Knowledge Fight Interactive Search Tool

All Episodes

Previous Next

Sept. 11, 2022 - Rubin Report - Dave Rubin

01:06:05

Exposing the CDC's Errors, Leakers & the Lying Media | Jared Kushner | POLITICS | Rubin Report

Participants

Main voices

dave rubin

09:16

jared kushner

56:22

Large

Audio Only |

Scroll

Show episode speakers

Speaker	Time	Text
jared kushner ▲ ● ▼		You have media sources that you thought were these pristine, amazing institutions like the New York Times or the Washington Post or CNN or MSNBC, but every single day and every single night they're running more Articles are running more stories saying that, oh, the breaking news.
		The walls are crashing.
		The walls are crashing in.
		And I'd see it every day.
		And I'd turn on Rachel Maddow at night, and I was like, holy cow.
		Do people actually believe this?
		Schumer used to be a close friend of our family.
		And he was going around the Upper East Side telling all my parents' friends, Jared's about to be indicted.
		He's going to go to jail.
		We know it for sure.
		We have all the facts, what they did to collude with Russia.
dave rubin ▲ ● ▼		They were basically denying an election.
unidentified		We're going to have to talk about that in just a second.
dave rubin ▲ ● ▼		Breaking history.
		Jared Kushner, good to see you, my friend.
		How's it going?
jared kushner ▲ ● ▼		Doing great.
jared kushner ▲ ● ▼		Thank you for having me on, David.
dave rubin ▲ ● ▼		I am glad to be sitting here with you.
		First off, they put you at number one in the New York Times.
		I don't think the New York Times likes you very much, and they did it.
		How does that feel?
jared kushner ▲ ● ▼		Because they didn't put me on there at all for my last book, so this is a little bit It is funny that it's given this height as a goal to attain but I think that is the goal that all the people who are authors try to attain so it's nice to have achieved it but you try not to give it too much value as well.
		But it was kind of funny, they wrote a review that was pretty Unhinged in terms of how they characterized the book.
		And actually once that happened, the sales of the book started going up immediately.
		And I think it's because what's in the book contradicts a lot of what they wrote about Trump and his administration for four years.
		And so they obviously didn't want to see it in existence or want people to read a point of view that differs from theirs.
dave rubin ▲ ● ▼		They are not big fans of that, that is for sure.
		I do appreciate the fact that your book matches our local set pretty perfectly.
		As you know, I just got back on the grid.
		So you released, the book came out last week of August, right?
		So I did not get to see any of your press around this or anything.
		So I'm going into this pretty blind.
		And when I've mentioned you on the show, we've gotten to know each other a little bit personally over the last couple months since I moved down here.
		When I mention you on the show, I often say, people don't know what his voice sounds like.
		They see him, but they don't know what his voice sounds like.
		So let's do the beginning stuff first.
		I'm a Long Island guy.
		You're a Jersey guy.
		We have a similar background, somewhat similar ages.
		Tell people a little bit of the Jared Kushner growing up story.
jared kushner ▲ ● ▼		I thought you were going to ask me to sing or something with that buildup.
		So no, it's great.
		And obviously, it's been great having you and your family down in Florida now, your extended family.
		So basically, I grew up in New Jersey and had a lot of different experiences.
		I try to write it very quickly in the book, right?
		It's like doing your obituary in like 5,000 pages, trying to just condense it.
		But I basically grew up in a great suburb, had amazing parents, and just write about the journey in my life.
		I write about, obviously, starting businesses in college and whatnot, and I write about how Afterwards, I was in law school and business school.
		Basically, I write in the book about my upbringing.
dave rubin ▲ ● ▼		I'm freaking out because I'm not trying to get you.
dave rubin ▲ ● ▼		I'll get you in a second.
jared kushner ▲ ● ▼		I'm used to the killers coming at me, so it's too nice.
		But basically, I write in the book about my upbringing.
		I was in law school at NYU and business school after graduating Harvard, and I was working
		at Manhattan District Attorney's Office.
		I thought I'd be a prosecutor and then my father got arrested and I realized I didn't want to be a prosecutor anymore.
		I kind of saw what happens when prosecutors have a lot of political ambition and unchecked power and I didn't think I could be in that position.
		And then I write through what that experience was like, how it changed my view of the world.
		I met a lot of people through that experience, and I went to my father's business.
		It was a real time of problems.
		And really through that period, that three-year period, and then the three-year period of the financial downturn, that's where I learned a lot of lessons.
		That really taught me a lot.
		And then I write about how I was very fortunate when I was in New York to meet a great,
		great beautiful woman named Ivanka who we had an interesting courtship.
		She said yes, which was really great.
		I got the permission from her dad.
dave rubin ▲ ● ▼		And- Do you go to the dad first on that one?
jared kushner ▲ ● ▼		So I actually give a little bit of this story, but after, I didn't really spend too much time with him
		for about the first year that we were dating on and off.
		And then we were getting serious.
		And so Ivanka said, you know, my dad, you got to go talk to him because if not, he's going to start thinking, you know, you're not interested.
		And so I reach out to him and I say, you know, hi, Mr. Trump.
		You know, this is Jared Kushner.
		I'm dating Ivanka.
		I'd really like to come over and spend some time together.
		I didn't know what the hell I was going to say.
		And he says, that's great.
		Why don't we have lunch tomorrow?
		I'm like, oh man, that's, that's tough.
		I go over to Trump Tower and we have lunch in the Trump Grill.
		And what was funny about him is he would never go out for lunch.
		So Ivanka was very surprised because he would always have lunch by his desk or, you know, he didn't like to waste the time of going out.
		So we're going Trump Grill and Trump Tower.
		He's got Trump security guards around.
dave rubin ▲ ● ▼		Trump napkins, Trump glasses.
jared kushner ▲ ● ▼		Trump burger, Trump meatloaf, everything.
		And I said, look, Ivanka and I were getting more serious now, and she started a process of converting to Judaism.
		And he turns to me and says, well, why does she have to convert to Judaism?
		Why can't you convert?
		And I said, well, actually, that's a really good question.
		Nobody's asked me that question.
		But we've been studying, and this is how we feel when we go.
		And he says, that's great.
		I've been in New York real estate all my life.
		Everyone thinks I'm Jewish.
		All my friends are Jewish.
		And from that point, he was very supportive.
		And then he goes into another thing, which was funny that I tell in the book, where he says, as you know, Ivanka right now, she's in an amazing place in her life.
		A lot of my friends call.
		They all respect her.
		He says, but Tom Brady's a good friend, and he's been dying to take her out.
		And so I turned to him and I said, well, if I was here, I'd go out with Tom Brady.
		And he looks at me, maybe not, maybe getting my self-deprecating humor, or maybe it was serious, and he basically looks and says, yeah, I know.
		And so it was good.
dave rubin ▲ ● ▼		Wow, so you beat out Tom Brady for Ivanka.
jared kushner ▲ ● ▼		In his version of events, yeah.
jared kushner ▲ ● ▼		I don't know.
dave rubin ▲ ● ▼		It's close enough to something that sounds right.
		Can you just back up a little bit and explain a little bit more about some of the stuff with your dad and how that woke you up and then kind of changed the course correction for you?
		Because I think that's a super interesting part of the story here.
jared kushner ▲ ● ▼		Sure.
		So I write about this in the book as condensed as I can, but basically my father was a major Democrat donor.
		New Jersey is a big Democrat state.
		He was involved in a family dispute.
		It was a business that he built up.
		He brought his siblings in.
		And basically, he was prosecuted for three years.
		They couldn't really find much, but then he did something a little, maybe a little overreacting, kind of to get maybe revenge on them for causing so much pain to him, which, you know, human beings make mistakes.
		And he basically sent a tape of his brother-in-law, who was always having affairs with a prostitute, and then sent it to his sister just basically to say, screw you.
		And then at the time, his lawyers knew about it.
		They didn't think that it was a crime, but he didn't know that his siblings were then cooperating witnesses with the government.
		So they arrested him.
		Chris Christie was the prosecutor at the time.
		He made a big deal of it, very ambitious.
		He ultimately ran on to be governor.
		And after that happened, my father, I read about the experience.
		He was very reflective about it.
		Said, look, I sinned before God, before man.
		I made a mistake.
		I let my power go to my head.
		And I shouldn't have done that.
		So he took a plea deal and went to prison for a year.
		And it was very hard.
		His company was a big company at the time, had about 1,000 employees.
		And, you know, when he left, I went to his office five days a week, and we had great professionals who stepped up to run the company, but you have a million people.
		The government was still sending subpoenas, trying to target people.
		It was very chaotic, and I'd go and visit him every week, or maybe I'd take a week off every now and then, but try to visit him every week in prison just to spend the time.
		My father and I are very close.
		We ran the marathon together, and he's an amazing person.
		I think you learn a lot from that experience.
		You know, one thing he said to me was, you know, in life sometimes you're at 10,000 feet.
		You have to come down to earth to really understand what's there.
		And so, you know, I saw very high in life.
		I saw very low in life.
		And, you know, going through that experience, you realize that things can get taken from you, right?
		You know, your freedom can be taken from you.
		You know, your wealth can be taken from you.
		Your clothes can be taken from you.
		And what really matters is just, you know, your friends, your health, and what you do and what you make of the time you have.
		And so it was a fundamentally transformative period of my life.
		And I write about my reactions after.
		And two, you know, specific things that I write about are, number one is, you know, after a couple days of spending time with him and getting that situation as settled as it was going to get, I go back to New York and I got back to my apartment on Mercer Street and I basically just sat on the floor and I started crying and I realized that my life had changed and I realized that there was a lot of things I was angry at.
		You're angry at the prosecutor, you're angry at my father's siblings for escalating something over money, and I was angry at my father to a degree.
		I realized that that just wasn't productive.
		And then I really made a decision to shift all of my time and effort towards Trying to be helpful.
		Helpful to my mom.
		Helpful to my dad.
		Helpful to my siblings.
		Helpful to the company.
		And that was just a fundamental choice.
		And I think that that's been something in my life, whether it was some of the challenges in business that occurred or even my time in government.
		Anytime there was A challenge.
		A lot of people get very angry or trying to figure out why it happened or what they could have done different.
		I always would just say, OK, well, it is what it is.
		How do we take the variables we have and try to make it as good as it can be?
		And so that was really, you know, a fundamental lesson.
		And I think the other lesson I learned as well is I finally did my first day back at the office, at the DA's, at the DA.
		And, you know, I would take the 6 train down to Canal Street from Astor Place.
		And I was going back up and for whatever reason I just couldn't stand up.
		So I just stayed on the train and I rode the train all the way up to the Bronx and back for about two to three hours.
		And I was just looking at everyone's faces.
		You're seeing the people getting on and off the train.
		For whatever reason, in my mind, I was saying, what's their story?
		And I was kind of making up stories for each one.
	I was saying, well, this woman, maybe she can't find a way to feed her family, or maybe this guy's about to lose his job, or maybe this woman just found out that her mother has cancer.
	And so I kind of realized, Everyone has problems in life and I had my problems, but you know, everyone has problems.
	And so I kind of said, you know, nobody wants to hear about your problems.
	Nobody, you know, you know, just, you got to just do the best with what you got every day and move forward.
	So it was a very interesting experience.
	I met a lot of people in prison that were in prison.
	My father, actually amazing people, still friends to this day from different backgrounds.
	Some were bad people, some were amazing people who just, What was it about the prosecution that caused you to have that change and not go that route?
	Did you just see corruption?
	that obviously taught me a lot.
dave rubin ▲ ● ▼		What was it about the prosecution that caused you to have that change and not go that route?
		Did you just see corruption?
		Did you see like an endless goose chase?
jared kushner ▲ ● ▼		So I saw, you know, my father was, you know, he was really the leader of our community.
		He, you know, anyone who would lose a job, he would give them a job.
		He, anytime somebody, you know, needed a surgery and couldn't afford it, he would pay for it, you know, anonymously.
		You know, he supported so many people and did so many goods, so much good.
		When he was sentenced, he had over 700 letters that were sent on his behalf.
		Like, each one was more beautiful than the next about stories that even his family didn't know about.
		What I saw was that they started investigating and then they were looking for one thing and then it just never ends and they keep digging for more and more and there was an accountant who stole all the documents who now works for my father's brother who turned it over to the government and it just played out in the press.
		It's funny, at the time one of his friends said to him, there's an Irish saying which is tall buildings attract lightning.
		And he was a tall building and he attracted lightning.
		I saw just the prosecutors have unlimited power, unlimited resources, and when they want to dig, they'll dig.
		I mean, it was a company that had.
		Uh, you know, hundreds of millions of dollars of revenue at the time and ultimately they were saying, okay, you, you should have categorized something this way instead of this way for like a couple hundred thousand.
		And that was what he, he kind of pled to.
		And that's pretty subjective and usually something that's, that's done civilly as opposed to criminally.
		So I just saw that, you know, Christie wanted to get my father.
		He was a big trophy, uh, politically for him and he was just absolutely relentless.
		And, uh, But again, my father, under so much pressure, allowed his emotions to get the better of him and made a mistake as well, which was a lesson for me going through all the investigations that we ultimately went through as well in Washington, which was if you have good facts, you just have to be tight, be tight, be tight.
		And again, people saw I didn't talk much.
		They saw me accused of all kinds of things, but I tried to just be tight, be tight, be tight, just to know that I didn't think my enemies could defeat me but I knew that I was capable of defeating myself by making a mistake and I didn't want that to happen.
dave rubin ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, it's funny you turned it to that because as you were saying that I was thinking, boy, this sort of endless chase.
		Power that they have to keep going and going.
		That does sound awfully familiar to some things happening these days.
		So obviously it's not what the book's about but just to knock out a little bit of current events kind of quickly.
		When you're seeing sort of what's happening right now, the raid and all this stuff, does it ring very familiar to you?
		Like, oh, we just kind of have power and we can exercise that power and then we'll figure out if he did something.
jared kushner ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, a thousand percent.
		Like, you saw this with Trump.
		And again, I write about in the book what it's like to be in the middle of that storm and being accused of treason and having to spend two years.
		At some point you're saying, like, maybe I'm the one who's crazy, right?
		Because I know I didn't collude with Russia.
		I mean, in most days I couldn't collude with Trump on the campaign, you know, or like the handful of people we had.
		It was a ragtag campaign.
		And I write about how we pulled it together.
		Did that but then you go to Washington you have media sources that you thought were these like pristine amazing institutions like the New York Times or the Washington Post or CNN or MSNBC but every single day and every single night they're running more Articles are running more stories saying that, oh, the breaking news.
		The walls are crashing.
		The walls are crashing in.
		And I'd see it every day.
		And I'd turn on Rachel Maddow at night.
		And I was like, holy cow.
		Do people actually believe this?
		And I write, actually, Schumer used to be a close friend of our family.
		And he was going around the Upper East Side telling all my parents' friends, Jared's about to be indicted.
		He's going to go to jail.
		We know it for sure.
		We have all the facts, what they did to collude with Russia.
		They were basically denying an election.
		Yeah.
		But anyways, so that was definitely it.
		And I see it with Trump now, where it's like they tried one thing, it failed.
		They tried the next thing, it failed.
		And then, you know, he leaves office and then they impeach him after he leaves office.
		And then, you know, now he's being looked at by the Attorney General, even though there was no No money lost at all but they're saying maybe his financial statements were either high or low or whatever it is and then then they run these prime time hearings basically say what a bad person he was and then and then you know then they rate his home and so you know i do have a lot of.
		Feelings that prosecutors left unchecked with political ambitions.
		And that's why one of the issues I read about in the book, too, is how because of my experiences, I spearheaded an effort that President Trump ultimately endorsed and got behind to bring criminal justice reform.
		And I do think that his being so persecuted while he was in Washington opened his heart to appreciate how unfair prosecutors can be.
		And what bothers me a lot is that all the people who are my allies from the left Thanks for watching.
		They were amazing advocates, they believe it, but when it happens to Trump, it's okay.
		And so, the moral lines are a little bit, they have, I guess, footnotes to them, you know?
dave rubin ▲ ● ▼		I think that's pretty much the definition of Trump Derangement Syndrome, these people that have this set of beliefs, but when it comes to Trump, those beliefs kinda just don't exist.
		So, going forward a little bit, before you got fully into politics, so now you and Ivanka are married, Donald signed off on it, obviously, and you're living a life in New York City that's not political.
		Particularly, right?
		And then the call comes in, okay, you're gonna, he's gonna do this thing.
		Did you immediately think that you could be part of it, or had value to add, or that Ivanka wanted to be part of it, or were you worried, et cetera?
jared kushner ▲ ● ▼		So we didn't know, I know this may sound weird, but you know, I imagine like most families sit around and say, what should we do, this is a big decision, you know.
		I write about, you know, we were having lunch with Donald for, I think it was his birthday, and he says to the kids, he says, you know, Okay, guys, I'm announcing this week and everything's going to be different.
		And with him, there's always something.
		And he'd been flirting with it for a long time.
		He'd asked Ivanka to write a speech for him.
		And actually, one thing that was funny, she took him to go see Rupert Murdoch, because she said, look, if you're running, you've got to go sit with him.
		And Rupert says, you're not running.
		You're not going to do it.
		And Donald left, and he says, why was he so dismissive?
		And Ivanka says, look, Dad, you asked me to introduce you when you gave your speech.
		I'm still not sure you're going to announce, right?
		And she says, look, if, you know, by the way, if you make me write this speech and get ready and I give this speech and you get up there and say, just kidding, like, I'll be pretty mad at you.
		And so, you know, he kind of went into it.
		And then we all said, let's see what happens.
		And the first month was just crazy.
		I mean, somebody tweeted, which I saw, which is funny, where they said that the last slow news day we've had was June 15th, 2015, right?
		The day before he announced.
dave rubin ▲ ● ▼		The day before the escalator.
jared kushner ▲ ● ▼		And, uh, you know, he got up there and the month after for Ivanka was really consumed with putting out all the fires, right?
jared kushner ▲ ● ▼		I think Trump lost about $30 million in just annual contracts that were coming in with different, you know, vendors.
dave rubin ▲ ● ▼		Yeah.
jared kushner ▲ ● ▼		And her and her brothers were dealing with that.
		Um, and I didn't really get involved until, uh, I guess it was later on.
		I got, Donald said, call me to a rally.
		And I said, you know what?
		Let me see this, right?
		Everyone in my, In my social circle in New York was saying this is a joke he's gonna lose but every time that happened like he kept going up more and more in the polls.
		And so I thought we were in a very worldly circle with the heads of the banks the heads of the fashion industry the heads of the technology the heads of the media.
		And I said well let me just go see things with my own eyes so I traveled him to springfield illinois you know we fly on his big seven five seven you know trump force one jet.
		And we're going out there and he's just, you know, bullshitting like he does, you know, talking about the grandkids and football.
		And we walk out.
		I have no idea what to expect.
		We get into a car, go to a convention center.
		We walk in.
		The gentleman greets him and says, you know, welcome, Mr. Trump.
		Congratulations, you just broke the record for this convention center.
		And he says, well, who's the record?
		He says, well, it was Elton John 36 years ago.
		And he turns to me and says, see, I don't even have a guitar.
		So we went in there.
		And I also was surprised, too.
		I saw him shaking everyone's hand.
		And, like, he was a germaphobe before it was popular to be a germaphobe.
		And so he was shaking everyone's hand, really engaging with everyone he saw, trying to get information from them.
		And he gets up on stage for about an hour and just talks with no notes and anything.
		And there's one particular moment, you know, he's talking about trade where he was saying things that were contrary to what my friends in the Upper East Side thought.
		But he gets up there and says, we're going to end common corn, we're going to send it to the States.
		And the crowd went wild.
		And keep in mind, the crowd was not what CNN told you it was going to be, right?
		They made it seem like it was like Ku Klux Klan or whatever.
		It was old, young, white, black, male, female.
		And so it just felt like it was real Americans who felt like the government had stopped representing them.
		And so two weeks earlier, I'd been at a charity gala in New York for the Robin Hood Foundation, which is one of these great, great groups that does amazing work.
		And the president of it gets up there and says, the way we are going to create equality in this country and save our country is by promoting Common Core.
		And what everyone has to do is call their senators, call their congressmen.
		This is the policy.
		This is it.
		This is going to change.
		I was like, okay, I guess common core is good.
		I mean, what did I know?
		I was doing real estate and technology and like I wasn't, you know, deep in the policy.
		So it kind of made me think like, wait, I thought all these worldly people knew what they were talking about.
		Why did these people feel so differently to them?
		And so all it did was really start my exploration through the process.
dave rubin ▲ ● ▼		And then, What did you consider yourself politically at that point, like if you were sort of having your own wake up relative to some of this stuff?
		Did you consider yourself like a New York liberal?
		Like I was an Upper West Side liberal.
		I was for many years.
		I'm obviously not anymore.
jared kushner ▲ ● ▼		I wouldn't say that.
		When I was at Harvard, I was probably much more liberal.
		That's what you're taught.
		You take like Act 10 with Marty Feldstein.
		You have certain views of how the world works.
		I started off doing social studies, so I was reading a lot of the political theorists.
		But through the newspaper, we endorsed Obama in 2008, and then in 2012, we endorsed Romney, because I thought that Obama's policies were very divisive, and I thought that he was terrible with his Middle East work, especially how he was kind of going to try to do a deal with Iran, and I felt like he was really weakening the US-Israel relationship, which I didn't like.
		And so I endorsed him, and I was very close with Mike Bloomberg at the time.
		I thought he represented probably He was probably the best embodiment of my political package.
		So I was registered as an independent, but probably at that point very centrist.
		But like I said, it was more, it was kind of like this deep, right?
		And I learned too, like most people are actually this deep.
		And one of the cool things about the books, I take people about through my journey as somebody who was from that echo chamber, and then went and explored the country, most people Don't get to meet people who disagree with them and don't engage with them.
		And I got to speak with so many people, but I did it with an open mind because I was having to write speeches at the time for Donald on the campaign that were representing his points of view, which were points of view that were different than what I thought was the right point of view to have.
		So in doing that, I was exploring these things, researching these things.
		And it opened my eyes to the fact there's a lot more nuance to a lot of these policies.
dave rubin ▲ ● ▼		So then the campaign's starting and I've talked to Don Jr.
		about this publicly on this show and privately, like he was telling me how so many people that were lifelong friends of his suddenly deserted him and just all of that nonsense.
		So now you and Ivanka are intimately involved in this thing and then he wins.
		Now you're going to D.C.
		I mean, first off, did you have just a whole bunch of friends that Shed you immediately?
		And how insane was just getting to DC and then seeing what that was like?
jared kushner ▲ ● ▼		So believe it or not, we didn't.
		And I think that what happened was, is I think through my father's experience, I was very selective in who I let in.
		So Ivanka and I have a very close relationship.
		And a lot of our time in New York was spent just the two of us, right?
		If we had to choose between going to a dinner party or being with us, we would be with us.
		And we would always love doing different adventures, going on dates, you know, trying new restaurants, seeing new neighborhoods.
		And then as we started building a family, that was a priority for us as well.
		And we'd had a ton of acquaintances, you know, from New York, but the people who were our real friends were people who we thought were very quality people who we got things out of, and I think who got things out of us.
		And those people were all people mostly on the left of the political spectrum.
		Again, I had probably like one conservative friend that I could think of from before this experience.
		But everyone was very respectful and very open of what we were doing and recognized that Again, it wasn't Ivanka and I who were giving speeches or making policies.
		It was her father, and she was doing what a devoted daughter would do.
		But for me, I was much more open-minded and much more studying the policies.
		I think for Ivanka, she basically said, okay, if this is the situation that's happening, she had a mission-driven business at the time.
		There were issues she was advocating for.
		She said, well, if I can use this as a platform to elevate the issues she cared about, like paid family leave and child care, she says, well, then I think it's kind of irresponsible not to do that.
		So she gave a speech at the RNC introducing her father, and all the things on the internet after were saying was, did she think she was at the Democratic Convention?
		Because they were not traditionally Republican policies.
dave rubin ▲ ● ▼		And that her dad used to be loved by the Democrats.
		I mean, there's no shortage of pictures with all those people when they used to love him.
		And he was donating to some of them.
jared kushner ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, being in New York, and again, he was part of pop culture and all this.
		But the short answer is that our friends were really strong and really still are.
		And what I found is that when we decided to go to Washington, and I write about kind of how we made that decision, because it wasn't like we were thinking, okay, he's gonna win and then this is gonna happen, right?
		The whole campaign was like, Let's get to goal line plus an inch.
		Like, you know, who the hell knows how this is going to work out.
dave rubin ▲ ● ▼		But you do talk about that.
dave rubin ▲ ● ▼		You kind of thought it was going to happen the whole time, right?
jared kushner ▲ ● ▼		I didn't.
		Again, logically, it felt like he should be able to do it, right?
		All the math.
		And I can go into a whole thing on polling, but From what I saw, it was like the polling all seemed like it was not scientific, right?
		So if you look at all the public polling that predicted he was going to lose, I was shocked by how many people just followed it.
		But polling is basically you call 500 people and they say yes or no, and then you have to do something called a weighting, right?
		And weighting is basically you say, okay, if we called 100 Democrats and 100 Republicans, how many people do you think are going to vote?
		And then you kind of recalculate the results in order to do that.
		So what happened in Brexit right before Trump won was The polling was off massively.
		Now it predicted the amount of people who said stay pretty accurately, but it was off by about 3 million votes for the people who predicted to leave.
		And as we researched why that was, I was reading all the info on it.
		It basically said that they just undercounted low propensity voters.
		And so with Trump, all the media was using basically the Obama-Romney turnout model.
		And I was like, I don't think that's indicative, right?
		Like Obama had a different electricity that Hitler didn't have, and Trump had a different electricity that Romney didn't have.
		So it felt like it should be different.
		And then when I look at, we had a data, we built a data file about 10 million people were showing up to Trump rallies.
		And a big percentage of them were low-propensity voters.
		And so we basically, every time we do a sample, which we re-engineered the polling, we basically ran it through two different models.
		One was like the media model, which showed we were going to lose, and one was our model, which showed we were going to win.
		And so I just, again, Romney went into election night thinking they were going to win, if I was told, and then were disappointed.
		So I never allowed myself to believe our data, because I'd never done it before.
		But that was what I believed was more logical as an outcome, but we didn't think about what would come next.
		Sorry, it's such a long thing.
dave rubin ▲ ● ▼		No, no, so speaking of what came next, so now you get there, now you're working for the president, and the media's not that happy, CNN, New York Times, okay, all that stuff, but you guys actually were accomplishing an awful lot, pretty much from the get-go, considering you had nobody willing to work with you.
jared kushner ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, so it was a wild thing, and the first year, in writing the book, I went through the first year, and it brought back a lot of memories that actually were really painful for me.
		Because, A, we get to Washington, so we make the decision to, and it wasn't like, oh, should we stay in New York and live our lives, or should we go to Washington?
		It was like, okay, he is now going to be the President of the United States.
		Our former lives as we knew it don't exist anymore.
		And then you say you have an opportunity to serve in government and try to make an impact.
		And I built more confidence based on the fact that in the campaign I was able to achieve certain successes and things that experienced political people told me was the wrong way to do it.
		But then I did it that way and it ended up working.
		And so I said, well, let's give it a shot and let's try to help him.
		And again, you know, he'd never been a mayor, never been a governor, so he was running a family business.
		He was used to working with family.
		His campaign was a family campaign.
		And so we said, let's go give it a shot and really try to see if we could help him implement the policies that we believe in and try to do things that we believe are good.
		So Ivanka gave up her business to then focus on her mission.
		I went in, And we had no idea what a brutal world Washington was gonna be.
		And so whether it was like the attacks from the media, whether it was the investigation, I mean, within three months I have, you know, people leaking on me like crazy from inside the White House.
		You know, you talk to yourself and it would be in the Washington Post.
dave rubin ▲ ● ▼		Wait, can you just talk a little bit more about what that's like, the leak situation?
		Like, how is it possible?
		Because everyone's always talking about the leaks.
		They were talking about it an awful lot with Trump, but it happens in every administration.
		Did you feel like, oh, here's ten people in this room in this meeting, like six of them might be the one, or like, how do you manage some of that stuff as an advisor?
		Or do you pull him aside and say, hey, Mr. President, maybe don't, or dad-in-law, or whatever you call him, Don, maybe don't say everything you think off the cuff in front of everybody because we have this problem?
jared kushner ▲ ● ▼		So I think I learned and I think he learned as well.
		You know, one of the funny jokes somebody told me was they said in Washington, if you want to keep a secret between three people, two of them have to be dead, right?
		And so, you know, but it wasn't quite that bad.
		I think it was a function of, in the beginning I felt very, very helpless, right?
		Like I said, I think something and like it would link to the Washington Post.
		It was so bad.
		And I think with him too.
		So a couple of things, again, I read about how I adjusted and said, okay, the game is the game.
		It's been here long before me.
		It's going to be here long after me.
		You know, you have a chance to be in the game.
		If you are in the game, you can get good things done, but you have to get better at the game.
		And so certain things like when I would give my opinion to Donald, especially when I would disagree with him, I would always do it one-on-one.
		I would never say my opinion in front of other people.
		Or I would say something that I didn't think would be salacious.
		But when I wanted to strongly disagree, I would always do it privately because you never wanted to read about that in the press.
		I never wanted division to show between us because he always gave me the opportunity to voice my opinion and sometimes he would listen, sometimes he wouldn't.
		Again, I was an advisor.
		And some things, quite frankly, I had more conviction on.
		Some things I had less conviction on.
		And often when he would ask me, I'd say, look, I'm not an expert on it.
		Let me find somebody who I think is and bring them in to give you that point of view.
		But that was probably number one.
		And then when it came to just dealing with people, you learn very quickly, like, who was leaking to which places.
		And we just had so many of them who were scumbags who were doing that.
dave rubin ▲ ● ▼		Were they all your guys?
		You know what I mean?
		Or were they like sort of deep state people that were all there all the time?
		No, no, no.
jared kushner ▲ ● ▼		A lot of them were the people coming in.
		Look, we, I mean, we didn't have a lot of people, right?
		And, you know, the campaign was ragtag.
		We had to staff up quickly.
		We were making a lot of decisions, putting different people together.
		And yeah, you just have people.
		And then, you know, the more people get insecure, the more they, it's an environment that kind of encourages more of it.
		Very complicated situation to work in.
		But like I said, I figured out how to adjust.
		I got tighter.
		And then ultimately over time, towards the end, we announced a peace deal, which we'll talk about later.
		And nobody knows about it, right?
		So I learned how to find the people who you could work with to keep things quiet, but it just took me some time.
		And when you work in real estate or technology, nobody's out there leaking to the press.
		And everyone's aligned for the same mission, too.
		So it's just a different game, and you just have to learn to adjust to the game.
dave rubin ▲ ● ▼		Right, so all right, let's jump over to the peace process.
		So now things are happening.
		You're a couple years in.
		You were working on this from day one, basically?
		Really, was it from day one?
		Like you said, this is going to be something I'm going to get on.
		Did he want you on that?
		Was this something that you just brought to him?
jared kushner ▲ ● ▼		So the way I found out about it was I get a call from the woman who did public relations for our real estate business.
		And at the time, Ivanka and I were still thinking, will we go to Washington or not?
		And she calls and says, the New York Times just called and said, you and Ivanka have decided to go to Washington, that you're working on Middle East peace.
		I said, well, that's not true.
		I said that we haven't made a decision.
		She says, well, their source is your father-in-law.
		I said, OK.
		So he went there for, I guess, an editorial board meeting, and they asked him.
		He said, oh, Jared's great.
		He's going to come, and he's going to work on Middle East peace.
		Oh, that's hilarious.
		I don't know if he meant it or not, but the next thing you're going to be like, who is Jared Kushner?
		What the hell does he know about the Middle East?
		By the way, they were right.
		I didn't know anything.
		Maybe it was the last time they were right.
		But then, after the first couple months, I said, okay, well, this is something I was tasked with.
		Let me start exploring.
		So Jason Greenblatt came in with me and Avi Berkowitz, and we started just researching what had been done before us.
		And what I did in the first year was I just tried to understand everyone's perspective on the file.
		So my biggest deficit was that I didn't have any diplomatic experience, but my biggest advantage was that I didn't have any diplomatic experience.
		So I came in, And I give one example in here where I'm meeting with the ruler of the UAE who's thought to be the most strategic thinker in the region.
		He's somebody who's been there a while.
		He just became the president of the country.
		And he's a guy, Mohammed bin Zayed, who's really a giant.
		And I'm meeting with him after about six months.
		And I take him through some of the thoughts as to how I want to approach it.
		And I really was asking him a ton of questions.
		And he says, I think you're going to make peace here.
		So why do you say that?
		He says, well, the U.S.
		usually sends one of three types of people to see me.
		The first types are people who come and fall asleep in meetings.
		The second are people who come and they basically read me talking points and have no ability to have a conversation.
		The third are senior level people who come and basically try to convince me to do things that are against my interests.
		He says, you're the first person who's ever come to see me from the U.S.
		who's asking questions.
		And my fundamental question was very simple, which is, the U.S.
		has a ton of power.
		What would you do if you were us?
		What's the end state that's achievable here?
		And what levers would you play with if you were us in order to try to achieve that end state?
		And it took him a couple times of me asking that question to actually understand that I was seeking an honest feedback on the question.
		But that was how I started with everyone, trying to understand, get their point of view on what needed to be done, knowing that American foreign policy, and this is not a knock on Democrats, a knock on Democrats and Republicans, basically screwed up the entire Middle East.
		If you take it from You know, allowing, even just from, you know, the fall of the Shah in Iran to, you know, the revolution in 79, and then you go into, obviously, allowing Al-Qaeda to have harbor, and then the attacks on the U.S., and then getting us into a war in Iraq, and a war in Afghanistan, and then you have disbanding the army, and then just, it goes on and on and on.
		Then, you know, you have ISIS has a caliphate the size of Ohio, they're beheading journalists, they're killing Christians, they're, you know, you have, Them radicalizing people online, the San Bernardino shooting, the Pulse nightclub shooting, Syria's in a civil war, half a million people are killed.
		I mean, US policy in that region for decades was absolutely awful.
		And part of me, I guess maybe Trump was saying, can't get any worse, so give Jared a try.
		Right.
		But we thought about it in a different way and really worked hard.
		And I write about kind of my journey trying to understand it for what it was at the time.
		Instead of being romanced by the old notions, and then the more I would talk to the people who'd done it, and they would explain, well, this is what you have to look at, and this is what you have to do.
		I was like, that makes absolutely no sense to me.
		And I was like, okay, well, if I'm gonna fail, at least I'll fail in an original way, and doing something that I think is logical, and I was creamed.
		I mean, the New York Times would tell me, all the experts, you know, on CNN, they would write articles, you know, saying that everything I was doing was wrong, and stupid, and reckless, and gonna cause wars.
dave rubin ▲ ● ▼		Well, even as the announcements were coming out, as the deals were coming out, they were saying, why, these are bad deals.
		And it's like, wait, I thought that we all wanted Middle East peace.
		Wasn't that one thing?
		There's a short list of things we all agree on that used to be one thing that we all kind of want.
		So did you find that a lot of the countries actually were quite willing once you made that initial sort of, once you flipped the script on them, in essence?
jared kushner ▲ ● ▼		In some ways, the entrenchment there was just as bad as the entrenchment home, right?
		So you think about all these critics, and what you have in Washington is like this class of people who are basically careerists, you know, going in and out of Washington.
		And then you have the same people who are writing about them or from the think tanks or the media.
		And they're also, you know, so it's like the same class of people.
dave rubin ▲ ● ▼		I believe this is what we call the swamp?
jared kushner ▲ ● ▼		Is this the swamp?
		And they're all vested in not being proven wrong.
		So they'd rather you also fail than you be proven right and do it.
		And the whole notion of the Trump presidency was bringing people who were outsiders to Washington.
		We're results driven you know again politicians are about process and talking points businessmen are about results and so we come in with a fundamentally different approach and that's the theme in my book that happens time and time again right there's two basic cross currents in the book one is.
		What it was like to be under endless attack from, you know, Russian investigation and impeachment about trying to, you know, look into corruption in Ukraine, all the media attacks.
		And that's one current.
		I call that the waves.
		And then you have kind of under the water where it's nice and calm, which is how did all these policies get done, right?
		How do we get trade deals done?
		How do we get peace deals done?
		How do we get deals with Congress done?
		We have criminal justice reform done.
		And so I really try to put those two things together.
		But that complacency was the same thing I found in the Middle East, in the sense that everyone thought that there were limitations to what they could do, and what I found is all these barriers are usually in people's minds.
		And in the region, everyone thought it was fixed, and that if there were certain things you did, it was just unsolvable, and you had to go and solve it the same way that people before tried to solve it and fail, or else it's gonna be World War III.
		And I take people through, again, I take them into the Situation Room, and really try to give them The intensity of what it was like to make some of the first decisions, right?
		So Trump making the decision to move the embassy to Jerusalem, his Secretary of State was against it.
		Secretary of Defense was against it.
		The intel community comes out with assessments saying that if he does it, it's going to be World War III and the world's going to explode.
dave rubin ▲ ● ▼		Even though every president for, what, decades before said they were going to do it.
jared kushner ▲ ● ▼		But then they all got scared away by the conventional thinking that happened.
		And what Trump did, again, a businessman, you think about, okay, that's a risk.
		How do I assess the risk?
		And then how do I mitigate the risk?
		And I talk about how we assess the risk, how we mitigated the risk, and how we pushed forward to do it.
		And at the end of the day, at that point, he'd gotten closer with the Arab countries.
		He said, look, you can't cherry pick your relationship with America.
		Iran's your biggest threat.
		I'm going to work with you on that, because I agree with you on that, right?
		That's in our common interests.
		But don't mess around on the things that I want to do.
		Israel's a sovereign country.
		They have the right to determine their capital.
		And America's a sovereign country, and we have the right to recognize the decision of another sovereign country, and that's what I'm doing.
		Okay?
		And I'm not going to ask your opinion.
		And again, it was very, very intense because people showed that Trump makes a decision.
		And I really give some funny stories about kind of the back and forth and the high stakes of it.
		But he makes a decision.
		And then we worked hard to mitigate.
		And then what happens is the next morning the sun rises and the next evening the sun sets and the world moves on.
		Same thing with getting out of the Iran deal.
		People warned him that if you do this you're going to have World War III.
		Everything's going to blow up.
		He makes a decision.
		Next morning the sun rises.
		Next evening the sun sets.
		And he figured out ways to maneuver.
		And so all of a sudden everything that seems so fixed to people All of a sudden was becoming a little bit more of a fluid situation.
		And so the big obstacle was the Israelis and the Palestinians.
		And, you know, again, as I looked at that issue, and I go through this in the book, that seemed to me like a fake situation, right?
		It's been one of these manufactured situations for years, and there's just so much asymmetry.
		And incentives right the palestinian leadership was getting rich and bb netanyahu who runs a military and economic superpower in israel would fly to israel if i in a commercial jet.
		Abbas who i'm sitting with him in a meeting like we are he wants a cigarette he puts a cigarette in his mouth somebody comes over and lights it from like he's a king.
		And then he flies to Washington in a 60 million dollar BBJ, you know what I mean?
		It's like the whole thing was, he was rich, his family was rich, everyone was doing great, but the Palestinian people weren't getting the love, right?
		So we exposed kind of what a bunch of crap that was and how, again, the goal of a leader should be to, you know, number one, provide security for their people, number two, to provide economic opportunity so people could live a better life.
		Security, he did as much for himself as he did for the people and I have some examples in the book of ways that we tested and he kind of was bluffing and then we call his bluff and he backs off very weakly.
		And then we also have situations in there with economics where we expose that he wasn't really trying to do that.
		So that was kind of what we have in there and that also allowed the leaders to think differently than they did before.
dave rubin ▲ ● ▼		How much more do you think you could have got done?
		Had there been four more years?
		Like were dominoes really ready to fall?
		I remember right before The election people kept saying, oh, no, there's six more deals in place and there's all this other stuff.
jared kushner ▲ ● ▼		We wouldn't even need a four more years.
		We wouldn't need it six more months.
		And again, I outlined this all for the incoming administration.
		But, you know, so the last deal that we got done and it was a high wire deal.
		And I have some very crazy moments of this in my book was.
		After we get UAE and Bahrain, you have Sudan and Morocco.
		Sudan goes, then Morocco we get in the lame duck period, which people were surprised.
		And we were trying to get Saudi to go, but we couldn't get Saudi or Qatar until the rift was resolved between them.
		So I'd been working on that for about three months, and we had amazing breakthroughs in a very intense negotiation.
		And that one, again, literally on the tarmac to take off, and the deal dies, and it dies several times, and these are complicated situations.
		So that one we got done Jan 5th, which I think opened it up for the new administration.
		I laid out for them a roadmap.
		We were close with Mauritania, I felt.
		I think Saudi was very doable.
		I think now it's a question of when, not if, but it needs U.S.
		leadership to make it happen.
		And so what I basically said to the incoming administration is like, Look, congratulations.
		You guys can get all these deals done.
		We're running out of clock.
		But just don't run to Iran.
		If you run to Iran, you're going to upset everything.
		We have Iran weaker than they've ever been.
		Our policy's working.
		Just tell Iran you're too busy dealing with climate change and COVID and all the stuff you're focused on.
		And wait for them to come to you.
		And what I would do is go to Saudi Arabia and say, look, we want you to do a deal with Israel.
		We'll wait six months.
		We'll wait a year.
		Let's work on a plan together.
		Well, I know we said some bad stuff in the campaign.
		You've been a country that's worked with America for 80 years.
		You've been a great ally in many regards.
		What's it going to take to get that to happen so we could finally end once and for all the Arab-Israeli conflict?
		They nodded and then did absolutely nothing according to that.
dave rubin ▲ ● ▼		So I think that we could have... Did you literally hand them like a packet?
dave rubin ▲ ● ▼		Did you hand them like, this is what's got to happen?
jared kushner ▲ ● ▼		I didn't write like a memo, but I sat down twice with incoming National Security Advisor, basically outlined.
		I said, look, this is where we are.
		I was giving full transparency into the discussions.
		But I fundamentally believe it could have happened very quickly.
		Have they taken a policy?
		But again, they ran to Iran, got down on their knees, started begging them.
		Trump used to always say Iran's never won a war, but never lost a negotiation.
		And what they did was terrible.
		Then they started kind of browbeating Saudi, which made them say, OK, there's other countries in the world, too.
		Then they're running over to China.
		They alienated a lot of the people there.
		And look, I think their recent policy has shifted back, right?
		They went to Saudi Arabia.
		You know, what they did with UAE, they had missiles shot at their airport from the Houthis in Yemen, right?
		So we actually designated the Houthis a terror organization because they were firing missiles into two of our allies in Saudi Arabia and UAE and chanting, you know, insignificant statements like, death to America, death to Israel.
		And the first thing the Biden administration does when they come in is they undesignate them as terrorists.
		And then they fire missiles into UAE that land at their airport.
		I mean, that's like the nerve center of commerce.
		And the U.S.
		doesn't call, they're not restocking their weapons.
		It was a very, very tense time.
		So I think right now, to give them credit, I think they are Understanding that that maybe they didn't handle as well as
		they could in the beginning and it does feel just from what i'm seeing i'm an outsider now so i don't.
		It's like they're trying harder and i still think that these deals are very gettable if they if they focus on in
dave rubin ▲ ● ▼		the right way yeah do you think part of the problem is that they don't want to do anything because it'll feel like it's
		just an extension of what you guys did and they sort of want to erase everything right.
		They don't want them referred to as the Abraham Accords.
jared kushner ▲ ● ▼		No, this is one thing they've come around on, right?
		And actually, they participate in some of the events we've done to try to promote the
		Abraham Accords.
		It took them a year, right?
		The first year, they wouldn't call it by its name.
		But I think that that was high-level people.
		I think a lot of the career folks in the State Department, they were amazingly helpful in
		getting the Abraham Accords done and implemented.
		I think even like you know like dealing with Brett McGurk he was very supportive.
		So I think there are a lot of people there who who want to see it happen.
		And I think it with the right prioritization it can.
		I just again I don't know if these guys have the right ability to do the negotiation.
		Again, they're career politicians, right?
		They're diplomats.
		Like we were the anti-diplomats, right?
		In the sense that we basically came in and we sat down and we figured out how to make deals.
		We got six-piece deals done.
		We got major trade deals done.
		And again, I write about how we did it, which again, every single thing in this book that ended up being effective towards getting deals done are things that I got criticized for in the pages of the New York Times and the Washington Post.
dave rubin ▲ ● ▼		Of course, of course.
		So let's talk a little bit about the COVID situation and then sort of how policy worked around that.
		Because one of the things that kind of blew me away the entire time was that the same people who every day were calling Donald Trump Hitler and all the worst things in the world, he's a dictator, blah blah blah.
		They were the same people who wanted him to have all the federal power to do whatever he wanted because very early on he was like, let's leave it to the states and let them figure it out.
		You talk a little bit about some of the tensions with Fauci and all that.
		How crazy was that to advise him in this sort of unknown moment?
jared kushner ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, so that was by far One of the scariest moments you could ever have, right?
		And again, we, this was after three years and by the way, hypocrisy, I figured out it's not like a new thing and why you have to like day three to take me after three years, you know?
		Right.
		But, but that was by far the scariest.
		We had things really move in.
		We were, you know, again, economy was roaring.
		We had great people in place.
		We had plans.
		We were building for second term and then COVID comes out of nowhere and really hit the world like a ton of bricks.
		And, I read about the book my experience getting pulled in again not as a medical expert but just as somebody to help operationally who knew to move the levers of government vice president pens.
		I worked very closely with ask me to come on and help him you execute certain things like scale testing and what not.
		But it was very interesting.
		So you're making a lot of decisions.
		The media was the first thing they got Trump on, right?
		Because if he was more careful than he was killing jobs, if he was opening the economy, he was killing people.
		And so CNN kept those tickers up, you know, depending on the day.
		And they were loving the fact that they can just bludgeon him.
		And you could always find a nurse who's afraid they're going to run out of stuff.
		And we were playing racquetball.
		I mean, I had stories, you know, that I write about where I'd see a nurse on CNN complaining they don't have masks at a hospital.
		I'd get on the phone with the head of the hospital and say, what do you need?
		Okay, we'll get it to you.
		And we made sure all of these shortages that everyone was fearing We're going to happen did not happen a lot of us because we thought like business people not like bureaucrats right so I tell stories about how you know we find all these masks we figure out how to do DPAs and to get them in order to get them over we don't have enough planes as US I call Fred Smith I call David Abney from UPS and FedEx and I said look we need your planes and they're like they're your Air Force take them like anything you do and even David Abney.
		Only months later, I've never seen anything like it in my career.
		As quickly as I could land planes in Asia, you had them filled with masks and sent back.
		We were under a week away from running out of supplies in this country.
		And again, Trump thought out of the box.
		He empowered business people to do it and got a lot of things done.
		And ultimately, the biggest testament to that was Operation Warp Speed, right?
		So even Fauci said, Trump is over-exaggerating.
		It's going to be at least a year and a half until we get a working vaccine.
		And so we got the bureaucracy out of the way.
		We brought in the private sector, brought in the military.
		Each thing, and this is one of the things I think readers have really liked about the book so far, is that I'm pretty honest about mistakes that I made and things that I could have done better, but I show from all these things how I learned from these experiences that enabled us.
		So like the lessons we learned on scaling testing was that I always say to solve a problem, there's three things you need, right?
		You need imagination, you need money, and you need gravity, right?
		Those three are basically the catch-alls of the categories you need.
		For testing, we had, I think, a really good plan, so the imagination check.
		Now you're the federal government, you print money, so we had endless cash, that wasn't our issue.
		Right.
		But we just couldn't produce Q-tips, right, basically swabs for people.
		Like, you know, we're about to launch 400 sites, and they come to us and say, sorry, we only have 1.2 million swabs in the country.
		So I'm like, man.
		And I started learning that, like, the lowest cost item was going to become our biggest bottleneck.
		And that was just a gravity issue.
		So we worked that through.
		That's actually one of our issues with Fauci.
		He goes on television and he says, oh, I'm testing.
		We're just not there yet.
		Instead of saying like, dude, you were in charge of infectious diseases.
		You didn't tell us that we didn't have enough supplies in case one came.
		Then you're sitting in the task force every day.
		You've given us no additional ideas for how to do this better.
		If you're on TV, explain.
		We have a plan.
		We're doing it as fast as we can.
		We're going fast and everywhere else.
		I was like, are you a sportscaster?
		Or are you a member of the task force?
dave rubin ▲ ● ▼		So what do you make of him?
		Or what did you make of him then?
		And is that different than now?
jared kushner ▲ ● ▼		I'll get that in a sec, but just to finish what I was saying, is that ultimately those lessons we learned from that for Warp Speed, which is how we did everything right early, and that enabled us to be successful and ramp up the manufacturing simultaneously, and I give some lessons on that.
		With him, I think that to make it for, first of all, nobody should be in a job for 50 years, especially not in a government job.
		I think he was an excellent politician in terms of his ability to be a survivor, but I think he also embraced A lot of the people would always build these people up as a counter to Trump.
		Take Michael Avenatti, who is now I think in prison.
		The media made him a hero because he was against Trump.
		So the media would create these false heroes.
		And I think with Fauci, they elevated him like they elevated 20 people before.
		And I think he embraced it.
		And I think he liked it.
		And I think that that led to a lot of It wasn't about service, and it led to a lot of misinformation and confusion that didn't have to be the case.
		And so, again, I give one great scene where Trump is fighting with him, saying, Doc, I'm not going to keep the country closed.
		I'm not going to oversee the funeral of the greatest country and economy in the history of the world.
		And he meekly goes back and says, look, I'm just here to give medical advice.
		I'm just a doctor.
		You're the president.
		Your job is to account for all the other factors.
		And he backed off pretty quickly there.
		And so, again, interesting guy to work with.
		He was very pleasant.
		You know, we had a good working relationship together, but very politically calculating and savvy and, you know, wasn't always on our team.
dave rubin ▲ ● ▼		Did you feel that from the agencies in general, that the CDC or the NIH or whoever else you were working with, that generally they weren't going to be staffed with Trump people so that there was an odd incentive structure, right?
dave rubin ▲ ● ▼		They needed, you know, they knew an election was coming.
jared kushner ▲ ● ▼		Yes and no.
		Look, so Dr. Collins at NIH I thought was very professional, very knowledgeable, always doing well.
		We had a couple of tensions with him about getting EUAs because they were trying to preserve perfect science.
		What we're saying like convalescent plasma was an issue where we got killed in the paper because we were pushing to say this is something that's been around for a hundred years.
		We have a study that's showing that it's working.
		Get it out there.
		Let doctors make the decision if they want it or not.
		But they're saying the study, which is done by the Mayo Clinic, I think, or Cleveland Clinic, wasn't done in pristine time.
		So look, this is wartime.
		If it's looking good, let people make their decisions.
		It's not going to kill people.
		And that was where we had some fights with the scientists.
		The CDC was an absolute barn fire mess.
		And there's one But I had with them where, and again, I backed off quickly.
		So I'm saying, okay, how's this going to look on the front page of the New York Times?
		And I'm screaming at the head of the CDC, but they basically were saying this, this 14 days rule.
		And I said, okay, they're telling our people they had to quarantine for 14 days.
		And so I said to me, Bill, where does that come from?
		So we have a study.
		So I said, bring this study.
		So that night, again, I was on like two hours of sleep, but I read through the study and I'm seeing that it's like a study of 182 people.
		Of which they know when 140 of them got the disease, the average time from contracting the disease to showing symptoms was 5.1 days.
		And because the sample size was so small, they used two standard deviations and told the whole world they had to spend 14 days in quarantine.
unidentified		Wow.
jared kushner ▲ ● ▼		I'm saying, wait, so we're screwing up the entire global economy off the sample size of 140 people.
		It's like so my point is like a lot of the things they were saying in the name of science were not scientific and you know we tried to be nimble and at first we trusted all these people because what the hell do we know these were the experts on infectious diseases but I think over time we became more convinced that we had to be pragmatic about these things and take their guidance and their perspective, but weigh it accordingly, knowing that there were a lot of academics who weren't very operational.
		Somebody like Dr. Birx was actually quite helpful because she'd been on the front lines in a lot of these different countries in Africa.
		So when it came to problems, she knew operationally how to solve them.
		And again, I thought she was a very useful voice.
		I learned a lot from her.
		But it was a very complicated time to be in.
		An amazing experience.
		And again, I do think the work that President Trump did saved a ton of lives.
		And I think if you would have had a normal politician there instead of an outsider
		and somebody who had a results mentality, the outcomes would have been significantly different.
dave rubin ▲ ● ▼		Well, maybe this is a silly question, but do you think had the Democrats, media,
		some of the organizations, CDC, et cetera, had they all been willing to work with Trump
		little bit more.
		Do you think we could be in some real golden age right now that so many of the things that we see with the economy, supply chain, just all the nonsense that we're seeing, disaster in Afghanistan, that we really did have a chance to fix so much?
		You mentioned before that the peace deals, like there was a whole bunch coming right there.
		Do you think that had he, he was willing to work with people, right?
jared kushner ▲ ● ▼		Very much so.
		Look, I think that one of the things I try to be very honest about in my book is that I had certain biases coming in and my biases changed.
		But we all have biases.
		I think that the media today in particular is not really honest about their biases.
		And I don't think people are as liberated where they still feel like playing to the standard of the media is the appropriate standard by which to try to conduct your conduct.
		And ultimately we became liberated and said, okay, let's just do what we think is right.
		But I do think a lot of these people in these agencies tried to play to the media and the media was rewarding anyone who was in opposition to Trump.
		So that was kind of like the general playing field.
		Again, not right or wrong, it's just the reality of what it was.
		I think from a pure policy point of view, like I said, I think I'm more of a centrist, more of a pragmatist in terms of how I think about these things.
		A lot of President Trump's policies, I thought, were spot on, right?
		Trade, right?
		There was a big debate on trade.
		Bringing our manufacturing jobs back to America was something that was, like, anti-... I mean, you know, Paul Ryan was pissed at us, saying you're never going to get your USMCA trade deal done, but my mentor on that was Bob Lighthizer, who, by the way, is, I think, the best character in this book.
		People have come away saying that they really want to meet Bob, and he really is a mentor and a great friend and hysterically funny.
		And I read about how, what it was like working with him, but trade was an issue, uh, you know, immigration, right?
		So a lot of my friends in New York would say, well, the wall is xenophobic and racist.
		And I'd say, okay, well, maybe that's what they feel.
		But then you get down, you're like, well, it's just like a sovereignty issue.
		And then like, you know, I talked to the border agents, like, oh, every mile of wall you put up, we can do, you know, more and more.
		And I write about actually how we got the wall built because that became a symbol of Trump's success.
		And so the Democrats and even I mean, Steve Bannon, John Kelly, they were supposed to get it done for the first two years.
		Both failed.
		Trump asked me to get it done.
		I write about how we found the $11 billion, and I worked with Stephen Miller, Pat Cipollone, Chad Wolf, Mark Morgan, a whole group of people, Russ Vought, to figure out How do we get the money and then how do we get it implemented and built and so and even on immigration I think it the merit based immigration system he was working on is something that would have kept wages in America rising brought a lot of GDP craters to our country.
		People said he was against immigrants but he was wanting people to come to our country legally and make America vacuum cleaner for the best and brightest in this world so that they will.
		Continue to take our country to the next level.
		So I thought his policies were really excellent.
		And to your question specifically, I do give examples in the book of Kim Kardashian or Van Jones, people who were not naturally with Trump coming to the White House on an issue they cared about.
		Both of them took a lot of grief from people in the liberal circles.
		I think Van was getting called an Uncle Tom for coming and working with Trump.
		Trump, but banned something that they didn't do.
		I mean, he had John Lewis criticizing him for doing it.
		But meanwhile, we got the biggest criminal justice reform and prison reform bill done
		in the history of our country.
		And so, you know, so I think that Trump was always, people would go out and criticize
		him on television.
		I always saw that as virtue signaling, and I have no patience for virtue signaling.
		But people who wanted to get things done, a lot of people would work with me behind
		Some things didn't get done in those meetings, and you'd be surprised.
		Some people were in my office in the White House, you know, meeting on policies.
		And Trump, anytime somebody wanted to reach out and meet with him, you'd hear him out.
		Sometimes he would agree, sometimes not.
		But I always saw him more as a pragmatist than anything else.
dave rubin ▲ ● ▼		I think I legally have to ask you, so if, let's just say, he was to run again, and you get the call again, or Ivanka gets the call, or it's on speakerphone, how are you going to feel?
jared kushner ▲ ● ▼		Look, I think that, and I'll tell you what I believe, right?
		So, number one with Trump, you never know what he's going to do, and you never know what's going to happen, right?
		That's the only thing that you can say with certainty.
		Number two is, I do believe that he is very bothered by what he sees them doing to this country, right?
		You know, if you think about when he left, we had peace throughout the world.
		China was on their back heel.
		You know, we even had a deal with the Taliban that I think would have worked out really well.
		No wars in Europe.
		Economy was getting ready to explode.
		You know, gas prices were low.
		Inflation was low.
		Wages were rising.
		It was pretty good, people forget, but it was pretty good.
		2019 was the first year in 20 that the wealth gap in our country started to shrink.
		Which was amazing, and that was because people on the bottom were making a lot more because of Trumponomics.
		So, policies were great, but now these guys come in, and number one is, the only thing that unites them is that they hate Trump, right?
		So that's why they're raiding him and investigating him, and they can't stop talking about him.
		I think Biden just gave a speech, you know, all about him, which is crazy, after he raids his home, which is like, again, this is getting very close to like third world country stuff, the stuff that we would be mad at a dictator for.
		But his policies were really good.
		And I wished when they came in that they would say, you know what, let's just maybe talk the way politicians are supposed to talk and just keep all of Trump's policies.
		And I think they could have gone down as an incredible administration.
		But instead, they've chosen to do the opposite.
		I think for him, he knows that he could fix things really quickly.
		And that's what I think is pushing him to want to do something.
		And whether he makes a decision, that'll be up to him.
		But we'll see what happens with that.
dave rubin ▲ ● ▼		So let's finish up with something that's not Trump related and not directly DC related or anything else.
		But when I moved down to Florida or when we moved down in December, I get an email from you and it basically says, hey, heard you're down here in Miami.
		Let's get together.
		And now we've become friendly and had dinner a couple of times.
		And you said something to me the first time that we met that has really rung true with me.
		Which is, you said something to the effect, and maybe you could, I'll slightly butcher the quote and then you can fix it, but I think you said something like, if America is to succeed, it starts here in Miami.
		It was something to that effect.
		That something is happening here, in Miami and more broadly Florida, that is the map for the rest of the country.
		Now clearly I believe that, you know how much we're loving it here.
		I just opened these offices and this studio, like it's so flourishing here.
		What should people know about what's going on down here?
		And did you guys always think you were going to come down here once DC was done?
		Was it immediate?
unidentified		No.
dave rubin ▲ ● ▼		Let's go down to Florida and Miami or did you want to go?
dave rubin ▲ ● ▼		How did you even end up here?
jared kushner ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, it was very last minute.
		First of all, I was very glad when I saw you move down because you were a voice that I followed when I was in the White House and I know we'd missed each other at one of the parties in the White House.
		And when I saw you came down, I said, this is great, you know, cause Florida people are forming.
		It's just, it's a place where everyone's helping everyone.
		And so the decision was like this, right?
		We're, we're, we're figuring out what we want to do.
		We traveled the whole country.
		So we'd seen all these different places.
		So we'd identified like maybe two or three cities that we thought, Could be really exciting places to go.
		New York was out of the question at the time because it was basically like Pompeii.
		It was closed down.
		The restaurants were closed.
		The schools were closed.
		None of our friends were there.
		Everyone had either gone to the Hamptons or in Florida, or some people were living in Aspen.
		And we basically said, you know, this doesn't feel like the place to go.
		So we said, Florida, we honed in on.
		I joked with Ivanka, I said, look, I know we're about 30 years ahead of schedule, because most old people end up here anyway.
dave rubin ▲ ● ▼		Del Boca Vista.
jared kushner ▲ ● ▼		Exactly.
		But it felt like a place that had the energy of the future.
		And so we come down here and we said, look, if we don't like it, we'll put the kids in school, it has a very nice Jewish community, then we'll go back to New York, you know, in the fall.
		We came down and we just fell in love.
		I mean, it just, first of all, the weather's great, the energy's great.
		What really surprised us, though, was the people, right?
		Right now you have people from LA, San Francisco, Chicago, New York coming down, but you have an original crop of Miamians who are also phenomenal.
		Everyone's coming together.
		When we were coming up in New York, it felt like a city that had become great over the previous decades people have fought to make it.
		Here you have people coming together trying to create a great city.
		They're all very invested in doing things civically, socially.
		We've made a ton of amazing new friends.
		I call it sometimes like freshman year of college, where everyone's creating new friend groups, trying new hobbies.
unidentified		Right, right.
jared kushner ▲ ● ▼		You know, with your kids, you have activities, taking them fishing, taking them boating.
		So it's just a very creative place.
		And what I find is everyone comes through.
		So what I loved in Washington was that, I mean, the local community, we were like jackals, because it's a one-industry town.
		Right.
		But you always had very interesting people from business, from intellectual, just passing through, trying to influence in one way.
		Here you have an amazing community, but you also have a lot of people coming through.
		And then what I find is that it's a very tolerant place, and that you can be at dinner with people, very liberal, very conservative.
		Everyone wants to learn from each other.
		And I find that it's a place where people don't take themselves too seriously.
		Everyone's doing interesting things, everyone has interesting stories, and the lifestyle's amazing.
		So that's been our experience so far.
		I know that you're also converted as well.
dave rubin ▲ ● ▼		There is nothing that I can possibly say right now that my audience has not heard me say about Florida.
jared kushner ▲ ● ▼		Did I repeat a lot of it?
dave rubin ▲ ● ▼		It was pretty much, yeah, it's pretty good here.
		That's the point.
		And it must feel kind of refreshing for you guys in that regard that you're sort of out of the political thing and then you get to build something in a place that seems to represent some of the ideas you were trying to get across to the country.
jared kushner ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, we don't miss it.
		And I will say too, like, you know, Florida, and again, it's been interesting that it's becoming this big Republican epicenter now, the free state of Florida, but it's, it
		feels like it's more of like a freedom driven Republican, like a no judgment.
		I think a lot of the future of what I think conservatism can be, and again, the one thing
		I'll say too, I'm very hesitant to use labels, right?
		I learned that like, we're basically a two party country right now, but Democrats and
		Republicans, like they're each a collection of tribes more than they're like ubiquitous
		But I feel like here in Florida, it's just a lot of people doing creative things and a lot of fun people.
		So it's been a lot of fun to be a part of it so far.
dave rubin ▲ ● ▼		Well, thank you for coming down to our local studio here in Miami.
dave rubin ▲ ● ▼		You are the first guest in the local studio.
jared kushner ▲ ● ▼		You were actually the first guest.
dave rubin ▲ ● ▼		Technically, I was the first guest.
jared kushner ▲ ● ▼		Good to see you, my man.
jared kushner ▲ ● ▼		Thank you, Dave.
dave rubin ▲ ● ▼		If you're looking for more honest and thoughtful conversations about politics instead of nonstop yelling, check out our politics playlist.
dave rubin ▲ ● ▼		And if you want to watch full interviews on a variety of topics, watch our full episode playlist all right over here.

▲