Jared Kushner

So during the planning, I'd speak to MBS almost every day, and I'd go through all the different details and the things that would be coming up.

And I said, look, I really need to get these things in writing.

He sent over a guy, Dr. Masada Laiban, who's a tremendous diplomat for them.

And he came to Washington, stayed for three weeks, and we worked through all the different details of what we needed.

And we ended up coming to an arrangement on what it should be.

So I think about now, in retrospect, why...

I was so focused on getting things like this done and why I even believed that they could be possible.

But the answer is really the people I was talking to on the other end were telling me that these things were possible.

And so just because they hadn't been done before and just because others around me didn't believe that they could be done, I wasn't willing to just say, well, let's not try.

I think that is funny.

That was an essay I read and we're doing just a snippet of it, but I would encourage anyone listening to go and find it and read the entire thing because it's something that really spoke to me as I was transitioning into my new career now.

And I just loved it.

But when we were talking about why certain people who don't have traditional qualifications are able to come in and do incredible work and solve complex problems, it made me think of that essay, which is why I shared it.

And I think that in the context of the work that I was doing here,

uh perhaps not having the historical context became an advantage and obviously went back and then tried to study it but if you go into a problem i always find that especially in the political realm my favorite political issues are ones where they're contrarian by being obvious and you know sometimes they feel very intuitive and so you take them on there's always a lot of resistance when you go against something that's been accepted

as the way that you're supposed to do things.

And I came to learn over the course of my time in government that when everyone was agreeing with what I was doing, then it actually made me more nervous because I felt like you have these problems, they haven't been solved for a long time.

And then if you take the same approach as others, you're gonna fail just like they did.

So taking a different approach doesn't mean you're gonna succeed, but at least if you fail, you're gonna fail in an original way.

And so I did like this a lot.