggressively and passively independent-minded individuals.
- 02:35:00 The podcast discusses the importance of taking a different approach to problem-solving and setting ambitious goals. It highlights Vision 2030, a plan by the Saudi Arabian leader to transform the country and create economic and security integration in the Middle East. The ultimate vision is for Saudi Arabia to become a strong country economically and a positive influence in the world.
- 02:40:00 The podcast discusses the responsibility of leaders in addressing tragedies and implementing reforms to prevent their recurrence. It also explores the impact of narratives and historical tensions on international relations. The conversation touches on the challenges of achieving peace in the Middle East and the importance of creating a positive paradigm for progress.
- 02:45:00 The speaker discusses their pragmatic plan for peace in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, highlighting the lack of criticism towards the details of the plan. They also emphasize the corrupt nature of the Palestinian leadership and the need for a different approach to finding a solution. The speaker suggests separating the issues between Israel and Palestine and shares an anecdote about a meeting with Sultan Qaboos of Oman.
- 02:50:00 The speaker discusses the Israeli-Palestinian issue and suggests that solving territorial contiguity, security, and religious site access are key components. They propose drawing a map, ensuring security, and allowing peaceful worship as potential solutions. The speaker also highlights the need for economic development and transparency in aid distribution to improve the lives of Palestinians.
- 02:55:00 The speaker discusses the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and the need for a solution that focuses on economic development and opportunities for the Palestinian people. They highlight the corruption within the Palestinian Authority and the potential for economic growth in the West Bank through increased diplomatic relations with Israel. The speaker also emphasizes the importance of creating a positive future paradigm and moving away from past grievances.
The podcast explores the Arab-Israeli normalization agreements, which have led to peace deals between Israel and Muslim-majority countries. These agreements have fostered cultural exchange and religious respect. The guest discusses their decision to start a new business combining geopolitical expertise and private equity, emphasizing the importance of objective metrics and returns. The conversation also touches on topics such as clemency cases, Trump's unpredictability in foreign policy, the conflict in Ukraine, and the importance of understanding historical context when dealing with Russia.
- 03:00:00 The podcast discusses the Arab-Israeli normalization agreements, which have led to peace deals between Israel and several Muslim-majority countries. These agreements have separated the Israeli-Palestinian issue from the broader Arab-Israeli conflict and have allowed for increased interaction and understanding between Jews and Muslims. The guest emphasizes the transformative effect of these agreements in promoting cultural exchange and religious respect.
- 03:05:00 The guest responds to recent attacks regarding the Saudi public investment fund giving $2 billion to their investment firm after leaving government. They explain their decision to start a new business combining geopolitical expertise and traditional private equity, with a focus on building economic links between countries. They emphasize that the success of their business should be judged based on objective metrics and returns.
- 03:10:00 The guest discusses Kim Kardashian's involvement in a clemency case and how they worked through the details to ensure it was a legitimate case. They highlight President Trump's willingness to grant clemency and his unpredictability as a positive trait. The guest also mentions the impact of Trump's unpredictability in foreign policy and the success of trade deals. They believe that the war in Ukraine could have been avoided if Trump had been re-elected.
- 03:15:00 The transcript discusses the conflict in Ukraine and the need for productive conversations and trust between leaders to find a resolution. It also mentions the importance of a mediator to create a new paradigm and outline the way forward. The conversation touches on the role of leadership and the risk of nuclear war. The mention of Russia sending supplies to the US during the COVID-19 pandemic is highlighted as an example of goodwill between countries.
- 03:20:00 The speaker discusses the idea that countries do not have permanent enemies or allies, using examples such as the US and Germany after World War Two. They also recount a negotiation to stabilize the oil markets during COVID-19, involving Saudi Arabia, Russia, and the US. The speaker shares insights into the perspectives of Vladimir Putin and the importance of understanding historical context when dealing with Russia.
- 03:25:00 The transcript discusses the importance of establishing connections between nations and finding collaborative solutions. It also mentions the book 'Prisoners of Geography' by Tim Marshall, which provides insights into geopolitical conflicts and the role of geography in shaping international relations. The conversation touches on the meeting between Donald Trump and Xi Jinping, highlighting the significance of their dialogue on trade and national security issues.
03:30:00 - 03:54:15
The podcast explores the rise of China as a global power and its strategies to secure its position. It discusses the need for an even playing field in the global market and a rules-based world order to counter China's dominance. The guest emphasizes the importance of working hard, continuous learning, and taking initiative for a successful career and life. Jared Kushner highlights the power of listening and understanding different perspectives to solve societal problems.
- 03:30:00 During a visit to China, President Trump's granddaughter singing Chinese songs demonstrated respect for Chinese culture. President Xi discussed Chinese history and the country's rise. The Trump administration's approach to China shifted from praising free trade to implementing tariffs, which led to a poker-like negotiation process. The book 'The Hundred Year Marathon' by Michael Pillsbury offers an intense perspective on China's ambitions and provides insight into Trump's thinking. The hope is for the two superpowers to find ways to work together in the 21st century.
- 03:35:00 The podcast discusses the historical rise of China and its strategies to become a dominant global power. It explores how China utilized tactics such as stealing intellectual property, ignoring international trade rules, and implementing the Belt and Road Initiative to secure its position as the world's manufacturing hub. The host expresses a preference for an American-led world order over a Chinese-led one.
- 03:40:00 The podcast guest discusses the need for an even playing field in the global market and a rules-based world order to counter China's dominance in industries like solar panels and electric vehicles. They also share a funny story about their experience visiting Iraq with General Dumford. The guest explains that their low-key approach allowed them to build trust and operate more effectively behind the scenes.
- 03:45:00 The podcast discusses the keys to a successful career and life, including working hard, continuous learning, stepping out of one's comfort zone, and doing the right thing. The guest shares personal anecdotes and emphasizes the importance of taking initiative and being resourceful. They also mention the value of reading books as a source of information. The guest's approach to problem-solving is described as pragmatic and based on asking questions and seeking advice from knowledgeable individuals.
- 03:50:00 Jared Kushner discusses the power of listening and understanding different perspectives to solve societal problems. He expresses hope for the future, citing advancements in technology, medicine, and exploration as potential drivers of progress. He emphasizes the importance of focusing on shared advancements rather than tribal conflicts.
The following is a conversation with Jared Kushner, former senior advisor to the president
during the Donald Trump administration, and author of Breaking History, a White House memoir.
He's one of the most influential and effective presidential advisors in modern history,
helping conduct negotiations with some of the most powerful leaders in the world
and deliver results on trade, criminal justice reform, and historic progress towards peace
in the Middle East. On Thursday, October 5th, we recorded a conversation on topics of war and peace,
history and power in the Middle East and beyond. This was about a day and a half before the Hamas
attack on Israel, and then we felt we must sit down again on Monday, October 9th and add a
discussion on the current situation. We opened the podcast with the second newly recorded part.
My heart goes out to everyone who has and is suffering in this war. I pray for your strength
and for the long-term peace and flourishing of the Israeli and Palestinian people. I love you all.
And now, a quick few second mention of each sponsor. Check them out in the description.
It's the best way to support this podcast. We've got Inside Tracker for biological data,
BetterHelp for mental health, Aidsleep for naps, and AG1 for health. She's wise with my friends.
And now, onto the full ad reads. As always, no ads in the middle. I try to make this
interesting, but if you must skip them, please still check out our sponsors. I enjoy their stuff.
Maybe you will too. This show is brought to you by Inside Tracker, a service I use to track biological
data that comes from my body and gives me lifestyle advice based on the very data that came from my
body. It's hard to do these ad reads if I'm being honest as I'm thinking about everything that's
happening in the Middle East today and all the people who are suffering, the Israelis and the
Palestinians. I've traveled to that region recently and I will return to that region. And if there's
any one thing I could say about those travels is I got to see just how beautiful people are.
And I got to see as cliche as it may sound, the common humanity, the culture might be different,
the perspectives might be different, but the hope and the pain and the anger and the love and the
full spectrum of the human condition was all there in their eyes and the eyes of Israelis and the
eyes of Palestinians. So my heart goes out to the people suffering there now. In some fundamental
sense, I'm deeply grateful for having these sponsors, for having people that supported this
podcast for several years now. It's been an honor. It's been a gift. Anyway, go check them out at
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I remember the first time a sponsor reached out wanting to support the podcast. It was hard
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that I missed when I was traveling in the Middle East and thinking about America because the Eight
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This is the Lex Treatment Podcast and now dear friends, here's Jared Kushner.
We did a lot of this conversation before the Hamas attack on Israel and we decided to sit down
again and finish the discussion to address the current situation which is still developing.
If I may allow me to summarize the situation as it stands today, it's morning Monday, October 9th
on Saturday, October 7th at 6.30 a.m. Israel time, Hamas fired thousands of rockets into
southern Israel. The rocket attack served as cover for a multi-pronged infiltration of Israel
territory by over 1,000 Hamas militants. This is shortly after at 7.40 a.m. The Hamas militants
went door-to-door in border towns, killing civilians, and taking captives, including women and
children. In response to this, Israeli air force began carrying out strikes in Gaza, also fighting
on the ground in Israel to clear out Hamas militants from Israel territory and preparing to
mobilize Israeli troops for a potential ground attack on Hamas and Gaza. Now of course, this is
what it appears to be right now and this along with other things might change because the situation
is still developing. The IDF is ordering civilian residents of Gaza to evacuate their homes for their
safety. Benjamin Netanyahu declared war in several statements and warned Israelis to brace themselves
for a long and difficult war. Just today, Israeli ministers ordered a quote complete siege of Gaza,
interrupting supplies of electricity, food, water, and fuel from Israel to Gaza. As of now,
October 9th, the death toll is over 1,200 people and over 130 hostages taken to Gaza by Hamas.
So as I said, the events are rapidly unfolding, so these numbers will sadly increase,
but hopefully our words here can at least in part speak to the timeless underlying currents of
the history and as you write about the power dynamics of the region. So for people who don't
know, Gaza is a 25 miles long, six miles wide strip of territory along the Mediterranean Sea.
It borders Israel on the east and north and Egypt on the southwest. It's densely populated,
about 2.3 million people, and there's been a blockade of Gaza by Israel and Egypt since 2007
when Hamas took power. I could just summarize that Hamas is a Palestinian militant group
which rules the Gaza Strip. It originated in 1988 and it came to power in Gaza in 2006.
As part of its charter, it's sworn to the destruction of Israel and it is designated by the United
States, the European Union, the UK, and of course Israel as a terrorist group. So given that context,
what are your feelings as a human being and what is your analysis as the former senior advisor
to the president under the Trump administration of the current situation in Israel and Gaza?
So I think you did an excellent job of summarizing a lot of the context, but
watching what's unfolded over the last 48 hours has been truly heartbreaking to see.
We're still in the early stages of what's developing, but seeing the images on X of
militants, terrorists going door to door with machine guns, gunning down innocent civilians,
seeing beheaded Israeli soldiers, seeing young 20-year-olds at a rave dance party to celebrate
peace with militants flying in and then shooting machine guns to kill people indiscriminately.
Seeing young children captive and held prisoner, seeing 80-year-old grandmothers,
a Holocaust survivor, also being taken captive. These are just images and actions that we have
not seen in this world since 9-11. This is a terror attack on the scale of which we have not seen
and it's been incredibly hard for a lot of people to comprehend. My heart goes out obviously to
all of the families of the victims, to the families of those who are held in captive now
and to all of Israel because one of the beautiful things about the state of Israel is that
when one Israeli is hurting, the entire nation comes together. It's a shame that it's taking
an action like this to unify the nation, but I have seen incredibly beautiful signs over the
last 48 hours of a country coming together. The Jewish people have been under oppression before.
The Jewish people know what it's like and seeing people rally together to fight for their homeland,
to try to reestablish safety is a very beautiful thing to watch. I wish it wasn't something we
had to watch, but it is. With that being said, though, the backdrop, I've been speaking to
friends over the last couple of days. I have one friend I spoke with last night who was saying that
a good friend messaged him saying, I'm going in, we're going to do some operations
to try to free some of the hostages held in one of the cupits. He messaged him the next morning.
He was one of the first through the door to try to free these hostages and he was killed by a
Hamas militant. Sadly, we're going to be hearing many, many more stories of brave Israeli soldiers
trying to get these terrorists out of Israel, trying to free innocent civilians who unfortunately
are risking their lives to do it. They're all heroes, but some will have less good faith than
others, sadly. It's a very, very heartbreaking moment. I do think that it's very important
at this moment in time for the entire world to stand behind Israel. I think that Hamas has shown
the entire world who they really are, I think what their aim is, what they're willing to do,
and all of the strong security that Israel has put in place over the last years, which in some
instances was criticized, I think is now being validated that there was a real threat that
they were looking to deter. Short answer is my heart is broken, praying for peace, praying for
strength, praying for Israel to do what it needs to do to avoid being in this situation again,
which is either eliminating or severely degrading Hamas's capabilities. There cannot be peace in
Israel and in the Middle East while there is a terror group that is being funded by Iran that is
allowed to flourish and is allowed to plan operations that are going to aim to kill innocent
civilians. As somebody who was formerly in this position, who was intimately involved with Israel
with the strategies to minimize attacks from Hamas and to try to turn the region around,
and I think we did do a very substantial job under President Trump. The Middle East went from one of
the most chaotic regions in the world. You had ISIS in 2016. ISIS had a caliphate the size of
Ohio. They're beheading journalists. They were killing Christians. They controlled eight million
people. They were planning attacks all over the world from their caliphate. They were using the
internet to radicalize people. We had the San Bernardino shooting in America. We had the Pulse
nightclub shooting in Orlando. There was real threat. Then you had Iran, which was given $150
billion in a glide path to a nuclear weapon. They were using their newfound riches to fund Hamas,
Hezbollah, the Houthis, different rebels all over the region that were looking to destabilize further.
Syria was in a civil war where 500,000 people were killed. Yemen was destabilized. Libya was
destabilized, and it was just a mess. All of America's allies had felt betrayed. President
Trump came into power. We rebuilt the trust and the relationships with all of our traditional
allies. We were able to eliminate ISIS, the territorial caliphate, and then we were able
to project strength in the region, really go after Iran's wallet. We were able to stop
through crushing sanctions, a lot of their financial resources, which they were using
to fund all these terror groups. We left the Middle East with six peace deals and a fairly
peaceful world. Seeing what's happening, I think it was completely avoidable. I think it's horrible
to see that it's occurring. I pray that those in power will make the right decisions to restore
safety, but also to potentially create a better paradigm for peace in the future.
I have a lot of questions to ask you about the journey towards this historic progress towards
peace with Abraham, of course, but first, on this situation, to step back and some of the history,
is there things about the history of Hamas and Gaza that's important to understand
of what is happening now? Just your comments, your thoughts, your understanding of Hamas.
I think you did an excellent job, Lex, of really giving the summary. Just a couple things. Maybe
I'll add to it is that Hamas was originally founded from the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt,
which is a group that's caused a lot of issues in the region. They've attacked Israel many times in
the past. There's a lot of discussion about how Israel is in occupying power. In Gaza in 2005,
they withdrew from all the land, and then they say Israel's an apartheid state. Israel then gave
governance of the region to the Palestinians. Then what's happened is the Palestinian people's
lives have now gone down, not up since then. I will say that under Hamas's leadership in Gaza,
the people who have suffered the most are the Palestinian people. I've watched cries throughout
my time in government from people saying we want to see the Palestinian people live a better life.
I agree with those people. I think that the Palestinian people in Gaza are essentially hostages.
In Gaza, you have basically 2.2 million people that are being held hostage by 30,000 Hamas terrorists.
That's really the problem. I would just encourage people to push their attention and energy in this
moment and their anger towards Hamas. Those are the people who are killing innocent civilians, who
are murdering indiscriminately. Those are the people who have held back the Palestinians from
having a better life. Finally, what I would say is what we saw with Hamas was that if you go back
to 2007, they basically had just one plan that they did over and over. We were very careful to try to
monitor very closely and stop the Iranian money and the resources from coming in. Again, we took
a little bit of criticism from the international community from keeping the border tight. But
unfortunately, every time you'd allow construction materials to go into Gaza, they'd use them to
build tunnels, not homes. You would have equipment that would come in to build pipes. They'd turn
it into bombs. It was very, very hard to figure out how do you get the resources into Gaza to
help people have a better life, while at the same time the leadership in Gaza was taking all those
resources and turning it into military equipment to attack Israel. What role does Iran play in this
war and this connection to Hamas? Can you speak to the connection between Hamas and Iran that's
important to understand, especially as this most recent attack unfolds? Sure. The correlation,
I mean, there's reports that Iran is behind the attack. Hamas has thanked Iran for their support
and it's been very well known that Iran supports the destruction of the state of Israel. I won't
say Iran as a country. I'll talk about Iran in the leadership. There's actually a beautiful thing I
saw on the internet where at one of the soccer games in Iran, they were trying to rally support for
the Hamas terror attacks. A lot of people in the crowds were chanting FU to the regime because I
think the Iranian people, the Persian people, generally are peace-loving people who don't
want to see this focus on destruction and annihilation. But you saw this in 2015-2016,
when the Iranian government had resources, the region was less safe. And since now,
there's been more resources allowed to go to the Iranian regime by lack of enforcement of
sanctions. And as a result, Iran is funding Hezbollah, Hamas. They were funding the Houthis. Now
there's a little bit of a detente between Saudi and Iran, which has led to that going down, which
only further proves that Iran was behind the Houthis, which is what the Saudis had been saying
for years and Iran was denying. So there's a very strong relationship between the two.
And we always knew that the way that Iran fights wars or fights conflicts is never directly. It's
usually through its proxies. And in this case, a Hamas has been a proxy for Iran who wanted to
obviously see the destruction of Israel, but also does not want to see the Israelis and the Saudis
come together for a peace agreement. So the name of this operation, of the Hamas operation,
is al-Aqsa Flood, referring to the al-Aqsa Mosque. How much of this attack is about the al-Aqsa Mosque?
In actuality, I don't think any of it is, but the al-Aqsa Mosque is something that
all of the Shia jihadists have used for years in order to justify their actions that are aggressive
towards Israel. So this is something I'll maybe even take a step back and go through when I was
working initially in my first year on the peace plan. I was doing a lot of listening, and quite
frankly, a lot of what people were saying to me didn't make sense. And the reason why I was trying
to figure out, they were talking about sovereignty over al-Aqsa Mosque. The al-Aqsa Mosque is a mosque
that's built in the Holy of Holies, the Haram al-Sharif in Israel, where the Jewish Beytah
Magdash, the holy temple, was built in a very religious place about after the temple was destroyed.
Then there was a big mosque built there, and it's one of the more holy places in Islam now. So
the big thing everyone was saying is, what do you do with this land where you have a mosque
built over a very big Jewish site? And I was hearing all of the experts, and I always say
experts with quotes because only in Washington can you work on something for a decade and
continue to fail, and then you basically leave and are considered an expert. But that's one of
the problems with Washington, which maybe we could talk about later. But the notion here was,
I went and I said, let me try to understand what the issue is with the Israeli-Palestinian conflict
with the people. I always felt the politicians were a little disconnected, so I commissioned
several focus groups, one in Amman, one in Cairo, one in Dubai, and one in Ramallah. And I asked
people, Muslims, what is the Israeli-Palestinian conflict about? And time and time again, the most
popular thing that they said was that Israel was not allowing access to the mosque for Muslims to
pray. And what was interesting was that Israel's policy is to allow anyone who wants to come and
pray peacefully at the sites to come and pray. Sometimes they have security issues when there's
provocations. But by and large, since 1967, when Israel was able to take back Jerusalem in a defensive
war, just to be very clear, they were attacked in the south and they were attacked from the east,
and they basically were able to beat back the Jordanians and the Egyptians and then reconquer
the old city of Jerusalem. And during that time, immediately after Israel then passed the Protection
of Holy Places Law, which they basically took resources they didn't have, and they said,
we're going to restore the Christian sites, the Muslim sites, the Jewish sites, and they've worked
to allow everyone access to the mosque. So today, any Muslim who wants to come can come and pray at
the mosque. The mosque is, Israel's acknowledged that King Abdullah, the King of Jordan, is the
custodian of the mosque. And as long as people want to come to the country and pray peacefully,
they're able to do that. But if you look at a lot of the propaganda that's been used by
ISIS or Iran to recruit terrorists or to justify their incursions, they often
say they're doing it in the name of liberating the al-Aqsa mosque. But from an operational and
pragmatic perspective today, any Muslim who wants to go to the mosque, you can book a flight to
Israel now through Dubai because there's flights between Israel and Dubai. And as long as your
country has relations with Israel and they'll accept your passport in there, you can come and
pray and that's what Israel wants. Israel wants Jerusalem to be a place where all religions
can come and celebrate together. But you have a lot of actors that look to find ways to use these
religious tensions in order to sow division and justify violent behavior. I wonder how it's possible
to lessen the effectiveness of that propaganda message that a lot of the war, a lot of the attacks
about access to the al-Aqsa mosque. Is there something you can speak to why that message hasn't
disseminated across the Arab world? So Israel's good at a lot of things. They're not very good
traditionally with public relations. After the Abraham Accords, we made the first Abraham Accords
deal in August 2020 and then we made five other deals. We first did United Arab Emirates, then we
did a deal with Bahrain, then we did a deal with Kosovo, then we did a deal with Sudan, then we
did a deal with Morocco. And then we got the GCC deal done as well, the tension between Qatar,
Saudi, UAE, Egypt, and Bahrain. And that was allowing us to create a pathway to then pursue the
Israeli-Saudi normalization. So we had so much momentum then that the goal was just keep getting
more countries to normalize relations with Israel. Once you create the connection between people
and create the ability for people to do business together, the ability for flights to fly between,
then you would just start naturally having people coming and everyone has a smartphone today so they
can then post and combat the misinformation that's been out there. But this misinformation is not
something that's new. One of the characters who played a very big role in spreading the
anti-Semitism and the violence in Israel in the 1920s was a guy named Haj Amin al-Husayni who was
known as the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem. He was very close with Hitler and Mussolini and he was working
with them to try to get some claims to the Middle East once the Jewish people were annihilated.
And what he did for a very long time was he did the same shtick only it was before you had smartphones
in YouTube where he would say the mosque is under intact, these imperialist Zionists are coming in
to try to destroy the mosque and he would use that to raise money from Indonesia, from Pakistan,
from all over the world and then use that threat to justify recruiting groups of young, vulnerable
Muslim men and then getting them in the name of religious rights to go and kill people, which
really is more of a perversion of the religion than I think the true essence of what Islam is.
I think Islam at its core is a peaceful religion and I think that's where a lot of the great
leaders in Islam want to take it, but the people who use Islam or the mosque or as a justification
for violence, those are people who I think are really, they are disrespecting the Islam religion.
As you said, you helped make major strides towards peace in the Middle East with Abraham
Accords. Can you describe what it took to accomplish this? And maybe this will help us
understand what broke down and led to the tragedy this week.
Yeah, so I always believed in foreign policy. I learned very quickly that the difference between
a political deal and a business deal is that in a business deal, you have a problem set,
you come to a conclusion and then if you buy or sell something, you either have more cash or you
have a company, so more to do, less to do. Political problem set is very different where
the conclusion of a problem set is essentially the beginning of a new paradigm.
So when I would think about how do you move pieces around the board, you couldn't say,
let me just solve the problem. You have to think about what happens the day after the signing
and how do you create a paradigm that has positivity to it. So the biggest piece of what
President Trump did during his four years in office was he really strengthened the
relationship with Israel, number one. And he did things like recognizing Jerusalem as the
capital of Israel. He moved the embassy to Jerusalem. He recognized the Golan Heights.
He got out of the Iran deal. We did an economic conference in Bahrain where we brought Israelis
to meet with Saudi and Emirati and Qatari businessmen and everyone came together.
And each one of these instances were unthinkable previously and everyone said that if you did
it, the world was going to end. And every time President Trump did one, the next morning the
sun rose, the next evening the sun set and things moved on. And so by doing that, what President
Trump did was he slaughtered a lot of the sacred cows of these false barriers that people had
erected and showed people that the vast majority of the people in the Middle East, whether they're
Jewish, Muslim, Christian, whatever religion they are, they just want to live better lives.
And so what we basically did was create a paradigm where the voices for peace, the voices for
together, now finally had a forum where they were able to do it. And we did that in the backdrop.
The way we were able to be successful was we severely limited the resources of Iran and they
were focused more internally and they couldn't cause the trouble that they were causing everywhere
else. Since we've left, obviously, the dynamics have changed. But the way you get to peace is
obviously number one through strength and number two by finding a way for people to be
better off tomorrow than they are today. And what I found was that most of the voices looking for
violence or trouble were people who were just focused on what happened two years ago, 20 years
ago, 70 years ago, 1,000 years ago, people who were trying to solve those problems in that context
often were looking more to use those past grievances as a justification for their power
and for the bad behavior that they were looking to perpetuate.
So managing, as we have talked about extensively, managing the power dynamics of the region
and providing a plan, this is something you did with the economic plan titled
peace to prosperity, a vision to improve the lives of the Palestinian and Israeli people.
Can you first of all describe what's in the plan?
Sure. So this was something I took on. I was working on the political framework between
the Israelis and the Palestinians and trying to understand what were the issues. And the issues
were not very many. It basically was you had a land dispute. You had to figure out where do
you put borders ultimately. You had a security paradigm, which I was much more favorable to
Israel's perspective on. And obviously the events of the past 48 hours have fully justified that
that bias. And then in addition to that, you had to deal with the religious sites,
but I felt operationally that wasn't actually as complicated as people made it because you wanted
to just leave it open for everybody. Then I went through and I felt that the Palestinian
leadership was fairly disincentivized to make a deal because there was just this paradigm where
for they had billions of dollars coming in from the international community. And I think that
they feared that if they made a deal, they would lose their relevancy internationally and the money
would stop flowing into the country. So what I tried to do is to say, my approach when I would
get into a hard problem, say, how do I understand all the different escape hatches? How do I try
to eliminate them? And then build a golden bridge that becomes really the only but also the most
desirable pathway for the decision makers to walk through. And it wasn't always hard and sometimes
you have to go and hold their hand or you try to pick them up and walk them across. But a lot
of these leaders are very reluctant to change. And the dynamics of the Palestinians also were
such that I think they were fairly stuck where they were. So we developed a business plan for
Gaza, the West Bank. We threw in some improvements for Jordan and Egypt as well. I was based
it off of the Vision 2030 that they did in Saudi Arabia, which I thought was a visionary document.
I went back through this process and I studied basically every economic project in the post-World
War II period. So we looked at what they did in South Korea, why it was successful with some
strong industrial planning. We looked at Japan, we looked at Singapore, we looked at Poland,
why it was successful. We spent a lot of time on the Ukraine plan for the country and why it
wasn't successful. And that was mostly because of governance and corruption, which actually
resembles a lot of what's gone wrong with the Palestinians where there's no property rights,
there's no rule of law. And what we did is we built a plan to show it's not that hard in the
sense that between the West Bank and Gaza, you had 5 million people. And we put together a plan,
I think it was about $27 billion. We got together a conference. I had the head of AT&T. We had Steve
Schwartzman from Blackstone came, which was very gracious of them. We had all the leading Arabic
businessmen, the leading builders, leading developers. And the general consensus of that
of that of that of that conference was that this is very doable. You know, we think that for Gaza
in particular, it would cost maybe maybe $7 to $8 billion to rebuild the entire place. We felt we
could reduce the poverty rate in half, we can create over a million jobs there. The only thing
that people said was holding it back wasn't Israel. What was holding it back was governance.
And people wouldn't have confidence investing there with with the rule that that Hamas was
perpetuating. So I encourage people actually to look at the plan. It was very thoughtful. It was
181 pages. We went project by project. Each project is costed out. It's a real plan that
could be implemented, but you need the right governance. And all of the different Arabic
countries are willing to fund it. The international community is willing to fund it because they've
just been throwing so much money at the Palestinians for years that's never been outcomes based.
They're conditions based. It's just been, you know, entitlement money. And unfortunately,
it hasn't really achieved any outcomes that have been successful. So it's a great business plan.
It just shows to rebuilding Gaza could be easy. But like I said, the problem that's held the
Palestinian people back and that's made their lives terrible in Gaza has not been Israel. It's
really been Hamas's leadership or lack of leadership and their desire to focus on trying to kill
Israelis and start war with Israel over improving the lives of the Palestinian people.
And the current approach of Hamas, the more violence they perpetrate, the more they can
hold on to power versus improving the lives of people. So they, as you said, maybe you can
comment on, they do not propose an economics plan. I mean, Hamas has been running it now
for 16 years, and they don't have a lot to show for it. And, you know, our posture with them was
basically a very simple deal. You know, if you think about what's the end state in Gaza,
it's actually not that complicated. It's, you know, there's no territorial disputes, right?
The border is the border. There's no religious issues there as well. You're not dealing with
Jerusalem. You're basically just dealing with the fact that, you know, Israel wants to make sure
that there's no threat from Gaza. So it's a demilitarization or some kind of security guarantee
from a credible source where Israel doesn't feel like Gaza can be used to stage attacks into Israel
or to fire rockets into Israel. And by the way, these are things I was saying,
you know, three, four years ago, that that was the objective. And that was really the fear
now that's been proven, you know, unfortunately, the fear has manifested.
And in exchange, you can rebuild the place and you can give the people a much better life. But
Hamas has not shown a desire for that or a capability for that. And I don't think there's
enough trust to allow them to do that, which is why, you know, under the current circumstances,
if you do want to have peace there, Hamas has to be either eliminated or severely degraded
in terms of their military capabilities. I would love to ask you about leadership,
especially on the side of the United States. What has the current administration, the Biden
administration done different than the Trump administration, as you understand,
that may have contributed to the events we saw this week?
So all I can talk about are where we left them, right? We left them a place where they had
tremendous momentum in the Middle East. I met with them during the transition and said, you know,
look, you know, we even got the Qatar-Saudi conflict done, which was a big, no peace between
Israel and Saudi would have been possible without that. So we even got that done in our lame duck
period. And they came in and they said, look, we want to focus on the three Cs, which is COVID,
climate change in China. And I said, that's great. But, you know, the Middle East, we have an
amazing place right now. It's stable. There's momentum. Iran is basically broke. We put such
crippling sanctions on Iran that they went from about, I think it was 2.6 million barrels a day
of oil they were selling to about 100,000 under Trump. So their foreign currency reserves were
basically depleted and they were broke. Same with the Palestinians. We stopped the funding to
to the to UNRA, the UN agency, which is totally corrupt. It's, you know, we've
put $10 billion in there over time. I did a poll in the Middle East in Gaza to say, okay,
we've invested $10 billion here as a country. Are we popular? Right? The US had a 7% approval
rating. USAID had a 70% approval rating, but it just felt like a waste of our taxpayer dollars.
And again, we wanted to make it conditions based. The Biden administration came in
number one, they started insulting, you know, Saudi and Russia oil prices went up. At the same time,
what they did was they stopped domestic production of oil. They made it, they disincentivized a lot
of oil and shale production with regulations. They stopped pipelines. Oil prices went up.
They stopped enforcing the sanctions against Iran, probably to get the oil prices lower to make up
for what they were doing. They ran to Iran to try to make a deal. They started funding the
Palestinians again right away. And I even said, you know, if you're going to fund them, if that's
your policy, I respect that. Again, elections have consequences and you can take a different
policy. But what I would recommend is get some conditions, make them do some reforms, make them
give property rights to people, make them, you know, do real economic investments for people.
But they just went right away. So they were funding the Palestinians,
not enforcing the sanctions, and then overall just projecting a lot of weakness in the region.
So one of the most embarrassing examples is what happened in the United Arab Emirates. Again,
an amazing, probably one of America's best allies over the last, you know, 20, 30 years.
They fought with us in Afghanistan. They were the first Muslim country to stand up and do that
after 9-11 because they didn't want it to be a war of the West against the Muslim religion.
So they joined the fight because they saw it as a fight between right and wrong.
They have rockets shot into their country from the Houthis and they basically don't get a call
from the U.S. for 17 days. They need their equipment that they buy from the U.S., which
creates jobs in the U.S. They need it restocked. We don't call. So they've severely degraded the
trust that we had to rebuild with our allies. I think they've been working now to get it back.
They, after two years, started working with Saudi and Israel, which I think was good. You know,
I think that they realized after a stint that maybe the process that President Trump
had created in the region was the right policy. And keep in mind, you know, President Trump's
policy was that I was working on was very strongly criticized during the first three years before
we were able to achieve the results because it was departure from the failed policies of the past.
And so first there was return to those policies, appease Iran, let's criticize Saudi Arabia.
Then they started embracing and working on the Israel-Saudi deal, which I was really exciting.
I think we were all very excited about it. But they did it in public. And I think that that
also was something, and I didn't have access to their intelligence. So I assumed that by doing it
so publicly, they thought that they'd either had a deal with Iran because they were letting them
get all this revenue where Iran wouldn't be a problem. But one of the reasons with the Abraham
Accords, we kept it so quiet during the whole time was because we always felt like the troublemakers
in the region, particularly Iran, who we thought would would be disadvantaged by having UAE, Saudi,
Israel altogether. Israel's a nuclear power. You have other strong economies. Iran seeks
instability. They seek looking to create division in the region. And if you can create that economic
sphere where you have security from Haifa to Muscat from Israel to Oman all the way through
with Saudi, Jordan, UAE, Qatar, Egypt, that's an incredibly powerful block. If you can make it
secure and then get economic integration, that really could be a Middle East that thrives. So
Iran obviously wanted nothing to do with that. And that's why they've been working to disrupt.
So I think the administration has, they took an incredibly stable situation with momentum.
I think they underestimated the way that Iran would approach the region to undermine. I think
they gave way too much rope to Iran. And I think that they didn't seize when they had an opportunity
of strength with the Palestinians to try to drive to a conclusion that I believe could have prevented
us being where we are today. Not to mention that even just three weeks ago, I mean, it's a bad look
that they just basically gave $6 billion to Iran in exchange for hostages. And then Iran's
basically funding these terror attacks are killing American citizens in Israel. And it's a
heartbreaking situation, again, totally avoidable and one that I think has been very badly mismanaged
to date. If Trump was currently president and you were still working with him on this part of the
world, what actions would you take? What conversations would you have? What ideas would you be working
with in order to unite the various allies that you mentioned in the Middle East over this tragedy?
And not let it be a thing that divides the Middle East, but make it a thing that
catalyzes progress towards peace, further progress towards peace.
So I want to say one thing Lex. I have a lot of friends who are fans of Trump or not fans of
Trump. But one thing I want to say with absolute certainty is that if President Trump was in office,
this never would have happened. And when President Trump was in office, anyone who supports Israel
or who wants to see, you know, Jewish people not be innocently slaughtered,
he would never have allowed that to happen. It did not happen when he was in power. And I hope
people recognize that as something that's very, very true. How I would play the ball,
where it lies right now, keep in mind we transferred the ball, it was on the green,
now it's almost like it's gone back, you know, 150 yards and it's in a sand trap.
I think the way that I would play the ball right now is number one is you have to show
strength. I actually think President Biden's words were the right words. I see that they're
moving aircraft carriers to the region. Again, the purpose of having a strong military
I believe obviously, you know, if you get into a war, you want to win the war,
but the purpose of a very strong military primarily is to avoid a war.
I don't know what kind of credibility the Biden administration has to show the strength,
but right now you have to support Israel completely. You have to really let people
in the region know that there'll be consequences if they try to escalate. Again, we saw a little
bit of rocket skirmish from Lebanon, from Hezbollah, but again, this is the type of thing
that they have to know. There'll be severe consequences if they make this a multi-party
fight. I think sending a strong message to Iran, I think that they have to see some consequences
from this and know that they're not going to be allowed to have a free reign to cause instability
and that Iran doesn't usually fight face to face. They usually do it through proxies,
but let's just all be honest about where this is coming from and let them know that there will
be a consequence if they instigate these actions. Again, at least with the Biden administration,
they've had contact with Iran. They've been talking with Iran, but they've allowed Iran.
Again, the number I saw last year, I think under Trump, the number was maybe like $4 or $5
billion of oil revenue. In total, I think last year, it was something like $45 billion in revenue.
This year, I think it'll be even more. That's a combination of them driving up oil prices,
but also allowing much more sales. You would think that they would find a way to get them
to behave and allow them to have this happen, or if that's not the case, then be tough. Go back
to being tough. That's what you have to do. Building off of Abraham Accords, as you mentioned,
Israel's Saudi normalization, there's been a lot of promising progress towards this.
What does it take to not allow this tragedy to damage the progress towards Israel's
Saudi normalization? I think right now, it's probably not the best to think about that.
I think that we want to think about that after whatever is going to happen is going to happen
now. I think right now, the number one priority for Israel has to be to fully regain security in
the country. Then number two is to figure out how you can, like I said, eliminate or degrade
the Hamas capability or other Iranian threats to make sure that you have your security apparatus.
I think that the Israeli leadership right now should proceed with that. I don't think that
they should be thinking about normalization with Saudi at this moment. My instinct, and I've been
watching this Israeli-Saudi normalization play out, obviously just speaking with people and
seeing what I've been reading and watching with great excitement. I think it would be a game
changer for the region. I think it's one of Iran's worst nightmares to have Israel and Saudi
interlink together. I think it'd be great for the Saudi people from a security perspective,
what they're discussing with America would be very strong. The ability to get
different elements across would be incredible. What I would say with it is that the industrial
logic held yesterday, and I think it will hold again tomorrow. I always expect countries to
act in their interests. I think that the deal that's on the table right now between Saudi Israel
and America is in Saudi's interests, it's in America's interests, and it's in Israel's interests.
What's going to happen now though is the political dynamics are going to shift. I think that as we've
seen with political dynamics, they come and go. I think let's get through this moment. Then I hope
at the right time that those talks will be able to resume and conclude in an appropriate way.
It's funny, Lex, when I was working on the US-Mexico agreement for the trade, we would have every
day there'd be a tweet that would go out or there would be an issue. People forget how
intense it was between America and Mexico. I would speak to my counterpart in Mexico after a rough
day and we were working on something, we were making progress, it'd get blown up. I'd speak to
him and say, look, they're not moving America, they're not moving Mexico. Let's just stop for
today. Let's pick up tomorrow and let's find a new way to bring this forward. I would just encourage
everyone working on that not to give up, to keep working hard at it and to find a way. Like I said,
I would take a little bit of a pause for the time being. Let's let the current situation play out
and then hopefully there'll be a way for it to move forward.
I just hope there's still people on the US side picking up the phone and calling
UAE, Saudi Arabia, just as human beings, as friends, as allies, and just keeping that channel
communication going. Maybe you can correct me, but I just feel like there's just simple human
dynamics that play out here that divisions can form and just run away from you over simple
misunderstandings, over just inability to see a tragedy from the same perspective because of
conversations that could have happened but didn't happen.
I think there'll definitely be communication, but words on phone calls is only worth so much.
It's really trust between people and power. Obviously, when you're in a position of power,
you represent your country and your country's interests, but the ability to have trusting
relationships where people feel like they're okay taking more risks to help each other,
that's actually what's most important. Communication, I hope for, but deepening
and trusting relationships, that's what I believe makes progress and keeps people safe.
We talk quite extensively about the value of trust and negotiation and just working
with leaders, which I think is a fascinating conversation and you've taught me a lot about
that. Let me ask you about the end here. What are the various trajectories this work can take
in your view? What are some of the end states, as you've said, which are desirable and are
achievable? I mentioned this earlier, but whenever I would get a problem set in government, I'd always
think through, from a First Principles perspective, what's the logical outcome and forget about all
the reasons why it can't happen. That's what everyone in governments always rush to talk about,
but I do think here, number one, Israel has to have a secure environment where they don't feel
threatened from Gaza, and number two is the people in Gaza need to have an environment where they
feel like they can live a better life and have opportunities. That's the end state. I think
that the international community should come together. I do think that the people who are
usually putting blame on Israel should now realize that maybe they've been a little bit of harsh here
and that Hamas has been as big a threat, if not an even bigger threat than Israel has been saying,
and I do think that if the international community comes together and unites behind Israel
and really forces Hamas and their Iranian backers to stop hostilities, to stop saber-rattling,
to stop misrepresenting the history in order to justify their violent behavior, and if they say
instead, we want to hold you accountable, no more money, and they all say that they're going to stand
behind Israel's efforts to eliminate their national security threats, and then we will all come
together and only fund again into a framework that we believe can be a long-term solution
where the Palestinian people really have a chance to live a better life. That's really the best way
to get there. There's tons of complicated factors, but that's the end state that the global community
should be looking to come together, and it's very achievable. It's very, very achievable.
So as we stand here today, there's a lot of different ways that this war can evolve.
If a ground invasion happens by Israeli forces of Gaza, and if the number is correct of 100,000
Israeli soldiers, do you worry about various trajectories that can take
of the consequences that might have of an unprecedented ground troop attack?
So I think as a leader, you can change yesterday, but you have the ability to change tomorrow,
and that's a very important fundamental. I mean, that's true for all of us, not just leaders,
but we saw with 9-11 how America was caught off guard by terrorist attack. We acted
somewhat rationally, somewhat emotionally, which led to a 20-year war with trillions of dollars
lost, I think almost a million lives lost, not just American, but all lives,
and it was a total tragedy what occurred. I think right now the temptation is to be strong.
I think that that's a necessity. I do think eliminating risk is the right objective. I think
the goal should be to stay very clear about what the objective is, but also this attack was very
well planned not to walk into another trap. I think you have to be very smart, very cautious.
I've been happy to see that what they've been doing in retaliation so far has been somewhat
measured, and they've taken their time to try to assess what's achievable. Again, I don't have
access to the intelligence, and we're talking at a very early stage in this conflict, so a lot
could happen even by the time this is published, but my hope is that they'll just stay very focused
on what the objective is and try to make sure that they're acting appropriately in order to
do that. I will say this, too, that this has been different than what I've seen in the past,
in that the attacks were so heinous and so disgusting that I've seen the international
community rally around Israel more so than I ever have, and I hope that Israel continues to
keep the moral high ground and continue to communicate what they're fighting for,
why they're fighting. I do hope that the international community supports the objective,
and they can work together to achieve it. Benjamin Anyahu, Bibi, somebody you've gotten to know well
in negotiation and conversation. He has made statements, he's declared war, he has spoken
about this potentially being a long and difficult war. What have you learned about the mind of
Benjamin Anyahu that might be important to understand here in this current war?
Bibi is definitely a historic figure. I meet with a lot of different world leaders,
and some of them I would say they're very, very special transformational figures,
and some I would say, how the hell is this person running a country?
Bibi, somebody who has done a lot for the state of Israel, he has a tremendous understanding of
the security apparatus, he has tremendous global relations. For a crisis like this,
I think Bibi's the leader you want if you're Israel to be in that seat. I think he's ambitious
in what he's going to look to achieve. He understands his role in history as somebody
who's helped strengthen Israel economically, militarily, and I don't think he wants to see
his legacy be somebody who left Israel more vulnerable than it had to be. I think in that
regard he'll be incredibly strong, but I also think that he'll hopefully be calculating in the risk
that he takes and not create more risk than is needed. That's easy to say, the two of us sitting
here having a conversation when you're sitting in that chair as a leader in the fog of war.
It's a very hard decision to make. He's been here before. He knows the weight of the situation.
I'm sure he knows the moment. I pray that he'll do what's right here to bring the best outcome
possible. I wonder if you can comment on the internal political turmoil that Bibi has been
operating in and how that relates to the tragedy that we saw.
On the one hand, the political turmoil is a sign of a vibrant democracy. I think it's been
actually nice to see how people have fought for their country and their beliefs in a democratic
way. You compare that to the Palestinians where there's no democracy, there's no free speech,
there's no free press. You can't disagree with the leadership in Israel. If you want to be
homosexual, you can go to a parade and live your life. In Gaza, they'll throw you off a building
and kill you. In Israel, you have the freedoms which I think make it a special place and you have
a very vibrant democracy. With that being said, the times in Jewish history where the Jewish
people have been most vulnerable have been when there's been division and that's when
the temple was destroyed, but that's not just with the Jewish people and with Israel,
that's in all societies. I definitely believe that this division has left them less prepared
for the situation than it would. I do think there's real lessons we should be taking from this
here in America where we're in a time where we're very divided, but I do think that
it'd be very wise for our leaders to find the areas where we do agree and find ways to
secure our southern border to make sure that we know who's in our country, what risks we all face.
I do think that division definitely creates risk for countries.
Let me switch gears here and just zoom out and look at our society and our
public discourse at the moment. What do you make of the scale and nature of the Palestinian
support online in response to this situation? This is something I've observed over the years
since I got involved with the Israeli-Palestinian issue with a lot of interest. I think a lot of
the people who are pledging support for the Palestinian people, I think that they want to see
the Palestinian people live a better life and I actually agree with them in that regard.
Unfortunately, I think many of them are incredibly ill-informed as to the facts on the ground.
I think all of the people who are advocating online for the Palestinian people who are going
to these marches in support of them, I think they'd be best served if they really care about
effectuating the outcome of joining with Israel right now and directing their anger
towards the Hamas leadership. I think that it's very clear that the group that's responsible for
the Palestinian people living the lives that all of these people are angry about is Hamas.
If they direct their anger towards Hamas and put the attention on the failings of Hamas
and put forth a vision for what they'd like to see leadership in Gaza do and they respect
that there's a real fear that Israel has and any country would have of having a group of terrorists
next to them that's calling for their destruction. I think that that recognition of finding a way
for Israel to be secure and then having an opportunity for the Palestinian people to live
a better life is the right pathway to try and pursue. So to you, there's a clear distinction
between Hamas and the Palestinian people in that Hamas is the enemy of progress
and the flourishing of the Palestinian people. 100%. It's very, very clear and I think that if
people were honest about the situation, if they spent a time to really understand it, again,
if you follow the conference I did in Bahrain, we had all of the leading businessmen there and
they said we can rebuild Gaza very easily. We all want to. The leading Arab businessmen,
the leading American businessmen, everyone wants to. They're just held back by Hamas.
And so I do think having an honest conversation about this at this point in time has really
only one logical conclusion and my hope is that maybe this conflict leads to that conversation
being had and if it is, then maybe that brings more unity and understanding
and we kind of get to a conclusion better that could improve the lives of the Palestinian people.
Pragmatic question about the future. Do you hope Donald Trump wins in 2024 and how can his
administration help bring peace to the Middle East? I think when Donald Trump was president,
we had a peaceful world. Everyone said if he was elected, we would have World War III.
Meanwhile, he gets elected and he not only is the first president in decades to not start any wars,
he's making peace deals. He's making trade deals. He's working with our allies,
getting them to pay their fair share in NATO. He's having a dialogue with China, with Russia.
He's weakening Iran. And so I do think that the job he did as a foreign policy president
was tremendous. I think now more and more people are starting to recognize that. Again,
under President Biden, this is the second war that's broken out in the world. And when you have
a weak American leadership, the world becomes a less safe place. And so my hope and prayers are
that President Trump is reelected and that he's able to then restore order and calm and peace
and prosperity to the world. From a place of strength. That's the only way he knows how to do it.
What gives you hope about the future of this region, of Israel and of the Middle East?
The Middle East for 20 years was an area of conflict. They spent all their money on bullets
and bombs. You have young leadership now in Saudi Arabia and UAE and Qatar. And there's a much more
ambitious agenda now for the region to make it an economic superpower and hub of the world.
Israel is one of the most burgeoning and exciting tech economies in the world. And if you think
about it, it's almost like having Silicon Valley not connected to California. The thing that's held
the region back for all these years has just been the conflict and the division and the lack of
connectivity. But if you have that region and if it can all come together, if you can create a
security architecture, you have an incredibly young population. You have a lot of wealth and
resources and a lot of capabilities and know-how. And so I think that if it's managed correctly
and if Iran is able to be restrained and suppressed with their ambitions to cause
destabilization, I don't mean Iran the country. I mean the Iranian regime. Because actually,
once you have this economic sphere, if you could bring Iraq into it, if you could bring Iran into
it, that makes it even bigger and stronger. And the Persian people are incredibly entrepreneurial
and incredibly industrious. So I do think that the region has tremendous potential. It's just been
held back by bad policy, bad leadership, bad objectives. And again, when President Trump left
office in 2021, the Middle East was really on a very, very positive trajectory. And if the right
things happen, it can continue to be so. So I'm praying at this moment in time that we navigate
the current crisis, that the important objectives are achieved of eliminating the terrorists and
their threats, and then allowing the leaders who are focused on giving their citizens and their
neighbors the opportunity to live a better life, are able to work together and really dream and
be ambitious and find ways to create a paradigm where humans can flourish. What is the best way
to defeat hate in the world? Hate is a very powerful force. And it's much easier to hate people you
don't know. It's funny, when I was working on prison reform, one of the most interesting people I
met was a reverend, actually down in Texas, who negotiated the first truce between the
Bloods and the Crips, two of the notorious gangs in America in prison. And I was very excited to
meet him. And when I met him, I said, well, how'd you do it? And he said, it was very simple. He
says, I got all the guys together. And I had a tremendous amount of barbecue brought in. He
says, and I got the meeting says no drinking says drinking sometimes gets people a little bit more
against each other. He says, but I got a meeting and they started sitting down together and they
started saying, you know what? You're just like me. And all of a sudden they started finding areas
where they were more together. Look, I've traveled all over the world now. I've been very fortunate
to meet people from different states in America. I've different political persuasions, different
ages, different classes. And what I found is that there's a fundamental driving amongst all of us
where we all want to live a better life. And, you know, people don't want to fight naturally,
but it's easy to fight when you feel wronged or you feel like somebody disrespected you or somebody
did something from hatred and hatred leads to more hatred, which sometimes just pushes that
cycle further and further. So I believe that each and every one of us has the power to stop that
cycle. And we don't do it by, you know, being on Twitter and yelling at people, we don't do it
by just being critical. We do it by finding the people we disagree with, by listening to them,
by asking questions, by sitting with them. And then if we each take responsibility to try to
make the world better, then I think that there's no limits to the incredible place that this world
can be. So as you've said, you've traveled all across the world. Do you think most people are
good? Most people have love in their heart?
I do believe that. Yeah, and you have some bad people. I mean, you have some real evil people.
I mean, a big part of the work I did was on prison reform. And, you know, previously the
mentality was is that the prison should basically be a warehouse for human trash. And if you've
made a mistake in this world, then, you know, we're going to throw you out and we're going to make
the rest of your life incredibly difficult because you're going to have a criminal record,
you're not going to have access to jobs. But what I found is when I would sit with people in
prison, the people I've met through my father's experience and who I met along the way is that,
you know, people make mistakes. We're all human. I think it's the right thing from a religious
perspective to give people second chances. I always believe you shouldn't judge people by
the worst mistake they make in their life. Unfortunately, now in the era of social media,
people will say one wrong thing. It sticks with them forever. They get canceled or they get put
out. We're all humans. We grow from our mistakes. We learn from our mistakes. And I think that
some people are just evil. There are some evil people. But I do think the vast, vast, vast
majority of people are good. And I do think that people sometimes also can be in a bad place and
then society can push them to a worse and worse place. But we all have the power to make them
feel loved, make them feel heard. And I think there's also tremendous power that we have as
people to help people get to a better place. And so, you know, my wife and I, we've always tried
to be a force for good. We've always tried to be, you know, we've always tried to provide a place
where people can discuss with each other. When we were in Washington, we would host dinners at
our house all the time or we would have Democrats and Republicans sitting together. You know,
we just had, I saw Senator Feinstein just passed away. We had a great dinner at her house when
she was a senator with her and her husband. And Mark Meadows, when he was on the Freedom Caucus,
we had actually a fascinating discussion about Iran. Mark was much more hard-line than me. I had
to actually bite my tongue. I was impressed at how much he did. Whereas, you know, Feinstein and
her husband were like super into, you know, they knew the Iranians well. They thought they were
peace-loving. And it was an incredibly robust and respectful debate. And so, I don't think we
maybe concluded anything that night. But it was interesting for people to get together. Having
a dinner at my house where I had Dick Durbin, you know, the number two ranking Democrat in the
Senate, Lindsey Graham and Stephen Miller, who's known to be a very hard line in immigration,
discussing what an immigration reform could look like. I mean, they left that dinner saying, wow,
you know, we hadn't spoken to people on the other side. And we actually agree on like 85% of things,
like maybe something is possible. And so, I believe that we should always be trying to push to make
the world a better place. And you only do that by listening to people and connecting with each,
with people and by respecting people. And finally, I'll just say on this is that,
you know, I meet people all the time who have so much confidence in their perspectives. And
I'm very jealous that these people are able to be so confident about every single thing. Because
for me, I have, you know, some degree of confidence in the things that I've studied and what I've
learned. But I'm always trying to find, you know, people who disagree to kind of sharpen my perspectives
and to help me grow and to help me learn further. And so, I think that's kind of the beauty of the
world is that, you know, the knowledge base continues to grow, the facts continue to change,
and what's possible tomorrow continues to become different. And so, as humans, we have to continue
to thrive to learn and to grow and to connect. And if we do that, everything's possible.
Well, Jared, thank you for your compassion, first of all, but also your wisdom today on this very
difficult, this tragic set of events, these difficult days for the world. It's a big honor
to speak with you again. Every time I speak to you, I learned a lot about the world. And I deeply
appreciate, like I said, that your humility and your understanding of the details of all the complex
power dynamics and human dynamics that are going on in the world. Once again, thank you for talking
today. Thank you. And Lex, if I could say just one final thing, which is that
my thoughts and prayers are really with all the people in Israel and the innocent civilians as
well from the Palestinian side. And my prayers are with the IDF soldiers that they should be safe
and they should be really watched by God to accomplish whatever mission will enable to make
the world a safer place. Thank you for listening to this newly recorded segment of the conversation
that addresses the current situation in Israel and Gaza. And now we'll go on to the
second part of the conversation recorded on Thursday, October 5th.
Given your experience in negotiating with some of the most powerful and influential leaders in
the world, what's the key to negotiating difficult agreements in geopolitics? Let's start with a
big question. If I look back on the different negotiations I had when I was in government,
either with leaders of countries, with representatives of leaders, or even with members
of Congress to pass legislation, the most important thing I would draw back to would be trust.
I think getting to know each other, understanding what was motivating the other party to get to
the outcome, and making them feel like you weren't going to use whatever information they gave you
to benefit yourself at the expense of them, is probably what I would call table stakes to
have a shot at accomplishing anything that was hard in negotiation. After that, I would say
taking maybe a first principles approach to what the outcome of whatever problem you're looking
to solve should be. Now you have different kinds of negotiations. I always try to create a framework
in the negotiation where it wasn't me against you. It was always, let's agree on what the outcome is
that we're trying to accomplish. Let's all sit on the same side of the table and say,
we want to get to this outcome. How do we get there? Really try to create a roadmap. Once you
understand the destination you want to get to, the endpoint, then you'd have to work backwards and
really try to put yourself in their shoes and try to understand what were their motivations macroed.
Most of the time, you have to assume that a leader's primary objective was to stay in power.
All decisions made would be made through the framework of what it would take to do that and
how it would impact their ability to do that. Finally, I would just say that in any negotiation,
you have to understand the power dynamics as well. You have to then wait your approach in order to
maneuver pieces to accomplish the objective. In areas where we had stronger power dynamics,
I'd always look at it and say, what are the potential escape routes where a politician would
say, this is just the reason why we can't get there? I'd always think, how can you try to
eliminate those escape routes or make them much harder to accomplish? Then ultimately think about,
what's the golden bridge that you want to create for them in order to get to the other side where
they were motivated to get there because it was in their self-interest to get there,
but also because it helped accomplish the different objective. I have many examples
that I lived through with that, obviously negotiating in Congress for prison reform.
I had to form a lot of trust with Democrats, whether it was Hakim Jeffries or Dick Durbin,
and then also on the Republican side with Mike Lee, Lindsey Graham, I had Tim Scott,
Senator Grassley, and then also Doug Collins in the House was tremendous. Every time we
maneuvered something, we would get attacked either from the left. There was a time we were being
attacked by Nancy Pelosi, John Lewis, for not being inclusive enough. Then there were times
that we maneuvered it. We'd be attacked from the right for maybe going too far, and ultimately
we had to find just the right place where we can get it done. The same thing happened with
USMCA, where we were negotiating the biggest trade deal in the history of the world,
which was $1.3 trillion in annual trade between Mexico, Canada, and the United States of America.
We were able to form good trust with the other side and try to say, how do we create win-win
outcomes? Ultimately, we were able to do something in a record time that people thought was very
hard to do. Both of them, in a divided time of the Trump administration,
were bipartisan wins with big, big votes in the Senate and the House.
You have a lot of stories of this kind, sometimes a soft approach, sometimes a hard approach.
I think the story where with BB, there was a potential dramatic election coming up and you
had to say, no excuses, no delaying. We have to make this agreement. I know BB cares about Israel
more than the particular dynamics of the election. You have to draw a hard line there.
But in fairness to him, during the time that we were dealing with him, he was always in
election versus election and then election. What he was saying wasn't wrong. I think he was more
expressing his concerns given the dynamics. We never held those concerns against him. We just
said those are real concerns he had. We respected those concerns, but then we helped him prioritize
to help accomplish the right things. That's ultimately what the partnership is. My job
was to represent America, his job was to represent Israel, and you had other parties
representing their own interests. As long as you assume that people were acting mostly in good
faith, you were able to navigate areas where you didn't have complete overlap of priorities and
objectives. Just to go back to the trust thing, you sometimes see that with leaders where it
looks like they're trying to screw over the other person when they're talking. Not having that,
I think is a really powerful thing for earning trust. People actually can believe that your
results driven are working towards a certain end. Is there a skill to that? Is that genetics?
Are you born with that? Or is that something you develop? Basically, it requires you to look at
the game of politics and not have a cynicism about it to where everybody's trying to manipulate you
and actually just go in with a kind of open mind and open heart and actually speak truthfully
to people at a basic human level. I would say that I always would think about,
how can I be a partner to others? I would want somebody to be a partner to me. A lot of it comes
from just my different experiences in business. I've had great partners. I've had terrible partners.
My father, again, a lot of my childhood was I was exposed to business. My father,
on Sundays, he would take us to job sites and to the office with him instead of the football
games like my friends fathers would do. We're exposed to business. What he would say about
his father, who was an immigrant to America, came over with nothing and no formal education,
but he would always say, a good deal with a bad partner will always be a bad deal.
And a bad deal with a good partner, you'll figure it out. And so going through some of the
challenges that I had in my life early on, whether it was the issue with my father that I'm sure
we'll talk about, or even going through some tougher financial times during the great financial
crisis, I really learned a lot about partnership and I always thought, how can I act in a way
where I could be the type of partner or friend to others that I wish others would be to me?
So when you look for a good partner, don't you think there's the capacity
for both good and bad in every person? So when you talk, when you negotiate with all of these
leaders, aren't there like multiple people you're speaking to inside one person that you're trying
to encourage, catalyze like the goodness in the human? Yeah, so leaders are generally chosen
by their country. And so my view was, if I had an objective, I didn't get to choose who is the
leader of other countries. My job was to deal with that leader, understand their strengths,
understand their weaknesses, understand their power dynamics as well. One of my greatest
takeaways when I grew up, I'd read the newspapers about all these powerful, famous people. And
then as I got older and had the chance to meet them and do business with them, and then ultimately
interact with them in government, is I realized that they're just like you and me. They wake up
every morning, their kids are pissed at them, their wife doesn't want to talk with them.
And they've got a set of advisors around them, one saying, let's go to war, one saying,
let's make peace, one saying, do the deal, one saying, don't do the deal. And they're all thinking,
where do I get advice? How do I make decisions? And so understanding the true human nature of
them and then the different power dynamics around them, I thought was very key. And so I didn't
have a choice, do I deal with them or not? It was a function of how do you deal with them effectively
in order to find areas where you have common interests and then work well together to pursue
those common interests in order to achieve a certain goal. First of all, you're incredibly well
read. I've gotten to know you and I've gotten to know Ivanka and the book recommendation list is
just incredible. So first of all, thank you for that. You told me about The Guns of August by
Barbara Tuckman. It's a book on World War I and I went down a whole rabbit hole there.
It's like an incredible historian. But anyway, there's a bunch of stuff you learned from that,
but one of the things you told me is it influenced your general approach to diplomacy of just picking
up the phone and giving it a try. So as opposed to planning and strategizing, just pick up the phone.
So this was a book I read way before the notion of serving in government
was ever even on my mind or a reality. And I remember thinking about it,
reading it and thinking how World War I started where you had somebody who was assassinated and
then you had all these different alliances that were created. And then in order to accomplish
objectives, it triggered all of these people getting in bed with everyone else because of
documents that were created without the intent of going to a massive war. And I think in the
course of World War I, it was one of the greatest atrocities that we've seen as humanity. We've had
16 million people killed in that war. And I was reading the book, I remember thinking to myself,
even though things are set in a certain way, go sit with somebody, go talk to them and say,
this doesn't make sense, this is wrong, how do we create a better pathway? And as a civilian,
all my life, I would read the newspapers, I would observe how different leaders would act. But when
we had the opportunity to serve in government and have the position, you realize you're not a
civilian, you don't have the luxury of sitting back and letting the world happen the way it's
happening, you have agency and you have the potential to influence the outcome of things. And
one thing I've seen is most political prognosticators are wrong. Anyone who tells you
what's going to happen really has no clue. And it's not because they're bad or they're not intelligent,
it's because nobody knows. And at the end of the day, the outcomes in the world are usually
driven by the decisions of humans. And if you're able to come together, form relationships, listen
to each other, you can do that. And one of the great examples that I speak about in the book is
with North Korea. Whereas if you remember, in 2017, it was very intense when President Obama
was leaving office, he told President Trump that the single biggest fear that he had, and this is
a time when the world was a mess, you had the Middle East was on fire, ISIS was the heading
journalists and killing Christians, they had to caliphate the size of Ohio, Libya was destabilized,
Yemen was destabilized, Syria was in a civil war, where 500,000 people were killed, Iran was on a
quad path to a nuclear weapon. Yet the single biggest fear he had was North Korea. And then it
got compounded by the fact that we get into office and President Trump brings his generals around,
and he's learning how to interact with all the generals and says, okay, what are my options?
And they said, calm down, we've been using all of our ammunition in the Middle East,
we don't have enough ammunition to go to war over there. And he says, let's not let that be
too public, let's try to restock and come up with a plan. And at the time, there was a lot of
banter back and forth. And I got a call from a friend who was an old business contact who
actually had done business in North Korea. And he said, I'd love to find a way to solve this.
And I was getting calls from friends at the time saying, I'm trying to go to Hawaii for
vacation, should I not be going? Is it not safe? I mean, we forget the psychology of how intense
that was at the time. And then through that interaction, he called some of his contacts
in North Korea, and then we were able with the CIA to open up a back channel that ultimately led to
the de-escalation, the meeting between Trump and Kim Jong-un, which led to a de-escalation.
So that was really the mindset, which was whenever there's a problem,
just pick up the phone and try. And I think President Trump had a very similar approach,
which was let's give it a shot. And he wasn't afraid to go after the hard ones too.
And I'll say one final thing on this, which is that in politics, the incentive structure is just
much different than in the real world, in the sense that you have a hard problem. Then if you try to
solve a hard problem, the likelihood of failure is great. Whereas in the business world, if you're
going after a hard problem, we celebrate those people. We want our entrepreneurs and our great
people to go after solving the big hard problems. But in politics, if you try to take on a hard
problem, you have a high likelihood of failure, you'll get a lot of criticism on your pathway to
trying to accomplish that if you fail. And then if you fail, it has a higher probability of leading
to you losing your opportunity to serve. And so it's just one of these things where people want
to play it safe, which is not the notion that really was taken during the time that President
Trump was in office. Do you think it has to be that way? I think there's something in the human
spirit, in the public that desires politicians to take on the big, bold problems. Why is it
that the politicians need to be so afraid of failure? I don't think it has to be that way.
And that's, I think, one of the great lessons from the time of the Trump administration. He
brought a lot of people from the business world into government. The business people have a much
different mindset than government people. And there was a lot of resistance. And I think part
of why there was so much resistance was because I think about it from my personal sense was that
if I was successful with no traditional qualifications to do diplomacy,
it meant that all the people with traditional qualifications and diplomacy didn't necessarily
need those qualifications in order to be successful. And that same sentiment manifested
itself in many areas in government. And I think that in the business world, it's outcome oriented,
it's results oriented. And what we would see in New York is there, they would stab you in the eye
and DC, they would stab you in the back, and it just became a whole different dynamic of how you
work through these different areas. So the answer is it doesn't have to be that way. You just need
the right courageous leader. And that's why I'm so optimistic about what the future of America
and the world could be if you have the right people in power who are willing to take on the
right challenges and do it in the right way. So if we just linger on the North Korea and the
de-escalation and the meeting, what's the trajectory from this could be the most catastrophic thing
that destroys the world to you find back channels, you start talking and start arranging the meeting?
Is there some insights you can give to how difficult that is to do in that, in the North
Korea case, which seems like to be one of the more closed off parts of the world and in the other
cases that you worked on? Yeah, it's always very challenging. And especially when you're going
against the grain of what's established, we did something different to think that an old business
contact that I had could then do it. I mean, that's the type of thing that if the press knew
what we were doing, they would have derided it and criticized it in every which way. But that was
one of the benefits of operating very much below the radar is that we were able to try all these
different things. And not all of them worked, but some of them did. But that is what's amazing
about the world, right? This could be the biggest story on the front page of every paper and they're
inciting fear in everyone. And it's not illegitimate fear. I mean, there were missile tests over
Japan. I mean, you had a lot of very big challenges with that file. And then all of a sudden, we make
contact, we go through negotiations to set a meeting. There's a meeting between President
Trump and Kim Jong-un. And then all of a sudden, there's a framework to try and move things forward.
And again, I think that there's a lot of possibility there for what could happen if it's
worked in the right way. I just want to know how you award that first email or text message,
like what emojis to use, like the hugging emoji. It's just personally, I've gotten to know a lot
of powerful and rich people. It's funny that they're all human, just like you're saying.
And a lot of the drama, a lot of the problems can be resolved with just a little camaraderie,
a little kindness, a little like, just actually just reaching out.
We're all human beings and people want to be successful and people want to be good.
And you're right too. There's way more emojis involved in diplomacy than I ever would have
expected. And every leader, I'm sure, has their favorite emoji. This is also I learned about
people. Everybody has their go-to emoji. I usually go to the heart very quickly,
emoji. There's some people who go to the hugging, whatever that, where you're like
doing the hugging thing. Anyway, this conversation quickly turned to the ridiculous.
But to do another book reference, you mentioned the book 13 days in September by Lawrence Wright
while in discussing all the work you've done in Israel and the Middle East. I just want to ask
you sort of the interesting aspect of that book, which is the influence of the personalities and
personal relationships on these negotiations. You kind of started to allude to that with the trust,
but how much do the personalities matter in this? So going from North Korea to the Middle East here
to within Congress and all that kind of stuff. Yeah, completely in every way. I mean, that's
an incredible book and it's a very entertaining read. It has obviously a lot of good historical
context on some of the key players, whether it's on more Sadat or Menachem Begin or Jimmy Carter
and Cy Vance and a lot of the others who were involved with those negotiations. And the thing
that I kind of took from that experience was just how personal it was. And again, one of my
favorite stories from that book was how Anwar Sadat, who was a big, big leader, he had a mystic
who was, according to this book, again, history. I like reading it, but I always realize that you
have to notice that this is just the perspective of a given author that's writing it. But the way
that they write this book was that he had an advisor who was a mystic, and the mystic was
having a back channel with the Israelis. And the mystic told Sadat, if you go to Israel and you
make a speech at the Knesset, Begin is ready to give you the Sinai. And so he goes to Israel,
they set this whole thing up, he goes and gives the Knesset, they go for their meeting after,
and Sadat says, okay, well, are we going to do this thing? And Begin says, what are you talking
about? Am I giving you an inch of our land? And it was just one of these things where it was a
miscommunication that brought about the symbolic visit of Anwar Sadat to Israel. And that was one
of these notions that just made everyone think that something was possible, that they thought was
impossible a moment before. And actually, we had an example like that during our time in government
when we did the Abraham Accords. The first step of the Accords was really a phone call between
President Trump, a Prime Minister in Netanyahu, and Hamid Ben Zayed, who at that point was the
Crown Prince and de facto ruler of the UAE. But all we had was a phone call and then a statement
that was released. And what was interesting after that is we said, okay, well, how do we integrate
countries? Nobody's done this in a long time. And we were trying to figure out all the issues, and
there's big miscommunications between Israel and UAE, and we were navigating through all the issues.
And so after a couple weeks, I said, you know, I've got to go over there and try to
sort through these issues. So we make a plan to go to Israel, then we can go to UAE.
And then a young gentleman who worked with me named Avi Berkowitz says,
well, if we're flying from Israel to UAE, instead of flying on a government plane, why don't we
see if we can get an LL plane and we'll do the first official commercial flight.
And so I said, that's a great idea. Let's call, you know, Ambassador Otaiba Yusuf, who was a
tremendous player in the Abraham Accords working behind the scenes, you know, day and night,
and was really a big catalyst. So he calls Yusuf and he said, sure, no problem. Let's give it
a shot. So we go and we do it. And he says, if we can work out these issues, we'll do it.
So we go to Israel, we do our meetings, we get everything back into a good place.
We set up this trip over. We fly on an LL plane. We filled it up at the time it was during COVID
with a health delegation. We had the financial ministry because we had to open up, you know,
banking relationships. They could wire money between countries. We wanted to get, you know,
health partnerships. Then we just had a lot of legal things and national security things.
We wanted to start putting together. So we do this flight and we end up landing in UAE.
And the picture of us coming off the plane, being greeted by, you know, Emiratis and Tobes
with an LL plane with an Israeli flag on it, just captured everyone's imagination. And so it was
one of these things where it's like, you work so hard on the details and the negotiation,
I mean, hundreds of hours to kind of make sure everything's perfect. And the one thing that
you do kind of, you know, yeah, let's give it a shot. That image ended up capturing everyone's
heart. So going back to Sadat, that visit was very critical. And what was interesting was,
is according to this book, it happened because of a miscommunication. That was the first part.
The second part of the book, that's just amazing theater, and actually the book was based on a
play, was just going back and forth with all of the different methodologies that they tried,
that failed, but they kept trying out it. And then ultimately seeing how the personalities
were able to find ways to make the compromise that ultimately was a very, very big thing for
more stability in the Middle East. And so amazing book, I would highly recommend it.
A very entertaining read and something that at least gave me encouragement to keep going when
the task I was pursuing seemed so, so, so large. I mean, if you could just linger on the personalities,
you write in the book that words matter, or you write in the context of saying,
in the diplomacy business, words matter. And then you said that we're in the results business.
It's a badass line. But if we just stick to the diplomacy business and words mattering,
it seems like one of the things you really highlight that individual words can really have,
like you can fight over individual words. So like, how do you operate in a world where
single words matter? I think you have to be respectful to the craft that you're in,
where words matter, but then realize that they don't matter as much. And then also
focus on the fact that the actions are actually what's going to matter more than the words. And so
you have a difference between leaders and politicians. Politicians are there to say
the right thing and to hold the power. Leaders are people who are willing to do things that will
be transformational from my perspective. And so when I would think about diplomacy,
words without actions or without the threat of actions, and that was something that President
Trump did very well was that people knew that he was willing to take action. He was very unpredictable
in how he would act. And that made our words much more effective in what they did. So it's
all a combination. But coming from the private sector, we are all about results. If you're in
government, you can work on something for 10 years and fail and then retire and they consider
you an expert in the private sector. If you work on something for 10 weeks and you don't have a
success, then you're unemployed. So it's a different kind of notion. And it was just
understanding the mentality and trying to adjust and bridging the divides between the different
trainings. Is that the biggest thing you took from your business background? Is that just
be really results focused? It was just the only way to be. If I was giving up
a nice life in New York and if I was giving up the stuff that I really enjoyed, the company
that I'd helped build and the life that I was enjoying in order to do government,
I was going there to make a difference. And we had to focus on it. The other skill set,
so there was a couple skill sets that I found were quite deficient in government. First of all,
there was a ton of amazing people. I mean, people talk about the bureaucracy.
What I found was is you had incredibly committed, passionate, intelligent, capable people
all throughout the government. And what they were waiting for though was
direction and then cover in order to get there. And so there were a lot of tasks that I worked on,
whether it was building the wall at the southern border where I was able to work with
customs, border patrol, Army Corps of Engineers, military, DHS professionals, DOD.
And we basically all came together. And then once we had a good project management plan,
we were able to move very, very quickly. I think we built about 470 miles of
border barrier in about two years basically. And that worked very well because we basically
brought private sector project management skill sets, which were quite often missing in government.
The second one is just, we spoke about negotiation earlier. I would say that most people in government
is just a different form of negotiation than you see in the private sector and way less effective
in that regard, which is why I think it's good the more we can encourage more people with
private sector experience to do a stint in government and to really try to contribute and
serve their country. That's how our founders, George Washington and all the founding fathers,
they were working on their farms. They left their farms serving government and they went back to
the farm. And that was kind of the design of the representative government. It wasn't a career
political class. It was people coming in to show gratitude for the freedoms and liberties that
they enjoyed and then do their best to kind of help others have those same opportunities that
they had. And then they'd go back and live their lives. And so I think that there's a lot of
opportunity with our government, if people with more business mindsets who are going to think
about things from a solutions perspective, go and serve. Is that one of the main problems here?
So you also mentioned the book, The Great Degeneration by Neil Ferguson, an awesome historian
who's been on this podcast. It helped you understand the inefficiencies of government
regulation. I'd love it if you can give an insight into why government is so inefficient
at times. Like when it is inefficient, when it doesn't work, why is that the case? The bureaucracy
that you spoke to, the negative aspects of the bureaucracy. So we don't have enough time on
this podcast to go into it, but there's a lot of aspects that work as well, right? But I do think
we've gotten too big. Neil's book that you mentioned, one of the things that I took from
that, I read it I think in 2012, kind of in the middle of the great financial crisis, was
he was talking about how government regulation often was put in place to deal with old crises,
right? So it was never going to solve future problems. It was more to kind of create,
to solve for problems that had happened in the past. And I remember thinking about that.
One thing I was very proud of, of the work of the Trump administration was that
you had four years consecutively where there was a net decrease in the cost of regulations.
So to give you a context, in the last year of Obama in 2016, there were 6 million man
hours spent by the private sector, complying with new federal regulations. And that's not really
what the intent of our government was, right? If we have rules or regulations, those should be
legislated by Congress. They shouldn't be put in by bureaucrats who are basically saying,
I want to follow this objective. So using kind of the power of the pen in order to do that.
So the deregulatory effort was actually very critical to Trump's economic success that happened
at the beginning of the administration. And then what I saw with regulation was anytime either
there was legislation or regulation coming, the people pushing for it were usually the people
who would benefit from the regulatory capture. So you had these, you look at the great financial
crisis where you had this big banking reforms. Well, what happened during the big banking
reforms? Then you had a big reduction in the amount of banks that occurred and the big banks
became even bigger. Whereas I don't think that was the intention of the legislation,
but the people who were writing the legislation and influencing it had a lot of the constituencies
from those larger institutions. And then what happened as a result of that? A lot of these
smaller institutions didn't have the ability to be as competitive. They had more restrictions,
more costs, they became less profitable. But these were the banks that were serving small
business, which is the biggest creator of jobs in our country. And then as a result,
the bigger banks got more powerful. And what happened in the country as a result of the
regulations that they put in place, the wealth gap in the country grew, it didn't shrink.
And so I think oftentimes what they say these regulations are intended to be,
the result often becomes the opposite. And so what President Trump did in his administration
was they did a massive deregulatory effort. And I think they pledged that for every one
regulation they put on, because you do need some regulation in an economy and in a society,
they would take off too. And in the first year, they eliminated eight regulations
for everyone. And so that was just something I took from it, which was, I thought, very
interesting. And you had to really, I think you have to think through what are the consequences
going to be of the different actions you take. And often government gets it wrong by taking
an action that feels right, but has big negative consequences down the road.
Let's go to some difficult topics. You wrote in the book about your experience with some
very low points in government. You've been attacked quite a bit. One of the ones that
stands out is the accusations of collusion with Russia. And you tell in the book in general,
this whole story, this whole journey on a personal level and a sort of big political level.
Can you tell me some aspects of this story? Sure. So to give the listeners some context,
and people remember this now, it's been kind of swept away, because it turned out not to be true,
was that after President Trump won the election in 2016, instead of the media saying,
we were wrong. Because again, everyone thought he had zero chance of winning. They said, okay,
well, we couldn't have been wrong. It must have been the Russians who worked with him. And so
at first, when this started coming up, I thought this was ridiculous. I mean, I was very intimately
involved with the operations of the campaign. I was running the finance of the campaign. I was
running the digital media of the campaign. I was running the schedule for the campaign.
And I knew that on most days, we had trouble like, you know, working, coordinating with ourselves,
you know, let alone, you know, collaborating with another government, and colluding as they called
it. And so we did a great job, I think, as an underdog campaign, very leanly staffed. And then
they said that, you know, we were working with the Russians. And so at the time, I didn't take it
too seriously, because I knew there was no truth to it. But it was amazing to me to start seeing all
of these institutions, whether it was CNN, the Washington Post, New York Times, these were news
organizations that I grew up having a lot of respect for, taking these accusations so seriously,
and then working themselves up in order to just cover it for two years. And then as a result,
you had a special counsel, you had a house investigation, a Senate investigation. And I
personally spent about, I think, over 20 hours just, you know, testifying before these different
committees, again, spent millions of dollars out of my own pocket on my legal fees to make
sure I was well represented. And the reason I did that was because I saw in Washington,
it was like a sick game, right? It's almost like, you know, even though there was no underlying
problems to the accusation, I felt like this is one of those things where they're going to try to
catch you. And then if you step on the line, they catch you with one misrepresentation,
they're going to try to put you in jail or worst of, you know, bid, bid, bid, bid. And so
for me, that was a big concern. So, you know, it was amazing. I mean, my poor mom, you know,
I told her to stop, you know, reading whatever. I said, well, I promise you, we didn't do anything
wrong. It's good. But, you know, she'd call me and say, well, you know, our friends were, you
know, on the Upper East Side, we're talking with Chuck Schumer, he says, Jared's going to jail.
You know, we know for sure that he colluded with the Russians. And this is like a leading
senator saying things like this. And so it was just interesting for me to see how the whole
world could believe something and be talking about it that I knew with 1000% certainty it was
just not true. And so seeing that play out was very, very hard. Obviously, you know, I was accused
of a lot of things. There were times in Washington, I was radioactive. I remember one weekend,
you know, it was all over CNN, you know, the people, they had panels on CNN, like the news
organization that I grew up thinking was like the number one trusted name for news in the world,
talking about how I'd committed treason, because I met with an ambassador and said,
we'd like to hear your perspective on what you think the policy should be
in Syria, where there was a big civil war happening and ISIS and a lot of different things.
So it was quite a crazy time in that regard. But luckily, again, we were able to fight through
it. It was a major distraction for our administration. I think we were able to kind
of stay focused on the objectives and the policies. But it was a crazy time. And I learned a lot
from that experience. It's crazy how just an accusation can be viral and can just go.
One of the things that worries me is the effect on your mind, the psychology of it,
to make sure it doesn't make you cynical. Like people that are trying to do stuff,
those kinds of stories that can destroy their mind. So one of the things I'd love to sort of
understand, you kind of rolled in from the business floor, and all of a sudden the entire world
from CNN to everybody's accusing you of colluding with the Russians. Like what do you
do? Like when you're sitting at home, how do you keep a calm mind, a clear mind,
an optimistic one that doesn't become cynical and actually just keep trying to push on and do
stuff in the world? So it was a surreal experience. I would say number one is I felt very confident
that I hadn't done anything wrong. So I would always tell my lawyer, the good news is I've
got a good fact problem, right? Like I need a good lawyer to get me through it, but it's much
easier to be a good lawyer if you have a very innocent client. And so the fact that I knew
that I didn't have, I didn't believe that I had any legal liability helped me kind of intellectually
separate the challenge I needed to do to fight through it from it. And then I just basically
said, like, and I'd had hardship earlier in my life where I dealt with the situation with my
father. And what I realized there is that you can't really spend energy on the things that
you don't control. All you can do is spend your time and energy worrying about what you can control
and then how do you react to the things that you have there? And so it took a lot of discipline,
it took a lot of strength. And again, I give my wife Ivanka and even Donald a lot of credit for
having my back during that time and encouraging me just to kind of fight through it. And then I
also had to make sure that I didn't allow that to distract me from my job. I felt like I had an
amazing opportunity in the White House to make a difference in the world. And if I would have
spent all my time playing defense, you know, in politics, it's a time duration game. In business,
you have whatever duration you set for yourself. In politics, it's time duration. We had four years.
Every day was sand through an hourglass. My mindset was, I need to accomplish as much as I can in
these four years. And I guess the traditional game that's played in Washington is whether it's the
media, the opposition, their job is to distract you and then try to stop you from being as successful
as you want to be. And so just fought through it. And it wasn't always fun, but we got through. And
thank God, it's something people don't talk about. And it has been amazing to me, just the lack of
self-awareness and reflection of a lot of the people who hyped this up for two years. They
don't think there was anything wrong with it. And that's interesting. But you know, my view is,
we got through it, it's good. So it's in the past. And then I started moving to the future. And
that's really where I spent my time. Yeah. But I want to linger on it because to me, that has a
really discouraging effect on anyone who's trying to do positive in the world. Like these kinds of
attacks are intense. Yeah. I mean, you say kind of one of the lessons you learned is that you
really have to be perfect. But I hate that to be the lesson. Like, I feel like you should be able
to do stupid stuff, take big risks. And like people celebrate the big risks and not try to weave
gigantic stories over nothing. I just want to kind of understand the two aspects of this,
how to not have such stories of so much legs. And the other is how to stay psychologically
strong. So you kind of waved it off that you didn't have a fact problem. But it can just have
a fact in your psyche. Yeah. You seem to be pretty stoked about the whole thing. But like how, I mean,
just on the psychology side, how did you stay calm and not become cynical where you can continue
to do stuff and take big risks? I didn't have a choice. What do you mean? I mean, I could have
spent every day feeling sorry for myself or complaining or saying things aren't fair. But
the general way I looked at it was that in life, every opportunity has a cost. And
you know, you could look at it and say, maybe this was a massive cost either in dollars or in
time or in reputation or in emotional drain. But you could also say that, you know, I had an
opportunity to work in the White House and I had an opportunity to work on some of the hardest
challenges. And you talk about how that's not celebrated, that is something very different.
In the private sector, when you take on big challenges that is celebrated in government,
when you take on big challenges, people want to see it fail or they want to criticize those people
who are trying to take that on. And I think that's wrong. And I think that, you know, as a country,
we should be thinking big, we should be dreaming big and we should be encouraging our politicians
to try and to fail more and to, you know, to go and to take on big things knowing that there's
risk of failing. Obviously we want them to succeed not to fail, but let's take on the big things.
Let's try to do that. So I think it's just very basic that, you know, you're in a situation,
I've made decisions, I can't go back and change decisions in the past. I still felt, you know,
very blessed to be in the position I was in. And I knew that I just had to work through it. And
like I said, I was very lucky to have, you know, support from my wife and from my family
and from good friends. Again, I think I'd chosen very good friends in life and my friends were
with me. I had one friend who, you know, my lowest moment, you know, got on the plane,
you lived in Arizona, got on a plane and came just have dinner with me to say,
just pick your head up, I know you're down now, you're going to be fine, just fight through.
That meant a lot to me. And again, I always think in my life, you know, you don't learn as much from
your successes, you don't learn as much from your high points, you learn the most about
who you want to be and how the world works from your lowest moments. And at those lowest moments,
it just, it made me better. And it taught me how to be a better friend to people who are in
tough situations. And I tried to just get, get tougher and I tried to just get better and work
through it. Yeah, you said that you and Ivanka, this, this, this intense time brought you two
together and helped you kind of deal with the intensity of the chaos of it all.
So I think it was just number one, knowing that you had a partner and knowing that you had somebody
who loved you and believed in you. I think that was definitely by far the biggest of anything.
And love is the answer. Love is very important. But then there's also a lot that I've learned from
her always, you're getting me to read different books or learn different things, which I love.
But she's also, I think, an amazing role model. And I go through our time in Washington where
there were so many people who were, I thought, very nasty to her unfoundedly. And I'm not talking
about individually, because again, you know, most people interacted with her were super kind,
but I would see people, you know, on Twitter, different places go after and she always stayed
elegant. And I felt like that was something that she never stooped down to a lower level.
She kept her elegance the whole time. And she really went to Washington wanting to be a force
of good. And I see all the time that she follows her heart, she does what's right. And she has a
very strong moral compass. And I feel very lucky to have her as a partner. And I respect her
tremendously. Yeah, she walks the fire with grace, I would say. And she's recommended a bunch of
amazing books to me. And she has an incredible, a fascinating mind. So, but one thing that jumped
out to me is you both love diners, Jersey diners. So I lived in Philly for a while. And I've,
you know, I traveled quite a bit and traveling from Boston down to Philly, maybe to D.C. You can
drive through Jersey. It's something about Jersey. I know what it is. You listen to Bruce Springsteen,
there's a Lucy K is this bit where I think it's part of criticizing cell phones today where people
are too much on their phone. They don't just sit there be bored. But he uses that story to tell
where he's just driving and the Bruce Springsteen song comes on. And he just wants to pull over
to the side of the road and just like weep for an unexplainable reason. And I think that's true.
Because life is difficult. Life is full of suffering or struggle or challenges. Sometimes
it's always Bruce Springsteen, but like some kind of song like this can really
make you reflect on life, that melancholy feeling. But that melancholy feeling is the other side of
the happiness coin, where if you just allow yourself to feel that pain, you can also feel
the highest joys. That's the sort of the point Lucy K makes. And there's something about Jersey
with the diners often late at night. Now there's several diner experiences, I should say. Okay,
there's like the family friendly, there's the nice waitress and just this is sweetness of kindness,
like hello sweetheart, that kind of thing. There's also like the 3am diner, where you're like the
ones that are open 24 hours. That has a romantic element when you're a young man or young woman,
traveling the loneliness of that. This is all of it. The American diner is like, from like Jack
Kerouac on, represents something. I'm not sure what that is, but it's like a real
beautiful experience. And the food itself too. Always fresh, yeah. The thing with diners,
there's so much to love about it. And I grew up, obviously in New Jersey, when I'd go with my father
to business, he'd always stop and we'd eat at a diner late at night. I'd be coming back with
my friends, we'd stop at a diner. And it's a tradition that Ivanka and I love doing as well.
And I think there's a notion of, it's very egalitarian in that people from all places are
there, you could order basically whatever you want. I mean, the menus at the diners look like the
phone book. And it's amazing how they keep so much fresh ingredients to do it, at least the good
ones do. I love as a Jersey guy, you get mozzarella sticks and an omelet at any hour of the day,
because most of them are open 24 hours. And that's basically my Ivanka, my go-to. We'll
throw in a milkshake or two as well. But for me as a kid, my father would take me. Sometimes I'd
sit with him in the meeting. Sometimes I'd be at the table next to him. He'd give me a bunch of
quarters to put in the music machine that they would have on the wall. And it was always just
a great experience doing it. And I joke that if you grew up in Jersey, you grew up with just
enough of a chip on your shoulder that you have to go and make something of yourself in life.
It's a special place. I had an amazing childhood there and very, very proud to be from the state.
And I will just give a little bit of a plug now because the state has now actually turned the
corner and they had a $10 billion budget surplus for many years. It was a state that was basically
bankrupt and now actually under a pretty progressive Democrat governor, Phil Murphy,
he's turned the state around and it actually has a very bright future ahead. And it's probably
one of the best places to raise a family in the country. It's got very low crime,
one of the best public school systems in the country, a pretty good healthcare system,
a lot of green parks. People know the term pike, but it's got a lot to it. That's really great.
So I'm a big, big fan of Jersey. I like how this is the first for this particular podcast. You
literally gave a plug to a state. So in New Jersey, everybody, it's where it's at.
South Jersey is North Jersey. I mean, there's all kinds of jerseys too. I mean, the whole thing.
And don't get me started on the Jersey Shore, Lex.
Jersey Shore is the whole thing.
And I'm not talking about the snuggly part. I'm talking about the real nice parts where
you have great food, great people. I mean, nice parts. It's all beautiful. The full
range of human characters that are in New Jersey are all beautiful.
I agree with that. And every time I travel across the world, there's always a meet somebody from
New Jersey and you kind of give a knot of a deep understanding. It's the cradle of civilization.
Anyways, okay. So back, I don't know how we got there. Oh, all right. Going back to the low points,
you mentioned your father, if we could just return there, even just the personal story
of your father, that you write about, all the betrayal that happened in his life,
and then how he responds to that betrayal. And he was kind of after that arrested.
Can you just tell the story?
Sure. So my father is an amazing person. And we grew up in New Jersey. My father was a big
developer, a great entrepreneur, built an amazing business. He got into a dispute with
two of his siblings. And through that dispute, they basically took all the documents in his
company, went to the US Attorney's Office, and turned into, from a civil dispute into a real
public dispute. My father did something wrong in that process. And when he got arrested for that,
he basically said, what I did was wrong. And he took his medicine and he did it like a man.
And he said, I'm going to go to prison. And he did that for a year. And so for me, that was a very
challenging time in the family, obviously. It was a shock. It was a total change. I mean,
I grew up, my childhood was, I think, a very nice childhood. My parents always said,
do good in school, work hard. I was very focused on my athletics. I was captain of the basketball
team, captain of the hockey team. I ran a marathon with my father. And it was always about pursuing,
went to Harvard, graduated with honors, and that was in NYU pursuing a law degree and a business
degree. And I was working at Manhattan District Attorney's Office at the time, actually thinking
I wanted to go into public service. Because my father always taught us, we were always surrounded
by politicians. And he always said, you know, my parents came to America, they lived in the land
of opportunity. And they had these opportunities, because this is the progressed country in the
world. And so you should, you know, be successful, work hard, don't ever let your opportunities
become your disadvantages, because you have advantages in life, you have to work harder.
And that's what he instilled in myself and my brother, and always pushed us to make the most
of ourselves. And when we did that, you know, everything changed overnight when my father
got arrested. Obviously, it's very embarrassing for a family when you're on the front page of the
papers, I would see the newspapers writing all these things about my father that I didn't think
were representative of the person that I knew. It was a big change for our family. And, you know,
I was angry. I was angry, I said, you know, I could be angry at the prosecutor, I could be angry at
my father's brother, I could be angry at my father's lawyers, I could be angry at my father
for making this mistake. And then I kind of said, that's not going to change anything.
And I had a real shift, and I do think that that was a turning point in my life where I basically
said, let me focus on the things I can control, let me focus on the positive things I can do.
And from that moment forward, I said, how can I be a great son to my father? How could I be a
great older brother slash, you know, substitute father for my two sisters, my younger brother?
How could I be there for my mother? How could I be there for my father's business?
And I just went into battle mode. And I put my armor on and I just, you know, ran into it. And
for the next two years, it was, every day was painful. I mean, I was dealing with banks,
I was dealing with the company was still at subpoenas. I was still in law school. I tell my
father I wanted to drop out of law school and business school, but he said, please don't. So,
I would basically go to law school one day a week or maybe I'd skip it most days and I'd go to his
office every day. And my friends would joke that if my professors wanted to fail me, the law professor
would have to give me a test that had four pictures and say, circle who your professor is, you know,
but I would basically take a week off, I'd read the books and I did well and I got my degrees.
And it was just a very, very challenging time. But like I said to you before is that you learn
the most about life and you learn the most about humanity and yourself when you're in your most
challenging periods. And I'll say that, you know, that experience also changed, you know,
the people I interacted with spending weekends with my father down in a prison in Alabama. I
met the other inmates, I met their families. I spent time then trying to advise the children
of other people who were going through the same experience that I'd gone through on how to navigate
it, you know, correctly. And you just learned a lot about the world and you see that, you know,
in life, everything could get taken from you, your status, your money, your friends. I saw that
certain people were very disloyal to my father at the time who he thought were friends. It was
only a handful. But again, I learned from those people, how can I be a true friend to people?
How can I be better? And I learned a tremendous amount through that experience.
You're right that your father told you about being humble. I'd love to ask you about this,
that in life sometimes you get so powerful that we start to think
where the deal is of our own fate. Where not the dealer is God as the dealer. Sometimes we have to
be brought back down to earth to get perspective on what is really important. What do you think he
meant by that? What did you learn from that experience? The way I interpreted at the time,
and those were very, very memorable words, and it occurred, I was down after I picked up my
father from the arraignment, I drove him down, I drove the car and my father and I are very,
very close. And he didn't say a word for the whole time. And I think he was processing,
number one, what was happening to him. And I couldn't even imagine. But I actually think
the bigger pain for him, because my father is such a committed person to the family is like,
did I let my family down? Did I let my kids down? And I do think he felt at that moment like his
life was over. He couldn't really see past what this challenge was going to bring. And if there
would be a life for him after it, so I could see that he had a lot of fear. And he really
wasn't saying much. And then I didn't know what to do. And so I just stood by him and stood close.
And later that day, or the next day, he got up and started walking. He had an ankle monitor for
whatever reason. The prosecutor was such a so aggressive, he was a flight risk. So they made
him wear an ankle monitor. They were very, very aggressive and nasty. And at the time,
my father was the biggest donor to Democrats. The prosecutor was a Republican. It was a very
political thing. And what happened was, is he was walking around the pool and I just started
walking with him. And he said to me, you know, Jared, in life, sometimes we get so powerful
that we believe that we're the dealer. He says, but we're not the dealer. God's the dealer. And
we have to, you know, come down to earth to understand, like you said. So what I took from
that was that my father, with all of his success, had started to believe that maybe certain rules
didn't apply to him. And I think that that's where he made a mistake. And I think he had a lot of
regret that he made the mistake. And, you know, my father is a very humble person. He's a very
moral person. You know, for me, with my humility, my brother and I joke that we give our credit for
being humble number one to being Metz fans, because every year you have a lot of promise and
then it never ends up paying off. Although now with Steve Cohen, hopefully we run a different
trajectory. But the other thing is also our mother, you know, our mother really raised us
to be very humble, to be, you know, we had, we knew we had a lot, but every Sunday morning,
my mom was there clipping the coupons, the cereal we ate in our house was based on,
you know, was based on what was on sale versus what we liked, you know, when we would have
a problem with our teachers in school and I'd say, well, teacher doesn't like me. She'd say,
well, I'm not calling them. It's your job to make the teacher like you. And so my mother gave us a
lot of that. My father gave us a lot of the grounding. And I think during that time, my
father was just realizing that maybe he had gotten disconnected from the grounding and the values. And
again, I think he also accepted maybe he could have, you know, blamed others for acting inappropriately,
but I respect the fact that he took responsibility himself and said, I can't control the actions
of other people. I can't control what they do is right and wrong. I can just control my actions.
And as I go on the next journeys in my life and I go to government, I go to Washington,
I mean, I even think through the craziness of going from, you know, visiting my father in a
prison to 10 years later, sitting in the office in the White House next to the president of the
United States. And like, I think about that story and that it's a story that only God could write.
And I really believe that you have to have a lot of faith because the lows and the highs are both
so extreme and unbelievable that I feel like those low moments in some ways allowed me to
keep my grounding and to understand what was truly important in life for when I ended up going
through those other moments. Your father was betrayed perhaps over money by siblings.
Is there some deeper wisdom you can draw from that? Have you seen money or perhaps power cloud
people's judgment? Oh, 100%. 100%. Is there some kind of optimistic thing you can take from that
about human nature of how to escape that clouding of judgment when you're talking about leaders,
when you're talking about government, even business. As you mentioned, there's a power dynamics
at play always when you're negotiating. Is there a way to see the common humanity and not
see the sort of will to power in the whole thing? Definitely. You mentioned about power,
money, corrupting. There's a great quote I heard a friend of mine say is a guy, Michael Harris,
who was one of the founders of Death Row Records. And he was being interviewed recently and they
asked him about what happened with Shook Knight. And his line was, money just makes you more of
what you already are, which I thought was a very elegant way of saying it. And I would see this
time and time again in the White House where you had people who were now given a lot of responsibility
and power and it went to their head and they acted very crazily and maybe it didn't act in a way
that I thought was always conducive to the objectives. So I think it's a very big problem
that you have. Whether it's something that's solvable, I think it's about having the right
leaders and hopefully for the leaders having good friends. I'm still friends with a lot of the
people I interacted with when I was in government. And the number one thing I try to beat to them
is just a good friend. I try to be somebody who they can talk about things with. I don't go in
trying to tell them what to do on different things. And I think that that's a big thing,
is that people just need friends and they need conversation. And if they have that,
then hopefully that allows them to keep their head in the right place.
I think this is a good place to ask about one aspect of the fascinating work you've done,
which is on prison reform. Can you take me through your journey of helping the bipartisan bill
get passed? Just working on prison reform in the White House in general,
how you made that happen, how you help make that happen.
Sure. So we passed a law called the First Step Act, which was the largest prison and
criminal justice reform bill that's been done maybe in 30, 40, 50 years in the US. And so
what it basically did was two things. Number one is it took the prison system and it took a
certain class of offenders and allowed them to become eligible for earlier release if they go
through the certain trainings that will allow them to have a lower probability of going back.
So stepping back, you look at the prison system, you say, what's the purpose? Is it to punish?
Is it to warehouse? Is it to rehabilitate? And I do think that we're a country that believes in
second chances. I saw firsthand when my father was a client of the system how inefficient it was
and how much better it could be. And when my father got out, we didn't run from that experience.
He started hiring people from Micro's Island and different prisons into the company into a second
chance program, which we're very, very proud of doing. And what we saw through our micro experience
was that if you give people mentorship, if you give them job training, a lot of people leave,
they have addiction issues, and they can't find housing. And so people leave prison with a criminal
record and they're less likely to go back and reintegrate in society without help from different
institutions that can help them do that. So we modeled the reforms of what they did in Texas
and Georgia and other states where they basically put a lot of job training, alcohol, and addiction
treatment programs in the prisons as a way to incentivize the prisoners to work on themselves
while they're there in order to allow them to reenter society. It's turned out to be very successful
so far. They just had a report that showed that the general population has had a 47% recidivism rate,
meaning that people who leave federal prison, half of them go back, and people who have now taken
this program, only 12% of them go back. So number one, you're making communities safer because if
people are going to now get a job and enter society instead of committing future crimes, you're
avoiding future crimes. And number two, you're giving people a second chance at life. And so
that was the first part of it. The second thing we did was there was a rule passed in the 90s
that basically penalized crack cocaine at 100 times the penalty of what regular cocaine was.
And I think a lot of the motivations of what people say in retrospect was that crack was more
of a black drug and cocaine was more of a white drug. And so there was a really racial disparity
in terms of what the application of these sentences were. So they then revised that to make it 18 to
one. And what we did in this bill is we allowed it to go retroactive to allow people who were in
prison with sentences under what we thought was the racist law to be able to make an application
to a judge in order to be dismissed. And it was based on good behavior, being rehabilitated and the
fact that they would have a low probability of offending in the future. And so that was really
the meat of it. And there was a couple other things in there we did as well, which were also
quite good. So we did it, worked very closely with the Democrats, Republicans to do it.
At first, President Trump was a little bit skeptical of it because he's a big strong law and
order supporter, but he made me work very hard to put together a coalition of Republicans and
Democrats and law enforcement. We had the support from the policemen, we had the support from the
ACLU, and ultimately we were able to get it together. And it was an amazing thing. We ended
up getting 87 votes in the Senate. This happened for me at a time, while the Russia investigation
stuff was still happening. New chief of staff came in, John Kelly, he basically marginalized me
in the operations. So I had kind of less day-to-day responsibilities in the White House.
And so for me, this effort became one of my full-time efforts along with negotiating the
Mexico trade deal and along with the Middle East efforts. And the reason why that was great was
because it didn't have a lot of support from the Republican caucus originally. And people thought
there was no way it would happen. So I really was able to be the chief executive, the middle
executive, the low executive, the intern. And through that process, I've really got an education
on how Congress works, on how to pass legislation. I was negotiating text, I was negotiating back
and forth. And I built a lot of trust. Again, I deal with whether it's Akeem Jeffries or
Cedric Richmond that we built a lot of trust. We'd speak three times a day. These guys had my back,
the ACLU. Again, I never thought they were suing our administration every day or every other day
on something. But for whatever reason, we built trust and we're able to work together.
And then also with the real conservative groups, because there was a lot, a big part of the
conservative base that felt like we should be giving people a second chance. And in addition to
that, this will keep our country safer and will reduce the cost of what we spend on prisons. And
so it was a great effort. And I was very, very proud that we're able to get it done under President
Trump. How'd you convince the Republicans? So they were skeptical at first. Are we talking about
like just phone conversations, going out to lunch, just back to the emojis or what?
Hand-to-hand combat, meetings. The cool thing about this is, so everyone always says,
I always get frustrated when I hear a lawmaker say, oh, the Senate's not what it used to be or
Congress isn't what it used to be. Things are broken today. I don't think that's true. I think
going through the process, I think that our founders were totally genius in the way that
they designed our system of government. And what I saw is you just have to work it. So everyone
knows the power of their vote. Some would give it to me easily. Some wouldn't give it to me easily.
Some would trade it for other things. Some would withhold it because they were pissed about other
things. And it was just hand-to-hand combat. So it was just making calls, using the phone,
going, walking the halls, going to lunches, hosting dinners at my house. It was just,
it was a nonstop lobbying effort. And by the way, it was also adjudicating issues and making people
feel like they were heard hearing their issues and then trying to find solutions that you don't
put something in that then tips off where you lose a whole coalition. So it was really a balancing
act. But it was an amazing thing. And we're very close in that with Van Jones and Jessica Jackson,
who also gave me a lot of help on the left. And it was an amazing thing. Had a great team too.
So you mentioned the importance of trust at the very beginning of the conversation.
From the outsider perspective, just maybe a dark question, which is like how much
trust is there in Washington? How much, did the flip side of that, how much backstabbing is there?
Can you form like long-term relationships with people on a basic human level, where you know
you're not going to be betrayed, screwed over, manipulated for, again, going back to the old
money and power? The answer is yes and the answer is no. So I made some incredible friends, lifelong
friends through my time in Washington. But the way I think about it from politics, and I think in
geopolitics as well, is I would say that politicians really don't have friends, politicians have
interests. And as long as you kind of follow that rule, you should be able to know how to rate
where your relationship with a given person falls in the spectrum. But I do think I was the
exception. I did make some tremendous friends. And again, I'd go back to what I said about
negotiation where, you know, when you're in a situation where there's really nothing in it for
any of you personally, but you're in a foxhole together and nobody in Washington could get
anything done by themselves. So you have people coming from all different backgrounds, all different
experiences, all different geographies, coming together, agreeing on an objective, creating a
plan, and then every day rowing together in order to get it done. It's a beautiful thing. And you
really learn what people are about. And so when you go through an experience like that, you learn
who's in it for themselves, you learn who's in it for the cause. And, you know, for every, you know,
thing you read about in the press of a fight I had with somebody because we were at odds,
you know, I have about, you know, 100 people who have become lifelong friends because I respect
the way that when we were under fire together, they got better, they were competent, and they were
there to serve for the right reason. And so, so I guess the answer is yes, it is, it is possible.
You have to be careful because there are a lot of mercurial people there. I always say the politicians
are like gladiators. I didn't have as much respect for politicians till I got there. But if you think
about it, everyone who's got a congressional seat or a Senate seat, there's 25 people back at home
who want their job. We think they're smarter than them who are trying to backstab them. And so
I always say that the political dynamic, it's like in the private sector, you're standing on, on
flat ground. You choose which fights you take on when you take them on, how you fight them. In
politics, it's like you're standing on a ball. And what you have to realize is that there's maybe
like 10 things that you have to do, but there's a potential cost to taking on each one that
might destabilize you. You fall off the ball and then you lose your opportunity to pursue those.
You have to always be kind of marking everything to market and going through your calculations
to make sure you can accomplish what you want to without falling off the ball and losing your
opportunity to make a difference. I guess people like power. And I just feel like to be a good
politician, you should be willing like good meaning, good for humanity, be willing to let go of power.
You know, try to do the right thing. If there's somebody back home that doesn't manipulate
yourself, screws you over and takes power from you, it's okay. I feel like that kind of
humility is required to be a great leader. And I feel like that's actually a good way to have
long-term power because karma has a viral aspect to it. Just doing good by others, I feel like,
I'd like to say that's true, Lex. I think it's just way more complicated. I mean,
you look what happened this week with Kevin McCarthy, right? He did what he thought was
morally right. He thought he did a bipartisan deal. He was told that they would have his back,
and then the moment things got tough, they cut him loose. So again, I don't know if that was
the right thing or the wrong thing, right? I've also seen leaders on the other end say,
I'm going to do things that are short-term or selfish. But the way they justify to themselves
is to say, I believe that myself staying in power is existential to the greater good. So I will do
things that maybe are not in the greater good now because I believe that my maintaining power is.
And so it's complicated. In an idealized world, I'd love to believe that's the case,
but it's just way more complicated than that. Yeah. I wish it wasn't, but it is.
Yeah. I do just wish people zoomed out and people in politics zoomed out a bit and just asked
themselves, what are we all doing this for? Sometimes you can get a little bit lost in
the game of it. If you zoom out, you realize integrity is way more important than little
gains in money or little gains in power in the long-term. It's when you look yourself in the
mirror at the end of the day and also how history remembers you. I just feel like people do some
dark stuff in that moment when they're losing power and they try to hold on a little too hard.
This is when they can do really dark things, like bring out the worst in themselves.
And it's just sad to see, and I wish there was a machinery of government would
inspire people to be their best selves in their last days versus the worst selves.
When that system gets invented, you'll share with me what it is, but it's a,
look, let me give you another way to frame it, which is, and this was the revelation we spoke
before about when I was getting my butt kicked by the Russian investigation and all the different
areas. But the basic framework I looked at was I said, okay, this all feels tough, but I said,
the game's the game. The game's been here way longer, but way before I came and it'll be here
way long after I leave. And so I have two choices. I can complain that the game's tough, it's not
fair, it's not moral, or I can go and I can try to play the game as hard as possible. And I think
that there's two different things. You have people who are willing to sit in the stands and
they're willing to yell at the players or make their points known, or you have people who are
willing to suit up and get in the arena and go play. And I have a lot of respect for the people
who suit up and go play. And again, some of them, I wish they would play for different means,
but the fact that they're willing to put their name on the ballot, make the sacrifice,
and go put on the pads and get hit and hit others, I think that you need those people. And I wish
more people who had maybe the moral wiring that you discussed would be putting on a helmet and
go into play, because it's hard. It's hard. I agree with you. I just would love to fix the aspect of
the Russia collusion, accusation, the virality, the power of that, because that's a really discouraging
thing for people. Maybe it's the way it has to be, but it seems like a disincentive to people
to participate. It is, but I'll give you again an optimistic side of it, is that
what you're seeing now with social media is I do think with what's happening at X,
there is now more of a reversion towards more egalitarianism of information. And so for many
years, the media publications were the gatekeepers, and then you had these social media companies
that grew, they became so powerful, but then they were tilting the scales, why they were doing it.
We can go through long explanations for that, but if there truly is a real forum and a democratization
of information, then you would think that the marketplace of ideas would surface the real ones
and discredit the non-real ones. And I think that as a society, we're starting to come to grips with
the fact that the power dynamic is changing and that some of these institutions that we used to
have a lot of faith in don't deserve our faith, and some of them will actually reform and maybe
re-earn our faith. So I think that there could be an optimistic tone. Again, the years of Trump,
I think that he was an outsider and he represented something that was existential to the system.
You think about for the 30 years before, you were either part of the Clinton dynasty or the Bush
dynasty. I think a lot of people in the country felt like that whole class, whether you were in
a red shirt or a blue shirt, wasn't representing them. And Trump represented a true outsider to
that system. And I do think that as he went in there, there was a lot of norms that were broken
to try to stop him from changing the traditional power structure. So I think that we're at a time
where maybe there will be an optimistic breakthrough where you'll have institutions that will allow
for a lot more transparency into what truth really is.
I'd love to go back and talk to you about the Middle East because there's so many interesting
components to this. Let's talk about Saudi Arabia. And first, let me ask you about MBS,
Mohammed bin Salman, the Crown Prince. So you've gotten to know him pretty well. You've become
friends with him. What's he like as a human being? Just at a basic human level. What's he like?
For the listeners, Mohammed bin Salman is now the Crown Prince of Saudi Arabia. He
has risen to that position over the last couple of years. And he's been a tremendous
reformer for the country. He's gone in and he's really modernized the economy. He's put a lot
more investment into the country. He's marginalized the religious police. And he's really done a good
job to bring modernization and a lot of reform. So he's been a great reformer. What he's like as
a person is he's very high energy. He's got tremendous candle power, very, very smart,
incredibly well read. When he was younger, his father would give him a book a week and make
him report on it on the weekend. He was trained as a leader and as a politician really by his
father. He's not Western educated. So he grew up in the Saudi culture and he's a real Saudi
nationalist. He loves their history, loves their heritage, has a steep understanding of the tribal
nature of the region. And his father was actually known to be a tremendous politician. So when he
was governor of Riyadh, people who I speak to today about him say that if they had a full election,
he would have won in a landslide. They say every time somebody went to the hospital,
he was the first person to call. Anytime there was a funeral, he was the first person to show up.
He's a very, very beloved leader. Mohamed Ben Salman, he was a businessman before he got into
Crown Prince. So he thinks really with a business mindset about how he runs the country.
And he's brought, I think, a different mindset and energy to the Middle East.
You know, one thing I'll say that maybe that comes to mind here is that I remember early on
talking with him about all the different initiatives he was taking on. He's building a big city
called Neome in the desert in a place where there really was nothing on the Red Sea.
And a lot of people were criticizing the ambition of the plan. And I was sitting with him one night
and I said, you know, why are you taking on all these things? You know, you've got a lot of different
programs. But, you know, what most politicians do is they set lower expectations and then they
exceed the expectations. And he looked at me without hesitation. He says, Jared, you know,
the way I look at it is that in five years from now, if I set five goals and I achieve five goals,
I'll achieve five things. If I set 100 goals and I fail at 50 of them, then five years I'll
accomplish 50 things. And so it's a very different mindset as a leader. The way I got to work with
him was Saudi Arabia was a big topic in the campaign. President Trump was basically saying
during the campaign that, you know, we're going to, you know, they've got to pay for their fair
share. They haven't been a great partner in the region. He's very critical of Saudi. And then
during the transition, I was asked by several friends to meet with a representative of Saudi
Arabia. I said, I don't want to meet with them, you know, but I came over and I met and they said,
well, we want to make changes. And I said, well, you have to make changes, you know,
to how you treat women. Then women couldn't drive. They had guardianship laws. So you got to start
working with Israel. You know, you have to be paying more if you're fair share and you have to be,
you know, stopping the Wahhabism that's being spread. And again, I'd know knowledge. These were
just kind of the traditional talking points about Saudi Arabia. So the guy I was with basically
said, as a guy, Fatah al-Tunzi, who's a very respected minister there, he says,
Jared, he says, you know, you don't know much about Saudi Arabia, do you? I said, no, no,
no, I don't. Just really what I, really what I have kind of been told or what I read. And he
says, okay, let me, let me do this. We want to be great allies with America. We've traditionally
been great allies with America. Can I come back to you with a proposal on ways that we can make
progress on all of the different areas where we have joint interests and keep in mind at that
point in time, the Middle East was a mess. And probably the single biggest issue we had
after ISIS was the ideological battle. If you remember in 2016, there was the Pulse
nightclub shooting in Orlando. You had the San Bernardino shooting and people were being radicalized
online with the extremism. And then there was a lot of crimes that were being, that were happening
because of that. And it was a big topic in the campaign. And so that, when I was thinking about,
you know, talking different generals and what capabilities the US had to really combat the
extremism and the ideological battle, what we realized was that Saudi Arabia is the custodian
of the two holiest sites in Islam, the Mecca Medina, that that would be the best partner to
work with if they were willing to. But for years, they really hadn't been willing to kind of lean
into this fight. So I said, sure, give a proposal. So they come back, give a proposal. And they said,
look, if you make President Trump's first trip to Saudi Arabia, we will do all these different
things. We'll increase our military spending and cooperation. We'll counter all the terror financing,
unbelievable layer. So I took the proposal, I went to the National, then it was General Flynn,
I said, if Saudi Arabia did these things, would this be considered a big, unbelievable,
but it will never happen. I said, well, they're telling me they want to do these things. Again,
having no foreign policy experience, I'm just saying I've got somebody telling me they want to
do it. And that's kind of where we started. Again, to office, I don't think much more about it.
And then I think it was like a baby a month in, President Trump has a call
with King Salman. And before the call, we're in the Oval Office. And the president's basically
saying, well, this is what we want to go through. And I have Secretary Mattis and Secretary Tillerson,
the Minister of Defense and the Secretary of State basically saying, you have to deal with MBN.
MBN is the guy who's been our partner for all these years. He's the head of intelligence and
he's been a great partner. I said, well, if he's been a great partner, then why do we have all
these problems that you guys are complaining about with Saudi? I said, I've been told that we have
this proposal from MBS who's the deputy crown prince. And that's who we should be dealing with
on this. And so the phone call starts and President Trump listened to both of us. And on the phone
call with King Salman, President Trump says, okay, we'll go through all these things. These are the
things we want to get done. And he says, well, who should we deal with? And King Salman says,
deal with my son, the deputy crown prince MBS. And so President Trump sent the phone,
have him deal with Jared. Because I think he knew that if he were to put him with the other guys,
they were not believers in what he had the ability to do. And that's how I got assigned to work with
him. I get back to my office after that, have an email from him, spoke to him for the first time.
And then we just went to work. And a lot of people were betting against that trip. They
thought it wasn't going to be successful. And they've been betting against him. And
he's been underestimated, but he's been doing an incredible job. And the whole Middle East is
different today because of the work that he's done. Maybe it's instructive to go through the
mental journey that you went on from the talking points, the basic narratives, the very basic
talking points, understanding of Saudi Arabia to making that human connection with MBS
and making the positive connection that it's actually possible to solve problems. Like,
what was that journey like? Why was it so difficult to take for others? And why
were you effective in being able to take that journey yourself?
Maybe some of it came from my inexperience, but my desire to listen and hear people.
So I had this proposal. I was told that all of these things were good.
Then we're trying to schedule this trip. And the National Security Council calls a meeting
where we're in the situation room and we have Homeland Security, Secretary of Defense,
Secretary of State. And everyone's saying, this is going to be a disaster. They said,
if we go to Saudi Arabia, the Saudis never keep their promises. And our Secretary of State at
the time was a gentleman named Rex Tillerson, who'd been the CEO of Aksan. So he dealt with
all these people very extensively. And he basically said, in my experience, the Saudis won't come
through. And Jared, you don't know what you're doing. You're wasting your time. And I basically was
at a point where I said, look, guys, but they're saying they want to do all these things. Shouldn't
we at least give them a chance to try to do it? Like, why do we want to predetermine their
direction by not giving them a chance to change just because things in the past haven't gotten the
way you want them to? That doesn't mean they can't go that way in the future. So we fought the battle
and they basically deferred and let me go through with it. But when I do the planning meetings for
the trip, nobody would show up because they all thought it was going to be an absolute disaster.
And by the way, they probably weren't wrong to think that because I'd never planned a foreign
trip before and I'd never done any foreign policy before. So during the planning, I'd speak to MBS
almost every day. And I'd go through all the different details and the things that would be
coming up. And I said, look, I really need to get these things in writing. He sent over a guy,
Dr. Massad Al-Iban, who's a tremendous diplomat for them. And he came to Washington,
stayed for three weeks, and we worked through all the different details of what we needed.
And we ended up coming to an arrangement on what it should be. So I think about now,
in retrospect, why I was so focused on getting things like this done and why I even believed
that they could be possible. But the answer is really the people I was talking to on the other
end were telling me that these things were possible. And so just because they hadn't been
done before, and just because others around me didn't believe that they could be done,
I wasn't willing to just say, well, let's not try. It just seems like that cynicism that takes over
is paralyzing. And you sent me a great essay from Paul Graham, I'm a big fan of, that I think
explains a lot of your success. That essay is called How to Do Great Work. And people should go,
definitely read the full essay. There's a few things I could read from it.
Some quotes, having new ideas is a strange game because it usually consists of seeing things
that were right under your nose. Once you've seen a new idea, it tends to seem obvious.
Why did no one think of this before? Seeing something obvious sounds easy and yet empirically
having new ideas is hard. And like the steps you took seem trivial. And yet nobody was taking them.
Or at least in the past, they weren't successful. So the successes you've had
were as simple as essentially picking up the phone or trying. There's a lot of interesting things
here to talk about this aspect of doing this seemingly simple that seems to be so hard to do.
It, as Paul describes, requires a willingness to break rules. There are two ways to be comfortable
breaking rules. To enjoy breaking them and to be indifferent to them. That's an interesting
distinction. I call these two cases being aggressively and passively independent minded.
So again, that's to enjoy breaking the rules or to be indifferent to the rules.
The aggressively independent minded are the naughty ones. Rules don't merely fail to stop them.
Breaking rules gives them additional energy. For this sort of person, delight at the sheer of
audacity of a project sometimes applies enough activation energy to get it started. The other
way to break the rules is not to care about them at all, or perhaps even to know they exist.
This is why novices and outsiders often make new discoveries. Their ignorance of a field,
ignorance may be in quotes, or a field's assumptions act as a source of temporary
passive independent mindedness. Aspes also seem to have a kind of immunity to conventional beliefs.
Several I know say that this helps them to have new ideas. So the aggressive and the passive is
such an interesting way of looking at it. Perhaps some aspect of this, at least in the story you
told is some passive aspect where you're like not even acknowledging, not even caring that there
was rules, just kind of asking the simple question and taking the simple action.
I think that was an essay I read and we're doing just a snippet of it, but I would encourage
anyone listening to go and find it and read the entire thing because it's something that really
spoke to me as I was transitioning into my new career now. I just loved it. But when we were
talking about why certain people who don't have traditional qualifications are able to come in
and do incredible work and solve complex problems, it made me think of that essay,
which is why I shared it. And I think that in the context of the work that I was doing here,
perhaps not having the historical context became an advantage and obviously went back and then
tried to study it. But if you go into a problem, I always find that especially in the political realm,
my favorite political issues are ones where they're contrarian by being obvious. And sometimes
they feel very intuitive and so you take them on. There's always a lot of resistance when you go
against something that's been accepted as the way that you're supposed to do things. And I came to
learn over the course of my time in government that when everyone was agreeing with what I was
doing, then it actually made me more nervous because I felt like you have these problems,
they haven't been solved for a long time. And then if you take the same approach as others,
you're going to fail just like they did. So taking a different approach doesn't mean you're
going to succeed, but at least if you fail, you're going to fail in an original way. And so I did
like this a lot. And I think that what I saw was the people who were very good at getting things
done that hadn't been done before were people who came with different qualifications, different
perspectives, and they came in and really worked the problem in untraditional ways. And so I think
in the Middle East, I came in with a very different approach than people before me, not because I
came in deliberately trying to do it differently, but because I came in trying to listen and understand
from people why the problem hadn't been solved and then think from a First Principles perspective on
what's the right perspective today, not based on what happened 50 years ago or not based on what
somebody's feelings who were hurt, but what's the right thing to make people's lives better,
to make the world a safer and more prosperous place tomorrow.
So if we can go back to MPS for a little bit, from the person to the vision,
there's something called Vision 2030 about his vision for Saudi Arabia in the future.
Can you maybe look from his perspective, what is his vision for the region?
Sure. So it's fine. We were talking before about how we wish leaders would set big audacious goals
and take on big things. Well, that's what he did with Vision 2030. When he was young, and again,
this is something that was derided, and a lot of people were very skeptical of it,
but the people who actually picked it up and read it said this is a very thoughtful plan
that's very achievable. So he studied his country and said, what's our place
in the world? What are our advantages? What are our disadvantages? And then he set publicly
KPIs that he wanted to hold his country to and then put in place plans and committees and
really worked hard to push things in that direction, which was pretty remarkable.
I think that it's something when I saw it, I thought it was very refreshing. I said, wait,
in America, why don't we have set goals? Why don't we have KPIs? And I do think that it's
something that most countries, if not all countries, should have. One of my favorite quotes was from
the Alice in Wonderland where the Cheshire cat says, if you don't know where you're going,
it doesn't matter which path you take. And so I think that that's something that
really helped set them on a good path and they've been very successful with it.
One of the things he told me about putting that together was he said, my father's generation,
they created this country from almost nothing. They came here, they were a poor country,
they were Bedouins in the desert, and then they look back and see what they've done over 50 years
and they say, it's absolutely remarkable. He said, his generation, they come in and they say,
we're very grateful for everything that's been done to date, but we have so much opportunity
that we're not taking advantage of. And so he's now empowered the next generation
to be ambitious and think big and grow with it. What that means for his vision for the Middle
East is that the general architecture that should exist and now there's excitement in the
discussions with Israel that have advanced was the general view of what we thought from a Trump
perspective should be the new Middle East is having an economic and security corridor all the way from
Haifem to Muscat from Oman to Israel, where basically you go through and if you can create
a security area where people can live free of fear of terrorism and of conflict,
the Middle East for the last 20 years has been a sinkhole for arms, for death, for terrorism.
It's been awful. It's been a big national security threat for America, a big place where our
treasure is gone. We've had a lot of our young, amazing American soldiers killed in action there
and the same thing for the Arab countries as well. So if we can create a security architecture
for that region and then we can create economic integration between all the different countries,
I mean, the amount of innovation happening in Israel is unbelievable. Think of it like
Silicon Valley is not connected to the rest of California. You have a very young population,
a very digital savvy population. You have a lot of resources and so if you can get that whole set,
the potential for it is unbelievable. I do think that that's his ultimate vision is to become
a really strong country economically and then to become a place where you could be funding
advancements in science, advancements in humanity, advancements in artificial intelligence
and think about ways to be a positive influence in the world.
So a difficult question. One big source of tension between the United States and Saudi
is the case of Jamal Khashoggi. I was wondering if you can comment on what NBS has said about it to
you. You've spoken to him about it and what NBS has said about it publicly in 60 minutes and after.
Yeah. So what he said to me was no different than what he ultimately said on 60 minutes,
which was as somebody helping lead this country, I bear responsibility and I'm going to make sure
that those who are involved are brought to justice and I'm going to make sure that we put in place
reforms to make sure things like this don't happen again. It was a horrible situation that occurred.
What I saw from him after that was just a doubling and a tripling down on the positive things he
was doing, figuring out ways to kind of continue to modernize society, build opportunity in the
kingdom and continue to be a better ally to all the different countries that wanted to be aligned
with them. One thing I learned from this case is how one particular situation, a tragedy,
can destroy so much progress and the possibility of progress and the possibility of connection
between the bridges that are built between different nations and how narratives around that
can take off and take such a long time to repair. You've worked with this in the Middle East, with
Israel and so on, how the history, the narratives, the stories, they kind of have this momentum that's
so hard to break even when you have new leaders, new blood, new ideas that come in and it's just
sad to see that yes, this tragedy happens but it doesn't mean that you can't make progress.
I don't know if you have kind of lessons from that, just how much of a dramatic impact it had
on creating tension between the United States and Saudi and in general in the Middle East,
that somehow Saudi is not a friend but is against the ideals and the values of the United States.
So it definitely created massive tension and it became a very high-profile
action that actually overshadowed a lot of the good work that was being done in the region and a
lot of the progress we were making. But when you think about this or you think about the other
issues that we've gone through today, I think the general framework that I always try to approach
things with is you can't change what happened yesterday. You can only learn from it and then
you can change how you deal with tomorrow. And when I think about the people in power,
what do I hope that they're spending their time focused on? Number two basic things. Number one
is how do I create safety and security for my people and for the world? And then how do I give
people the opportunity to live a better life? And so when things like this happen, obviously,
there are certain reactions that are appropriate. But ultimately, you have to think through how do
you not allow the paradigm that you're creating in the world to lead to worse outcomes than
would happen otherwise. And so when I would think about foreign policy in general,
one of the differences between foreign policy and business is that in business,
the conclusion of a problem set, you finish a deal, you either have a company or a property,
or if you sell it, you have less to do and more capital, hopefully if it's successful.
In a political deal, it's always about paradigm. So the end of a problem set is always the beginning
of a new paradigm. And you're always thinking through how do you create an environment that
leads to hopefully the best amount of positive outcomes that could occur versus creating a
paradigm that will lead to negative outcomes. So bad things happen a lot in the world. And you have
to make sure that when those happen, people are held accountable for it. But you also don't want
to make sure that in the process of making sure that there's accountability for these actions,
you don't set a lot of progress that the world is making back that will lead to
worse off situation for many more people. If we can go back to the incredible work with Abraham
Accords and Israel in the Middle East, first a big question about peace. Why is it so difficult to
achieve peace in this part of the world between Israel and Palestine and between Israel and the
other countries in the Middle East or any sort of peace like agreements? If I had to give you
the most simple answer, I would say that it's structural. And if you go back to the incentive
structure of different leaders, this whole peace process between Israel and the Palestinians,
and again, I've gotten criticized for saying this, but it's what I believe. So I'm going to say it is
that the incentive structure was all wrong. And when I went before the United Nations Security
Council to discuss the peace plan that I proposed, which again, was more of an operational plan,
and it was a pragmatic plan. It was over 180 pages in detail. In politics, people don't like
putting forward detail because it just gives a lot of places for you to get criticized on.
Nobody actually criticized the detail of my plan. They just criticized the fact that it was coming
from us and didn't want to debate the merits of the operational pieces of it. So I created a slide
where I showed from the Oslo Accords till the day I was there, all the different peace discussions.
I put a dove in the slide for those. And then I put a tank for every time there was a war because
there was always skirmishes between Hamas and Hezbollah and the Palestinians. And then I showed
two lines and they both went from the bottom of the page all the way up like this. One of the lines
was Israeli settlements. So every time a negotiation failed, Israel was able to get more land.
And then the other one was money to the Palestinians. And I said, every time a negotiation failed,
the Palestinians would get more money. The problem with that money, though, was that
it wasn't going to the people. Some of it would make its way down, but most of it was
going to the politicians. You had leadership of the Palestinians who was basically, I think
at that point, it was in like the 16th year of a four-year term, so it wasn't democratically
elected. And a lot of what I tried to show was that there was no rule of law. There was no
judicial system. There were no property rights. And there was no opportunity or hope for the
people to live a better life. And so all of the envoys to date were basically trained to go and
do the same things. And again, I got massively criticized by all the previous envoys for not
doing it the same way they did. But I thought the problem structurally just didn't make sense.
And so I felt like the incentive structure was all wrong. And I took a different approach.
And so what's the different approach?
I started writing down a document. These are the 11 issues, but there's really only three issues
that matter. I said, just tell me what you think the compromise is that you think the other side
could live with that you would accept. And it was very hard to get them talking about this. Oh,
you have to go back to 1972. You have to go back to 1982. You have to go back to 2001. You have to
go to camp. And I was just like, I don't need a headache and I don't need a history lesson. Just
I want a very simple thing here today in 2017. What's the outcome that you would accept?
And I was dealing with their negotiators, their back channel secret negotiators,
their double secret. And I was just like, this whole thing is like, it's a process created where
nobody wants to talk about the actual solution. So coming from the business world, I said,
okay, let me just write down a proposed solution that I think is fair. And let me have each side
react. Don't tell me about theoretical things. Tell me, I want to move the line from here to
here. I want to change this word. So I tried to make it much more tactical. And what I realized
was the Palestinians, they'd worked so hard to get the Arab world to stay with the line of the
Arab Peace Initiative. And so I went back and I read the Arab Peace Initiative. It was 10 lines
and it didn't have any detail. So it was a concept. And so they liked that concept because it allowed
them to reject everything. They kept getting more money. I mean, BB Netanyahu, who runs
one of the most incredible economies in the world, who runs an incredible superpower
militarily for the size of their country, he would fly to Washington to meet us and he'd be
taking a commercial et al plane. Abbas, who runs a refugee organization, a refugee group, right,
that claims that they don't have a state that gets billions of dollars in eight year eight every
year from the global community would fly in a $60 million Boeing BBJ. So the whole thing was just
very corrupt and off. And I do think that that's why it, I don't think people were incentivized
to solve it, to be honest. What do you think an actual plan on that part, if we can just before
we talk about Abraham Accords, if there is a peace plan that works between Israel and Palestine,
what do you think it looks like? You have to separate it into two different issues. And I
think that that's actually how we came to the Abraham Accords is that, I tell the story in
the book and it was one of my favorite experiences during my time in diplomacy where I went to meet
with Sultan Qaboos, who was the Sultan of Oman. And we fly out there because he'd had a secret
meeting with BB and I thought maybe he was open to normalizing with Israel. So after he meets with
BB, he calls me and says, I want you to come see me. So I go over to see him. And again,
I tell the story. It was a crazy night in all these different areas. But when I was talking to him,
he basically says to me, I feel badly for the Palestinian people that they carry with them
the burden of the Muslim world. And that line just like stuck with me. And a couple of days later,
I was thinking about it. And I said, wait a minute, who elected the Palestinian people
to represent the Muslim world on the al-Aqsa mosque? And so the reason why I felt like it had
never been solved was it was a riddle A that I believed was designed to not be solved. But B,
you were conflating two separate issues. You had the issue between Israel and the Muslim world,
which really was the issue of the al-Aqsa mosque. And then you had just a territorial dispute,
which throughout history, you have lots of territorial disputes and they're usually resolved
in different ways. So if you go back to the Israeli-Palestinian issue, there's just a couple
components you need to solve. Number one is territorial contiguity, right? You need to figure
out where do you draw the lines? And that's something that, you know, you can talk about
what people were owed 70 years ago, but it's much more productive to say this is what you can make
work today, right? And that's kind of what we did. I we literally spent months and months drawing a
map and we put something out, probably change a couple lines here and there. But by and large,
it was a very pragmatic solution that I think could work. And I think it could work for the
safety and security of Israel, which was number one. So first issue is drawing a map. Second
issue is security. Again, Israel, and again, this is one issue we were incredibly sympathetic with
Israel, which is you can't expect, you know, a prime minister of Israel to make a deal where
he's going to make his people less secure than before. So we worked very closely with them on a
security apparatus. We laid something out that I think would keep the whole area safer and it would
make sure Israel was safe and also keep the Palestinian issue safe. So you need security.
Number three was the religious sites. And that was one that was actually
always made much more complicated by people, the Al-Aqsa Mosque, because you basically have
Haram al-Sharif, which is a place where the mosque was built in the 7th or 8th century.
But originally, it was where the the Holy of Holies were and the Beta Migdash for the Jewish
people. So and then, you know, compounding by the fact that you have all the Christian
holy sites in Jerusalem, it's a city that should be bringing everyone together. But in fact,
it's become a place where you have, you know, wars and hatred and a lot of different conflicts
that have risen because of it. But what I said was, instead of fighting over concepts of sovereignty,
which is interesting how I got to the notion that this wasn't really the big issue,
I basically said just operationally, why don't we just make it simple, let everyone come and be
able to worship as long as they're being able to worship peacefully. So that's really the contours
of it. And what the Palestinians have done is they've kind of deflected from a lot of their own
shortcomings. And a lot of the Arab leaders did that as well, kind of in the pre-Abraham Accord
days, by kind of allowing this issue to be so prevalent. So one thing I'll say on the Palestinians
is that, you know, what we tried to do by laying out a plan was we said, okay, what are the reasons
why the Palestinian people are not having the lives that they deserve? And I'll give you a couple
things. One is, I studied the economies of, you know, Jordan, West Bank, Gaza, Egypt, Morocco.
This was, you know, numbers from like 2019. But what was interesting was the GDP per capita
of somebody living in the West Bank was actually the same as Jordan. And it was actually more than
somebody living in Egypt. And the debt of GDP that the Palestinians had was like 30, 40 percent
compared to Egypt, which was at like 130 percent in Jordan, which was at 110 percent. And Lebanon
was at 200 percent. And so, you know, you're in a situation where a lot of this stuff didn't make
sense. But if you draw lines, create institutions where Palestinian people can now feel like they
have property rights and have ownership over their place and let the money flow past the
leadership ranks, you know, to the people, let them have jobs, let them have opportunity,
and then let all Muslims from throughout the world have access to the mosque and Israel,
making sure that they can control the security, which I think the Jordanians and a lot of others
want Israel to have strong, you know, security control there to prevent the radicalists and
the extremists from coming, you could have peace there very easily.
So there's a lot of things to say here. One is just to emphasize a lot some masks. So this is
holy place. And this is something in our conversations and in my own travels, I've seen the
importance of sort of frictionless access to those sites from the entirety of the Muslim world.
And that's what Abraham, of course, took big leaps on. Okay, so we'll talk about that a little bit
more. But that's kind of a religious component. That's a dignity in the religious practice and
faith component. But then the other thing you mentioned, so simply, which is you have money
flow past the leadership ranks. How do you have money flow past the leadership ranks in Palestine?
So make sure that the money that's invested in Palestine, the West Bank gets to the people.
So to date, all of the aid that's been given to the Palestinians has been an entitlement. It's
not conditions based. It's always just we give the money and there's no expectations. It's very
simple. You make the aid conditions based, you fight for transparency, you do it through institutions
other than the PA, or you put reformers into the PA that will allow it to go down that way.
PA being the Palestinian Authority, which is the leadership.
It's not hard to do. It just takes people who actually want to do it. But I think the mindset
of the international community has not been let's solve this problem. It's like, let's just throw a
little bit of money. The money is novocaine. Let's put a little novocaine on the problem and let's not
have to deal with it. But nobody's ever said, oh, let's do an accounting of the $20 billion we've
given them and see how many jobs it's done and where it's gone. That just hasn't happened. Again,
it's an incredibly corrupt organization. You think about the post-World War II dynamic.
You had a lot of refugees. My grandparents were refugees post-World War II. Every other refugee
class has been resettled and you only have one permanent refugee organization ever created.
Why was this done? It was done to perpetuate the conflict so that a lot of Arab leaders could
basically deflect from a lot of their shortcomings at home. I think for Israel, they view all these
things as existential. They value their safety. They've been under attack for a long time.
I do think having a deal where we can say, how do the Jews and the Muslims come together?
I think King Abdullah from Jordan's been an incredible custodian for the mosque. I think
everyone in my travels recognized that he's the right guy for that, that the King of Jordan should
be the custodian of the mosque. We should have some kind of framework to make sure everyone has
access. The more countries that have diplomatic relations with Israel, the more Muslims and
Arabs that should be able to come and visit. And by the way, the more you have these normalizations,
think about what that will do to the economy of the West Bank, where they'll have great hotels,
hospitality, tremendous tourism industry because of all the Christian, Muslim,
and Jewish holy sites that they have there. So there's a lot of potential there. We just have
to get unstuck. I believe that it's so possible if the leaders want to make tomorrow better that
they can. And unfortunately, the people who suffer the most are really just the Palestinian people.
And I think that in Gaza, their hostages to Hamas and in the West Bank, they're just held back
because their leadership just is afraid or too self-interested to give them the opportunity
to change their paradigm and pursue the potential of what they have. And by the way, it's an
incredibly well-educated population. It's an incredibly capable population. And they're right
next to Israel where the economy, they need everything. And so the potential should be
incredible if you can just move some of these pieces. But again, there's still a lot of emotion
and hatred you have to work through as well. But I do believe that you're not going to solve that
by litigating the past. You're only going to solve that by creating an exciting paradigm for the
future and getting everyone to buy in and then move towards that. And maybe increase the chance of
being able to establish an economy where the entrepreneurs can flourish in the West Bank
and so on in Palestine once the relationship across the Arab world is normalized.
So one thing on that, which is very interesting, is when I got into my job in the Middle East,
all the conventional thinkers said to me, the separation in the Muslim world is between the
Sunnis and the Shias. And that's really the big divide. And as I was traveling,
I didn't think there was any divide in that regard. The divide that I saw was between leaders
who wanted to give a better opportunity for their people and create economic reforms and
opportunity, and leaders who wanted to use religion or fear to keep their stronghold on power. And
so if you think about who's not creating the opportunity for their people, is the Palestinian
leadership and the Iranian leadership. All the other Arab countries were focused on how do we
give opportunity for our people to live a better life. And there is a big foundation on which that
framework can succeed, which I think is the, in general, the idea of Arab-Israeli normalization.
So that's where Abraham Accords come in. Can you tell the story of that?
Sure. So it's an amazing thing. And I said here today, somebody not in government, and
every day I see another flight that goes between, or I see an Israeli student studying at a
university in Dubai or a new synagogue opening up in Abu Dhabi, and it just gives me such,
or Bahrain, it gives me such tremendous pride to see all of the progress that's been made.
How it occurred, part of why I wrote the book was to put this down for history's sake, to go
through all the different intentional, unintentional, circumstantial things that occurred. It's fine,
we left government, there's a lot of people saying, well, this is why I said, I was kind of at the
middle of it, and I couldn't even perfectly articulate why it happened, because it was in
evolution of a lot of things. And I joke that we made peace on Plan C, but only because we
went through the alphabet three times, failing at every letter, and by the time, but we didn't give
up and we kept going and we got it done. And maybe this is a good place to also step back and say,
what is Arab-Israeli normalization? What is the state of things for people who may not be aware
before the progress you made? That's probably the best place to start. So what we did is we made
a peace deal between Israel and the United Arab Emirates, and then Israel and Bahrain. Then we
did a deal with Israel and Sudan, then Israel and Kosovo, Israel and Morocco, where basically
countries that didn't recognize each other before ended up recognize each other. All of these were
Muslim-majority countries, and getting them to integrate with Israel was a very big thing.
The traditional thinking had always been, was that Arab countries would not make peace with
Israel until the Israeli-Palestinian issue was solved. And what we were able to do was separate
the issues and then make these connections, which are leading to amazing interaction between Jews
and Muslims. So when I think about kind of, obviously you have national security, you have
emotional benefits from these things, but the single biggest benefit that I've seen
from the accords is that if you were an Arab or a Muslim and you were willing to say positive
things about Israel or the Jews before this came out, you would have been viciously attacked by
the media or the hordes of influencers or the extremists in these different countries.
What this did was it brought out into the public the fact that Jews and Muslims can be together,
and they can be respectful, they can have meals together, and that the cultures can live together
in peace. So just to link on this, it's like once subtle and in another sense transformative.
So normalization means you're allowed to travel for a place together. That has a kind of ripple
effect of that. You can now start talking in a little bit more accepting way. You can start
integrating, traveling, communicating, doing business with, socializing. So the cultures mix,
conversations mix, all of this. And this kind of has a ripple effect on the basic connection between
these previously disparate worlds. I don't know if there's a nice way to kind of make clear why
these agreements have such a transformative effect, especially in the long term.
I would say the simplest form is just a mindset. And it's almost like you're taught all your life
where enemies or we can't be friends with that tribe on the other side of the fence.
And then one day the leaders get up and say, no, it's okay now. And there was never an issue
between the people. The people were just taught different things and they were separated from
each other. But again, one of the things that I respect about the work you do is you believe in
the power of conversation and the power of human interaction. And these issues and gaps between
us feel so big when we think about them, when we're told about them, when we read about them.
But when we go and sit with each other, all of a sudden we realize maybe we have a lot more in
common than we have that divides us. For me, what I've seen about it that's made the biggest
difference is I've seen people who wouldn't have the ability to be together, be together.
And that's now forming a nucleus of togetherness, which is a restoration. So you think about the
modern Middle East from post-Holocaust to now. Again, in 1948 after that war of independence,
you had Jews living in Baghdad and Cairo. Then they became so anti-Jewish that they then expelled
all of the Jews from all these capitals of those cities. So you think about the Jewish history
in Baghdad. I mean, I think the Talmud was written in Baghdad. It was a place in Babylon
where the Jewish people thrived. I think in 570 B.C. when Nebuchadnezzar conquered Jerusalem,
he took about 10,000 Jews back with him to Babylon because he thought it'd be good for his economy.
And during that place, the Jews actually flourished and had a good life there. So
for a thousand years before the Second World War, the Jews and the Muslims
lived very peacefully together. So people say that what we're doing now is an aberration. I
actually think it's not an aberration. I think it's actually a return to the time where people
can live together culturally. And so this is the beginning of the end of the Arab-Israeli conflict
and it's the beginning of togetherness, which again, you think about how much war, how much
provocation, how much terrorism has been made in the name of religious conflict. This is,
I think, the start of the process of religious respect and understanding.
We've talked about you being attacked in the press for the Russian collusion
and other topics. One of the most recent set of attacks comes on the topic of
Saudi public investment fund giving $2 billion to your investment firm after you left government.
So that includes a 1.25% asset management fee of $25 million a year. Can you respond to these
recent set of attacks? Sure. So left government obviously worked for four years. It was a very
action-packed time. That's why I wrote the book. I wanted to put down all those experiences.
I started thinking like, what do I want to do next? So my previous career, I'd been in real
estate. I'd worked with my brother on some technology businesses that I'd started and then
I got into government. So I kind of had a career shift. In my previous career obviously was very
successful. The New York Times, they violated and they've published my financial statements.
They showed I was making about $50 million a year in the private sector before I went to
government. I went into government and I volunteered. I didn't take a salary. I
paid for my own health insurance for four years. My wife and I and then we went and I was thinking,
should I go back to my old company or should I start something new? And my thinking was is that
through my time in government, I'd met so many people. I'd learned so much about the world. I
had a big understanding now for how the macroeconomic picture worked and I did feel like there was a
lot more that I could do than just going back to real estate. In the meantime, I was getting a
lot of calls from different CEOs and companies saying, can you help me with this company? Do
you help me with that company? Your knowledge could be helpful to help this company navigate
this challenge or to expand internationally. And so I said, maybe I should create a business to
do an investment firm where I can do something different, where I'm putting together geopolitical
expertise and traditional private equity and growth investing and figure out how to do that,
where I can do something differentiated, where I can invest in growing things and help
with my navigation skills and relationships. So that was kind of the thesis of what I thought
could make sense as kind of a next step. I called different friends. They were very excited to back
the effort. Obviously, this was coming off the success that I just had in the Middle East where
I did six peace deals there. And one of the notions I wanted to be able to do with the firm
was to be able to take money from the Gulf and then to be able to invest it in Israel,
to continue to build the economic links between the countries. Again, if countries have more
economic ties, I think war and fighting is less likely. And then in addition to that,
I wanted to figure out how do you bring the entrepreneurs together from both of those
countries. So that was really the mission of what I set out to do. So far, I've been enjoying it.
It's been a lot of fun. I've been learning a ton. I think we're doing very well with it.
In terms of the criticisms, I think that I've been criticized in every step of everything
I've always done in my life. And so what I would say is this business is actually an objective
metric business. It's about returns. So in three, four years from now, five years from now, see how
I do. Hopefully, I'll do very well and judge me based on that. In terms of any of the nefarious
things, I haven't been accused of violating any laws. And I haven't violated any of the ethics
rules either. When I was in government, I every year submitted all my financials to the Office
of Government Ethics. They certified it every year. And I followed every rule and every law
possible. So to my critics, I'll say criticize me before, you'll criticize me now. I'm going to keep
doing me and going to keep pursuing things that I think are worthwhile. And I'm very excited about
this chapter of my career. Maybe this is a good place to ask. In working closely with Donald
Trump, what in your sense, looking into the mind of the man, what's the biggest strength of Donald
Trump as a leader? I would say his unpredictability. I think that as a leader, he consumes a ton of
information. He doesn't like to be managed or have his information filtered. So he'll speak to a
lot of people to draw his information himself. He's very pragmatic. I don't see him as terribly
ideological. I see him as somebody who's about results. I think he wants to deliver results.
And I think ultimately, I mean, he's an incredible fighter. He's a big counterpuncher,
but he also wants to get along with people. And that's probably the biggest surprise that
people found with him. I mean, you look at even situations like, I would always tell people,
if you disagree with him, don't go on television and criticize him. Pick up the phone and call him
and go see him. And he'll talk to you about it. He may not agree with you. But again,
that's what Kim Kardashian did when she had a case of clemency with a woman, Alice Johnson,
that she felt strongly about. We went through the case. I wouldn't have had her call if I didn't
think it was a legitimate case. So we spent about eight months quietly working through the case,
working through the details to make sure that it really was a worthy case.
I brought it to President Trump, said she'd like to come meet with you to talk about this case.
And he said, I recommend. So she came in, we went through the case, and President Trump ultimately
granted the clemency to Alice Johnson, who was a woman who was accused of being part of a drug ring.
She had basically a life sentence for doing it. She'd served 22 years in prison.
While in prison, I mean, she basically was a grandmother and she was putting on the prison
plays. She was mentoring young women in prison, somebody who, again, there's always a risk,
but by and large had a very, very, very low risk of committing a crime in the future.
And then it goes back to the notion of, are we going to judge people by the worst decision they
make in their life? And so President Trump was willing to grant the clemency and it went. And
I think that it just goes to the notion of like, maybe this goes back to his unpredictability in
a positive way, which is, if you go sit with him and you make your case, he'll hear you,
he'll listen to you, and he's not afraid to act, and he's not afraid to be controversial,
which I think is a good thing. So from a foreign policy point of view in particular,
his unpredictability just meant that everyone was always on their back foot. People were afraid to
kind of cross America. And what I would tell people who don't like Trump is I would say,
think about how crazy he's making you and his enemies. You know, he did that to the enemies
of America. And yeah, so he was a very, very strong president and I think did a great job.
So in some of these agreements I've been talking about and speaking with leaders,
how do you think the unpredictability helps? So in all the agreements that I was negotiating,
I wasn't doing it as a principle. I was doing it on behalf of President Trump and people knew that
I'd access to President Trump and they knew that, you know, I could say, you may say this that we
don't like, but I'm gonna have to take it back to him and then we'll see what he does. And one of
the biggest instances was on the USMCA trade deal where that deal happened because Mexico
was legitimately concerned and smartly so that President Trump was going to impose tariffs
on the car industry, which would have been decimating to their economy. And by the way,
he was ready to do it. We were holding him back from doing it with every ounce of strength that
we could. So it wasn't a bluff. I mean, that was actually real, but they were smart to read that
it was real. And ultimately we created a great win-win deal. Tell you a funny story, just popped
into my mind from the tariffs is we did also, we used a 232 national security exemption to protect
our steel industry and we put tariffs on steel and aluminum. And again, I thought about this
because we also negotiated them with Canada. And there was a very funny phone call where Trudeau
was calling Trump. And again, they got along decently well. And Trudeau's calling saying,
you can't put national security tariffs on us in Canada. You know, we're your NATO ally. We
fought wars with you. We do military together. And Trump says to him, didn't you burn the White
House down in 1812? And Trudeau says, that was the French. He says, no, it was the Canadians.
And so it was just, like I said, he's always keeping everyone on their toes.
But he wasn't afraid. He took very calculated risks. And like I said, everyone was outraged
all the time with everything. But if you look at his body of work, people said if he was elected,
he would start World War III. Meanwhile, we inherited a world filled with wars, no new wars.
Right? Three years, he made peace deals. No new wars. He was tough. He was strong.
People respected him. He built relationships and got trade deals done, got peace deals done.
The economy was rocking. His body of work, I think, was pretty strong as president.
Like you said, no new wars. This makes me think if Donald Trump won the presidency,
what the current situation in Ukraine would look like. But let me just ask you,
zoom out and ask you broadly, do you think the war in Ukraine could have been avoided?
And what do you think it takes to bring it to an end?
I think 100%. It would have been avoided, not 99%. President Trump for four years had no problems
with Russia. We were arming Ukraine, but we were working with Russia. And again, the first two years,
we had a little bit of issue working with Russia because they were accused of colluding with us
since we had to go through that investigation. But in the second two years, we were trying to
focus Russia on what are the areas where we can collaborate together. I think Russia,
we thought it was in their strategic advantage to play US and China against each other because of
the way that everything was done before. They were stuck with China, but not getting a lot for it.
Under Bush, they took Georgia. Under Obama, they took Crimea. Under Trump, there was no problems.
And then under Biden, unfortunately, I think they misplayed a couple of things, which I think
provoked Russia to go forward. Still no excuse to do what they did. I think that the invasion was
a terrible thing and should not have occurred. But with that being said, I think 100%, if Trump
was president, there would not be a war in Ukraine today. Coming to the table and negotiating a piece,
whether it's Donald Trump, whether it's Biden, whether it's anybody, what do you think it takes?
Do you think it's possible? And if you're in a room, if Jared Kushner is in the room,
Vladimir Putin and Volodymyr Zelensky, what does it take to have a productive conversation?
And what does it take for that conversation to fail? Like what are the trajectories that lead
to success and failure? I think we go back to negotiations. Number one is trust. Both leaders
have to have the ability to communicate what an off-ramp is without fearing it's going to
lead to the public. So if you go to the posture of Zelensky right now, and by the way, President
Zelensky, I have a lot of respect for the courage he showed, especially initially. You saw what Ghani
did in Afghanistan. They were getting attacked by the Taliban. He took the cash and got the hell out
of there. Staying in Kiev when he did, how he did, it was one of the most brave things we've seen
in a long time. And he has a ton of my respect and admiration for doing that. But now he's
promising his people we're going to win the war. And the military action has not necessarily
coincided with that sentiment. And so there has to be some form of off-ramp, but he can't say that
publicly. So for him to be able to work privately with somebody who can help create a new paradigm
where both leaders can say, we're going to stop the bloodshed. We're going to stop the risk of
nuclear war for the world. We're going to stop what's happening. That's really what it will take.
How that occurs, again, it's not something I'm involved in now. So I don't know who the right
broker is or how to put that together. But essentially, they need somebody in between them
who can figure out how do you create a landing zone that works because neither party is going to
jump until the pool is filled with water. And you have to outline what the go forward looks like,
because you can't just stop it for then to get worse for both parties. You have to
move it forward into what happens next that hopefully can start to turn the tide to benefit
both sides where they can focus on the future instead of being stuck into the old paradigm
of who started what, who's to blame for what, who did what to who. It's just a lot of tough stuff
now that's occurred that's going to be hard to walk back. And it's a big task to get it done.
But for the sake of the world, it'd be amazing if we were able to reach a conclusion to that
conflict. Just going back to your earlier mention of North Korea,
what do you think it takes to bring Vladimir Putin and Vladimir Zelensky to the table together?
Leadership.
So you're saying like it has to be a US president.
It has to be somebody who's willing to put themselves on the line to go and do it. And
you know, again, if you're the US president and you're the most powerful nation in the world,
you should be trying. But I do think, again, the posture that the US has taken has probably
been a place where they would be very hard for them to get the trust of Russia based on the way
that they've played their moves to date. And I always thought from the beginning that Putin would
try to bring in President Xi in China to resolve it, to basically give a big screw you to America
to say, you know, China is now the one, you know, in charge of this, but that hasn't seemed to manifest
itself to date either. But it takes leadership. You know, the leaders have to get in and say,
you know, let's get everyone together and let's try to get this done. Because every day it goes on,
A, more people are dying. And B, you know, we do risk a nuclear war for the world, which is not
a good situation. Let me ask, since you helped set up phone calls between Donald Trump, Putin, and
King of Saudi Arabia, if I were to interview Putin, what advice would you give on how to
get a deep understanding of the human being?
So I didn't deal with Russia a ton. But in my interaction with Putin and with Russia,
you know, I would kind of point out a couple of things. Number one is,
when America was hit with COVID and New York was looking like we were going to run out of ventilators
and masks, Russia was the second country that sent us a plain load of supplies. And they didn't
send that because they hate America. They sent that because we were starting to make progress
together as countries. And they thought that they wanted to show good will to figure out,
how can we start working together? And again, people may attack me for saying that that sounds
naive. Again, the past, you know, 15 years may show that that's not the case. But I don't believe
that countries have permanent enemies. And I don't believe countries have permanent allies.
Right. Again, you think about the US and Russia and World War Two, we worked together to defeat
the Nazis, right? And now we're great allies with Germany, who basically was our great enemy in
World War Two. We're great allies with Japan, who was our great enemy in World War Two. So
it goes back to the notion we discussed earlier of you shouldn't condemn tomorrow
to be like yesterday if you're unhappy with yesterday. So number one is, I would definitely
ask them about that. The phone call that you mentioned was after we did a pretty intense
negotiation to create the largest oil cut in the history of oil production. So during COVID,
demand just shut off like crazy. And it was stopping very quickly.
Saudi and Russia at that time were having a conflict. They created this thing called OPEC Plus,
which goes back again, history between the two countries where they had conflicts. And then
all of a sudden they were working together to try to stabilize the oil markets. But they couldn't
agree on the cut. So Saudi actually increased production. So you had two things hitting at
once where Saudi and Russia were both increasing production and demand was dropping. So you were
headed for a real crisis. And I was starting to get calls from a lot of the oil industry executives
here in America saying, you don't understand, we can't just like flip a switch and turn off
our oil wells. Like we're running out of storage here. And I said, look, I present Trump likes
low oil prices. So he's not upset about what's happening. You have to call him. And if he gives
me permission or the instruction, then I can try to intervene. But right now he's not inclined to
intervene. After a little bit, he said, you know what? It's time. Get involved. Go do it.
It was right over Passover. This was during COVID. I spent three days nonstop on the phone with
Kirill Dmitriev from Russia and with MBS directly. And I was dealing with Dan Berlet,
who is our energy minister, going back and forth. And it was like, it was crazy. I mean,
it was just one of the craziest negotiations. We ended up agreeing on the largest oil cut in
the history of the world. But the story you went to before, which was pretty funny, was finally
make the deal. And we set up a call between King Salman, Vladimir Putin, and President Trump to
announce the deal. And I'm like, oh, this is great. So President Trump gets us congratulations. We
have a deal. And then King's must is we don't have a deal. Mexico hasn't agreed to their cuts.
And he said, what do you mean? And so they were part of the OPEC plus. And so I get a note saying,
you got to go call Mexico. So I'm calling Mexico. They're saying, we're not doing any cuts. So why
I said, we're hedged to $55. I said, why do you tell us that at the beginning? So I'm telling the
Saudis. So we were working through this whole thing. So meanwhile, we were trying to find the
compromise with Mexico. I set up a call with Trump and Putin so they can kind of talk this through.
And he was always trying to play the game of how do we get Russia away from China? He always
thought that that was not the right strategic framework for US interests. And again, we had no
problems with them during that time. What I would say is that for Zelensky and Putin, any conversation
with both of them is about understanding their perspective. I think with Putin, he's a student
of history from the things that I saw with him. If you look at Russia over the last 500 years,
I think they were attacked by the Polish in early 1600s. I think they were attacked by
the Swedes in the 1700s. I think they were attacked by Napoleon in the 1800s. And then
in the 1900s, they were attacked by Germany twice. And so from his perspective, there is,
in the early days of Russia, they were attacked by the Mongols. They were very vulnerable. And a lot
of the geography of Russia today is really designed for defensive purposes that they have
natural barriers that makes them easier to defend. And Russia is a massive landmass. It's twice the
size of America. They have 11 time zones in the country. And so I do think that for Vladimir
Putin, his biggest concern is how do we create a security paradigm in the west of his country
that won't be a creep? And I think that there's two different parts of the mindset. The people who
are most cynical of Putin will say, well, he's just trying to recreate the USSR. He's being
expansionist. And the people who want to be sympathetic to him will say, well, if you think
about it, the Russian perception of the NATO arrangement was that they wouldn't be expanding
westward over the last years. They've included all these countries that they said they promised they
wouldn't include, who knows what the promises were or weren't. But what I do know from his
perspective is allowing Ukraine and to NATO was always a red line. And that's why we never offered
it. We never provoked it. We never brought it up. We said, we're going to arm them. And we basically
said, just calm down. We don't want any conflicts there. We have bigger issues and bigger opportunities
to work from. So I do think you have to think through what's a paradigm that he can accept.
And I do think that he'll give the justification for why he's done what he's done. And then I think
the framework for a solution is about how do we move both parties forward? Tough job. I hope
you get the opportunity to do it because I think it's a conversation that will only
help the world hopefully find a pathway forward. And I should mention, because you mentioned
geography, one of the many books you've recommended to me that gives a very interesting
perspective on history is called Prisoners of Geography by Tim Marshall. And it has a very
interesting perspective on the geopolitical conflicts and perspective of Russia from a
geography perspective. And also for China in the second chapter. And there's a lot of understanding
of why the expansion of NATO is such a concern for Russia. Because geography still, even in the 21st
century, less and less so because of technology and so on, but it still plays a major role in
conflicts between nations, rivers, mountains. And understanding the DNA of countries. It was one
of the most phenomenal books. And I just found it on Amazon randomly, but I loved every minute of it.
The chapter on America is also incredible, going through the evolution of how we became the country
we are, the different acquisitions, the different changes, why we have all these geographic advantages.
And it's an unbelievable book for anyone who's interested in geopolitics.
So I have to ask on several aspects of China. First on the president, the meeting,
you helped set up a first call and first meeting between Donald Trump and Xi Jinping.
Can you tell the story of that? Because that's also interesting. Again, that first phone call,
the reaching out, the forming the human connection, which ultimately leads to the connection between
nations and the possibility of collaboration. So during the transition, President Trump took
a call from the head of Taiwan and that sent the Chinese into a real tailspin. And he didn't do it,
I think, to be provocative to them as much as, just as a businessman, he felt the answer to your
call. Somebody wants to speak to you, you speak to him like you, you want to have conversations
here at their point of view. But it was taken as a very big insult and it was against tradition and
norm. And so that was something that set us off in a wrong direction. My view at the time was that
we are kind of entering a G2 world, whether people want to admit it or not. And that
a lot of these countries in what I call the middle market countries were basically playing,
this one China was being aggressive with their one belt, one road, they were basically playing
US and China against each other. And I thought that by the two leaders coming together,
there were some things they wouldn't agree on. But there's a lot that they probably could agree on,
which could lead to resolutions to a lot of issues in the world. That was like my most optimistic
view. My most more pragmatic view was that President Trump had very big issues on trade
that he wanted to get to with China. He felt like China, their trade practices were unfair,
they weren't following all the global rules of trade. He was a little bit nervous that
they would be provocative with Taiwan. And I felt like the two of them getting together
would be the best way to try and resolve that. So the Chinese are very proud and a lot of it
is about face. And so in order to negotiate for that first call, we basically agreed on what
would happen in the call. So now let's just have a call say hi, nice to meet you as a question of
President Trump basically agreed that he would acknowledge the one China policy,
which he didn't see as a big concession because you could always un-acknowledge it the next day.
So yeah, I'll acknowledge it and then we'll go and exchange. President Xi was going to come over
to the US for a visit so they could sit together. And they wanted to do it outside the White House
and so we agreed on our logo, which I also thought was good because President Trump always felt much
more comfortable when he was hosting at his properties and he just felt at home. And so
he liked having people as his guests and he loved, he loved it. He always felt really relaxed and it
was great. So that was really what we did. Then the Chinese come over, very much anticipated visit
and it was incredible. So they were supposed to sit together for 15 minutes and they sent
about an hour and a half together. And during that meeting, President Trump, they said,
look, let's just set some ground rules to this relationship. Like let's just not talk about
Taiwan. Like, you know, just don't do anything. I don't want on the table. If it does, I'm going
to have to do harsh things. I still want this to be a problem for four years. We got bigger issues.
They basically just, again, you notice four years of Trump administration, no Taiwan talk
whatsoever. It was a non-issue. Started talking about the trade issues. They spent a lot of time
on North Korea. President Trump was trying to get the perspective from President Xi about
North Korea because that was, again, considered from Obama, the biggest national security issue
that we faced at the time. And they just had a good feeling for each other. It also helped that,
you know, my wife and I, we actually had a Chinese nanny and teacher in our house and our kids
learned fluent Mandarin. And our daughter actually opened when President Xi and President Trump were
together with Melania and with Madame Pang is my daughter actually saying them a couple of Chinese
songs. And I thought that was a nice way to show, you know, we're tough, but we respect your culture.
Because the Chinese have an incredible culture that goes back thousands of years. They're very
proud in how they do it. And I think that sign of respect also set things off in a very warm
way. For President Trump to say, my granddaughter speaks Chinese and we're showing you the respect,
which I think is very important. And he did have respect for them.
The next part about the visit, I mean, obviously we had a lot of discussions on trade, but the part
that was probably most impactful to me was President Xi basically did an hour monologue
at lunch where he just went through Chinese history from his perspective. And he talked about
with particular emphasis on kind of the treaty of unequals and then the 100 years of humiliation.
And then you go through from Mao all the way to today. And you had, you know,
China coming back and rising. And you could tell that he was learned the lessons from the past
and was very committed to kind of seeing China go through. So that was a different time, right?
So China today is different than it was in 2017. In 2017, I remember President Xi was at Davos and
he was feted by all the top business people in the world as the, you know, Donald Trump was the
threat to the global world order. President Xi was the champion of free trade and the biggest
champion of environmentalism and fighting for climate change. And what occurred was President
Trump came in and basically said, like, I think China has not been following the rules-based
order, took very, very drastic approaches with tariffs. Every time he would do the tariffs,
again, you know, I had Mnuchin, our Treasury Secretary come to Ivanka, my house, if he does
this, this is going to crash the whole economy. I mean, these, and by the way, he believed it.
I mean, these were things that people were telling him would be very tough to do.
You know, President Trump had a gentleman named Ambassador Lighthizer, Robert Lighthizer.
He was really the tip of the spear on all of our trade negotiations. He worked very well with
Secretary Mnuchin and they ended up, we ended up increasing tariffs to numbers that hadn't
even been thought could happen. So we did the first round of tariffs. Then, you know,
the Chinese came back and retaliated very surgically, trying to hit us in all the
areas that politically would have been difficult. And what Trump did was instead of backing down,
he took some of the revenue from the tariffs, gave it to the farmers and said, I know that
this is going to hurt your business, but I'm going to make sure you guys are made whole.
And then he doubled down and basically went back at the Chinese with even more tariffs.
So what we watched over a year and a half was probably the biggest hand of poker that was
ever played. And it was an amazing experience to be a part of it. And the role I played was really
working for Secretary Mnuchin and Ambassador Lighthizer as a back channel with the Chinese to
make sure we can just de-escalate things and get to solutions in the best way possible.
And so anyway, it was a fascinating time. But if you think about the global awareness of the bad
practices that China was putting in place today versus what they were in 2016, I think one of
President Trump's most successful policies was shifting the way the entire world understood
the threat of China and then putting in place the beginning of a regime to try and rebalance
the world so that we could have more economic parity.
So you mentioned to me the book The Hundred Year Marathon by Michael Pillsbury
when we discussed China. And I've got a chance to read parts of it. And I highly recommend
people read it because there's a few, it's definitely an eye-opening perspective.
I don't know if I agree with all of it. I don't know if you agree with all of it,
but it certainly opens, it gives a very intense perspective on China. And you said it was
instructive to how you thought, how Donald Trump thought about China. Can you describe the main
thesis of the book and maybe with a hopeful view how it's possible to have a trajectory
of these two superpowers working together in the 21st century versus fighting against each other?
Perfect. So it's a very, very big book. And I think it's a book definitely worth reading.
Michael is tremendous. He speaks fluent Mandarin, so he spent a lot of time researching to do the
book. So I highly recommend it to everyone. And it was considered more of a fringe perspective
in 2016, but it really, I think, came to represent the underpinning of what the collective thought
was of the Trump administration. And maybe you could argue that it was even more cynical. The
whole thesis of the book was that China from 1949 to 2049 was working to reclaim their position as
the global leader. So you had the Chinese empire, one of the things, I don't know if it's from this
book or a different book that I read that spoke about how in the late 1700s, basically the emperor
of China was offered some of the industrial capability from England, which was basically now
becoming the industrial revolution. And basically, no, we're fine. We're the great Chinese empire.
We don't need any of these things. We're better than that. And by rejecting that, the rest of
the world got stronger. China remained weaker. Then you had the opium wars. The Chinese had
big opium problems through all the trade back and forth. And then China from about 1840 to
the 1940 at 100 years, where they really, after all these treaties, were really a second class
country. And so then you have the People's Revolution that comes in. And he talks about how
China, very strategically as a very, very poor country, would fight their way back and build
brick by brick. And he proffers in the book that Nixon didn't go to China and open China. It was
China that actually went to Nixon and was able to use Nixon in order to open up. And then they
talked about how under Carter, they were able to get the US to contribute to a lot of there.
They were able to kind of start borrowing the US know-how from our university systems,
from our medical, from our science, from our research. And the whole notion that was the
conventional thinking of American leaders was that the more we helped China advance,
the more they would become a free market economy. And it was a great market. The only difference
was that they weren't allowing us access. They were making our companies basically give them all
of their technical knowledge. They were stealing our intellectual property. They were doing espionage
to steal a lot of the patents. They were just ignoring our patents. And they weren't following
any of the rules of international trade. Then they started becoming the world's manufacturing
hub. They basically came to the world's factory. And then they started this whole initiative called
the Belt and Road Initiative in order to start locking in their lines of trades. They were buying
up all the ports everywhere. They were building railways thinking, how do we lock in our distribution
so that we can maintain the dominance as the world's global factory? And so it was a brilliant
long-term plan that they were doing. And by raising awareness, by putting the tariffs,
Trump slowed them down a lot. The real question is if they actually did achieve this full objective
of becoming the world dominant country, what they would have done with it, whether they would have
been nefarious or not, I think from my perspective, even with some of the divisions and issues we have
now in America, I still would rather an American-led world order than a Chinese-led world order.
But the notion was that they were playing a very zero-sum game and really going to be the
dominant leader in this new world order. So that really framed the perspective. And it wasn't
necessarily... People asked me, and the Chinese were always fearing, is Trump trying to stop our
rise? And you have a great book also by Graham Allison that he writes about, are we destined for
war between the US and China? And he goes through different historical times where you have a power
and a rising superpower. And I think more than half the time, it ends up leading to war. So the
question is, what's going to happen here? And I do think that Trump's perspective, and this is my
interpretation, because everything was always tactical day to day. And he was unpredictable to
the Chinese, which they couldn't deal with. And he was unpredictable even to his team sometimes,
because he was playing it day by day and issue by issue and always changing and adjusting,
which is how an entrepreneur thinks. He respected the job they did by building their country. They
moved 300 million people out of poverty into the middle class. They did it at the expense of a lot
of other countries throughout the world, especially America. But Trump says, look, stupid politicians
made deals. I respect China for doing what they did. But what I want to do is I want to change the
paradigm so that for the next 20 years, we can maintain our advantage over them. We can maintain
our competitive dynamic. And his general view was that America is the best private sector in the
world. We have a lot of the best minds in the world. And if we can just have a level playing
field with set rules, then America should be able to outperform. And so that's really what we were
trying to do. We were trying to kind of get rid of some of their state subsidies, get rid of,
make them follow some of these international rules of trade and not allowing them to do predatory
investments that then undercut different industries that we had so that they can have global market
dominance or monopolies in different industries and then have pricing power, but also geopolitical
power. So one of the examples that people talk about now is China for the last 20 years was very
advanced on seeing this electrification trend. They subsidized solar panels. A lot of the American
solar panel players were put out of business. So now I think it's like 90 plus percent of solar
panels in the world are manufactured in China. Then all the rare earths that you need in order to
make these solar panels and to make these electric vehicles, China's bought up most of them in a lot
of the refining capacities in China. So thinking through strategically, how do we create an even
playing field so that we're not at the mercy of them and how you can have a rules-based world
order, that was really kind of the thought of what we were trying to work towards.
So there's this SNL skit where Jimmy Fallon plays you and you're walking into the old office
looking cool, wearing shades and a bulletproof vest to the song Unbelievable by EMF. I don't know
if you've seen it, but it's pretty epic. And then Trump says that you've traveled the world
representing the administration, but no one has ever heard you speak. So there's a lot of questions
I can ask about that. One of them is, can you introspect why you choose this low-key approach
of kind of operating behind the scenes and not speaking much to the public,
at least at the time? You've spoken a little bit more and today you've spoken for a really long
time, which I deeply appreciate. It's been a pleasure to do this. And thank you for the
opportunity to talk about these things. So that was a really funny skit. And it's funny,
the thing I got made fun of the most for that was the wardrobe. And that came from after three
months in the administration, we were having dinner with all the generals and they were saying,
updating us on the war with ISIS. And General Dumford said to me after, look, the president
can't come to see how we're fighting this war, but I'd like to invite you to come with me to Iraq
and come see and would you come with me? I said, no, that's great. I always learned in business
that you can't make decisions from just an ivory tower. You have to go to the front lines and see
what's actually happening. So I said, no problem. I'd love to go. Meanwhile, two days before I'm
about to go, the doc from the White House stops by my office and says, we need to get your blood
type. So what do you mean by blood type? You're going to an active war zone. I'm like, okay,
so I guess I'll go to war zone. I didn't really think this thing fully through.
So I get on the plane with Dumford and we land in Iraq and he looks like G.I. Joe. He's a great
general. He's very, very well respected in the military. And we go in and we get on Black Hawk
helicopter. They said, today's a nice day. Let's take the sides off. And so I get on the plane
and there's a guy, military service officer who then takes a machine gun, locks it into a thing,
takes the bullets, puts them into the gun and is sitting there saying, we're ready to go. And
then I'm looking out and there's like three other helicopters with guys. One was an Osprey with a guy
buckled in also with a machine gun looking out. We take off and we're flying over Baghdad from the
airport to the embassy. And as we're going, I'm sitting in an open air helicopter with the chairman
of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, guys with machine guns everywhere. This is a new experience for you.
I would say slightly. I mean, I was doing real estate like three months ago, you know,
now I'm flying over Iraq. And the chairman says, that's Saddam Hussein's palace. And I look down,
there's like a big bomb right through the middle. Then you see the area with the two swords in the
hands. I'm saying to myself, like, how the hell did I get here? Like, what is happening? So meanwhile,
we end up going to the front lines to be with the service, the Iraqi military, which the US
military is working closely with. And I had a meeting that night with the president of Iraq.
And so I wore, what do you wear to the front lines in a battle zone? And also me the president.
So I put a sports jacket on. We land at the front line and they give me a bulletproof vest
that says Kushner on it. I tape it. I just, I put it on, I go out and cover the NER. So it just
said Kush. And I went and I didn't realize they were taking pictures. And so-
I think the picture looks pretty epic. You with sunglasses. I think I love it.
So anyway, so that was the funny story behind that. And then actually my brother was at some
society event in New York and he ran into Jimmy Fallon. So the two of them took a selfie together
and Josh writes me says, hanging out with my older brother in New York. I'm trying to explain to
him what your voice sounds like. So it was good. So that was a funny one. But I think just being
behind the scenes for me just gave me more maneuverability in the sense that, again, it goes
back to trust and people knowing that I wasn't going to try to publicize the things they were
telling me. I think it just gave me more ability to operate that way. And I also realized too,
like, communicating is a very important skill. Luckily in Washington, there's no shortage of
amazing communicators. I think there were a lot of people who are much better at me than being
communicators. So I was very happy that they were willing to do it because it wasn't something that
I had a lot of experience with or necessarily I thought was very, I was very good at. And so I
kind of just did my job and just focused on getting things done.
Let me ask you, you have a very interesting life. If you were to give advice to young folks
on how to have such an impactful life, what would you say? Career and life. How to have a
successful career and a successful life. Number one is, I would say, you just have to work hard
at everything you do. Number two, I would say, never stop learning and always try to
say yes more than you should. Go out of your comfort zone. And I think just you got to work
hard at everything you do. And if you're going to take something on, do it the best you can.
You know, one of the lessons I write about in the book from my father was, I remember I was going
for a job interview and he asked me, he says, well, what time are you leaving to the job
interview? Was that nine o'clock? I said, I'll leave at eight o'clock. He said, well, what if
there's traffic? I said, dad, I've done this drive a thousand times. Like there's never traffic.
So what if there's an accident? I said, I can't control that. He said, Jared, the only excuse
you ever have for being late is that you didn't leave early enough. And I just think it's something
where if you want to accomplish something, you know, a lot of people I hear they complain about
what other people do or why it's hard or why it's impossible. And again, I say this as somebody
who's been so blessed with so many things in life. But, you know, when I've had challenges or
things I've wanted to achieve, I just focus and say, what can I do? And I'll read everything I
can get my hands on. If I fail at one, the door closes, I'll try the window. If the window closes,
I'll try the chimney. If the chimney throws, I'll try to dig a tunnel. It's just,
if you want to accomplish something, you just have to go at it. And, you know, I think the most
important thing I'll say, sorry, I'm kind of thinking my way into this answer, is just do the
right thing. I think that's also right. And I saw that in my career, you know, be good to people,
be honest, do the right thing. And if you do that, I think long term, it does pay off,
maybe not in politics, but in the world at large it does. And my hope is in politics, it will as well.
I wonder if you can comment on your process of learning in general, because you took on so many
new interesting problems and approached them with a first principles kind of approach.
So what was your source of information? So because you didn't seem to be listening to the
assumptions of the prior experts. You were just taking on the problem in a very pragmatic
perspective. So what was, how did you learn about the Middle East? How did you learn about
China? How did you learn about Mexico? How did you, you know, like all of these
prison reform, all of this that you've taken on and were extremely effective at?
It really started with just talking to people. I would try to reach out to people who had been
involved in different things and ask them, you know, what they did, what they thought of the
problem, who they thought was smart on it, what they read that helped them get a better understanding,
why they think something had failed. And then I would just, you know, read voraciously on every
topic. You know, Washington, it was harder to get advice from humans, because I found humans had
this weird tendency to talk to the media. And so, you know, I talked to somebody and I'd ask advice.
And then the next thing I know is the Washington Post would call and say, Jared's an idiot,
doesn't know what he's doing, and he's even going to this person to get advice. I'm like, yeah,
I'm asking everyone. So books really became an amazing guide for me. Ivanka, she's an incredible
researcher. She's just voracious. And so she gave me some of my best books and some incredible advice
as well. But that was really the process. And then I think that was kind of the first stage.
And then the second stage was just constant iteration and readjusting plan as you continue
to get more learning. And one story I tell in the book as well is that on my first trip to the
Middle East, where I met with Muhammad bin Zayed, who I spoke about earlier, the ruler of UAE,
I spent two hours with him asking him questions and really going through the Israeli-Palestinian
issue, the Israeli-Arab issue. And he said to me at the end of the meeting, he says, Jared,
I think you're going to make peace here in the Middle East. And I was shocked because, I mean,
first of all, he was at the time, I think, one of the most respected leaders in the region,
somebody who I found to be very wise and super thoughtful and experienced. And I said to him,
why do you say that? I was flattered, obviously, but not certain why he was saying that,
based on the fact that I didn't know what my plan was, I didn't know what I was going to do,
and I had no pathway to make peace. And he said, well, the US usually sends one of three different
kinds of people to come see me. He says, the first are people who come and they fall asleep
in meetings. He said, the second are people who come and they basically read me notes,
but have no ability to interact on the message theory there to convey. And then the third have
been people who have come to convince me to do things that aren't in my interests. He says,
you're the first person who's ever come here and has just asked questions. He says, why have you
done that? I said, because I figure this problem's been going on for a long time, you live here,
I'll be gone at some point, you're going to have to live with the consequences of whatever
my work is. And the US has a lot of power. And my question is, what would you do if you were me?
And how would you approach this and help me think about it? And again, I wasn't going to then take
his plan and then execute it, but I thought it'd be very provocative to understand from the people
in the region and instructive how they would use the resource and the power that the US had to
solve the problems that were having significant impact on their lives.
Yeah, there's a lot of power to the simplicity of that human approach where you're just listening.
And one of my wishes for society is I leave government. I was living on the Upper East
Side in a very liberal echo chamber. I then traveled the country. I met so many people
who I never would have met otherwise on the conservative side, on the independent side,
on so many different issues. I think that people benefit. If you have such a strong
point of view, I would follow the John Stuart Mill marketplace of ideas and find people who
disagree with you and don't call them names, don't say they're a bad person. Say, I want to
understand why you feel the way you do. Let's have conversations in this country. And I think
that that's probably going to be our best way to work through the issues that we have currently.
When you zoom out and look at the 21st century from a human history perspective across the time
scale of many decades, maybe centuries, what gives you hope about human civilization?
Everything you've seen, you've traveled the world, you've talked to some of the most powerful
and influential people, and you look at the future. What gives you hope about this little
planet of ours? What gives me the most hope is that anything's possible. If there's one lesson
that I took from my time in government, it's that people coming together to try to make
tomorrow different than yesterday can succeed. And if the right people in the right places
focus on the right ideas, I think the advancement that we can have for human history and for society
can be tremendous. And I think that right now, I see we're at a place in society where there's a
lot of what I call squabbles between countries, which are really man versus man issues. And
those are as old as time. We've been fighting about borders or religion or who wronged somebody
a hundred or a thousand years ago. And these are what I call more tribal battles. But I do think
that as we advance with artificial intelligence, as energy becomes cheaper, and it's more readily
available, I think we're going to have massive industrialization. I think we're going to have
massive advancement. I think in medical and science, we're going to have cures for diseases.
We have the potential in 10, 20 years from now to enter a dawn for humanity
that could be incredible. We could become multi-planetary. We can explore the wonders of
the world. We can find things we didn't know. So I think that if we put our energy towards
finding these advancements that will improve the lives of everyone on this planet,
instead of figuring out ways to have these tensions between us, that for me is the most
optimistic case for what's possible. And the reason why I believe it's possible is because
somebody with no experience, somebody who all I really had was the faith of a leader,
and I had the courage to try. And I went out there with other people, and we took on some of the
most hopeless, impossible problems, and we succeeded. And if we were able to do that,
then everyone else should be able to do that as well.
Well, Jared, thank you for having the courage to try. Thank you for your friendship, for your
kindness, most importantly for your book recommendations. And thank you for talking
today. This was fascinating, eye-opening. I hope to have many more conversations like this.
Thank you very much, Lex.
Thank you for listening to this conversation with Jared Kushner. To support this podcast,
please check out our sponsors in the description. And now, let me leave you with some words from
Mahatma Gandhi. An eye for an eye will only make the whole world blind. Thank you for listening,
and I hope to see you next time.
Machine-generated transcript that may contain inaccuracies.
Keywords
Abraham Accords, Iran, Middle East, Israel, collusion with Russia, Media coverage, Investigations, Legal fees, Arab-Israeli normalization agreements, peace deals, cultural exchange, religious respect, Challenges, Positive mindset, Support, Encouragement, Risk of failure, China, global market, rules-based world order, Iraq, building trust, operating behind the scenes, China's rise as a global power, Belt and Road Initiative, intellectual property theft, international trade rules, Conflict in Ukraine, Mediation, Leadership, Risk of nuclear war, Diplomacy, Results-oriented approach, Business background
People
Avi Berkowitz, Otaiba Yusuf, President Trump, BB Netanyahu, Abbas, Sultan Qaboos, Benjamin Netanyahu, Donald Trump, Xi Jinping, George Washington, Neil Ferguson, Graham Allison, Haj Amin al-Husayni, Fatah al-Tunzi, King Salman, MBS, John Stuart Mill, Muhammad bin Zayed, Ivanka Trump, Senator Feinstein, Mark Meadows, Dick Durbin, Lindsey Graham, Jimmy Fallon, General Dumford, John Kelly, Akeem Jeffries, Cedric Richmond, Van Jones, Jessica Jackson, Kim Kardashian, Alice Johnson, Lawrence Wright, Anwar Sadat, Menachem Begin, Jimmy Carter, Cy Vance, Prime Minister Netanyahu, Hamid Ben Zayed, Michael Harris, Mohammed bin Salman, Paul Graham, President Obama, Chuck Schumer, Melania, Madame Pang, Ambassador Lighthizer, Steve Schwarzman, Vladimir Putin, Volodymyr Zelensky
Companies
Organizations and Institutions
ACLU, Abraham Accords, Army Corps of Engineers, DHS, DOD, Hamas, IDF (Israel Defense Forces), Iran, National Security Council, Homeland Security, Secretary of Defense, Secretary of State, Nixon administration, Carter administration, OPEC Plus, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, United Arab Emirates, SNL, White House, US military, United Nations Security Council
References
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Jared Kushner is a former Senior Advisor to President Donald Trump and author of Breaking History. Please support this podcast by checking out our sponsors:
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OUTLINE:
Here’s the timestamps for the episode. On some podcast players you should be able to click the timestamp to jump to that time.
=== Recorded on Mon, Oct 9 ===
(00:00) – Introduction
(07:02) – Hamas attack on Israel
(09:55) – Response to attack
(16:14) – History of Hamas
(18:54) – Iran
(20:41) – Al-Aqsa Mosque
(27:06) – Abraham Accords
(36:00) – Trump vs Biden on Middle East
(45:00) – Israeli-Saudi Normalization
(49:12) – How the Israel-Gaza war ends
(53:29) – Benjamin Netanyahu
(57:06) – Palestinian support
=== Recorded on Thu, Oct 5 ===
(59:47) – Trump 2024
(1:03:15) – Human nature
(1:10:13) – Geopolitics and negotiation
(1:18:56) – North Korea
(1:27:35) – Personalities of leaders
(1:34:11) – Government bureaucracy
(1:39:56) – Accusations of collusion with Russia
(1:49:35) – Ivanka
(1:55:30) – Father
(2:04:13) – Money and power
(2:12:56) – Trust and betrayal
(2:21:57) – Mohammed bin Salman
(2:44:16) – Israeli–Palestinian peace process
(2:58:47) – Abraham Accords and Arab-Israeli normalization
(3:08:53) – Donald Trump
(3:13:59) – War in Ukraine
(3:19:14) – Vladimir Putin
(3:26:33) – China
(3:44:50) – Learning process
(3:51:19) – Hope for the future