Jared Kushner: belief

Transcript context

…So when you look for a good partner, don’t you think there’s the capacity for both good and bad in every person? So when you negotiate with all of these leaders, aren’t there multiple people you’re speaking to inside one person, that you’re trying to encourage, catalyze the goodness in the human? Yeah. Leaders are generally chosen by their country. And so, my view was if I had an objective, I didn’t get to choose who was the leader of other countries. My job was to deal with that leader, understand their strengths, understand their weaknesses, understand their power dynamics as well. One of my greatest takeaways when I grew up, I’d read the newspapers about all these powerful, famous people. And then as I got older and had the chance to meet them and do business with them and then ultimately interact with them in government, is I realized that they’re just like you and me. They wake up every morning, their kids are pissed at them, their wife doesn’t want to talk with them. And they’ve got a set of advisors around them, one saying, ” Let’s go to war,” one saying, “Let’s make peace.” One saying, “Do the deal,” one saying, “Don’t do the deal.” And they’re all thinking, where do I get advice? How do I make decisions? And so, understanding the true human nature of them and then the different power dynamics around them, I thought was very key. And so, I didn’t have a choice, do I deal with them or not? It was a function of how do you deal with them effectively in order to find areas where you have common interests and then work well together to pursue those common interests in order to achieve a certain goal. First of all, you’re incredibly well-read. I’ve gotten to know you and I’ve gotten to know Ivanka, and the book recommendation list is just incredible. So first of all, thank you for that. You told me about The Guns of August by Barbara Tuchman. It’s a book on World War I, and I went down a whole rabbit hole there. She’s an incredible historian. But anyway, there’s a bunch of stuff you learned from that, but one of the things you told me is it influenced your general approach to diplomacy of just picking up the phone and giving it a try. So as opposed to planning and strategizing, just pick up the phone.…

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