Jared Kushner: commitment

Transcript context

…Is that the biggest thing you took from your business background, is that just be really results focused? It was just the only way to be. If I was giving up a nice life in New York, and if I was giving up the stuff that I really enjoyed, the company that I’d helped build and the life that I was enjoying in order to do government, I was going there to make a difference and we had to focus on it. The other skillset, so there was a couple skill sets that I found were quite deficient in government. First of all, there was a ton of amazing people. People talk about the bureaucracy. What I found was is you had incredibly committed, passionate, intelligent, capable people all throughout the government. And what they were waiting for though was direction and then cover in order to get there. And so, there were a lot of tasks that I worked on, whether it was building the wall at the southern border, where I was able to work with Customs, Border Patrol, Army Corps of Engineers, military, DHS professionals, DOD, and we basically all came together. And then once we had a good project management plan, we were able to move very, very quickly. I think we built about 470 miles of border barrier in about two years, basically. And that worked very well because we basically brought private sector project management skillset, which we’re quite often missing in government. The second one is just, we spoke about negotiation earlier. I would say that most people in government, it’s just a different form of negotiation than you see in the private sector, and way less effective in that regard. Which is why I think it’s good the more we can encourage more people with private sector experience to do a stint in government and to really try to contribute and serve their country. That’s how our founders, George Washington and all the founding fathers, they were working on their farms. They left their farms, served in government, then they went back to the farm. And that was kind of the design of the representative government. It wasn’t a career political class, it was people coming in to show gratitude for the freedoms and the liberties that they enjoyed, and then do their best to help others have those same opportunities that they had, and then they’d go back and live their lives. So I think that there’s a lot of opportunity with our government, of people with more business mindsets who are going to think about things from a solutions perspective, go and serve. Is that one of the main problems here? So you also mentioned the book, the Great Degeneration by Niall Ferguson, an awesome historian. He’s been on this podcast. It helped you understand the inefficiencies of government regulation. I’d love it if you can give an insight into why government is so inefficient at times. When it is inefficient, when it doesn’t work, why is that the case? The bureaucracy that you spoke to, the negative aspects of the bureaucracy.…

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