Jared Kushner The Mechanic

[Music] hello and welcome everyone I’m Patrick oesi and this is invest like the best this show is an open-ended exploration of markets ideas stories and strategies that will help you better invest both your time and your money invest like the best is part of the Colossus family of podcasts and you can access all our podcasts including edited transcripts show notes and other resources to keep learning at join colossus. Patrick oesi is the CEO of positive sum all opinions expressed by Patrick and podcast guests are solely their own opinions and do not reflect the opinion of positive sum this podcast is for informational purposes only and should not be relied upon as a basis for investment decisions clients of positive Su May maintain positions in the Securities discussed in this podcast to learn more visit psvc my guest today is Jared Kushner Jared has lived more life than just about anybody I know his age he ran Kushner companies for years investing in real estate in and around New York City he owned the New York Observer he was a senior adviser to president Trump in his first term he now runs Affinity Partners which we discuss in detail a private Equity Firm built to find and execute unique Investments around the world that stem from Jared and his team’s unique set of experience in business and government this is one of our longest episodes ever because there was so much to discuss we cover real estate negotiation geopolitics his work in prison reform operation warp speed the Abraham Accords in the Middle East business investing his family and everything in between Jared told me I could ask him about anything and I really enjoyed doing so please enjoy my conversation with Jared Kushner you said something to me once which has probably been in my mind every single day since you told me the story and the punchline of the story is thank you for this training I’d love you to explain that mentality or idea of yours where it came from and maybe what the origin story was of that specific phrase the origin of it comes from a bunch of stories and I would say it’s probably over the last couple of years that I’ve realized that I could overcome challenges and that now when I get a challenge I don’t get afraid of the challenge the general idea that I shared with you was that I look at setbacks or things that don’t go the way you want them to go in life and when that happens I think through what is God trying to teach me what is God training me for instead of saying why is this happening and what I found is that a lot of the successes I’ve had in life in my different careers I can often Trace back to challenges or failures that I’ve had in previous iterations of my life where having to work through a problem and seeing that maybe I don’t get to where I want it to get to but then it still works out in a good way is something that’s been an everpresent theme in my life so a it’s a more fun way to look at life in the sense that if something doesn’t happen instead of of being upset or emotional about it’s more productive to say okay well this is a teaching lesson and a training opportunity and I think it just goes to the general approach that I’ve learned to bring to the different things that happen to me in life which is just to have radical acceptance and to say you can’t worry about the things that you can’t change so just stay focused on what is the actual problem what are the things that you can do to understand the problem what are the different maneuvers you can make to try to overcome the problem and then just put all your effort and energy into focusing on creating the best outcome possible versus being upset at people or circumstance that you can’t control do you think this is just a relatively simple active Choice as you scan back on your life was there a moment that you just said okay there’s one of two ways to go here the world is happening to me or the thank you for this training mentality I’m going to do what I can does it happen in a moment is it cumulative over time you think it’s accessible to everyone like how do you think about it I’ve had debates about this with friends and my orientation is towards the fact that happiness is a choice you wake up every morning and you can look at all the blessings you have we’re alive we’re healthy we have our family you have a roof over your head you have what to eat you have exciting things to do or you can wake up and focus on all the things that don’t go right and maybe some of the problems you have I’ve learned through the course of my life everyone has problems and it’s a function of how much you allow these problems to consume you and I think a lot of it is figuring out the proper context that you want to put those problems in in order to create the framework you want to bring to approach them but I do think that being optimistic and positive is way more fun than the alternative and I think often it can manifest better outcomes and I also think being negative and defeatist and angry can also manifest outcomes so I don’t know maybe it’s different for different people but I’ve found for myself the framework that works is to basically wake up every morning be grateful for all the things I have I pray every morning and when I do I just thank God for all the blessings I have and I find that it’s the same words and the prayers that you say every day but depending on what’s happening in the world around you they sometimes have different meaning depending on the challenge or the opportunity or the accomplishment that you’re facing on that given day I’d love to zoom in on some of the specific examples of things that you’ve been through that I think have been formative for sure and especially try to focus on some that I have not heard you talk about in this format elsewhere I think that thinking of you as a product of your time as a new york-based real estate investor is really interesting I think you did 14 billion or so of transactions in that sort of chapter of your career but I want to zoom in on one ominous sounding address which is 666 and have you tell that specific story of what happened and what it taught you it taught me a lot and it was a very challenging investment that went on for many years we signed the deal in 2007 before the crash of lhan at the time New York office buildings were on fire Manhattan’s vacancy rate in the plaza District was about 4% which meant the rents were going up double digits every year there was real scarcity and it looked like a very good investable asset class at the time my father wanted to focus on Office Buildings and we went into that market and we bought 666 we had a thesis at the time which I think was the right thesis we just had the wrong timing and the wrong capital structure the thesis was that on Fifth Avenue the retail was starting to go up in value tremendously and a lot of the old leases that had been signed you could Mark to Market at tremendous uptick so at the time the income that was coming from the retail was something like maybe 12 or5 million and we thought over time that could be $50 to $60 million and if you sell that at 2025 times there’s a massive markup in the value that you can create from the retail so one of the the good things we did was we bought it with a capital structure that allowed us to unlock the condominium of the retail from the office building over time and then pay off the debt on the retail once we created that unlock in the time that it takes you to do those condominium documents and you need to figure out how to get your lenders consents and then you need to get consents from the city the market crashed and the Dynamics changed dramatically so we were still able to execute that thesis the building we bought was for $1.8 billion which at the time was the largest price ever paid for a single asset in the country our thesis was was that the million and a half sare foot building was probably worth about ,000 to $1,200 a foot which we thought could have been roughly 1.5 to$ 1.8 billion which is what class A Office Buildings were trading for in that market and that the retail alone if we were able to complete the unlock over three or four years could have been worth north of a billion as well maybe a billion to a billion three so so that was really the thesis going into it and then obviously we got hit with terrible timing it wasn’t just us I mean that was the Great Recession everyone went through it and for me as a young guy who didn’t have a ton of experience in New York or in Office Buildings or had to navigate complex situations in that regard was kind of faced with a really big Challenge and so the way I did was and again it was very difficult but I woke up every day just tried new things and tried plan a when that failed I went to plan B when that failed I went to plan C But ultimately we were able to create a great outcome there where we brought in Carlile group and the Cher family to buy 50% of the retail for $525 million at the time and then we kept to 50% that allowed us to pay off a lot of our debt pull out a little bit of cash which was helpful at the time and then we were able to turn that value into North of a billion of value over the next three four years and the cheros did a great job along with Carlile and we were able to get our 50% of the profits which also returned a lot of our cash cash from the original investment the office building was a little bit more challenged because we lost tenants and then the office building component went through a big ret tenting we ended up bringing in Fado into the deal recapped it was able to turn him out the debt and it turned out to be an okay deal but at the time I was a 25 26 year old in New York I had every Predator you could possibly have in my debt from l&r iar cus Colony renado AP they were all going for the jugular and they all really wanted to take the building for me one of my biggest turning points in that deal was I went out to see Tom baric who my father-in-law introduced me to he says Tom’s a killer I was very afraid of Tom because he had a reputation for being a total pirate and I went out to see him and I sat down with him and I said look this is the situation we don’t have to do anything for another two years but if we don’t do anything the value of the building is going to atrop further I think it’s in the interest of the debt holders and us the building is going to need more Capital we can inject more Capital into the building but we need to change the terms of the debt in order to do that and Tom asked me questions for about 2 hours and he looked at me after and said Jared I was expecting something totally different I’ve had people come in try to be Wise Guys you came in here with no lawyers no Representatives no legal threats you basically came in and said I recognize this a bad situation he said look you didn’t cause this situation the rents were $120 now they’re $60 and I think your thesis is right that if we work together we can salvage value for both of us and let’s figure out how to create a joint objective and let’s work together and that was a real turning point for me in the building because Tom became a great Advocate and in some ways I liken my approach to Congress later on which is everyone had a vote everyone had a different issue one guy had his fund expired at this point one guy had an ego issue and I had to kind of satisfy each person’s micro issue in order to accomplish the greater restructuring and so we were able to salvage the investment and get the bond holders pretty much most of their money back we able to salvage our investment which turned out to be okay but it was a brutal time it was many years of just meetings and a lot of people were making a lot of threats and as a young person I really learned how to deal with very complex negotiations with very very high stakes what was the stress like you were in your early 20s or mid-20s you couldn’t have done that much before this was that the first time that you had at this scale if you think back on the stress itself describe it and what it was like and how you got your arms around it I’d been used to stress I mean I had the previous situation in my life a few years earlier when my father had an unfortunate situation with the company and he had to take some time away and and I was forced to kind of jump into the company and the company was under siege from prosecutors and that was also an unfortunate so I joke that the first six years of my career I was either getting kicked in the nuts or kicked in the stomach every day and some days it was both those were six very very tough years for me and I think at some point you just kind of get used to it and you realize like I said before you could wake up and you can focus on all your problems or you can just acknowledge that these are the problems that exist you don’t say why I’m in this situation you just say I’m in this situation so I have to choose to find a way to be constructive and I have to choose a way to work to try to create outcomes and my mindset was always very much focused on create win-wins how could I convince somebody who has more leverage across the table to do something that I want to do and it was really by catering to their interests more than their sympathy or their fears I had to find ways to make it worth their while to try to get them to do things that aligned with what I thought was the best outcome possible I was wondering about what your experience and generally New York City real estate and investing in that sector a very competitive high stakes place can teach you that no other experience in the world can teach you so I was going to ask about that I also remember you telling me something around early in your career across a lot of that 14 billion you had bigger ideas than necessarily you had Capital to match the specific idea and so it was very important that you work with the incentives and the desires of your counter parties to find creative ways forward I would just love to hear a bit about those two things in conjunction like what New York can teach you that maybe nowhere else can that you had that experience and then also this creative deal making early on when your ideas maybe outstrip your specific resources at that moment so New York real estate is probably the most competitive real estate market in the world it’s buillt with a lot of characters and colorful people some are incredible people some are terrible people and you just have to find your way to navigate through it as a young guy I got to meet them all and I was able to differentiate myself ultimately by being somebody who focused on the next deal instead of the last dollar and as I saw everyone who I was dealing with particularly in 666 was most people were very shortsighted Tom was phenomenal it really made me think well I should just try to be a good person to people be honest don’t operate the way that a lot of others were operating and I think that that differentiated people people really wanted to start doing business with me and it helped me refocus on what I wanted to accomplish so coming out of that deal I learned a million and a half lessons from it so I find in life you learn very little when things go right you learn a lot when things go wrong and I learned a lot about how to structure your capital I learned that it wasn’t maybe the most prudent thing to make big concentrated bets unless you have super high conviction but you should figure out how to find ways to create asymmetric risk profiles and Deals one of the first buildings I bu bought in New York was a building called 200 Lafayette Street which is in mberry it was owned by an old guy who’s actually married to uh Geraldine Ferraro and he was a building I me when I went to the building I didn’t even do any inspections on it because it would rain on the roof and it would be in the basement it would just go right through it was an old sweat shop building but it was beautiful and I saw at the time I was working with Josh and Thrive and we were helping a lot of entrepreneurs and I think the ethos behind what Josh was trying to do at Thrive was to say how can I help entrepreneurs like I would wish I was helped when he was an entrepreneur one of the things I was doing was I was helping a lot of his companies with their real estate needs and I realized how arrogant a lot of the landlords were and that they said what are the needs of these tenants they want a cool designed building they need a place for their bikes they want fast Wi-Fi and they just wanted simple interactivity so I started realizing the places they wanted to be they wanted to be in SoHo they want to be in Brooklyn and they were willing to pay more rent than what the market was currently asking if you can give them that package and make things simple for them so this building to inter Lafayette was a premier location and had all the bones of what it could be I met with the owner I was able to convince him to give me the deal and then I thought about bringing an Institutional partner but at the time our family had never dealt with an Institutional partner before so I went to a lot of the traditional funds they all didn’t want to do business with me at the time and there was one fund that I went with a gentleman named AI shames at cim I remember walking through the building and he asked me he said well how big are the floors I said they’re 177,000 200 ft he said well is that the right size for the tenants we’re going after and I said well it’s what we got and he says how fast will you renovate this building in and I said I’m going to do it in under a year and he says but most of my people are telling me you could do it in 18 months minimum I said I’m going to be here every day and I’m going to renovate in under a year and I believe I can do it he looked at me on top of the roof and he said Jared I’m not going to invest in this building I’m investing in you and that was my first real institutional partnership in New York and we bought the building I worked it very very hard we got through hurricane Sandy was slowed us down but I think I did the full renovation about nine months leased the whole building and we ended up selling it for about 160 million about a year later it was a big success and that really was the one that got me started with my whole next chapter of momentum in that regard and in doing that too I was dealing with the Brokers with retail guys with all the different contractors one of the best lessons I learned on that was again I was sewing the Weeds on the construction I had a great gentleman named Greg cunio who was an old Italian guy who was semi-retired at the time but he liked me so he was willing to work on my job with me and I remember I was negotiating with the elevator guys very aggressively and he looked at me and he said give me an Italian term where he said J just remember everyone’s got to eat so if you negotiate with this guy too hard and you make too good of a deal he’s going to prioritize your job last so you don’t want to get the best deal you want to have the best person doing the work for you and you want to pay them a fair price you don’t want to get gouged but you don’t want to cut them too thin because you want them motivated to do an excellent job for you and so all these little micro lessons were just very important in my early formation but again I really was always focused on being long-term greedy doing the right thing and opportunities just started multiplying and we developed a very nice franchise for understanding where the tech tenants wanted to be buying old Warehouse buildings and then designing them in a way that these tenants wanted and giving them the great modern infrastructure needed and we started buying a lot of buildings and then creating a lot of value for my family and for the investors that partnered with us everyone’s got to eat makes me wonder how do New York Real Estate Investors negotiate differently than others that you’ve dealt with if it’s an especially Cutthroat hardcore place an asset class anything stand out from your many negotiations with New York real estate specifically that seem distinctive and unique I would say there’s two different barbells on how people negotiated and then I chose my style based on that because every negotiation I was in I wasn’t just negotiating I was actually learning from how the people across the table negotiated with me so you would have some people who over neego every Clause every provision like it was a nuclear code and then I did one deal with a developer who basically sent back the contract and I said I’ll be okay with your whole contract these are my three issues and if you give me those three issues in the way I want it I’ll just sign your contract and I was like that made a lot more sense to me because if you want to buy then be a buyer and a lot of these Provisions didn’t matter that much so it was really a function of understanding what your objectives are and your priorities and if you wanted to buy make it as easy as possible for the seller to sell it to you don’t let your lawyers over complicate it or Jam them up with a lot of minutia that doesn’t really matter I’m not just asking about New York real estate now but just across your entire life experience what have you learned about the most effective way to figure out what’s important to people and what they want you just have to listen if you listen to people they tend to tell you what’s important to them why don’t more people do that well probably insecurity people generally either come with preconceived notions to different situations perhaps it’s ego but I find that if you’re trying to do a transaction with somebody it’s not about trying to impose what you want it’s about trying to give them what they want while also getting what you want and the type of transactions I always tried to do were not ones where I slice up a piece of pie it was how do you make the pie bigger the good news is mean you go on a plane and you fly out there’s a million buildings you look down below somebody’s always getting divorced somebody’s getting old somebody’s mismanaged so there’s a million things to buy and over time I really developed the discipline to know that you have to just walk away from the deals that don’t make sense and if you’re don’t have the right chemistry with a seller or you don’t think you can make the returns it’s a lot of work to convert a building it’s a lot of work to manage a building so you want to make sure you’re making the Fair Deal to keep the upside for yourself and your investors not giving it all away by overpaying to somebody you’re never going to see again so that was really a lot of the framework for the approach but just if you listen to people they’ll tell you what they want and I saw this in government as well because in government most of the people I dealt with had never really negotiated before if you think about people who are technically experienced in government they’re experienced because they’re more like historians or subject matter experts so a lot of them might say well what have you ever negotiated for do you own your house do have a mortgage and I was really shocked in government at the lack of sophistication that most people had in negotiating which is unfortunate because the stakes in government could not be higher they’re way higher than a little bit of money that changes hands in a real estate transaction or a corporate deal I think people would be much more theatrical in their negotiations where they would either see it in movies or read in books how to negotiate without realizing that it’s just a human- to human effort where you just have to sit together as people and try to figure out how to solve problems and a lot of the relationships I made from the deals I made in government or even in New York most people will tell you that I was very fair to deal with I was very honorable I never tried to negotiate me against you I would always say let’s sit on the same side of the table let’s identify what our common objectives are and then let’s work together to find solutions to accomplish those objectives and at the end of the day even when you go back to New York real estate the price is 100 that somebody wants they can get that price from four or five different people I always tried to be the one who they felt the best about and who built a reputation as when I say I’m going to do something I do it and somebody who’s not going to play games not going to jerk them around and who’s going to deliver and that reputation helped me out a lot as I started started growing more and more in the industry our mutual friend David senra is fond of saying that relationships run the world and I was interested in your book that there’s this little butterfly flapping its wings moment when Rick Gerson made an introduction to you that maybe ultimately led to the Abraham Accords if you think about the butterfly flapping its wings and I was really struck by that story in your book which is the same story basically you just told that when you first went to the Middle East with really no foreign policy experience you weren’t a historian of the Middle East necessarily that you went and listened and maybe a unique way that they said was unique can you just tell that story to really drive home the power and the point of just going in with this orientation even if you’re not a huge subject matter expertise when you start first of all Rick is a special friend really a special human being and I think he’s very genuine through and through and that’s why he’s built so much trust and I find that one of the things that makes me very rich in life is the fact that I’m blessed to have great friends like Rick and others who I really respect in every regard and who I value that story was when I went to UAE and this was on one of my first trips overseas I sat with MB Zed who’s now the president of UAE at the time he was the Crown Prince but he was the deao ruler of the country and I spent the first hour basically asking him as very simple question so the goal during that meeting was to really bounce off of him my early framework for how I was going to approach the Palestinian issue and some of the broader Regional issues with Iran and different challenges that we had if you remember at the time in the Middle East it was a total mess so Syria was in a civil war where 500,000 people had been killed Assad was using chemical weapons on the opposition Libya was destabilized Yemen was destabilized Iran had just done the deal with Obama where they now were flushed with cash and on a Glide path to a nuclear weapon and Isis was roaming around and had a califate the size of Ohio where they were governing over 8 million people pretty ruthlessly so it was a mess and a lot of the US allies felt betrayed by the deal that Obama had done with Iran so it was probably bad as bad a situation as we’ve seen in a long time when I was sitting with mbz I basically was asking him one simple question which was America has a lot of power we have a lot of tools at our disposal you are somebody who’s been here for a long time you’re thought to be one of the wisest leaders in the region in the world if you were me what would you do and I could tell he was just like not getting the question it took us several iterations till he finally started giving me answers and it was a great disc discuss where I started sharing with him some of the initial thoughts that I had and then pulling thoughts out of him and getting his responses to help me shape some of the different approaches I was thinking of taking he said to me at the end of the conversation it was like a two and a half hour meeting he said Jared I think you’re going to make peace in this region and I said well why do you say that and he says well the US usually sends one of three different people to come see me the first are people who come and they fall asleep in the meetings the second type of person they send is somebody who comes and they read off note cards and transmit messages but have no Authority or ability to actually engage and have a conversation and the third are the senior people who they send who usually come to try to convince me to do things that aren’t in my interest they said you’re the first senior person that’s come from the US that I can remember who actually asked questions and at the time I was shocked by that statement a little dismayed but that was kind of the only way that I knew how to do it and it wasn’t because necessarily that was my approach it was because I came with no subject matter expertise in the Middle East I came with no experience in diplomacy and so I did what I thought I should do which is find the smartest people who have vested interest in the situation and start asking them their perspectives on what they think should be done so this was not like you need to be a nuclear physicist to think of this it’s like this should be 101 but it was shocking to me at how rare that is and I think that that approach really built for me tremendous trust and understanding with a lot of the leaders in the region and ultimately led to a lot of the different breakthroughs that we were able to accomplish and again it goes through the same thing I was doing in New York real estate when I was doing it in diplomacy it was very simple I was sitting with somebody we were trying to get a mutual understanding of what the objectives were what the challenges were and identifying what we thought an end state was that was desirable and then figuring out how do we move forward and get something done and I think that the doctrine that I used in the Middle East which I think was different what was done previously was that I was focused more on Mutual future interests instead of religating old problems because if you spend your time trying to figure out who wronged who 75 years ago I mean it’s a very interesting intellectual exercise but it’s not going to make anyone’s lives better and a lot of the modern Middle East in particular was really constructed by generals and US diplomats who were focused on strength and power as the way to create an equilibrium but all that leads to is one creating strength and power and then the other trying to have more strength and power and then it’s a constant arms buildup and nobody trusts somebody if they’re just constantly needing to have a stronger Edge over the other what I saw as somebody’d come from the business world is that at the end of the day if you want people to have better lives you need a foundation of security but you need people to feel like they have the opportunity to live better lives and that can only be done through economic invest M and through economic ties and figuring out how people can have a paradigm where they can have better lives together and that was my initial Instinct and that was what I really pursued over the course of the four years that I did it and ultimately that led to a lot of big breakthroughs and I think that that’s the right formula for people to be using going forward for diplomacy not how do we outm militarize each other I think military is an important component to it but to have an end State that’s sustainable you need to figure out how can people have a Baseline of security but then the opportunity to live better lives and to let their children live better lives than they’ve lived I have so many questions about the work you did in the Middle East the Abraham Accords it’s been so fascinating to hear about from you but also to read about independently but my biggest overarching question is just about leadership you had to deal with a very complicated situation very talented very different leaders across lots of different countries and interest groups Etc can you just say one click more about the role of leadership in affecting the sort of change that I think I don’t know many people that would disagree that they want peace and progress I’m sure some people do I’m going to ask big questions about good versus evil and stuff later but it does seem like most people kind of want the same basic things and yet it’s been incredibly hard to get those things done it sounds to me like your approach is fundamentally a human one that is very focused on enabling and listening to other leaders and then working together as a group can you just Riff on everything you learned about the role of leadership and affecting change in situations that are extremely hard to change because of complex histories it starts with understanding that all leaders are human beings and I think maybe because the two foremost leaders who were mentors to me was number one my father you know I saw the way he led a business and I saw the way that he was effective by setting examples and by showing people that he wouldn’t ask people to work harder than he worked and by basically saying like this is the North Star of where we’re going to get to and how we’re going to get there and I saw the way Donald would lead and manage and that was also very inspiring to me he had a very unconventional approach but the thing I respected about my father-in-law was that he was very unafraid to go after hard challenges so like the Middle East for example was something that most leaders would set low expectations on and then try to navigate through he was unafraid to go right after it and North Korea like let’s go meet with them let’s try and he wasn’t afraid to try which I liked as well what I would say about the leaders in the Middle East is that when I came in it was a very chaotic situation and they had a lot of fear for what Iran would do if they were allowed to stay on the Glide path and they realized that a lot of the old habits that the countries had taken were not necessarily the right ones so it was kind of the beginning of the realization that we needed an economic project and we needed to give our people hope and opportunity instead of just holding them back with more of a repressive nature as had been the case throughout the Middle East in the past so if you think about the Arab Spring that was really I think in some ways a turning point where leaders realized that if they’re not giving their people hope and opportunity they needed to break out and they needed to get them focused on economics instead of extremism and that was the permeating undertone of what we thought was like a better chance and I think because they’d seen the failure in the previous model there was more open-mindedness to the new approach you had at the time entering the deputy crown princip in Saudi Arabia then who’s now the Crown Prince of Muhammad Ben Salman also a former businessman who really had big ambitious goals for what he wanted to do with his country and then in Qatar they had a new Amir tamim who and his foreign minister Muhammad who I worked very closely with who also wanted to modernize their countries and get to a different place so I think there’s a big revelation of we’ve gotten to a great place but we have so much more potential and if we don’t address these problems it’s not going to work so there was a big fear at the time of change because most people in politics are very comfortable with their status quo and they could tell you everything that’s wrong with it but there’s risk to moving because if they change the status quo then what it does is it creates uncertainty and they know how they can survive in the current state they’re not sure if they can survive in a different state and so that becomes complex in that regard so a lot of what we tried to do was figure out how to identify what the paradigms were that would be acceptable and in some cases with President Trump he would just eliminate the status quos and then force people to try different status quos and then we’d work with them to say how do we create better status quos and avoid the worst potential status quos and once you create that impetus for change then I found that leaders had a lot of courage in order to get there a lot of these leaders in particular in the Middle East for them they had a real vision for what they wanted to do for their societies but there was just a lot of old constructs that they had to fight through in order to get there and I think what I was able to do was to be a sounding board for them in a trusting way they knew that if our conversations if they shared with me their desires and those conversations lead out that would be very hard for them they would have to deny that this is where they want to go because if your policy’s been one thing for such a long time and then you’re going to change that policy you want to do it with an element of surprise and you want to do it from a position of strength and so I think just building trust with them understanding what their true desires were and then work working hand inand with them on how they could migrate their situations was a very critical element of what we were able to accomplish I want to ask a lot today about the relationship between governments and the business communities in different countries around the world and the lessons that each can learn from either side I think it demands that I start with a question we’re talking on a very interesting day which is the day after Assad was run out of Damascus just to like put a timestamp on it I would just love to hear what you think are the most interesting and important elements of the I guess call it the geopolitical map today late in December of 2024 as a stage for everything else that we can dive into and talk about it’s changing really really fast I understand that so this may be stale quickly but I’m so interested with your deep experience around the world what you think are those most important and interesting elements today I think there’s several I think that with President Trump coming back I think the world is very excited it appears to have real leadership people know that Trump 2.0 is going to be different than the first time he has way more knowledge of all the problems there’s not going to be as much learning on the job as there was last time he’s surrounded by a phenomenal team of people throughout the government in all areas I was joking with Susie how jealous I am of the fact that she has so many like competent and functional people who she’s working with and I think it’s going to be pretty extraordinary what they’re going to be able to do and I think through that end the objectives are pretty clear so if you think about from president Trump’s perspective number one you absolutely need to secure your border which is something that we were able to do in the first term at the end and then the Biden Administration just basically repealed all the different efforts we did and it’s been an absolute disaster what’s occurred so number one you need to protect your Homeland and I think that’s very critical and I believe that there’s a very good team and there’ll be very strong action to do that when I was working government on that issue I had some friends who said you’re on the wrong side of the history because one of the jobs I got was to build the wall and work on figuring out how to secure the Border and I had some friends from New York who were very offended by that I think there’s been a massive shift in the sentiment on that issue I think it’s way more widely understood now and I think people understand that it’s a national security issue I think it prevents a lot of human trafficking a lot of the women who are brought over are abused and I think it’s a very important issue that will get straightened out very quickly I think the geopolitical issues are probably number one Russia Ukraine I think that that obviously when you have a nuclear power in a state of conflict that creates risk to the world and I think that resolution to that is needed very quickly I think that also will stop Russia from playing games in different areas obviously with the fall of Syria it takes away some of their leverage in that region but if you think about also with Iran they’ve been massively degraded over the last six months in particular about the efforts that Israel’s taken in Lebanon and in other areas so I think you have the Russia Ukraine issue which I think needs to be resolved you have the Iran situation which last time when President Trump left they were basically broke because of the sanctions he put in place and the Biden team was worried about the global oil prices they stopped enforcing the sanctions they’ve sold over 150 billion of oil which has allowed them to refill their coffers and then they’ve started enriching uranium again since then so that’s a big issue that needs to be dealt with but if the Ukraine Russia situation is dealt with I think the Iranian situation becomes much more manageable as well you want to tie everything together with Saudi Israel that was pretty much ready when President Trump was leaving office it’s a shame it didn’t have the last years but that’s something that I believe President Trump could bring to fruition very quickly and then you have the big issue with China and the US China relationship which will be a function of obviously trade issues but then there’s some Global competition issues that can be resolved and I think there’s areas where it’s okay for us to compete and then there’s some areas where if America and China overlaps and cooperates there could be big benefits but I think the world generally is tired from conflict I think the whole world could benefit from like a decade of rebuilding where people focus internally on building their countries and their societies and their infrastructure and their economies focus on AI I think a lot of these issues could be resolved pretty quickly and in a framework that could bring about I think a time of amazing Prosperity if LED correctly if every football bounced the right direction and everything resolved itself in the way that would make you personally most excited about the stage being set for Global Prosperity what would that mean what are the most important couple balls in your mind to bounce the right way to set that stage I think that President Trump what he wants is a fair global trading system which I think is critical because sometimes when these things become imbalanced they lead to tensions between countries that are unnecessary so I think number one creating a set of rules for the world that everyone’s going to follow and that they actually do follow I think that’s a very critical thing figuring out how we can cooperate together and compete but on a fair set of terms is very important and then figure out how people can focus on Mutual benefit instead of re litigating old problems again these wars the investments in bullets and bombs really don’t benefit the citizens I think a lot of these wars are negative in that regard whereas if we can redirect those funds and those intentions and these young boys I see fighting in these wars let them go build products let them build companies let them do things that will advance Humanity that’s just a much better framework and it takes a strong leader I learned this the hard way when I was in Washington that there’s not really a big constituency for compromise and these conflicts are very heated you saw when Elon Musk put out an idea for how to navigate the situation in Ukraine he got blasted by a lot of people but the truth is is that if you want to be a leader and you want to and conflicts you need to figure out how to create compromises so that these conflicts can end and so net net these conflicts don’t benefit the world and I think that seeing a resolution to them would be very beneficial for everybody fair is such a a key and important word what do you think that means how do we know what’s fair and not as we think about such an interconnected world and such an interconnected set of economies what is Northstar for what fair means do you think I think just everyone operating on the same set of rules and principles so I think there’s definitely some imbalances I think a lot of the work that President Trump did with China in his first term was about having them acknowledge that they were not following the rules that were set in the global trading spere and so you could say let’s just go punish them and let’s impose tariffs which we did there’s probably more work that needs to be done but ultimately what I believe President Trump wants is he just wants a Level Playing Field and he says as long as we’re all competing on the same principles then he has a lot of Faith in American industry to be able to out compete the rest of the world and to do very very well by the way he doesn’t want the rest of the world to do bad he just wants America to do great and he’s okay if other people do well in addition you’ve been spending your last couple years as an and I’d love to tell the long detailed story of affinity and how you’ve settled on and continued to improve upon your thinking around strategy and where to invest and how to invest and maybe the right way to start the conversation is just for you to tell us a model for how we should think about affinity and who it is and what it is designed to do like why it exists in the world we spoke earlier about my time in New York real estate and we’re also investing in some technology and companies and so that was an amazing experience for me I started out during a very troubled time and then we had about seven amazing years where the company was growing tremendously and I really was enjoying it a lot then I got diverted into government which also was very very exciting I saw on the campaign Trail in 2016 actually 2015 I went with my father-in-law and started seeing what he was seeing in the country and I was very inspired by it I felt the country really wanted change and I worked with him very closely on that campaign and then was very inspired by him to go work in Washington and go work on some very very hard problems and so being a businessman and going to Washington I was able to see that if you bring a business perspective to Global issues you can create outcomes that people didn’t think were possible necessarily and when I left government I had spent my time understanding the world I was exposed to all these Global Trends the way that business was done in different places and I taken a regional company when I was in business and I’d taken it national in the country but then I thought that taking the perspective of somebody who’ done business and then who understood geopolitics and Global Trends taking that into the business world would be a very interesting Adventure taking those learnings from my previous business and political experience into the global business world could create a very unique firm so I set out to do something that I didn’t think had been done before where I was combining different expertise both traditional business and investing expertise along with geopolitical navigation expertise and at the core of it was really our ability to do complex problem solving and understand Global Trends and that was really the foundation of what I was trying to do and so I wanted to build a firm that kind of aligned with the values of who I felt I was and what was interesting to me so some of them are number one always be curious learn about the different things in the world and try to learn about things from a very base perspective I saw in my time in the White House that there’s a lot of information asymmetry was in the most covered building in the world yet most of what they wrote was not accurate about us so I felt like that should probably be the same in the business press so if you go out and you meet with people and you understand what they’re working on you could find some opportunities that are underappreciated so stay curious be very empirical in what you look for so look for areas where you see things that the conventional thinking is different work to build trust I think trust was a critical element of the success I had in my previous two careers both in my real estate business and in my government and so if you become somebody who’s trusted by CEOs companies they’re willing to share with you what their dreams are and what their challenges are and if you can be somebody who’s going to brainstorm with them and it’s not going to leak to the press and you can come up with ideas and solutions and even connections for them that could help them achieve those objectives that can make you a very compelling partner being collaborative working with other firms most of the deals we’ve done have been with other firms where I try to say with affinity that we’re competitive to no one but collaborative with everyone and complimentary so we work with all the other top tier firms and we co-invest where they bring different skills that we don’t have but we bring different skills and relationships that they don’t have and 1 plus one hopefully equals 11 as we like to say so we work on that we obviously try to be givers we try to be problem solvers and we try to be collaborators and I think those are the different elements that I brought to the firm a base way and so we started exploring the world it was in 2021 but when I started the world’s a little bit different than what I expected and it took us a while to get started and that turned out to be a great thing and I think one of the things our investors really liked was the fact that we were so patient with the way that we approached our investing initially we were doing mostly preferred Equity deals that was a time where people were paying crazy prices in 2021 I had a lot of my friends who’ made billions of dollars sending me transactions to co-invest with them in and they were explaining to me Jared this one’s at 15 times Revenue instead of 20 times revenue and I was saying what the hell is a revenue multiple and I didn’t think they were necessarily wrong I just thought that maybe I was not up to speed on how modern investing was done but it turned out that that corrected pretty quickly then as that happened we started seeing that the market shifted very quickly where everyone was very focused on not investing in anything that was losing money that was cash flow negative but then we found some amazing companies that were technically cash flow negative but were growing tremendously and we thought that with our investments we could help them turn into profitable companies and those were some of our best investments that we’ve made in that sphere and then I think what we’ve come to and it fits with our original thesis is that we basically are looking for Global platforms Global problem solvers and looking for companies that we think can make a big difference over the long term and that we can be long-term investors and I do think there’s an amazing role for the private sector to play in bringing prosperity and progress in the world so I saw this from my time in government that governments can set policy but policy alone can’t bring Prosperity or progress you need the private sector to come in and to figure out how to create the jobs create the companies and execute the different businesses that need to be done in order to lift sociey so that was really the foundational thinking that I had at the time and we put together a very unique team and we’ve done some very unique Investments and it’s been intellectually very stimulating met a tremendous amount of new people which has been great and I’m very very proud of what we’ve been able to do so far you told me this great line one time which is that there are something like 10,000 publicly traded equities companies they’re all pretty efficiently run they’re all sort of unified by this profit motive as the Northstar and then there are 250 some odd countries they’re all pretty inefficiently run and the northstars are all very different the interests are different it’s not necessarily a profit multiple and that therein lies an interesting opportunity to sort of understand the latter and then work with the former to find and build unique investment opportunities which certainly is unique relative to most investors I talk to maybe an example would bring the concept to life I know you’ve been working on a big investment in Mexico for a long time I’m curious for you to explain that one just as a case study of why this blend between like Sovereign Nations businesses people going global and your unique experience might all come together for like an investment that other people would make or wouldn’t be able to make so this one we’re in the final stages of so I can’t give all the information but I could give generically what it is we’ve been working on this now for about 18 months doing a participating preferred Equity investment in one of the leading infrastructure companies in Mexico and the thesis there at the time was that Mexico was benefiting through the near Shoring obviously a lot of manufacturing Supply chains during covid were disrupted and I think there’s a big desire in the US to have a lot of the lower end products done closer to home versus in Asia overseas and there should be savings from that through less Transportation costs more reliability if that could be accomplished but in order for that to happen Mexico is far behind on the infrastructure they need to deal with the rush of investment that’s come into that country so we identified an amazing opportunity there a great company with a great sponsor and that’s one where we’re at the final stages of I think that with what could happen with President Trump I think that the things that he’s focused on which is figuring out how to curtail the migration and curtail the power of the cartels I see that only as a net positive for Mexico over time so I think that actually will strengthen the Mexico economy over time if they work collaboratively with him if they don’t work that could obviously hurt their economy tremendously so that’s obviously a risk factor right now but what I see in Mexico is a market that a lot of businesses have been chased out of but I think there’s a big opportunity to invest there and I think from America’s interests want to have a strong Mexico because if they don’t have a strong economy then obviously a lot of illegal migration will come north we want them to curtail their southern border so that the prosperity comes into Mexico so having a balanced trading relationship which is what we tried to create during the usmca and if both countries work collaboratively there’s a role for them to play to complement each other economically what are the most difficult parts of a deal like this I’m curious about who you’re talking to you know in a normal diligence cycle you talk to the company you talk to customers maybe you talk to some industry experts or something strikes me that this probably requires that you spend a lot of time with all sorts of different people and that there’s lots of moving parts to making sure that it’s a good asymmetric investment as you said just talk through that a little bit like what you’re learning are the hardest parts about this style of investing I wouldn’t say it’s the hardest part I’d say that’s actually one of the most interesting parts so like one of my partners is a gentleman Luis figar who is the foreign minister and the finance minister of Mexico and we negotiated together the usmca trade deal and afterwards he went went to MIT to be a professor in Ai and he’s since joined our firm to help us with some of our AI efforts but obviously he has tremendous knowledge on global economies as a PhD Economist we also have Kevin hasset who’s on our team who’s now going to become the National Economic adviser for president Trump but by having these economic advisors you’re able to look at the macroeconomic trends and then look at the different elements in these countries that are either going to drive growth or not drive growth so one of the most interesting projects I worked on when I was in government was we put together a business plan for the Palestinians and in order to do that we studied every economy post World War II that basically had some form of industrial plan so we looked at Singapore South Korea Japan we looked at Poland we looked at Ukraine ironically Poland and Ukraine had very similar plans the reason why Poland’s been one of the phenomenal successes and Ukraine has not been is because Ukraine’s just been plagued by corruption so when you look at the different reforms and policies that are put in place by governments and then if they create the right incentives for the private sector to execute you can kind of see these Trends ahead of others in terms of whether these countries are going in the right direction or not so for me one of the things we’ve been doing at Affinity is looking at different markets around the world we actually like the fact that we’re Global in that regard because it allowed us over the last years where we were less certain about America given what I saw as like not always rational economic policies put in place by the Biden Administration there was excessive regulation they were working more towards social and environmental goals versus pure free market economics and so we would look for markets around the world where we thought the policy aligned with the products that we were investing in an example is we went into Brazil and Brazil we had two factors that led to an investment we made there we bought in partnership with mubadala all the Burger Kings and Popeyes there and then since then we bought out of bankruptcy the subway and we’ve bought the Starbucks out of bankruptcy as well and at that point the reason we were able to buy that at such an ractive price was first of all after covid most of the units were in malls and the malls were shut down so the cash flow dropped tremendously so the company was valued at a lot less than what we thought the future value of the company would be and then second of all we looked at the fact that the interest rates had gone from about 2% to 14% in Brazil which also led a lot of investors to flee the country so we basically thought through what would be the depreciation in the currency between time of the investment and the time of our exit and we some pretty conservative estimates for that but we still felt long term that these products were going to play in line with what the economic Trends in the country would be we use very little leverage we bought just over five times cash flow we think over time that’s something that can continue to compound and now that we have all this cash flow coming in you can then allocate the capital towards all the different products you have that you think can continue to either buy back stores invest in the different stores that you’re making and so there’s not a lot of innovation in the business model although it’s funny I would joke with my team that that’s one of our few to companies that has an AI mode but then my lead on that deal pointed out that the management has figured out how to use Ai and cameras and computer vision in order to figure out how to reduce the food waste by 35% which has actually led to better margins for the company as well so even a company like that we’re finding ways to apply AI which is quite interesting in this regard so yeah so we weren’t afraid to go into Brazil I think over time that’ll be a phenomenal investment that we made there another example is we made a big investment in Israel and we did that in the summertime right before the war in the North and we invested in a company called Phoenix we bought 4.9% and we took a fixed priced option 37 and a half shekels today it’s trading over 50 and we had to buy another 4.9% we’re going to own 10% of that company that’s about as Blue Chip as you can get in Israel and there we thought the Israeli Market at the time was very undervalued because of all the global he that was going against Israel but Israel is a very very strong and resilient economy this company is phenomenal and I could talk about the company a little later but just from a market perspective we thought there was a high probability of a war in the North which turned out to be true but even despite that we thought that that’s why it was trading at such an attractive price which gave us the opportunity to buy into something that since then has gone up a tremendous amount in each of those three Investments you hear a lot of mispricing amid an uncertain environment and change and it makes me wonder before going into some of the details on Phoenix specifically just about like your overall emerging investment philosophy it’s so cool because you spent time in real estate you jok you know what the hell is a 20 times Revenue multiple real estate is very different in terms of how assets price you need cash flow cash flow page you can’t P our friend Alex Lo has the pillow that says happiness is positive free cash flow then you spent a ton of time helping Josh your brother set up Thrive and he’s become one of the leaders in the world probably the other end of the investing Spectrum from Real Estate in betting on very fast growing primarily technology companies and then it sounds like the style that’s emerging at Affinity is probably ingredients from all these different things that you’ve learned in in your own new unique recipe I’m curious if you could articulate your investment philosophy having had all those separate experiences of course throw in government as well because it sounds like pretty distinctive like I hear some traces of value investing or mispricings that you’re focused on but also really big secular stories in big important countries I’m curious how you think about just your own investment philosophy with so many different aspects of the history first of all it continues to evolve one of the coolest things about being an investor it’s very similar when I was in Washington I went in and I just would read a ton from people had been successful before me in investing you have a lot of very rich successful people and they do podcasts like yours and they write books and they tell you all their secrets and they tell you why they were successful and you can learn from them and so when I first started my business Ray Delio gave me some great advice and one of the things he said to me was he said Jared what are your investing principles and I said well actually don’t have that specifically written down so he says well as you look at every single deal why don’t you start thinking through what is attractive to you about this deal and what’s not attractive to you about this deal and I started writing those things down and what we’ve come to in terms of affinity what we look to invest in so the four principles that we use and we have like nine principles but the four first principles are number one we look for big macro Trends I learned when I was investing in real estate I could buy an office building in New Jersey and I could buy an office building in New York if I bought in New York I would have made a lot more money but it’s the same contract the same work why because the market was a lot better so we look for big macro trends that we think are going to lift a lot of the different Industries we’re going to be investing in number two is people which is you want to be backing phenomenal people and phenomenal teams and what’s interesting I was with another investor recently who said we don’t in our firm he’s a very very lean investment firm and he said to me if we have to go tell the management how to go run their business we don’t want to be investing in them so I think that there’s a lot to be said to investing in exceptional people and exceptional teams that if you do nothing and add no value they should be able to do a great job without you the hope is we do add value but that to me is our second principle our third principle is really about what kind of modes or structural advantages to these businesses have so you want to be investing in businesses that have done the hard work to create a unique angle where you can just see something different about that business where they can do well for a long time because of advantages that they’ve created for themselves so those are really the first three things we look at sometimes we’ll over index on one versus the others but we try to have those three the fourth which we’ve added recently based on the conversation with I had with a friend was why us again there’s a lot of different things you can invest in and I find that you do your best work when you’re very interested in something when you’re very intrigued by it and you have to be thinking why are we doing this investment versus somebody else and the way I look at it this is there’s over hundred trillion dollars in annual GDP in the world we don’t have that big of a fund right you just have to invest billion dollars a year or so you can be very very selective on where you put that money and who you put that money with and so that’s something that I think about then the rest of our principles are do we have the right protections the right price the right can we add value but those are really the four things that we think about when we look at Investments and I keep it pretty broad because things change the way we’re thinking about AI today is much different than how we were thinking about it a year ago we thought it was a big opportunity a year ago but it wasn’t as investable necessarily as it is today we continue to work with other firms and part of that is we get to hear from other firms what they’re most excited about and they’re looking for us to co-invest with them in the opportunities that they think we could add value to which they think are their best opportunities for growth there’s this range in investing you actually talked about the Spectrum for Trump between pragmatism and ideology which I think is like a really interesting stylistic difference and you get people at different ends of that Spectrum or along the Spectrum how do you think about your own activity where you tune on that dial between pragmatism which you know is always changing you’re kind of facing the situation in front of you you’re doing the best you can and a more fixed view of like how things are how things should be do you think that that’s a helpful dividing line that would help describe your style as pragmatic in facing what the world needs and wants and trying to solve those problems for it through investing I think the most important thing is just humility always be rechecking your assumptions and to always be asking yourself is what I believed yesterday the same thing that I believe today I read a great quote recently where somebody said I wouldn’t die for my beliefs because my beliefs might be wrong and and I think about that in the context of all the things that I’ve believed at one point in my life and I think that as human beings when I went into Washington I was look around at everyone like man I’m jealous how confident everyone is in everything like I don’t feel that way and there’s a couple things that I’ve really studied and I feel like I’ve become expert on that I have high degrees of confidence on but I think part of what I do is I’m always checking and rechecking and rechecking and then trying to look for other forms of challenges to my strongly held beliefs in order to make sure that I’m not missing something and I think that’s very critical another thing is an investor which is this is kind of a weird rule but it’s something actually that Scott bassent told me when we were together about a year ago where he said to me think about how you feel in your stomach before you make an investment just remember that feeling and then if things go better than you expect or worse than you expect or as you expect you kind of always know before you’re making that final sign off and I thought that that was a very interesting notion that I’ve thought about a lot and I think about the last four years of doing my own company and doing it in my name and really going in the directions that I want to go in one of the things that’s been very interesting is that I think the few times that I’ve made mistakes have been when I’ve made decisions quicker than I was ready to make decisions and so now I find that I’m tremendously disciplined on if I don’t feel comfortable making a decision if something feels to me like a 50/50 or a 6040 I just try very hard not to make a decision and say Let Me Wait and I think about it from an investing perspective so we’re looking at hundreds or thousands of deals a year we have a team we have all these different things coming in the more we identify what we’re looking for and more importantly what we’re not looking for that enables us to throw things out of the boat much quicker there’s this great line in the book about the Secret Service started calling you the mechanic a funny nickname the story behind that was just like kind of always problem solving in the background and for a long time in government you chose I think to just be very quiet and you talked a lot about making sure nothing ever leaked in the conversations you were having with your counterparties around the world and I think you took great pride in that that you were very quiet I thought it was really funny that you said at one point you had the lowest approval rating of any Trump family member at 10% but that still me 30 million people you know liked what you were doing that was before I’d given any interviews or said anything so I was impressed that even 10% liked me I didn’t know why I there’s no reason to I didn’t say anything but it’s interesting to me because it seems to be a theme that at least certainly in the episode in government but also in some of the other stories that you wrote about you’re very willing for a long time to not say much to sort of listen and learn and figure out what’s going on figure out what people want and then start to manufacture to be a mechanic to start coming up with Solutions how much do you think today so far in Infinity the best deals you’ve done have been manufactured versus received sometimes I think about this deal flow pipeline like there’s deals and you can like go in and do one or there’s deals that come because you insert yourself and start to shape the world around you what do you think so far is it is it manufactured is it received is it some combination well I think everything by definition is manufactured because you put yourself in the positions to receive things so that’s part of the system design that you create that things are being shown to you so I would say the last year and a half has been has been really we’ve hit an amazing stride and it’s been much different because I think we really feel like we know what we’re looking for and we’re able to project that to the world we’ve built a tremendous amount of relationships tremendous man of trust and the quality of opportunities we’re seeing and it also may just be the market has gotten a lot better as well are just phenomenal and I think that we’ve earned the confidence from our partners by not blowing ourselves up early and being very cautious in the beginning I think that gave us a lot of credibility and then the more we’ve gone the more we basically say like our job is to make three good decisions a year it’s basically to you do a lot of meetings you travel to a lot of places you analyze a lot of things you look at Trends you read a lot you meet people but at the end of the day to be successful I have to make three good decisions a year and that’s kind of how I think about it and so when you simplify it to that level I think that actually takes a lot of the pressure off in terms of what you’re trying to accomplish everything you do is basically around how do I put myself in the position to make the best decisions possible and to be making those decisions on the best opportunities possible that’s kind of how I think about it is you almost want to create the reverse vacuum where you explain to people what you do what you are what you’re looking for what value you could add why it’s in their benefit to be working with you and it took us a while to do that but we’ve really had that manifest and now the opportunities we’re seeing are phenomenal and we’re very excited about it what do you want that bat signal to be at maturity like what are the conditions under which you want all the best counterparties to think of you and call you when they have something I think that’s happening naturally in the sense that people who work with us have good experience with us they realize we don’t take a lot of their time we get to answers very quickly and when we’re partners with them on deals there’s just things we’re able to do that if they have a unique problem or a unique opportunity they want to seize they call us and we’re pretty much able to figure things out obviously this compounds on itself so it can become more and more true but do you think most of that is just you just have a unique set of experiences between you and your team and relationships and that in some ways like the mechanic name is very apt that you’re just going to know how to solve certain kinds of problems uniquely or better than others can and that just grows over time like is that a reputation that you hope you have as one of the primary things that people think about when they think about Affinity from very early age I was thrown into a pool in the deep end and I didn’t necessarily know that I had the skills or the ability to find my way through and and I was able to work my way through very complex problems and then the reward for work is more work for whatever reason fate had it that I was thrown into several more deep ends of pools and I have always found a way to get myself out of them and to achieve great results in all the different Endeavors that I’ve been in and I’m very proud of that and so I know that I have the personal confidence that if given a unique challenge I can solve it and that gives me the ability to say at this point in my life what are the challenges that I want to be working on and how do I look for those challenges in order to make sure that I’m working on things that I think are worthy of my time and exciting for me personally because when I’m excited I’ll do my best work in that regard and so I think more and more people have come to recognize that we can be an exceptional partner and you look at that Real Time by your current deal flow which is a future indicator in the sense and then ultimately we’ll be judged based on the returns of our fund which is an objective metric business and I believe over time that if we do this in the best way we could achieve Superior returns by putting together all these different elements I want to learn more about this skill of you’re in a very difficult situation we’ve talked about some of them we can talk about more and you step by step work your way through them there’s a great line in the book which I think your dad maybe was the person that told you when you’re running up a hill to not look up the hill just look at your feet for whatever reason as I read the book that’s one of the lines that stuck out as defining you in some interesting ways that you seem to be very good at looking at your feet but maybe say just a little bit more like you’re in the hairiest problem you can imagine what are the steps you’re taking what are your days like what are things you find yourself doing over and over again that help you get through those what are the footsteps I guess is what I’m trying to ask each situation is very different so the story you talked about was in my book I wrote when I was training for Marathon at 17 with my father we were on the top end of Central Park at the hill and I remember it was tough and my father said to me in life if you have a big challenge don’t look up at the top of the hill just look down at your feet and just take one step then the next step then the next next step and before you know it you’ll be at the top of the hill and that’s turned out to be very helpful advice that I’ve taken to a lot of activities in life outside of running I’d say one example of that was when we were in the White House during covid which was probably the hardest challenge we faced or one of the many hard challenges we face but the stakes in that were incredibly High because the whole world was relying on us and the consequences for not coming through was that people were going to die and we were faced at a situation where the government was just very unprepared for what was occurring and there had been a lot of mistakes done by the CDC with the testing and people were really saying that if you can’t pull off these impossible problems that people would die and I always say that when you have a problem like the basic three constraints are number one imagination number two money and number three gravity and the truth is is that we at the time did our best to figure out how to use as much imagination as possible because you’re the government you have unlimited money basically in a time like that when there’s a crisis and the one that was probably the biggest constraint was just gravity you had to literally make physical things appear at speeds and at scales that had not been conceived before in order to satiate these new demands that had real consequences to people if they were not able to happen and so my brother gave me some great advice too and I called a lot of my smartest friends we brought in Adam bowler Nat Turner and brat Smith Admiral jaah and we basically just camped out in the White House house and just started figuring out how do we just take these problems one by one and miraculously we came up with a lot of solutions to these things faster than we thought could have been done otherwise you wrote In the book that that time operation warp speed early covid was among maybe the top two most stressful times of your life maybe just zoom in on that time and maybe pick like the most stressful time and just again as an anecdote describe one FR in front of the other approach that you were taking so like set the scene for us was happening how are you receiving information and then what did you do with that team of people that you just mentioned to try to make progress every day just more and more problems would come I remember the first day the vice president asked me to get involved with the task force I was in the situation room and they were talking about testing and he says well Jared what do you think is this the right message for us to put out and I said with all due respect sir you don’t have a messaging problem you have a fact problem we really figured out then how to jump into speed to figure out what are the elements you need what the supplies we have let’s get inventory let’s get a fast Cadence and we just basically pushed all the bureaucrats out of the way and started figuring out how to make decisions as quickly as possible one of the coolest things which actually led to I think some of the success we had with operation warp speed was I got a call one night at about 10 o’clock from Ken Griffin who basically called and said Jared one of the best investments you could ever make is if you have some vaccines that are in phase three trial start manufacturing all of them at the same time time because if one of them ends up passing you’ll be six months ahead on your manufacturing and at the time I was still trying to figure out masks and testing and so it wasn’t really on my mind but I kind of stored that away and at the time we were building out our testing and we really had some great breakthroughs so we brought our team in we found all the supplies we were getting it going we came up with this idea to say how do we put all of the testing in CVS Walgreens Walmart we said look that’s what’s in every Community maybe we could have them do the test for us and we use the private sector to do it so we started cold calling the CEOs they said this is a crisis for our country I think do to step up let us know and so through that we were actually making great progress where we basically were going to get about 400 testing sites up from nothing in about four or five days so they all came into the White House to work on it remember the next day one of the CEOs said well instead of doing it in our stores can we do it in our parking lot because we don’t want everyone to think that everyone with CO’s coming into our stores we said okay that’s a reasonable thing let’s move to the parking lots and we had the HHS Health teams working on this and then one of the CEOs asked us he says can we get some kind of liability waiver from the government for this I was like you don’t understand I have no authority to give you this like I just need you guys to do this and he said well then we’re out and Doug McMillan from Walmart at the time said you know what if our country is asking us to do this we’re going to do it we’ll take the liability and because he said that the other guys I think got a little guilted into going along with it so they all went forward so meanwhile we’re feeling great literally in maybe about 48 hours we figur out how to get the FDA to approve the test we fig figured out the locations we have the Manpower we now have this distribution mechanism and I’ll never forget Brad Smith and Admiral jair come into my office on a Saturday afternoon and we were feeling great because we really thought that we’d turn this thing around and they said we have a problem I said what’s the problem they said we have 1.2 million swaps in the country I said okay what does that mean they said that means we could do 37 testing sites and so I was like wow so now we’re going to be constrained because we don’t have enough Q-tips basically and they’re like yes and so we ended up finding more more Q-tips in a factory in Italy and we sent some c17s from the military in to pick them up before anyone noticed they were there and so we were doing everything we could to get our hands on these things but that was a big constraint and it kind of made me realize that our biggest constraints were going to be our lowest cost items we’re going to become our bottlenecks and so between that and then the call I got from Ken Griffin we then said okay let’s get a whole separate task force together to go buy up or manufacture every single Supply you could need for any kind of vaccine imaginable and so we started that process very early which gave us an amazing advantage over the rest of the world then took those elements and that’s how we created warp speed where we basically figured out how to do the manufacturing with the military and the hardest part on that was figuring out we were going to do12 billion two billion a vaccine to manufacture and the question was which vaccines do you bet on and there we basically were sourcing people to kind of lead that effort for us and we did four finalists and there was only one person we interviewed who said they could do it under a year all the experts said it would take us two to three years to do it it was a guy Dr monf slowy he basically said if we really get everyone out of the way I think we can do this and he created more vaccines than anyone alive so I said okay well you’ve got the job and so we put him in charge and I remember the media was attacking us said well he’s got conflicts and I said if we hired somebody who didn’t have conflicts to do this job then you should be mad at us you know you want somebody courage ma who’s focused on this and so it ended up being an extraordin experience we were able to work with the confines of an FDA that was an NIH that was basically working against President Trump trying to slow him down but we passed every test of safety that they set out for us we worked at speeds that had never been done before we basically made the bureaucracy move as quickly as possible we did manufacturing at scale and at speeds that had never been done before for this type of medical supplies and it was really a miracle we were able to accomplish I think it became a lot more controversial when the Biden admin ation took the vaccines and started creating mandates that was never the intention of what we want to do the goal was to create the vaccines for whoever wanted them and then to figure out how to prioritize them towards the cohorts that were at the highest risk but I think that was a tremendous effort that we made and it was something that quite frankly just came from just we had a problem and we just had to figure out step by step how to solve it and if we spent time being panicked or focused on feeling bad for ourselves we probably wouldn’t have gotten anything done there’s that amazing Jeff basos idea of the two Pizza team it’s starts to get hard to get things done if you can’t feeded a team with two pieces or less you just need small teams to make lots of progress that story and lots of other ones in the book and that I’ve heard you tell is often it’s a relatively speaking small group of people that are working together intimately there’s not a lot of layers of communication and they’re just trying to get things done one of the areas that people seem most excited about post election is do the department of government efficiency and of course Elon you know is heavily involved and there’s the famous story of him letting of 80% of Twitter now X and it kind of functions the same way this question was sparked by your use of the word bureaucracy and I’m curious when and if ever bureaucracy is good in your experience and how you think about the efficient way to get things done in government now in the next Administration but also just in general bloat and bureaucracy and this sort of thing which have taken on in my mind a very negative meaning is it ever good is it there for any good reason or do we really need this two Pizza mentality for most major projects to make real steady progress I’m sure there are examples where it’s good I think with the government what I found with a lot of the career silver servants is there’s actually a lot of incredible people there but what happens is is they’re not really given a clear objective and they’re not given empowerment to go and accomplish things and nobody gets prizes for cutting costs or for trying to create more efficiency so as a result the incentive structure in the there’s a big risk aversion towards trying to do things that could cause problems or disruption and so nobody takes on the hard challenges I think that what Elon and VC will find at doge is way more in efficiency than what he found at X and I think the fact that they’re building a lot of popular support for people to go in and find ways to make our government run more efficiently I think there’ll be some big battles but I think there’ll be tremendous findings and I think the fact that they’re doing it so transparently I think will inform a lot of people how inefficiently our governments run so this is a courageous effort I will say that only a president as out of the box as Donald Trump would ever allow something like this to happen it has happened I think during Bush and Reagan where they did efficiency commissions but those were done by proper people who did proper processes and then made proper recommendations I get the sense this will be much more Guerilla style I think it’s going to be fascinating what it’s going to uncover and I think the benefits to our country in the long term will be incredible and if you look at with mle in Argentina what he’s done I mean that’s been one of the most exciting transformations to watch I think America’s not quite at the level where Argentina is from a rot perspective but I think applying those same principles of cleaning up and simplifying and streamlining our government and really focusing on what’s the purpose of our federal system and what should it be doing and where is it Crypt to over time that could lead to a revolutionary cleansing for our country that will make our economy will make our citizens just way better off so again they’re definitely going to make mistakes and if they’re not making mistakes that means they’re not trying hard enough to find every bit of inefficiency that exists but again it goes to the businessmen’s mentality of in business we’re rewarded for taking risks and when I do a company or if I’m backing a founder or if I’m building a company myself I want to be focused on things that might potentially fail because we have big ambitious goals in government the goal is to figure out how not to fail and so people often don’t take on ambitious projects and it’s just not celebrated in the way it is in the private sector and one thing also that I loved about the first Trump Administration I think will be about 100x in the second Trump Administration is that Trump is a businessman and he was a pragmatist and he brought a lot of businessmen with him to Washington one of the reasons I wrote my book was because I wanted to inspire other people from the private sector to go and do their service and my hope would be is that they would learn from the mistakes I made and the things that worked for me and figure out how to avoid my mistakes and 10x of things that worked well but I’m seeing a tremendous amount of High Caliber people looking to make big sacrifices again people talk about the financial sacrifice of going into government I would tell people before I hire yeah I would tell people you’re gonna work harder than you’ve ever worked you’re GNA make less money than you’ve ever made and you’re G to be less appreciated than you’ve ever been are you in and a lot of people love the country they feel grateful so they went to do it but the biggest personal sacrifice people make is just the way it becomes all encompassing and it takes you away from your children your family and so I have so much gratitude and respect for all the people who are raising their hand now to come into the government and I think it’s going to be an amazing group and I think they’re going to accomplish some incredible things over the next bit did you get any time off I’m thinking about these two ends of the spectrum of government work the phrase government work was classically like nine to four or whatever Postal job or something not to pick on them but not the hardest you’re ever going to work a lot of the government jobs might be thought of that way when I’ve heard you describe you’re working government it sounds like it didn’t stop and it was sort of like the sport of Kings if you will different than business more intense than even the craziest fastest growing businesses was that your experience that if you were to contrast the four years in government to let’s say your four craziest most intense years in pure business how did the two compare and contrast in terms of just how intense it was how much time you had to be on whether not you got breaks and sort of the feeling that it had doing the two different kinds of work it’s a 100 or zero first of all it was the job and the responsibility that I had where I had some set responsibilities but then a lot of my job was just there’d be a problem orque opportunity and it would come to me because it wasn’t being solved and because you know I worked for my father-in-law and I didn’t want to see him fail I was always getting in the middle of things that were blowing up and trying to figure out how to get them to a better course and so there’s endless problems around the world there’s endless things happening so there’s always things that are pulling at your time and then there’s also the element of doing that under Donald Trump and I remember I think it was in the middle of the second year he turned to me and asked about John Kelly says you think he’s exhausted and I said sir we’re all exhausted you’re the only one who’s not exhausted he just works 247 he’s got more energy than anyone I’ve ever worked with and he just increases the metabolism of government tremendously and I think that this time he has a lot more confidence he knows what he wants to do I think he’ll have an exceptional team so I think it’s going to be a really Around the Clock non-stop effort towards bringing transformational change and so yeah when I was there it was 24/7 and again you miss a lot of time with your children it’s a big sacrifice to do that work but I’m very very proud of what we’ve done and it was a absolutely amazing experience in that regard but when I’m in my business now again I’m working very hard to do it but I’m able to keep the prioritization of the time with my kids I cook them breakfast every morning they leave the house at 6:40 so it’s not like too difficult of a thing but I get to spend the time with them then I get to see them at night when I’m not traveling and that’s a very special luxury for me that I was not afforded when I was in government and then when I’m with them I’m able to be present with them which I also wasn’t able to do when I was in government we’ve talked about some hard things that you’ve been through when reading the book one of the things that really stuck out to me was I don’t know how long it was into your time in government and at the White House but it wasn’t long you were under investigation by special counsel which a very scary sounding term that I would not want to be on the receiving end of about colluding with Russia that must have been a tough and stressful episode of life especially so early in your government career what was that like and what did that experience teach you I try to laugh about it in retrospect but it was quite a surreal experience and I’ll never forget I was getting interviewed in some windowless conference room I had my two lawyers next to me I had three FBI agents and three representatives of the special Council sitting across the desk and I kind of had like an outer body experience from I’m like looking down on the room and I’m like you’re being interviewed by a special counsil investigating the president of the United States who happens to be her father-in-law how the hell did you get here you were a kid in New Jersey what’s going on for me it was just a massively surreal experience because we went through the campaign and we could barely collude with our team in Iowa and on most days I couldn’t collude with Donald and so the fact that they were saying we colluded with Russia was crazy initially I didn’t make much thought of it because I was like we didn’t do that that’s a crazy accusation but then I saw all these institutions that had respected previously like the New York Times and CNN and the Washington Post breathlessly covering this thing like this was the next Watergate scandal I was just kind of surprised with how serious this was being taken by everybody and everyone in Washington thought it was real and so it was very stressful and the thing that I felt very badly about was a lot of the great people in the White House who came in again they were taking very low salaries leaving Big opportunities to serve their country and now they’re being forced to hire lawyers one guy worked with me got shingles he was so stressed from it people were having legal bills and they had to then leave the government because they couldn’t afford to pay them so it was a brutal brutal situation in that regard and you know I had one morning two mornings actually where there were cameras outside my house and I called my lawyer I said is anything going on he says I called the network they think you’re being arrested this morning I said for what he said I don’t know I said i’ better get to the office quick luckily that never happened but it was definitely a high stake situation but again it goes back to what we discussed which is just keep your eyes on your feet go step by step and be very careful not to step on the line and I think my biggest risk there was I knew I hadn’t done anything wrong but it was don’t do anything and trying to get out of it where you step on a line or you purger yourself or you do anything where then they can try to get you on a technicality because it was a nasty game and you know look I was a player at the center of a lot of things and I think they wanted to take me off the board in order to not allow me to help on all the different efforts I was helping on and it did take me off the board because it I had spent half my time dealing with lawyers and testimonies and then it gave an excuse to my enemies to push me aside on a lot of different issues so it was a brutal time it was two years of hell but I Not only was able to focus on that I was able to focus on my different lines of effort whether it was the trade relations with Mexico the Criminal Justice Reform the Middle East efforts and I just stayed focused somehow on doing it and again I give my wife aanka a lot of credit for for keeping me strong and for being strong for me then because it was a very lonely time for us and somehow we survived it but then I go back to where we are today in the world and it’s like people can accuse us of different things or call us different names my view is as long as I know I haven’t done anything wrong I just either ignore it or we kind of fight back but I think it gives me a lot of confidence that we can navigate complex situations in that regard and keep in mind like for my service in government which I volunteered for I didn’t take a salary paid for my own healthare I’ve now done 33 hours of testimony between the house the Senate special Council grand jury and I’ve paid for all my legal fees myself which is in the millions of dollars my view is is that’s the nasty part of Washington what do you learn about people when there’s negative things written about you in the Press what do you learn about the people in your life at this point I think most people are just kind of immune to it it’s funny I still have a couple senators and congressmen who every time there’s negative AR pick me up and call me just to say how crazy these articles and accusations are which is actually really nice it does mean a lot to me I feel badly that they have to make that call but they do that to be honest we haven’t had as much negative recently I think what I started doing a year and a half ago was when the Press would call I just would pick up the phone and talk to them and say hey I’ve got nothing to hide this is what it is when I started in Washington I was involved in everything because we were figuring it out and I didn’t understand press and I just thought it was something you can’t deal with and so I didn’t speak to the Press I didn’t know how to speak to the press and then finally after a couple of years the White House said no you have to start being out there and giving interviews and so I did a few of them but I was never fully comfortable with it mostly because I was working on things for other people now that I’m working for myself I’m able to feel confident in all the things I’m doing and I’m willing to explain them and I find that if you’re just transparent about things then let the truth be the truth I’m curious going back to Affinity now and thinking about the way you spend your hours where you find yourself getting the most energy so running an investment firm is lots of stuff you had to do you have a lot of it before you meet thousand people you travel everywhere you’re learning about everything you’re building these relationships if you just think of all of it and I had to zoom in on the part that gives you personally the most energy what is it there’s two parts to that answer the first part is the research part I love meeting people learning about what they’re doing and then seeing if I can believe that something’s going to be different than people conventionally believe for example in Phoenix I saw the business it’s something I’ve known for a long time but I empirically believe that they were valuing it based on percentage of book the way I saw them transforming the business I felt like it should be valued as a multiple of earnings business and people would say but Israeli insurance companies never go above Book value but I say well I don’t think this is actually an Israeli insurance company and I think that if we told the story globally on what it was I thought the valuation could go much higher on the company and that was interesting to me the company had just started translating their financials from Hebrew to English about a year ago it was a very misunderstood company it took us about a year to really understand it with deep research talking to different experts spending a lot of time with company management and what I realized is they manage over $150 billion dollar they’re doing smas Nows with black rock and Aries and Apollo and many others and they have a a very strong position in the market phenomenal management team and several business lines that I think are poised for tremendous long-term growth so I looked at it and I just thought that it was very attractively priced relative to what I thought it would be and I think that’s also the way I look at companies is I’m less concerned with what the current state of the company is I’m way more focused on what do I think that company can be in five years or seven years or 10 years and if I have a very strong conviction that it could become that then you kind of have to make sure you’re paying an okay price today but the price today matters a lot less than what you think something’s going to be the second thing I love is I love manifesting things so for example one of the it ations of affinity is we think that we’re extraordinary problem solvers and Navigators and manifestors what we’ve actually started to realize is that we should be really trying to look to work with people like us so one of the Investments we made recently is with Brad Jacobs who’s been on your podcast who’s phenomenal actually first heard of him by listening to David senra podcast Founders the episode on Brad’s book and I was very very impressed and when we met it was very flattering he told me he read my book I told him I read his book and we just built a fast friendship and he asked me to join his board and we invested in it and the investment’s up a lot today tomorrow a lot yeah it’s been a very good return 70 or 80% in less than a year but I’ll be honest working with Brad I think there’s a lot that we can complement to what he does but I’m learning a tremendous amount from him I think he’s even better than I expected and it’s going to be an extraordinary business that he’s going to build and so that I get a lot of excitement about because you basically start with a white sheet of paper and you say these are all the different outcomes and then what can we do together with our different skills and relationships to make things happen that are better than should happen otherwise and so those are really the two things and and I find that I love working with great people some people don’t like working with their friends I try to only work with my friends because I find that I spend probably more time with the people I work with than I do with my family so so if I’m spending the time away from my family which I love then it has to be with people I enjoy so if I’m traveling I’m traveling with my partners and I love working with them they’re great people they’re great humans and we keep a very good culture in that regard and so those are the two things that I get most excited about with Brad specifically it makes me chuckle that here I am interviewing him and others covering him and you hear it and go make the actual investment with the guy what have you learned from him so far I know you’ve only known him a relatively short period of time but I was with him recently and he is just one of the most dynamic guys in terms of his energy and his excitement and his curiosity that I’ve encountered in everything that I’ve done what have you personally learned from watching him seeing him operate what’s interesting to you about him he’s incredibly charismatic he has a very good Vision he’s intellectually flexible which is fun to be with because some of the things he’s trying to do now are different than what we initially discussed and initially I was say wait didn’t we think about one thing but he said no I think this is a better pathway and after a couple conversations he was able to convince me that his strategy is the better strategy and obviously I have a lot of humility in that conversation because you’re like okay why do I think something different than Brad Jacobs thinks but he was very generous to let me keep probing him in that regard but I guess that’s part of being an investor in a board member to do that I love that he has a great commitment to Excellence I’ve learned more and more that from when I was at kusher companies the quality of your team matters and if you surround yourself with exceptional people you’ll be able to just do exceptional things and so he really keeps a very high bar for the people he hires one of the signs that actually was an intriguing first reaction is he hired a general Michael hat it from the White House who was one of our most solid quiet get stuff done guys and he hired Michael I said oh Michael you’re working with Brad and it was sign that Brad found one of our best people and brought him to go work with him I’ve it exposed now to his whole management team exceptional people very creative and thoughtful in the way they do things very methodical very detail oriented obviously it will change as they further progress in their business plan but so far I just like their commitment to exceptionalism and their desire to go for really big things and so it’s a company that I’ve been enjoying a lot we’re going to look to commit more Capital to it over time if there an opportunity exists it’s just been very very fun I’d love to talk for some time about how and why you chose your Capital partners and how that ties into a much bigger interesting story that I’ll call an open economic Corridor in a key part of the world that you worked very hard through the Abraham Accords which we still haven’t gotten to which I will get to because I’m so fascinated by it but maybe tell us who Capital partners are and why you formed Capital the way that you did and what it was about those partners that made you excited to do it this way because we’re SEC registered I can’t disclose all but I’ll just talk about the ones that have been publicly confirmed my three biggest LPS are pif from Saudi Arabia lunate from Abu Dhabi and qia from Qatar and those are three of the leading institutions in the world I also have Terry GW who built foxcon who’s one of the biggest manufacturing Geniuses in the world who I knew before my time in government and then I have a couple other friends that I allowed to invest in the fund and basically I chose these partners because they are at the center of where I think a lot of the world is going in the future so these are some of the most prestigious institutions they each have different perspectives and styles but what I saw coming out of government was that the Middle East was just one of the most exciting and Rising parts of the world focused on how you can bring Economic Development to the world and they had very bag Ambitions but they were way less known in the west I think at the time everyone was doing so well that all the pensions and all the endowments were flush with cash and I think that as that correction occurred over the last two years I think people have realized what a phenomenal place the Middle East is and how exceptional these partners are what I find from them that makes them very unique is number one they have tremendous information so there’s not a day that goes by where one of the top fund managers in the world isn’t coming through their dinner table and so their information flow on trends and on what’s happening around the world is probably Second To None from an investment perspective number two they’re very long-term in their orientation so the type of stuff that appeals to me of figuring out how can you find exceptional companies with exceptional leaders where you think you can compound over the Long Haul is something that they’re looking for as well and then finally through all their different operating nodes they just have so much information and ability to add value to a lot of the different companies we’re investing in so like one thing we’re doing now is where looking at a lot of the AI companies in Silicon Valley they’re looking for customers and these three countries are basically some of the advanced thinkers and how do we apply AI into our Industries and into our government and so helping build a bridge and make a connectivity through American innovation to that region is something that we’ve been enjoying a lot and we’re finding it adds value to our partners but it also adds value to these American companies that we think are at the Forefront of a lot of innovation and so I would say that because we have such deep relationships with all of them we have a tremendous amount of trust and they know that when we come to them with a different company or a different idea we’re not looking to waste our time or their time and so we’re able to be a validator of the entrepreneurs of their character that these are people that we would be willing to introduce to them and then also that we found ways to validate their products that’s been extro in that regard one of the things I’m also proud of is again we were able to make some Investments for all them in Israel which I think is very important I think over time it’s inevitable again I thought it would happen four years ago but I’m pretty confident it will happen now that we’ll have the Saudi Israel normalization hopefully under President Trump and I think that that will lead to a lot of the Innovation from Israel spreading out to those regions but a lot of the advanced industries from that region will start spreading throughout that part of the world as well so it’s just a tremendously exciting part of the world we made one investment in the UAE where we invest in a company called Dubizzle which is the leading online classified business there it’s a pretty well-known business model throughout the world a phenomenal business model the online classifi es but we invested at the time where companies that were cash flow negative were out of Vogue and so we saw them about to convert now they’re massively cash flow positive and growing and thinking potentially of an IPO in the future or some other strategic things but they’re growing like wildfire in the region but they’ve been very correlated to the real estate activity in the UAE which has just been on fire and now they’re doing a lot of work in Saudi they just open an office they have over 400 employees there and doing very very well so that’s part of the world where I think there’s a lot of great Innovation and excitement and just from a personal perspective it makes me very happy when we were doing our peace to Prosperity plan for the Palestinians in in 2009 we were having a hard time finding entrepreneurs that were good examples for the Young Generation to look up to and I was in Saudi about two years ago and I did a round table with about 30 young entrepreneurs and I saw what they were building what I’m seeing now in Saudi the difference between 2017 when I first got to know them and today is the next generation is really taking control their building things they’re investing in technology and the younger generation really wants to go a different path that they didn’t think was available to them times before so I think it’s very exciting to be a part of I love the partnership with them and we’ve done incredible things together there’s an anecdote in the book that really stood out we could talk about for a long time I’m sure I’ll call it a Gambit a phone call Gambit a conversation you were brokering between tamim and MBS and that you just kind of went with your gut on something to try get things going in the right direction can you tell that specific story because again as I read the book that was one that I don’t know it just seems so emblematic of so many things about you that was actually one of the hardest deals that didn’t get a lot of coverage because it happened really at the end of the Trump Administration and we got it signed on January 5th which meant that it got overshadowed by other events but basically in our first year Saudi Arabia United Arab Emirates Egypt and Bahrain blockaded Qatar and it was a rift over differences that they had but they basically stopped anything going into the country so I mean one of the extraordinary stories in guar is they had a bunch of businessmen who they couldn’t get milk because they used to buy all the milk from Saudis they literally flew cows in from America and then started a milk business now they have like a massive milk business there but it was really dire and it was a very nasty conflict between the countries and these guys are all close in that regard but it was very very nasty and they were working at Cross purposes which really hurt our ability to make a lot of progress the reason I got into it was basically because my conversations with Saudi they said that they couldn’t normalize with Israel until the issue with qar was resolved and so I got into that very aggressively at the end I was with MBS when I was working with him to try and get his clearance for Bahrain to join the Abraham Accords and at that meeting I said well do we want to get this thing resolved with Qatar and he says yeah absolutely I really do and I have a proposal that we’re going to send to the quades I said well look I’m going to see tamim tomorrow in qar why don’t I just take it let me bring it to him I’ll save you the postage stamp so he says no problem he gives me the proposal he has them bring it to me and I go over to see toine the next day and I say look I have a proposal from MBS I read it I don’t think it’s perfect there’s a couple things I would change but I think it’s legit I think we can get this thing done and so tamim very wisely said to me does NBS really want to do this or is this a game and I said to I said no no I promise you he says Jared you know him better than anyone do you think he actually wants to get this done I said yeah I’m pretty confident he wants to get this done and he really wants to bring a resolution here so tamim says to me well how do you propose we proceed I said well should we just call him let’s get him on the phone he saids no I don’t want to call him we spoke two years ago and it didn’t end very well he put out a statement after that was conflicting with our statement I’m in a very strong position now I don’t want to set it back and do that so he said but if there was a phone call and we agreed to proceed on this paper how would you suggest doing it and I said look I think the real secret is we have to get his brother involved a KBS who’s I think very very talented and if he would agree to have him involved your foreign minister Muhammad who’s now the prime minister I think is one of the most talented diplomats I’ve ever worked with I said I think between them I could moderate the channel and I think we could get it done so he says will MBS do it I said well let me call him so I literally leave the Royal Room and I go into his conference room and I call MBS and I said look are you okay if holled works on this channel with them and he says yeah absolutely no problem whatever you think so I said you know just hold on one second so I go back in I say to me I literally have him on the phone let me just bring him in here and he says Jared I said just let me put him on the phone he says okay so I go in I take my iPhone I put it on speaker and I say look I’ve got two guys on the phone who really like each other a lot but we have a little issue we got to get over and then they start talking for like 10 minutes in Arabic and it’s on speaker phone but I don’t understand a word of Arabic tamim hangs up the phone after and I said well was that a good call or a bad call and he looks at me and he says that was a great call and he said the reason this has been so hard is because we like each other so much and it’s a shame we brought our countries into this and after that we started negotiating back back and forth on the agreement and we had a whole bunch of roadblocks I mean this deal I have 10 other stories is how it died you know a million times and it was very high Pace because a lot of people on both sides were just very afraid and there was no trust and so the only trust that existed was my trust with each side and it’s funny because at that point I wasn’t as close with the qataris because they saw me as closer with the Saudis and the amadis but through that time I mean shik Muhammad who’s now the Prime Minister I spoke to him every day about three times a day for 100 days straight and I found him be just an incredibly straight shooter very creative and he really was helpful towards trying to navigate through all the different challenges that everyone who didn’t want to get the deal done was throwing at us it was just one of these things where it was like old school deal making which probably didn’t follow any diplomatic protocol that I didn’t know existed but it led to that breakthrough and and ultimately that got done and it’s funny because you leave government you go into the private sector I remember about a year and a half later I was flying into Qatar to see some friends and I landed and I saw big Saudi plane there I guess NBS was there having a meeting with tamim and I was kind of looking at I was like you know what that wouldn’t have been here if I didn’t do that call it was just one of these things where you just feel good about the fact that the world is a little bit different because of the efforts you made and today the relationship between Saudi and Qatar is phenomenal the relationship between Qatar and UAE is phenomenal and all these countries instead of working against each other are now working in collaboration with each other um on the things that matter and I think that for the sake of the Middle East that’s such a critical element and I think it’s a big Advantage for president Trump coming in because that block is about an economic project they’ve kind of have reversed you look at Iran you look at the Palestinians they’re on kind of the old grievance and victimization and radicalism project which is proven not to work you look at who’s been a part of that project and it’s led to any benefit for their citizens whatsoever and you know I think if what’s happened in Syria is any proof point that just doesn’t seem to work and I think the Arab world is really woken up and I think that that core engine that President Trump really helped bring about in the GCC now that it’s all United and they’re working in the same direction towards stability and Economic Opportunity that to me is going to be a battery that could help that whole region get to levels that it hasn’t seen in a century I think the history of that region for those that haven’t read it is the most interesting and underappreciated history you could literally go country by country or ruler by ruler and never get bored I’d love the opportunity since I have you to ask the same question for each of your three key Partners which is where public perception is most incorrect based on your experience of the countries the people the leaders maybe starting with Saudi what do you think the world gets the most wrong in its perception of the country and its history so Saudi is interesting because they have a few big advantages one is they have the biggest real estate and I always say that the reason why they have the biggest real estate is because they were some of the best warriors back in the day they have unbelievable natural resources they obviously have the oil that everyone knows about but now they’re exploring and finding minerals and natural gas and everything else their location is phenomenal they’re the custodian of the two holy mosques which obviously if we think about the destruction that radical Islam has done with people taking the religion and perverting it over the last years the reversal that they’ve done as the leading Authority in Islam has been a tremendous shift in history that’s been not a low-risk maneuver it’s one that if people would have asked with me in 2017 if it was possible everyone in the US administration every expert expressed extreme skepticism that it could ever happen and that MBS would be able to be a reformer towards that and that alone has been a major gift to the world and I think a gift to Saudi Arabia and to Muslims everywhere they also as a market have a massive consumption market so I think they’re almost a trillion in GDP and they have a big population and a robust population so now they’re building basically like six Dubai at once so it’s a massive economic experiment they’re running a kpi driven government and I think that people for the next couple centuries will really study the economic turnaround that they’re doing in their country and it doesn’t come without risk I’ve mentioned before one of my favorite things MBS said to me once and I said look why are you taking on so many projects this is a lot of risk for you I said most leaders set low bars and then exceed them and he said Jared if I set set five objectives and I achieve five things in five years I’ll achieve five things if I set 100 objectives and I fail at 50 of them in five years I’ll achieve 50 things and he says look I only live once and I want to get as much done for my country as possible and he’s building a tremendous amount and doing a tremendous amount and pushing the limits on everything and I think the amount of pride that I’ve seen in the Saudi people and embrace of his reforms and the way they’re behind him has been unbelievable and so it’s very inspiring to see a country really shift in under a decade the way that that country shifted so that’s just an extraordinary place to be a part of and amazing friends and I think for him personally like I hope over time he’ll do even more long form podcasts been encouraging him to do it I think that when people see the depth and the range on what he is able to talk about and the way he thinks about things I think people will realize that he’s truly going to be one of the great leaders of the world I think for the next 30 40 50 years God willing so very very special place UAE they were ahead of everyone else they started doing their economic reforms and modernization a long time ago what they built in Dubai was incredible they have about 10 million people so it’s not as big of a consumption Market but they’ve tried to make themselves a major Financial Hub they’re a great tourism destination they’ve become a place where a lot of people put their corporate offices and I think they’ve taken advantage of all the different conflicts in the world to try to be like the new Switzerland where they’re trying not to take sides and just say we want to do do business so their ethos has shifted to say we just want to be an economic Hub and we want to be a partner to all these places and they’ve also been really at the Forefront on AI actually the first person who actually spoke to me about AI was in 2018 I was doing a a meeting in UAE with Shake tuon who’s their National Security adviser and he basically told me he says jar I’m not meeting with you unless you spend two hours after with me to see what I’m doing an AI and I said I really have to focus on Gaza and these different things I said I don’t have time for they so I’m not meeting with you I said okay let’s do that and so he took me after to a conference room and you I joke with him because at the time they couldn’t get the sound to work with some of the guys zoomed in I said before you figure out AI you got to figure out AV but they showed me some of the stuff they were doing at the time which was very Cutting Edge in advance and it’s just been a fascination of theirs and I think that the work that they’ve been doing is pretty extraordinary in that regard and so they’re very forward thinking and they have a tremendous long-term approach to the way that they deal with their countries and their president Muhammad Ben zad is really known to be the Elder Statesman of the region and is just incredibly wise he’s a tremendous leader he’s decisive and I feel tremendous gratitude to that country based on the success we had with the Abraham Accords I always say that they were the ones who took all the risk in that deal but they measured measured measured and they really wanted to make a statement to show the world that we need to all be together we need to work together and we need to respect all faiths in order to thrive and Advance as as a society they’ve been very courageous very long-term in their thinking and I have just tremendous love and respect for the job that they’ve done and it’s an exciting place and a lot of people are moving there a lot of businesses are being based there it really is a great place I have a lot of friends who’ve moved there Qatar is different it’s a lot smaller they have a much smaller population and I think what they’ve really excelled at is being almost like a diplomatic Hub and I think that they obviously inherited a lot of things like having the Taliban and Hamas which were both offices at the US asked them to keep I think under the Bush Administration and I think they now are looking at saying wait a minute why are we doing this but they’ve just been tremendous diplomats in the world and I think that under the current tamim’s leadership he’s really tried to take a much harder line around cutting out a lot of funding for extremists the controversies you hear about them are around they’re funding a lot of these colleges and universities but from what I’ve looked into that it shows that they are basically funding the universities that have built campuses in their country because they care a lot about getting Western education for their citizens and then the other criticism is that they were helping fund Hamas and they have the office there but the reality is is that that was always done at the request of the US government and the Israelis were working hand inand with them in order to work that through so they’ve been very pivotal in the recent efforts in the Middle East I think they have very good geopolitical perspectives and I think that they’ve started to really because they did the World Cup they really have like almost no capex that they need to put in their country they built it out probably for at least the next decade so they’re thinking through what are their different economic projects but they’re looking to deploy AI throughout their government throughout their system obviously they were a major player post the Ukraine war and helping Europe get LNG which they’re one of the biggest suppliers of LG in the world and I find generally they’re just great stores of information and very pleasant people to deal with the one other thing I’ll say about these different places is I see the friendships made with them when I was starting in government we were all much younger and the Middle East was a mess now I see just how like in my third year what would take me six minutes took me six months to do in my first year these leaders are becoming more and more seasoned and they understand the flows of the world and I think they’re going to have a larger and larger impact in the diplomacy of the world and helping to shape outcomes and hopefully it’ll be in the form of being a positive force towards getting people focused on the economic relationships and how do we create Mutual investment to advance people and societies over the old way of really using military to do that there’s such an interesting balance between history present future you’re such a future oriented person in this conversation and so much of this is not about Rel litigating the past but describing what could be and how we could get from here to there and I think some of the criticism of different countries in this region for different reasons would be even as they make that progress maybe the how is not as perfect as it should be but they’re all trying to make the same progress I’m curious though if you scan just all of your experience around the world now and you think about your worldview that it could be fundamentally tragic it could be fundamentally that there’s good and there’s real evil or it could even be like that old line of Good and Evil runs through each human heart or something like that where do you fall on that what remains to be done if I think about Iran I would be most tempted to say maybe that’s pure evil is that your view like is that how you think about these sorts of things how do you process that big question because you strike me as optimistic incredible hardworking you did a lot of things in government that were probably low odds but the Abraham Accords is a great example I don’t know many people that think that’s a bad thing how do you answer like that basic question about good evil who’s doing the right thing who’s doing the wrong thing how they’re doing things you know and vision all in that big soup maybe I’ll start by saving a lot of your listeners a lot of time by saying that anyone who’s going to prognosticate about the future in politics has no idea what they’re talking about at the end of the day it’s all based on the decisions of hum and humans can have good days and bad days make good decisions or bad decisions we all experience that and the leaders who are determining the course of the world are no different sometimes they act in their interest sometimes they act from emotions and it could lead to different outcomes so one of my demystification benefits of having been through government is that all of these quote experts that I used to read about that I used to read or solicit their opinions or I’d go to dinner parties in New York and listen to their every word they all have no idea what the hell they’re talking about so so the future will really be determined by the leaders who are in power and their ability to work hard to create the outcomes possible one of the central lessons I took with me when I went to Washington was I remember I read a book called guns of August about World War I and it talked about how World War I basically started where you had a series of treaties and everyone was just following these old written documents that were constructed long before the current situation developed and not with the current situation that was developing in mind and I kept thinking as I was reading I like man just pick up the goddamn phone and just say I know we have an agreement and you think about how many millions of lives could have been saved if leaders would have been rational in that regard so the way I think about it is that everyone ultimately acts on their interests people are much more comfortable staying in their status quo so what I find is the most important thing is to have strong relationships and understanding with people and then work with people to figure out how do we create a better Paradigm sometimes it takes a disruptor like Donald Trump to come in and eliminate the status quo and when you do that by definition everyone’s going to scream at you one of the lessons I learned from the Middle East is that if people aren’t screaming at you you’re not on the right track because everything I went in and said and did for the first three and a half years everyone was screaming at me and my view was is they were screaming at me for doing things differently than they’ve done it before my view is if I did it the same way they did then I probably would have achieved the same result result they did which was failure and so even though it was an impossible task with a very low probability of succeeding it was the job I was given and I was going to give it everything I had and I was going to study it meticulously work my butt off to do it and I was going to create the most rational construct imaginable in order to give myself the highest probability chance of achieving a very low probability outcome that’s ultimately how we led the breakthroughs that and then constantly changing and changing and upd as I got more information and rechecking my premises and learning new things and trying different things and working with people so what I would say is that with Iran they are weaker today than they have been a long time Hezbollah was basically the gun that they had aimed at the host’s head the hostage was Israel and what they would always say is that if you do something to us then we will take out Israel so basically there was always a huge cost that could be imposed for anything done there now there tremendously paranoid because they don’t know how deeply penetrated they are by Israeli intelligence and from what I hear it’s pretty deeply penetrated number two in the raid that Israel did in retaliation they took out all of their air defenses and a lot of their longrange missil making capability which means they don’t have the ability necessarily to sustain a long conflict and with Trump coming in there’s a super high probability that their ability to sell oil in the future is going to go down so to give you a sense when Obama OB left office they were selling 2.6 million barrels of oil a day when Trump left office they were selling about 100,000 barrels of oil a day the Biden Administration didn’t enforce the sanctions and now they’re selling over 2 million barrels of oil a day which is crazy so now they have more cash which gives them more staying power but they don’t have enough cash to get through the next four years they are very vulnerable and so they’re going to have some very tough decisions to make maybe they are pure evil I don’t know I’ve never met them but I would think that if there’s a rational construct where they can say why don’t we change our program and focus on investing in our society and in our people maybe there’s a way that something can be reached but in order to do that they can’t do a fake deal like they did with Obama and Kerry which is probably one of the dumbest deals ever because it was a temporary restriction on nuclear and there was no inspection so they could basically do nuclear anyway so if they were willing to do a real deal I think there’s tremendous investment and unlock that could go into their country they have a phal population the Persian people are amazing they have a beautiful country every day that they stay focused on the old mentality they’re in like an old operating system from the 70s they’re falling further behind their neighbors it’s going to be a very interesting Dynamic but if they could figure out how to shift course I think that they can prosper tremendously so I see an outcome that’s acceptable the question is whether leadership is capable of understanding that outcome and then sometimes you have leadership that’s capable of understanding an outcome but they don’t necessarily know how to achieve that outcome so like one example I use is with North Korea where I think president Trump did a great job of lowering the temperature with Kim Jong-un and I was helpful to opening that Channel with them during my time I write about it in my book he basically I think got him pretty excited about what a Dayton could look like I mean they have about7 trillion dollars was the number I heard of minerals in their countries they could be a very wealthy population but I think for him it’s just very uncertain how do you do that transition from where he is today to opening up the population and allowing for things to change so like I hear that all the North Korean soldiers that are working with the Russians in Ukraine like what are those guys doing now they’re out of North Korea hear they’re all like on the smartphones looking at porn they’ve never seen anything like it before so you think about how repressive of a society it is and can he do that transformation I think what I’ve seen with Western diplomats is they’re saying well you have to denuclearize you have to change I think that that’s the right outcome the question is can you be nimble and help build them a golden bridge we have to eliminate all the Escape Routes but help build them a golden bridge to do something that they’ve never done before so they don’t end up like Gaddafi which is what their biggest fear is so you’ve known for I guess almost a year now that there’s a decent chance that Donald Trump would be president again how have you taken action to prepare yourself in the business for that potential outcome it’s hard to bet against Trump so as he started doing well I thought there was a pretty high probability he could become president and so the things we did to prepare the business one is basically just keep our high compliance we spend millions of dollars a year on compliance we had our first exam from the SEC and we got a no action letter and that’s very important to me I wouldn’t do that because we’re high-profile I just do that because in life let the investing part of it be hard don’t let any technical things make your life hard number two is we were getting to the place at the end of our fund where we were going to have to raise more Capital so I spoke to my investors earlier this year in February and said something that we should talk about if you’re thinking of re-upping in the fund let’s do it sooner as opposed to later they all agreed and so over the last year we closed a billion and a half extra capital and extended the investment period of the fund to 2029 my investors really like that we went slow in the first two years so adding an extra two years on the end was something that was easy for them to do and increas in the capital we did from Luna and qia that gave us more Firepower to be able to go forward we closed all that before the election they wanted to do that irrespective of what the outcome was and I made very clear to them that in the event that Trump was elected that they should not expect anything from me for that this is based on the initial Investments they made in 2021 when at the time Trump didn’t look political at all we were in a position where we were starting a business for the future it’s been a tremendous relationship with them we’re very excited about what we’ve done and I’m very honored that my partners have stayed committed to the platform and I think that that will be very exciting going forward so the framework that I’m going to use for the business over the next couple of years is number one we’re going to follow all the laws and the rules and that goes without saying number two is we’re going to do what we think is right we’re not going to make investments that we think we shouldn’t make and we’ll be investing in things that we think align with the values of the firm and that we think are appropriate to make and finally I’m not going to allow people like the media or these ethics experts who quite frankly don’t have real jobs and get paid to try to find potential conflicts that don’t exist to change what we think and what we’re going to do we’re going to follow what we think is right I think we’re going to do good business in that regard so that’s kind of how we’re thinking about it so we preemptively try to avoid any conflicts so we don’t have to raise capital for the next four years and we have a great team we have an investment process we have a great Pipeline and we’ll just continue to make investments as we see fit invest in great companies work with our portfolio companies follow all the rules and we’ll do that in a great way and so for us that’s something we’re very excited about doing I also know right before the election you got a letter from some Senators you can guess the side of the aisle asking some questions about Affinity anything you can share about that sure so that was a letter I got right before the election from a Democrat Senator and Congressman but number one is they haven’t acknowledged that we’ve done anything wrong in our business my sense there is that these are not serious efforts we’ve complied with all the laws and rules and we’ll continue to do so we’re just going to continue to do our business in that regard and also what was kind of funny was people like Bill Amman wrote up long responses on Twitter showing how ignorant they were about private Equity they basically were saying why we hadn’t returned any money yet after three years and then in addition to that they were saying you’re taking all these fees but they don’t realize that we have to pay back all of our fees with an 8% interest before we get our profits so their lack of understanding of private Equity was silly in that regard and quite frankly at the end of the day they could write letters and the media sometimes could be there spokes people and and write stories about it but there’s nothing that they’ve even raised that we have any concern about because like I said we’re running a very legitimate business we’re SEC regulated and we’re just going to continue to do good legitimate business with top tier partners and great companies in the best way possible they’re going to be very disappointed when they start looking into Blackstone I don’t think they would understand how to read the financials of a company like Blackstone you need to have our best and brightest but thankfully Trump’s bringing a lot of business people to Washington and maybe some of these business people could explain to them how Finance works if I’m in the seat of a business an American Business the big technology businesses are especially interesting to me as an investor and now those are such a huge percent of the global market cap how would you give them advice on preparing for the next four years like what are the sorts of things given what you know about how the world has changed and is changing that you think are really important for businesses to nail their opportunities in the next four years the thing about Trump that I think very few people took advantage of last time is that he’s very accessible and very pragmatic what happened last time is they made it so tough for people to work with Trump because of the different narratives that they put about him that a lot of people were quicker to criticize than to kind of show up and work what I found with Trump is that the people who reached out and went and sat with him and shared their ideas he always listened and most of the time they were able to achieve outcomes that were very good and one example Criminal Justice Reform where we were able to kind of bring in Democrats in a very divided time and when they sat with Trump and made their case and treated him respectfully he listened and he was willing to kind of do what was rational and pragmatic now he’s coming in much more popular than last time way more accepted them last time so my advice to Business Leaders and to anyone who wants to engage with the government is that he’s very outcome oriented and I think that this could be an incredibly productive government where if you have objectives you want to achieve go and engage and do it respectfully if you’re going to go and criticize and say nasty things they’re not going to work with you and they don’t have to but if you actually care about the issues that you claim to care about then show up speak respectively engage properly and you’d be surprised at how many amazing things will be able to occur and I think that that’s kind of athema to a lot of people who maybe have been fed so much propaganda about how bad Trump was or all these different things and so for these people maybe it’s a little bit hard to process my advice would be is focus on what your core cares are and objectives come up with ideas and go engage with the administration respectfully and I think you’ll find that this will be a time where incredible things can get done what a lot of people have told me the last four years years even on the left is that nothing was getting done because people were afraid to make decisions Trump is not afraid to make decisions and he’s not afraid to make bold decisions and he wants to just get things done and so I think this could be a very productive time and a time where great progress is made I’d love to switch gears and ask you about Josh and Thrive when I was talking to him this weekend he said something very sweet which was as he thinks back on the early days of Thrive that there was nobody beside you as impactful as a strategist and a support system to getting that business set up the right way and to its early success it was two things not just like the strategy and the thinking and the problem solving but the sort of Lent confidence to him he was really young when he started Thrive I think he was 24 or something crazy you’re four years older or something like that he said that exact thing like you lent him a certain degree of confidence early on I’d love to just ask about that episode from your memory like the early days of Thrive maybe even like what you saw in Josh when he was really young that made you I mean obviously he’s your brother your bias but what you saw that made you excited about the potential for that business and what you learned in that whole episode of being there in the early days I think first of all what Josh has accomplished is extraordinary I think what he’s built is amazing I can say I’m both surprised and not surprised by what Thrive has become surprised because my intention going into it was just how do I help my brother do what he wants to do I never thought we were building a big business I just thought I was helping my brother follow his passion not surprised because everything I’ve seen Josh apply himself to he finds a way to increase the scope of how you should be thinking about things and execute in an incredible way so the early days of Thrive as I remember it was Josh was in business school or he was in college and he had started a technology company called vosu when he was Raising venture capital we would speak about all the different negotiations he was happening and all the different business building challenges and opportunities and I was running companies and building companies at the time I had The Observers I was in the media business I had the real estate business and so we would share experiences and I would try to help him as an older brother and what Josh kept remarking to me is how all the people trying to invest in vastu were trying to rip their faces off and take advantage of them and together we negotiated our best to kind of make sure that they couldn’t do that and he had a phenomenal co-founder in Mario what they were doing was extraordinary so as Josh kind of matured to the next phase he said I want to start investing in technology companies but I want to be a partner to them like I wish I had when I was an entrepreneur that really didn’t know a lot about the world so the ethos was is let’s find great people doing great things and let’s invest in them and before I knew it they were all showing us different opportunities we were investing Small Checks 25,000 50,000 I’ll never forget then Josh was diligen in a company called Kickstarter he got into it he spoke to a firm called General Catalyst and they basically called her said how’d you get into that deal and he says I don’t know I just I like the guy I thought we could help very neat I said we want to meet you so Josh had meeting with General Catalyst and we were excited that like a big firm wanted to even meet with us and so Josh went there and he didn’t call me and so he calls me like five hours later I said Josh why didn’t you call me he says Jared they kept me there for five hours I said well what happened he says well they offered me a job I said what’ you tell him he said I told him I don’t want a job and what happened was is they said can we give you a million dollars to invest in companies that you’re investing in with you and so Josh said I guess we have a fun now and so we took some of the money we were investing I was learning about where these companies want to be and I couldn’t help them with their technology but I could help them with their landlords and negotiations how to get Wi-Fi and even with different things I ran in recently to Brian chesky and he said to me Jared you were so helpful to me when I was starting because he was having trouble in New York with all the things and I guess Josh introduced him to me came in and saw me and I helped I made him some connections I got him some people but i’ forgotten about that at the time our ethos was just help everybody body put Good Karma into the world and see what happens then as Josh got to fund too he got some institutional investors he was very lucky that a guy named Andy golden really believed in him and his vision and really they helped him think through how to start institutionalizing it into a different business and Josh very naturally sees opportunities around him and he started thinking just bigger every day about what was possible and he was like a magnet entrepreneurs wanted to be with him and he at his core felt like an entrepreneur and wanted to build something and so he ended up starting Oscar which was also a great experience then he started seed investing a lot of businesses I remember we were investing in warie Parker and Harry’s and a whole bunch of other ones you invested in Spotify you I sit with them on the investment committee for the first couple of funds it was just extraordinary he built a great team he had great attraction of talent it had its ups and downs we had different challenges that we probably don’t talk about too much now but not everything was as smooth as it could be every time I had friends I I introduced a lot of people to who wanted to invest and even people like John Winkle Reed who represented me at Goldman he left Goldman was looking for something to do he came to invest with me in real estate and I said you should meet Josh and ended up working with Josh and and a lot of others I was just very happy to help him mostly as a brother but also I found it to be very very interesting and if you would have asked me back then would Thrive be today what it is I would tell you it wasn’t what my vision was for it then but I’m not surprised that Josh has been able to build it into that and I think that it’s funny my time time leaving into government we used to talk 10 times a day beforehand about every decision in his life and my life and so we really were very close we knew everyone’s deals and how to structure it and how to negotiate it but I think he was also good because I think I saw the growth in him over the last years of doing that himself and now there’s lot of things that I call him for advice on and I’m just so impressed with the businessman that he’s become and the way he’s kept himself grounded through this process and it’s an extraordinary platform that he’s built and most importantly I think it resembles him and who he is which is when you build these firms you want them to represent your values and you want them to be vehicles to help you live the life you want to live so I think that when I think about Affinity I want to be meeting with interesting people I want to be researching interesting problems and then I want to be helping to apply my skills to the problems that I think are both interesting and worthy that can achieve great outcomes for my investors and I think Josh has done very very similar thing in Thrive where he’s able to create a flywheel that attracts great entrepreneurs great companies and then take all the information that he’s getting from different stages of the cycle and apply it to investing in different areas and I’m very very proud of the job he’s done in recent years what has he most taught you I’d say the best part with Josh has been when I run my investments by him I kind of know how he’s going to react to them if there’s certain things I’m looking at I’m like I kind of don’t want to go tell this to Josh then I kind of have like a sense that it’s one that’s not going to fit the criteria what do you think that is like what is he recognizing and the ones that are wrong I think that he sees me maybe better than I see myself and I think that he believes that I should only be investing in people in platforms that are worthy of his older brother if that makes sense he loved the Phoenix deal and the qxo deal from the very beginning when I was talking with him about them because he thought that that was the right company for Affinity to be keeping he pushes me more and more to use my creativity because when I started out I was probably doing more conventional things I wanted downside protection I was doing more conventional and because what I was trying to build with affinity hadn’t been done before putting those elements together there was no off-the-shelf model to just show up and find those types of deals so it’s taken me really two years to start manifesting and creating those deals and I think Josh always pushed me to say no you have this vision for what this can be you have unique talents unique skills unique perspective make sure you’re really giving yourself the chance to follow that through and don’t get stuck in conventional investing really figure out how to build something that’s unique to you where you can enjoy it and when you’re enjoying it you’ll do your best work over time and I’d say that’s probably where he’s pushed me the most I love to ask a similar set of questions about your dad there was a line in the book that was really powerful he said in life sometimes we get so powerful that we start to think that we are dealers of our own fate but we are not that line just again I’m trying to pick the things in the book that really just hit me the hardest maybe with that as a jump off point just tell me about your dad the kind of person he is the experiences you’ve been through with him and the impact that he’s had on you so my dad is an extraordinary person he’s a very raw entrepreneur in the sense that he grew up in a very poor neighborhood in Elizabeth his father was a carpenter who then became a home builder so he really watched his parents work 247 very family oriented and he went to law school and then business school and then worked as an accountant and a lawyer and then started his own business so he brought us up seeing both his highs and his lows and he didn’t hide from us his problem again building his business had had some early bumps along the way and he didn’t hide that from his family so he always believed the reason why he was working to build the business was to provide for his family and he wanted us to just have full transparency into that he treated Josh and I like we were adults he never treated us like we were children he wasn’t talking to us about sports if we want to go to a baseball game we’d go with our uncle or somebody else that’s why we became Mets fans so my dad’s a Yankee fan which not sure if that’s a good thing or a bad thing but we always say we got our humility from being Mets fans and it’s really given us a lot in life perspective but I do tell my daughter that she should marry a Mets fan because they’re very loyal he would have us reading financial statements by the time we were 10 years old and he would be taking us to properties with him on Sunday when we had a day off from school he’ take us to work so he just trained us to work and he taught us about problem solving entrepreneurialism and he really just instilled in us the values of hard work of leadership and of saying you always have to live in the lane of going the extra mile just have to put everything into it anything you’re going to do compete to do it the best you can do one of my favorite stories with my father is he I guess we talk about self- responsibility I remember I was going for an internship interview and he says what time are you leaving I said I’m leaving at 8 he says why the interview’s at 9: he says what if there’s traffic I said there’s not traffic I’ve done this drive a million times said what if there’s an accident I said I don’t control that he said no no no Jared the only excuse for not being on time is that you didn’t leave early enough and that was just kind of the mentality that he instilled in us which is take responsibility for what you do and always try to do things the right way my father made a big mistake in his life he got into a sibling rivalry and that led to some legal issues they were fighting mostly over money which is and probably ego which was stupid and I think that you know our siblings we’ve all internalized that and I think that money and ego is something that doesn’t come between us which is important but through that experience my father I’d say we all gained a lot of grounding and I think it definitely changed my relationship with my father because he went to prison for a year and that forced me to take a lot more responsibility in the business at I think I was 23 or 24 at the time and I was in law school and business school then I almost dropped out my dad didn’t want me to do that so I basically would take four of the days of the week off and I would drive into the office at 5:00 a.m. and I would come in and my friends would joke that if my law professors wanted to fail me they would just have to give me a multiple choice test with five pictures and say Circle who your professor is but I had to really run a lot of his Affairs for him while he was gone and I had to be a father to my siblings and really a support for my mother so that Chang changed our relationship but my father through that experience I saw a guy who was at the top of the world who then went to prison where you learn that in prison they could take in this world everything from you you could lose friendships you could lose money you could lose your freedom and it really taught me what to value and what not to value in life and then don’t value the things that could be taken away and try to spend as much time on the things that are real and don’t pursue things for the wrong reasons and I think that that also has anchored me through all the different challenges in my life as well and so my father came out and didn’t run from his experience and he just said I made a mistake and he took full responsibility he’s done a lot of charity work he’s volunteered in prisons he’s mentored inmates he started a second chance program in his company where a lot of people come out of prison get jobs at at Kushner and I think that it was something we’re very very proud of and he’s just an extraordinary businessman I’ve learned a lot from him amazing working with him when I was in Kushner companies I’m very proud of him he just got nominated to be Ambassador for France loves Donald they always had a very close relationship actually When Donald ran the first time I think he sent Donald his first check because he says look I don’t know if this thing’s going anywhere but he’s I love him so I got to just support him and he did the same this time and I think he’ll do a great job he always instilled in us a strong sense of Public Service of wanting to do right for your country of being grateful for being in America our grandparents came over as refugees after the Holocaust and they would always say what a great country this is he would always support politicians and I think now him having the opportunity to serve his country country and to do it in a way in France which has a lot of issues with anti-Semitism and trade I think he’ll do an extraordinary job and I’m very very proud for him and very very excited for him to have this shift in life and he’s built an extraordinary company and I keep telling my dad for what end at this point you don’t need more money and you now have trained the Next Generation and how to do this so it’s a great time for him to do it in life he’s a hard worker he’s in great shape and I think he’s going to do a great job so he’s a very very special person and Josh and I and our sisters Daren Nikki feel very lucky to have him as a father and I I’ll say just the same is our mother’s also extraordinary she’s the most selfless elegant quiet person I think a lot of our values of family and keeping us grounded I think a lot of that comes from our mom who’s also been just an extraordinary person in our lives selfless elegant and quiet if you had to think of the same three variables like you imagine your grandkid sitting on your knee one day and you get three adjectives to describe each of them what would the three be kind impactful and loving do you care about Legacy not really I thought about this a lot recently the thing that I thought about the most in terms of legacy is not to do things so that others will think of you or remember you in a certain way I think about now with my children just living my life in a way and making decisions to make sure that I could be a good role model for my children and I think that that’s probably the foundational question I ask myself all the time when I have a tough dilemma which is how would you want to be as a role model for your children and act that way and so I think that’s really what’s important I think that I’ve had an unusual life with lots of twists and turns it feels like now it’s GNA you know it’s going to turn again but that’s just what it is for whatever reason these are the pathways that God laid out for me in life I have a lot of faith I feel extraordinarily grateful I wake up every morning I have an amazing wife Vanka is one of the most brilliant kind curious people I’ve ever met she’s an amazing partner we don’t go out that much because we like being together we like going for walks every night after dinner she’s always exposing me to new and interesting things she’s a veracious consumer of information and I’m very grateful that over the last couple years she’s really pushed herself into helping me build my business and to helping us raise our family after four years in Washington I think that that’s very important I could accomplish amazing things in life but if I don’t have a good relationship with my children and if I don’t feel like I’ve done everything possible to raise them in the best way then what good is it to have been successful in business or in politics or anything else so that’s kind of where my head is right now in the world I’m proud of what I’ve done in all these different areas and I have a lot lot of confidence because I see all the different challenges I’ve been thrown into I know I’ve been able to find ways through them but at this phase in life I look at the current situation and I basically am of the mindset of let me continue to do what I’m doing let me help all the people who are going into to serve and I’ve really been spending a lot of time helping people get up to speed who are going into the incoming Administration on all the challenges that we face so they can avoid those challenges on any advice they call for to figure out how in the files that I worked on they could start where we left off or more advance that they don’t have to go through all the learning phases and then we’ll continue to be a resource and a helper to all of them to help them be successful for the country and for my father-in-law so that’s really what’s most important to me right now what investors I’m sure you’ve met basically all of them what characteristics are shared in common amongst the investors that you respect the most I think number one is they take the time to research and think so I think there’s a difference between a manager and an investor and I’ve been trying very much to be more of an investor than a manager so the time to think research the way they gather information process information curiosity and then I think the humility to always be rechecking your premises if that makes sense so I think those are the things that I keep trying to do and again right now in our firm we’re recruiting for another senior partner and what’s interesting is that that we created a hybrid in our firm of people with geopolitical expertise and people who have conventional private equity and growth investing skills and what’s happened over the last years is that the people who are investors are becoming better at geopolitics and the people who are at geopolitics are becoming better investors and so this merging is happening as we try to create this type of firm that we think could persist over the long run and what I’m finding is is that we have to hire somebody who’s great at one or the other that has to fit our criteria of being a phenomenal person that can merge very well into the culture of what we had so I think that safeguarding our culture and making sure we’re working with people who we really enjoy and care about and can learn from is just a very critical element as well so we have a very flat team like when we do RC’s everyone’s at our ic’s I want everyone to be learning from our problems I want everyone to be learning from our opportunities I want everyone to be learning from our arguments and I want everyone to see when we agree and so that’s something that’s very important to me because I find the best talent often is grown more than it is hired and so having a transparent organization will enable us to really build something that I think will be more enduring and vibrant over the long run what have you learned about Trump his strengths his weaknesses you spend a lot of time with him he’s now the most focused on person in the world you have the benefit of knowing him personally not from the media what have you learned about him and from him so I worked for him for six years but I’ve known him now for 16 years obviously as my father-in-law I would say I’ve really grown to understand him and the way he operates I learned a tremendous amount from him when I was working for him in the way he communicates which I think is unique to him he is a very good processing mechanism in the sense that he can process a lot of complex situations and simplify them very quickly he’s an unbelievable negotiator he’s an amazing reader of people so for him a lot of what he’s able to do is to kind of determine if people are lying to him or not and he knows how to ask the right questions to throw people off their game and he just has a very pragmatic perspective on a lot of issues the more I went through the campaign the more I was agreeing with him on the issues on trade or immigration and people would criticize me for that but I was like I just think he’s pragmatic in the things he would say like I remember in the campaign he would say let’s put America First and people are saying that’s a racist slogan I was like I don’t know if you’re running for president of America you want to put America First that seems like that’s a good ground to have he was just very pragmatic in the way he approaches things very open-minded he will change his mind if he gets a better argument which is I think very unusual he’s quick to throw out statements on things that don’t matter very careful with the things that really do matter like when I would see him make decisions on things like bombing or big military things he was incredibly deliberate and thoughtful and meticulous about his process and he processed these things with the seriousness and intentionality that you would want to leader to process them with and he’s pretty transparent one of the things with him is you don’t have to guess what he thinks on most things because he’ll either tell it you directly or he’ll tweet it out publicly he’s a very unusual leader what I’m finding is is that now that he’s been gone for a couple years people are way more used to his style and they’re excited to have him back like his tweets on Mexico and Canada if did that in 2017 everyone would have been saying oh this is terrible and then the Senators would have been coming out saying well we’re going to stop him from doing this now everyone’s saying oh he’s back message he put out on the hostages which was very strong people were loving it I think he’s more refined people are more used to him now he has great knowledge of the situations he’s a very big and outof the-box thinker and I think he’s going to do some very disruptive things in the world then look some things may not go perfectly but I think a lot of things will go very very well so I think he’s a historic figure an unusual figure and somebody who I’ve been very very lucky to learn a lot about and then I also get to see the way he is with my children so like my little kid Theo just when we’re in the summer together just follows him around all day sits with him in the golf cart and we’ll go sit with him at dinner when he’s out with other people I was with him the other day and the phone starts ringing it’s Theo I said Theo calls you he says oh yeah he calls me like 34 times a week and he’s very funny when he is with his grandkids there’s a realness and and I find that he appreciates how unique the situations are but he’s also willing to be very disruptive in that regard so very excited to see what he’s going to do and very very proud of the job he’s done I think he’s changed the discourse in the world I think he’s changed people’s minds on a lot of issues and I think he’s going to change our country hopefully for the better in a very substantial way if I think about the things that would cause your intensity your personal intensity to ramp up what are the most common triggers for you to feel that intensity rise either identifying a problem or an opportunity I’m a big believer in that work shouldn’t be distributed what you should be doing is when you find either a big problem or an opportunity then you go all in on that thing that means you need the right organizational structure to enable you to not be bogged down to a fixed schedule or fixed responsibilities so over the last year in particular I’ve been building a lot of the resiliency in The Firm of the Personnel now I may have a little bit of a setback because a lot of our good people are getting recruited into the government now and that’s an amazing thing and obviously I encourage that because I believe in service and I think that it’s a beautiful thing for people to leave the private sector and go do their service but building that resiliency where the business functions can really run themselves and that I can be involved in focusing on looking for the big opportunities and getting involved in the biggest areas that will hopefully create the biggest outcomes for us if you think about the things that you don’t know anything about in the world that you most would love to learn about what comes most immediately to mind I think right now we’re doing it so we started a company recently with elot Gill who’s one of the top investors in Silicon Valley in the AI space as we were looking at Ai and how it was going to impact the world when I started it was really software but I didn’t really see any competitive advantages for us in software when AI became real in people’s minds it restarted the race a little bit and so we kind of broke it down into four categories one was the infrastructure which is Data Centers and energy and we actually have a bunch of Investments we’re making in that phase but that’s long-term probably I think strong safe returns which will be great then you look at the llms which are big Capital needs and really a big boys game and the competition is incredibly incredibly Fierce One thing I’ve been able to do with a lot of these companies is help be a bridge for them to the Middle East and introduce them to the different Middle East investors because for the first time a lot of these companies have kex needs that they never had before so a lot of them have reached out to me and I’ve introduced them to my partners in the Middle East to look at Partnerships and that’s been very interesting then you have the consumer products which are fascinating because we use them all the time and they’re able to make our lives more efficient and there’s just no bounds for where they can’t impact our lives in a positive way and then finally you have the way that that AI is being applied to corporates and big Industries that’s something that is in my mind a massive inevitability and if you think about AI it’s basically going to create a lot of efficiency and as it creates efficiency it should create a lot of value and so we started a company with some of our portfolio companies and partners and different companies who I’m trusted by to say how do we bring phenomenal Engineers from Silicon Valley into these companies to start start looking at ways to use their data to create unique products to create efficiencies for them solve problems and then ultimately productize some of the different tools that we’re able to create by being first in some of these bigger companies and so the real Arbitrage is between getting A+ Talent which we’ve been able to attract our team is over 25 people now and major corporations which we are now working with four of and getting them all to work together and then see what you’re able to create out of that and so far it’s been fascinating because that puts you on the front lines of what the AI is going to be able to do in the real world to create efficiencies in these companies so the real purpose of doing this initially was to learn from the best talent how this is being applied they add value to people in my partner’s Network and then ultimately I believe the company will be very very successful by doing that and so that gives us a good lens into everything we’re investing in because we’re constantly thinking about how AI is going to either enhance or disrupt any company we look at and we look at that in a very real sense now so that to me is just the most fascinating thing from a business perspective to be looking at and then obviously you know I have a lot of passion on the Middle East and the geopolitics there and I’ve been working closely with Steve wickoff who’s the envoy for president Trump helping him with the transition getting him up to speed he’s a good friend for a long time we’ve been talking for this now for almost a year when he told me he was interested in doing this which I was very excited about and really helping Steve get up to speed talking through with him what to do and being a resource to him for whenever he calls to make sure that he’s able to hit the ground running so that him and president Trump are able to really finish the work that we started in the first term which I think is very very achievable now what are you most proud of from the Abraham Accords and what is that work that’s still left unfinished the work I’m actually most proud of my time in government is the Criminal Justice Reform because that was something that I know what it’s like to be a family member of people in prison what that did for a lot of people to give them hope and make them feel cared about and to give them an opportunity is something that I think was just an extraordinary achievement and it just brings so much satisfaction to me to know that I’ve impacted so many people’s lives who are going through a period of being helpless in that regard and I think that under President Trump Pam bondi’s a good friend who’s going to be the Attorney General she was very helped us with the prison reform efforts ironically Biden has done nothing with the first step act they have not implemented it the way that it should be and I’m pretty confident that under President Trump and Pam Bondi they’ll actually Implement a lot of the skills training programs in prison that will help people leave prison get jobs and then not become returned customers that’s something I’m incredibly proud of probably my most proud of thing for my time in government and just to follow up on that for those that don’t know what you did what is the important learning and so what of improving the system that you affected to give you an idea there was just a study that came out on the program we put in place which basically is bringing skills training alcohol training and allowing inmates to earn earlier release by taking these courses what it did was there was the people who got out who didn’t use these programs had about a 45% recidivism rate and the people who did take the programs had a a recidivism rate I think in like 12% or so or something in the teens and so basically showing that the people who went through all these programs were not going back to prison with the same frequency as people who are leaving and again A lot of times people leave prison they have a criminal record they don’t really have places to go back to often they have addiction issues they don’t have modern skills and so what do they do they go back to commit crimes from a public safety perspective and from like a human perspective giving these people the ability to learn these skills while they’re in prison I mean it’s called Department of Corrections you’re supposed to be helping correct people it’s really more of like a warehouse for human trash is the way they do it now helping people who have made mistakes during that time and helping them build the tools and create a framework to live a more productive life is a very important thing to do and I think that that’s something that could make a big difference and we modeled it off of what’s happened in a lot of States like Texas and Georgia and Kentucky so we really took reforms that have proven over time to be successful and it just seems like a very basic thing to do because it reduces crime and I had all the police groups the sheriff’s Association the uh fop everyone supported the reforms and I think that they’ll make a big difference over time but to your question on the Abraham Accords I think we got it started we got five deals done then we got the GCC deal done which was critical towards getting Saudi when I met with the Biden team in the transition I basically told them you guys can get a deal done with Saudi in three to six months and that’s what they were telling me the Biden team then spent the first two years criticizing Saudi and then finally after two years started adopting our policies and then figured out they did it so public and clumsy and they didn’t deal with the Iran issue and the Palestinian issue properly that October 7th happened and it’s just been difficult for them to get that done so I think that’s a very doable issue I think president Trump has the different skill and relationships in order to make that happen I think getting Saudi done will be key because there’s another 10 countries that will happen right after that whether it’s Pakistan andonia we had a whole bunch of countries that really wanted to go and I think there’s a lot more work to do there which just gets rid of that issue I think there’s still work to do on the Palestinian issue I think the Iran issue is key Syria now is a whole different mess but I think the incoming team between uh Rubio Waltz witkoff they have a really good team and I think they’ll be able to achieve some incredible outcomes and most importantly again president Trump now knows the terrain and the players and I think he has a pretty strong perspective on how to get these things done I’ve seen you talk about Germany and Japan and the relationship we have with them now X number of decades after World War II what is the promise of all this in the midd East what gets you excited about the potential different state of things 20 30 years hence I think if you get all these deals done and you integrate the countries the vision we had was to integrate from hi the port of hia and Israel to muscot and Oman and to get one economic block where people can trade across they can bring technology across they can do investment across and these regions are some of the highest per GDP Spenders on Military but if they can convert that money into Bridges in education they have very young populations I think that that will raise that region which will raise a lot of Africa as well and you’re seeing a lot of the islamists that got kicked out of the Middle East I mean they’ve gone mostly to Africa some have gone to Europe and the US which is crazy that we let these people in but that’s something that I think will just make a big difference in the center of the world and getting these guys focused on how do we advance Humanity together and not have these religious divides I think that’ll be a massive shift and like I said earlier it’s already a massive Shi shift of not having all the Islamic extremism that was as prevalent in 2017 based on the reforms that NBS worked on with President Trump on his first visit to Saudi Arabia then if you think about the next four years what do you think are the most important things that the administration could or might do right now there’s a lot of discussion about the hot issues around the world whether it’s the war in Ukraine with Russia the issues in the Middle East with Iran and the opportunities with Israel and Saudi and now with Syria and with Lebanon being changed I think that will be a very fertile ground for great progress in the US people are very excited about Doge and hopefully we can create a much more competitive environment in our country with taking down regulations and creating much more efficient government we have deficits in debt that need to be dealt with as well in addition to the southern border which uh is a key issue that I think they’ll be very fast action on but ultimately I think the topic that will probably be the most impactful of the next four years will be how president Trump deals with artificial intelligence and what could be AGI or super intelligence and how this is coming uh very rapidly and there’s a lot of different outcomes that could come from that I think the Biden Administration put in place an EO that was really intended to stifle a lot of American innovation and I think under President Trump hopefully America can lead the world into creating the most advanced super intelligence and making sure that it’s done in an ethical way and in a way that Advan us interests and it’s going to be permeated throughout the economy it’s going to be permeated through our militaries and it’s going to be very interesting to make sure that it’s done in a responsible and thoughtful way where America’s values are the ones that rule the day if you think about your own future you said the thing that gets your intensity up is problem and opportunities and those are unpredictable and Ever Changing is there any grander agenda or Vision that you think about beyond the things you’ve talked about anything else that you really want to happen from this point forward I really think about this a lot my wife told me a statistic which is by the time your kids are 18 you’ll have spent like 80% of the time with them that you’re going to spend with them in their lives and I think almost because I was so detached from our kids when I was working in government the first time mentally because I was just so consumed by my job it’s made me appreciate spending time with my family that much more I think that there’ll be plenty of time in life for me to do different things and different iterations but right now the thing that my wife and I have said is just non something we would compromise on is keeping our family unit in a really amazing place and being amazing parents to our children and I travel a lot for work and my kids do beat me up on it but at least when I’m home I’m able to be with them and I’m able to create the balance bance that I want to create which is not like a balanced balance it’s like extreme with them and extreme on my work but I’m able to make it work in a way that works well and so far that’s what it is and what I would say is that every plan I’ve ever made in my life God’s had different plans and nothing in my life has gone according to plans so I’ll keep making plans and then I’ll keep navigating the different storms and Summers that come and really look to have interesting adventures and enjoy it with amazing people and keep trying to challenge myself learn and get better along the way you told me once that if you want to make bad decisions ask for advice an interesting line you have a really interesting way of processing these kinds of decisions that being one of them but I know instead of asking for advice you sort of just very good at calling around and getting people’s perspectives let’s say what are the other key steps that you’ve learned in just making these decisions around these problems around these opportunities I think the number one thing you always have to ask yourself is what do you want and then number two is always what are you actually solving for and I think that those are the two fundamental questions that people forget to ask and I think that as long as you’re in touch with those questions then sometimes that brings a lot more clarity in between I’ve obviously read a lot as I’ve been an investor the last years from Charlie Monger I’ve read almost everything he’s put out and one of the things I love he says is that when you’re making decisions sometimes it’s helpful to figure out what you don’t want on your way to figuring out what you do want so sometimes you can eliminate a lot of the potential options by figuring out what you absolutely don’t want and I find that’s also a very helpful mechanism but ultimately it goes back to what I said trust your stomach don’t make decisions before you have to or before you’re comfortable making them and get perspective from the different places and I am very blessed with a very good network of friends I know what I don’t know but I also know how to find the people who I think are experts or whose opinions I’ll Trust on different things and I find that is an amazingly efficient way for me to form points of view and people I think because maybe I’ve been so generous to people with my time and my advice and my willingness to put things in the world I find that the more I have things where I’m calling on people people are very willing and able to do a lot to help me as well as we come close to a wind down here I have a selfish question you own the New York Observer you spent time in media you’ve thought about media a lot you gave me this book that I read in the last couple days called the man that time forgot about the founding of time which was amazing like basically two guys one guy started fortune and time and life and all these Sports Illustrated like all these different things at a moment in time you posed an interesting question to me which was if you were starting let’s say Fortune today from scratch how would you do it and so same question back to you what have you learned about media as an owner of a very well-known media brand and as just an observer of the landscape what would you say about the current state of it and observations that you would have for me couple thoughts on this one is my experience at The Observer was I went into a prestigious old world model and then I tried to convince journalists that there was this thing called the internet coming and we need to do transformation of the business plan and I was called all kinds of names for trying to do that it was an unbelievable experience I learned a lot along the way running a newspaper is a crappy business so you really have to learn how to take the nickel off the dollars so just as a pure operator I learned a lot about how to run a business I learned a lot about dealing with journalists and what I would say is that the business has changed a lot since then when we were in the white house we would have some reporters and we would say well why can’t you write positive stories about the things we’re doing in the White House and what they basically said to us is that if we do we’re going to get killed on Twitter from our friends and I think the ecosystem was so negative that social media became like the assignment editors for a lot of these reporters over time and I think that that’s largely broken down if I was going to do something today from scratch I think the most most powerful form of media is the podcast I think that’s clearly in its early stages of what it’s going to be and if you think about the news business X has become so powerful that I was looking last night for updates on Syria and I was getting all of my news up to speed on X from what I was looking to find so what was interesting was X has almost become the raw material of the news and then if you think about what journalists do they basically pick and choose from raw material and which opinions and which quotes to do and they’re almost a form of editing whether they like it or not and imposing their Viewpoint of how you should process this news based on the sources they choose the quotes they choose the experts they choose to quote and it’s becoming I think a very Arcane method of being informed and then what I find is that now people with social media have the ability to give their replies as well so it’s one of these things where you can’t write one of these news articles about some now and then have the full word because if you go too crazy people can then respond and actually get a lot more pressed and it becomes a little degrading to the reporter so if you’re in the print news business I think that’s a very very challenging business right now I think the podcast is very interesting it’s funny like we were talking about that book was about Brit Haden who was partners with Henry loose it’s funny time was created for the person who didn’t have time right it was supposed to be a digest for people and then over time it became a little bit more high-end in terms of what it tried to be if I was to kind of recut time today I would make time for the person who has time and I think that what you’re finding is that with podcasts people want to be informed and if they are interested in something there’s now this free market of information available and if you’re somewhat interested and motivated you could learn about almost anything very quickly and now with AI that’s going to change even more so so I would almost say that finding a way to help people navigate the amounts of high quality information that’s out there and synthesizing it for them to say if you’re somebody looking to learn about these topics or you want to find out about events of this week these are the places that will give you real information and I think that people should think about like I consume my news now mostly on X and then through podcasts and occasionally I’ll look at the Wall Street Journal to go through it the post is still the post I love the post the New York Post that is but a lot of the other stuff is just very much you’re getting their perspective you go to the columnist it’s just a bunch of angry people yelling about the world who don’t know anything anyway again I saw this when I was in government these were the people telling me that everything I was doing was wrong and then couldn’t acknowledge when we got something right and I was just like forget about these people like who needs their approvals who cares what they say but I think that podcasts are a very powerful medium and if you were doing media I think it’s about more how do you give people high quality information for people who are looking for it instead of just a news Digest this has been so much fun tons and tons of ground covered I can’t believe the amount of things that you’ve done in 43 44 years and I think you know my traditional closing question what is the kindest thing that anyone’s ever done for you I know this may sound really strange but when my father was in prison he had a friend who just called and took me to lunch and said how are you doing at the time it was very challenging for our family very challenging emotionally we had a lot of issues in the company because Banks couldn’t do business with somebody who had a criminal record so we were dealing with a lot of problems and just the fact that people were willing to go out of their way to say how can I help you at that time just meant the world to me and I think that that’s probably been the foundational thing in terms of how I approach people which is I try to be a friend to the people who I care about in a way that I appreciated the way people were to me during my most vulnerable time just being there for people when no one else is there that means the world around that time there was a subway ride that you took I think for hours around New York City can you just close by describing that what you learned at the end of it so at the time I was working at the Manhattan District Attorney’s office I wanted to be a prosecutor I was at NYU Law School I remember my first day back in work it was obviously a little humiliated and I didn’t know what to take but my team there was really awesome it was an amazing place to work the District Attorney’s Office back then under Morgan th at the end of the day I went home I took the subway stop from I think Canal Street up to Aster where I was living at the time I got to my stop and I just didn’t get up and I just stayed on the train and I just didn’t want to go out of the subway and I just was sitting there watching people and I was looking at their faces and I was kind of creating a story for each person and so I remember remember I saw somebody a young person I said maybe they just found out their parent has cancer or I saw another woman I said maybe this woman doesn’t have food to eat tonight and she’s going to be hungry and I kind of thought to myself you know what I have my problems now nobody knows on this Subway what I’m going through everyone here could have their own problems that they’re holding inside of them as well and so my view was is just give everyone the benefit of the doubt you never know what people are going through in a moment and just simple acts of kindness and being good to people can go a long way and again I think if you look at the criticism that I’ve had over the last years people ask me why it doesn’t bother me that much and what I say is because it’s mostly from people who have never met me who don’t know me and so I’m not going to let them impact how I feel about myself or impact my mood or really take much space in my brain I feel like as long as you can be kind to the people you interact with and treat people well then you could do a lot of good in the world a wonderful place to close thank you so much for your time thank you if you enjoy this episode check out join colossus. there you’ll find every episode of this podcast complete with transcripts show notes and resources to keep learning you can also sign up for our newsletter Colossus weekly where we condense episodes to the Big Ideas quotations and more as well as share the best content we find on the internet every week n [Music]