Podcast

Jared Kushner - The Mechanic - [Invest Like the Best, EP.403]

Invest Like the Best with Patrick O'Shaughnessy

Last highlighted December 27, 2024 Source ↗ ← All highlights

Long-Term Greed
- In competitive markets, focus on building trust and long-term relationships, not maximizing every dollar.
- Prioritize finding win-win solutions and future deals over short-term gains. Transcript: Patrick O’Shaughnessy What your experience and generally New York City real estate and investing in that sector, a very competitive, high stakes place can teach you that no other experience in the world Can teach you. So I was going to ask about that. I also remember you telling me something around early in your career across a lot of that 14 billion, you had bigger ideas than necessarily you had capital to match the specific idea. And so it was very important that you work with the incentives and the desires of your counterparties to find creative ways forward. I would just love to hear a bit about those two things in conjunction, like what New York can teach you that maybe nowhere else can, that you had that experience. And then also this creative deal-making early on when your ideas maybe outstrip your specific resources at that moment. Jared Kushner So New York real estate is probably the most competitive real estate market in the world. It’s filled with a lot of characters and colorful people. Some are incredible people, some are terrible people, and you just have to find your way to navigate through it. As a young guy, I got to meet them all, and I was able to differentiate myself ultimately by being somebody who focused on the next deal instead of the last dollar. And as I saw everyone who I was dealing with, particularly in 666, most people were very short-sighted. Tom was phenomenal. It really made me think, well, I should just try to be a good person to people, be honest, don’t operate the way that a lot of others were operating. And I think that that differentiated people really want to start doing business with me. And it helped me refocus on what I wanted to accomplish. So coming out of that deal, I learned a million and a half lessons from it. So I find in life, you learn very little when things go right. You learn a lot when things go wrong. And I learned a lot about how to structure your capital. I learned that it wasn’t maybe the most prudent thing to make big concentrated bets, unless you have super high conviction. But you should figure out how to find ways to create asymmetric risk profiles and deals. One of the first buildings I bought in New York was a building called 200 Lafayette Street, which is in Mulberry. It was owned by an old guy who was actually married to Geraldine Ferraro. And he was a building. I mean, when I went to the building, I didn’t even do any inspections on it because it would rain on the roof and it would be in the basement. It would just go right through. It was an old sweatshop building, but it was beautiful. And I saw at the time I was working with Josh and Thrive and we were helping a lot of entrepreneurs. And I think the ethos behind what Josh was trying to do at Thrive was to say, how can I help entrepreneurs? Like I wish I was helped when he was an entrepreneur. One of the things I was doing was I was helping a lot of his companies with their real estate needs. And I realized how arrogant a lot of the landlords were and that they said, what are the needs of these tenants? They want a cool design building, they need a place for their bikes, they want fast Wi-Fi, and they just wanted simple interactivity. So I started realizing the places they wanted to be. They want to be in Soho, they want to be in Brooklyn, and they were willing to pay more rent than what the market was currently asking, if you can give them that package and make things simple For them. So this building, 200 Lafayette, was a premier location and had all the bones of what it could be. I met with the owner. I was able to convince him to give me the deal. And then I thought about bringing in an institutional partner. But at the time, our family had never dealt with an institutional partner before. So I went to a lot of the traditional funds. They all didn’t want to do business with me at the time. And there was one fund that I went with, a gentleman named Avi Shemesh at CIM. And I remember walking through the building and he asked me, he said, well, how big are the floors? I said, they’re 17,200 feet. He said, well, is that the right size for the tenants we’re going after? And I said, well, it’s what we got. And he says, how fast will you renovate this building in? And I said, I’m going to do it in under a year. And he says, but most of my people are telling me you could do it in 18 months minimum. I said, I’m going to be here every day and I’m going to renovate in under a year. And I believe I can do it. He looked at me on top of the roof and he said, Jared, I’m not going to invest in this building. I’m investing in you. And that was my first real institutional partnership in New York. And we bought the building. I worked it very, very hard. We got through Hurricane Sandy with Slotus down, but I think I did the full renovation about nine months, leased the whole building. And we ended up selling it for about 160 million about a year later. It was a big success. And that really was the one that got me started with my whole next chapter of momentum in that regard. And in doing that too, I was dealing with the brokers, with the retail guys, with all the different contractors. One of the best lessons I learned on that was, again, I was so in the weeds on the construction. I had a great gentleman named Greg Cuneo, who was an old Italian guy who was semi-retired at the time, but he liked me. So he was willing to work on my job with me. And I remember I was negotiating with the elevator guys very aggressively. And he looked at me and he said, give me an Italian term where he said, Jerry, just remember, everyone’s got to eat. 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’t want to get gouged, but you don’t want to cut them too thin because you want them motivated to do an excellent job for you. And so all these little micro lessons were just very important in my early formation. But again, I really was always focused on being long-term greedy, doing the right thing, and opportunities just started multiplying. (Time 0:17:59)
Effective Negotiation
- Listen actively to understand people’s interests in negotiations.
- Focus on creating mutually beneficial outcomes by making the pie bigger, not just slicing it differently. Transcript: Patrick O’Shaughnessy And we started buying a lot of buildings and then creating a lot of value for my family and for the investors that partnered with us. Everyone’s got to eat makes me wonder, how do New York real estate investors negotiate differently than others that you’ve dealt with? If it’s an especially cutthroat, hardcore place and asset class, anything stand out from your many negotiations with New York real estate specifically that seem distinctive and Unique? Jared Kushner I would say there’s two different barbells on how people negotiated. And then I chose my style based on that because every negotiation I was in, I wasn’t just negotiating. I was actually learning from how the people across the table negotiated with me. So you would have some people who over-negotiated every clause, every provision, like it was a nuclear code. And then I did one deal with the developer who basically sent back the contract and he said, I’ll be okay with your whole contract. These are my three issues. And if you give me those three issues in the way I want it, I’ll just sign your contract. And I was like, that made a lot more sense to me because if you want to buy, then be a buyer. And a lot of these provisions didn’t matter that much. So it was really a function of understanding what your objectives are and your priorities. And if you wanted to buy, make it as easy as possible for the seller to sell it to you. Patrick O’Shaughnessy Don’t let your lawyers overcomplicate it or jam them up with a lot of minutiae that doesn’t really matter. I’m not just asking about New York real estate now, but just across your entire life experience, what have you learned about the most effective way to figure out what’s important to People and what they want? Jared Kushner You just have to listen. If you listen to people, they tend to tell you what’s important to them. Patrick O’Shaughnessy Why don’t more people do that well? Probably insecurity. Jared Kushner People generally either come with preconceived notions to different situations. Perhaps it’s ego. But I find that if you’re trying to do a transaction with somebody, it’s not about trying to impose what you want. It’s about trying to give them what they want while also getting what you want. And the type of transactions I always tried to do were not ones where I slice up a piece of pie. It was, how do you make the pie bigger? The good news is, I mean, you go on a plane and you fly out, there’s a million buildings. You look down below, somebody’s always getting divorced, somebody’s getting old, somebody’s mismanaged. So there’s a million things to buy. And over time, I really developed the discipline to know that you have to just walk away from the deals that don’t make sense. And if you don’t have the right chemistry with a seller, or you don’t think you can make the returns, it’s a lot of work to convert a building. It’s a lot of work to manage a building. So you want to make sure you’re making the fair deal to keep the upside for yourself and your investors, not giving it all away by overpaying to somebody you’re never going to see again. (Time 0:23:17)
Middle East Diplomacy
- On his first Middle East trip, Jared Kushner focused on asking questions, not imposing solutions.
- This approach, focusing on listening, built trust and led to breakthroughs like the Abraham Accords. Transcript: Patrick O’Shaughnessy Our mutual friend, David Senra, is fond of saying that relationships run the world. And I was interested in your book that there’s this little butterfly flapping its wings moment when Rick Gerson made an introduction to you that maybe ultimately led to the Abraham Accords, if you think about the butterfly flapping its wings. And I was really struck by that story in your book, which is the same story basically you just told, that when you first went to the Middle East with really no foreign policy experience, You weren’t a historian of the Middle East necessarily, that you went and listened in maybe a unique way that they said was unique. Can you just tell that story to really drive home the power and the point of just going in with this orientation, even if you’re not a huge subject matter expertise when you start? First of all, Rick is a special friend, really a special human being. Jared Kushner And I think he’s very genuine through and through, and that’s why he’s built so much trust. And I find that one of the things that makes me very rich in life is the fact that I’m blessed to have great friends like Rick and others who I really respect in every regard and who I value. That story was one when I went to UAE, and this was on one of my first trips overseas. 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. And I spent the first hour basically asking him his very simple questions. So the goal during that meeting was to really bounce off of him my early framework for how I was going to approach the Palestinian issue and some of the broader regional issues with Iran And different challenges that we had. If you remember at the time in the Middle East, it was a total mess. So Syria was in a civil war where 500,000 people had been killed. Assad was using chemical weapons on the opposition. Libya was destabilized. Yemen was destabilized. Iran had just done the deal with Obama where they now were flush with cash and on a glide path to a nuclear weapon. And ISIS was roaming around and had a caliphate the size of Ohio, where they were governing over 8 million people pretty ruthlessly. So it was a mess, and a lot of the US allies felt betrayed by the deal that Obama had done with Iran. So it was probably about as bad a situation as we’ve seen in a long time. When I was sitting with MBZ, I basically was asking him one simple question, which was, America has a lot of power. We have a lot of tools at our disposal. You are somebody who’s been here for a long time. You’re thought to be one of the wisest leaders in the region and in the world. If you were me, what would you do? And I could tell he was just like not getting the question. It took us several iterations till he finally started giving me answers. And it was a great discussion where I started sharing with him some of the initial thoughts that I had and then pulling thoughts out of him and getting his responses to help me shape some Of the different approaches I was thinking of taking. He said to me at the end of the conversation, it was like a two and a half hour meeting. He said, Jared, I think you’re going to make peace in this region. And I said, well, why do you say that? And he says, well, the U.S. Usually sends one of three different people to come see me. The first are people who come and they fall asleep in the meetings. The second type of person they send is somebody who comes and they read off note cards and transmit messages, but have no authority or ability to actually engage and have a conversation. And the third are the senior people who they send, who usually come to try to convince me to do things that aren’t in my interest. They said, you’re the first senior person that’s come from the US that I can remember who actually asked questions. And at the time, I was shocked by that statement, a little dismayed, but that was kind of the only way that I knew how to do it. And it wasn’t because necessarily that was my approach. It was because I came with no subject matter expertise in the Middle East. I came with no experience in diplomacy. And so I did what I thought I should do, which is find the smartest people who have vested interests in the situation and start asking them their perspectives on what they think should Be done. So this was not like you need to be a nuclear physicist to think of this. It’s like this should be 101. But 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. (Time 0:27:28)
Leadership and Change
- Effective leadership in complex situations requires recognizing leaders as humans.
- Focus on building trust, understanding their desires, and working collaboratively towards shared goals. Transcript: Patrick O’Shaughnessy Than they’ve lived. I have so many questions about the work you did in the Middle East, the Abraham Accords. It’s been so fascinating to hear about from you, but also to read about independently. But my biggest overarching question is just about leadership. You had to deal with a very complicated situation, very talented, very different leaders across lots of different countries and interest groups, et cetera. Can you just say one click more about the role of leadership in affecting the sort of change that I think, I don’t know many people that would disagree that they want peace and progress. I’m sure some people do. I’m going to ask big questions about good versus evil and stuff later, but it does seem like most people kind of want the same basic things. And yet it’s been incredibly hard to get those things done. It sounds to me like your approach is fundamentally a human one that is very focused on enabling and listening to other leaders and then working together as a group. Can you just riff on everything you learned about the role of leadership in affecting change in situations that are extremely hard to change because of complex histories? Jared Kushner It starts with understanding that all leaders are human beings. And I think maybe because the two foremost leaders who were mentors to me was number one, my father. I saw the way he led a business and I saw the way that he was effective by setting examples and by showing people that he wouldn’t ask people to work harder than he worked. And by basically saying like, this is the North Star of where we’re going to get to and how we’re going to get there. Then I saw the way Donald would lead and manage. And that was also very inspiring to me. He had a very unconventional approach. But the thing I respected about my father-in was that he was very unafraid to go after hard challenges. So like the Middle East, for example, was something that most leaders would set low expectations on and then try to navigate through. He was unafraid to go right after it. And North Korea, like, let’s go meet with them. Let’s try. And he wasn’t afraid to try, which I liked as well. What I would say about the leaders in the Middle East is that when I came in, it was a very chaotic situation. And they had a lot of fear for what Iran would do if they were allowed to stay on the glide path. And they realized that a lot of the old habits that the countries had taken were not necessarily the right ones. So it was kind of the beginning of the realization that we needed an economic project and we needed to give our people hope and opportunity instead of just holding them back with more Of a repressive nature as had been the case throughout the Middle East in the past. So if you think about the Arab Spring, that was really, I think, in some ways, a turning point where leaders realized that if they’re not giving their people hope and opportunity, they Needed to break out and they needed to get them focused on economics instead of extremism. And that was the permeating undertone of what we thought was like a better chance. And I think because they’d seen the failure in the previous model, there was more open-mindedness to the new approach. You had at the time entering the deputy crown prince in Saudi Arabia then, who’s now the crown prince, Mohammed bin Salman, also a former businessman who really had big ambitious goals For what he wanted to do with his country. And then in Qatar, they had a new emir, Tamim, and his foreign minister, Muhammad, who I worked very closely with, who also wanted to modernize their countries and get to a different Place. So I think there was a big revelation of, we’ve gotten to a great place, but we have so much more potential. And if we don’t address these problems, it’s not going to work. So there was a big fear at the time of change because 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 can survive in the current state. They’re not sure if they can survive in a different state. And so that becomes complex in that regard. So a lot of what we tried to do was figure out how to identify what the paradigms were that would be acceptable. And in some cases with President Trump, he would just eliminate the status quos and then force people to try different status quos. And then we’d work with them to say, how do we create better status quos and avoid the worst potential status quos? And once you create that impetus for change, then I found that leaders had a lot of courage in order to get there. A lot of these leaders in particular in the Middle East, for them, they had a real vision for what they want to do for their societies. But there was just a lot of old constructs that they had to fight through in order to get there. And I think what I was able to do was to be a sounding board for them in a trusting way. They knew that if our conversations, if they shared with me their desires and those conversations lead doubt, that would be very hard for them. They would have to deny that this is where they want to go because 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. And so I think just building trust with them, understanding what their true desires were, and then working hand in hand with them on how they could migrate their situations was (Time 0:33:30)
Investing Energy
- Kushner finds energy in researching and manifesting deals, focusing on long-term potential.
- He emphasizes exceptional teams, strong company cultures, and working with friends. Transcript: Patrick O’Shaughnessy The way you spend your hours, where you find yourself getting the most energy. So running an investment firm, there’s lots of stuff you have to do. You got a lot of it before you meet a thousand people, you travel everywhere, you’re learning about everything. You’re building these relationships. If you just think of all of it and had to zoom in on the part that gives you personally the most energy, what is it? Jared Kushner There’s two parts to that answer. The first part is the research part. I love meeting people, learning about what they’re doing, and then seeing if I can believe that something’s going to be different than people conventionally believe. For example, in Phoenix, I saw the business. It’s something I’ve known for a long time, but I empirically believe that they were valuing it based on percentage of book. The way I saw them transforming the business, I felt like it should be valued as a multiple of earnings business. And people would say, but Israeli insurance companies never go above book value. But I said, well, I don’t think this is actually an Israeli insurance company. And I think that if we told the story globally on what it was, I thought the valuation could go much higher on the company. And that was interesting to me. The company had just started translating their financials from Hebrew to English about a year ago. It was a very misunderstood company. It took us about a year to really understand it with deep research, talking to different experts, spending a lot of time with company and management. And what I realized is they manage over $150 billion. They’re doing SMAs now with BlackRock and Aries and Apollo and many others. And they have a very strong position in the market, phenomenal management team, and several business lines that I think are poised for tremendous long-term growth. So I looked at it and I just thought that it was very attractively priced relative to what I thought it would be. And I think that’s also the way I look at companies is I’m less concerned with what the current state of the company is. I’m way more focused on what do I think that company can be in five years or seven years or 10 years. And if I have a very strong conviction that it could become that, then you kind of have to make sure you’re paying an okay price today, but the price today matters a lot less than what you Think something’s going to be. The second thing I love is I love manifesting things. So for example, one of the iterations of Affinity is we think that we’re extraordinary problem solvers and navigators and manifestors. What we’ve actually started to realize is that we should be really trying to look to work with people like us. So one of the investments we made recently is with Brad Jacobs, who’s been on your podcast, who’s phenomenal. Actually, I first heard of him by listening to David Senra’s podcast, Founders, the episode on Brad’s book. I was very, very impressed. And when we met, it was very flattering. So he told me he read my book. I told him I read his book and we just built a fast friendship. And he asked me to join his board and we invested in it. And the investment’s up a lot today. A lot. A lot. Yeah, it’s been a very good return, 70 or 80% in less than a year. But I’ll be honest, working with Brad, I think there’s a lot that we can complement what he does, but I’m learning a tremendous amount from him. I think he’s even better than I expected, and it’s going to be an extraordinary business that he’s going to build. And so that I get a lot of excitement about because you basically start with a white sheet of paper and you say, these are all the different outcomes. And then what can we do together with our different skills and relationships to make things happen that are better than should happen otherwise? And so those are really the two things. And I find that I love working with great people. Some people don’t like working with their friends. I try to only work with my friends because I find that I spend probably more time with the people I work with than I do with my family. So if I’m spending the time away from my family, which I love, then it has to be with people I enjoy. (Time 1:32:50)
Father’s Influence
- Kushner’s father instilled values of hard work and transparency, even sharing business challenges.
- His father’s experience with prison taught Kushner about what truly matters in life. Transcript: Patrick O’Shaughnessy Love to ask a similar set of questions about your dad. There is a line in the book that was really powerful. He said, in life, sometimes we get so powerful that we start to think that we are dealers of our own fate, but we are not. That line, just again, I’m trying to pick the things in the book that really just hit me the hardest. Maybe with that as a jump off point, just tell me about your dad, the kind of person he is, the experiences you’ve been through with him and the impact that he’s had on you. Jared Kushner So my dad is an extraordinary person. He’s a very raw entrepreneur in the sense that he grew up in a very poor neighborhood in Elizabeth. His father was a carpenter who then became a home builder. So he really watched his parents work 24 seven, very family oriented. And he went to law school and then business school and then worked as an accountant and a lawyer and then started his own business. So he brought us up seeing both his highs and his lows. And he didn’t hide from us his problems. Again, building his business, it had some early bumps along the way. And he didn’t hide that from his family. So he always believed the reason why he was working to build the business was to provide for his family. And he wanted us to just have full transparency into that. He treated Josh and I like we were adults. He never treated us like we were children. He wasn’t talking to us about sports. If we want to go to a baseball game, we’d go with our uncle or somebody else. That’s why we became Mets fans. So my dad’s a Yankee fan, which not sure if that’s a good thing or a bad thing, but we always say we got our humility from being Mets fans and it’s really given us a lot in life. A lot of perspective. But I do tell my daughter that she should marry a Mets fan because they’re very loyal. 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 when we had a day off from school, he’d take us to Work. So he just trained us to work. And he taught us about problem solving, entrepreneurialism. And he really just instilled in us the values of hard work, of leadership, and of saying, you always have to live in the lane of going the extra mile. You just have to put everything into it. And anything you’re going to do, compete to do it the best you can do. One of my favorite stories with my father is he, I guess we talk about self-responsibility. I remember I was going for an internship interview and he says, what time are you leaving? I said, I’m leaving at eight. He says, why? The interview’s at nine. He says, well, what if there’s traffic? I said, there’s not traffic. I’ve done this drive a million times. So what if there’s an accident? I said, I don’t control that. He said, no, no, no, Jared. The only excuse for not being on time is that you didn’t leave early enough. And that was just kind of the mentality that he instilled in us, which is take responsibility for what you do and always try to do things the right way. My father made a big mistake in his life. He got into a sibling rivalry and that led to some legal issues. They were fighting mostly over money, which is, and probably ego, which was stupid. And I think that, you know, our siblings, we’ve all internalized that. And I think that money and ego is something that doesn’t come between us, which is important. But through that experience, my father, I’d say we all gained a lot of grounding. And I think it definitely changed my relationship with my father because he went to prison for a year and that forced me to take a lot more responsibility in the business at I think I was 23 or 24 at the time. And I was in law school and business school then. I almost dropped out. My dad didn’t want me to do that. So I basically would take four of the days of the week off and I would drive into the office at 5 a.m. And I would come in and my friends would joke that if my law professors wanted to fail me, they would just have to give me a multiple choice test with five pictures and say, circle who your Professor is. But I had to really run a lot of his affairs for him while he was gone. And I had to be a father to my siblings and really a support for my mother. So that changed our relationship. But my father, through that experience, I saw a guy who was at the top of the world, who then went to prison, where you learn that in prison, they could take in this world everything from You. You could lose friendships, you could lose money, you could lose your freedom. And it really taught me what to value and what not to value in life. And then don’t value the things that can be taken away and try to spend as much time on the things that are real and don’t pursue things for the wrong reasons. And I think that that also has anchored me through all the different challenges in my life as well. And so my father came out and didn’t run from his experience. And he just said, I made a mistake. And he took full responsibility. He’s done a lot of charity work. He’s volunteered in prisons. He’s mentored inmates. He started a second chance program in his company where a lot of people come out of prison, get jobs at Kushner. And I think that it was something we’re very, very proud of. And he’s just an extraordinary businessman. I’ve learned a lot from him. Amazing working with him when I was in Kushner companies. I’m very proud of him. He just got nominated to be ambassador for France. He loves Donald. They always had a very close relationship. Actually, when Donald ran the first time, I think he sent Donald his first check because he says, look, I don’t know if this thing’s going anywhere, but I love him, so I got to just support Him. And he did the same this time. And I think he’ll do a great job. He always instilled in us a strong sense of public service, of wanting to do right for your country, of being grateful for being in America. Our grandparents came over as refugees after the Holocaust, and they would always say, what a great country this is. He would always support politicians. In a way in France, which has a lot of issues with antisemitism and trade, I think he’ll do an extraordinary job. And I’m very, very proud for him and very, very excited for him to have this shift in life. And he’s built an extraordinary company. And I keep telling my dad, for what end at this point? You don’t need more money. And you now have trained the next generation in how to do this. So it’s a great time for him to do it in life. He’s a hard worker. He’s in great shape. And I think he’s going to do a great job. So he’s a very, very special person. And Josh and I and our sisters, Dara and Nikki, feel very lucky to have him as a father. And I’ll say just the same is our mother is also extraordinary. She’s the most selfless, elegant, quiet person. I think a lot of our values of family and keeping us grounded, I think a lot of that comes from our mom, who’s also been just an extraordinary person in our lives. (Time 2:19:58)
Trump’s Strengths
- Kushner highlights Trump’s communication, negotiation skills, ability to read people, and pragmatism.
- He also acknowledges Trump’s careful deliberation on important decisions. Transcript: Patrick O’Shaughnessy What have you learned about Trump? His strengths, his weaknesses? You spent a lot of time with him. He’s now the most focused on person in the world. You have the benefit of knowing him personally, not from the media. What have you learned about him and from him? Jared Kushner 16 years, obviously, as my father-in I would say I’ve really grown to understand him and the way he operates. I learned a tremendous amount from him when I was working for him in the way he communicates, which I think is unique to him. He has a very good processing mechanism in the sense that he can process a lot of complex situations and simplify them very quickly. He’s an unbelievable negotiator. He’s an amazing reader of people. So for him, a lot of what he’s able to do is to kind of determine if people are lying to him or not. And he knows how to ask the right questions to throw people off their game. And he just has a very pragmatic perspective on a lot of issues. The more I went through the campaign, the more I was agreeing with him on the issues on trade or immigration. And people would criticize me for that. But I was like, I just think he’s pragmatic in the things he would say. Like I remember in the campaign, he would say, let’s put America first. And people were saying that’s a racist slogan. I was like, I don’t know if you’re running for president of America. You want to put America first? That seems like that’s a good ground to have. He was just very pragmatic in the way he approaches things, very open-minded. 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 bombing or military things, he was incredibly deliberate and thoughtful and meticulous about his process. And he processed these things with the seriousness and intentionality that you would want a leader to process them with. And he’s pretty transparent. One of the things with him is you don’t have to guess what he thinks on most things because he’ll either tell it to you directly or he’ll tweet it out publicly. He’s a very unusual leader. What I’m finding is, is that now that he’s been gone for a couple of years, people are way more used to his style and they’re excited to have him back. Like his tweets on Mexico and Canada, if we did that in 2017, everyone would have been saying, oh, this is terrible. And then the senators would have been coming out saying, well, we’re going to stop him from doing this. Now everyone’s saying, oh, he’s back. Message he put out on the hostages, which was very strong. People were loving it. I think he’s more refined. People are more used to him now. He has great knowledge of the situations. 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. So I think he’s a historic figure, an unusual figure, and somebody who I’ve been very, very lucky to learn a lot about. And then I also get to see the way he is with my children. So like my little kid, Theo, just when we’re in the summer together, just follows him around all day. He sits with him in the golf cart. We’ll go sit with him at dinner when he’s out with other people. I was with him the other day and the phone starts ringing and it’s Theo. I said, Theo calls me. He says, oh yeah, he calls me like three, four times a week. And he’s very funny when he is with his grandkids. There’s a realness. And I find that he appreciates how unique the situations are, but he’s also willing to be very disruptive in that regard. So very excited to see what he’s going to do and very, very proud of the job he’s done. I think he’s changed the discourse in the world. I think he’s changed people’s minds on a lot of issues. And I think he’s going to change our country, hopefully for the better in a very substantial way. If (Time 2:30:30)