YouSaid · the spoken record

Jared Kushner

lines on the record: 249
first: 2023-10-11
most recent: 2023-10-11
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“So for the listeners, Muhammad bin Salman is now the crown prince of Saudi Arabia. He has risen to that position over the last couple of years, and he's been a tremendous reformer for the country. He's gone in and he's really modernized the economy. He's put a lot more investment into the country. He's marginalized the religious police, and he's really done a good job to bring modernization, a lot of reform. So he's been a great reformer. What he's like as a person is he's very high energy. He's got tremendous candle power, very, very smart, incredibly well read when he was younger. His father would give him a book a week and make him report.”
2023-10-11 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #399 – Jared Kushner: Israel, Palestine, Hamas, Gaza, Iran, and the Middle East · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And some of them will actually reform and maybe rearn our faith. So I think that there could be an optimistic tone. Again, the years of Trump, I think that he was an outsider. And he represented something that was existential for the system. You think about for the 30 years before you were either part of the Clinton dynasty or the Bush dynasty. I think a lot of people in the country felt like that whole class, whether you're wearing a red shirt or a blue shirt, wasn't representing them and Trump represented a true outsider to that system. And I do think that as he went in there, there was a lot of norms that were broken to try to stop him from changing the traditional power structure. So I think that we're at a time where maybe there will be an optimistic breakthrough where you'll have institutions that will allow for a lot more transparency into what”
2023-10-11 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #399 – Jared Kushner: Israel, Palestine, Hamas, Gaza, Iran, and the Middle East · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It is, but I'll give you again an optimistic side of it is that what you're seeing now with social media is I do think with what's happening at X, there is now more of a reversion towards more egalitarian, right? Egalitarianism of information. And so for many years, the media publications were the gateholders. They were the gatekeepers. And then you had these social media companies that grew. They became so powerful. But then they were tilting the scales why they were doing it. We can go through long explanations for that. But if there truly is a real forum and a democratization of information, then you would think that the marketplace of ideas would surface the real ones and discredit the non-real ones. And I think that as a society, we're starting to kind of come to grips with the fact that the power dynamic is changing and that some of these institutions that we used to have a lot of faith in don't deserve our faith.”
2023-10-11 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #399 – Jared Kushner: Israel, Palestine, Hamas, Gaza, Iran, and the Middle East · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Ballot make the sacrifice and go put on the pads and get hit and hit others. I think that you need those people and I wish more people who had maybe the moral wiring that you discussed would be putting on a helmet and going to play because it's hard. It's hard.”
2023-10-11 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #399 – Jared Kushner: Israel, Palestine, Hamas, Gaza, Iran, and the Middle East · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“When that system gets invented, you'll share with me what it is, but it's a Look, let me give you another way to frame it, which is, and this was kind of the revelation we spoke before about when I was getting my butt kicked by the Russian investigation and all the different areas. But kind of the basic framework I looked at was I said, okay, this all feels tough, but I said, the game's the game. The game's been here way longer, but way before I came and it'll be here way, long after I leave. And so I have two choices. I can complain that the game's tough. It's not fair. It's not moral, or I can go and I can try to play the game as hard as possible. And I think that there's two different things, right? You have people who are willing to kind of sit in the stands and they're willing to yell at the players or make their points known, or you have people who are willing to suit up and get in the arena and go play. And I have a lot of respect for the people who suit up and go play. And again, some of them, you know, I wish they would play for different means, but the fact that they're willing to put their name on the”
2023-10-11 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #399 – Jared Kushner: Israel, Palestine, Hamas, Gaza, Iran, and the Middle East · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I'd like to say that's true, Lex. I think it's just way more complicated. I mean, you look what happened this week with Kevin McCarthy, right? He did what he thought was morally right. He thought, you know, he did a bipartisan deal. He was told that they would have his back. And then the moment things got tough, they cut him loose. So again, I don't know if that's the right thing or the wrong thing, right? I've also seen leaders on the other end say, I'm going to do things that are short-term, more selfish. But the way they justify to themselves is to say, I believe that myself staying in power is existential to the greater good. So I will do things that maybe are not in the greater good now because I believe that my maintaining power is. And so it's complicated. In an idealized world, I'd love to believe that's the case, but it's just way more complicated than that.”
2023-10-11 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #399 – Jared Kushner: Israel, Palestine, Hamas, Gaza, Iran, and the Middle East · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's like in the private sector, you're standing on flat ground. You choose which fights you take on when you take on. Politics, it's like you're standing on a ball, and what you have to realize is that there's maybe like 10 things that you have to do, but there's a potential cost to taking on each one that might destabilize you. You fall off the ball, and then you lose your opportunity to pursue those. You have to always be kind of marking everything to market and going through your calculations to make sure you can accomplish what you want to without falling off the ball and losing your opportunity to make a difference.”
2023-10-11 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #399 – Jared Kushner: Israel, Palestine, Hamas, Gaza, Iran, and the Middle East · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Day rowing together in order to get it done. It's a beautiful thing. And you really learn what people are about. And so when you go through an experience like that, you learn who's in it for themselves. You learn who's in it for the cause. And for every thing you read about in the press of a fight I had with somebody because we were at odds. I have about 100 people who have become lifelong friends because I respect the way that when we were under fire together, they got better, they were competent, and they were there to serve for the right reason. And so I guess the answer is yes, it is possible. You have to be careful because there are a lot of mercurial people there. I always say the politicians are like gladiators. I didn't have as much respect for politicians till I got there. But if you think about it, everyone who's got a congressional seat or a Senate seat, there's 25 people back at home who want their job, who think they're smarter than them, who are trying to backstab them. And so I always say that the political”
2023-10-11 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #399 – Jared Kushner: Israel, Palestine, Hamas, Gaza, Iran, and the Middle East · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The answer is yes, and the answer is no. So I made some incredible friends, lifelong friends, through my time in Washington, but the way I think about it from politics, and I think in geopolitics as well, is I would say that politicians really don't have friends. Politicians have interests. And as long as you kind of follow that rule, you should be able to know how to rate where your relationship with a given person falls in the spectrum. But I do think I was the exception. I did make some tremendous friends. And again, I'd go back to what I said about negotiation, where you're in a situation where there's really nothing in it for any of you personally, but you're in a foxhole together and nobody in Washington could get anything done by themselves. So you have people coming from all different backgrounds, all different experiences, all different geographies coming together, agreeing on an objective, creating a plan, and then every”
2023-10-11 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #399 – Jared Kushner: Israel, Palestine, Hamas, Gaza, Iran, and the Middle East · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Really, a balancing act, but it was an amazing thing. And we're very closely on that with Van Jones and Jessica Jackson, who also gave me a lot of help on the left. And it was an amazing thing. Had a great team too.”
2023-10-11 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #399 – Jared Kushner: Israel, Palestine, Hamas, Gaza, Iran, and the Middle East · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Hand to hand combat meetings. The cool thing about this, so everyone always says, I always get frustrated when I hear a lawmaker say, oh, the Senate's not what it used to be or a Congress isn't what it used to be. Things are broken today. I don't think that's true. I think, you know, going through the process, I think that our founders were totally genius in the way that they designed our system of government. And what I saw is you just have to work it. So everyone knows the power of their vote. Some would give it to me easily. Some wouldn't give it to me easily. Some would trade it for other things. Some would withhold it because they were pissed about other things. And it was just hand-to-hand combat. So it was just making calls, using the phone, going walk in the halls, going to lunches, you know, hosting dinners at my house. It was just, it was a nonstop lobbying effort. And by the way, it was also adjudicating issues and making people feel like they were heard, hearing their issues, and then trying to find solutions that you don't put something in that then tips off where you lose a whole coalition.”
2023-10-11 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #399 – Jared Kushner: Israel, Palestine, Hamas, Gaza, Iran, and the Middle East · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The middle executive, the low executive, the intern. And through that process, I really got an education on how Congress works, on how to pass legislation. I was negotiating text. I was negotiating back and forth. And I built a lot of trust. Again, I would deal with whether it's Hakeem Jeffreys or Cedric Richmond. We built a lot of trust. We'd speak three times a day. These guys had my back. The ACLU, again, I never thought they were suing our administration every day or every other day on something. But for whatever reason, we built trust and we were able to work together. And then also with the real conservative groups because there was a lot, a big part of the conservative base that felt like we should be giving people a second chance. And in addition to that, this will keep our country safer and it will reduce the cost of what we spend on prisons. And so it was a great effort. And I was very, very proud that we were able to get it done under President Trump.”
2023-10-11 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #399 – Jared Kushner: Israel, Palestine, Hamas, Gaza, Iran, and the Middle East · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Supporter, but he made me work very hard to put together a coalition of Republicans and Democrats and law enforcement we had the support from the policemen. We had the support from the ACLU. And ultimately we were able to get it together. And it was an amazing thing. We ended up getting 87 votes in the Senate. happened for me at a time while the Russia investigation stuff was still happening. A new chief of staff came in, John Kelly. He basically marginalized me and the operations. So I had kind of less day-to-day responsibilities in the White House. And so for me this effort became one of my full-time efforts along with negotiating the Mexico trade deal and along with the Middle East efforts. And the reason why that was great was because it didn't have a lot of support from the Republican caucus originally. And people thought there was no way it would happen. So I really was able to be the chief executive”
2023-10-11 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #399 – Jared Kushner: Israel, Palestine, Hamas, Gaza, Iran, and the Middle East · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Regular cocaine was. And I think a lot of the motivations what people say in retrospect was that crack was more of a black jug and cocaine was more of a white drug. And so there was a really racial disparity in terms of what the application of these sentences were. So they then revised that to make it 18 to 1. And what we did in this bill is we allowed it to go retroactive to allow people who were in prison with sentences under the what we thought was the racist law to be able to make an application to a judge in order to be dismissed. And it was based on good behavior, being rehabilitated and the fact that they would have a low probability of offending in the future. And so that was really the meat of it. And there was a couple other things in there we did as well, which were also quite good. So we did it, worked very closely with the Democrats, Republicans to do it. At first, President Trump was a little bit skeptical of it because he's a big, strong law and order.”
2023-10-11 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #399 – Jared Kushner: Israel, Palestine, Hamas, Gaza, Iran, and the Middle East · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“In other states where they basically put a lot of job training, alcohol and addiction treatment programs in the prisons as a way to incentivize the prisoners to work on themselves while they're there in order to allow them to re-enter society. It's turned out to be very successful so far. They just had a report that showed that the general population has had a 47% recidivism rate, meaning that people who leave federal prison, half of them go back, and people who have now taken this program, only 12% of them go back. So number one, you're making communities safer because if people are going to now get a job and enter society instead of committing future crimes, you're avoiding future crimes. And number two, you're giving people a second chance at life. And so that was the first part of it. The second thing we did was there was a rule passed in the 90s that basically penalized crack cocaine at 100 times the penalty of what”
2023-10-11 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #399 – Jared Kushner: Israel, Palestine, Hamas, Gaza, Iran, and the Middle East · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And different prisons into the company, into a second chance program, which we're very, very proud of doing. And what we saw through our micro experience was that if you give people mentorship, if you give them job training, a lot of people leave, they have addiction issues, and they can't find housing. And so, you know, people leave prison with a criminal record. They're less likely to go back and reintegrate in society without help from different institutions that can help them.”
2023-10-11 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #399 – Jared Kushner: Israel, Palestine, Hamas, Gaza, Iran, and the Middle East · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Sure. So we passed a law called the First Step Act, which was the largest prison in criminal justice reform bill that's been done maybe in 30, 40, 50 years in the US. And so what it basically did was two things. Number one is it took the prison system and it took a certain class of offenders and allowed them to become eligible for earlier release if they go through this certain trainings that will allow them to have a lower probability of going back. So stepping back, you look at the prison system, you say, what's the purpose? Is it to punish? Is it to warehouse? Is it to rehabilitate? And I do think that we're a country that believes in second chances. I saw firsthand when my father was a client of the system how inefficient it was and how much better it could be. And when my father got out, we didn't run from that experience. He started hiring people from Rikers Island.”
2023-10-11 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #399 – Jared Kushner: Israel, Palestine, Hamas, Gaza, Iran, and the Middle East · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Try to beat to them is just a good friend. I try to be somebody who they can talk about things with. I don't go in trying to tell them what to do on different things. And I think that that's a big thing is that people just need friends and they need conversation. And if they have that, then hopefully that allows them to keep their head in the right place.”
2023-10-11 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #399 – Jared Kushner: Israel, Palestine, Hamas, Gaza, Iran, and the Middle East · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Definitely, you know, you mention about power, money corrupting. There's a great quote I heard a friend of mine say. There's a guy Michael Harris, who was one of the founders of Death Row Records. And he was being interviewed recently, and they asked him about what happened with Shook Knight. And his line was, you know, money just makes you more of what you already are, which I thought was a very elegant way of saying it. And I would see this time and time again in the White House where you had people who were now given a lot of responsibility and power and it went to their head and they acted very crazily. And maybe didn't act in a way that I thought was always conducive to the objective. So I think it's a very big problem that you have, whether it's something that's solvable. I think it's about having the right leaders and hopefully for the leaders having good friends. I mean, I'm still friends with a lot of the people I interacted with when I was in government. And the number one thing I”
2023-10-11 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #399 – Jared Kushner: Israel, Palestine, Hamas, Gaza, Iran, and the Middle East · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“In some ways, allowed me to keep my grounding and to understand what was truly important in life, for when I ended up going through those other moments.”
2023-10-11 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #399 – Jared Kushner: Israel, Palestine, Hamas, Gaza, Iran, and the Middle East · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And I think during that time, my father was just Realizing that maybe he had gotten disconnected from the grounding and the values. And again, I think he also accepted maybe he could have blamed others for acting inappropriately. But I respect the fact that he took responsibility himself and said, I can't control the actions of other people. I can't control what they do is right and wrong. I can just control my actions. As I go on the next journeys in my life and I go to government, I go to Washington. I mean, I even think through the craziness of going from visiting my father in a prison to 10 years later sitting in the office in the White House next to the President of the United States. And like I think about that story and that it's a story that only God could write. And I really believe that you have to have a lot of faith because the lows and the highs are both so extreme and unbelievable that I feel like those low moments.”
2023-10-11 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #399 – Jared Kushner: Israel, Palestine, Hamas, Gaza, Iran, and the Middle East · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That may be certain rules didn't apply to him. And I think that that's where he made a mistake. And I think he had a lot of regret that he made the mistake. And, you know, my father is a very humble person. He's a very moral person. For me, with my humility, my brother and I joke that we give our credit for being humble, number one, to being Mets fans because every year you have a lot of promise and that it never ends up paying off, although now with Steve Cohen hopefully run a different trajectory. But the other thing is also our mother. You know, our mother really raised us to be very humble, to be, you know, we knew we had a lot, but every Sunday morning, my mom was there clipping the coupons, the cereal we ate in our house was based on what was on sale versus what we liked, you know, when we would have a problem with our teachers in school. And I'd say, well, teacher doesn't like me. She'd say, well, I'm not calling them. It's your job to make the teacher like you. And so my mother gave us a lot of that. My father gave us a lot of the grounding.”
2023-10-11 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #399 – Jared Kushner: Israel, Palestine, Hamas, Gaza, Iran, and the Middle East · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Later that day or the next day, he got up and started walking. He had an ankle monitor for whatever reason the prosecutor was such so aggressive that he was a flight risk. So they made him wear an ankle monitor. They were very, very aggressive and nasty. And at the time, my father was the biggest donor to Democrats. The prosecutor was a Republican. It was a very political thing. And what happened was he was walking around the pool and I just started walking with him. And he said to me, you know, Jared in life, sometimes we get so powerful that we believe that we're the dealer, but we're not the dealer. God's the dealer. And we have to come down to earth to understand, like you said. So what I took from that was that my father, with all of his success, had started to believe that”
2023-10-11 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #399 – Jared Kushner: Israel, Palestine, Hamas, Gaza, Iran, and the Middle East · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“What this challenge was going to bring and if there would be a life for him after it. So I could see that he had a lot of fear. And he really wasn't saying much. And then I didn't know what to do. And so I just stood by him and stood close.”
2023-10-11 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #399 – Jared Kushner: Israel, Palestine, Hamas, Gaza, Iran, and the Middle East · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The way I interpret at the time, and those were very, very memorable words, and it occurred after I picked up my father from the arraignment. I drove him down. I drove the car and my father and I are very, very close. And he didn't say a word for the whole time. And I think he was processing, number one, what was happening to him. And I couldn't even imagine. But I actually think the bigger pain for him because my father is such a committed person to the family. It's like, did I let my family down? Did I let my kids down? And I do think he felt at that moment his life was over. He couldn't really see past.”
2023-10-11 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #399 – Jared Kushner: Israel, Palestine, Hamas, Gaza, Iran, and the Middle East · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Also changed, you know, the people I interacted with spending weekends with my father down in a prison in Alabama. I met the other inmates. I met their families. I spent time then trying to advise the children of other people who were going through the same experience that I'd gone through on how to navigate it correctly. And you just learn a lot about the world. And you see that, you know, in life, everything could get taken from you, your status, your money, your friends. I saw that certain people were very disloyal to my father at the time who he thought were friends. It was only a handful. But again, I learned from those people, how can I be a true friend to people? How can I be better? And I learned a tremendous amount through that experience.”
2023-10-11 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #399 – Jared Kushner: Israel, Palestine, Hamas, Gaza, Iran, and the Middle East · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Brother, how could I be there for my mother? How could I be there for my father's business? And I just went into battle mode and I put my armor on and I just ran into it. And for the next two years, every day was painful. I mean, I was dealing with banks. I was dealing with the company who still had subpoenas. I was still in law school. I tell my father I wanted to drop out of law school and business school. But he said, please don't. So I would basically go to law school one day a week, or maybe I'd skip it most days and I'd go to his office every day and my friends would joke that if my professors wanted to fail me, the law professor would have to give me a test that had four pictures and say, circle who your professor is, you know, but I would basically take a week off. I'd read the books and I did well and I got my degrees. And it was just a very, very challenging time. But like I said to you before, is that you learn the most about life and you learn the most about humanity and yourself when you're in your most challenging periods. And I'll say that.”
2023-10-11 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #399 – Jared Kushner: Israel, Palestine, Hamas, Gaza, Iran, and the Middle East · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You know, everything changed overnight when my father got arrested. Obviously, it's very embarrassing for a family when you're on the front page of the papers. I would see the newspapers writing all these things about my father that I didn't think were representative of the person that I knew. It was a big change for our family. And, you know, I was angry. I was angry. I said, you know, I could be angry at the prosecutor. I could be angry at my father's brother. I could be angry at my father's lawyers. I could be angry at my father for making this mistake. And then I kind of said, that's not going to change anything. And I had a real shift. And I do think that that was a turning point in my life where I basically said, let me focus on the things I can control. Let me focus on the positive things I can do. And from that moment forward, I said, how can I be a great son to my father? How can I be a great older brother slash substitute father for my two sisters, my younger brother?”
2023-10-11 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #399 – Jared Kushner: Israel, Palestine, Hamas, Gaza, Iran, and the Middle East · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You know, my parents always said, you know, do good in school, work hard. It was very focused on my athletics. I was captain of the basketball team. Captain the hockey team. You know, I ran a marathon with my father. And it was always about pursuing, went to Harvard, graduated with honors. And that was in NYU, pursuing a law degree and a business degree. And I was working at the Manhattan District Attorney's Office at the time, actually thinking I wanted to go into public service because my father always taught us we were always surrounded by politicians and he always said, you know, my parents came to America. They lived in the land of opportunity. And they had these opportunities because this is the progressed country in the world. And so you should be successful, work hard, don't ever let your opportunities become your disadvantages because you have advantages in life. You have to work harder. And that's what he instilled in myself and my brother. And he always pushed us to make the most of ourselves. And when we did that,”
2023-10-11 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #399 – Jared Kushner: Israel, Palestine, Hamas, Gaza, Iran, and the Middle East · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Sure. So my father is an amazing person and we grew up in New Jersey. My father was a big developer, great entrepreneur, built an amazing business. He got into a dispute with two of his siblings and through that dispute they basically took all the documents in his company, went to the U.S. attorney's office and turned into from a civil dispute into a real public dispute. My father did something wrong in that process. And when he got arrested for that, he basically said, you know what, what I did was wrong. And he took his medicine and he did it like a man. And he said, I'm going to go to prison. And he did that for a year. And so for me, that was a very challenging time in the family. Obviously, it was a shock. It was a total change. I mean, I grew up. My childhood was, I think, a very nice child.”
2023-10-11 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #399 – Jared Kushner: Israel, Palestine, Hamas, Gaza, Iran, and the Middle East · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Pretty good healthcare system. A lot of green parks. People know the turnpike, but it's got a lot to it. That's really great. So I'm a big, big fan of Jersey.”
2023-10-11 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #399 – Jared Kushner: Israel, Palestine, Hamas, Gaza, Iran, and the Middle East · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But for me as a kid, my father would take me. Sometimes I'd sit with him in the meeting. Sometimes I'd be at the table next to him, he'd give me a bunch of quarters to put in the music machine that they would have on the wall. And it was always just a great experience doing it. And Jersey, and I joke that, you know, if you grew up in Jersey, you grew up with just enough of a chip on your shoulder that you have to go and make something of yourself in life. It's a special place. I had an amazing childhood there and very, very proud to be from the state. And I will just give a little bit of a plug now because the state has now actually turned the corner and they had a $10 billion budget surplus for many years. You know, it was a state that was basically bankrupt. And now actually under a pretty progressive Democrat governor, Phil Murphy, he's turned the state around and it actually has a very bright future ahead. And it's probably one of the best places to raise a family in the country, right? It's got very low crime, one of the best public school systems in the country.”
2023-10-11 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #399 – Jared Kushner: Israel, Palestine, Hamas, Gaza, Iran, and the Middle East · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Always fresh, yeah. The thing with diners, there's so much to love about him. And I grew up. Obviously, New Jersey, when I'd go with my father to business, he'd always stop. We'd need at a diner late night, I'd come back with my friends. We'd stop at a diner. And it's a tradition that Ivan and I love doing as well. And I think there's a notion of it's very egalitarian in that people from all places are there. You could order basically whatever you want. I mean, the menus at the diners look like the phone book. And it's amazing how they keep so much fresh ingredients to do it. At least the good ones do. I'd love as a jersey guy, you get mozzarella sticks and an omelette at any hour of the day because most of them are open 24 hours. And that's basically my Vanka, my go-to. We'll throw in a milkshake or two as well.”
2023-10-11 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #399 – Jared Kushner: Israel, Palestine, Hamas, Gaza, Iran, and the Middle East · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Love is very important. But then there's also a lot that I've learned from her, always getting me to read different books or learn different things which I love. But she's also, I think, an amazing role model. And I go through our time in Washington where there were so many people who were, I thought, very nasty to her unfoundedly. And I'm not talking about individually because, again, most people interacted with her were super kind, but I would see people on Twitter, different places go after. And she always stayed elegant. And I felt like that was something that she never stooped down to a lower level. She kept her elegance the whole time. And she really went to Washington wanting to be a force of good. And I see all the time that she follows her heart. She does what's right. And she has a very strong moral compass. And I feel very lucky to have her as a partner and I respect her.”
2023-10-11 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #399 – Jared Kushner: Israel, Palestine, Hamas, Gaza, Iran, and the Middle East · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So I think it was just number one knowing that you had a partner and knowing that you had somebody who loved you and believed in you. I think that was definitely by far the biggest of anything.”
2023-10-11 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #399 – Jared Kushner: Israel, Palestine, Hamas, Gaza, Iran, and the Middle East · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It made me better, and it taught me how to be a better friend to people who are in tough situations. And I tried to just get tougher and I tried to just get better and work through it.”
2023-10-11 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #399 – Jared Kushner: Israel, Palestine, Hamas, Gaza, Iran, and the Middle East · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Obviously, we want them to succeed, not to fail, but let's take on the big things. Let's try to do that. So I think it's just very basic that you're in a situation. I've made decisions. I can't go back and change decisions in the past. I still felt very blessed to be in the position I was in. And I knew that I just had to work through it. And like I said, I was very lucky to have support for my wife and from my family and from good friends. Again, I think I'd chosen very good friends in life and my friends were with me. I had one friend who, you know, my lowest moment got on the plane. He lived in Arizona, got on a plane and came just have dinner with me to say, just pick your head up. I know you're down now. You're going to be fine. Just fight through. That meant a lot to me. And again, I always think in my life, you know, you don't learn as much from your successes. You don't learn as much from your high points. You learn the most about who you want to be and how the world works from your lowest moments. And at those lowest moments, it just.”
2023-10-11 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #399 – Jared Kushner: Israel, Palestine, Hamas, Gaza, Iran, and the Middle East · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I didn't have a choice. I mean, I could have spent every day feeling sorry for myself or complaining or saying things aren't fair. But the general way I looked at it was that in life, every opportunity has a cost. And you could look at it and say, maybe this was a massive cost, either in dollars or in time or in reputation or in emotional drain. But you could also say that I had an opportunity to work in the White House and I had an opportunity to work on some of the hardest challenges. You talk about how that's not celebrated. That is something very different. In the private sector, when you take on big challenges, that is celebrated. In government, when you take on big challenges, people want to see it fail or they want to criticize those people who are trying to take that on. And I think that's wrong. And I think that, you know, as a country, we should be thinking big, we should be dreaming big, and we should be encouraging our politicians to try and fail more and to go and to take on big things, knowing that there's risk of failing.”
2023-10-11 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #399 – Jared Kushner: Israel, Palestine, Hamas, Gaza, Iran, and the Middle East · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Wasn't always fun, but we got through and thank God it's something people don't talk about. And it has been amazing to me just the lack of self-awareness and reflection of a lot of the people who hyped this up for two years. They don't think there was anything wrong with it. And that's interesting. But my view is we got through it. It's good. So it's in the past. And then I started moving to the future. And that's really where I spent my time.”
2023-10-11 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #399 – Jared Kushner: Israel, Palestine, Hamas, Gaza, Iran, and the Middle East · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Donald a lot of credit for kind of having my back during that time and encouraging me just to kind of fight through it. And then I also had to make sure that I didn't allow that. In politics, it's a time duration game. In business, you have whatever duration you set for yourself. In politics, it's time duration. We had four years. Every day was sand through an hourglass. My mindset was, I need to accomplish as much as I can in these four years. And I guess the traditional game that's played in Washington is whether it's the media, the opposition. Their job is to distract you and then try to stop you from being as successful as you want to be. And so just fought through it.”
2023-10-11 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #399 – Jared Kushner: Israel, Palestine, Hamas, Gaza, Iran, and the Middle East · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So it was a surreal experience. I would say number one is I felt very confident that I hadn't done anything wrong. So I would always tell my lawyer, like, you know, the good news is I've got a good fact problem, right? Like I need a good lawyer to get me through it, but it's much easier to be a good lawyer if you have a very innocent client. And so, you know, the fact that I knew that I didn't have, I didn't believe that I had any legal liability helped me kind of intellectually separate the challenge I needed to do to fight through it from it. And then I just basically said, like, you know, I'd had hardship earlier in my life where I dealt with the situation with my father. And what I realized there is that you can't really spend energy on the things that you don't control. All you can do is spend your time and energy worrying about what you can control and then how do you react to the things that you have there. And so it took a lot of discipline. It took a lot of strength. And again, I give my wife Vanka.”
2023-10-11 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #399 – Jared Kushner: Israel, Palestine, Hamas, Gaza, Iran, and the Middle East · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The people, they had panels on CNN, like the news organization that I grew up thinking was the number one trusted name for news in the world talking about how I'd committed treason because I met with an ambassador and said we'd like to hear your perspective on what you think the policy should be in Syria where there was a big civil war happening and ISIS and a lot of different things. So it was quite a crazy time in that regard, but luckily, again, we were able to fight through it. It was a major distraction for our administration. I think we were able to kind of stay focused on the objectives and the policies, but it was a crazy time. And I learned a lot from that experience.”
2023-10-11 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #399 – Jared Kushner: Israel, Palestine, Hamas, Gaza, Iran, and the Middle East · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I felt like this is one of those things where they're going to try to catch you. And then if you step on the line, they catch you with one misrepresentation. They're going to try to put you in jail or worst of, you know, and so for me, that was a big concern. So it was amazing. My poor mom, I told her to stop reading whatever. I said, I promise you, we didn't do anything wrong. It's good. But, you know, she'd call me and say, well, you know, our friends were on the uppery side. We're talking with Chuck Schumer. I says, Jared's going to jail. You know, we know for sure that he colluded with the Russians. And this is like a leading senator saying things like this. And so it was just interesting for me to see how the whole world could believe something and be talking about it that I knew with 1,000% certainty was just not true. And so seeing that play out was very, very hard, obviously. You know, I was accused of a lot of things. There were times in Washington I was radioactive. I remember one weekend, you know, it was all over CNN.”
2023-10-11 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #399 – Jared Kushner: Israel, Palestine, Hamas, Gaza, Iran, and the Middle East · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Leanly staffed. And then they said that, you know, we were working with the Russians. And so at the time, I didn't take it too seriously because I knew there was no truth to it. But it was amazing to me to start seeing all of these institutions, whether it was CNN, the Washington Post, New York Times. These were news organizations that I grew up having a lot of respect for taking these accusations so seriously and then working themselves up in order to just cover it for two years. And then as a result, you had a special counsel, you had a house investigation, a Senate investigation. And I personally spent about, I think, over 20 hours just testifying before these different committees, again, spent millions of dollars out of my own pocket on my legal fees to make sure I was well represented. And the reason I did that was because I saw in Washington, it was like a sick game, right? It's almost like, you know, even though there was no underlying problems to the accusation.”
2023-10-11 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #399 – Jared Kushner: Israel, Palestine, Hamas, Gaza, Iran, and the Middle East · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So to give the listeners some context and people remember this now, it's been kind of swept away because it turned out not to be true was that after President Trump won the election in 2016, instead of the media saying we were wrong, because again, everyone thought he had zero chance of winning. They said, okay, well, we couldn't have been wrong. It must have been the Russians who worked with him. And so At first when this started coming up, I thought this was ridiculous. I mean, I was very intimately involved with the operations of the campaign. I was running the finance of the campaign. I was running the digital media of the campaign. I was running the schedule for the campaign. And I knew that on most days we had trouble working, coordinating with ourselves, you know, let alone, you know, collaborating with another government. And our colluding, as they called it. And so we did a great job. I think as an underdog campaign, very”
2023-10-11 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #399 – Jared Kushner: Israel, Palestine, Hamas, Gaza, Iran, and the Middle East · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Going to be of the different actions you take. And often government gets it wrong by taking an action that feels right but has big negative consequences down the road.”
2023-10-11 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #399 – Jared Kushner: Israel, Palestine, Hamas, Gaza, Iran, and the Middle East · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Be as competitive. They had more restrictions, more costs, they became less profitable. But these were the banks that were serving small business, which is the biggest crater of jobs in our country. And then as a result, the bigger banks got more powerful. And what happened in the country as a result of the regulations that they put in place, the wealth gap in the country grew. It didn't shrink. And so I think oftentimes what they say these regulations are intended to be, the result often becomes the opposite. And so what President Trump did in his administration was they did a massive deregulatory effort. And I think they pledged that for every one regulation they put on, because you do need some regulation in an economy and in a society, they would take off too. And in the first year, they limited eight regulations for everyone. And so that was just something I took from it, which was, I thought, very interesting. And you had to really, I think you just have to think through what are the consequences.”
2023-10-11 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #399 – Jared Kushner: Israel, Palestine, Hamas, Gaza, Iran, and the Middle East · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Legislated by Congress. They shouldn't be put in by bureaucrats who are basically saying, I want to follow this objective. So using kind of the power of the pen in order to do that. So the deregulatory effort was actually very critical to Trump's economic success that happened in the beginning of the administration. And then what I saw with regulation was anytime either there was legislation or regulation coming, the people pushing for it were usually the people who would benefit from the regulatory captures. You had these, you know, you look at the great financial crisis where you had this big banking reforms. Well, what happened during the big banking reforms? Then you had a big reduction in the amount of banks that occurred in the big banks became even bigger. Whereas I don't think that was the intention of the legislation, but the people who were writing the legislation and influencing it had a lot of the constituencies from those larger institutions. And then what happened as a result of that, a lot of these smaller institutions didn't have the ability to”
2023-10-11 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #399 – Jared Kushner: Israel, Palestine, Hamas, Gaza, Iran, and the Middle East · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So we don't have enough time on this podcast to go into it. Look, there's a lot of aspects that work as well, right? But I do think we've gotten too big. You know, Neil's book that you mentioned, you know, one of the things that I took from that, I read it, I think, in 2012, right in the middle of the great financial crisis, was he was talking about how government regulation often was put in place to deal with old crises, right? So it was never going to solve future problems. It was more to kind of create to solve for problems that had happened in the past. And I remember thinking about that. One thing I was very proud of the work of the Trump administration was that you had four years consecutively where there was a net decrease in the cost of regulations. So to give you a context, in the last year of Obama in 2016, there were 6 million man hours spent by the private sector complying with new federal regulations. And that's not really what the intent of our government was, right? If we have rules or regulations,”
2023-10-11 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #399 – Jared Kushner: Israel, Palestine, Hamas, Gaza, Iran, and the Middle East · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It wasn't a career political class. It was people coming in to show gratitude for the freedoms and the liberties that they enjoyed and then do their best to kind of help others have those same opportunities that they had. And then they'd go back and live their lives. And so I think that there's a lot of opportunity with our government of people with more business mindsets who are going to think about things from a solutions perspective, go and serve.”
2023-10-11 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #399 – Jared Kushner: Israel, Palestine, Hamas, Gaza, Iran, and the Middle East · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source