[SPEAKER_06]: It's not easy to see how they're affecting me.
[SPEAKER_03]: I don't know who he trusts on these kinds of... Who, the president?
[SPEAKER_03]: I don't know who the president really trusts.
[SPEAKER_03]: McDonough.
[SPEAKER_03]: On these kinds of strategic... McDonough.
[SPEAKER_03]: McDonough.
[SPEAKER_03]: McDonough.
[SPEAKER_03]: Yeah.
[SPEAKER_06]: The young guy.
[SPEAKER_03]: The young guy.
[SPEAKER_06]: Yeah, but he doesn't...
[SPEAKER_06]: I read you with Valerie Jarrett.
[SPEAKER_06]: There is a woman named Samantha... Power.
[SPEAKER_06]: Power.
[SPEAKER_03]: Yeah.
[SPEAKER_03]: No.
[SPEAKER_03]: Yeah, but he doesn't...
[SPEAKER_03]: There's a difference between who he trusts and who he likes.
[SPEAKER_04]: Yeah.
[SPEAKER_04]: So, I don't... You know, he...
[SPEAKER_03]: I'm not a chatterer.
[SPEAKER_03]: You know if I'm a chatterer?
[SPEAKER_03]: Yeah.
[SPEAKER_04]: I don't know well enough.
[SPEAKER_06]: But I noticed that he...
[SPEAKER_06]: I noticed that Obama listens to her.
[SPEAKER_06]: His door, his telephone is always open for her.
[SPEAKER_06]: He listens to her.
[SPEAKER_06]: He believes her instincts about politics, about who is against him, who is for him, what's going around.
[SPEAKER_03]: Ultimately, listen to what B.B.
[SPEAKER_03]: Robozo thought?
[SPEAKER_03]: Listen to?
[SPEAKER_03]: You may not know this name.
[SPEAKER_03]: B.B.
[SPEAKER_03]: Robozo.
[SPEAKER_05]: Oh, no, I don't remember.
[SPEAKER_03]: Richard Nixon, B.B.
[SPEAKER_03]: Robozo was some kind of business seminarist.
[SPEAKER_03]: was Richard Nixon's best friend.
[SPEAKER_03]: And whenever Richard Nixon went to Key Biscayne or went to California, B.B.
[SPEAKER_03]: Rebozo was there.
[SPEAKER_03]: Richard Nixon would spend a lot of time on B.B.
[SPEAKER_03]: Rebozo's boat.
[SPEAKER_03]: And if B.B.
[SPEAKER_03]: Rebozo wanted something, Richard Nixon would say it.
[SPEAKER_03]: But I don't think when Richard Nixon was deciding what to do about the Olympic War, he was talking to B.B.
[SPEAKER_03]: Rebozo.
[SPEAKER_03]: Valerie Jarrett.
[SPEAKER_06]: So in this regard, he's probably alone, but he feels, comparing to other leaders that I happened to meet in the last decades, Obama impressed me as an extremely autonomous person.
[SPEAKER_06]: Exactly, that's what I'm saying.
[SPEAKER_06]: He feels good with himself, even when he's alone in the room.
[SPEAKER_06]: I didn't see in him what we know in Clinton or in our Paris.
[SPEAKER_06]: And Anshati, our intelligent experience there, emotionally or psychologically, there is there, deep within their personality, and Anshati will need for love, for explicit expressions of love.
[SPEAKER_03]: I didn't see anything of this in Obama.
[SPEAKER_03]: I've never seen a...
[SPEAKER_03]: I mean, there's lots of things, lots of things to say like that.
[SPEAKER_03]: Somebody told me this story that, Bob Reich told me this story.
[SPEAKER_03]: This is Robert Reich, he was Secretary of Labor.
[SPEAKER_03]: Yeah, a small guy.
[SPEAKER_03]: He said he had been a friend of Clinton's.
[SPEAKER_03]: They'd been students together in England.
[SPEAKER_03]: So he was kind of Clinton's friend.
[SPEAKER_03]: He said that if you went to a cabinet meeting, and whenever Clinton looked at him,
[SPEAKER_03]: He looked annoyed or looked away.
[SPEAKER_03]: For sure, Clinton would call within two days.
[SPEAKER_03]: How's it going, Bob?
[SPEAKER_03]: What's up?
[SPEAKER_03]: Is there something on your mind?
[SPEAKER_03]: What's going on?
[SPEAKER_03]: He just wanted the love.
[SPEAKER_03]: If you tried that shit with Obama...
[SPEAKER_03]: You freeze in hell before you go.
[SPEAKER_03]: I mean, Obama didn't, he had lunch, he was pretty much set to eat lunch alone half the days.
[SPEAKER_04]: Is that right?
[SPEAKER_04]: Yeah.
[SPEAKER_03]: I mean, they would schedule in, like, time for him to be alone.
[SPEAKER_03]: And if he did, if he did some event where, you know, he was speaking to a thousand people, they would give him, like, a little rest time afterwards.
[SPEAKER_05]: human beings around.
[SPEAKER_03]: Yeah, he just wanted to be, yeah.
[SPEAKER_03]: He had no need.
[SPEAKER_03]: And, you know, it's the same.
[SPEAKER_03]: He wants to be with the people he wants to be with.
[SPEAKER_06]: I think it's a source of strength ultimately in tough moments in politics.
[SPEAKER_06]: Probably it's not the most effective way to mobilize people.
[SPEAKER_03]: No, but it's a very, or look, another thing which is, which I'm sure they tried a lot of times.
[SPEAKER_03]: Let's say you're president of the United States and you like to play golf.
[SPEAKER_03]: You're president of the United States and you like to play golf, which he does.
[SPEAKER_03]: It's a potential big political asset that you like to play golf.
[SPEAKER_03]: The president likes to play golf with his buddies.
[SPEAKER_03]: And so 80% of the golf is with the same three guys.
[SPEAKER_03]: You know, his photographer, his campaign guy, and, you know, his three buddies from Chicago.
[SPEAKER_03]: That's who plays golf.
[SPEAKER_03]: Now, most people, if they were president and they played golf, you know, they'd play golf with people from Congress.
[SPEAKER_03]: They'd play golf with business guys.
[SPEAKER_06]: Read Clinton memoirs.
[SPEAKER_06]: It's all boring because it's like a list of what he had done with anything and still very careful not to insult anyone years after he's not in office anymore.
[SPEAKER_04]: And Obama just is not...
[SPEAKER_04]: It's all... Cerebral.
[SPEAKER_04]: He's extremely cerebral.
[SPEAKER_03]: They called him... Yeah, and he has this...
[SPEAKER_03]: Their nickname for him during the campaign was Black Jesus.
[SPEAKER_04]: Who knows what kind of character Jesus was?
[SPEAKER_03]: He has this sense of himself as not me.
[SPEAKER_06]: And...
[SPEAKER_06]: I think that when he looks at the pictures of all his predecessors, he doesn't see them all.
[SPEAKER_06]: He sees probably seven or eight of them.
[SPEAKER_06]: Of course, Lincoln, probably Kennedy, Reagan.
[SPEAKER_06]: He doesn't see the rest of them.
[SPEAKER_06]: He sees in terms of greatness.
[SPEAKER_06]: We understand that greatness comes from few major
[SPEAKER_06]: decisive achievements, sometimes against all odds, that happen to be perceived at hindsight as important.
[SPEAKER_06]: And that's, I think, even on Iran, what really disturbs him is the possibility that this will be a great stain on his role.
[SPEAKER_06]: If they turn nuclear under his term, under his watch,
[SPEAKER_06]: where he had, you know, Bush, it's a paradox, you will to joke in Israel that labor governments can make war and only the good governments can make peace.
[SPEAKER_06]: Here you find something similar.
[SPEAKER_06]: The Bush administration, they can run very high rhetoric, but in effect they were parallel even from ordering the Pentagon to plan contingencies for certain cases.
[SPEAKER_06]: This administration, they got Nobel Peace Prize as a down payment before they even started.
[SPEAKER_06]: Somehow they are planning and preparing much more seriously.
[SPEAKER_06]: Obviously the Pentagon right now, they keep improving.
[SPEAKER_06]: surgical operations, we are talking about using scalpel, and they are talking about chisel with 10 pounds hammer.
[SPEAKER_06]: But in the last several years they developed extremely subtle scalpers, probably more effective than ours.
[SPEAKER_06]: And bear in mind that they hold the big stick there anyhow, without having to
[SPEAKER_06]: Basically, I once told the President, look, I'm confident that if on a scale, a spectrum of operational decisions, a decision to delay the Iranian nuclear program by several years would look more like a raid on bin Laden than a fully fledged war in Iraq.
[SPEAKER_06]: you might have considered very seriously already.
[SPEAKER_06]: It is only the fact that somehow people succeeded in implanting in your mind an extremely dramatic scenario that might eventually develop out of it that makes you judge it as something closer to the other pole.
[SPEAKER_06]: And that's not an accurate description of reality.
[SPEAKER_04]: But didn't he start out...
[SPEAKER_03]: I might not have this exactly right, but I think he started thinking that part of his grand legacy was that he was going to bring
[SPEAKER_03]: hope and harmony to the big Middle East.
[SPEAKER_03]: That he was going to give the Cairo speech, that the Islamic world was going to feel better about him, that Israel was going to be induced to be constructive, that there was going to be peace in the West Bank, and then everybody was going to feel better, and he was going to do for Iran what Nixon did for China.
[SPEAKER_03]: Yeah.
[SPEAKER_03]: And so I think he started with the idea that he was going to be a visionary great man.
[SPEAKER_03]: And I think he's learned in the last four years that that's not going to happen.
[SPEAKER_03]: And now I think he thinks, and now I think it's much more defensive.
[SPEAKER_03]: That is, I think he's trying to avoid a stain rather than to have it achieved, is my sense.
[SPEAKER_03]: Is my sense watching him.
[SPEAKER_03]: But is he?
[SPEAKER_04]: But how long?
[SPEAKER_03]: I mean, I have this sense that people always say the next year is the crucial year, the next nine months are the crucial nine.
[SPEAKER_03]: But then it sort of... Moves.
[SPEAKER_03]: Drifts.
[SPEAKER_06]: Moves a quarter every quarter.
[SPEAKER_06]: Moves what?
[SPEAKER_06]: Moves forward a quarter every quarter.
[SPEAKER_03]: Yeah, it's like shale oil.
[SPEAKER_03]: I think it's no longer true, but for 40 years, the price at which shale oil would be profitable was the same.
[SPEAKER_03]: The current price of oil plus 10.
[SPEAKER_03]: But is Iran likely to come to a crunch in the next year?
[SPEAKER_03]: What's the crunch?
[SPEAKER_06]: To reach a nuclear capacity?
[SPEAKER_03]: Is there likely to be?
[SPEAKER_03]: Well, no.
[SPEAKER_03]: I mean, that's one question.
[SPEAKER_06]: So things that could happen are there could be an attack.
[SPEAKER_06]: will always act based on what they feel, to what extent the other side, mainly the United States and Israel, are ready to act.
[SPEAKER_06]: And they are clever enough to act counter-cyclically.
[SPEAKER_06]: counter-cyclical.
[SPEAKER_06]: Namely, when the attention of the whole world somewhere else or for other reasons will be paralyzed from doing something, they will be hectic.
[SPEAKER_06]: When all of us are focused on it and stand ready, they might even go with further gambits.
[SPEAKER_06]: They might announce that they stop everything for a year.
[SPEAKER_06]: They are chess players, extremely clever, but they are determined to follow in the footsteps of Pakistan and North Korea and not to fall into the trap that, in a way, the late Gaddafi or, under other circumstances, the South Africans fell into.
[SPEAKER_06]: And clearly they want that to end with something like Iraq or Syria.
[SPEAKER_06]: So the very fact that I can quote these three pairs of examples means that there is an opening for them.
[SPEAKER_06]: So there is a need for something much more dramatic than the present kind of level of sanctions.
[SPEAKER_06]: They are very unprecedented and very painful for them.
[SPEAKER_06]: It reduced their...
[SPEAKER_06]: reserves dramatically, and some of the reserves are practically blocked, they cannot approach it very easily.
[SPEAKER_06]: The real currency was evaluated dramatically.
[SPEAKER_06]: And it's not easy, but as we know from other examples in the past, the elites don't suffer.
[SPEAKER_04]: by the fact that I didn't see...
[SPEAKER_03]: If you treated the country as one actor doing what was best for the country, then I think there's a case to be made that the...
[SPEAKER_03]: take off the sanctions, give them rewards, they give up the nukes, all that.
[SPEAKER_03]: But if you take it from the point of view of the people who are there now, I don't see how if the sanctions come off and they give up the nukes, they're alive and in power a year later.
[SPEAKER_06]: You know, the basic strategy of the regime is to
[SPEAKER_06]: defend its continuity.
[SPEAKER_06]: And for them, I'm talking from time to time about a zone of immunity for the nuclear military program.
[SPEAKER_06]: But the whole program aims at achieving another layer of immunity, an immunity for the regime.
[SPEAKER_06]: They see, look at what happened right now in
[SPEAKER_06]: North Korea, they fully understand Iranians.
[SPEAKER_06]: Once they turn nuclear, that's become the ultimate guarantee that no one will try to intervene within their internal side, however brutal they might have to go with their own people.
[SPEAKER_06]: So they do not need it in order to drop a bomb on a neighbor or anything.
[SPEAKER_06]: They need it in order to be able to spread terror, to hegemonize the region, to intimidate neighbors, and to be secure that whatever they are doing will not end up with someone trying to topple the regime.
[SPEAKER_06]: So I think that the problem is that for us, for Israel, time is running out because they are actively keeping
[SPEAKER_06]: more centrifuges and now start with a new version of centrifuges that will be only five times more effective in enrichment, that shortens the time frame between decision and reaching weapon-grade capabilities running from 20% or whatever.
[SPEAKER_06]: They protect better the size, they improve their surface-to-air missile system,
[SPEAKER_06]: radars to identify stealth kind of airplanes or even cruise missiles, they are not sleeping.
[SPEAKER_06]: They already built a force of some 600-500 floating mines with GPS that can navigate, so to speak, their place into their places in the Straits of Hormuz.
[SPEAKER_06]: And it's quite...
[SPEAKER_06]: create enough redundancy that Israel with its limited military potential won't be able to delay them by significant time and probably a year later or 18 months later even America won't be able to do it in a clearly surgical operation and that's basically their calculation so they do not have a
[SPEAKER_06]: It doesn't matter for them.
[SPEAKER_06]: They waited for nuclear weapons for 4,000 years.
[SPEAKER_06]: They wait another four years or four years, it doesn't matter.
[SPEAKER_06]: They just want to reach it before they start to collapse as a regime.
[SPEAKER_06]: That's the real.
[SPEAKER_03]: Will their election matter?
[SPEAKER_06]: to those who don't want to create a moment of truth, not to reach this moment.
[SPEAKER_06]: Under normal situation, the coming spring, it should have been a moment of truth, P5 plus one is going to meet in Kazakhstan, afterwards probably dire conversation.
[SPEAKER_06]: There were some rumors that Valery,
[SPEAKER_06]: started to... She was born in Iran, in Shiraz.
[SPEAKER_06]: Her father... Who was on site?
[SPEAKER_06]: Valerie Jarrett was born in Iran.
[SPEAKER_06]: Was she really?
[SPEAKER_06]: In Shiraz.
[SPEAKER_06]: Her father was, before the revolution, he was heading a hospital financed by some international NGO, by American government, to help the Iranian people.
[SPEAKER_06]: So she was born there.
[SPEAKER_06]: And the...
[SPEAKER_06]: Some others, even some former players, including one of my former colleagues and some former leading ambassadors, tried to create a direct contact with the Iranians to try to clarify what would be the terms and the reasons.
[SPEAKER_06]: And the Iranians
[SPEAKER_06]: I'm not guessing, that this type of guy would not have contacted them without informing the NSC or State Department, Pentagon, whatever.
[SPEAKER_06]: And so for them, even if the intention is not this, it is read by the Iranians.
[SPEAKER_06]: And they might end up, I recommend it to my colleagues here too,
[SPEAKER_06]: I told them, we cannot pretend to be able to tell you whether to talk to them directly or not if you feel that's absolutely necessary to make sure that you exhausted all alternatives.
[SPEAKER_06]: But if you
[SPEAKER_06]: so that coming the election, coming April, they will have to face a choice, because if they reach elections and you are still negotiating with them, they will tell their people, we are standing firm, including America, they are all crawling to our doorstep to ask for some concessions, and at the same time they keep moving.
[SPEAKER_06]: It's ridiculous.
[SPEAKER_06]: And I guess that even after elections,
[SPEAKER_06]: someone else will be elected.
[SPEAKER_06]: Whoever he is, there will be people who will say, oh, that's a moderate cancer.
[SPEAKER_06]: Assume that they will elect someone who is less, just less, less, kind of less colorful than Ahmadinejad.
[SPEAKER_06]: Immediately there will be interpretation that he is more serious, more moderate.
[SPEAKER_06]: It is moderate, I am too light.
[SPEAKER_06]: It makes a difference.
[SPEAKER_06]: You should get a chance or it will swallow another quarter.
[SPEAKER_06]: So that's how 2013 is going to pass.
[SPEAKER_06]: That's one of the reasons why I decided to leave, because I don't see it converging into a moment, a real moment of truth or decision.
[SPEAKER_06]: It can easily drag over another year.
[SPEAKER_06]: But at a certain point they will turn nuclear.
[SPEAKER_06]: I told the president, I remember Clinton.
[SPEAKER_06]: I never questioned his will to block the North.
[SPEAKER_06]: No, it didn't happen.
[SPEAKER_06]: I told Jeff, I remember sitting with Bill Casey, Reagan time, as head of our intelligence.
[SPEAKER_06]: In regard to Pakistan, it was exactly the same.
[SPEAKER_06]: How many sites, how many centrifuges, how about a plutonium bypass that they work and they...
[SPEAKER_06]: Didn't work.
[SPEAKER_06]: Reagan wanted to see them non-nuclear, but... That's what might easily happen here, once again.
[SPEAKER_00]: And if it happens, now what?
[SPEAKER_06]: I see it, it will, first of all, it will be the end of any conceivable...
[SPEAKER_06]: non-proliferation regime.
[SPEAKER_06]: Because it basically means that you can defy the whole world if you have enough money, not huge amounts of money and willpower.
[SPEAKER_06]: And it will start a much more self-confident intimidation of neighbors, which are still the major supplier of oil to Europe, to the East, to the Far East.
[SPEAKER_06]: And the regimes there are already kind of crushed between two powers.
[SPEAKER_06]: One is Iran and the other is the Islamists in Turkey and Egypt.
[SPEAKER_06]: These are two corner, kind of pillars of the, main pillars of the Middle East.
[SPEAKER_06]: And the Saudi leadership, they are dying.
[SPEAKER_06]: I don't know how you call the phenomenon where a candle is just about to die.
[SPEAKER_00]: Flicker.
[SPEAKER_06]: Flicker.
[SPEAKER_06]: Flicker.
[SPEAKER_06]: But the old Mender is practically inactive, the second is deep in dementia.
[SPEAKER_06]: They now just nominated a third one, someone about our age, who was the head of intelligent Mukherjee, but I don't believe that anyone sees him as a king.
[SPEAKER_06]: probably knife and other cutting will become ultimate.
[SPEAKER_06]: But they are not self-confident.
[SPEAKER_06]: And Abdallah of Jordan is not self-confident.
[SPEAKER_06]: The UAE and some of the Emirates are much more confident because of their money.
[SPEAKER_06]: How do you call it?
[SPEAKER_06]: They behave, yeah.
[SPEAKER_06]: They behave this way.
[SPEAKER_06]: I call them a TV station with an emirate.
[SPEAKER_06]: I don't know.
[SPEAKER_06]: I met Sheikh Jassim in Munich.
[SPEAKER_00]: Oh, he came?
[SPEAKER_00]: He came to the security conference?
[SPEAKER_06]: Yeah, I talked to him.
[SPEAKER_06]: The Americans, I met Kerry this morning, they don't know how to read the Qataris.
[SPEAKER_06]: They are totally confused.
[SPEAKER_06]: I told them they are just starting to hedge their bets.
[SPEAKER_06]: against the possibility that you will be the we, will be the losers, and the Iranians will be the winners.
[SPEAKER_06]: That's all.
[SPEAKER_06]: They start, they see Turkey and Egypt under Islamist government, so they become more Islamist.
[SPEAKER_06]: They see the discrimination of the Iranians and what happens in Iraq, so they turn more pro-Iranian.
[SPEAKER_06]: So it ends up that they're less pro-Iranian.
[SPEAKER_06]: for us or for the others.
[SPEAKER_06]: They're trying to survive.
[SPEAKER_06]: I told Kerry several years ago, I asked him, not him, the other one, Emile, I asked him, even then I asked him, are you starting to hedge your bet?
[SPEAKER_06]: He said, look at Google Earth, in front of our shows you'll find certain places where you can find two whales.
[SPEAKER_06]: 25 yards from each other.
[SPEAKER_06]: One is other, the other is Iranian.
[SPEAKER_06]: They were practically drinking from the same place.
[SPEAKER_06]: Whoever has a bigger, higher diameter of pipe takes more.
[SPEAKER_06]: And so we have to take it into account.
[SPEAKER_06]: Plain.
[SPEAKER_06]: So Middle Eastern.
[SPEAKER_00]: What's happening in Egypt?
[SPEAKER_00]: I don't know.
[SPEAKER_06]: I told Kerry today, I think that you're the only players to have any leverage upon them.
[SPEAKER_06]: Because in spite of all the bad kind of ideology and kind of extreme vision,
[SPEAKER_06]: There are practical people.
[SPEAKER_06]: Morsi is an engineer.
[SPEAKER_06]: An engineer tends up, shooting the same diameter bolt at the nut.
[SPEAKER_06]: It doesn't end with ideology, the same spiral.
[SPEAKER_06]: And the great leader of the
[SPEAKER_06]: Muslim Brothers in Egypt is not, unlike the ayatollahs at Qom, he's not a religious scholar, he's a veteran.
[SPEAKER_06]: You have to vaccinate, you have to make sure that the cow gets pregnant.
[SPEAKER_06]: And the third one is the one who is supposed to run for president.
[SPEAKER_06]: Before, he was pushed by some tricks and more things.
[SPEAKER_06]: He's a businessman, a medium-sized business.
[SPEAKER_06]: They are all practical people, so they need to feed 80 million, 88 million, to create a million jobs every year, probably more, to deal with the presence of multinationals, with direct foreign
[SPEAKER_06]: They need you.
[SPEAKER_06]: They need Americans.
[SPEAKER_06]: They believe that America gives orders to the World Bank, to the IMF, to any other organization that they need.
[SPEAKER_06]: And they understand that it's all about the economy and they see, after a very short time, they see the kind of stress of the public, the resentment, the rejection in the streets right now.
[SPEAKER_06]: So I believe that they could be, their actual behavior, probably not their vision, but their actual behavior could be shifted.
[SPEAKER_06]: My colleagues here, I didn't see any reason to keep providing them with military hardware.
[SPEAKER_06]: It doesn't make sense.
[SPEAKER_06]: They don't need it against Libya, they don't need it against Sudan.
[SPEAKER_06]: So basically you help them to accumulate against Israel, and then Israel asks to accumulate more.
[SPEAKER_06]: And you pay both, it's unlike the Soviet Union.
[SPEAKER_06]: this one half billion or whatever, and pour it into their economy, the infrastructure, some projects that you can have a say about and will deepen their dependency on you.
[SPEAKER_03]: What's the future of...
[SPEAKER_03]: I mean, something will happen in Iran.
[SPEAKER_03]: Maybe we'll succeed.
[SPEAKER_03]: Maybe we won't, and that'll make it worse.
[SPEAKER_03]: But the demography seems terrible.
[SPEAKER_03]: Nobody sane seems to be procreating, and everybody insane in their own way seems to have five children.
[SPEAKER_06]: The Haredim are more productive than the Arabs.
[SPEAKER_06]: We cancelled some of the... we had exponential support function for productivity.
[SPEAKER_06]: It's something bizarre.
[SPEAKER_06]: Rather to be an Escher, we became the exponential.
[SPEAKER_06]: When I meet a friend with three children, I tell him, another two and you are deep into the social security trap.
[SPEAKER_06]: That's your job.
[SPEAKER_06]: You can't sit idle.
[SPEAKER_06]: The future of Israel is waking up at the right moment before it's too late, putting a wedge
[SPEAKER_06]: drift along the slippery slope to one state nation.
[SPEAKER_06]: First of all, because with one state nation it would be even faster.
[SPEAKER_06]: It would be a bi-nation at first and then within the generation with an Arab majority.
[SPEAKER_06]: In fact, one of Abu Mazen's partners to leadership, Abu Ala, he was the one who negotiated with us all along.
[SPEAKER_06]: a crucial point some five years ago when he negotiated with Tzipi Livni about, far from the public eye, but everyone knew about that, and she demanded that he would recognize the Jewish, Israel, the Jewish state as a part of any document, and told her, you know, lady, it's a...
[SPEAKER_06]: cannot do it.
[SPEAKER_06]: If you continue with this demand, probably will turn into one state, big state from the Jordan to the Mediterranean.
[SPEAKER_06]: Every citizen will get a vote and the majority will decide what could be simpler.
[SPEAKER_06]: So it's not a...
[SPEAKER_06]: There is a need to stop this immediately.
[SPEAKER_06]: In a way, it's a collective...
[SPEAKER_06]: blindness of our society.
[SPEAKER_06]: The sight field is not full.
[SPEAKER_06]: Some people do not see everything.
[SPEAKER_06]: So that's what happens to our society right now.
[SPEAKER_06]: That's number one.
[SPEAKER_06]: And that's why it's not a zero-sum game.
[SPEAKER_06]: We are not making them a favor, doing a favor to the Palestinians or to anyone.
[SPEAKER_06]: But even within the borders of smaller Israel, there is still an issue.
[SPEAKER_06]: And I think the Arabs are growing slowly.
[SPEAKER_06]: They were 40 years ago, they were 16% and now they are 20%.
[SPEAKER_06]: We should be able to make, to provide equality first to the Duhuns,
[SPEAKER_06]: they are about 1%, they are totally Israelis in their behavior by security people, by the military aid that came for the president, some generals, some pilots are Druze.
[SPEAKER_06]: Then we should take the Christian minority, they are about another 2%.
[SPEAKER_06]: They could become, they have an education system which is better than ours.
[SPEAKER_06]: But like minority, it reminds me somehow
[SPEAKER_06]: I was a student in a special university between the Dnieper and Groningen.
[SPEAKER_06]: A minority with a sense of being kind of isolated, they excel in everything they do.
[SPEAKER_06]: Then we have, I believe, we have to break the monopoly of the Orthodox rabbinate on marriage and funerals and whatever, and the definition of a Jew, and accept, open, in a sophisticated, subtle manner, open the gates from massive conversion into Judaism.
[SPEAKER_06]: It's a successful country.
[SPEAKER_06]: Many will apply at the beginning without making it a precondition, but under the social pressure, the need especially of the second generation to adapt, it will happen.
[SPEAKER_06]: And we can control the quality much more effectively than our
[SPEAKER_06]: ancestors or the founding fathers of Israel could deal with the wave that it was a kind of salvation wave from North Africa, from the Arab world, from wherever.
[SPEAKER_06]: They took whatever came just to save people.
[SPEAKER_06]: Now we can be selective.
[SPEAKER_06]: And I think that with much more open kind of mind about turning Jew
[SPEAKER_06]: We can easily absorb another million.
[SPEAKER_06]: I used to tell Putin always, what we need is not just one more million.
[SPEAKER_06]: He changed Israel in a dramatic, dramatic manner, the million Russians.
[SPEAKER_06]: And I see that many will prefer to be below Russian, or there are many young, handsome girls who come, tall, skinny.
[SPEAKER_06]: We now have... We used to... Then you come, you interview someone entering into some unit in the army, asking, what's your name?
[SPEAKER_06]: He answers, Sergei Biton.
[SPEAKER_06]: It's already started to work together.
[SPEAKER_06]: Sergei Biton of Vladimir Abutbol.
[SPEAKER_06]: Fine.
[SPEAKER_06]: I think that...
[SPEAKER_06]: I'm optimistic.
[SPEAKER_06]: There's some sort of necessity created
[SPEAKER_06]: We have the background, it depends on what you look for.
[SPEAKER_06]: I used to scorn the Haredim all the time about the Bedouin wife of Moses.
[SPEAKER_06]: He went to the Zebra, the Bedouin wife, the poor one was Bedouin.
[SPEAKER_06]: Or the grand-grandmother of King David, she was Moabite, that seduced his grand-grandfather in the field.
[SPEAKER_06]: And the whole story is there.
[SPEAKER_06]: we can be more tolerant.
[SPEAKER_03]: Is there any recognition of what you said about smaller Israel, not bigger Israel is the only prospect?
[SPEAKER_03]: That seems right, but there doesn't seem to be any recognition within the country.
[SPEAKER_03]: There is.
[SPEAKER_06]: There is certain underlying recognition.
[SPEAKER_06]: It's not, you know, we had the quite surrealistic election right now.
[SPEAKER_06]: These questions are extremely interesting, both Iran and the Palestinian issue.
[SPEAKER_06]: But the whole discussion was about the draft law for Haredim and the memories of the recent kind of... We had much more genuine, wider state, Occupy Wall Street kind of... More genuine, really mobilized.
[SPEAKER_06]: masses, and they appeared.
[SPEAKER_06]: They took the son of Tommy Lapid, the journalist that everyone knows because he's handsome, and he appears every Friday evening on the most popular TV anchor.
[SPEAKER_06]: And he became, out of nowhere, not a drop of a...
[SPEAKER_06]: It's like taking a presenter of a bank, making the CEO, which I can't say, and became the second largest party.
[SPEAKER_06]: But that reflects somehow the uneasiness of the mainstream, the old elites and the youngsters from what we are doing.
[SPEAKER_06]: So I think that probably a wake-up call will come.
[SPEAKER_06]: I always hope not to a painful crisis where you have to bury the
[SPEAKER_06]: consequences, but through something softer.
[SPEAKER_06]: But basically there is a clear, clear, whoever is ready to think of it independently knows what should be done.
[SPEAKER_06]: We should launch immediately a dramatic effort, even if we know that probably it won't yield a fully fledged peace.
[SPEAKER_06]: but it can yield quite easily an interim agreement where we set a solution for borders and security.
[SPEAKER_06]: And the world guarantees the Palestinians that it will not remain so, that within five years there will be a solution for the rest of the issue.
[SPEAKER_06]: I think that we have to launch immediately with the American effort to create
[SPEAKER_06]: regional security system based on the America, Europe, the moderate Arab countries and Israel focused on blocking fundamentalist terrorism, missile defense and cornering Iran and coming to terms with the Islamist government.
[SPEAKER_06]: And that will help those
[SPEAKER_06]: The fact that we are moving with the Palestinians will help those moderate Sunni leaders, most of them are monarchs and emirs, to join hands with us in America vis-à-vis Iran.
[SPEAKER_06]: Because they personally don't care about Palestinians probably, but they are fully aware that their peoples in their streets, there will be a very high price to work with Israel to modify the tensions.
[SPEAKER_06]: if we are not going with the Palestinians.
[SPEAKER_06]: And for the Israeli public, this will create a kind of framework for something reasonable.
[SPEAKER_06]: We join hands, we do not promise heaven on earth, but we join hands with the white people in the region of the world to solve concrete issues.
[SPEAKER_06]: It will help a lot to...
[SPEAKER_06]: And even somehow, I think that when you focus only on the Palestinian-Israeli issue, Israelis feel fires, we say in Yiddish, if they go to peace.
[SPEAKER_06]: Because they remember, I pulled out from Lebanon, there are 60,000 rockets.
[SPEAKER_06]: Sharon pulled out from Gaza, there are 10,000.
[SPEAKER_06]: If Bibi will pull out from the West Bank, there will be just behind the, you know, when you come to land to Ben Gurion, you go over some 2000 feet over Arab, the occupied territory.
[SPEAKER_06]: It could be crazy.
[SPEAKER_06]: People feel
[SPEAKER_06]: That we are only giving, we cannot get anything.
[SPEAKER_06]: And it's true, for the Palestinians we cannot get anything.
[SPEAKER_06]: But once you put into the equation the whole Arab moderate world, it ends up that we get a lot of recognition from the Arab world.
[SPEAKER_03]: That's been the argument, but the problem is that's been the argument for...
[SPEAKER_03]: In one way or another.
[SPEAKER_03]: Last 20 years.
[SPEAKER_03]: Yeah, I was going to say the last 15 years.
[SPEAKER_03]: And it seems like...
[SPEAKER_03]: It's a less strong argument.
[SPEAKER_06]: That's a success of Bibi in a negative sense.
[SPEAKER_06]: He became successful in convincing our people that we did our part of it, that we tried and all the responsibility is upon the shoulders of our mother, which is not true.
[SPEAKER_06]: We never tried in the last four years to make... We were never ready to make painful decisions in order to ever break through.
[SPEAKER_06]: Later on, Abu Mazen is responsible partly for what happens.
[SPEAKER_06]: The Americans made mistakes, the Europeans made a lot of mistakes, but that cannot justify our kind of...
[SPEAKER_06]: how to put it, failure for... Yeah, and it's true.
[SPEAKER_06]: Abu Mazen doesn't help.
[SPEAKER_06]: He's not an easy client.
[SPEAKER_03]: Do people expect that Obama and Kerry are going to invest heavily in Israel-Palestinians?
[SPEAKER_06]: Or that they're going to stay away from it?
[SPEAKER_06]: Probably they dream about it, some of them, but I don't think that...
[SPEAKER_06]: I think the rhythm of Obama's visit is that he has to do it.
[SPEAKER_06]: There are even some stories that it was born in not exactly normal way, that Perez, who got here a kind of liberty medal, planned to bring
[SPEAKER_06]: Israeli president to participate in a conference that Perth initiates in the last several years, every June, and to participate in his 90th birthday.
[SPEAKER_06]: If you can't arrange a funeral, at least arrange a birthday.
[SPEAKER_06]: It was promoted by some people who supported
[SPEAKER_06]: Obama actively.
[SPEAKER_06]: So he said, okay, yes, no problem.
[SPEAKER_06]: Then his people heard about it, some Jewish people heard about it and said, are you crazy?
[SPEAKER_06]: You're going to make a private visit to Shimon Peretz after five years?
[SPEAKER_06]: You missed Israel.
[SPEAKER_06]: The only way is to make a formal visit and to be hosted by the Prime Minister.
[SPEAKER_06]: So he found himself there.
[SPEAKER_06]: Then he thought twice and thought, yeah, it's not that bad.
[SPEAKER_06]: Probably just to make sure that I cease to be the reason for everything, the fact that I didn't visit Israel, now that because of this, everything doesn't work.
[SPEAKER_06]: So, okay, let's be there, visit all the capitals, talk to the people.
[SPEAKER_06]: I don't think that...
[SPEAKER_03]: I mean, Clinton, you would know infinitely better than I, but Clinton at a certain point decided that this was his path to a Nobel Prize in history.
[SPEAKER_03]: And I don't think, Obama does not feel on that trajectory tomorrow.
[SPEAKER_03]: But Kerry, it seems to me, will decide that's what he wants to do, won't he?
[SPEAKER_03]: I mean, the imperative is Kerry's job.
[SPEAKER_03]: No.
[SPEAKER_03]: are that if he wants to have a historic achievement to end his career, he's not going to get a historic achievement out of anything they do in the Pacific.
[SPEAKER_06]: I think he understands it.
[SPEAKER_06]: He plans to come to Israel probably even before.
[SPEAKER_06]: I don't know how to cut it.
[SPEAKER_07]: Just take it.
[SPEAKER_07]: I don't want to take so much.
[SPEAKER_07]: I know.
[SPEAKER_00]: You can leave it on your plate.
[SPEAKER_06]: You know, Kerry made several missions for Obama in the past four years.
[SPEAKER_06]: Sometimes with Palestinians, sometimes with Karzai.
[SPEAKER_06]: Karzai, that's far from our military, but with Assad, the young Assad.
[SPEAKER_06]: When he came as a kind of freelancer, he used to be always over-enthusiastic.
[SPEAKER_06]: If by his very enthusiasm he will, it will... Infect him.
[SPEAKER_06]: I will call it, yeah, contagion will take place and they will all... Enthusiasm, before they land, they will have something.
[SPEAKER_06]: I think, I looked at him, I spent some time with him, one...
[SPEAKER_06]: he knows and he knows that he comes
[SPEAKER_06]: He'll be too early.
[SPEAKER_06]: Bibi doesn't have a fixed idea about what should be done and then he makes the government the government that can do it.
[SPEAKER_06]: He just waits to see what kind of government he has and then he will modify what he wants to achieve.
[SPEAKER_06]: If Kerry comes too late, too early for this.
[SPEAKER_06]: But he wants to make sure that Abu Mazen is with him and will not disappear.
[SPEAKER_06]: That's all.
[SPEAKER_06]: He's more realistic.
[SPEAKER_06]: He will try.
[SPEAKER_06]: But I think
[SPEAKER_06]: some intervention from heaven or some other place too.
[SPEAKER_06]: An opportunity for a fully fledged agreement will be created.
[SPEAKER_00]: Larry, since you left, who's now going to be leaving government, he's going to go into the real world after 50 years.
[SPEAKER_00]: It was his birthday two days ago, your birthday, yes?
[SPEAKER_05]: Uh-huh.
[SPEAKER_05]: How old are you?
[SPEAKER_06]: 71.
[SPEAKER_06]: I was born exactly six course and 13 years after Lincoln.
[SPEAKER_06]: Same day.
[SPEAKER_03]: And have you been, have you ever been in the private sector?
[SPEAKER_03]: Yeah.
[SPEAKER_03]: Have you been in government?
[SPEAKER_06]: I have been for several years.
[SPEAKER_03]: You were for several years after you were prime minister.
[SPEAKER_03]: Yeah.
[SPEAKER_03]: You were in the private sector and... Yeah.
[SPEAKER_06]: were doing various kinds of business.
[SPEAKER_06]: I was involved with two small private equity firms as a part of the general partner.
[SPEAKER_06]: And they gave advice to several, some of the biggest hedge funds and private equities as a consultant and made these lectures.
[SPEAKER_06]: and participate in some small-scale opportunities.
[SPEAKER_06]: Some Israeli companies wanted to work in Africa, make IPO in London, they need someone who can
[SPEAKER_03]: And is that the kind of thing you're going to try to do now?
[SPEAKER_06]: I think of finding ways to make more money and to do something more substantive, but I cannot go at my age from this position and start to...
[SPEAKER_06]: actively on a high resolution level running an operation or whatever, it will be too late in life.
[SPEAKER_03]: Do you think you're now done with government?
[SPEAKER_03]: Do you think you're
[SPEAKER_04]: always looking for...
[SPEAKER_04]: I mean, Israeli politics...
[SPEAKER_04]: I'm not looking.
[SPEAKER_04]: ...is very cyclical.
[SPEAKER_06]: I'm not looking.
[SPEAKER_06]: And I don't have any kind of burning, compelling motive to come back and prove something justified.
[SPEAKER_06]: But with our kind of eclectic, chaotic kind of...
[SPEAKER_06]: move in the stage where we are, I cannot exclude that under certain types of crisis I might be called to play a certain role.
[SPEAKER_06]: I don't look backward with any kind of hard feelings or needs, unlike if you knew Sharon
[SPEAKER_06]: almost burning with a kind of sense of of something that had not been completed from the time he could not become the chief of staff then he could not become a
[SPEAKER_06]: Prime Minister, he was Defense Minister, was sent out under kind of an inquiry commission that blamed him for some mishaps and so on.
[SPEAKER_06]: So he was burning it and he didn't see even the lines.
[SPEAKER_06]: He basically got a stroke in the evening or in the morning, major headlines said that he got, according to the police, 3.5 billion as a bribe to finance some political activity.
[SPEAKER_06]: Even Rabin was burning with need to come back after his first.
[SPEAKER_06]: I don't have fully satisfied.
[SPEAKER_06]: But I know that I might be called.
[SPEAKER_06]: So I would not do something that deliberately and for sure will close the way back.
[SPEAKER_06]: But I will not hesitate to go something that might, you see.
[SPEAKER_06]: that will make it almost impossible to come back.
[SPEAKER_06]: Don't be deterred if it's tempting enough by the conversation.
[SPEAKER_03]: Probably the way to have the greatest chance to come back is to look
[SPEAKER_03]: least interested and eager to come back.
[SPEAKER_03]: I think that's an irony of political life is that when you look like you don't need it.
[SPEAKER_03]: and don't want it, you become more desirable as a consequence.
[SPEAKER_00]: But you would go back to government?
[SPEAKER_00]: At this stage?
[SPEAKER_03]: I'm like he.
[SPEAKER_03]: I wasn't prime minister of my country, and I'm not going to be president of my country.
[SPEAKER_03]: I am, I think, in the same general.
[SPEAKER_03]: I'm a little younger.
[SPEAKER_03]: I'm 58.
[SPEAKER_03]: But I'm in the same general place, I think, that Ehud is.
[SPEAKER_03]: There were moments in my life when I was burning.
[SPEAKER_03]: something about this financial crisis in 2008.
[SPEAKER_03]: Now, if the right role presented itself, I would go, I don't want to do anything that would
[SPEAKER_03]: I don't want to carelessly foreclose options since I don't know what I'm going to want in the future.
[SPEAKER_03]: But unlike, to take somebody I was friendly with, Richard Holbrook.
[SPEAKER_03]: Whenever Richard Holbrook was not in government, his whole life.
[SPEAKER_03]: people would ask me, you know, before 2008, people, I remember in India once, they asked me, you know, where was the Democratic Party, where's the Democratic Party going to be on the non-proliferation agreement?
[SPEAKER_03]: And I said, and they had been talking about Holbrooke, and I said, well, what did Holbrooke think?
[SPEAKER_03]: And they said, well, Holbrooke thinks it's a good idea, Holbrooke's supporting our position.
[SPEAKER_03]: And I said, well, then the Democratic Party will support it.
[SPEAKER_03]: And they said,
[SPEAKER_03]: I remember somebody said, does he have that much influence?
[SPEAKER_03]: I said, no.
[SPEAKER_03]: But I promise he will not have taken a position on the record that has any substantial chance of being opposed by whoever the Democratic presidential candidate will be.
[SPEAKER_03]: So I don't want to lose my life.
[SPEAKER_06]: He was in a way suppressed.
[SPEAKER_06]: kind of depressed when he was out of, he never really enjoyed being out of Darmot Holbrooke.
[SPEAKER_03]: No, it was all about getting back into government.
[SPEAKER_03]: People say, I have not, I've known him fairly well for the last
[SPEAKER_03]: 15 years or so, but I didn't know him before.
[SPEAKER_03]: People said that it took Kissinger a long time to come to terms with the fact... That he doesn't influence anymore.
[SPEAKER_03]: Well, that he wasn't going back into government.
[SPEAKER_03]: That for a long time he was organized around going back into government.
[SPEAKER_03]: And at a certain point he...
[SPEAKER_03]: decided to become a, decided to have a different kind of role and was sort of happy having that kind of role.
[SPEAKER_03]: My challenge has been, I don't know whether you found this, it sounds from the way you spoke like you found it.
[SPEAKER_03]: My challenge was relatively,
[SPEAKER_03]: for being a government official.
[SPEAKER_03]: It was fairly easy to make substantial amounts of money.
[SPEAKER_03]: Not money like Jeffrey and some of his friends, but money that was like a lot of money from my point of view.
[SPEAKER_03]: The challenge is, and it's actually not that hard to do things that are reasonably pleasant and kind of interesting.
[SPEAKER_03]: What is hard is
[SPEAKER_03]: Because you have… Adrenaline.
[SPEAKER_00]: Excitement.
[SPEAKER_06]: That are exciting, where you… Probably depends how deep you go.
[SPEAKER_06]: In my last round in business, you know, I have a friend who was very successful in venture capital in the good year, the very beginning of the hype.
[SPEAKER_06]: And he asked me to work with him and after several months he told a common friend of us that Ehud is not hungry enough.
[SPEAKER_06]: But I feel more hungry now than then because then I still thought that I might come back within several years and now I don't have any problem with not
[SPEAKER_06]: with finding something that should be fun and very profitable and fun at least some of the time.
[SPEAKER_06]: In my experience, even politics was not always fun, even science.
[SPEAKER_06]: Before I chose to go to the military rather than to science, I spent the summer at the Weizmann Institute.
[SPEAKER_06]: I met yesterday a Nobel Prize laureate in astrophysics that worked together with a member of my class.
[SPEAKER_06]: He's also an astrophysicist.
[SPEAKER_06]: And he told him that we worked together in Weizmann's research center.
[SPEAKER_06]: So after this summer, he decided to stay in science, and I decided that we were working all the summer
[SPEAKER_06]: photographs from bubble cells, hydrogen under heavy magnetic fields, the preliminary CERN operation about identifying the behavior of particles.
[SPEAKER_06]: And I've seen, we were six labs working all over Europe and Israel on the same one million photographs and after a year and a half
[SPEAKER_06]: The professors sat down together, decided what to do, the young PhDs proved the greatest idea, the professor went to the congresses abroad to represent it and so on.
[SPEAKER_06]: And I found the relationship between the fascinating work in the last six weeks and the extremely boring looking of a picture after picture to see some abnormality in the behavior of all this bubble chamber.
[SPEAKER_06]: And I decided to go there.
[SPEAKER_06]: So somehow I don't think that any probably paintings or sculptures that...
[SPEAKER_03]: So nothing is fun all the time.
[SPEAKER_03]: The question is finding... Something that makes a change.
[SPEAKER_03]: Where you feel like...
[SPEAKER_06]: It's not just achievement, it's meaning, that there is some meaning, something which is important to you.
[SPEAKER_03]: Some high meaning which depends on both what the thing is and how large your, what your role is.
[SPEAKER_06]: Yeah, it's about something that goes beyond your body and beyond your time.
[SPEAKER_06]: Something important, really important.
[SPEAKER_06]: It's not complicated.
[SPEAKER_06]: I don't think that there are many things.
[SPEAKER_06]: Probably at an earlier age than all of us, someone can gamble on some idea and build something from scratch that has never been there and changed a certain part of the world.
[SPEAKER_06]: It's not for us.
[SPEAKER_06]: The most we can do is to use our...
[SPEAKER_06]: capacity to integrate things, still to make judgments and to make good recommendations, to back up what we say by two or three layers deeper into certain areas where we feel confident.
[SPEAKER_06]: And probably to find a way to join such efforts in a way that creates synergy between several kinds of us.
[SPEAKER_06]: I think that there could be...
[SPEAKER_06]: probably all the day last Saturday or the week before, in Munich, meeting with only 20 ministers of foreign affairs and heads of state who were invited there, from Georgia to Mongolia, Montenegro to Albania, Zagreb, Estonia,
[SPEAKER_06]: And you see how much these guys, some of them at the very kind of not primordial but imperialic phases of normalizing a society or state, facing huge challenges and having huge potentials in a way.
[SPEAKER_06]: And they don't know how to
[SPEAKER_06]: how to move in finance, how to move in security, how to move in international relations positions themselves.
[SPEAKER_06]: I think that working on such projects could be fascinating, because you see embryonic nations.
[SPEAKER_06]: Some of them have been born as nations, they have all the identities.
[SPEAKER_06]: And they look, think that for you, something that's long behind you is the great next challenge sometimes.
[SPEAKER_06]: That could be something of importance, you know.
[SPEAKER_06]: I've never been to Montenegro or Mongolia, but I assume if you go to Mongolia, see these nomadic herds.
[SPEAKER_06]: The most interesting thing I have heard about them participating in a gathering ran by some NGO in Davos about micro-insurance.
[SPEAKER_06]: They want to copy the idea of micro-financing to micro-insurance.
[SPEAKER_06]: Someone told a story that they went with micro-insurance against weather to Mongolia.
[SPEAKER_06]: And they had to set a way how to calculate.
[SPEAKER_06]: I passed a kind of...
[SPEAKER_06]: equal judgment about what to pay out.
[SPEAKER_06]: You create a parameter because you cannot go to Mongolia to take case by case.
[SPEAKER_06]: So it ended one parameter was the size of the herd that you hold.
[SPEAKER_06]: Because they didn't get someone from the locals to work with them.
[SPEAKER_06]: It ended up that they set the counting station at some point in this hilly landscape.
[SPEAKER_06]: And many of the shepherds identified immediately, without knowing anything about it, that that's a parameter, and the herds were moving around, they didn't put a stamp on any...
[SPEAKER_06]: So it's full of... you find it so, so, so...
[SPEAKER_06]: deeply backward, that it gives a sense of something that you can do with all that you accumulate to make... You cannot invent a vaccine against some remote parasite in Africa, but in sub-Saharan Africa there are huge opportunities to help them.
[SPEAKER_06]: There are many, many corrupt people and it will take time for probably a generation.
[SPEAKER_06]: Down the stream they will keep robbing the nature of society by the elites, but they are still moving forward.
[SPEAKER_06]: It cannot be denied when you compare them to 20 or 40 years ago.
[SPEAKER_00]: I think that could be interesting.
[SPEAKER_00]: I think, you see, the two of you, that's why I want to...
[SPEAKER_00]: The two areas, I think, these beginning nation states, whether Mongolia or parts of Africa or even Kazakhstan, there's a lot of money, but the sophistication is 10 years back.
[SPEAKER_00]: Cellular service being sort of a prime example of not being burdened with copper in the ground and fiber so you can go right to cellular phone.
[SPEAKER_00]: You have this leapfrog.
[SPEAKER_00]: And I think you're both a little crazy in the fact that in terms of compensation and money,
[SPEAKER_00]: The two hottest areas is every country wants to be now in the world of finance.
[SPEAKER_00]: They're not really talking about manufacturing.
[SPEAKER_00]: If you're a leader, you're talking about food security.
[SPEAKER_00]: You're not talking about a production line.
[SPEAKER_00]: You want to explore natural resources, but you want to exploit your natural resources for an economy.
[SPEAKER_00]: And you want to have two things.
[SPEAKER_00]: You want to have economy and you want to have money, security.
[SPEAKER_00]: So you two are really, I think, in the
[SPEAKER_00]: primary positions for the current time, I don't know if it lasts more than five, ten years, maybe something else takes over.
[SPEAKER_06]: We're not interested in development more than 30 years.
[SPEAKER_00]: No, but security, I think you need to think about how to break it down.
[SPEAKER_00]: Cyber security.
[SPEAKER_00]: That's the hot, I think it's going to be the hot button for the next two years.
[SPEAKER_00]: Big time.
[SPEAKER_00]: Border security is less of an issue.
[SPEAKER_00]: A lot of people can handle it.
[SPEAKER_06]: But national security is something, because in many of these countries they don't know even how to approach it.
[SPEAKER_06]: How to approach on a national level the issue of security of a country in the backyard of Europe, like Montenegro or Albania or Estonia or Latvia, and on the other hand, in a totally different situation, the security of Mongolia or Kazakhstan.
[SPEAKER_06]: They don't know what to do, so they do what they know.
They issue bids and take some.
And that's it.
[SPEAKER_06]: They don't build even national security in a proper way.
[SPEAKER_06]: It's the last guy who comes to them with some impressive ideas and good margins that they fall into the trap.
[SPEAKER_00]: But if you were advising Mongolia on security… See, again, I might…
[SPEAKER_00]: General security, how do you start?
[SPEAKER_00]: Step one through five is why.
[SPEAKER_06]: From budget to what to do and what not to do.
[SPEAKER_06]: And how to do it effectively.
[SPEAKER_06]: And what could not be treated by any kind of security but by diplomacy.
[SPEAKER_06]: And probably even, you know, I met with the foreign minister of the National Security Advisor and they insisted on sending a delegation to Israel because we are a small country.
[SPEAKER_06]: Hostile.
[SPEAKER_06]: They are good people, but they are so, so far behind.
[SPEAKER_06]: It's like coming to a seminar in the university about some issue.
[SPEAKER_06]: They have something.
[SPEAKER_06]: They are responsible for the country.
[SPEAKER_06]: They try to act.
[SPEAKER_06]: But they never thought of how to balance, how to approach this issue.
[SPEAKER_06]: how to make it, what's worth investing, what's not worth investing in, how to make the major effort they are doing now with multinationals to balance their approach to mining.
[SPEAKER_06]: how to combine this with security, first of all security of the mining fields and security of the whole area and what to do with the...
[SPEAKER_06]: They are trying to find a way, they are reasonable people but they are afraid, afraid that some of the advice that they are given are motivated by
[SPEAKER_06]: great powers behind those who advise them the issue of trust.
[SPEAKER_06]: Of course they don't know what to do with the economy and even what to do with the money they can get, how to use the potential, how to develop what should be taken by the state, how to make the big companies participate in it, how you can leverage them to do it, how to make them
[SPEAKER_06]: how to keep the edge of being the owner of the whole thing beyond the first signature on a document.
[SPEAKER_06]: They're not, you know, it's not simple.
[SPEAKER_06]: Nothing is simple.
[SPEAKER_03]: You were saying before you came in that you think there are a lot of these people who really are very hungry for advice.
[SPEAKER_00]: You see it, right?
[SPEAKER_06]: I feel the same.
[SPEAKER_06]: I feel that if...
[SPEAKER_06]: I spoke to a friend of mine that became a friend of Jeff as well, a guy who works with Ban Ki-moon, for one dollar per year, named Terje Larsson.
[SPEAKER_06]: He's a Norwegian diplomat, his wife is Norwegian.
[SPEAKER_06]: He had some trouble, so he left the public services, his wife remained there.
[SPEAKER_06]: And he travels all around the world on behalf of the... Now, assume for a moment,
[SPEAKER_06]: that you, Jeff and myself, and this Terje Lauser, establish a consulting group that takes on the basis of countries, sovereigns, to give them advice, strategic advice on macroeconomy, finance, security, and international relationship.
[SPEAKER_06]: And these are all things for leaders
[SPEAKER_06]: even democracy for government, but clearly for more kind of autocratic reasons.
[SPEAKER_06]: It's a gestalt.
[SPEAKER_06]: They don't really see a difference.
[SPEAKER_06]: Everything touches, everything is.
[SPEAKER_06]: And if some group that has kind of can talk to each other quickly, intelligently,
[SPEAKER_06]: Give them advice It was money is for some of them, you know think of Kazakhstan can pay in fact they are paid By now they are paying for more than one in more than one channel.
[SPEAKER_06]: They want second opinion And a special opinion of this that they pay quite a lot of money.
[SPEAKER_06]: They have this money for
[SPEAKER_06]: They can consult.
[SPEAKER_06]: Sometimes they see it as not just consulting all these sovereigns.
[SPEAKER_06]: They think that if they will choose the white people, they get certain edge in nothing.
[SPEAKER_06]: probably not in lobbying, not in active lobbying, but in helping them to find a way of navigating issues that they have with international bodies and with NGOs, and sometimes even to ask those advisors to find who could be the lobbyist.
[SPEAKER_06]: If they have to pass certain...
[SPEAKER_06]: I remember Nazarbayev came to me 10 years ago, because he was frightened by some investigations, he was
[SPEAKER_06]: went from the United States, I believe, about some behaviors of his government.
[SPEAKER_06]: Sometimes they need an access to the ECB, to the World Bank, to access... You have to be careful of this.
[SPEAKER_03]: I mean, it's a little different.
[SPEAKER_03]: It's probably a little better.
[SPEAKER_03]: They probably need access to America more often than they need access to Israel.
[SPEAKER_06]: Yeah, but they rely more on the advice from Israel than on advice from America.
[SPEAKER_06]: Because Israel's problems are more like their problems.
[SPEAKER_06]: No, because Israel is small enough not to threaten.
[SPEAKER_06]: We are supposed to have good contacts all around the world.
[SPEAKER_06]: When I talked to the Mongolians, they asked me, can you talk to Putin?
[SPEAKER_06]: I said yes.
[SPEAKER_06]: It's important for them
[SPEAKER_06]: Because there are certain, many antagonisms, and if a Russian would come to them, they would think that he works for Putin.
[SPEAKER_06]: If an American comes, they might find that they find themselves within a bigger game.
[SPEAKER_06]: So we have... No, that's right.
[SPEAKER_06]: We have certain kinds of people being connected in the world and not threatening anyone.
[SPEAKER_03]: And you have a sense of having been...
[SPEAKER_03]: extraordinarily effective given your...
[SPEAKER_03]: I mean, Israel has a sense of having been extraordinarily successful, effective, and strong given its location and its size.
[SPEAKER_03]: And a human capital.
[SPEAKER_06]: I'm not sure whether you have the same human capital in Mongolia, but they know it as well.
[SPEAKER_03]: If you're a Mongolia or a Kazakhstan, I'd like to have a generation
[SPEAKER_03]: had, like Israel had, is a natural way to think, whereas I'd like to have a generation like the United States.
[SPEAKER_03]: It's different.
[SPEAKER_06]: They're just going to be in a different kind of... No, we are also a source of unique cutting-edge knowledge, Israel, in some issues which are extremely important for them.
[SPEAKER_06]: water processing and both disseminating reuse of water and even the effectiveness of use of it in agriculture in semi-aero and aero areas.
[SPEAKER_06]: We have the most sophisticated agriculture on earth.
[SPEAKER_06]: The real point is that all players are Israelis so they sometimes take two kilograms of newly genetically manufactured seeds
[SPEAKER_06]: bring them to Cuba or some Angola or wherever, and within five years we have competitors.
[SPEAKER_06]: So we have to excel in running ahead of the wave in R&D.
[SPEAKER_06]: And we are doing it in agriculture.
[SPEAKER_06]: You know better than me that there's a need to probably double the food production within a generation or so without kind of causing...
[SPEAKER_03]: So you and I aren't going to tell them what seeds they want to use.
[SPEAKER_03]: Yeah, yeah, not, but what the direction could be.
[SPEAKER_06]: You're going to connect them to the people who are going to tell them that.
[SPEAKER_06]: Yeah, yeah.
[SPEAKER_06]: And there is... Jeffrey can tell us that there could be certain...
[SPEAKER_06]: kind of practical economic benefit from being able to be the one who points to them as genuine, sincere players in a certain area.
[SPEAKER_06]: But you know who you are going to recommend in advance.
[SPEAKER_06]: You can leverage this kind of... Having the trust of a government
[SPEAKER_06]: like a bit Montenegro, of course the Danish government doesn't need it.
[SPEAKER_06]: But all these governments which are not yet self-confident enough, they feel that they need it, they need experienced people
[SPEAKER_06]: who doesn't lose a sleep at night if they hear of major problems in some country, they face that issue.
[SPEAKER_03]: You're saying it's not India, but it is Mongolia, and maybe it's Sri Lanka, and maybe it's... Yeah, yeah, yeah.
[SPEAKER_06]: Out of the 194 nations, I can easily think that some 50.
[SPEAKER_06]: We cannot work in 50 places.
[SPEAKER_06]: And some of them are quite potentially quite rich or with other potentials to create money that enables them to pay for it.
[SPEAKER_06]: They feel it or realize it.
[SPEAKER_06]: There's no sense for us to go to lost places.
[SPEAKER_03]: Well, anyone who has natural resources has a way of...
[SPEAKER_03]: The natural resources are always under a kind of quasi-state control that's not quite the government.
[SPEAKER_03]: It's not like the government's kind of taking your taxpayers' money and giving it to somebody.
[SPEAKER_03]: It's that the state natural resources, whatever, that's where the money comes from.
[SPEAKER_06]: I do not exclude the possibility that in five years' time you will end up with decentralization of decision-making.
[SPEAKER_06]: in both China and India for different reasons, through different mechanisms, where you might find Chinese cities, not just the provinces, but cities with enough authority and enough resources to hire their advisors to operate
[SPEAKER_06]: they basically think of themselves under the idea of centers of excellence.
[SPEAKER_06]: They look and they see we are just 400 Singaporeans, basically the same ethnic background or even more advantageous, more homogeneous.
[SPEAKER_06]: If we can copy 400 times Singapore, we are the real success of the world.
[SPEAKER_06]: When you meet with Chinese mayors right now, first of all, some of them have population under control, which are medium-sized to big.
[SPEAKER_06]: They are bigger than most of the European countries, like Austria, Switzerland and Denmark together, their cities.
[SPEAKER_06]: I think.
[SPEAKER_06]: And they get more.
[SPEAKER_06]: That's part of the way of the Chinese to face the threat of losing control as a result of social...
[SPEAKER_06]: The whole transition
[SPEAKER_06]: it's not going to be a smooth way for them.
[SPEAKER_06]: And in order to fail, they try to anticipate and to find generic solutions, not to take us through processes that will smooth the heating of the problem.
[SPEAKER_06]: And India for different reasons, they come from another direction, but also you might find that in Indian states they will get more
[SPEAKER_06]: autonomous capability to take.
[SPEAKER_06]: They have the governor who is supposed to intervene on behalf of one thing, but it's only if things get wrong in an explicit way, illegal way, big scandals that come to the surface.
[SPEAKER_06]: So I think there is a lot of work.
[SPEAKER_06]: It could be fascinating because it's really, in a way, it's using what you accumulate all along your life to help real people facing real problems that you are acquainted with and they don't feel as confident.
[SPEAKER_06]: They draw both emotional kind of confidence and... No, it's a very good thing to do if one can find...
[SPEAKER_00]: I think once you...
[SPEAKER_00]: And that's how they hang out the shingle.
[SPEAKER_00]: They find you.
[SPEAKER_00]: They don't know where to go.
[SPEAKER_00]: They sort of... Who do I talk to?
[SPEAKER_00]: I've said by default that they talk to me, but it's by default.
[SPEAKER_06]: They read in The Economist the articles about them in order to try to find a hint about how they...
[SPEAKER_00]: It's wild.
[SPEAKER_00]: Now, you have to be sensitive.
[SPEAKER_00]: There's places like the Congo that have tremendous natural resources, but it's zero.
[SPEAKER_00]: You have to stay away.
[SPEAKER_00]: It's impossible.
[SPEAKER_00]: Rwanda, there's African countries.
[SPEAKER_00]: So it's different than Mongolia.
[SPEAKER_06]: I met Kagemi.
[SPEAKER_00]: What's his name?
[SPEAKER_06]: The big basketball player.
[SPEAKER_06]: President of Rwanda.
[SPEAKER_06]: And I believe that...
[SPEAKER_06]: Tony Blair has given him a lot of advice.
[SPEAKER_03]: But Kagame, I don't know about Kagame.
[SPEAKER_03]: Kagame is...
[SPEAKER_03]: It feels like if you're the president of Rwanda, you should sometimes be in Rwanda.
[SPEAKER_03]: Judging by how often I meet him, going to one conference or another, he couldn't be spending very much time in Rwanda.
[SPEAKER_06]: Yeah, but it's a way to avoid the stress of being all the time in Rwanda.
[SPEAKER_00]: But it's like Rwanda has gas, but it's in the middle of the lake.
[SPEAKER_04]: Are there places in Africa?
[SPEAKER_00]: Which lake?
[SPEAKER_00]: I think Africa is a museum.
[SPEAKER_00]: Kagame said there's a gigantic gas field
[SPEAKER_00]: But just like there's a place in... What's the problem?
[SPEAKER_00]: The Caspian Sea also is in the gas.
[SPEAKER_00]: You can't get it out of the country.
[SPEAKER_00]: Why?
[SPEAKER_00]: There's no infrastructure.
[SPEAKER_00]: How do you put it?
[SPEAKER_00]: Well, in Africa, putting in even trains, half the time you put down the rails, you go to sleep, and the rails are gone because someone took it.
[SPEAKER_03]: Is there any place in Africa that you think has a prospect?
[SPEAKER_00]: No.
[SPEAKER_03]: No.
[SPEAKER_00]: Really?
[SPEAKER_00]: Yes.
[SPEAKER_00]: You think no?
[SPEAKER_00]: Angola, maybe.
[SPEAKER_00]: I don't know.
[SPEAKER_00]: No.
[SPEAKER_00]: I think it's... Let me be less cavalier.
[SPEAKER_06]: South Africa is going to be a major economic power.
[SPEAKER_06]: It goes very slowly.
[SPEAKER_06]: South Africa?
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah.
[SPEAKER_00]: I think the concept is over some 30 years, maybe.
[SPEAKER_00]: But I think there are easier...
[SPEAKER_00]: There's low-hanging fruit.
[SPEAKER_00]: Like Kazakhstan.
[SPEAKER_00]: Kazakhstan's a perfect example.
[SPEAKER_00]: There's $80 billion in sovereign wealth.
[SPEAKER_00]: They would like to be part of the Western world.
[SPEAKER_00]: It's the big things to be seen, to have human rights.
[SPEAKER_00]: They want to be part of the financial system.
[SPEAKER_00]: Part of it is that they don't want to be embarrassed.
[SPEAKER_00]: That's clear.
[SPEAKER_00]: So when they want to talk to someone, they want to know there's discretion and good advice so they can at least take credit for their decisions.
[SPEAKER_00]: So those are easier places.
[SPEAKER_00]: So in Africa, maybe, but very hard work, I think.
[SPEAKER_03]: What about Africa?
[SPEAKER_00]: South America.
[SPEAKER_00]: Venezuela at the moment.
[SPEAKER_00]: Chavez dies in the next...
[SPEAKER_00]: I had a whole bunch of the oil guys here.
[SPEAKER_00]: It's the... Monstrous proven reserves.
[SPEAKER_00]: Lots of things to do.
[SPEAKER_00]: Little... Once Chavez goes and the financial system, they devalued their currency last week.
[SPEAKER_00]: 32%.
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah.
[SPEAKER_00]: So...
[SPEAKER_00]: They had three exchange rates.
[SPEAKER_00]: Now they only have two exchange rates.
[SPEAKER_00]: But they don't have an economy.
[SPEAKER_06]: They have Dudamel.
[SPEAKER_00]: Dudamel?
[SPEAKER_00]: Yes, that's the only thing.
[SPEAKER_06]: One of the best conductors on earth.
[SPEAKER_06]: The young Venezuelan.
[SPEAKER_00]: So I think there's plenty of places.
[SPEAKER_00]: China is a different thing because there's a cultural... You have a better... You both have a great issue in China because it gives them face.
[SPEAKER_00]: to talk to you or to you.
[SPEAKER_00]: So that they feel... And if you went to see them for a day and you left the country, you never want to stay there.
[SPEAKER_00]: Because if you go and you leave, they can tell all their friends that you came just to see them.
[SPEAKER_06]: So that's a... What about Azerbaijan?
[SPEAKER_00]: Same thing.
[SPEAKER_00]: Just tricky.
[SPEAKER_06]: Yeah, I'm at Aliev.
[SPEAKER_06]: Yes.
[SPEAKER_06]: I remember his father.
[SPEAKER_06]: His father was a communist KGB representative in the place, head of the communist party.
[SPEAKER_06]: And now the son took over when the father died.
[SPEAKER_06]: It's a kind of run like a family business.
[SPEAKER_06]: I met their minister of foreign affairs.
[SPEAKER_06]: It ended up that he's not just most preferred colleague, but also the best friend he has in Israel is Avigdor Lieberman.
[SPEAKER_00]: Is that right?
[SPEAKER_06]: Yeah.
[SPEAKER_06]: But Israelis are making a lot of business in Azerbaijan.
[SPEAKER_00]: Mind...
[SPEAKER_00]: I think once you set it up, once people understand that you're really in business, you have to choose which is the right place.
[SPEAKER_00]: And you can charge a lot of money.
[SPEAKER_06]: I think there is an opportunity.
[SPEAKER_06]: And if you don't create a huge overhead, do not pretend to run operations to secure oil fields, you point them to companies.
[SPEAKER_06]: There are many in Israel, some in America.
[SPEAKER_06]: Some would not like to have an American company running, but something from a smaller country.
[SPEAKER_00]: Well, what have you found most interesting?
[SPEAKER_00]: You've been out now for how long?
[SPEAKER_03]: I've been out two years and I would say two most interesting things have been being on the boards of a couple of
[SPEAKER_03]: at the venture capital.
[SPEAKER_03]: You just have a sense that you're seeing people who are creating something new and they're young and they're vigorous and there's a sense of energy and being an adult you can add something.
[SPEAKER_03]: So I've enjoyed being with Hendrys and Horowitz and being on the board of Square.
[SPEAKER_03]: that's been good and I've enjoyed, I do a couple hedge, I advise a couple hedge funds and that's interesting because you sort of hear what the people, you have a sense of what the people
[SPEAKER_03]: as well and then I do a bunch of sort of speaking and kibitzing and stuff on a variety of things which is fine but is less is less sort of exciting and and and stimulating well if opportunities materialize I don't think you can quite hang out the shingle and say country doctor but
[SPEAKER_00]: It has a new meaning now, access on country.
[SPEAKER_06]: Right.
[SPEAKER_06]: Yeah, but access into country can, in certain countries, create a leverage to make a lot of money for a long time.
[SPEAKER_06]: Sometimes you can just bring together a leading major kind of mining company with a leading place to mine whatever they look for and just agree with them on a...
[SPEAKER_06]: Very small percentage.
[SPEAKER_06]: Extremely small, small, small percentage or promillage or whatever they are doing.
[SPEAKER_06]: But as long as the operation is there, you might end up quite living quiet.
[SPEAKER_06]: It also has its value.
[SPEAKER_00]: But has something in the past two years gotten you excited, in the adrenaline?
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, he said to work with the young people.
[SPEAKER_00]: That's kind of exciting.
[SPEAKER_00]: Has Square been the most thing?
[SPEAKER_03]: Square's probably been the thing.
[SPEAKER_03]: That you look forward to going out there?
[SPEAKER_03]: I look forward to going out there, but it's not that I...
[SPEAKER_03]: I really do look forward to when we're going out there and when they call.
[SPEAKER_03]: That's going to be interesting, and I'm glad they called.
[SPEAKER_03]: It's not quite that...
[SPEAKER_03]: It's not quite at the level of I'm thinking about it every night before I go to sleep, in part because a lot of what it is is like developing better technology and all that.
[SPEAKER_03]: It's not what I do.
[SPEAKER_06]: Think of it, it's one of your edges as well.
[SPEAKER_06]: part of what they needed, someone who's experienced enough to look at it in somewhat, a little bit more detached manner, be able to judge or avoid a kind of over-enthusiasm that sometimes blinds them to where they are heading or what could be the consequence.
[SPEAKER_06]: That's where you can end, because you have much more... Judgment, wisdom, and I'm able to say...
[SPEAKER_03]: you know, and I'm able to say, like you are, I'm able to say to anybody, that doesn't seem quite right.
[SPEAKER_03]: When lots of people spend their lives surrounded by people who will never say to them, that's not, that's not quite right.
[SPEAKER_03]: That's not quite right.
[SPEAKER_03]: So I like the things where you're,
[SPEAKER_03]: engaged with more young people young and I'm sure in Israel there must be a ton of that yeah Israel is a fascinating place with the
[SPEAKER_06]: for an eruption of entrepreneurial spirit and young people.
[SPEAKER_06]: It's very typical to find the best two kind of desilons of the population coming out of the outpost.
[SPEAKER_06]: Some of them are spending their time in the outpost.
[SPEAKER_06]: in activities which are basically R&D or start-up kind of operations without economic side to it.
[SPEAKER_06]: And they come, they jump energetically.
[SPEAKER_06]: There is a buzz.
[SPEAKER_03]: Are you going to live in Israel or are you going to live in New York?
[SPEAKER_06]: That's a good question.
[SPEAKER_06]: I basically live in Israel, but I am extremely fascinated by going out and seeing the world and to be in many places.
[SPEAKER_06]: So I don't feel any kind of problem of spending most of my time out of the country.
[SPEAKER_06]: That was a fascinating experience.
[SPEAKER_06]: But you're going to make your home in Tel Aviv rather than in London or in New York.
[SPEAKER_06]: Yeah, you can fly.
[SPEAKER_06]: I don't have a problem if I have to spend a full two months in New York.
[SPEAKER_06]: Take some place in a hotel or whatever.
[SPEAKER_06]: Or in London or in another place.
[SPEAKER_00]: Before you go, what's your sense of the economy?
[SPEAKER_00]: What do you think is going on now?
[SPEAKER_03]: I think the best guess is that we're turning around the corner.
[SPEAKER_03]: We're turning a bit.
[SPEAKER_03]: I think because Jeffrey and I were discussing before, I think there's a wall of money coming into the U.S. A wall of?
[SPEAKER_03]: coming in just a gigantic amount of money stock market you know i had been it's interesting i had been thinking to myself two months ago the interest rate the adjusted for inflation for 10 years is negative stocks are pretty cheap
[SPEAKER_03]: Why isn't anybody with the right mind borrowing money to buy stocks?
[SPEAKER_03]: And so there should be a lot of deal activity.
[SPEAKER_03]: And now, sure enough, in the last month, there's Dow.
[SPEAKER_06]: But Dell is not typical.
[SPEAKER_06]: Somehow he's doing it himself with some... Who?
[SPEAKER_06]: Dell.
[SPEAKER_03]: Dell is not typical, but Heinz is typical.
[SPEAKER_03]: Heinz.
[SPEAKER_03]: The ketchup.
[SPEAKER_03]: Carrie's wife.
[SPEAKER_03]: Carrie's correct.
[SPEAKER_03]: Yeah, and you saw what just happened.
[SPEAKER_03]: She saw it?
[SPEAKER_03]: I don't think she ever, I think she's pretty much out of it, but Warren Buffett and a Brazilian beer guy.
[SPEAKER_03]: I'm just paying $23 million to buy it, and the mining companies are all getting bought up.
[SPEAKER_03]: How could you not do it?
[SPEAKER_00]: When interest rates are this low, how can you not go into the takeover business?
[SPEAKER_00]: Not me.
[SPEAKER_03]: No, and I think it's starting to happen.
[SPEAKER_03]: So I think that that plus...
[SPEAKER_03]: turning plus the fact that while everybody's hysterical about the dysfunctionality of our government, the truth is we're a pretty dynamic society and our government doesn't usually do insane things.
[SPEAKER_06]: But for how long?
[SPEAKER_06]: Because in September there is an election in Germany.
[SPEAKER_06]: I talked to Schauble and de Maizière.
[SPEAKER_06]: De Maizière is my colleague, but he was advisor to the Chancellor for a long time.
[SPEAKER_06]: And Schauble, I know him from before he was shot.
[SPEAKER_06]: From before?
[SPEAKER_06]: Before he was shot.
[SPEAKER_06]: He's now in a wheelchair.
[SPEAKER_06]: I still remember him walking on his feet.
[SPEAKER_06]: from both.
[SPEAKER_06]: I got the impression that Germany cannot do anything, politically speaking.
[SPEAKER_06]: They cannot do anything by throwing some short-term, immediate small pieces to the Spanish or Italians or the Greeks in order not to break the whole thing before.
[SPEAKER_04]: But then after they can.
[SPEAKER_06]: Yeah, but after they can and basically they will because they are not doing a favor for the rest of Europe.
[SPEAKER_06]: The people are still getting old.
[SPEAKER_03]: They still don't want to work very hard.
[SPEAKER_03]: And it's not very innovative.
[SPEAKER_03]: So I think that Southern Europe to Europe will be like Southern Italy to Italy.
[SPEAKER_03]: not very competitive, lots of people not working, dependent, but stable.
[SPEAKER_03]: And so I think, I now think the odds that the Euro will, who knows what will happen about Greece, but I think the odds that the Euro will stay together is very, very high.
[SPEAKER_03]: But I think the odds
[SPEAKER_03]: place are not very high.
[SPEAKER_06]: It means that ultimately culture matters.
[SPEAKER_06]: The Mediterranean culture is inferior to the kind of Scandinavia, the kind of post-reformation kind of answer.
[SPEAKER_03]: Maybe the cultures vary and they work well for 50-year periods and theirs isn't.
[SPEAKER_03]: But I don't know about Japan.
[SPEAKER_03]: I think it's...
[SPEAKER_03]: an island full of people getting old.
[SPEAKER_03]: The last thing they invented that was any good was the Walkman.
[SPEAKER_03]: That was a long time ago.
[SPEAKER_03]: And so I think that they're probably going to try to pump up and print a lot of money.
[SPEAKER_03]: But is Abe a serious guy?
[SPEAKER_06]: Because last time that he was in power he was not serious.
[SPEAKER_03]: I don't think so.
[SPEAKER_03]: From everything I hear and read, I don't think he's a hugely serious guy.
[SPEAKER_03]: All the hedge funds are
[SPEAKER_03]: are betting that the yen's going down and that the Japanese stock market's going up.
[SPEAKER_03]: I have gotten more confidence that the yen's going down over the medium run than I do that the Japanese stock market's going up.
[SPEAKER_03]: I think if there's a pulse in trade
[SPEAKER_03]: like Paulson, the guy who made... Yeah, yeah, Paulson.
[SPEAKER_03]: If there's a...
[SPEAKER_06]: The one from the mortgage-backed security.
[SPEAKER_03]: Right, right, right.
[SPEAKER_06]: Go up and then fell down.
[SPEAKER_03]: Right.
[SPEAKER_03]: If there's a trade like that in the next three years, I think it's short the Japanese long bond.
[SPEAKER_03]: Because I think that maybe they'll recover, in which case they'll stop having 10-year bonds at 70 basis points.
[SPEAKER_03]: Maybe they'll have inflation, in which case they'll stop having long bonds at 70 basis points.
[SPEAKER_03]: Maybe they'll decide that they can't really fix their problems at all.
[SPEAKER_03]: in which case people will start to worry about whether they're going to get repaid, in which case they won't be at 70 basis points.
[SPEAKER_03]: So it seems to me that they're likely.
[SPEAKER_03]: What is 70 basis points?
[SPEAKER_03]: The spread of Japanese bonds?
[SPEAKER_03]: That's the bond.
[SPEAKER_03]: For 10 years, the interest rate is 70 basis points.
[SPEAKER_00]: But it's been that way for a while, to be fair.
[SPEAKER_03]: A long time.
[SPEAKER_03]: It's been very long, very, very long.
[SPEAKER_00]: Imagine five years ago people would have said the same thing.
[SPEAKER_00]: The widow makers, what they call the trade.
[SPEAKER_06]: Correct.
[SPEAKER_06]: But they already have for a long time, they have some 200% of the debt.
[SPEAKER_06]: So that's why I said that if there is a success...
[SPEAKER_03]: It will be that.
[SPEAKER_03]: And, you know, the last time they were crazy, there were more people who thought their stock market was nuts when it was at $25,000 than there were who thought it was nuts at $35,000 because the people...
[SPEAKER_03]: Because by the time it got to $35,000, everybody had taken their crack at thinking that it was nuts and been wiped out.
[SPEAKER_03]: And so they thought they didn't understand and maybe it would keep going.
[SPEAKER_03]: And that's a little bit how the Japanese bond feels to me right now.
[SPEAKER_06]: But tell me, Larry, we have more to worry about inflation as a result of all this supply of wider money.
[SPEAKER_06]: I'm relatively... Or deflation.
[SPEAKER_06]: What's more worrying for you?
[SPEAKER_03]: For the last four years, I've been very confident that it was deflation.
[SPEAKER_03]: As time passes, I move my view.
[SPEAKER_03]: I am still more worried about slowdown than I am about a big increase in inflation in the United States.
[SPEAKER_03]: I don't think...
[SPEAKER_03]: I don't think countries don't get big increases in inflation without labor demanding wage increases and tight labor markets and all of that.
[SPEAKER_03]: And I don't see any of that coming in the United States.
[SPEAKER_03]: My friend Stan Fisher did a good job in Israel.
[SPEAKER_06]: According to most observers, he is extremely popular.
[SPEAKER_06]: People believe that he saved us from major disasters and he is highly appreciated in the country.
[SPEAKER_06]: But there are here and there a few quite important players in the financial markets who think differently.
[SPEAKER_06]: that he did accumulate too much and did not invest in the right time in gold.
[SPEAKER_06]: The whole running of the... because he raised the reserves from 20 billion to 80 billion, major move, and they complained that probably he could have done better if he would have invested more in gold or keep...
[SPEAKER_06]: put much more capable people to run this Nostro.
[SPEAKER_06]: It's a huge Nostro to run this money somehow, even without gambling.
[SPEAKER_06]: And some even argue that Arnold probably did identify.
[SPEAKER_06]: too late that what the Swiss have done with their weight could be done with the shekel.
[SPEAKER_06]: So for some time he appeared as if he believes that you cannot fight the markets when in reality you can fight it on one side if you are so popular that everyone wants to buy you.
[SPEAKER_06]: So there is certain critics among
[SPEAKER_06]: more sophisticated players, but basically the feeling is in flying colors, he ends.
[SPEAKER_06]: He's going to leave in a short time.
[SPEAKER_03]: That was my impression, that he had done very good, that he had been very successful.
[SPEAKER_06]: I like him very much, he's sincere.
[SPEAKER_06]: He's very sensitive.
[SPEAKER_06]: Yeah, and respectful.
[SPEAKER_06]: He thinks slow but kind of in a systematic manner.
[SPEAKER_06]: Avoid kind of gambling.
[SPEAKER_06]: That's very important to our collective character.
[SPEAKER_03]: He said that he's, there's this phrase, a safe pair of hands.
[SPEAKER_03]: Safe?
[SPEAKER_03]: A safe pair of hands.
[SPEAKER_03]: Yeah.
[SPEAKER_03]: He gives very much the feeling of being a safe pair of hands.
[SPEAKER_03]: You know, the thing about the, I think it goes to sort of some of what you were talking about.
[SPEAKER_03]: All over the world, people have these huge quantities of money that they mostly invest in U.S. treasuries that pay zero.
[SPEAKER_03]: Yeah.
[SPEAKER_03]: And everybody ought to be investing their stuff more aggressively.
[SPEAKER_06]: Yeah, but that's the scars from the recent events.
[SPEAKER_06]: People lose their, it's like a hair, they lose their self-confidence very easily.
[SPEAKER_06]: And what happened in the crisis actually, we could not predict this and no one warned us.
[SPEAKER_06]: loudly enough, so probably now it's immediately frozen.
[SPEAKER_06]: It's human nature.
[SPEAKER_00]: That sounds right.
[SPEAKER_00]: Okay, I'm going to spend some time with Ehud.
[SPEAKER_00]: I'll see you tomorrow morning at 10.
[SPEAKER_00]: I'm picking you up at 10 in the morning.
[SPEAKER_03]: You're picking me up at 10 in the morning?
[SPEAKER_03]: I will see you then.
[SPEAKER_03]: Excellent.
[SPEAKER_03]: Ehud, this was very good.
[SPEAKER_03]: It was very
[SPEAKER_03]: He's only a free man.
[SPEAKER_06]: In three weeks, I hope.
[SPEAKER_06]: I contemplate setting a departure ceremony and set a time, a day and time because I'm afraid that under certain tricky developments there will be no new government and we'll go to another election and that's...
[SPEAKER_06]: You know, theoretically it's possible, but I don't want to find myself stuck.
[SPEAKER_00]: Great to see you.
[SPEAKER_06]: Very nice to see you.
[SPEAKER_02]: Am I close?
[SPEAKER_03]: You're very good at this.
I appreciate it.
Yeah.
I can't say that.
[SPEAKER_02]: I just can't say it today.
[SPEAKER_02]: It's like, what's the bad that some people don't want?
[SPEAKER_02]: They don't want that.
It's like, what's the bad?
It's like, what's the bad?
And you're like, that's something for me.
[SPEAKER_05]: More tea, sir?
[SPEAKER_06]: Yeah, more tea, if you please.
Judges?
[SPEAKER_07]: He's a great mind.
[SPEAKER_06]: Extremely, yeah.
[SPEAKER_06]: I like him very much.
[SPEAKER_06]: Extremely sophisticated, clever, wise person.
[SPEAKER_06]: But what do you think?
[SPEAKER_06]: He has the appetite to grow.
[SPEAKER_06]: Yes.
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah?
[SPEAKER_06]: Yes.
[SPEAKER_06]: Okay, that's good.
[SPEAKER_06]: I believe that's a very good name.
[SPEAKER_06]: That's one of the ideas I kind of exchanged with Terry.
[SPEAKER_06]: Terry, yeah.
[SPEAKER_06]: I think it could be really interesting.
[SPEAKER_00]: if you find a way to work together to make probably a pilot on one or two of them.
[SPEAKER_00]: Yes.
[SPEAKER_00]: Look, Larry is not liked by any.
[SPEAKER_00]: What he said, I said that you were going to come to dinner.
[SPEAKER_00]: And he said, did you read the article in Foreign Affairs?
[SPEAKER_00]: Did?
[SPEAKER_00]: Ah, yeah.
[SPEAKER_00]: And he read it?
[SPEAKER_00]: Yes.
[SPEAKER_00]: He said to me, did you read the article on foreign affairs?
[SPEAKER_00]: And what did he say about it?
[SPEAKER_00]: I said, yeah.
[SPEAKER_00]: He said, well, what did you think?
[SPEAKER_00]: I said, I didn't like it very much.
[SPEAKER_00]: He said, well, he said, I come at it from a different angle.
[SPEAKER_00]: He said, I didn't like it, but I identify because they say everything they say about him, they say about me.
[SPEAKER_04]: Yeah.
[SPEAKER_06]: Yeah.
[SPEAKER_06]: Let's go through, I want to, I thought we would start earlier, but I hope we have enough patience.
[SPEAKER_07]: I have patience and I have time.
[SPEAKER_06]: I want to go with you through a variety of opportunities that were proposed, different levels of concreteness.
[SPEAKER_06]: But I find that probably with
[SPEAKER_06]: I want to hear your advice before I try to focus on an order of priority and probably to have your judgment on some of them and what it means.
[SPEAKER_06]: Now, probably unlike Larry, I can find fascinating adrenaline and satisfaction in just making money.
[SPEAKER_06]: I knew that.
[SPEAKER_06]: I already knew that.
[SPEAKER_06]: I will spend it.
[SPEAKER_06]: I will have the real adrenaline.
[SPEAKER_06]: It's not for making, it's for spending it.
[SPEAKER_06]: Spending it cleverly around.
[SPEAKER_06]: Okay.
[SPEAKER_06]: I want to start with what I brought you here.
[SPEAKER_06]: I brought you here a document of...
[SPEAKER_06]: The German takeover.
[SPEAKER_06]: A German supposedly sophisticated takeover group.
[SPEAKER_06]: that I was one of the founders of.
[SPEAKER_06]: And according to the real achievements that they had, according to this record, are those that they have made when I was still there.
[SPEAKER_06]: I don't know what they have done since then.
[SPEAKER_06]: Probably they won some court trial about something.
[SPEAKER_06]: deal that they were involved in, and they were bypassed at the last moment.
[SPEAKER_06]: Probably the deal never materialized.
[SPEAKER_06]: It had to be with some sub-unit of Deutsche Telekom that operates here, T-Mobile, it was taken by ATT, but in a way that was...
[SPEAKER_06]: The way to bypass them was by acting much more aggressively.
[SPEAKER_06]: And by this aggressive action, they raised the attention of the authorities, the regulators here, and somehow it was blocked.
[SPEAKER_06]: But they kind of had still a complaint, probably they got some 30 million or whatever from this complaint, and they ran themselves off since then.
[SPEAKER_06]: Probably there are some areas that I don't know of, but basically I see something which reminds me very much what we had in mind six years ago,
[SPEAKER_06]: when I left them as I entered the... Read it and try to get, ask me whatever question, I know the people, I know... Who's the principal?
[SPEAKER_00]: Who's the main person?
[SPEAKER_06]: Originally it was four people, one named Philip Scholler,
[SPEAKER_06]: You will find all the details about it.
[SPEAKER_00]: Who do you like the most?
[SPEAKER_00]: Who do you have the best?
[SPEAKER_00]: No, no.
[SPEAKER_06]: I have with the two.
[SPEAKER_06]: We were five people.
[SPEAKER_06]: Philip Scholler, Christoph Bulfon, who's a lawyer, another entrepreneurial kind of guy, Hubertus Hoffman, Dr. Hoffman, and German origin Canadian guy.
[SPEAKER_06]: At the moment, do they have any money?
[SPEAKER_07]: Named?
[SPEAKER_06]: I will remind you in a moment.
[SPEAKER_06]: We were basically four of us, we started a German operation, registers in the islands, BVI.
[SPEAKER_06]: You will read it.
[SPEAKER_06]: You will find it.
[SPEAKER_06]: Basically the idea was the following.
[SPEAKER_06]: There is suppressed value within the DAX leading companies, from the biggest to the smallest, leading DAX companies, because of three elements.
[SPEAKER_06]: One is the nature of governance of companies in Germany with these double, two layers of
[SPEAKER_06]: a board which slows down dramatically and spreads the decision power and capability to take decisions.
[SPEAKER_06]: Secondly, the deep involvement of unions that are participants of the board and you can practically not move without them.
[SPEAKER_06]: And then passive shareholders.
[SPEAKER_06]: There is nothing like ICANN or whatever here.
[SPEAKER_06]: extremely passive.
[SPEAKER_06]: Now, how do you know it's suppressed?
[SPEAKER_06]: You take any company, take BASF and compare it to DuPont or whatever, a similar sized company, you will end up a German company with half the market cap.
[SPEAKER_06]: Take any, I don't know, insurance big company, compare it to
[SPEAKER_06]: companies finance other activities and you will end up that much lower but even if you compare them to any successful North American companies and do the same with every in every aspect and
[SPEAKER_06]: In fact, that's the case.
[SPEAKER_06]: They are much lower now.
[SPEAKER_06]: In order to do something with it, you have to change it.
[SPEAKER_06]: The idea is that you can easily take, by the rules, if you get 10% of the stock of a company, you become practically the owner of the company, you can call a special General Assembly of the whole shareholding,
[SPEAKER_06]: and you can nominate a director, you can change the nature of it.
[SPEAKER_06]: Usually it doesn't work.
[SPEAKER_06]: If you are German, they look at you in quite a bizarre way.
[SPEAKER_06]: If you are non-German, they will go...
[SPEAKER_06]: So the idea is to establish a German...
[SPEAKER_06]: In this group you will see
[SPEAKER_06]: who are former heads of leading DAX companies, they know the companies
[SPEAKER_06]: and everything, they have a lot of informal, internal information about what happens, including when we...
[SPEAKER_06]: I remember fighting with Volkswagen before PiH took it over, and with Deutsche Telekom, when we were continuously acquainted with what really happens in any board meeting afterwards and so on.
[SPEAKER_06]: So to establish a Luxembourg or whatever operation for any given project, and let's say you typically might need one billion in equity, another one billion in debt to create 10% of a company with a market cap of 20 billion and start to operate.
[SPEAKER_06]: You will need more if it's a bigger company, but usually it's relatively small
[SPEAKER_06]: Think of...
[SPEAKER_00]: I understand all of it.
[SPEAKER_06]: Munich Re.
[SPEAKER_06]: Very huge potential of money like Berkshire Hathaway but probably making 4 billion per year on 200 billion of assets.
[SPEAKER_06]: So by just making not very good insurer but good manager of assets you can do more.
[SPEAKER_06]: That's the idea.
[SPEAKER_06]: Now they want...
[SPEAKER_06]: to find players, or think that whether we can find players who are ready and capable, after they understand they can be behind this SPV, probably having convertible bonds with the SPV.
[SPEAKER_00]: Let me stop you for a second.
[SPEAKER_00]: It's much more important, when you initially describe these things,
[SPEAKER_00]: The structure of where and whether SPVs or it's in Luxembourg, BVI, it doesn't mean anything.
[SPEAKER_00]: The only thing you need to focus on now when you're talking about these types of businesses are the numbers.
[SPEAKER_00]: So that the numbers are the numbers are the numbers.
[SPEAKER_00]: Nothing else is going to make a difference.
[SPEAKER_00]: So you need to tell me five things.
[SPEAKER_00]: A, have they performed before and what's their returns?
[SPEAKER_00]: Because structurally, it's different.
[SPEAKER_00]: I'll look.
[SPEAKER_06]: You will find two examples, which are successful ones.
[SPEAKER_06]: Both of them happened when I was there.
[SPEAKER_06]: And I will add to you some.
[SPEAKER_06]: If you have to ask me whether they are extremely successful till now, my answer is no.
[SPEAKER_06]: Otherwise, they are rich people, all of them.
[SPEAKER_00]: What do they want from you?
[SPEAKER_00]: So I want to know the numbers, and what do they want from you?
[SPEAKER_00]: So those are my two biggest goals.
[SPEAKER_06]: you will find.
[SPEAKER_06]: The idea to take anything from a small DAX company could be taken over by putting 300, probably 300 in equity and 300 in debt, you have 600 million, you can take over 60.
[SPEAKER_06]: The very big ones might need
[SPEAKER_06]: and 3.5 billion in equity, which enables you to take even diamonds.
[SPEAKER_06]: In fact, the only one who did what GCG has as a vision is Ferdinand Pir, when he took over Volkswagen.
[SPEAKER_06]: He ran ahead of us.
[SPEAKER_06]: We had been here trying to convince several
[SPEAKER_06]: and the hedge funds to do exactly what he had done.
[SPEAKER_06]: They were much slower because several generations have already had a strong hold within the company.
[SPEAKER_06]: Probably he identified the opportunity, but he extracted clearly a real jump that still holds several years, 5-6 years after all.
[SPEAKER_06]: Basically, think what people have done with Volkswagen and you will get a sense of what they plan.
[SPEAKER_06]: Whether they did it or not, that's probably the reason why they want me.
[SPEAKER_06]: They want me to be able to somehow help them, to convince somehow for whom these amounts of money are not frightening.
[SPEAKER_06]: If we convince, for example,
[SPEAKER_06]: the sovereign fund of be it Singapore or the Emirates or China to be with us or even a major Russian.
[SPEAKER_06]: To be with us, the GCG provides the front in Luxembourg and they are behind it.
[SPEAKER_06]: Because if some sovereign fund will take over a major tax company, it could end up politically...
[SPEAKER_00]: So they want you to go to the sovereign funds?
[SPEAKER_06]: Yeah, to help them to convince the sovereign fund.
[SPEAKER_06]: extremely rich individuals like Tom Pritzker for example I just wrote down Tom's name because I talked to him this morning probably a guy that can if he wants to take over a major I understand but what is your real advantage for them the fact that you know rich people the fact that you have open I can open the door I can access I can be there I can
[SPEAKER_00]: The door opener.
[SPEAKER_06]: Yeah, in a way.
[SPEAKER_06]: And yeah, someone that they respect, it gives them certain respect, as you said, about this blue...
[SPEAKER_06]: Right.
[SPEAKER_06]: So basically, and they know me and they trust me because we work together.
[SPEAKER_06]: I help them to go to Bruce Kovner and to Leon Black and to others and start to see what they are.
[SPEAKER_06]: For example, they worked very hard to convince the Russians and they failed.
[SPEAKER_06]: Until now.
[SPEAKER_06]: And I think that probably I can convince, you know, one of the guys that, think of two of the guys that they get now with BP10K, brought together, they got some four of them, they got some 28 billion.
[SPEAKER_06]: They have to put it somewhere.
[SPEAKER_06]: The story with Germany is quite clear.
[SPEAKER_06]: It's the best performing operation on the manufacturing flow and a very slow, not creative on the top.
[SPEAKER_00]: Right, but Germany has always traded a discount to the States.
[SPEAKER_00]: I'm not sure the comparison of German company valuations and earning price is an issue with taxes and unions.
[SPEAKER_00]: You can't fire people there so easily.
[SPEAKER_00]: But my concern is that
[SPEAKER_00]: They want you to open the door, I understand.
[SPEAKER_00]: It's not really your expertise.
[SPEAKER_00]: I understand.
[SPEAKER_00]: Your capabilities, I think you're going to make a lot of money.
[SPEAKER_00]: See, you're going to make a lot of money.
[SPEAKER_00]: You're definitely going to make a lot of money.
[SPEAKER_00]: I'm not going?
[SPEAKER_00]: You will.
[SPEAKER_00]: You're definitely going to make a lot of money.
[SPEAKER_00]: You will make money.
[SPEAKER_00]: The question is which place you do it with.
[SPEAKER_06]: Okay, look.
[SPEAKER_06]: I will show, after we read it, I will show the concrete proposal that they sent to me.
[SPEAKER_06]: They gave an example.
[SPEAKER_06]: They said, we are going to get, when we put the money,
[SPEAKER_06]: assume for a moment you succeed in bringing us someone who can put $1 billion equity for some project.
[SPEAKER_06]: Big enough.
[SPEAKER_06]: Think, for example, of the China investment company.
[SPEAKER_06]: They run probably $400 billion.
[SPEAKER_06]: of the 2 billion we got 3%.
[SPEAKER_06]: We are ready to give you 12 million out of the 60 million we get immediately, and then smaller amounts down there.
[SPEAKER_00]: So what Tom asked me this morning, and he said he told you at Davos, was he thought you should make a list of his work.
[SPEAKER_00]: Metrics, as I told you.
[SPEAKER_00]: Yes, but who has IOUs to you?
[SPEAKER_00]: Is that... Who's the... Out of the people in the past who you think you're close to, he said he really wanted you to make this list of...
[SPEAKER_00]: This person owes me a favor.
[SPEAKER_00]: This person owes me his life.
[SPEAKER_00]: This person owes me his job.
[SPEAKER_00]: This person owes me... Yeah, okay.
[SPEAKER_00]: And so you've got to work it backwards.
[SPEAKER_00]: and say, here is my, instead of thinking about what the opportunities are first, because right now you're focused on opportunities.
[SPEAKER_00]: I need you to focus on your personal balance sheet in terms of competences.
[SPEAKER_00]: What's your real strengths?
[SPEAKER_00]: One of the liabilities is you're 71 years old, so you can't be in a business that takes 20 years to make money.
[SPEAKER_00]: We have to make money in the next three years.
[SPEAKER_00]: So, people, competence, things.
[SPEAKER_00]: I talked to Ian yesterday.
[SPEAKER_00]: I asked him to come.
[SPEAKER_00]: He flew in Monday for an hour.
[SPEAKER_00]: What was his impression from the...
[SPEAKER_00]: So, same thing.
[SPEAKER_00]: He's very connected to Samsung.
[SPEAKER_00]: Very.
[SPEAKER_00]: Samsung.
[SPEAKER_00]: Samsung.
[SPEAKER_00]: Yes.
[SPEAKER_00]: Very.
[SPEAKER_00]: They pay him $3 million a year.
[SPEAKER_00]: Just to make PR.
[SPEAKER_00]: Yes.
[SPEAKER_00]: He has 10 companies like that now.
[SPEAKER_00]: Okay.
[SPEAKER_00]: So he said there's this company called Lookout.
[SPEAKER_00]: He said he mentioned it to you.
[SPEAKER_00]: L-O-O-K-N-U-T. Yeah, you told me.
[SPEAKER_00]: He thinks they'll pay you a couple million dollars to be on the board.
[SPEAKER_07]: Yeah.
[SPEAKER_07]: That would be good.
[SPEAKER_07]: I understood.
Yeah.
[SPEAKER_00]: He thought there was two cyber companies, Lookout and...
[SPEAKER_00]: Even though I know Peter...
[SPEAKER_00]: I've never met Peter Thiel.
[SPEAKER_00]: And everybody says he sort of jumps around and acts strange, like he's on drugs.
[SPEAKER_06]: Smoking, yeah.
[SPEAKER_06]: He looks under drugs.
[SPEAKER_00]: However, he has a company called Palantir.
[SPEAKER_00]: P-A-L-L-E-N.
[SPEAKER_00]: T-I-E-R. Palantir is Peter Thiel's company.
[SPEAKER_00]: And look out.
[SPEAKER_06]: Palantir.
[SPEAKER_06]: P-A-L-A-N-T-I-E-R?
[SPEAKER_06]: Yes.
[SPEAKER_06]: How do you write Thiel?
[SPEAKER_00]: T-H-I-E-L-L-Y?
[SPEAKER_00]: T-H-I-E-L. L-L-Y?
[SPEAKER_00]: No.
[SPEAKER_00]: T-H-I-E-L-L.
[SPEAKER_00]: Okay.
[SPEAKER_00]: Okay.
[SPEAKER_00]: So he thought that Peter would put you on the board of Palantir.
[SPEAKER_00]: Peter Thiel is one of the best.
[SPEAKER_00]: I've never met him.
[SPEAKER_00]: He's going to come here next week.
[SPEAKER_00]: So I wanted to talk to him after I talk to you.
[SPEAKER_00]: He and Andreessen.
[SPEAKER_00]: It's called Andreessen Horowitz.
[SPEAKER_00]: Andreessen Horowitz.
[SPEAKER_00]: They pay Larry a million dollars a year.
[SPEAKER_00]: Just to advise them.
[SPEAKER_00]: A-N-D-R-E-E
[SPEAKER_00]: S-O-N, Andreasson, and Horowitz.
[SPEAKER_00]: And Horowitz?
[SPEAKER_00]: H-O-R-O, Horowitz.
[SPEAKER_00]: Horowitz.
[SPEAKER_07]: What are they?
[SPEAKER_07]: Lobbyists?
[SPEAKER_00]: They are the biggest venture capital people in Silicon Valley.
[SPEAKER_00]: Bigger than Sequoia or Kleiner Perkins?
[SPEAKER_00]: These are the new Kleiner Perkins.
[SPEAKER_00]: These are the smart boys.
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah.
[SPEAKER_00]: So those two companies right away, in terms of...
[SPEAKER_00]: I said that we need... Now, in the next three weeks, if you're going to leave...
[SPEAKER_00]: those two right away.
[SPEAKER_00]: Let's go more through.
[SPEAKER_00]: I need to see the numbers here before I have, so I can be intelligent.
[SPEAKER_06]: See the numbers.
[SPEAKER_06]: What is tempting there, that I know the people, and basically, you don't know more than one success on this scale, according to the contract that they proposed to me,
[SPEAKER_06]: to get basically much richer than I am now.
[SPEAKER_06]: I understand.
[SPEAKER_06]: Getting some 20 or 30 million dollars along several years.
[SPEAKER_06]: I understand.
[SPEAKER_06]: So that's number one.
[SPEAKER_06]: Number two.
[SPEAKER_06]: A Swiss private bank.
[SPEAKER_06]: I'm going to meet with them in Zurich.
[SPEAKER_06]: is coming, I'm flying tomorrow to Europe and going to meet with them.
[SPEAKER_06]: They basically asked me to join something very similar to what, if I understand well, Tony or Schultz
[SPEAKER_06]: namely running certain kinds of international advisory boards that they don't have now to help them to push business.
[SPEAKER_06]: And they are very clear what they would like to do.
[SPEAKER_06]: To help them to approach effectively and convince people and players, families, they are like many other banks,
[SPEAKER_06]: They concentrate on high-net-worth individuals, family offices, some extremely big operations, for some reason they have to invest.
[SPEAKER_06]: They have quite a known name.
[SPEAKER_06]: They are not as small and private and almost confidential as Piktet or Lombard.
[SPEAKER_06]: And as a result, cleaner.
[SPEAKER_06]: I tried to check, I didn't find anything about them.
[SPEAKER_06]: But they told me, frankly, that they don't want to work with Americans.
[SPEAKER_06]: Because even if I bring... Nobody works with Americans.
[SPEAKER_06]: They told me it doesn't make sense from a reputational point of view to work with Americans because they want to know everything, they want to publicize it.
[SPEAKER_06]: It's not easy to the customer, not easy for us.
[SPEAKER_06]: So they want me to help them to reach sources of money to manage in whatever, Latin America.
[SPEAKER_00]: How big are they now?
[SPEAKER_00]: How big are they now?
[SPEAKER_00]: Do you know?
[SPEAKER_06]: I see between 150 to 250 billion in assets.
[SPEAKER_06]: They didn't reach this level.
[SPEAKER_06]: And they feel, for example, they don't know even how to approach Russia, because they still feel that some of the Russians are bad and they shouldn't approach them, but some others are good enough.
[SPEAKER_06]: money runs operations outside of Russia and became quite legitimized in the financial world.
[SPEAKER_00]: What's the name?
[SPEAKER_00]: Can you tell me the name?
[SPEAKER_06]: Probably I will tell you in a few days.
[SPEAKER_06]: They just asked me not to.
[SPEAKER_06]: But think of it, there are several, probably half a dozen or a dozen operations.
[SPEAKER_00]: Have they been under investigation by the states?
[SPEAKER_00]: No.
[SPEAKER_00]: You sure?
[SPEAKER_00]: That doesn't sound right.
[SPEAKER_00]: It doesn't sound right.
[SPEAKER_00]: Why?
[SPEAKER_00]: Because I can't imagine that there's an institution of $150 billion that has not been under investigation by the States.
[SPEAKER_00]: It just doesn't sound right to me.
[SPEAKER_06]: Yeah, okay.
[SPEAKER_06]: I will recheck it with them directly.
[SPEAKER_06]: No, you need to find some...
[SPEAKER_06]: Okay, probably after the meeting.
[SPEAKER_06]: You can ask him.
[SPEAKER_06]: I think in three days it will be behind me.
[SPEAKER_06]: I will find a way to ask.
[SPEAKER_06]: They were not under investigation for something wrong.
[SPEAKER_06]: Probably the American authorities approached them like they approached all other big firms.
[SPEAKER_00]: In general terms, every Swiss bank of big size like that has been under investigation.
[SPEAKER_00]: So it's a question, if they no longer, the question you need to ask, did you ever deal with Americans?
[SPEAKER_00]: Now, if they dealt with Americans in the past, they're under investigation.
[SPEAKER_00]: Everybody who's touched an American is under investigation.
[SPEAKER_00]: Okay.
[SPEAKER_00]: So they might not be now because they told all the, what normally happened, like there's a bank called Weglen, W-E-G-E-L-E-N. Yeah.
[SPEAKER_00]: They were the big ones.
[SPEAKER_00]: Julius Baer, big ones.
[SPEAKER_00]: If you had an American, they told all the Americans, you must take your account out.
[SPEAKER_00]: All the Swiss banks were no longer allowed to have American clients.
[SPEAKER_00]: But the government says, look, I need to know who had accounts at your bank because they have not paid their taxes.
[SPEAKER_00]: And we want their names.
[SPEAKER_00]: There's been a big fight for most banks.
[SPEAKER_00]: Under Swiss law, we can't give you the names.
[SPEAKER_00]: But we can give it to the Swiss government.
[SPEAKER_06]: And the Swiss government probably is going to yield to the Americans in order to give.
[SPEAKER_06]: By then, all the banks will give.
[SPEAKER_06]: But all this, I believe that Lombard and the...
[SPEAKER_06]: under certain investigations.
[SPEAKER_06]: But Credit Suisse and the UBS also had been under.
[SPEAKER_00]: Yes.
[SPEAKER_06]: And the Wegland and the Jules Berg.
[SPEAKER_00]: The worst so far has been Wegland.
[SPEAKER_00]: Under investigation.
[SPEAKER_00]: No, they pled guilty.
[SPEAKER_00]: They were already charged.
[SPEAKER_06]: And the others, the Jules Berg?
[SPEAKER_00]: Not yet.
[SPEAKER_00]: Not yet pled guilty or not yet under investigation?
[SPEAKER_00]: All under investigation.
[SPEAKER_00]: Okay.
[SPEAKER_00]: Not yet, charged.
[SPEAKER_00]: Everyone's under investigation, some have been charged.
[SPEAKER_00]: Because it's how abusive, really what happens is this.
[SPEAKER_00]: You're under investigation.
[SPEAKER_00]: Congratulations, you're under investigation.
[SPEAKER_00]: You cooperate with me.
[SPEAKER_00]: So you're okay.
[SPEAKER_00]: We won't bother you.
[SPEAKER_00]: You want to tell me to take a walk, I will indict you in New York.
[SPEAKER_00]: If we indict you in New York, you're not allowed to do business with American banks anywhere in the world.
[SPEAKER_00]: So you're out of business.
[SPEAKER_00]: So you either give us what we want...
[SPEAKER_06]: If you are not cooperating... You're dead.
[SPEAKER_06]: And then automatically, anyone who is... Charged.
[SPEAKER_00]: You have a problem.
[SPEAKER_00]: So, Weglin paid a fine of $75 million.
[SPEAKER_00]: Who?
[SPEAKER_00]: Weglin Bank.
[SPEAKER_00]: W-E-G-E-L-I-N.
[SPEAKER_00]: Paid how much?
[SPEAKER_00]: $75 million.
[SPEAKER_00]: UBS paid $750 million.
[SPEAKER_00]: $750.
[SPEAKER_00]: But, they paid $75...
[SPEAKER_06]: But even...
[SPEAKER_06]: Wait.
[SPEAKER_06]: Yes, but a different trade.
[SPEAKER_00]: That was a rate rigging.
[SPEAKER_00]: But here's, I'm going to pay $75 million and give you the names of every American who had an account.
[SPEAKER_00]: So that's very much, that sets the tone moving forward.
[SPEAKER_00]: if the bank has given up American names, people are a little more hesitant because, okay, we know, it's like Mubarak, right?
[SPEAKER_00]: You threw the last, anybody who came to you the last time, Americans, maybe it's my country, it's Russia who wants to know, are we having it?
[SPEAKER_00]: Are these managed accounts, are they private accounts, are they secret accounts, they're all, you need to know.
[SPEAKER_06]: Yeah, yeah.
[SPEAKER_06]: Swiss banking system ceased to be
[SPEAKER_06]: fully protected, our clients know it somehow.
[SPEAKER_06]: They still trust that it's easier than in other places of poverty.
[SPEAKER_06]: It's not places like...
[SPEAKER_00]: The nice part about Switzerland, for people, if you have a hundred million dollars and you have it in Switzerland, you don't want a return.
[SPEAKER_00]: You don't care if your money makes money.
[SPEAKER_00]: You don't care if it doesn't make money.
[SPEAKER_00]: Because it's safe.
[SPEAKER_00]: So you have it there for safety, not for profit.
[SPEAKER_06]: But they are somehow taking some of the money as a management fee, or you're saying they probably do it and they let you get very little, but you don't get a lot anymore, so they...
[SPEAKER_06]: In fact, if they make 2%, they take 2%.
[SPEAKER_06]: They take 2%, give you half percent, all satisfied because what you really bought is safety.
[SPEAKER_06]: Right.
[SPEAKER_06]: But if that's the case, it might not be extremely complicated to help them to make money.
[SPEAKER_06]: That's correct.
[SPEAKER_06]: Unless they are under such an investigation and have to be on the wrong side.
[SPEAKER_01]: Correct.
[SPEAKER_06]: Why should they be on the wrong side if they understand what you have said?
[SPEAKER_06]: Everyone ultimately.
[SPEAKER_06]: It's an issue of survivability.
[SPEAKER_06]: Hello?
[SPEAKER_06]: Hello?
[SPEAKER_06]: Hello?
[SPEAKER_06]: Huh?
[SPEAKER_06]: Okay, okay, what are you saying?
[SPEAKER_06]: Okay, okay, I'm here in the middle of a meeting.
[SPEAKER_06]: What?
[SPEAKER_06]: Okay, I said.
[SPEAKER_06]: Come on, I'll give you...
[SPEAKER_06]: Put my phone up tomorrow at 10 o'clock in the morning.
[SPEAKER_06]: And we'll see, tomorrow morning, when?
[SPEAKER_06]: At 4 o'clock, I think, I'll go to the airport.
[SPEAKER_06]: Hello?
[SPEAKER_06]: Hello?
[SPEAKER_06]: Yes.
[SPEAKER_06]: Hello?
[SPEAKER_06]: Talk to me tomorrow morning at 10 o'clock.
[SPEAKER_06]: Hello?
[SPEAKER_06]: Yeah.
[SPEAKER_06]: Okay.
[SPEAKER_06]: Let's think of... Go after you.
[SPEAKER_06]: We'll come back later.
[SPEAKER_06]: They want, basically, they seem to be interested.
[SPEAKER_06]: They never, we never reach the point where they will tell me, okay, we want to send you an offer.
[SPEAKER_06]: They know that I'm going to leave only several weeks.
[SPEAKER_06]: But probably after this meeting in...
[SPEAKER_06]: in Switzerland, they might send me a certain paper proposing that I'll be there.
[SPEAKER_06]: I don't know what they have in mind in terms of compensation.
[SPEAKER_06]: I don't want, no, I assume that they will find a way to give me a certain amount as a kind of basis, certain coverage of expenses.
[SPEAKER_06]: could be quite high, because they have to satisfy, in order to meet with the possible clients, to have to spend some time, I know, in Sardinia, or in Gestadt, or in Punta del Este, or whatever.
[SPEAKER_06]: Did you talk numbers at all?
[SPEAKER_06]: No, no, never.
[SPEAKER_06]: And probably certain element of
[SPEAKER_06]: kind of performance or results based bonus or compensation probably stretch over time I think that there is basically I didn't talk to them about it but who are you speaking I mean you're speaking to the president or the owner I spoke they came to my house as a kind of just to our place
[SPEAKER_06]: one of the, probably number three in the organization, together with one of the, probably the then CEO.
[SPEAKER_06]: Later on, I met with the CEO, and he spent 45 minutes with me for the first time.
[SPEAKER_06]: I know indirectly that he was quite impressed.
[SPEAKER_06]: And he made up his mind that he wants to see me there.
[SPEAKER_06]: And he asked me to meet with them.
[SPEAKER_06]: And to visit with them and to meet.
[SPEAKER_06]: So we will meet.
[SPEAKER_06]: I assume that he will cover some of the issues.
[SPEAKER_06]: Probably it will come to a point where I will tell him, OK, if your interest is, send me an offer.
[SPEAKER_06]: I don't know how to continue from here.
[SPEAKER_06]: And I would appreciate if you give me some of your assessments or knowledge about how much they might propose, how much I might...
[SPEAKER_06]: asked for what could be something which is not... Outrageous.
[SPEAKER_06]: Yeah.
[SPEAKER_06]: Outrageous, kind of trying to use me somehow, I don't know.
[SPEAKER_06]: They basically seem to respect me, because it's their initiative.
[SPEAKER_00]: Do you want to get an offer while you're still in the government?
[SPEAKER_00]: Would you rather wait until you get out?
[SPEAKER_06]: No.
[SPEAKER_06]: I prefer to tell them, send me an offer after the 14th.
[SPEAKER_06]: I don't want something to be on record before.
[SPEAKER_06]: I will tell you later on that in regard to secure,
[SPEAKER_06]: sit down and start to work on list of whatever agencies or states that I will start to talk to as part of their proposal to establish some operations outside this country.
[SPEAKER_00]: Where is that company from?
[SPEAKER_06]: It's one of the, once again, they also, I will tell their name probably in a few days.
[SPEAKER_06]: They are one of the leaders of
[SPEAKER_06]: service providers in the internet.
[SPEAKER_06]: And they feel that they can use their security.
[SPEAKER_06]: They access and they control of the movement of material in the internet, the cloud enables them to create, it gives you a huge leverage.
[SPEAKER_06]: to develop the same kind of relationship with many other countries, because they can find or identify the cyber attacks or deployments for attacks much earlier than the firewalls or those who are looking just around the machines themselves.
[SPEAKER_00]: Now, do you... my understanding...
[SPEAKER_06]: I mention it only because...
[SPEAKER_06]: I mention it just because
[SPEAKER_06]: Just to tell you that I deliberately delayed them at a certain price, because they want to...
[SPEAKER_06]: They also came to me.
[SPEAKER_06]: I didn't know...
[SPEAKER_06]: I knew the name, but I didn't know what they were doing.
[SPEAKER_06]: They came to me, they asked to meet with me.
[SPEAKER_06]: I didn't yet see the number one person, I see the president, I didn't see the CEO, the guy who runs it.
[SPEAKER_06]: But it seems that they are interested.
[SPEAKER_06]: And I delayed them too.
[SPEAKER_06]: I told them I cannot do it, it's not proper.
[SPEAKER_06]: Too many people in the room who ended up that I started making business when I was still Minister of Defense, especially related to security.
[SPEAKER_06]: But I go back to that.
[SPEAKER_06]: I don't want a proposal before I end.
[SPEAKER_06]: But I want to...
[SPEAKER_06]: draw from you certain feelings, what could be reasonable for them and whether they might ask me to be exclusive?
[SPEAKER_06]: Does it make sense if America is not part of it?
[SPEAKER_00]: Why should they have any... For the next month, it's the same attitude, which is, look, I came here, I wanted to listen to what you have to offer.
[SPEAKER_00]: I am very fortunate because
[SPEAKER_00]: I'm going to make a decision by April where I will devote my time I'm not going to make a decision before April 1st when's your last day?
[SPEAKER_06]: last day is 14 of March if Bibi succeeds is it possible he doesn't succeed?
[SPEAKER_06]: it has no precedent but it can happen
[SPEAKER_06]: Theoretically it can happen.
[SPEAKER_06]: If then I'm going to lose a quarter of a million dollars just for the first six weeks by having to cancel certain lectures that I already committed myself.
[SPEAKER_06]: I consider even to retire, to fake myself, to resign on the 14th.
[SPEAKER_06]: But it won't be read properly in Israel.
[SPEAKER_06]: People immediately will identify, they will find where I made them.
[SPEAKER_06]: The only thing I can say, okay, I planned it in advance, I cannot... People say, yeah, what will happen in two days?
[SPEAKER_06]: Afterwards, Syria will collapse, there is no experience.
[SPEAKER_00]: And what is the truth there?
[SPEAKER_06]: I don't say, it happens in Syria, Syria is going to collapse.
[SPEAKER_06]: I don't know where, when.
[SPEAKER_00]: No, but what happens if Syria, I guess, America's not going to go after Iran soon.
[SPEAKER_00]: I don't think.
[SPEAKER_00]: But if something happens that's dramatic, if Hezbollah does something goofy, who else is going to, here's one of my issues.
[SPEAKER_00]: I mean,
[SPEAKER_00]: Even though you're disliked as a politician, if Israel has a military something or other, who's going to do it besides you?
[SPEAKER_06]: No, no.
[SPEAKER_06]: Once there is a defense minister, he will do it.
[SPEAKER_06]: Probably short of preference, but he will do it with the government.
[SPEAKER_06]: He's not alone.
[SPEAKER_06]: I worry only about the technical situation that might be created.
[SPEAKER_06]: I hope it won't.
[SPEAKER_06]: If...
[SPEAKER_06]: Nothing happens.
[SPEAKER_06]: And then there is another round.
[SPEAKER_06]: And if the other round fails as well, after another, probably the mid of April, another round is failing.
[SPEAKER_06]: So within 90 days, namely May, June, July, at the beginning of July, there will be another election.
[SPEAKER_06]: After which there is another.
[SPEAKER_06]: It can end up the whole summer.
[SPEAKER_06]: So I don't want to be stuck there.
[SPEAKER_00]: Right.
[SPEAKER_06]: I prefer to impose upon Bibi to nominate someone else in the 40s, even if temporarily, and just say, okay.
[SPEAKER_00]: Because it's important that the first offer be high.
[SPEAKER_00]: So let's assume they say $3 million a year.
[SPEAKER_00]: Tony gets $5 million from J.P. Morgan.
[SPEAKER_00]: So we know it's not going to be more than five.
[SPEAKER_00]: So the number is going to be between one and four.
[SPEAKER_07]: Between one and four.
[SPEAKER_00]: That's the real number.
[SPEAKER_00]: So if they believe you have lots of other alternatives, I think they'll offer you one and a half to two to start off with.
[SPEAKER_00]: And we'll negotiate.
[SPEAKER_00]: Sorry.
[SPEAKER_00]: I thought you were serious.
[SPEAKER_02]: Yeah.
[SPEAKER_00]: I thought you were a serious player.
[SPEAKER_00]: If a million and a half dollars, I can make that in five speeches for five days a year.
[SPEAKER_00]: I don't need it.
[SPEAKER_00]: In real life, though, once we really know, because you can't have yourself involved in a bank that does funny things.
[SPEAKER_00]: What is funny?
[SPEAKER_00]: Illegal.
[SPEAKER_06]: I don't think that that's the case.
[SPEAKER_00]: I don't know, but you don't know.
[SPEAKER_00]: I don't care what you think.
[SPEAKER_06]: It's interesting, but we need to know that... How can I know and how can I present this?
[SPEAKER_06]: The very question raises doubts about their position.
[SPEAKER_00]: Once you tell me their name, we can have some sense.
[SPEAKER_00]: Who are their big clients?
[SPEAKER_00]: Are their big clients Africans, Russians, South Americans?
[SPEAKER_06]: No, that's exactly...
[SPEAKER_06]: They are not.
[SPEAKER_06]: They are mainly Europeans.
[SPEAKER_00]: You know, the Italians have a problem.
[SPEAKER_06]: They told me, quite frankly, that they hesitated to enter Russia because of reputational issues.
[SPEAKER_06]: And that they are not almost...
[SPEAKER_06]: They are relatively weak in Latin America.
[SPEAKER_06]: They think that they have to go there, or Latin America and Central America.
[SPEAKER_06]: And they don't even know how to start to think about China.
[SPEAKER_06]: And they think that it's a rising power in terms of wealth.
[SPEAKER_00]: Do they have any other branches, any other countries?
[SPEAKER_06]: Yeah, there's probably hundreds of people.
[SPEAKER_00]: No, no, but do they have other branches?
[SPEAKER_00]: Like a real business in Singapore?
[SPEAKER_00]: Do they have a bank in Singapore?
[SPEAKER_00]: Do they have a bank?
[SPEAKER_00]: I don't know.
[SPEAKER_06]: I don't think that they have banks in the normal...
[SPEAKER_06]: I need to know more.
[SPEAKER_06]: I don't think that they are running retail.
[SPEAKER_06]: For sure they don't have.
[SPEAKER_06]: I never see them under signing operations.
[SPEAKER_06]: Probably they are doing it
[SPEAKER_00]: So instead of talking theory, when you're free to tell me the details, I can give you real information.
[SPEAKER_06]: So probably it will happen mid-next week, probably Wednesday.
[SPEAKER_06]: And the security company when?
[SPEAKER_00]: After the 15th.
[SPEAKER_00]: They won't talk to you before that?
[SPEAKER_06]: No, they talk to me.
[SPEAKER_06]: I met with the president.
[SPEAKER_06]: Right.
[SPEAKER_06]: They sent a guy who was associated with them in Israel to talk to me.
[SPEAKER_06]: And they came directly.
[SPEAKER_06]: They came to me and asked for a meeting now here or in the headquarter.
[SPEAKER_06]: What country?
[SPEAKER_06]: Here.
[SPEAKER_06]: It's an American company.
Yeah.
[SPEAKER_04]: It's a big company.
[SPEAKER_06]: But from what I know, to be a member of the board of an American company could be half a million dollars a year or so.
[SPEAKER_06]: Probably $300,000, probably half a million, depends on it.
[SPEAKER_06]: Right.
[SPEAKER_06]: And, okay, if they do it just to get it, they probably will ask, you know, according to what they wait for this meeting, they are very extremely practical people.
[SPEAKER_06]: They want me to help them because they believe that outside of this continent, in this continent they are quite well connected.
[SPEAKER_06]: But once again, I notice that they raise their eyeballs when they learn whom I know personally here from the people they are fighting to convince the hierarchy underneath them to work.
[SPEAKER_06]: Is it a public company?
[SPEAKER_06]: Yeah.
[SPEAKER_06]: Publicly traded.
[SPEAKER_06]: Okay.
[SPEAKER_06]: but they don't have this kind of access to Germany.
[SPEAKER_00]: Right, but publicly traded companies are easier because most of the information is available.
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah.
[SPEAKER_00]: So we know what the board, we can find out what all the board members make by looking.
[SPEAKER_06]: I don't think they want me on the board.
[SPEAKER_06]: Okay.
[SPEAKER_06]: I think that probably they won't.
[SPEAKER_06]: They even left, they told the Israeli guy, left the open, ask Barak what he would like, they want to be.
[SPEAKER_06]: member or head of an international advisory board or advisor to us, consultant, whatever.
[SPEAKER_06]: But we know exactly what we want from him.
[SPEAKER_06]: We want him to help us with his authority on security and whatever, when quite advanced intelligence community was there, they know whatever they need about me.
[SPEAKER_06]: And say, we want, we believe that if we arrange a list of countries,
[SPEAKER_06]: that you can approach on top level.
[SPEAKER_00]: Do they know your last name was to be Brag?
[SPEAKER_06]: I hope they are.
[SPEAKER_06]: But they expect me to create a list of the working schedule, to bring the people, to start to convince other people to...
[SPEAKER_00]: But those things again are easy because if in fact
[SPEAKER_00]: if we know what you're selling and how much your work, what you're selling is worth.
[SPEAKER_06]: Yeah, and here, once again, I think that the real story is how, what kind of model could be shaped that will compensate me a long time, the kind of perpetuity, whatever, in regard to contracts that I have there, we set a target that are exclusive in the sense that I will approach them and if something goes up from it, I will be supportive.
[SPEAKER_06]: No question.
[SPEAKER_06]: That's
[SPEAKER_06]: the second stone.
[SPEAKER_06]: Now there is a third one that I will share with you because it comes together with something that I owe you kind of.
[SPEAKER_06]: I approached an American CEO, it's originally German, Klaus Kreinfeld.
[SPEAKER_06]: is the head of a company called Alcoa now, aluminum, the biggest public company.
[SPEAKER_06]: I know him from the time that he was here, head of Siemens America.
[SPEAKER_06]: under Heinrich von Peerer, who was a friend of mine, head of Siemens.
[SPEAKER_06]: And Dr. von Peerer asked me a favor that I will go meet with this young person and will give him my impression of the guy because he wants to consider whether he can jump him over the heads of everyone on the board and put him as his replacement for the scandal.
[SPEAKER_06]: And I came here and I was quite impressed by the guy and I had several meetings with the rest of the board members, I saw them as well.
[SPEAKER_06]: And I told him I think it could be good and he did it, he took him and jumped.
[SPEAKER_06]: I'm not sure that Klaus knows all the stories, but probably later on he became acquainted with it somehow through Dr. von Peer himself.
[SPEAKER_06]: But I met with him several times in business gatherings when I was in private life, and we even tried to start some initiative in Moscow, some parking system that Siemens would be the prime contractor.
[SPEAKER_06]: the relationship with Luchkov and Yelena Baturina and all the Russian leadership.
[SPEAKER_06]: I asked him to send him something similar there, we met, he brought his number two kind of operational assistant, a guy who once worked in the White House,
[SPEAKER_06]: And they also say basically, tell us what you want.
[SPEAKER_06]: Okay, we like you.
[SPEAKER_06]: He didn't use the I owe you, but he said I like Barak very much, great person.
[SPEAKER_06]: Tell me what way you want to be involved.
[SPEAKER_06]: Probably once again it might end up with certain kind of several hundred thousand that he can decide to pay if I give them, I don't know, whatever, consultancy about protecting him.
[SPEAKER_06]: of money, unless I can find some way once again to bring together achievements that I can help them to do, either in upstream or downstream.
[SPEAKER_00]: But they will know more about what you can do for them than you can guess.
[SPEAKER_00]: So you need to have them say, look, it's the same thing.
[SPEAKER_00]: I don't have that much time.
[SPEAKER_00]: I'm 71 years old.
[SPEAKER_00]: I have five years of being active.
[SPEAKER_00]: I can travel around for five years active.
[SPEAKER_00]: I'm going to have to make a decision about how I spend my time.
[SPEAKER_00]: If you think I'm going to be an asset for you, you should send me a proposal, but I need to receive it by March 20th, between the 14th and the 20th, because by April 1st I'm going to make decisions.
[SPEAKER_00]: That's it.
[SPEAKER_00]: No more talking.
[SPEAKER_00]: We're done.
[SPEAKER_00]: They know how much you're worth to them.
[SPEAKER_00]: But the more you say, well, you can't ask, will you pay my expenses?
[SPEAKER_00]: Just send me an offer between the 14th and the 20th, and by April 1st, I'll give you an answer.
[SPEAKER_00]: One, two, three.
[SPEAKER_00]: No discussion.
[SPEAKER_00]: Because the offer will come in higher than you think because of that.
[SPEAKER_00]: I like the security company more than I like the bank.
[SPEAKER_00]: The security company, you can't get in trouble.
[SPEAKER_06]: Let's continue and then we'll compare all these.
[SPEAKER_06]: Sure.
[SPEAKER_00]: March.
[SPEAKER_00]: Yes, March 14th and 20th.
[SPEAKER_00]: As if you're giving them an order?
[SPEAKER_06]: Yeah.
[SPEAKER_06]: March 31st and on April 1st.
[SPEAKER_00]: You want an offer between the 14th and the 20th?
[SPEAKER_00]: Mm-hmm.
[SPEAKER_00]: Send me an offer between the 14th and the 20th.
[SPEAKER_00]: 21st.
[SPEAKER_00]: Okay.
[SPEAKER_00]: You negotiated with me already?
[SPEAKER_06]: Yeah, and on...
[SPEAKER_06]: April 1st, I will give you an answer.
[SPEAKER_06]: Should I sell it, send me an offer, however, kind of, no, don't mention however, nothing, just send me an offer.
[SPEAKER_06]: Okay.
[SPEAKER_06]: You said basically the bank, they might propose something between 1 and 4 million.
[SPEAKER_06]: Right.
[SPEAKER_06]: Probably.
[SPEAKER_06]: and probably some mechanism of bonus, will they ask for exclusivity?
[SPEAKER_06]: No.
[SPEAKER_06]: They can't, basically, because they are not dealing with North America.
[SPEAKER_06]: And basically, even if they would ask...
[SPEAKER_06]: They might ask for a bank exclusively.
[SPEAKER_06]: Yeah.
[SPEAKER_06]: I could easily explain to them that some other activities might create synergies.
[SPEAKER_06]: It's not...
[SPEAKER_00]: It's better not to... Again, no.
[SPEAKER_00]: The answer is...
[SPEAKER_00]: I can't do an exclusive.
[SPEAKER_00]: Don't defend yourself.
[SPEAKER_00]: Don't explain yourself.
[SPEAKER_06]: Yeah, I can give them... Give them less than more.
[SPEAKER_00]: Would you consider exclusivity?
[SPEAKER_00]: No.
[SPEAKER_00]: No, no.
[SPEAKER_00]: You need to be seen, especially the military.
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, I fully understand.
[SPEAKER_00]: Okay, let me continue.
[SPEAKER_06]: A phantom.
[SPEAKER_06]: I was approached by a friend of mine, a soldier of mine,
[SPEAKER_06]: in a unit that once commanded seven.
[SPEAKER_06]: He's now a small-sized kind of real estate businessman here in New Jersey, owning some kind of parking operations here.
[SPEAKER_06]: But he's well-connected, up to Biden.
[SPEAKER_06]: You know, the people are connected, interesting, they don't get politics and stuff.
[SPEAKER_06]: Lovely guy, charming guy.
[SPEAKER_06]: He came to me and said the following.
[SPEAKER_06]: I feel very strongly that small funds, probably between 3 to 8 or 9 billion dollars in size, will be extremely interested.
[SPEAKER_06]: Not the big ones who have their own foreign ministries, but the small ones.
[SPEAKER_06]: in having you just because of your name you can go something very similar to what you told me about Blue Mountain and it seems that without even checking with them he told me I know one or two of those guys that might easily want to pay you one million dollars just to to use your name or to
[SPEAKER_06]: He mentioned one name.
[SPEAKER_00]: Are you going to tell me that name or you're not going to tell me that name either?
[SPEAKER_06]: No, no.
[SPEAKER_06]: Jimmy Walker.
[SPEAKER_06]: But the name sounds to me something bad because that was a guy that once, I met him several years ago here, and he was somehow dealing with running money for the Assad family or something like this.
[SPEAKER_00]: For the Assad family?
[SPEAKER_06]: Yeah.
[SPEAKER_06]: Yeah.
[SPEAKER_06]: I will tell you the rest of the names as well, long before March 14th.
[SPEAKER_06]: I don't know even the name of the fan.
[SPEAKER_06]: Probably I will know the name tomorrow.
[SPEAKER_06]: The hedge fund is here?
[SPEAKER_06]: It's not a hedge fund.
[SPEAKER_06]: It's probably private equity.
[SPEAKER_06]: So you think it's private equity?
[SPEAKER_06]: Probably.
[SPEAKER_06]: But the name Jimmy Walker.
[SPEAKER_06]: You can't find too many Jimmy Walker.
[SPEAKER_06]: I might be able to tell you tomorrow.
[SPEAKER_06]: Mm-hmm.
[SPEAKER_06]: More details, what this, or probably there are others.
[SPEAKER_06]: I don't know what he has in mind.
[SPEAKER_06]: I'm going to meet this guy.
[SPEAKER_07]: Session?
[SPEAKER_07]: Relatively young man.
[SPEAKER_07]: Was he a Washington firm?
[SPEAKER_07]: Yeah, probably.
[SPEAKER_07]: Either Washington or New York.
[SPEAKER_07]: I met him here.
[SPEAKER_07]: Wealth management, yeah, probably.
[SPEAKER_07]: Yeah.
[SPEAKER_07]: Probably.
[SPEAKER_07]: How old is he?
[SPEAKER_07]: No, that one is too old.
[SPEAKER_07]: He has two, so many kids.
[SPEAKER_07]: How old do you remind me?
[SPEAKER_00]: He married in 67, so it's 47.
[SPEAKER_00]: It's probably 70.
[SPEAKER_00]: 65, 70?
[SPEAKER_00]: 50?
[SPEAKER_00]: 65, 70?
[SPEAKER_00]: No.
[SPEAKER_00]: Okay.
[SPEAKER_00]: No.
[SPEAKER_00]: Can't be that.
[SPEAKER_00]: Why don't you give me the real...
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, but wait.
[SPEAKER_06]: I will tell you tomorrow by noon time.
[SPEAKER_06]: I will call you and tell you.
[SPEAKER_06]: I'm going to meet with this guy.
[SPEAKER_06]: Okay.
[SPEAKER_06]: But think of it once again.
[SPEAKER_00]: Is it a golden city?
[SPEAKER_07]: Probably.
[SPEAKER_07]: How it looks...
[SPEAKER_00]: No, I can't find it.
[SPEAKER_00]: Too many black people named Jimmy Walker.
[SPEAKER_00]: All right, tomorrow you tell me.
[SPEAKER_06]: I will tell you tomorrow.
[SPEAKER_06]: Okay.
[SPEAKER_06]: Now, the other idea is what Terry raised.
[SPEAKER_06]: Can you tell me in one word what you think about it?
[SPEAKER_06]: The idea that we will establish certain operations, probably together,
[SPEAKER_06]: I don't know whether you are readers or kind of want to, probably you are behind this example.
[SPEAKER_06]: Yes.
[SPEAKER_06]: Okay.
[SPEAKER_06]: Do you think that it's something viable or basically it will take years to develop the reputation or whatever?
[SPEAKER_06]: No, it's viable.
[SPEAKER_06]: Yeah?
[SPEAKER_06]: Because I remember Christian, you mentioned Christian.
[SPEAKER_06]: Christian once told me that he took to him whether probably with the reduction or whatever was before him.
[SPEAKER_06]: It took him probably one and a half years to make the first $1 million.
[SPEAKER_06]: That was 10,000.
[SPEAKER_06]: Yeah.
[SPEAKER_06]: He told me, you know, I had, I once told you, you wanted to consult probably Westinghouse or G for making two banks or something.
[SPEAKER_00]: No, because what did he, that's what I said to, that was why I said, Kissinger was policy.
[SPEAKER_00]: Strategy policy.
[SPEAKER_00]: So what does that mean?
[SPEAKER_00]: It means everything and nothing.
[SPEAKER_00]: So nobody knows what it is.
[SPEAKER_00]: In your case and in his case, it's security and economy.
[SPEAKER_00]: It's very simple.
[SPEAKER_00]: It's a totally different deal.
[SPEAKER_00]: Yes.
[SPEAKER_06]: Yeah, no, I think...
[SPEAKER_06]: So the thing is...
[SPEAKER_06]: So probably we'll have to set without asking you to send me an offer to send, to sit down together with Terry first, later on with... Terry's coming.
[SPEAKER_00]: Are you going to see him?
[SPEAKER_00]: Are you going to see him tomorrow?
[SPEAKER_00]: He's here.
[SPEAKER_00]: He'll be here tomorrow.
[SPEAKER_00]: Here?
[SPEAKER_00]: Not here.
[SPEAKER_00]: I'm leaving in the morning.
[SPEAKER_00]: He'll be in New York tomorrow, Terry.
[SPEAKER_00]: He's coming in at 3 o'clock, I think.
[SPEAKER_06]: Probably.
[SPEAKER_06]: I don't know.
[SPEAKER_00]: I see him Monday night.
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah.
[SPEAKER_00]: Okay, I'll be...
[SPEAKER_00]: I'm going to see Larry tomorrow.
[SPEAKER_00]: I'm taking Larry to Florida.
[SPEAKER_06]: Look, I think the following.
[SPEAKER_06]: Start to think over with Terriya.
[SPEAKER_06]: What could be the structure, what could be the idea, what could be the kind of services, the business model, how do we make money out of it?
[SPEAKER_06]: Should it be a contract with the government?
[SPEAKER_06]: That's also something that I've heard from you,
[SPEAKER_06]: that Tony Blair, for example, is doing probably 11 million per year from the Kazakhstan government just to give them advice, to help them with lobbying and some NGOs and UN organizations.
[SPEAKER_00]: Tony has turned funny.
[SPEAKER_00]: I don't know what Tony is doing for money.
[SPEAKER_00]: And I don't know if the money Tony is getting is actually to Tony or to somebody else.
[SPEAKER_00]: Who could it be?
[SPEAKER_00]: Sorry?
[SPEAKER_00]: Who could it be?
[SPEAKER_00]: Because it goes to Tony because they need help so Tony gets to pay some of the money to somebody else.
[SPEAKER_00]: Because I hear gigantic numbers given to Tony.
[SPEAKER_00]: 5 million here, 10 million here, 5 million there.
[SPEAKER_00]: Tony's not making 30 million dollars a year.
[SPEAKER_06]: Yeah, but it became quite...
[SPEAKER_06]: I can judge from the style of his watches.
[SPEAKER_06]: Yes, but he's making $10 million a year.
[SPEAKER_06]: Yeah, yeah, probably.
[SPEAKER_06]: Yeah, but probably he gets the money and he leaves some of it with others.
[SPEAKER_06]: Yeah, probably.
[SPEAKER_06]: Probably some of the providers.
[SPEAKER_00]: But again, see, Tony is much more... You have, for the moment, and that's... One of the things is we have to do it fast.
[SPEAKER_06]: Yeah.
[SPEAKER_06]: Yeah, because it fades away very fast.
[SPEAKER_04]: Very fast.
[SPEAKER_06]: I will not have an opportunity to talk this way to firms, but once.
[SPEAKER_06]: Correct.
[SPEAKER_06]: Right now.
[SPEAKER_06]: I fully understand the opportunity.
[SPEAKER_06]: Okay, but this one is also something that we have to discuss because we can do it beyond anything else and it can end up being both the advice for them and probably part of the model.
[SPEAKER_06]: is the capacity to provide opportunity to some...
[SPEAKER_06]: Think of some... We are advising some country which have kind of box site.
[SPEAKER_06]: And we get the... Don't worry about that.
[SPEAKER_00]: So just think about...
[SPEAKER_06]: Opportunity to propose to clients and mine kind of aluminum field.
[SPEAKER_00]: Ian Osborne is 29 years old.
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah.
[SPEAKER_00]: 29.
[SPEAKER_00]: So Samsung pays him, he has 10 clients pay him 3 million and he does investments for them.
[SPEAKER_00]: He does?
[SPEAKER_00]: So Samsung...
[SPEAKER_00]: They fund their fees for investment?
[SPEAKER_00]: No, no.
[SPEAKER_00]: They said, because he's internet.
[SPEAKER_04]: Yeah.
[SPEAKER_00]: They said, we're going to give you 100 million finest internet companies to buy and you get 30% of the profit.
[SPEAKER_00]: That's separate from his 3 million a year.
[SPEAKER_00]: And he doesn't know anything, this is brand new for him.
[SPEAKER_00]: And he doesn't have your stature.
[SPEAKER_00]: So that's the concept.
[SPEAKER_00]: It's three million a year and if you find investment.
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, but he's something else.
[SPEAKER_06]: I've noticed that he's socialite.
[SPEAKER_06]: He's a kind of man who entertains himself, entertains people around, enjoy.
[SPEAKER_06]: He genuinely enjoy being in continuous party with people and work, you know.
[SPEAKER_06]: He's in a way a workaholic of social relationship where I'm a little bit more like Obama.
[SPEAKER_06]: If I have to choose, I prefer to sit alone in a room rather than to intervene.
[SPEAKER_06]: And it's not, I cannot argue that it's a forte of mine to entertain people.
[SPEAKER_06]: I can be serious with them, I can...
[SPEAKER_00]: But that's why, since you're not an entertainer, you can't explain yourself.
[SPEAKER_00]: That's my point.
[SPEAKER_00]: You have to
[SPEAKER_00]: You seem to be military, and you need to keep that in mind.
[SPEAKER_00]: You don't want to be what they want.
[SPEAKER_00]: You need to be what they think of you.
[SPEAKER_00]: They think of you as military.
[SPEAKER_00]: It has to be crisp, clear, and precise.
[SPEAKER_06]: I will come back to Iron Osborne.
[SPEAKER_06]: Okay.
[SPEAKER_06]: So start to think about it.
[SPEAKER_06]: I think that it's a good idea.
[SPEAKER_06]: Now, Pritzker.
[SPEAKER_06]: Pritzker asked me the same.
[SPEAKER_06]: Tell me, try to make a matrix.
[SPEAKER_06]: Yes.
[SPEAKER_06]: What are your areas where you have certain genuine... Do you have any... Can you help him in Iraq?
[SPEAKER_00]: No.
[SPEAKER_00]: Okay.
[SPEAKER_06]: Not really.
[SPEAKER_06]: Probably within the Kurdish area, yes, but within the Iraqi government, I don't believe.
[SPEAKER_00]: Okay.
[SPEAKER_06]: No, I don't.
[SPEAKER_00]: And not Turkey?
[SPEAKER_06]: I can do it indirectly.
[SPEAKER_06]: For example, I met yesterday David Petraeus.
[SPEAKER_06]: You did?
[SPEAKER_06]: I am one of the only ones who keep respecting him in public.
[SPEAKER_06]: Where is he?
[SPEAKER_06]: I met him with his wife, with Olly, in a gathering at Katie Reynolds' ranch.
[SPEAKER_06]: Oh, Catholic dinner?
[SPEAKER_06]: on the roof of the Hay-Adams, and he stood up to congratulate me.
[SPEAKER_06]: I was quite embarrassed, I didn't know how to respond, but we talked a little.
[SPEAKER_06]: He is one of the most respected people, clearly have connections in Iraq.
[SPEAKER_06]: I can create a contact with him.
[SPEAKER_00]: Tom already knows him pretty well.
[SPEAKER_00]: Tom thinks he's...
[SPEAKER_00]: He doesn't need me.
[SPEAKER_00]: But he also thinks he's potentially toxic.
[SPEAKER_06]: Probably, in terms of his background.
[SPEAKER_06]: Okay.
[SPEAKER_06]: I can easily find... What's he going to do, Petraeus?
[SPEAKER_06]: I believe he's looking for opportunities in the private equity.
[SPEAKER_06]: Probably to join hands with one of the players.
[SPEAKER_06]: Private equity helps him take some money.
[SPEAKER_06]: Like what, what was his name, the commander of the Balkans that... General Clark.
[SPEAKER_00]: Wesley Clark.
[SPEAKER_06]: Wesley Clark.
[SPEAKER_06]: Wrapped himself with a flame.
[SPEAKER_06]: What's Pineda going to do?
[SPEAKER_06]: I don't know.
[SPEAKER_06]: He told me, I'm going to invite you for...
[SPEAKER_06]: to give a speech, not for free, in the Panetta Foundation.
[SPEAKER_06]: He wants to rest.
[SPEAKER_06]: But we contemplated establishing an operation where Jeremy Bashar, who is an aide, and Yoni Goren will be our office and censors.
[SPEAKER_06]: And they will bring ideas where either one of us can do something.
[SPEAKER_06]: We do it together to establish some kind of... You like Panetta?
[SPEAKER_06]: I like him very much.
[SPEAKER_06]: I like him and trust him.
[SPEAKER_06]: We can work together very well.
[SPEAKER_06]: That could be interesting as well.
[SPEAKER_06]: If I can...
[SPEAKER_06]: He told me, I will teach you golf.
[SPEAKER_06]: And he plays the piano.
[SPEAKER_00]: He does?
[SPEAKER_00]: See, even Panetta, you and him...
[SPEAKER_06]: Yeah, could be better than with the... That's a strong deal.
[SPEAKER_06]: Okay, but he feels quite satisfied.
[SPEAKER_06]: He told me I probably will do some boards and whatever.
[SPEAKER_06]: He's the kind of guy I believe that he's about my age, probably a year older or younger, I don't know.
[SPEAKER_06]: So he probably might think that it's great to live in Carmel or Monterey or whatever it is, at a farm or whatever.
[SPEAKER_06]: So the way that he raised it signaled to me that he preferred that some younger guys would do most of the work for us and we step in when it's
[SPEAKER_06]: becomes absolutely necessary to make sure that something is closed.
[SPEAKER_00]: And the chairman of the Joint Chiefs, the guy who is
[SPEAKER_00]: Testified.
[SPEAKER_00]: Dempsey.
[SPEAKER_00]: Yes.
[SPEAKER_06]: Dempsey is still in service, but I can, for example, take Malin.
[SPEAKER_06]: Right.
[SPEAKER_06]: Malin, he might know, he's now in business, or McChrystal.
[SPEAKER_06]: McChrystal also could be toxic in a way, or in a different way.
[SPEAKER_06]: But who do you have the best relationship with?
[SPEAKER_06]: Panetta?
[SPEAKER_06]: Yeah.
[SPEAKER_06]: Okay.
[SPEAKER_06]: Among the security people in America.
[SPEAKER_06]: Yes.
[SPEAKER_06]: Yeah, by far.
[SPEAKER_06]: I know Gates for a longer time, but he's a kind of cold fish.
[SPEAKER_06]: We were friendly, we were there.
[SPEAKER_06]: I visited him when we were both in...
[SPEAKER_06]: He headed some university somewhere, a remote place in A&M University.
[SPEAKER_00]: If Iran goes nuclear... Yeah.
[SPEAKER_00]: Sometime in the next three years.
[SPEAKER_00]: How much do you think, you at one point had suggested that it would, you know, everybody looks up to somebody above them, but in the case of you and Bibi, there was nobody to look up to.
[SPEAKER_00]: We have to look in the mirror.
[SPEAKER_00]: You can't, he's not answering the phone.
[SPEAKER_00]: Will it be seen, do you think, that you guys didn't do what you're supposed to do?
[SPEAKER_06]: That's not clear.
[SPEAKER_06]: It depends on many.
[SPEAKER_06]: Quite probably, you know, the same people who were ready to lie on the road to block us from doing it, will ask, why the hell didn't you overcome all your or our hesitation?
[SPEAKER_06]: You can expect anything, but I don't know.
[SPEAKER_06]: I don't think so, because basically we never pretended that you can destroy it fully at one stroke.
[SPEAKER_06]: So the counterargument could always be, okay, we could delay them by two and a half years or three years or whatever.
[SPEAKER_06]: And you cannot know for sure how long.
[SPEAKER_06]: But leave it.
[SPEAKER_06]: We have now more... No, what I want to know is, what's your risk?
[SPEAKER_00]: I'm trying to think about that.
[SPEAKER_00]: That's where I'm going.
[SPEAKER_00]: You know, are you doing something...
[SPEAKER_06]: I'm not going to be blamed for the fact that it's probably more the president.
[SPEAKER_06]: Okay.
[SPEAKER_06]: So with Pritzker, he asked me to try to... vertically, horizontally...
[SPEAKER_00]: But Tom uses the phrase, I owe yous.
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah.
[SPEAKER_00]: So who owes you a favor...
[SPEAKER_00]: Who owes you something?
[SPEAKER_00]: He said it to me ten times already.
[SPEAKER_06]: Okay, so an example is Klaus Pfeiffer.
[SPEAKER_06]: But there is no way to prove it or to really leverage it.
[SPEAKER_06]: It's about a certain sentiment in the mind of someone rather than a compelling need to do something.
[SPEAKER_06]: When I left prime minister, the role of prime minister, Nazarbayev felt this way toward me because in several international gatherings
[SPEAKER_06]: And he knew that I talked to Clinton and told him it doesn't make sense to behave with him.
[SPEAKER_06]: He cannot jump immediately into the Maryland standards and even the Maryland standards were not that perfect quite recently.
[SPEAKER_06]: You know, so he felt this way.
[SPEAKER_06]: And once I used it, I went there some seven years ago, brought with me an Israeli billionaire with a Kazakhi...
[SPEAKER_06]: billionaires and they waited until we were there and we were there and they asked, what do you want?
[SPEAKER_06]: And they described some big operation to take gas and oil from Turkmenistan and cross their area jointly.
[SPEAKER_06]: And nothing happened.
[SPEAKER_06]: Since then, 10 years, it's a long time.
[SPEAKER_06]: I cannot think of someone who owes me something.
[SPEAKER_06]: I have a very good relationship
[SPEAKER_06]: that stems out of certain sentiment with Putin.
[SPEAKER_06]: I can approach him, I can talk to him in a way that few, I believe, dare to or feel free to do.
[SPEAKER_06]: And I always find him responsive, very warm, very kind of, you know, see me from a long distance.
[SPEAKER_00]: But did you have a relationship when you were prime minister or defense minister with someone from Turkish government, someone from the...
[SPEAKER_00]: Jordanians.
[SPEAKER_00]: Before you used to have a good relationship with Suleiman, right?
[SPEAKER_00]: With?
[SPEAKER_00]: Egypt's Suleiman, what was he?
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, Omar Suleiman.
[SPEAKER_00]: Right.
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, with Omar Suleiman I worked for years.
[SPEAKER_00]: He liked you.
[SPEAKER_06]: Yeah.
[SPEAKER_00]: I remember.
[SPEAKER_06]: Yeah, yeah.
[SPEAKER_06]: But he really owed us.
[SPEAKER_06]: He owed us his courage in a way.
[SPEAKER_06]: And Mubarak owed
[SPEAKER_06]: So they were...
[SPEAKER_06]: In a sensitive moment you can always look him in the eye and remind him that you remember our relationship that started out for many, many years and it became based on mutual trust and resilience to extract a hand to each other.
[SPEAKER_06]: Critical points and it will immediately bring to his memory.
[SPEAKER_00]: I don't think...
[SPEAKER_00]: So that's the question.
[SPEAKER_00]: So who else... Who else liked that?
[SPEAKER_00]: That's the thing Tom was asking.
[SPEAKER_00]: That's the type of person.
[SPEAKER_06]: Putin is a guy.
[SPEAKER_06]: What happened to Solon?
[SPEAKER_07]: He's dead.
Oh.
[SPEAKER_07]: He passed away.
Putin.
[SPEAKER_06]: If I depart, send a message to him, and I left.
[SPEAKER_06]: If I will ask a favor that he can influence, he will probably do it.
[SPEAKER_06]: It's a kind of sign of blessing for him, for many reasons.
[SPEAKER_06]: It doesn't cost a lot.
[SPEAKER_06]: But let it happen.
[SPEAKER_06]: So he did the same.
[SPEAKER_06]: So they nominated him to be the representative of Gaspol.
[SPEAKER_06]: In Germany or in Europe, whatever.
[SPEAKER_06]: And to be responsible for the pike that he approved.
[SPEAKER_06]: Right.
[SPEAKER_06]: So, before he left.
[SPEAKER_06]: When you ask a German leading politician about Schrader, they almost feel uneasy.
[SPEAKER_06]: But I can find something there that I ask him, if it's a favor or the kind of which he can, he might do it.
[SPEAKER_00]: How often do you talk, when was the last time you spoke to him?
[SPEAKER_00]: Or dealt with him?
[SPEAKER_00]: Two years?
[SPEAKER_06]: So what I would do...
[SPEAKER_06]: It's something that... From the day one that he came to the Kremlin as a prime minister, he replaced a guy named Stepashin.
[SPEAKER_06]: I was already prime minister.
[SPEAKER_06]: I visited Yelchin when Stepashin was there.
[SPEAKER_06]: And then...
[SPEAKER_06]: of new.
[SPEAKER_06]: And since then we kept good relations.
[SPEAKER_06]: We visited him in Sochi, in St. Petersburg, in Moscow.
[SPEAKER_06]: Visiting socially or business-wise?
[SPEAKER_06]: We visited socially.
[SPEAKER_06]: I told him that I'm going, I don't remember too well.
[SPEAKER_06]: I don't remember.
[SPEAKER_06]: He asked, come to Moscow.
[SPEAKER_06]: I said, okay, I'll come to Moscow.
[SPEAKER_06]: He said, oh no, I'm in Sochi.
[SPEAKER_06]: Please come to Sochi.
[SPEAKER_06]: I came to Sochi.
[SPEAKER_06]: We sat down with him in his palace.
[SPEAKER_06]: He proposed we play billiards or whatever.
[SPEAKER_06]: He comes, he hugs me and reminds me of stories I've told him.
[SPEAKER_06]: There is some sense of, when I'm telling him the truth about him and the
[SPEAKER_06]: I'm talking to him very frankly.
[SPEAKER_06]: And he, frankly, kind of someone that looks him at the eye level, talks to him, say, I don't think that you are doing the right thing for you and for Racha and this and that.
[SPEAKER_06]: I think you should look at things.
[SPEAKER_06]: And he listens very carefully.
[SPEAKER_06]: He respects this way of direct talk.
[SPEAKER_06]: I don't think that there are anyone who really owes me something in the sense that
[SPEAKER_06]: You know, in a way, Ban Ki-moon doesn't owe me anything, but I believe that a long time he developed a kind of respect for me.
[SPEAKER_06]: I helped him to appear better in many small cases.
[SPEAKER_06]: He told me bluntly that he's ready to help me.
[SPEAKER_06]: There are moments I see even he's grumpy.
[SPEAKER_00]: So the key would be, I would think about, not decided, that at some point you can say, look, I would send a note to Putin saying, I'm going to leave government in March 14th.
[SPEAKER_00]: I'm going to be in Scandinavia or I plan to be in northern Europe.
[SPEAKER_00]: We should have dinner.
[SPEAKER_00]: That's it.
[SPEAKER_00]: No more.
[SPEAKER_00]: It has to be very short.
[SPEAKER_00]: In terms of recent military responsibility for you, how would you describe your strength now?
[SPEAKER_00]: Is it strategy, operations, tactics?
[SPEAKER_00]: How do you think about Putin for dinner?
[SPEAKER_00]: Or tea or vodka.
[SPEAKER_00]: You can meet somebody.
[SPEAKER_00]: Are you going to be in Paris?
[SPEAKER_00]: We should make a plan to meet sometime in the next two months.
[SPEAKER_06]: I can just tell him I would like to meet with you.
[SPEAKER_06]: That's it.
[SPEAKER_00]: He will say come.
[SPEAKER_06]: He will say come.
[SPEAKER_06]: He loves to sit with me and talk.
[SPEAKER_06]: Always with someone because he doesn't trust his English.
[SPEAKER_06]: He takes one of his personal kind of things.
[SPEAKER_06]: Okay.
[SPEAKER_00]: What was the next point?
[SPEAKER_00]: Well, the question I want to know is in terms of your military competence.
[SPEAKER_00]: Let me tell you.
[SPEAKER_06]: I sat down yesterday for the second time, a week earlier in Tel Aviv, with the lady who runs Robin Martin.
[SPEAKER_06]: And I talked to her about directions with them downstream, the risk that the F-35 is the last fighter with the pilot in it, for good reasons, and that probably many countries will not buy it.
[SPEAKER_06]: And even those who bought it might show reluctant to see a reduction in performance or climbing prices.
[SPEAKER_06]: And basically, unlike the situation 20 years ago, the decision-makers are not really looking for fighters that will win a war because they don't believe that there will be a war with the thermo in the life cycle of the airplane.
[SPEAKER_06]: So they are ready to settle for something much simpler, cheaper, that still flies.
[SPEAKER_06]: Yes.
[SPEAKER_06]: And I talked to her about the need to balance what Wade said.
[SPEAKER_06]: I looked at her.
[SPEAKER_06]: She's an intelligent woman that was pushed under the circumstances into the top role.
[SPEAKER_06]: I think that no one at her leadership talks to her this way.
[SPEAKER_06]: without insulting her or something like that.
[SPEAKER_06]: Much more authority, know what is good, know what happens, follow the industry as the generation before, and she was just, and she's not very fat, she's almost 60, probably 57, I don't know.
[SPEAKER_06]: And with such a wide kind, penetrating, thoughtful,
[SPEAKER_06]: insights about what is going to happen, what should be the fraction of dependence on a contract from the Pentagon and to what extent, what should be balanced between F-16, F-16 which now costs 4500 or so, and the F-22 that ended and the F-35 that will be
[SPEAKER_06]: I don't believe that it will become popular, but no one has the money to pay for it except for us, you see, Canada.
[SPEAKER_06]: Do you really believe that Canadians really think that they will have to order it flying against the hertz of Tupolev crossing over the Poles?
[SPEAKER_06]: And for some of the Arabs it will become a kind of token of prestige to have the best piece, but not...
[SPEAKER_06]: And I told you about the need to find what should be done and what's going to happen in the...
[SPEAKER_06]: Yes.
[SPEAKER_06]: And I thought that, you know, I have the combination.
[SPEAKER_06]: It's not policy.
[SPEAKER_06]: I have the combination of insights into the strategic level of it, but very deep understanding, detailed understandings of everything from technology
[SPEAKER_06]: tactics to the youth and to even the fallacies.
[SPEAKER_06]: Why Boeing failed after investing probably 5 billion in future combat systems for the ground forces and how such an issue should be approached in order not to repeat mistakes.
[SPEAKER_06]: In a way, it can be strategic, but with a lot of deep understanding of what's feasible, what's not feasible, what's needed, what armed forces of sophisticated countries will need in order to fight, not the previous world, the future ones as they have.
[SPEAKER_06]: But could you sit on the board of Martin Mariano?
[SPEAKER_06]: I don't know.
[SPEAKER_06]: I didn't check it.
[SPEAKER_06]: Probably not.
[SPEAKER_06]: If I did it immediately, it's...
[SPEAKER_06]: It's a little bit bizarre.
[SPEAKER_00]: When the Americans buy, give Israel $2 billion with the requirement that 75% of it gets bought, buys American stuff.
[SPEAKER_00]: How does it actually work?
[SPEAKER_06]: we run through the operational system, the priorities, there I approve it, and I sign the order, the signing of the contracts.
[SPEAKER_06]: So I think it would be a little bit strange, but in fact we had some of the general managers, former Air Force commanders, general managers of the Ministry of Defense, ended up being now a major kind of...
[SPEAKER_06]: high-level consultant for Boeing or the president of Boeing Israel for whatever it is, and his wife.
[SPEAKER_06]: But I just mention it as an example.
[SPEAKER_06]: Probably after a year I can do it, or probably I can do it if it's clear that I'm not going to deal in any way with Israel.
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, exactly.
[SPEAKER_00]: But in terms of your defense goals,
[SPEAKER_06]: Look for example at the drones.
[SPEAKER_06]: I am the person who basically made it fly.
[SPEAKER_06]: By 30 years