#436 – Ivanka Trump: Politics, Family, Real Estate, Fashion, Music, and Life

31:04And at the time there were post office being built in the style across the country, but this being really the defining one. Still to this day, the tallest habitable structure in Washington, the tallest structure being the monument, the nation's only vertical park, which is that clock tower, but you've got these granite walls, those carved granite turrets, just an unbelievable building. You've got this massive atrium that runs through the whole center of it, that is topped with glass. So having the opportunity to to spearhead a project like that was so exciting and actually was my first renovation project.

31:47So I came to it with a tremendous amount of energy, vigor and humility about how to do it properly and sharing. I had all the right people. We had countless federal and local government agencies that would oversee every single decision we made. But in advance of even having the opportunity to do it, there was a close to two -year request for proposal, like a process that was put out by the General Services Administration. So it was this really arduous government procurement process that we were competing against so many different people for the opportunity, which a lot of people said it was a gigantic waste of time, but I looked at that and I think so did a lot of the other bitters and say it's worth trying to put the best vision forward.

32:38Do you fall in love with this project? I fell in love. Yeah. So is there some interesting details about what it takes to do renovation? Is there about some of the challenges or opportunities? Because you want to maintain the beauty of the old. And now like upgrade the functionality, I guess, and maybe modernize some aspects of it without destroying what made the building magical in the first place. So I think the greatest asset was already there. The exterior of the building, which we meticulously restored and any addition to it had to be done sort of very gently in terms of any signage additions.

33:23And the interior spaces were completely dilapidated. It had been in a post office. then we was used for a really rundown food court and government office spaces. It was actually losing $6 million a year when we got the concession to build it and when we won. I think a great example of public -private partnerships working together. But I think the biggest challenge in having such a radical use conversion is just how you lay it out. So the amount of time I would get on that, Excela, twice a week, three times a week to spend day trips down in Washington. And we would walk every single inch of the building, laying out the floor plans, debating over the configuration of a room.

34:17There were almost 300 rooms and there were almost 300 layouts. So nothing could be repeated. Whereas when you're building from scratch, you have a box and you decide where you want to add potential elements and you can stack the floor plan all the way up. But when you're working within a building like this, every single room was different. You see the setback, so the setback, then required you to move the plumbing. So there was no, it was really a labor of love. And to do something like this, and that's why I think renovation, we had it with Dural as well. It was 700 rooms over 650 acres of property.

35:05And so every single unit was very different and complicated. Not as complicated in some ways. The scale of it was so massive, but not as complicated it is the old post office, but it required a level of precision. And I think in real estate, you have a lot of people who design on plan and a lot of people who are in the business of sort of acquiring and flipping. So it's more financial engineering than it is building and they don't spend the time sort of sweating these details. It makes something great and make something functional. And you feel it in the end result. But I mean, blood sweat tears years of my life for those projects.

35:51And it was worth it. I enjoyed almost. I enjoyed almost every minute of it. So to you, it's not about the flipping. Do you, it's about the art of the, and the function of the thing that you're creating. 100%. What's design on plan? I'm learning and you think today. When proposals are put forth by an architect and really just the plan is accepted without, and in the case of a renovation, like if you're not walking those rooms, the number of times a beautifully laid out room was on a blueprint, and then I'd go to Washington and I'd walk that floor and I'd realize that there was a column that ran right up through the middle of the space where, you know, the bed was supposed to be, or the toilet was supposed to be or the shower.

36:37So there's a lot of things that are missed when you do something conceptually without sort of rooting it in the actual structure. And that's why I think even with ground -up construction as well, people who aren't constantly on their job sites constantly walking the projects, there's just a lot that's, there's a lot that's missed. I mean, there's a wisdom to the the idea that we talked about before, live with the materials and walking the construction site, walking the rooms. I mean, that's what you hear from people like Steve Jobs like Elon. That's why you live in a factory floor. That's why you constantly obsess about the details, the actual, not of the plans, but the physical reality of the product.

37:25I mean, the insanity of Steve Jobs and Johnny I've working together on like making it perfect, making the iPhone, the early designs, prototypes, making that perfect. Like, what it actually feels like in the hand, you have to be there, like, as close to the metal as possible to truly understand. And you have to love it in order to do that. Right. It shouldn't be about how much it's going to sell for all that kind of stuff. You have to love the art. It's for the most part. He can probably get 90, maybe 95 % of the end result unless something is terribly gone to run awry by not caring with that level of almost like maniacal precision, but you'll notice that 10 % for the rest of your life.

38:11So I think that extra effort, that passion, I think that's what separates good from great. If we go back to that young Ivanka, the confidence of youth, and if we could talk about your She had a big influence on you. You told me she was an adventurer. Yeah. Olympic skier and a business woman. What did you learn about life from your mother? So much. She passed away two years ago now. And she was a remarkable, remarkable woman. She was a trailblazer in so many different ways as an athlete in growing up in Communist Czechoslovakia. as a fashion mogul, as a real estate executive and builder, just this all -around trailblazing businesswoman.

39:10I also learned from her, aside from that element, how to really enjoy life. I look back and some of my happiest memories of her are in the ocean, just lying on our back looking up at the sun and just so so in the moment or dancing. She loved to dance. She really taught me a lot about living life to its fullest and she had so much courage, so much conviction, so much energy and a complete comfort with who she was. What do you think about that? Olympic athlete, the trade -off between ambition and just wanting to do big things and pursuing that and giving your all to that and being able to relax and just throw your arms back and enjoy every moment of life.

40:05Like that trade off. What do you think about that trade off? I think because she was this unbelievable formidable athlete and because of the discipline she had as a child, I think it made her value those moments more as an adult. I think she was a great balance of the two that we all hope to find and she was able to find both incredibly serious and formidable. I remember as a little girl I used to literally traips behind her at the Plaza Hotel, which she oversaw and actually kind of was her old post office. It was this unbelievable historic hotel in New York City and I'd follow her around at construction meetings and on job sites and there she is dancing.

40:58That's funny that's the picture you pull up. I'm sorry. You just lagre in that picture. She had such a joy her and she was so unabashed in her perspective and her opinions. I mean, you know, she made my father look reserved. Whatever she was feeling, whether she was just very expressive and a lot of fun to be around. So she, as you mentioned, grew up during the the Prague Spring in 1968 and that had a big impact on human history. My family came from the Soviet Union and then the 20th century, the story of the 20th century is a lot of Eastern Europe, the Soviet Union tried the ideas of communism and turned out that a lot of those ideas resulted into a lot of suffering.

41:56So what do you think the Communist ideology failed? I think fundamentally as people we desire freedom, we want agency, you know, and my mom was like a lot of other people who grew up in similar situations where she didn't like to talk about it that often. So one of my real regrets is that I didn't push her harder, you know, so, but I think back to the conversations we did have and I try to imagine what it's like. she was at Charles University in Prague, which was really like a focal point of the reforms that were ushered in during the Prague Spring and the liberalization agenda that was happening.

42:40The dance halls were opening. The student activists and she was attending University there, right at that same time. So the contrast to this feeling of freedom and progress and liberalization in the spring, and then it's so quickly being crushed in the fall of that same year when Warsaw Pact countries and the Soviet Union rolled in to put down and ultimately roll back all those reforms. So for her to have lived through that, you know, she didn't come to North America until she was 23 or 24. So that was her life. As a young girl, she was on the junior national ski team for Czechoslovakia. My grandfather used to train her.

43:35They used to put the skis on her back and walk up the mountain and Czechoslovakia, because there or no, there were no ski lifts. She actually made me do that when I was a child. Just to let me know what her experience had been. If I complained that it was cold out, she's like, well, you didn't have to walk up the mountain. You'd be plenty warm if you had carried the skis up on your back up the last run. I feel like they made people tougher back then. Like my grandma, you mentioned it's funny. They go through some of the darkest things that a human being can go through and they don't talk about it.

44:09And they have a general positive outlook on life Like that's deeply rooted in the knowledge of what life could be Yeah, I call baddock you get my grandma survived Halt or more in Ukraine which is mostly a mass starvation brought on by the the collectivist policies of the style energy and then she survived the Nazi occupation of Ukraine never talked about it probably went through extremely dark, extremely difficult times and then just always had a positive follow -up on life and also made me do very difficult physical activity like you see imagine just to humble you like his these days soft kind of energy which I'm deeply deeply grateful for on on all fronts including just having hardship and including just physical hardship flowing at me.

45:05I think that's really important. You wonder how much of who they were was a reaction to their experience. Would she have naturally had that sort of forward -looking grateful, optimistic orientation, or was it a reaction to our childhood? I think about that. I look at this picture of my mom and she was unabashedly herself. She loved flamboyance and glamour. In some ways, I think it probably was a direct reaction to this very austere control childhood. This was one expression of it. I think her, how she dressed and how she presented. I think her entrepreneurial spirit and love of capitalism and all things.

45:50American was another manifestation of it and one that I grew up with. I remember the story she used to tell me about when she was 14 and she was going, to neighboring countries. And as an athlete, you were given additional freedoms that you wouldn't otherwise be afforded in these societies under communist rule. So she was able to travel where most of her friends never would be able to leave Czechoslovakia. And she would come back from all of these trips and the first place where she'd do ski races in Austria and I'll swear on the first thing she had to do was check in at the local police. And she'd sit down and she had enough wisdom at 14 to know that she couldn't appear to be lying by not being impressed by what she saw and the fact that you could get an orange in the winter.

46:48But she couldn't be too excited by it that she'd become a flight risk. So given enough detail that you're believable, but not so many that you're not trusted. And imagine that as a 14 -year -old. That experience and having to navigate the world that way. And she told me that eventually all those local police officers, they came to love her because one of the things she'd do is smuggle that stuff back from these countries and give it to them to give their wives perfume and stockings. because she figured out the system pretty quickly. But it's a very different experience from what I was navigating and the pressures and challenges me as a 14 year old was dealing with.

47:36So I have so much respect and admiration for her. Yeah, hardship clarifies what's important in life. You and I have talked about man search for meaning that book having kind of an ultimate hardship that finding joy in life is not about the environment, it's about your outlook on that environment. And there's beauty to be found in any situation. And also in that particular situation, when everything's taken from you, the thing you start to think about is the people you love, in the case of Mancer, for meaning, Victor Franco, thinking about his wife and how much you love her. And that love was the flame, the warmth that kept him excited.

48:22The fun thing to think about when everything else is gone. So we sometimes forget that with the business of life. You get all this fun stuff we're talking about, like building and being a creative force in the world. At the end of the day, what matters is just like the other humans in your life, the people you love. It's a simple stuff. You know, Victor Frankl is somebody, I mean, his that book and just his philosophy in general is, is so inspiring to me, but I think so many people, they say they want happiness, but they want conditional happiness. When this and this, a thing happens or under these circumstances, then I'll be happy.

48:58And I think what he showed is that we can cultivate these virtues within ourselves, regardless of the situation we find ourselves in. And in some ways, I think the meaning of life is the search for meaning in life. It's the relationships we have and we form it's an experience we have it's how we deal with the suffering that life inevitably presents to us and Victor Frankl does an amazing job highlighting that under the most horrific circumstances and I think it's it's just super inspiring to me. He also shows that you can get so much from just like small all joys, like getting a little more soup today than you did yesterday.

49:45I mean, it's like, it's the little stuff. If you're allowed yourself to love the little stuff of life, it's all around you. It's all there. So you don't need to like have these ambitious goals and the comparison being a thief of joy, that kind of stuff. Just like, it's all around the stability to eat. Like what I, when I was in the jungle, and I got severely dehydrated because there's no water. You run out of water real quick. And I mean the joy I felt when I got the drink Like I didn't care about anything else is speaking of things that matter in life I was I was starting to fantasize about water and it was that was bringing me joy You can tap into this blanket any time exactly I was just tapping in just to stay positive Your bathroom turn on the sink and watch the water Oh, for sure.

50:36For sure. I mean, people really, it's good to have stuff taken away for time. That's why struggle is good to make you appreciate, to have a deep gratitude for when you have it. And water and food is a big one, but water is the biggest one. I wouldn't recommend it necessarily to get severely dehydrated to appreciate water, but maybe every time you take us up a water, you can have that kind of gratitude. There's a prayer and Judaism you're supposed to say every morning, which is basically thinking God for your body working. It's something, you know, so basic, but it's when it doesn't that we're grateful.

51:17So just reminding ourselves every day the basic things of a functional body, of our health, of access to water which so many millions of people around the world do not have reliably is very clarifying and super important. Yeah, health is a gift. Water is a gift. Is there a memory with your mom that had a defining effect on your life? I have these vignettes in my mind, you know, seeing her in action and different capacities. A lot of times in the context of things that I would later go on to do myself. So, you know, I would go every day, almost every day after school, and I'd go to the Plaza Hotel and I'd follow her around as she'd walk the hallways and just observe her, and she was so impossibly glamorous.

52:14She was doing everything in, you know, four and a half inch heels with this Bufan and so it was almost it was almost like an it's almost like an inaccessible visual But I think for me when I saw her experience the most joy tended to be by the sea Almost always not not a pool and I think I get this from her. I I Pools yeah, they're fun. I love the ocean. I love saltwater I love the way it makes me feel and I think I got that from her. So we would just swim together all the time and it's a lot of what I love about Miami actually being so close to the ocean. I found it to be super cathartic, but a lot of my memories of my mom seeing her really like just in her bliss is floating around in a body of saltwater.

53:11Is there also some aspect to her being an example of somebody that could be sort of beautiful and feminine but at the same time a powerful, a successful business woman that showed that it's possible to do that? Yeah, I think she really was a trailblazer. It's not uncommon in real estate for there to be multiple generations of people and so on job sites, it was not unusual for me to run into somebody whose grandfather had worked with my grandfather and Brooklyn or Queens or whose father had worked with my mother. And they'd always tell me these stories about her rolling in and they'd hear the heels first.

53:54And a lot of times the story would be like, oh gosh, really it's two days after Christmas. like we thought we'd get a reprieve, but she was very exacting. You know, as I have this visual in my mind of her, you know, walking on rebar, you know, on the balls of her feet in these foreign shields. I'm assuming she actually carried flats with her, but I don't know. That's not the visual I have. But she was, I loved the fact that she so embodied femininity and glamour and was so comfortable being tough and ambitious and determined and this unbelievable businesswoman and entrepreneur at a time when she was very much alone, even for me and in the development world and so many of the different businesses that I've been in, there really aren't women outside of sales and of marketing.

54:56You don't see as many women in the development space and the construction space, even in the architecture and design space, maybe outside of interior design. And she was decades ahead of me. So I love hearing these stories. I love hearing somebody who's my peer tell me about their grandfather and their father and their experience with with one of my parents. It's amazing. And she did it all in point heels. And she did it. She used to say, there's nothing that I can't do better in heels. That would be her exact thing. And when I complain about wearing something, you know, it was like the early 90s, everything was also like uncomfortable, these fabrics and materials.

55:42And I was, I would like go back and forth between being super girly and a total tomboy. But she dressed me up in these things and I'd be complaining about it. And she'd say, you've all got pain for beauty, which I happened to totally disagree with because I think there's nothing worse than being uncomfortable. So I haven't accepted or internalized all of this wisdom, so to speak, but it was just funny. You know, she had a very specific point of view. And four good lines, paint for beauty. It's funny because I mean, just even in fashion. If something's uncomfortable, to me, there's nothing that looks worse than when you see somebody like tottering around, their heels hurt them, so they're kind of walking oddly.

56:32and you know, it doesn't, they're not embodying their confidence in that regard. So I'm like kind of the opposite. I start with, well, I want to be comfortable. And that helps me be confident and in command. A foundation for fashion for you is comfort and on top of that, you build things that are beautiful. And it's not comfort like, doudy, you know, there's that level of comfort, but functional comfort. But I think you have to, for me, I want to feel confident. and you don't feel confident when you're like pulling at a garment or, you know, hobbling on heels that don't fit you properly. And she was never doing those things either.

57:08So I don't know how she was wearing stuff like that. That's like a 40 pound V to dress. And I know this because I have it. And I wore it recently. And I mean, I got to work out walking to the elevator. Like this is a heavy dress. And you know, it was worth it. It was great. She's making it look easy. But she makes it look very, very easy. So... Do you miss her? I'm so much. It's unbelievable how dislocating the loss of a of a parent is. And her mother lives with me. Still, my grandmother, who helped raise us. So that's very special. and I can ask her some of the questions that I would have, sorry, I wanted to ask my own mom that it's hard.

58:00It was beautiful to see, I've gotten a chance to spend time with your family to see so many generations together at the table. There's so much history there. She's 97 and until she was around 94, she lived completely on her own, no help, know anything, no support. And now she requires really sort of 24 -hour care. And I feel super grateful that I'm able to give her that because that's what she did for me. It's amazing for me to have my children be able to grow up and know her stories, know her recipes, check dumplings and and Gulosh and Kitsalista and all the other things she used to make me and my childhood.

58:51But she really, she was a major, she was a major force in my life. My grandmother, she, you know, my mom was working. So, you know, my grandmother was the person who was always home every day when I came back from school. And I remember I used to shower and it would almost be like, comical. I feel like in my memory, and there is no washing machine I've seen on the planet that I can actually do this, but in my memory, I'd go to shower, and I'd drop something on the bed, and I'd come back into the room after my shower, and it was like folded, pressed, it was all my grandma's garbage, and just like running after me, taking care of me.

59:30So it's nice to be able to do that for her. Yeah. I got from her reading. My grandmother, she devoured books, like devoured books. She loved the more sensational ones. So like some of these like romance novels, I would pick them up, the covers, but she could tell you, she could look at like any royal lineage across Europe and tell you all the mistresses. All the drama. All the drama. She loved it. But her face was always buried in a book. You know, my grandfather, Deito, he was the athlete. He was, he swam professionally for, or, you know, on the national team for Czechoslovakian. He helped train my mom as I was saying before in skiing.

1:00:17So he was a great athlete and she was at home and she would read and cook. And so that's something I remember a lot from my childhood and she would always say, like, I got reading from her. I mean, speaking of drama, I had my English teacher in high school. I recommend a book from me by D. H. Lawrence. It's supposed to be a classic. She was like, this is a classic you should read. It's called Lady Shadow A's Lover. And so I've read a lot of classics, but that one is straight up like a romance novel about a wife who likes to cheat in with a gardener. And I remember reading this like, what I can retrospect, I understand why it's a classic because it was so scandalous to talk about sex in a book a hundred years ago, whatever.

1:01:01In retrospect, you know why she recommended it. I just have no, I think. I'm just saying the signal, hey, you need to get out more or something. I don't know. Maybe she's seeking to inspire you. Yeah, exactly.

1:01:17Anyway, I love that kind of stuff too, but I love all the classics. And they get, they get, there's a lot of drama. Human nature, drama is part of it. So, what about your dad growing up? What did you learn about life from your father? I think my father's sense of humor is sometimes underappreciated. So he had an amazing and has an amazing sense of humor. He loved music. I think my mom loved music as well. But, you know, my father always used to say that in another life he would have been a Broadway musical producer, which is hilarious to think about, but he loves music. That is fun. He's like about.

1:02:00Right? He does, now he DJs at Mar -a -Lago. So people get a sense of, you know, he loves Andrew Lloyd Webber and all of it, Poverati, Elton John. I mean, these were the same songs on repeat my whole childhood. So I know the playlist. Probably Sinatra and all that. Love Sinatra, loves Elvis. You know, a lot of the greats. So I think I got a little bit of my love from music, from him, but my mom shared that as well. I think one of the things, you know, in looking back that I think I inherited for my father as well as this sort of interest or understanding of the importance of asking questions and specifically questions of the right people.

1:02:48And I saw this a lot on job sites. So I remember with the old post office building, there was this massive glass top atrium. So heating and cooling, the structure was like a Herkulean lift. We had the mechanical engineers provide their thoughts on how we could do it efficiently and so that the temperature never varied. And it was enormously expensive as an undertaking. And I remember one of his first times on the site because he had really empowered me with this project and he trusted me to execute and to also, you know, we're open when I needed it. But when the first time he visits, we're walking the hallway and we're talking about how expensive this cooling system would be and heating system would be and he starts stopping and he's asking duct workers as as we walk what they think of the system that the mechanical engineers designed.

1:03:51First few, fine, you know, not great answers. The third guy goes, sir, if you want me to be honest with you, it's obscenely over designed. In the circumstance of a 1 ,000 year storm, you will have the exact perfect temperature. If there's a massive blizzard or if it's unbearably hot, but 99 .9 % of the time you'll never need it. And so I think it's just an enormous waste of money. And so we kept asking that guy questions and we ended up overhauling the design pretty well into the process of the whole system saving a lot of money, creating a great system that's super functional. And so I learned a lot and that's just one example of countless.

1:04:36That one really takes out of my head because I'm like, oh my gosh, we're redesigning the whole system. We were actively under construction. So it was, but I would see him do that on a lot of different issues. He would ask people on the work level what their thoughts were, ideas, concepts, designs, and there was almost like a socratic sort of first principles type of way he questioned people, trying to get down to sort of try to reduce complex things to something really fundamental and simple. So I try to do that myself to the best I can. And I think it's something I very much learned from him.

1:05:21Yeah, I've seen great engineers, great leaders do just that. You see, you want to do that a lot, which is basically ask questions to push simplification. Can we do this simpler? And the basic question is like, why are we doing it this way? Can this be done simpler? Yeah. And not taking as an answer that this is how we've always done it. Sort of not along yourself. It doesn't matter that's how it was done it. What is the right way to do it? And what is, and usually the simpler it is, the more correct the way. Yeah. Has to do with costs, has to do with simplicity of production manufacturer, but usually simple is best.

1:06:04And it's oftentimes not the architecture, the engineers, it's, you know, Neil Hans case, probably the line worker who sees things more clearly. So I think making sure it's not just that you're asking good questions, you're asking the right people, those same good questions. That's why a lot of the Elon companies are really flat in terms of organizational design where the, anybody on the factory floor or I can talk directly to you on. There's not this managerial class, this hierarchy where it's travel up and down the hierarchy, which large companies often construct this hierarchy of managers where no one manager, if you ask them a question of like, what have you done this week?

1:06:47The answer is like, it's really hard to come up with. Usually it's gonna be a bunch of paperwork. Yeah. So like nobody knows what they actually do. So when it's flat, you can actually get as quickly as possible. If when problems arise, you can solve those problems as quickly as possible. And also you have a direct rapid iterative process where you're making things simpler, making them more efficient and constantly improving. So yeah, it's interesting. Well, when large, you see this in government, a lot of people get together, a hierarchy is developed, and that somehow, sometimes it's good, but very often just slows things down.

1:07:29And you see great companies, great, great companies, Apple, Google, Meta, they have to fight against that bureaucracy that builds, the slowness that large organizations have. And to still be a big organization, act like a startup is the big challenge. It's super difficult to deconstruct that as well once it's in place, right? It's circumventing layers and asking questions, probing questions of people on the ground level, is a huge challenge to the authority of the hierarchy. And there's a tremendous amount of resistance to it. So it's how do you grow something in the case of a company in terms of a culture that can scale, but it doesn't lose its connection to sort of real and meaningful feedback.

1:08:23It's not easy. I've had a lot of conversations with Jim Keller, who is this legendary engineer and leader, and he has talked about, like you often have to kind of be a little bit of an asshole in the room, not in a mean way, but it's uncomfortable. Yeah, like a lot of these questions that are uncomfortable they break the kind of General politeness and civility that people have in communication when you get a meeting like nobody wants to be like Can we do it way different? Everyone wants just just like this lunch is coming up You know, I have I have this trip planned on the weekend with the family everyone just wants comfort They get the When humans get together, they kind of gravitate towards comfort.

1:09:09Nobody wants that one person that comes in and says, Hey, can we like do this way better and way different? And everything we've gotten comforted with, throw it out. Not only do they not want that, but the one person who comes in and does that, puts a massive target on their back. And it's ultimately seen as a threat. I mean, nobody really gets fired for maintaining the status quo. Even if things go poorly. It's the way it was always done. Yeah, humans are fascinating. But in order to actually do great big projects, to reach for the stars, you have to have those people. You have to constantly disrupt and have those uncomfortable conversations.

1:09:52And really have that first principles type of orientation, especially in those large bureaucratic contexts. So amongst many other things, you created a fashion brand, what was that about? What was the origin of that? I always loved fashion as a form of self -expression, as a means to communicate either a truth or an illusion, depending on what kind of mood you're in, but this sort of second body, if you will. So I loved fashion and look, I mean, my mother was a big part of the reason I did, but I never thought I would go into fashion. In fact, I was graduating from Warden. It was the day of my graduation.

1:10:37And a winter calls me up and offered me a job at Vogue, which is a dream in so many ways. But I was so focused. I wanted to go into real estate and I wanted to build buildings. And I told her that. So I really thought that that was going to be the path I was taking. And then very organically fashion, you know, it was part of my life, but it came into my life in a more professional capacity. By talking with my first of many different partners that I had in the fashion space about, he actually had shown me a building to buy his family had some real estate holdings. and I passed on on the real estate deal, but we forged a friendship and we started talking about how in the space that he was in fine jewelry, there was this lack of product and brands that were positioned for self -purchasing females.

1:11:39So everything was about, you know, the man buying the Christmas gift, the man buying the engagement ring, the stores felt like that. They were all tailored towards the male aesthetic, the marketing felt like that. And what about the woman who had a salary and was really excited to buy herself a great pair of earrings or had just received a great bonus and was going to use it to treat herself. So we thought there was a void in the marketplace and that was the first category. I launched Ivanka Trump Findrolery and we just caught lightning in a bottle. I was really quickly after that. I met my partner who had founded Nine West Shoes, really capable partner, and we launched a shoe collection, which took off and did enormously well.

1:12:26And then a clothing collection and handbags and sunglasses and fragrance. So we caught a moment and we found a positioning for this, for the self -purchasing multi -dimensional woman. And we made dressing for work aspirational. At the time we launched, if you wanted to buy something for an office context, like the brands that existed were the opposite of exciting. Like nobody was taking pictures of like what they were wearing to work and posting it online with some of these classic legacy brands. Really, it felt very much like it was designed by a team of men for what a woman would want to wear to the office.

1:13:10So we started creating this clothing that was feminine, that was beautiful, that was versatile, that would take a woman from the boardroom to an after -school soccer game, to date night with a boyfriend, to walk in the park with her husband, like all the different ways women live their lives and creating a wardrobe for that woman who works at every aspect of their life, not just sort of the siloed professional part. And it was, it was really compelling. We started creating great brand content and we had incredible contributors like Adam Grant, who was blogging for us at the time and creating aspirational content for, for working women.

1:13:57It was actually kind of a funny story, but I now had probably close to 11 different product categories and we were growing like wildfire. And I started to think about what would be a compelling way to sort of create interesting content for the people who are buying these different categories. And we came up with a website called Women Who Work. And I went to a marketing agency, one of the fancy firms in New York. And I said, we want to create a brand campaign around and this multi -dimensional woman who works. And what do you think? Like, can you help us? And they come back and they say, you know, we don't like the word work.

1:14:35We think it should be women who do. And I just start laughing because I'm like, women who do. And the fact that they couldn't conceive of it being sort of exciting and aspirational and interesting to sort of lean into working at all aspects of our lives was just fascinating to me, but showed that was part of the problem. And I think that's why ultimately, I mean, when the business grew to be hundreds of millions of dollars in sales, we were distributed at all the best retailers across the country from, you know, Neiman Marcus to Sachs to Bloomingdale's and Beyond. And I think we had really resonated with people in in an amazing way.

1:15:18And probably not dissimilar to how I have this incredible experience every time somebody comes up to me and tells me that they were married in a space that I had painstakingly designed. I have that experience now with my fashion company. The number of women who will come up tell me that they loved my shoes or they loved the handbags. I've had women show me their engagement rings, they got engaged with us. And it's really rewarding. That's really beautiful. Yeah, when I was hanging out with you in Miami, there's a number of women that came up to you saying they love the clothes, and they love the shoes.

1:16:01It's awesome. All these years later. All these years later. Yeah. What does it take to make a shoe where somebody would come up to you years later and just be just full of love for this thing you've created? What's that mean? I mean, like what does it take to do that? Well, I still wear the shoes, so. I mean, that's a good starting point, right? Is it a great thing that you want to wear? I feel like the product, I think first and foremost, you have to have the right partner. So, building a shoe, if you talk to a great shoe designer, it's like, it's architecture. Like making a heel that's four inches that feels good to walk in for eight hours a day.

1:16:38That is an engineering feat. And so I found great partners. and everything that I did, my shoe partner had found it nine -west, so he really knew what went into making a shoe wearable and comfortable. And then you overlay that with great design. And we also created this really comfortable, beautifully designed, super feminine product offering that was also affordably priced. So I think it was like the trifect of those of those three things that made that I think it made it stand out for so many people. Can you speak to, I don't know if it's possible to articulate, but can you speak to the process you go through from idea to the final thing, like what you go through to bring an idea to life?

1:17:26So not being a designer and this was true in real estate as well, I was never the architect So I didn't necessarily have the pen and in fashion the same. I was kind of like a conductor. I knew what I liked and didn't like. And I think that's really important. And that became honed for me over time. So I would have to sit a lot longer with something earlier on than later when I had more refined my aesthetic point of view. And so I think, first of all, you have to have a pretty strong sense of what resonates with you. And then as in the case of my fashion business, Asick grew and became quite a large business, and I had so many different categories.

1:18:10Everything had to work together. So I had individual partners for each category. But if we were selling at Neiman Marcus, we couldn't have a pair of shoes that didn't relate to address, that didn't relate to a pair of sunglasses and handbags all on the same floor. So, you know, in the beginning, it was much more collaborative. As time passed, I really sort of took the point on deciding, and this is the aesthetic for the season. These are the colors we're going to use. These are fabrics. And then working with our partners on the execution of that, but I needed to create an overlay that allowed for cohesion as the collection grew.

1:18:49And that was actually really fun for me, because that was a little different. You know, I was typically initially responding to things that were put in front of me and towards the end I was It was my partners who were responding to the things that myself and my team, but it's still it's You know, I would always I always wanted to bring the best talent in so I was I was hiring great designers and printmakers and And copywriters and so I had this You know almost like that conductor analogy. I had this incredible group of, in this case, women assembled to, who had very strong points of view themselves and created a great team.

1:19:35So, yeah, I mean, great team is really sort of a central. It's the essential thing behind any successful story. But there's this thing of taste. It's really interesting. It's hard to kind of articulate what it takes, but basically knowing A versus B will look good, or without AB comparison to say like, if we did, if we changed this part, that would make it better. That sort of designer taste that's hard to make explicit what that is, but the great designers like have that taste like this is gonna look good and It's not actually again the Steve Jobs thing is not the opinion pull like you can't Pull people asking what looks better.

1:20:21It's you got you have to have the vision of that Yeah, and as you said you also have to develop eventually the confidence that your taste is good such that you can like curate you do can direct teams You can argue that no, no, no, this is right even when there's several people that say this doesn't make any sense. If you have that vision, have the confidence, this will look good. That's how you come up with great designs. It's a mixture of great taste. You develop over time and the confidence. And that's a really hard thing, especially and I think one of the things that I love most about all of these creative pursuits is that ability to work with the best people right now.

1:21:04I'm working with my husband. We have this 1400 acre island in the Mediterranean, and we're bringing in the best architects and the best brands. But to have a point of view and to challenge people who are such artists respectfully, but not to be afraid to ask questions, it takes a lot of confidence to do that. And it's hard. So these are actually just internal early renderings. So we're in the process of doing the master planning now. But this is beautiful. Yeah, this is an early vision. Yeah, it's going to be extraordinary. A mom's going to operate the hotel for us. And they're going to be villas.

1:21:44We have carbon who's going to be doing the food and beverage. But it's amazing to bring together all of this talent. And for me to be able to play around and flex the real estate muscles again. and have some fun with it is. The real estate, the design, the art. How hard is it to bring something like that to life? Because that looks surreal out of this world. Well, especially on an island. It's challenging, meaning the logistics, and even getting the building materials to an island, or no joke, but we will execute on it. And it may not be this is sort of, as I said, early conceptual drawings, but it gives a sense of wanting to honor the topography that exists.

1:22:28And this is obviously very modern, but making it feel right in terms of the context of the vegetation and the terrain that exists is and not just have a beautiful glass box. Obviously you want glass, you want to look out and see that gorgeous blue ocean, but how do you do that in a way that doesn't feel generic and isn't a squandered opportunity to create something new. Yeah, and it's integrated with the natural landscape, but it's a celebration of the natural landscape around it. So I guess you start from this dream like, because this feels like a dream. And then when you're faced with the reality of the building materials and all the actual constraints of the building, then it evolves from there.

1:23:13Yeah, and so much, I mean, so much of architecture, you don't see, but it's decisions made. So how do you create independent structures where you look out of one and don't see the other? You know, how do you ensure the sort of the stacking and the master plan works in a way that's harmonious and view corridors and all of those elements, all of those components of decision making are super appreciated, but not often thought about. What's a view corridor? Like to make sure that the top unit, you're not looking out and seeing a whole bunch of units, you're looking out and seeing the ocean. So that's where you take this and then you start angling everything.

1:23:57And you start thinking about, well, in this context, do we have green roof? So if there's any hint of a roof, it's camouflage by vegetation that matches what already exists on the island. Where the engineers become very important. Well, yeah. So how do you build into a mountain side? while being sensitive to the beauty of the island. It's almost like a mathematical problem at a class competition in geometry and grad school, where you have to think about these view corridors. It's like a math problem. But it's also an art problem because it's not just about making sure that there's not occlusions to the view.

1:24:33You have to figure out when there's occlusions, like what is a vegetation? Is it, you have to figure all that out? there's probably every single room, every single building is a thing that adds extra complexity. And then the choice is, how does the sun rise on set? How do you want to angle the hotel and relation to the sun rise and the sunset? Do you obviously want people to experience those? Which do you favor? The directionality of the wind? And on an island, and in this case, the winds coming from the north and the vegetation is less lush on the northern end. So do you focus more on the southern end and have the horseback riding trails and amenities up towards the north?

1:25:21So there are these really interesting decisions and choices you get to reflect on. That's a fascinating sort of discussion to be having. And probably there's actual constraints on infrastructure issues. So all those are just... Yeah, well the grade of the land, right? If it's super steep, so also finding the areas of topography that are flatter, but still have the great views. So it's fun. I think real estate and building, it's like a giant puzzle. And I love puzzles. Every piece relates to another, and it's all sort of interconnected. Yeah, like you said, no post office. Like every single room is different, so every single room is a puzzle when you're doing the renovation.

1:26:01That's fascinating. And if you're not thoughtful, it gets like, at best, really quirky. At worst, completely ridiculous. Quirky is such a funny word. It's such a... I'm sure you've walked into your fair share of like quirky rooms. You know, and sometimes like that's charming, but most often it's charming when it's intentional through like smart design. Yeah, you can tell if it's by accident or if it's intentional. Yeah. You can tell. know, so much, I mean, the whole hospitality, it's just not just like how it's designed, it's how once the thing is operating for the hotel, like how everything comes together, the culture of the place.

1:26:42And the warmth, yeah. Like I think with spaces, they, you can feel like the soul of a structure. And I think on the hotel side, you have to think about like flow of traffic. You saw these things. When you're building condominiums or your own home, you want to think about the warmth of a space as well, and especially with super modern design, sometimes warmth is sacrificed. And I think there is a way to marry both. And that's where you get into the interior design elements and disciplines and how fabrics can create tremendous warmth in a space, which is otherwise colder, raw building materials.

1:27:24and that's a really interesting, like how texture matters, how color matters. And I think oftentimes interior design is not, it doesn't take the same priority and I think the, I think that underestimates the impact it can have on how you experience a room or a space. Yes, especially when it's working together with the architecture. Yeah, fabrics and color. That's so interesting. The finishes, you know, the choice of wood. That's making me feel horrible about the space we're sitting. It's like black curtains. The warmth. I need to work on this. This is a big two -door item. This is a big two -door item.

1:28:11You're making me feel. I'll listen back to this over and over. I think you made me, there may be like a woman's touch. a lot, a lot. But I actually, I appreciate the vegetation. Yeah. Fake plants. You know what I love about this space though, is it is like you come through. Like every single element, there's a story behind it. So it's not just some, you didn't have some interior design or curate your bookshelf. You know, there's like nobody came in here with books by the yard. This is basically an IKEA, like this is not, this is not deeply thought through, but it it does bring me joy. Yeah. Which is one way to do design, as long as you're happy, that usually means if your taste is decent enough, that means others will be happy.

1:28:57Or we'll see the joy radiate through it. But I appreciate you were grasping for compliments and you're friendship God. No, I actually, I love it. I love it. Do you have a little, I love this guy. Yeah, you're holding onto a monkey looking at a, at a human skull, which is particularly irrelevant. And this, I mean, I feel like you've really thought about all of these things. Yeah, there's robot, I don't know how much you looked into robots, but there's a way to communicate love and affection from a robot that I'm really fascinated by. And a lot of cartoonists do this too. You have to, when you create cartoons and non -human entities, if to bring out the joy so with Wally or robots and Star Wars, to be able to communicate emotion, to anger and excitement through robots really interesting to me.

1:29:50And people that do it successfully are awesome. Are awesome. To make you smile. Yeah, that makes you smile for sure. There's a longing there. How do you do that successfully as you bring them, your projects to life? I think there's so many detailed elements that I think artists know well, but one basic one is something that people know and you know know because you have a dog is the excitement that a dog has when it when you first show up just recognizing you and like catching your eye and just showing his excitement by wiggling his butt and tail and all this kind of this this. intense joy that overtakes this body, that moment of recognizing something.

1:30:41It's the double take, that moment of like where this joy of recognition takes over your whole cognition and you're just like there and there's a connection. And then the other person gets excited and you both get excited together. It's kind of like that feeling, what would I put it? You know like when you go to airports and you get to see people, who haven't seen each other for a long time, also, and recognize each other in their meeting. And they're all like, we're on tour with each other in the hug, that moment, but that's awesome to watch, just so much joy. And dogs that will have that every time, you could walk into the other room to get a glass of milk and you come back and your dog sees you, like it's the first time.

1:31:26So I love replicating that in Robux. They actually say, children, like one of the reasons why peekaboo is so successful, is that they actually don't remember not having seen you of your seconds prior. There's a term for it, but I remember is, when my kids were younger, you leave the room, and you walk back in 30 seconds later, and they experienced the same joy as if you had been gone for four hours. And we grew out of that. We become very used to one another. I kind of went up forever be excited by the peak of phenomena the simple joys we're talking about on fashion having the confidence of taste to be able to sort of push through on this idea of a design but you've also mentioned on some of you admires Rick Rubin in his book The Creative Act it has some really interesting ideas and one of them is to accept self -doubt and imperfection So is there some battle within yourself that you have on sort of striving for perfection and for the confidence and always kind of having it together versus like accepting that things are always going to be imperfect?

1:32:40I think every day, I think I wake up in the morning and you know, I want to be better, I want to be a better mom, I want to be a better wife, I want to be more creative, I want And so that very much lives within me all the time. You know, I think I also grew up in the context of being the child of two extraordinarily successful parents and that could have been debilitating for me. And I saw that and a lot of my friends who grew up in circumstances similar to that, they were afraid to try for fear of not measuring up. And I think somehow early on I learned to kind of harness the fear of not being good enough, not being competent enough.

1:33:35And I harnessed it to make me better and to push me outside of my comfort zone. So I think that's always lived with me. And I think it probably always will. I think you have to have humility in anything you do that you could be better and strive for that. I think as you get older, it softens a little bit as you have more reps. You know, as you have more examples of having been thrown in the deep end and figured out how to swim, you get a little bit more comfortable in your sort of abstract competency. But if that fear is not in you, I think you're not challenging yourself enough. Harness to fear.

1:34:27The other thing he writes about is intuition that you need to trust your instincts and intuition. That's a very recruitment thing, to say. So what percent of your decision making is intuition or what percent is through rigorous, careful analysis? I think it's both. It's like trust would verify. I think that's also where age and experience comes into play because I think you always have sort of a gut instinct, but I think intuition, like well -honed intuition, comes from a place of accumulated knowledge, right? So oftentimes when you feel really strongly about something, it's because you've sort of, you've been there, like you know what's right.

1:35:18Or on a personal level, if you're acting in accordance with your core values, You know, it just feels good. And even if it would be the right decision for others, if you're acting outside of your sort of integrity or core values, it doesn't feel good. And you know, your intuition will signal that to you. You'll never be comfortable. So I think because of that, I start oftentimes with my intuition and then I put it through like a rigorous test of whether that is in fact true. But very seldom do I go against what my initial instinct was. Not at least at this point in my life. Yeah, I had actually a discussion yesterday with a big time business owner investor who's talking about being impulsive and following that.

1:36:16Like on a phone call shifting like the entire everything like giving away a very large amounts some money and moving it in another direction on an impulse, making a promise that he can't at that time deliver, but knows if he works hard, he'll deliver and all doing just following that impulsive feeling. And he said now that, you know, he has his family, that probably some of their impulse is quite a down a little bit. He's more rational and thoughtful and so on, but wonders whether it's sometimes good to just be impulsive. and to just trust your gut and just go with it. Don't deliberate too long because then you won't do it.

1:36:57It's interesting. It's the confidence and stupidity maybe of youth that leads to some of the greatest breakthroughs. And it's like there's a cost to wisdom and deliberation. There is, but I actually think in this case, as you get older, you may act less and pulsively, but I think you're more like attuned with, you have more experience, so your gut is more well -honed. You know, so your instincts are more well -honed. I think I've found that to be true for me. You know, it doesn't feel as reckless as when I was younger. Amongst many other things, you were on the apprentice. People love you on there, people love the show.

1:37:45So what did you learn about business about life from the various contestants on there? Well, I think you can learn everything about life from show workers. So I'm just I'm Got it. Just from just that one human. Yeah, amazing But you know, I it was it was such a wild experience from me because I was I was quite young When I was on it just getting started in business And it was the number one television show in the country And it went on to be syndicated all over the world. And it was just this wild, like phenomenal success. So, you know, a business show had never crossed over in this sort of way.

1:38:25So it was really a moment in time. And you had regular apprentice and then the celebrity apprentice. But the tasks, I mean, they went on to be studied at business schools across the country. So every other week, I'd be reading case studies of how the apprentice was being examined and taught to classes and this university in Boston, or so it was extraordinary. And this was like a real -life classroom I was in. So I think because of the nature of the show, you learn a lot about teamwork, and you're watching it and analyzing it real time, you learned a lot about, a lot of the tasks were very marketing oriented because of the short duration of time they had to execute.

1:39:09a lot of, you learned a lot about time management because of that short duration. So, you know, almost every episode would devolve into people hysterical over the fact that they had 10 minutes left to, with this Herkulean lift ahead of them. So it was a fascinating experience for me. and we would be filming. I mean, we would film first thing in the morning, like five or six a .m. In Trump Tower oftentimes, like in the lobby of Trump Tower, that's where the war rooms and board rooms of the candidates were, the contestants were. And then we would go up in the elevator to our office. We would work all day and then we'd come down and we'd evaluate the task.

1:39:56It was a weird like real life television thing, experience in the middle of our sort of on the book ends of our work day. So it was intense. So you're like curating the television version of it and also living it? Well, living there, and oftentimes there was like an overlay. Like there were episodes that they came up with brand campaigns for my shoe collection or my clothing line or design challenges related to a hotel I was responsible for building. So there was this unbelievable crossover that was obviously great for us from a business perspective, but it's sometimes surreal to go experience.

1:40:41What was it like? Was it scary to be in front of a camera when you know so many people watch? I mean, that's a new experience for you at that time, just the number of people watching. Yeah. Was that weird? It was really weird. I really struggled watching myself on the episodes. I still to this day, like television as a medium, like the fact that we're taping this. I'm more self -conscious than if we weren't. I just, it's... Hey, I have to watch myself. After we record this before I publish it, I have to listen to my stupid self talk. So, and - So you're saying it doesn't get better? It doesn't get better.

1:41:30I still, I feel - Oh, I still, I'm like, does my voice really sound like that? Yeah. You know, why do I do this thing or that thing? And I find it, some people are super at ease. And who knows? Maybe they're not either. But some people feel like they're stupid. They feel like they are, yeah. You know, my father was, I think like who you, who you saw as who you get. And I think that made him so effective in that medium because he was just himself and he was totally unself conscious. I was not. I was totally self conscious. So it was extraordinary, but also a little challenging for me. I think certain people are just born to be entertainers.

1:42:15Like Elvis, like on stage they come to life. Yeah. This is where they, this is where they're truly happy. I've met, I've met guys like they're like great rock stars. Like this is where they, they feel like they belong on stages. It's not just the thing they do and they, they're certain aspects. They lost certain aspects. They don't know. This is where this is where they're alive. This is where they, they, they've always dreamed of being. This is where they want to be forever. Michael Jackson was like that. Michael Jackson. Some pictures of you hanging out like Jackson. That was cool. He came once to a performance.

1:42:46I wanted to be one woman in time. I wanted professional ballerina. Yeah. Okay. Yes. And I was, you know, working really hard. I was going to the School of American Ballet. I was dancing at the Lincoln Center in the Nutcracker. I was super serious, you know, nine, 10 -year -old. And my parents came to a Christmas performance of the Nutcracker. And my father brought Michael Jackson with him. And everyone was so excited that all the dancers, they wore one glove. But I remember he was so shy. He was so quiet. And when you'd see him in smaller group settings, and then you'd watch him walk on to stage, and it was like a completely different person.

1:43:36Like the vitality that came into him, and you say that's like someone who was born to do what he did. And I think there are a lot of performers like that. And I just in general love to see people that have found the thing that Makes them come alive. Yeah, like I As I mentioned went to the jungle recently with Paul Rosley and he's a guy who just belongs in the jungle Yeah, like that's a guy where like when I saw I Got a chance to go with him from the city to the jungle and you just see this person change of the happiness. The joy he has when he first is able to jump in the water the Amazon river and to feel like he's home with the crocodiles and all that.

1:44:24He's calling friends and probably dances around in the trees with the monkeys. So he, this is where he belongs. I love seeing that. You felt that. I mean, I watched the interview you did with him and you felt that like his passion and enthusiasm, like it radiated and capped. I mean, I love animals, like I love all animals. Never loved snakes so much. And he almost made me, now I appreciate the beauty of them much more than I did prior to listening to him speak about them. But it's an infectious thing. He actually, we're talking about skyscrapers before. I loved, he called trees skyscrapers of life.

1:45:06And I thought that was so great. Yeah, and they are. They're so big. I mean, just like skyscrapers or large buildings, they also represent a history, especially in Europe. I like to think, looking at all these ancient buildings, you like to think of all the people throughout history that have looked at them, have admired them, have been inspired by them. You know, they're the great leaders of history. In France it's like Napoleon just the history that's contained within a building you almost feel the energy of that history You can feel the stories emanate from the buildings and that same way when you look at giant trees that have been there For decades for centuries in some cases you Feel the history the stories emanate.

1:45:54I got just a climb some of them So you feel like there's a visceral feeling of the power of the trees. It's cool Yeah, that's an experience I'd love to have be that disconnected. Yeah, being in the jungle Among the trees among the animals you remember the year forever apart in nature you're you're fundamental our nature that this is a Earth is a living organism and you're a part of that organism and that's humbling Beautiful and you get to experience that in a real real way It sounds simple to say, but when you actually experience it, it stays with you for a long time. Especially if you're out there alone, I got a chance to spend time in the jungle solo, just by myself.

1:46:40And you sit in the fear of that, in the simplicity of that, all of it, and just no sounds of humans anywhere. You're just sitting there and listening to all the monkeys and the birds trying to have sex with each other all around you just screaming. And there's like romantic, I mean I'm romanticized everything. There's like birds that are monogamous for life like mucaws. You can see like two of them flying. They're also by the way screaming each other. I always wonder like are they arguing or is this their love link? That's very fun. You just have these like two birds that you know have been together for a long time.

1:47:20And they're just screaming at each other in the morning. That's really funny because there aren't that many animal species that are monogamous. And you highlighted one example. But they literally sound like they're just they're bickering. But maybe to them is beautiful. You know, I don't want to judge what they do. Sound very loud and very obnoxious. But I'm it's all that is just I don't know. I think it's so humbling to like feel so small too. Like I feel like when we get busy and when we're running around it's easy. to feel we're so in our head and we feel sort of so consequential like in the context of even our own lives and then you find yourself in a situation like that and it's I think you feel so much more connected knowing how miniscule you are in the broader sense and I feel that way when I'm on the ocean on a surfboard.

1:48:13You know you just it's it's really humbling to be so small and It's that vast sea and it feels, it feels really beautiful, you know, with no noise, no chatter, no distractions, just being in the moment. And it sounds like you experienced that in a very, very real way in the Amazon. Yeah, the power of the waves is cool. I love swimming out into the ocean, feeling the power of the ocean. Yeah. And you see how you just like this speck. And you can't fight it, right? You just have to sort of be in it. And I think in surfing, one of the things I love about it is I feel like a lot of water sports are manipulating the environment.

1:48:57And there's something that can be a little violent about it. You look at wind surfing. And whereas with surfing, you're in harmony with it. So you're not fighting it. You're flowing with it. And you still have the agency of choosing which waves you're going to surf. them. You sit there and you read the ocean and you learn to understand it, but you can't control it. What's it like to like like fall in your face when you're trying to surf? Like what? I haven't surfed before. It just feels like I always see videos of when everything goes great. I just wonder how the good it doesn't. Those are the ones people pose.

1:49:41No. Well, I actually had the unique experience of one of my first time surfing. I only learned a couple of years ago, so I'm not good. I just love it. I love everything about it. I love the physicality. I love being in the ocean. I love everything about it. The hardest thing with surfing is paddling out, because when you're committing, you catch a wave, obviously, sometimes you flip over your board, and that doesn't feel great. But when you're in the line of impact, and you've maybe surfed a good wave in, and now you're going out for another set, and you get sort of stuck in that impact line. There's like nothing you can do.

1:50:16You just sort of sit there and you try to dive underneath it, and it will pound you and pound you. So I've been stuck there while, you know, four or five, six waves, just like crash on top of your head. And the worst thing you can do is get reactive, and, you know, and scared and try and fight against it. You kind of just have to flow with it until inevitably, to play, there's a break and then paddle like hell back out to the line or to the beach, whatever, you know, whatever you're feeling. But it's, that's, to me, that's the hardest part, the paddling out. How did life change when your father decided to run for president?

1:50:58Wow, everything changed, you know, almost, almost overnight. We learned that he was planning to announce his candidacy two weeks before he actually did.

1:51:13And nothing about our lives had been constructed with politics in mind. You know, I most often, when people are exposed to politics at that level, that sort of national level, There's first like city council run and then maybe a state level run and maybe, maybe Congress senator ultimately the presidency. So it was unheard of for him never to have run a campaign and then run for president and win. And so it was an extraordinary experience. There was so much intensity and so much scrutiny and so much noise. So that took for sure like a moment acclimated, not sure I ever fully acclimated, but it definitely was a super unusual experience.

1:52:14But I think then the process that unfolded over the next couple of years was also like the most extraordinary growth experience of my life. You know, suddenly I was going into communities that I probably never would have been to. And I was talking with people who in 30 seconds would reveal to me their deepest insecurity, their gravest fear, their wildest ambitions, all of it, with the hope that in telling me that story, it would get back to a potential future president of the United States and have impacts for their family, for their community. So the level of candor and vulnerability people have with you is unlike anything I've ever experienced.

1:53:05And I had done the apprentice before, people may know who I was in some of these situations that I was going into, but they wouldn't have shared with me these things that you got the impression that oftentimes our spouses wouldn't know, and they wouldn't do so within 30 seconds. So you learn so much about what motivates people, what drives people, what their concerns are and you grow so much as a result of it. So when you're in the White House people, unlike in any other position, people have a sense that all the troubles are going through, maybe you can help. Yeah. So they put it all out there.

1:53:50And they do so in such a raw, vulnerable and real way. It's It's shocking and eye -opening and supermotivating. I remember once I was in New Hampshire and I'm early on right after my father had announced his candidacy and a man walks up to me in the greeting line. And within around five seconds he had started to tell me a story about how his daughter had died of an overdose and how he was worried his son was also addicted to opioids, his daughter's friends, his son's friends and it's heartbreaking. It's heartbreaking and it's something that I would experience every day in talking with people. And those stories just stay with you.

1:54:44Always. You know, I took a long road trip around the United States in my 20s. I'm kind of thinking of doing it again just for like a couple of months for that exact purpose. And you can get these stories when you go to like a bar in the middle of nowhere and just sit and talk to people. And they start sharing. And it reminds you of how beautiful the country is. It reminds you several things. One that people, it shows you that there's a lot of different accents. That's one. But aside from that, the people are struggling with all the same stuff. And at least at that time, I wonder what it is now.

1:55:28But at that time, I don't remember on the surface, there's like political divisions, there's Republicans, Democrats, and so on. But like underneath it, there are people who are all the same, the concerns are all the same. There's not that much of a division. Right now, the surface division has been amplified even more, maybe because of social media. I don't know why. So I would love to see what the country is like now, but I suspect probably it's still not as divided as it appears to be on the surface, what the media shows, what the social media shows. But what did you experience in terms of the division?

1:56:07I think a couple of reactions to what you just said. I think the first is when you connect with people like that, you are so inspired by their courage in the face of adversity And they're resilience. And it's like a truly remarkable experience for me. The campaign lifted me out of a bubble. I didn't even know I was in. You know, I grew up on the Upper East Side of New York. And I felt like I was well -traveled and well -educated. And I believed that I believed at the time that I'd been exposed to divergent viewpoints. And I realized during the campaign, how limited my exposure had been relative to what it was becoming.

1:56:56So there was a lot of growth in that as well. But I do think, you know, you think about the vitriol on politics and you know, whether it's worse than it's been in the past or not. I think that's up for debate. I think, you know, there have been, there have been tools. There's been screaming and there's, you know, politics has always been a blood sport and it's always been incredibly vicious. I think in the toxic swirl of social media, it's more amplified and there are, there's more sort of democratization around participating in it perhaps and it seems like the voices are louder but it's always been, it feels like it's always been that but I don't believe most people are like that.

1:57:43And you meet people along the way and they're not leading with what their politics are. They're telling you about their hopes for themselves and their communities. And it makes you feel that we are a whole lot less divided than the media and others would have us believe. Although I had to say having duels that sounds pretty cool. Maybe I just romanticized westerns, but anyway. All right, my miss Cleans would movies. Okay, but it's true. Like you read some of the stuff like in terms of what politics used to be in the history of the United States. Those folks went pretty rough like way rougher actually, but they didn't have social media So they had to go like real hard and the media was rough too.

1:58:32So all like the fake news all of that. That's not recent It's been nonstop. You know, I look at the surface division, the surface bickering, and that might be just a feature of democracy. It's not a bug of democracy. It's a feature. We're in a constant conflict, and it's the way we resolve. We try to figure out the right way forward. So in the moment, it feels like people are just tearing each other apart, but really, we're trying to find the way where, like, in the long arc of history, it will look like progress. But in the short term, it just sounds like people making stories up about each other and calling each other names and all this kind of stuff.

1:59:12But in the, there's a purpose to it. I mean, that's what freedom looks like, I guess, is what I'm trying to say in as better than the alternative. I think that the vast majority of people aren't participating in it. Sure. Yes, that's true. I think there's a minority of people that are doing most of the yelling and screaming. and the majority of Americans just want to send their kid to a great school and while their communities to thrive and want to be able to realize their dreams and aspirations. So I saw a lot more of that than it would feel obvious if you looked at like a Twitter feed. What went into your decision to join the White house as an advisor.

2:00:02You know the campaign I never I never thought about joining. It was kind of like get to the end of it. And when it started I was like everything in my life was almost firing on all cylinders. I had two young kids at home during the course of the campaign. I ended up I was pregnant with my third. So this young family, my businesses, real estate and fashion and working alongside my brothers, running the Trump Hotel collection, and my life was full and busy. And so there was a big part of me that was just wanted to get through, just get through it, without really thinking forward to what the implications were for me.

2:00:48But when my father won, he asked Jared and I to join him. And in asking that question, and keep in mind he was a total outsider. So there was no bench of people as he would have today. He had never spent the night in Washington, he's seen before staying in the White House. And so when he asked us to join him, he trusted us. He trusted in our ability to execute. And there wasn't a part of me that could imagine the 70 or 80 year old version of myself looking back and having been okay with having said no and going back to my life as I knew it before. I mean in retrospect I realized there is no life as you know before, you know, but just the idea of not saying yes wherever that would lead me.

2:01:45And so I dove in. And I was also during the course of the campaign, I was just much more sensitive to the problems and experiences of Americans. I gave you an example before of the father and new Hampshire, but even just in my consumption of information, I had a business that was predominantly young women, many of which were thinking about having a kid had just had a child, we're planning on that life event and I knew what they needed to be able to show up every day and realize the stream for themselves and the support structures they would need to have in place. And I remember reading this article at the time and one of the major newspapers of a woman she had had a very solid job working at one of the Blue Chip, accounting firms, and the recession came.

2:02:48She lost her job around the same time as her partner left her and over a matter of months she lost her home. So she wound up with her two young kids after bouncing around between neighbors living in their car. She She gets a call back from one of the many interviews she had done for a second interview where she was all but guaranteed the job should that go well. And she had arranged childcare for her two young children with a neighbor in her old apartment block. And the morning of the interview, she shows up and the neighbor doesn't answer the doorbell. And stanza five, ten minutes doesn't answer.

2:03:34So she has a choice. Does she go to the interview with her children or does she try to cancel? She gets in her car, drives to the interview, leaves her to children in the back seat of the car with the window cracked, goes into the interview and gets pulled out of the interview by police because somebody had called the cops after seeing her, her children in the back seat of the car. She gets thrown in jail. Her kids get taken from her and she spends years fighting to regain custody. And I think about, that's an extreme example, but I think about something like that. And I say, if I was the mother and we were homeless, like what I've gone to that interview.

2:04:19And I probably would have. And that is not like an acceptable situation. You know, so you hear stories like that and then you get asked, well, you come with me. And it's really hard to say no. You know, I spent four years in Washington. I feel like I left it all in the field. I feel really good about it. And I feel really privileged to have been able to do what I did. A chance to help many people. Saying no means you're kind of turning away from those people. You felt like that to me. Yeah, yeah, but then it's the turmoil of politics that you're getting into and it really is a leap into the abyss.

2:05:14What was it like trying to get stuff done in Washington? And this place where politics is a game, it feels that way, maybe from an outsider perspective and you go in there trying, given some of those stories trying to help people, what's the like to get anything done? It's an incredible cognitive lift. That's a nice way to put it, yeah. To get things done, you know, there are a lot of people who would prefer to cling to the problem, and they're talking points about how they're going to solve it, rather than sort of roll up their sleep and do the work it takes to build coalitions of support and find people who are willing to compromise and move the ball.

2:06:05And so it's extremely difficult. And, you know, Jared and I talk about all the time. It probably should be because these are highly consequential policies that impact people's lives at scale. Shouldn't be so easy to do them and they are doable. But it's challenging. You know, one of the first experiences I had where it really was just a full grind effort was with tax cuts and the work I did to get the child tax credit doubled as part of it. And it just meant meeting after meeting after meeting after meeting with lawmaker convincing them of why this is good policy going into their districts, campaigning in their districts, helping them convince their constituents of why it's important, of why childcare support is important, of why paid family leave is important, of different policies that impact working American families.

2:07:02So it's hard, but it's really rewarding. And then to get it done, I mean, just the child tax credit alone, 40 million American and families got an average of $2 ,200 each year as a result of the doubling of the child tax credits at one component of tax cuts. When I was researching this stuff, you just get to think the scale of things, the scale of impact is 40 million families. Each one of those is a story, is a story of struggle of trying to give a large part of your life to a job while still being able to give love and supporting care to a family and to kids and to manage all of that. Each one of those is a little puzzle that they have to solve and it's the life and death puzzle.

2:07:53You can lose your home, your security, you can lose your job, you can scooch stuff up with parenting. So you can mess all that up and you're trying to hold it together and government policies can help make that easier or can in some cases make that possible. And you get to do that at a scale not of like five or ten families, but like 40 million families. And that's just one thing. Yeah, the people who shared with me their experience and during the campaign it was what they hope to see happen. Once you were in there, it was what they were seeing, what they were experiencing, the result of the policies.

2:08:36And that was the fuel. You know, on the hardest days, like that was the fuel. Child tax credit. I remember visiting with a woman Brittany Houseman. She came to the White House. She had two small children. She was pregnant with her third. Her husband was killed in a car accident. She was in school at the time. Her dream was to become criminal justice advocate. That was no longer on the table for her after he passed away. and she became the sole learner and provider for her family. And she couldn't afford childcare. She couldn't afford a stay in school. So she ended up creating a childcare center in her home and her center was so successful because in part of different policies we worked on, including the childcare block grants that went to the stage.

2:09:26She ended up opening additional centers. I visited her one of them in Colorado. Now, she has like a huge focus on helping teenage moms who don't have the resources to afford quality childcare for their kids come into her centers and programs. And, you know, it's stories like that of the hardships people face, but also what they do with opportunity when they're given it that really like powers you through tough moments when you're in Washington. What can you say about the process of like bringing that to life? So the the child tax credits So doubling them from a thousand two thousand per child well like What are the challenges of that getting people to compromise?

2:10:13I'm sure there's a lot of politicians playing games with that because maybe it's a Republican They came up with an idea or a Democrat. They came up with an idea and so they don't want to give credit to the idea and And there's probably all kinds of games happening where they, when the game is happening, you probably forget about the families. Each politician thinks about how they can benefit themselves. You forget the serving part of the role you're supposed to be in. There were definitely people I met with in Washington who I felt that was true of. But they all go back to their districts. And I assume that they all have similar experiences to what I had where people share their stories.

2:10:52So there'd be something really cynical about thinking they forget. But you know, some do. You help get people together. What's that take? Trying to get people to compromise, trying to get people to see the common humanity? Well, I think first and foremost, you have to be willing to talk with them. So, you know, one of the policies I advocate for was paid family leave. We left in nine million more Americans had it through a combination of securing it for our federal workforce. I had people in the White House who were pregnant who didn't have access to to paid leave. So we want to keep people attached to the workforce yet when they have an important life event like a child, we create an impossibility for that.

2:11:35You know, some people don't even have access to to unpaid leave if they're part -time workers. And so that and then we also put in place the first ever national tax credit for workers making under $72 ,000 a year, where employers could then offer it to their workers. That was also part of tax cuts. So, you know, part of it is really taking the arguments as to why this is good smart, well -designed policy to people. And, you know, it was one of my big surprises that on certain policy issues that I thought would have been well -socialized. The policies that existed were never shared across the aisle.

2:12:20So people just lived with them. Maybe in hopes that one day they would have the votes to get exactly what they want. But I was surprised by how little discussion there was. So I think part of it is be willing to have those tough discussions with people who may not share your viewpoint and be an active listener when they point out flaws and they have suggestions for changes, not believing that you have a monopoly on good ideas. And I think there has to be a lot of humility in architecting these things. And a policy should benefit from that type of well -rounded input. Yeah, be able to see, like you said, well -designed policies.

2:13:05There's probably the details that are important to... There's just like with architecture and you walk the rooms. There's probably really good designs of policies, like economic policy that helps families, that delivers the maximum amount of money or resources to families that are needed and is not a waste of money. So there's probably really nice designs, nice ideas that are bipartisan, that has nothing to do with politics. as a doages great economic policy, great policies. And that requires listening. Quarice trust too. Like I learned tax cuts was really interesting for me because I met with so many people across the political spectrum on advancing that policy.

2:13:53I really figured out who was willing to deviate from their talking points when the door was closed and who wasn't. And it takes some courage to do that, especially without surety that it would actually get done. Especially if they've campaigned on something that was slightly different. And not everyone has that courage. So through tax cuts, I learned the people who did have that courage. And I went back to that well time and time again on policies that I thought was were important. You know, some were bipartisan, the Great American Outdoors Act, is something. It's incredible policy that... I love that one.

2:14:36Yeah, it's amazing. It's one of the largest pieces of conservation legislation since the national park system was created. And, you know, over 300 million people visit our national parks of ask majority of them being Americans every year. So this is something that is real and beneficial for people's lives, getting rid of the deferred maintenance, permanently funding them. But there are other issues like that that just weren't being prioritized, modernizing Perkins CTE, you know, in vocational education. And it's something I became super passionate about and helped lead the charge on. I think in America for a really long period of time, we've really believed that education stops when you leave high school or college.

2:15:26And that is not true, and that's a dangerous way to think. So how can we both galvanize the private sector to ensure that they continue to train workers for the jobs in no -work coming? And how they train their existing workforce into the new jobs with robotics or machinery or new technologies that are coming down the pike. So galvanizing the private sector to join us in that effort. So whether it's the legislative side, like the actual legislation of Perkins CT, which was focused on vocational education or whether it's the ability to use the White House to galvanize the private sector. We got over 16 million commitments from the private sector to retrain or reskill workers into the jobs of tomorrow.

2:16:15Yeah, there's so many aspects of education that you're helped on. Access to the STEM and computer science education. So the CT thing you're mentioning, modernizing career and technical education, that's millions, millions of people. The act provided nearly $1 .3 billion annually to more than 13 million students to better align the employer needs and all that kind of stuff. Very large scale policies that help a lot of people, it's fascinating. Education often isn't like the bright shiny object everyone's running towards. So one of the hard things in politics when there's something that is good policy.

2:16:53Sometimes it has no momentum because it doesn't have a cheerleader. So where areas of good policy that you can like literally carry across the finish line? Because people tend to run towards what's the news of the day, sort of to try to address whatever issues being talked about on the front pages of papers. and there's so many issues that need to be addressed. And, you know, education is one of them that's just under prioritized, you know, human trafficking. That's an issue that I didn't go to the White House thinking I would work on, but you hear a story of a survivor, and you can't not wanna eradicate one of the greatest evils that the mind can even imagine, you know, the trafficking of people, the exploitation of children.

2:17:44And I think for so many, they assume that this is a problem that doesn't happen on our shores. You know, it's something that you may experience at far -flung destinations across the world, but it's happening there and it's happening here as well. And so through a coalition of people that on both sides of the aisle that I came to trust and to work well with, we were able to get legislation, which the president signed past nine pieces of legislation, combating trafficking at home and abroad, and digital exploitation of children. How much of a toll does that take? Seeing all the problems in the world, it's such a large scale, the immense of it all.

2:18:31Was that hard to walk around with that? Just knowing how much suffering there is in the world. As you're trying to help all that it's also a very visceral recognition that there is suffering in the world. How difficult is that to walk around with? You feel it intensely. You know, we were just talking about human trafficking. I mean, you don't design these policies in the absence of the input of survivors themselves. So you hear their stories. Remember a woman who is really influential in my thinking, Andrea Hipwell, who she was in college, where she was lured out by a guy. She thought was a good guy, started dating him.

2:19:17He gets her hooked on drugs, convinces her to drop out of college and spends the next five years selling her. She only got out when she was arrested. And all too often that's happening too, that the victims being targeted.

2:19:37Not with DOJ around changing that. But now she's helping other survivors get skills and job training. And the therapeutic interventions they need. But you speak with people like Andrea and so many others. And I mean, you can't not your heart get seized by it. And it's both it's motivating and it's hard. It's really hard. I was just talking to a brain surgeon. Many of the surgery has to do. He knows the chances are very low success. And he says that that wears at his armor. It chips away. It's like only so many times can you do that. And thank God he's doing it because I bet you are there are a lot of others that don't choose that particular field because of those low success rates.

2:20:31But you could see the pain and his eyes like maintaining your humanity while doing all of it you could see the story though you could see the family that loves that person. You feel the immensity of that and you feel the heartbreak involved with mortality in that case and with suffering also in that case. and generally all these human trafficking. But even helping families try to stay afloat, trying to break out or escape poverty, all that, you get to see those stories of struggles, not easy.

2:21:10But the people that really feel the humanity of that, feel the pain of that, probably the right people to be politicians. But it's probably also why you can't stay in there too long. It's the only time in my life where you actually feel like there's always a conflict right between work and life and making sure, you know, as a woman, I'd often get asked about, you know, how do you balance work and family? And I never liked that question because balance, it's like a lucif, right? You're one fever away from like no balance. You know, like your child's like one day, what do you do? There goes balance, or you know, you have a huge project with a deadline.

2:21:58There goes balance. I think a better way to frame it is, am I living in accordance with my priorities? Maybe not every day, but every week, you know, every month and reflecting on, have you architected a life that aligns with your priorities so that more often than not, you're where you need to be in that moment. And service at that level was the one time where you really you feel incredibly conflicted about having any priorities other than serving. It's finite. You know, in every business I've built, you're building for duration, you know, and then you go into the White House and it is San Thorn Hourglass, whether it's four years or eight years.

2:22:43It's a finite period of time you have and most people don't last four years. I think the average in the White House is 18 months. It's exhausting. But it's the only time when you're at home with your own children that you feel, you think about all the people you've met and you feel guilty about any time that's spent not advancing those interests to the best of your capacity. And that's a hard thing. That's a really hard feeling as a parent. and it's really challenging then to be present, to always need to answer your phone, to always need to be available. It's very difficult, it's taxing, but it's also the greatest privilege in the world.

2:23:32So through that, the turmoil, that the hardship of that, what was the role of family, through all that, Jared and the kids? What was that like? That was everything, you know, to have that to have the support systems I had in place with with my husband and you know we had we had left New York and wound up in Washington and New York I lived 10 blocks away from my mother -in -law who if I wasn't taking my kids to school she was so we lost some of that which was very hard but we had what mattered which was each other and and you know my kids were young when I got to Washington, Theo, my youngest was eight months old.

2:24:12And Arabella, my oldest, my daughter was five years old. So they were still quite young. We have a son, Joseph, who's three. And, and I think for me, like, the dose of levity coming home at night, and having them there and just joyful. and it was super grounding and important for me. I still remember the, the O, when he was around three, three and a half years old, Jared used to make me coffee every morning and I was like my great luxury that I would sit there. He still makes it for me every morning. I told him I'm never, even though I, I secretly know how to actually work the coffee machine. But I've convinced him that I have no idea how to work the coffee machine.

2:25:04Now I'm gonna be fun. I just skill I don't want to learn because it's one of his like acts of love. He brings me coffee every morning in bed while I read the newspapers and and Theo would watch this and so he got Jared to teach him how to make coffee and Theo learned how to make like a full -blown cappuccino and he was so he had so much joy in every morning bringing me this cappuccino and I remember like the sound of his little steps, you know, like the slide. It's, um, it was so cute coming down the hallway with like perfectly foamed cappuccino. Now I try to get him to make me coffee and he's like, come on, not my face.

2:25:49That was a moment in time, but we had a lot of like little moments like that that were just amazing. So yeah, I got a chance to chat with him and he has a His silliness and sense of humor is, yeah, it's really joyful. I can see how that could be in escape from the madness of Washington of the adult life. And they were young. We really kept like our home life pretty sheltered from everything else. And we were able to do so because they were so young and because they weren't connected to the internet, they were too young for smartphones, all of these things. we were able to shelter and protect them and allow them to have as normal as upbringing as was possible in the context we were living.

2:26:37And they brought me and continued to bring me so much, so much joy, but they were, I mean, without shared and without the kids, it would have been much more lonely. So three kids, you've now upgraded two dogs in a hamster. Well, our second dog, we rescued him thinking we thought it was probably like part German shepherd, part lab is what we were told. He's now, I don't even know if he qualifies as a dog. He's like the size of a horse, a small horse, Simma. So I don't think he has much lab in him. We Joseph has not wanted to do a DNA test because he really wanted a German shepherd. So he's a German Shepherd.

2:27:26He's gigantic. And we also have a hamster, who's the newest addition, because my son Theo, he tried to get a dog as well. Our first dog, Winter, became my daughter's dog, as she wouldn't let her brothers play with him or sleep with him, and was old enough to bully them into submission. So then Joseph wanted a dog in God's Simba. Theo now wants a dog and has Buster the hamster in the interim. So we'll see. What advice would you give to other mothers just having planning on having kids and maybe advice yourself? If you're hearing out this puzzle. I think being a parent, you have to cultivate within yourself like height and levels of empathy.

2:28:13You have to really look at each child and see them for who they are, what they enjoy, what they love and meet them where they're at. And I think that can be enormously challenging when your kids are so different in temperament. You know, as they could older, that difference in temperament may be within the same child depending on the moment of the day. But it's really, I think it's actually made me a much softer person, a much better listener. I think I see people more truly for who they are, as opposed to how I want them to be sometimes. And I think being a parent to three children who are all exceptional and all incredibly different has enabled that in me.

2:29:04I think for me though, they've also been some migratus teachers in that we were talking about the presence you felt when you were in the jungle and the connectivity you felt. And sort of the simple joy. And I think for us as we grow older, we kind of disconnect from that. Like my kids have taught me how to play again. And that's beautiful. I remember just a couple of weeks ago, we had one of these crazy Miami torrential down for us. And Aire Bella comes down, it's around eight o 'clock at night, it's really raining. And she's got rain boots and pajama pants on, and she's going to take the dogs for a long rain.

2:29:49Which, you know, she had all day to walk, but she wasn't doing it because they needed to go for a walk. She was like, this would be fun. And I'm standing in the doorstep watching her and she goes out with Simba and Wincher, this massive dog and this little tiny dog. And I'm watching her walk to the end of the driveway and she's just dancing and it's pouring. And I took off my shoes and I went out and I joined her. And we danced in the rain and even as like a preteen who normally, she like allowed me to experience the joy with her. And it was amazing. We can be so much more fun if we allow ourselves to be more playful.

2:30:26We can be so much more present. I look at Theo loves games. So we play a whole lot of board games, any kind of game. So it started with board games. We do a lot of puzzles that it became card games. I just taught him how to play poker. He loves backgammon, like any kind of game. And he's so fully in them. you know, when he plays, he plays my son Joseph, he loves nature. And he'll say to me sometimes when like I'm taking a picture of something he's observing, like a beautiful sunset, he's like, mom, just experience it. I'm like, yes, you're right Joseph, just experience it. You know, so they, those kids have taught me so much about sort of reconnecting with what's real and what's true and being present in the moment and experiencing joy.

2:31:18They always give you permission to sort of reignite the inner child to be a kid again. And it's interesting when you said that the puzzle of noticing each human being, like what makes them beautiful, the unique characteristics, like what they're good at, the way they want to be mentored. I often see that, especially with coaches and athletes, young athletes aspiring to be great. Each athlete needs to be trained in a different way. Like, I, for example, was so mean to a softer approach. Like with me, I always like a dictatorial approach. I like the coach to be this like menacing figure. That's when that brought out the best of me.

2:32:07I didn't want to be friends with the coach. Like, I want to almost, I think, we're at the same level, yell that, like, put to be pushed. But that doesn't work for everybody. And that's what risk you have to take is in the coach context of, like, because you can't just yell at everybody. You have to figure out, like, what does each person need? And when you have kids, I imagine the puzzle is even harder. And when they all need different things, but yet co -exist and are sometimes competitive with one another. So you'll be at a dinner table, then the amount of times I get, well, that's not fair.

2:32:42Why did you let... And life isn't fair. And by the way, I'm not here to be fair. I'm trying to give you each what you need. Especially when I've been working really hard. And the White House said, okay, well, now we have a Sunday, and we have these hours, and I'll have a grand plan. And we're going to make it count. And it's going to involve... hot chocolate and sleds, you know, whatever it is that like my great adventure, they were going to go play mini -gall and then I come down all psyched up all ready to go and the kids of zero interest. And there have been a lot of times I've been like we're doing this thing and then I realize wait a second, you know, like sometimes you just like plop down on the floor and start playing magnetiles.

2:33:30You know, and like that's where they need you. And so those of us who have sort of like alpha personalities, who sometimes it's just witness, like witness what they need. Don't like play with them and allow them to lead the play. Don't force them down a road. You may think is more interesting or productive or educational or edifying, you know, just be with them, observe them. and then show them that you are genuinely curious about the things that they are genuinely curious about. I think there's a lot of love when you do that. Also, there's just fascinating puzzles. I was talking to a friend yesterday and she has four kids and they fight a lot.

2:34:17And she generally wants to break up the fights, but she's like, I'm not sure if I'm just supposed to let them fight, can they figure it out? Or you always break them up because I'm told that it's okay for them to fight kids to do that. They kind of figure out their own situation. That's part of like the growing up process. But you want to always, especially if it's physical, they're like pushing each other. You want to kind of stop it. But at the same time, it's also part of the play, part of the dynamics. And that's the puzzle you also have to figure out. And plus, you're probably worried that they're going to get hurt.

2:34:51If they're... I think there's like, when it gets physical, that's like, okay, we have to intervene. I know you're into martial arts, but that's normally like the red line. You know, once it tips into that, but there is always that, you know, like you have to allow them to problem solve for themselves. Like a little interpersonal conflict is good. It's really hard when you try to navigate something because everyone thinks you're taking their sides. You have oftentimes incomplete information. It's, I think for parents, what tends to happen to is we see our kids fighting with each other in a way that all kids do.

2:35:29And we start to project into the future and like catastrophize. You know, if like my two sons are going through a moment where they're like oil and water. Anything one wants to do, the other doesn't want to do. It's like a very interesting moment. So my instinct is they're not going to like each other when they're 25. You know, you sort of project into the future as opposed to recognizing this is a stage that I too went through and it's normal and it's not building it in your mind into into something that's unnecessarily Consequential it's short -term formative conflict. Yeah so ever since 2016 the The number and the level of attacks you've been under has been steadily increasing has been super intense How do you walk through the fire of that you've been?

2:36:27Very stoic about the whole thing. I don't think I've ever seen you respond to an attack You just let it pass over you you stay positive and you focus on solving problems and you didn't engage while being in DC, you didn't engage into the back and forth fire of the politics. So what's your philosophy behind that? I appreciate your saying that I was very stoic about it. I think, you know, I feel things pretty deeply. So initially, some of that really took me off guard, like some of the derivative love and hatred, some of the intensity of the attacks. And there were times when it was so easy to counter it, I'd even write something out and say, well, I'm gonna press send and never did.

2:37:23I felt that sort of getting into the mud, fighting back, it didn't run true to who I am as a human being. like it didn't, it felt at odds with who I am and how I want to spend my time. So I think as a result, I was oftentimes on the receiving end of a lot of a lot of cheap shots. And I'm okay with that because it's sort of the way I know how to be in the world. I was focused on things I thought mattered more. And you know, I think part of me also internalized, there's a concept in Judaism some called Lushenhara, which is translated into, I think, quite literally evil speech. And the idea that, you know, speaking poorly of another is almost the moral equivalent to murder because you can't really repair it.

2:38:19You can apologize, but you can't repair it. But another component of that is that it does as much damage to the person saying the words. Then it does the person receiving them. And I think about that a lot. I talk about this concept with my kids a lot. And I'm not willing to pay the price of that fleeting and momentary satisfaction of sort of swinging back because I think it would be too expensive for my soul and and that's how I kind of made peace with it because I think that's just that feels more true for me. But it is a little bit contrary in politics. It's it's definitely It's definitely a contrary and viewpoint To to not get into the fray.

2:39:14Actually, someday I love Dolly Parton says that she doesn't condemn or criticize. She loves and accepts. And I like that. It feels right for me. I also like that you said that words have power. It's not. Sometimes people say, well, words, when you speak negatively of others, oh, that's just words. But I think there's a cost to that. There's a cost like you said to your soul. And there's a cost in terms of the damage you can do to the other person, whether it's to their reputation publicly or to them privately, it's just as a human being psychologically. And in the place that it puts them, because they think they start thinking negatively in general, and then maybe they respond, and there's this vicious downward spiral that happens.

2:40:00They're almost like we don't intend to, but it destroys everybody in the process. You quote it, Alan Watts. I love him. And saying, quote, you're under no obligation to be the same person you wore five minutes ago. So how have the years in DC and the years after change you? I love Alan Wads too. I listen to his lecture sometimes falling asleep. He's got like an on plane. He's got like the most soothing voice. But I love what he said about you have no obligation to be who you were five minutes ago. because we should always feel that we have the ability to evolve and grow and and and better ourselves like I think further than that If we don't look back on her who we were a few years ago with some level of embarrassment We're not growing enough, right?

2:40:55So there's nothing I when I look back. I'm like oh, you know, it's I feel like that That feeling is you know because you're growing into to hopefully, you know, sort of a better version of yourself. And I hope and feel that that's been true for me as well. I think the person I am today, you know, we spoke in the beginning of our discussion about some of my earliest ambitions in real estate and in fashion and those were amazing adventures and incredible experiences in government. And I feel today that all of those ambitions are more fully integrated into me as a human being. I'm much more comfortable with the various pieces of my personality and that any professional drive is more integrated into more simple pleasures.

2:41:51Like everything for me has gotten like much simpler and easier in terms of what I want to do and what I want to be. And I think that's where where my kids have been my teachers just being fully present and enjoying the little moments. It doesn't mean I'm any less driven than I was before. It's just more a part of me than being the all -consuming energy one has in their 20s. Yeah, just like you said, will your mom be able to let go and enjoy the water, the sun, the beach? Yeah. and enjoy the moment, the simplicity of the moment. I think a lot about the fact that, you know, for a lot of young people, they really know what they want to do, but they don't actually know who they are.

2:42:43And then I think as you get older, hopefully you know who you are, and you're much more comfortable with ambiguity around what you want to do and accomplish. You're more flexible in your thinking around those things. And give yourself permission to be who you are. Yeah. You made the decision not to engage in the politics of the 2024 campaign. If it's okay let me read what you wrote in the topic, quote, I love my father very much. This time around I'm choosing to prioritize my young children and the private life we're creating as a family. I do not plan to be involved in politics. While I will always love and support my father going forward, I will do so outside the political arena.

2:43:25I'm grateful to have had the honor of serving the American people and I will always be proud of many of our administrations and accomplishments. So can you explain your thinking, your philosophy behind that decision? I think first and foremost, it was a decision rooted in me being a parent, really thinking about what they need from me now. You know, politics is a rough, rough business. And I think it's one that you also can't dabble in. I think you have to either be all in or all out. And I know today the costs they would pay for me being all in. Emotionally in terms of my absence at such a formative point in their life.

2:44:17and I'm not willing to make them bear that cost. I serve for four years and feel so privileged to have done it, but as their mom, I think it's really important that I do what's right for them. And I think there are a lot of ways you can serve. I think there's obviously, we talked about the enormity, the scale of what can be accomplished in government service, but I think there's something equally valuable about helping within your own community. I volunteer with the kids a lot and we feel really good about that service. It's different, but it's no less meaningful. So I think there are other ways, there are other ways to serve.

2:45:03I also think for politics is a pretty dark world. There's a lot of darkness, a lot of negativity, and it's just really at odds with what feels good for me as a human being. And it's a really rough business. So for me and my family, it feels right to not participate. So it wears on your soul. and yeah, there is a bit, at least from an outside perspective, a bit of darkness in that part of our world. I wish you didn't have to be this way. Me too. I think part of that darkness is just watching all the legal turmoil that's going on. What's it like for you to see that your father involved in that going through that?

2:45:59On a human level, it's my father. And I love him very much, so it's painful to experience. But ultimately, I wish it didn't have to be this way. I like it that underneath all this, I love my father is the thing that you lead with. And that's so true. It is family. And I hope I missed all this. Tormor love is the thing that wins. It usually does. In the end, yes. In the short term, there is like we were talking about this a bit of big ring. But at least no more duels. No more duels. You mentioned dolly part.

2:46:42That's a segue. Listen, I'm not very good at this thing. I'm trying to fix it. Okay, that we both love dolly part. I mean, so you're big into live music. So maybe you can mention why you love Dali Paran. I definitely would love to talk. I would love to interview her. She's such an icon. She's such a incredible woman. What I love about her, and I've really come to love her in recent years is she's so authentically herself, and she's obviously so talented, and so accomplished, and this extraordinary woman, but I just feel like she has no conflict within herself as to who she is. She reminds me a lot of my mom in that way and it's super refreshing and and really beautiful to observe somebody.

2:47:30Somebody who's so in the public eye being so fully secure in in who they are, what their talent is and what drives them. So I think she's she's amazing. and she leads with a lot of love and positivity. So I think she's very cool. I hope you have a long conversation. Yeah, she's like, okay, so there's many things to say about her. At first, like, incredibly great musician, songwriters, performer. Yeah. Also can create an image and have fun with it. You know, like, have fun being herself like over the top. It feels that way, right? Like, she's really, she enjoys. After all these years, it feels like she's enjoying it.

2:48:07She, like, enjoys what she does. And you also have the sense that if she didn't she wouldn't do it. That's right. And just an iconic country musician country music singer. Yeah. There's a lot we've talked about a lot of musicians. What do you enjoy? You mentioned Adele seeing her perform hang out with her. Yeah, I mean she's extraordinary. Her voice is unreal. So she is, I find her to be so talented and she's so unique in that three -year -olds love her music. She was actually the first concert Arabilever went to and Madison Square Garden when she was around four and nine -year -olds love her music and that's pretty rare to have that kind of bandwidth of resonance.

2:48:50So I think she's so talented. We actually just saw her. I took all three kids in Las Vegas around a month ago. Alice Johnson, whose case I had worked with in the White House. So my father commuted her sentence. Her case was brought to me by a friend Kim Kardashian. And she came to the show we all went together with some mutual friends. And I was like a very profound. It was amazing to see Adele, but it was a very profound experience for me to have with my kids because she rode with us in a car on the way to the show. And she talked to my kids about her experience in her story And how her case found its way to me.

2:49:31And I think for young children, it's very abstract, you know, policy. And so for her to be able to share with them this was a very beautiful moment and led to a lot of really incredible conversations with each of my kids about our time and service because, you know, they gave up a lot for me to do it. And actually, Alice told them the most beautiful story about the plays she used to put on in prison, how these shows were like the hottest ticket in town. Like you could knock it into them. They always extended their run. But for the people who were in them, a lot of those men and women had never experienced applause.

2:50:14Nobody had ever shown up at their games or at their plays or and clapped for them. and the emotional experience of just being able to give someone that, you know, being able to stand and applaud for someone and how meaningful that was and she was showing us pictures from these different productions. It was a really, it was a beautiful moment. Alice actually after her sentence was commuted and she came out of prison together, we worked on 23 different and partens our commutations. So the impact of her experience and how she was able to take her opportunity and create that same opportunity for others who were deserving and who she believed in was very beautiful.

2:51:04So anyway, that was an extraordinary concert experience for my kids to be able to have that moment. What a story. So just that's sort of the... uh, because it's here we are dancing at a del exactly exactly like that turning point six years later was almost to the day. Yeah. So that that policy that meeting meaning of the my results in a major turning point in her life analysis life and not only her dancing with a del and now we're out of del. Yeah. I mean, you mentioned also there I've seen commutations where it's it's an opportunity to step in and consider the ways that the justice system does not always work well.

2:51:45I can case when it's non -violent crime and drug offenses, there's a case of a person you mentioned that received a life sentence for selling weed. And it's just the number, it's like hundreds of thousands of people are in the federal in jail and system for drug, for selling drugs. That's the only thing with no violence on their record whatsoever. And obviously there's a lot of complexity. There's the details matter, but oftentimes the justice system does not do right in the way we think right is. And it's nice to be able to step in and help people like and direct. They're overlooked and they have no advocate.

2:52:31Jared and I helped in a small way on his effort, but he really spearheaded the effort on criminal justice reform through the first step act, which was an enormously consequential piece of legislation that gave so many people another opportunity. And that was amazing. So working with him closely on that was a beautiful thing for us to also experience together, but in the final days of the administration, and you know, you're not getting legislation passed. And anything you do administratively is gonna be probably overturned by an incoming administration. So, you know, how do you use that time for maximum results?

2:53:11And I really like dug in on, on pardons and commutations that I thought were, were overdue and were worthy. And, and my last night in Washington, DC, I, the gentleman you mentioned, Corvon, And I was on the phone with his mother at 1230 in the morning telling her that her son would be getting out the next day. So and it felt really, it's one person, but you see with Alice, like the ripple effect of the commutation granted to her and her ability and the impact she'll have within her family with her grandkids. And now she's an advocate for so many others who are voiceless. You know, it felt like, it felt like the perfect way to end four years to be able to, to be able to call those parents and call those kids in some cases and give them the news that a loved one was coming home.

2:54:04And I just love the cool image of you Kim Kardashian and Alex just dancing on a del show with the kids. Well, Kim wasn't at the ad -delish, but she had connected us. It was beautiful. Yeah, the way it dealt, like, can hold just like the bad assness you have. on stage. She does like hard break songs like Butter than anyone or no it's not even hard break. Like what's that genre of song like rolling in the deep like a little anger, a little love, a little like something, a little attitude and just like one of the greatest voices ever. All that together just her by herself. Yeah you can strip it down and the power of her voice.

2:54:45You know I think about that. One of the things we're talking about live music. like one of the amazing things now is you, there's so much incredible concert material that's been uploaded to YouTube. So sometimes I just sit there and watch these like old shows. We both love Stevie Ray von, like watching him perform. You can even find old videos of like Django Reinhardt. You got me. I got you. I got you. I got you. I got you. I got you. I got you. of Stevie's is Texas flood. Well, my bucket list is to learn how to play it. It's bucket list. It's bucket list. You made me feel so good because for me, Texas flood was the first solo and guitar I've ever learned because for me it was the impossible solo.

2:55:31And then that was so I worked really hard to learn it. It's like one of the most iconic sort of blues songs, Texas blues songs. And now you made me fall in love with the song again. Want to play it out live at the very least put it up on YouTube. And that's because it is it's so fun to improvise and when you lose yourself in the song, it truly is a blue song. You get out of fun with it. I hope you do do that. Throw on a stevery one. Regardless. I want you to play it for me. 100%. But he's he's amazing. And you know, there's so many great performers that are playing live now. Um, you know, I just saw Chris Stapleton show.

2:56:10He's an amazing country artist. He's too good. He's so good. That guy is so good. Lucas Nellison's one of my favorite to see live. And there's so many incredible songwriters and musicians that are out there touring today. But I think you also, you can go online and watch some of these old performances. Like Django Reinhardt was the first, because I torture myself. Was the first song I learned to play on the guitar. and it took me like nine months to a year. It was, I mean, I should have chosen a different song, but UA2 Monomore, one of his songs was, and it was like finger style, and I was just going through and grinding it out, and that's kind of how I started to learn to play by playing that song, but to see these old videos of him playing, you know, without all his fingers and the skill and the dexterity.

2:57:01One of my favorite live performances is actually who really influenced Adele as a Ritha Franklin. And she did this, she did a version of amazing grace. Have you ever seen this video? No. I cry. Look up. It was in LA. It was like the temple missionary Baptist church. Talk about stripped down. She's literally it. I mean, just listen to this. Oh. Oh. Oh. Oh. Oh. Well, you could do one note and you could just kill it. The pain, the soulfulness, the spirit you feel in her when you watch this. That's true. A delkary, some of that spirit also, right? Yeah. And you can take away all the instruments with the Dell and just have that voice.

2:57:55And it's so commanding. And it's so. Anyway, you watch this and you see the arc of also the experience of the people in the choir and then starting to join in. Anyway, it's amazing. I love watching like Queen, like Freddie Mercury, Queen performances. Like in terms of vocals and just like great stage presence. That live aid performance is like considered one of the best of all. I've watched that so many times. He's so cool. Can we pull up that for a second? Go to that part where he's saying radio gaga and they're all mimicking in his arm. It's so cool.

2:58:39Look at that. Oh, that's that guy. So that's an example of a person that was born to be on stage. So good. Well, we were talking surfing. We were talking. You did see, I think live music is one of those kind of rare moments where you can really be present. Where something about the anticipation of choosing what show you're going to go to and then waiting for the date to come and normally it happens in the context of community, you go with friends and and then allowing yourself to sort of fall into it is is incredible. So you've been training Jiu Jitsu? Yes, trying. I mean, I've seen you do Jiu Jitsu.

2:59:24You're extremely, you're very athletic. You know how to use your body to commit violence. Maybe there's better ways of phrasing that. But anyway. I'm in a skill that's been honed over. Yeah. I mean, what do you like about Jiu Jitsu? Well, first of all, I love the way I came to it. It was my daughter. I think I told you this story. She's at 11. She told me that she wanted to learn self -defense, and she wanted to learn how to protect herself, which I just, as a mom, I was so proud about because at 11, I was not thinking about defending myself. I loved that she had that desire and awareness. So I called some friends, actually a mutual friend of ours, and asked around for people who I could work with in Miami, and they recommended the Volentay Brothers Studio.

3:00:19And you've met all three of them now. They're these remarkable human beings, and they've been so wonderful for our family. I mean, first starting with Arabella, used to take her, and then she kind of encouraged me, and she'd sort of pull me into it, and I started doing it with her. and then Joseph and Theo saw us doing it. They wanted to start doing it, so now they joined and then Jared joined, so now we're all doing human zoo. And for me, there's something really empowering, knowing that I have some basic skills to defend myself. I think it's something as humans, we've kind of gotten away from.

3:00:56You look at any other animal, and even the giraffe, they'll use their neck, the lion, the tiger, every species, and then there's us, you know, who most of us don't, and I didn't know how to protect myself. And I think that it gives you a sense of confidence and also gives you kind of a sense of calm, you know, knowing how to de -escalate rather than an escalate a situation. And I also think as part of the training,

3:01:30you develop more natural awareness when you're out and about. And I feel like especially, you know, everyone's, you get on an elevator and like the first thing people do is pick up their phone, you're walking down the street, their people are getting hit by cars because they're walking into traffic. I think as you start to get this training, you become much more aware of the broader context of what's happening around you, which is really healthy and good as well. But it's been beautiful. They actually, the Valentay brothers, they have this 7 -5 -3 code that was developed with some of the sort of samurai principles in mind.

3:02:08And all of my kids have memorized it. And they'll talk to me about it. at the O, he's eight years old, he'll, he'll able to recite all 15. So, you know, benevolence and and fitness and nutrition and flow and awareness and balance and it's an unbelievable thing and they'll actually integrate it into conversations where they'll talk about something that happened. Yeah, rectitude, courage. But, nevertheless, respect, honesty, honor, loyalty. So, this is not about judicisous techniques or fighting techniques. This is about a way of life, about the way you interact with the world, where other people exercise nutrition, rest, hygiene, positivity.

3:02:50That's more on the physical side of things, awareness, balance, and flow. It's the mind, the body, the soul, effectively, is how they break it out. And the kids can only advance and get their stripes if they really internalize this. They give examples of each of them and and my own kids will come home from school and they'll tell me examples of how things happen that We're in a line with the 753 code. So it's it's a framework much like religion is in our house and and can be for others. It's a framework to discuss things that happen in their life large and small and It's been beautiful. So so I do think that like body, mind, connection is super strong and she did so.

3:03:32So there's many things I love about the Valenti brothers, but one of them is the how rooted it is in philosophy and history of martial arts in general You know a lot of places you'll practice the sport of it. Maybe there are of it But to recognize the history yeah, and what it means to be a martial artist broadly on and off the mat That's really great and the other thing is great is they also don't forget the self defense route to actual fighting routes So it's not just a sport. It's a way to defend yourself on the street in all situations. And that gives you a confidence in just like you said, an awareness about your own body and awareness about others.

3:04:10It is, you know, sadly we forget, but there is a, it's a world full of violence or the capacity for violence. So it's good to have an awareness of that and a confidence how to essentially avoid it. A hundred percent. I've seen it with all of my kids and myself how much they've benefited from it, but that self -defense component and the philosophical elements of, you know, they, Pedro, will often tell them about like, Wu Wei and sort of soft resistance and some of these sort of more Eastern philosophies that they get exposed to through their practice there that are sort of non -resistance that are beautiful and hard concepts to internalize as an adult, but especially when you're 12, 10, and 8 respectively.

3:05:07So it's been an amazing experience for us all. I love people like Pedro because he's like finding books that are like Japanese and translating them to figure out the details of a particular history. He's like an ultra scholar of martial arts and I love that. I love when people give everything, every part of themselves to the thing they're practicing. People have been fighting each other for a very long time. From the Colosseum on, you can't fake anything, you can't lie about anything. It's truly honest. You're there and you either win or lose. It's simple. And that's like, it's also humbling. The reality of that is humbling.

3:05:51And oftentimes in life, things are not that simple, not that black and white. So it's nice to have that sometimes. That's the biggest thing I gained from Jiu Jitsu is getting my ass kicked, which is the humbling. And it's nice to just get humbled in a very clear way. Sports in general are great for that. I think surfing probably, I think I can imagine just, you know, yeah, face planting, not being able to stay on the board. It's humbling. And the power of the wave is humbling. So just like your mom, you're an adventurer. Are there your bucket list? It's probably like 120 pages. Is there things like just pop to mind that you're like thinking about, especially in the near future, just saying.

3:06:36Well, I hope it always is long. I hope I've never exhausted exploring all the things I'm curious about. I always tell my kids whenever they say, you know, mom, I'm bored. Only boring people get bored. There's too much to learn. There's too much to learn. So I've got a long one. I think obviously there are some immediate, tactical, interesting things that I'm doing. I'm incubating a bunch of businesses. is I'm investing in a bunch of companies that hopefully I'll always continue to do that. Some of the fun things I'm doing in real estate now. So those are all on the list of things I'm passionate and excited about continuing to explore and learn.

3:07:15But in terms of the ones or more pure sort of adventure or hobby, I think I'd like to climb Mount Kilimanjaro. Actually, I know I would. The only thing keeping me from doing it in the short term is I feel like it'd be such a great experience to do with my kids. And I'd love to have that experience with them. I also told at her Bella, we were talking about this archery competition that happens in Mongolia and she loves horseback riding. So I'm like, I feel like that would be an amazing thing to experience together. I want to get barreled by a wave and learn how to play Texas flood. I want to see the northern lights like I want to go and experience that.

3:07:57I feel like that would be really beautiful. I want to get my black belt like you have. Nice. I asked you to, how long did it take? But so I want to get my black belt and you did see that's like, that's going to be a longer term goal, but within the next decade, yeah, a lot of things. You know, I'd love to go to space. I thought not just space. I think I'd look to go to the moon. Like step on the moon. Yeah, or float, you know, in close proximity, like that famous photo. Yeah, just you and I. In this space, dude. I feel like Mars is at this point in my life. Well, the moon's like four days feels more manageable.

3:08:43I don't know, but the sunset on Mars is blue. It's the opposite color. I hear it's beautiful. It might be worth it. I don't know. You negotiate with you. Let me know how it goes. Let me know how it goes. I think actually just even going to space where we can look back on Earth. Yeah. I think that just to see this little pale blue dot. Pale blue dot, just all the stuff that ever happened in human civilization is on that. And to be able to look at it and just be in awe. Now I think that's the thing that will go away. I think being interplanetary, my hope is that that heightens for us how rare it is what we have, like how precious the earth is.

3:09:31I hope that it has that effect because I think there's a big component to interplanetary travel that kind of taps into this kind of manifest destiny and inclination, like the human desire to conquer territory and expand the footprint of civilization that sometimes feels much more rooted in dominance and conquest than curiosity wonder. And obviously I think there's, you know, maybe an existential imperative for it at some point or a strategic or and security one, but I hope that what feels inevitable at this moment, I mean, you know Elon Musk and what he's doing with SpaceX and Jeff Bezos and others, it feels like it's not an if, it's a when at this point.

3:10:31I hope it also underscores the need to protect what we have here. Yeah, and I hope it's the curiosity that drives that exploration and I hope the exploration will give us a deeper appreciation of the thing we have back home and that Earth will always be home and it's a home that we protect and celebrate. What gives you hope about the future of this thing we have going on? Human civilization, the whole thing. I think I feel a lot of hope when I'm in nature. I feel a lot of hope when I am experiencing people who are good and honest and pure and true and passionate and that's not an uncommon experience.

3:11:17So those experiences give me hope. Yeah, other humans were pretty cool. I love humanity. We're awesome, you know, not always, but but we're pretty good species. Yeah, for the most part, on the whole, we do all right. We do all right. We create some beautiful stuff and I hope we keep creating. and I hope you keep creating. You've already done a lot of amazing things, build a lot of amazing things, and I hope you keep building and creating and doing a lot of beautiful things in this world. Ivanka, thank you so much for talking today. Thank you, Lex. Thanks for listening to this conversation with Ivanka Trump.

3:11:58To support this podcast, please check out our sponsors in the description. Now, let me leave you with some words from Marcus Aurelius. dwell on the beauty of life. Watch the stars and see yourself running with them. Thank you for listening. I hope to see you next time.