Jared Kushner

“My friend, Jared Kushner, who's obviously, you know, been involved in these administrations, he worked with Qatar, with Elad, and they built something where the permits only take, ah, 120 minutes there. So if you want a permit to build something, it'll get bac…”

“Yeah, so our respective firms helped set up this company called Brinko, which is a Company, which basically builds, it has both a common platform that is like data infra and evals and a bunch of other stuff for people to use. And then on top of that, it builds…”

“So I my fund and Jared's, which is affinity co-led it. So we each put in half and then we had a great sort of bevy of angels across AI”

“When I was in the White House the first time under President Trump this was part of the efforts that, that he was saying he wanted to focus on, and at his direction, actually, I reached out to TSMC and was in touch with them then to Push them to try and start…”

“The people that they're hiring now at like third and fourth levels into the government are better than the people who are willing to come work for us at the top levels in the first administration.”

“I think that it's very, very important to have private sector people going into government, doing tours of duty versus just having a permanent political class which I think is is not necessarily great for the long-term interests of America.”

“The first actual asset was an asset that I was able to secure vis-a-vis a relationship with Jared Kushner. Who was one of my earliest partners as well.”

“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…”

“Leased the whole building, and we ended up selling it for about a hundred sixty million about a year later.”

“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'…”

“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 overcomplicate it or jam them up with a lot of minutia that doesn't really matter.”

“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 o…”

“I sat with MBZ, who's now the president of UAE. At the time, he was the crown prince, but he was the de facto ruler of the country.”

“It was because I came with no subject matter expertise in the Middle East.”

“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 I think that the doctrine that I used in the Middle East, which I think was different than what was done previously, was that I was focused more on mutual future interests instead of relitigating old problems.”

“And I think that that's the right formula for people to be using going forward for diplomacy, not how do we out 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…”

“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 …”

“In some cases with President Trump, he would just eliminate the status quos and then force people to try different status quos.”

“If your policy has 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.”

“One of the jobs I got was to build the wall and work on figuring out how to secure the border”

“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 pret…”

“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.”

“I was in the most covered building in the world, yet most of what they wrote was not accurate about us”

“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 differe…”

“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 comfortab…”

“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.”

“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…”

“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 whi…”

“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 I said, with all due respect sir, you don't have a messaging problem. You have a fact problem.”

“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 mak…”

“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.”

“And Doug McMillan from Walmart at the time said, you know what? If our country's asking us to do this, we're going to do it. We'll take the liability.”

“And so we ended up finding more Q-tips in a factory in Italy, and we sent some C-seventeens from the military to pick them up before anyone noticed they were there.”

“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 we did four finalists, and there was only one person we interviewed who said they could do it in under a year. All the experts said it would take us two to three years to do it. It was a guy, Dr. Monsef Slaoui.”

“And he'd created more vaccines than anyone alive, so I said, okay, well, you've got the job, and so we put him in charge”

“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.”

“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 nonstop effort towards bringing transformational change.”

“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 counsel sitting across the desk.”

“For my service in government, which I volunteered for, I didn't take a salary, paid for my own healthcare, I've now done 33 hours of testimony between the House, the Senate, special counsel, grand jury, and I've paid for all my legal fees myself, which is in t…”

“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 Qatar was resolved.”

“Sheikh Mohammed, who's now the prime minister, I spoke to him every day, about three times a day for a hundred days straight.”

“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 I was helpful to opening that channel with them during my time. I write about it in my book.”

“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 eight percent interest before we get our profits.”

“I remember we were investing in Warby Parker and Harry's and a whole bunch of other ones. He invested in Spotify, and I'd sit with him on the investment committee for the first couple of funds, and it was just extraordinary.”

“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.”

“The only excuse for not being on time is that you didn't leave early enough.”

“I've really been spending a lot of time helping people get up to speed. Who are going into the incoming administration on all of the challenges that we face so they can avoid those challenges on any advice they call for to figure out how on the files that I wo…”

“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 humil…”

“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 b…”

“He's a very big and out of the box thinker, and I think he's going to do some very disruptive things in the world. And look, some things may not go perfectly, but I think a lot of things will go very, very well.”

“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 …”

“A lot of our good people are getting recruited into the government now”

“So we started a company recently with Elad Gill, who's one of the top investors in Silicon Valley in the AI space.”

“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 capex needs that they never had be…”

“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.”