The following is a conversation with Ivanka Trump, Businesswoman, Real Estate Developer, and former Senior Advisor to the President of the United States. I've gotten to know Ivanka well over the past two years. We've become good friends, hitting it off right away over our mutual love of reading, especially philosophical writings from Marcus Aurelius, Joseph Campbell, Alan Watts, Victor Franklin, and so on. She is a truly kind, compassionate, and thoughtful human being.
In the past, people have attacked her. In my view, to get indirectly at her dad, Donald Trump, as part of a dirty game of politics and clickbait journalism. These attacks obscured many projects and efforts, often bipartisan, that she helped get done, and they obscured the truth of who she is as a human being. After all that, she never returned the attacks with anything but kindness, and always walked
through the fire of it all with grace. For this, and much more, she is an inspiration, and I'm honored to be able to call her a friend. Oh, and for those living in the United States, happy upcoming Fourth of July. It's both an anniversary of this country's declaration of independence and an anniversary of my immigrating here to the U.S. I am forever grateful for this amazing country, for this amazing life, for all of you who have given the chance to a silicate like me, from the bottom of my
heart. Thank you. I love you all. Now, a quick few second mention of each sponsor. Check them out in the description. It's the best way to support this podcast. We got cloaked for protecting your personal information, Shopify for e-commerce, NetSweets for business management, H-Leap for NAPS, and ExpressVPN for privacy and security on the inner webs. Choose what is in my friends. Also, if you want to work with our amazing team, or just want to get in touch with me, go to lexframedme.com
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designing beautiful city skylines, especially in New York City. I love the New York City skyline. So describe the origins of that love of building. You know, I think there's both an incredible confidence and a total insecurity that comes with youth. So I remember 15. I would look out over the city skyline for my bedroom window in New York and imagine where I could contribute and add value in a way that, you know, I look back on and completely laugh at,
you know, how confident I was. But I've known since my earliest memories. It's something I've wanted to do. And I think I fundamentally, I love art. I love expressions of beauty in so many different forms. With architecture, there's the tangible. And I think that marriage of function and something that exists beyond yourself is very compelling. I also grew up in a family where my mother was in the real estate business working alongside my father. My father was in the business.
And I saw the joy that had brought to them. So I think I had these natural positive associations. They used to send me as a little girl renderings of projects they were about to embark on with notes asking if I would hurry up and finish schools so I could come join them. So I had these positive associations. But I came from something within myself. I think that as I got older and as I got involved in real estate, I realized that it was so multidisciplinary. You have, of course,
the design, but you also have engineering, the brass tax of construction. There's time management, there's project planning, just the duration of time to complete one of these iconic structures. It's enormous. You can contribute a decade of your life to one project. So while you have to think big picture, it means you really have to care deeply about the details because you live with them. So it allowed me to flex a lot of areas of interest. I love that confidence of youth.
It's funny because we're all so insecure, right? In the most basic interactions, but yet our ambitions are so unbridled. In a way that makes you blush as an adult. I think it's fun. It's fun to tap into that energy. Yeah, where everything is possible. I think some of the greatest builders I've ever met always have that little flame of everything is possible still burning. That is a silly notion from youth, but it's not so silly. Everybody tells you something is
impossible, but if you continue believing that it's possible. I have that naive notion that you could do it even if it's exceptionally difficult. That naive notion turns into some of the greatest projects ever done. 100%. Going out to space or building a new company where everybody said it's impossible, taking on that gigantic company and disrupting them and revolutionizing how stuff is done or doing huge building projects where like you said so many people are involved in making that
happen. We get conditioned out of that feeling. We start to become insecure and we start to rely on the input or validation of others and it takes us away from that core drive and ambition. It's fun to reflect on that and also to smile because whether you can execute or not time will tell. That was very much my childhood. Yeah, of course, it's important to also have the humility
of once you get humbled and realize that it's actually a lot of work to build. I'm amazed just looking at big buildings, big bridges that human beings are able to get together and build those things. That's one of my favorite things about architecture is just like wow, it's a manifestation of the fact that humans can collaborate and do something like epic much bigger than themselves and it's like a statue that represents that and it can be there for a long time.
I think in some ways you look out at different city skylines and it's almost like a visual depiction of ambition realized. It's a testament to somebody's dream, not somebody, whole ensemble of people's dreams and visions and triumphs and in some cases failures if the projects weren't properly executed. So you look at these skylines and it's a testament to that. I actually heard once architecture described as frozen music that really resonated with me. I love thinking about a city skyline as
an ensemble of dreams realized. Yeah, I remember the first time I went to Dubai and I was watching them dredging out and creating these man-made islands and I remember somebody once saying to me they're an architect, an architect actually who collaborated with us on our tower in Chicago. He said that the only thing that limited what an architect could do in that area was gravity and
imagination. So it's you know yeah but gravity is a trick you want to work against and that's where civil engineers one of my favorite things I used to build bridges in high school for physical classes. You have to build bridges and you compete on how much weight you can carry relative to their own weight. You study how good it is by finding its breaking point and that was a deep appreciation for me on the miniature scale of on a large scale what people are able to do with civil engineering
because gravity is a trick you want to fight against. It definitely is in bridges I mean some of the iconic designs in in our country are incredible bridges. So if we think of skylines as ensembles of dreams realized you spent quite a bit of time in New York. What do you love about and what do you think about the New York City skyline? What's a good picture we're looking
here at a few. I mean looking over the water. Well I think the water is an unbelievable feature of the New York skyline as you see the island on approach and oftentimes you'll see like in these images you'll see these towers reflecting off of the water surface. So I think there's something very beautiful and unique about that. When I look at New York I see this unbelievable sort of tapestry
of different types of architecture. So you have the Gothic form as represented by buildings like the Woolworth building or you'll have Art Deco as represented by buildings like Forty Wall Street or the Chrysler building or Rockefeller Center and then you'll have these unbelievable super modern examples or modernist examples like Liever House and Seagrames House. So you have all of these different styles and I think to build in New York you're really building the best of the best.
So nobody's giving New York their sort of second rate work and especially when a lot of those buildings were built there was this incredible competition happening between New York and Chicago for kind of dominance of the sky and for who could create the greatest skyline that sort of raced to the sky when skyscrapers were first being built starting in Chicago and then New York
surpassing that in terms of height at least with the Empire State Building. So I love sort of contextualizing the skylines as well and thinking back to when different components that are so iconic were added and the context in which they came into being. I got to ask you about this. There's a pretty cool page that I've been following an X architecture tradition and they celebrate sort of traditional schools of architecture and you mentioned Gothic the tapestry. This is in
Chicago the Tribune Tower in Chicago. So what do you think about that sort of the the old and the new mix together do you like Gothic? I think it's hard to look at something like the Tribune Tower
and not be completely in awe. I think this is an unbelievable building. Look at those buttresses and you've got gargoyles hanging off of it and you know this style was reminiscent of the cathedrals of Europe which was very kind of invogue in like the 1920s here in here in America actually I would mention the Woolworth Tower before the Woolworth Tower was actually referred to as the Cathedral of Commerce and because it also was in that Gothic style. So this was built maybe a
decade before the Tribune Building but the Tribune Building to me is almost not replicable. It personally really resonates with me because one of the first projects I ever worked on was building Trump Chicago which was this beautiful elegant super modern all glass skyscraper
right across the way. So it was right across the river so I would look out the windows as it was under construction or be standing quite literally on rebar of the building looking out at the Tribune and incredibly inspired and now the reflective glass of the building reflects back not only the river but but also the Tribune Building and other buildings on Michigan Avenue. Do you like it when the
glass the reflective properties of the glass as part of the architecture? I think it depends like they have super reflective glass that sometimes doesn't work it's distracting and I think it's one component of sort of a composition that comes together. I think in this case the glass on on Trump Chicago
is very beautiful. It was designed by Adrian Smith of Skidmore Owings and Marilla a major architecture firm who actually did the Burj Khalifa in Dubai which is I think like an awe-inspiring example of modern architecture but glass is tricky it's you have to get the shade right. You know some glass has a lot of iron in it and gets super green and that's a choice and sometimes you have more blue properties blue silver like you see here but it's part of the
character. How do you know what it's actually going to look like when it's done? Like is it possible
to imagine that because it feels like there's so many variables? I think so I think if you have a vivid imagination and if you sit with it and then if you also go beyond the rendering right you have to you have to live with the materials so you don't build a 92 story building glass curtain wall and not deeply examine the actual curtain wall before purchasing it so you have to spend a lot of time with the actual materials not just the beautiful sort of artistic renderings which can be
incredibly misleading. The goal is actually that the the end result is much much more compelling than than what the architect or artist rendered but oftentimes that's very much not the case. You know sometimes also you mention context you know sometimes I'll see renderings of building some like wait what about the building right to the left of it that's blocking 80% of its views of the you know the you know architects will remove things that are inconvenient they'll see so you
have to you have to be rooted in reality. And I love the notion of living with them with the materials in contrast to living in the imagined world of the drawings so the both both are probably important because you have to dream the thing to existence but you also have to be rooted in like
what things actually going to look like in the context of everything else. One of the underlying principles of the page I just mentioned and I hear folks mention this a lot is that modern architecture is kind of boring that it lacks soul and beauty and you just spoke with admiration for both modern and for gothic for older architectures so do you think there's truth that
modern architecture is boring? I'm living in Miami currently so I see a lot of super uninspired class boxes on the waterfront but I think exceptional things shouldn't be the norm you know they're typically rare so and I think in modern architecture you find an abundance of amazing examples of
super compelling and innovative buildings of science I mean I mentioned the birch califa it is awe inspiring this is an unbelievably striking example of modern architecture you look at some older examples the city opera house and so I think there's unbelievable there you go I mean that's
like a needle in the sky yeah reaching out to the stars it's huge and in the context of a city where there's a lot of height so it's it's unbelievable but I think one of the things that's probably exciting me the most about architecture right now is the innovation that's happening within on
you know there's example of robotic fabrication there's 3d printing your friend and who you introduce me to not too long ago nary oxman which he's doing at the intersection of biology and technology and thinking about how to create more sustainable development practices quite literally
trying to create materials that will biodegrade back into the earth I think there's something really cool happening now with the rediscovery of ancient building techniques so you have self-healing concrete that was used by the Romans an art and a practice of using volcanic ash and lime that's
now being rediscovered and is more critical than ever as we think about how much of our infrastructure relies on concrete and how much of that is failing on the most basic level so I think actually it's a really really exciting time for innovation and architecture and I think there are some
incredible examples of of of modern design that are are really exciting but generally I think Roosevelt said that comparison is the thief of joy so it's hard you know you look at the Tribune building you look at some of these iconic structures one of the buildings that most proud to have
worked on was the historic old post office building in Washington DC you look at a building like that and it feels like it has no equal also there's a psychological element where people tend to want to complain about the new and celebrate the old oh it's like the history of time so
there's just people are always kind of skeptical and concerned about change and it's true that there's a lot of stuff that's new that's not good it's not gonna last it's not gonna stand the test of time but some things will and there's just like a modern art there's a modern music
there's going to be artists that stand the test of time and we'll later look back and celebrate them those are the good times yeah when you just step back what do you love about architecture is it the beauty is it the function I'm most emotionally drawn obviously to the beauty but
I think as somebody who's built things I really believe that the form has to follow the function like there's nothing uglier than a space that is ill conceived that that you know otherwise it's it's decoration and I think that after sort of that initial reaction to seeing something that's
aesthetically really pleasing to me when I when I look at a when I look at a building or a project I love sort of thinking about how it's being used so having been able to build so many things and um in my career and and worked on so many incredible projects I mean it's really really rewarding
after the fact to have somebody come up to you and and tell you that they got engaged in the lobby of your building or they got married in the ballroom and and share with you some of those experiences so so to me that's equally as beautiful the the use cases for for these unbelievable
projects but but I think I think it's all of it I I love I love that you've got the construction and you've got the design and you've got then the interior design and you've got the financing elements the marketing elements and it's all wrapped up in um in this one effort so so to me it's
exciting to sort of flex in all those different ways yeah like you said as dreams realized hard work realized um I mean probably on the bridge side is why I love the function in terms of function being primary you just think of like the millions of bridges uh go go down you had
look at that yeah this is devil's bridge in Germany yeah I wouldn't say it's like the most practical design but look how beautiful that is yeah so this is probably well we don't know we need to interview some people whether the function holds up but in terms of beauty and then like
what we're talking about using the water for the reflection and the shape that creates I mean there's an elegance that is shape of a of a bridge see it's interesting that they call it devil's bridge because to me this is very ethereal you know I think about the ring the circle um life
there's nothing about this that makes me feel maybe they're just being ironic in the name one step functions really flow yeah exactly maybe no but he's ever successfully crossed across the bridge yet but I mean to me there's just I
kind I love looking at bridges because because of the function it's the Brooklyn bridge or the golden gate bridge I mean those are probably my favorites in the United States just in a city to be able to look out and see the skyline combined with the suspension bridge and thinking of all the
millions of cars that pass like the busyness like us humans getting together and going to work building cool stuff and just the bridge kind of represents the turmoil and the busyness of a city as it creates it's cool and the connectivity as well yeah the network of roads all come together
so the bridge is the ultimate combination of function and and beauty yeah I remember when I was first learning about bridges studying the cable stay um versus the suspension bridge and I mean you actually built many replicas so I'm sure you'll have a point of view on this but they're they
really are um so beautiful and you mentioned the Brooklyn bridge but growing up in New York that was as much a part of the architectural story and tapestry of that skyline as any building that's that's seen in it so what in general is your philosophy philosophy of design and building in
architecture well some of the most recent projects I I worked on prior to government service were the old post office building and almost simultaneously trumped morale in Miami so these were both to just massive undertakings both redevelopments which in a lot of cases having worked on ground up
construction redevelopment projects are in a lot of ways much more complicated because you have existing attributes but also a lot of limitations you have to work with in especially when you're repurposing a use so so this um the old post office building on Pennsylvania Avenue was so beautiful
it's unbelievable so this was a romanesque revival building um built in the 1890s on America's main street to symbolize American grandshire and um at the time there were post office being built in in the style across the country but this being really the defining one still to this day the tallest
habitable structure in Washington um the tallest structure being the monument the nation's only vertical park which is that clock tower but you've got these thick granite walls those carved granite turrets um just just an unbelievable building you've got this massive um atrium that that runs
through the whole um center of it that is is topped with glass so so having the opportunity to to spearhead a project like that was was so exciting and actually it was my first renovation project so I I came to it with a tremendous amount of energy uh vigor and humility um 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 that 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 um 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 um 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 for it. Do you phone love with this project? I phone love yeah. So what is there some interesting
details about what it takes to do renovation? Is there about some some of the challenges or opportunities because you want to maintain the beauty of the old yeah 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 and um the interior spaces were
completely dilapidated it had been in a post office then we was used for a really run-down food court and government office spaces it was actually losing six million dollars a year um when when we got um the concession to to build it and and when we won and and became one of I
think a great example of public-private partnerships working together but the 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 excel uh twice a week um three times a week to spend day trips down in
in Washington and we would walk every single inch of the building laying out the floor plans debating over the configuration of a room there were almost 300 rooms and there were almost 300 layouts so nothing could be repeated uh whereas when you have when you're building from scratch you tend
you know you have a box and you decide where you want to add you know potential elements and um and you kind of 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 setbacks or the setback then required you to move the plumbing so there was no um 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 um over 650 acres
of of property and so every single unit was was very different and complicated not not as complicated in some ways the scale of it was so massive but not as complicated as the old post office but it required a level of of precision and I think in real estate you have a lot of people who design on plan um 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 makes something functional and you feel it in the end result um that I I mean blood sweat tears years of my life for for those projects and and it was worth it I I enjoyed almost 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 percent what's design on plan I'm learning you think today um when when proposals are put forth by an architect and 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 um or the shower so there's a lot of things that are missed um when you do something conceptually without sort of rooting it in um in the actual structure and that's why I think even you know 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 yeah 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 I mean the the insanity of Steve Jobs and Johnny I've working together on like making it perfect making
the iPhone their 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 the how much is going to sell
for all that kind of stuff you have to love the art is for the most part he can probably get 90 maybe 95% of the end result unless something is terribly gone awry by by not caring with that level of almost like maniacal precision but you'll notice that 10% for the rest of your life you know so
I think I think that extra effort that 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 mom she had a big influence on you you told me she was an adventurer yeah Olympic scare 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 business women's I also learned from her you know aside from from that element how to really enjoy life you know I look back and some of my happiest memories of her are in the ocean you know just lying on her back looking up at the sun and just so so in the moment
or dancing she loved to dance she she really taught me a lot about living life to its fullest and 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 I mean Olympic athlete the tradeoff between like ambition
and just wanting to do big things and pursuing that giving you're all to that and being able to relax and just throw your arms back and enjoy the moment every moment of life with like that trade off yeah what do you think about that tradeoff 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 that's funny that's the picture you pull up
oh sorry that's great that's great she had such a joy to her and she was so unabashed in her perspective and her opinions I mean you know she made my father look reserved so whatever she was feeling whether she was just very expressive and 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 I mean my my family came from the Soviet Union and then you know the 20th century the story of the 20th century is a lot of Eastern Europe the Soviet Union tried the
ideas of communism and it turned out that a lot of those ideas resulted into a lot of suffering so 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 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 and I try to imagine what it's like she was at Charles University and in Prague which was really like a
focal point of of the reforms that were ushered in during the Prague Spring and the liberalization agenda that was happening the dance halls were opening the student activists and and she was attending university there right at that same time so the 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 and the Soviet Union rolled in to 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 as a young girl she was on the junior national ski team for Czechoslovakia my my grandfather used to train her they used to put the skis on her back and walk up the mountain and Czechoslovakia because
there were 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 you'd be plenty warm if you'd carried the skis up on your back
on up the last run I feel like they made people tougher back then like my my grandma you mentioned it's funny they they go through some of the darkest things that a human being can go through and they don't talk about it and 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 hot or more in Ukraine which is mostly a mass starvation brought on by the the collectivist policies of the Stalin regime 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 outlook on life and also made me do very difficult physical activity like your ski matching just to the humble you like his ideas are 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 I think that's really important you wonder how much of of who they were was a reaction to their experience you know would she have naturally had that sort of forward looking
grateful optimistic orientation or was it a reaction to to our childhood I think about that you know I look at this picture of my mom and she was unabashedly herself you know she loved flamboyance and glamour and and in some ways I think it probably was a direct reaction to this
very austere controlled childhood you know this was one expression of it I think her you know how she dressed and how she presented I think her entrepreneurial spirit and love of capitalism and all things American was was another manifestation of it and one that I grew up with remember the
story she used to tell me about when she was 14 and she was going to neighboring countries and you know as an athlete you were given additional freedoms that that you wouldn't otherwise be afforded in in in these societies under 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 elsewhere and 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 but 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 you know that experience and 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 and so she figured out the system pretty quickly but but it's it's a very different experience from what I was navigating and the pressures and challenges me as a 14 year old was was dealing with so so I've so much respect and and admiration
for her yeah hardship clarifies what's important in life you now have talked about man search for meaning that book having kind of an ultimate hardship clarifies that finding joy in life is not about the environments about your outlook on that environment and there's beauty to be found in any
situation yeah and also in that particular situation the when everything's taken from you the thing you start to think about is the people you love so in the case of man search for meaning Victor Franco thinking about his his wife and how much you love her and that love was the flame that
the the warmth that kept him excited the fun thing to think about when everything else is gone so we sometimes forget that with the business of life 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 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 you know
when this and this a thing happens or under these circumstances then I'll be happy and I think what he showed is that we can sort of cultivate these virtues within ourselves regardless of the situation we find ourselves in and in some ways I think the the meaning of life is the
search for meaning in life it's the relationships we have and we form its experience we have it's how we deal with the suffering that life inevitably presents to us and 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 joys like getting a little more soup today than you did yesterday I 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 this the ability 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 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 for sure for sure I mean people really I 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 a sip of 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 it's something you know so basic but it's when it doesn't that that we're grateful so just reminding ourselves every day the basic things of a functional body of of of our health of access to 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 yeah 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 she was doing
everything and you know four and a half inch heels with this buffant 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'm a pool they're fun I love the ocean I love saltwater I love the way it makes me feel and and I think I got that from her so we would we would just swim together all all the time and and you know it's it's a lot of what I love about Miami actually being being so close to the ocean
I find it to be super cathartic but a lot of my memories of my mom seeing her really like just in her bliss is is floating around and in in a body of saltwater is there also some aspect to her being an example of somebody that could be sort of beautiful and feminine but at the same time
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 of people and so on on job sites I 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 and they'd always tell me these stories about her you know rolling in and they'd hear the heels first and and a lot of times the story would be like oh gosh like you know really it's two days
after Christmas like we thought we'd get a reprieve but she was 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 four-inch heels I'm assuming she actually carried flats with her but but I don't know
that's not the visual I have but she was um I loved the fact that she so embodied femininity and um and glamour and um and was so comfortable being tough and ambitious and determined and um and this unbelievable businesswoman and entrepreneur at at a time when she was very much alone
even you know for 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 of sales and of marketing you don't see as many women in the development space and the construction space even in the architecture um and
and design space um maybe outside of interior design so and she was you know decades ahead of me so it was I love hearing these stories I love 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 four-inch heels and she did it she used to say there's nothing that I can't do better in heels that would be 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 and and I was I would like go back and forth between being super girly and a total tomboy um but uh but she you know dress me up in 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 this wisdom so to speak but um but but it was just funny you know she had she had a very specific point of view and four good lines pain for beauty it's 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 it like their heels hurt them so they're kind of walking oddly um and 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 um um and that helps me be confident and um and in command a foundation for fashion for you is comfort and on top of that you build and it's not a comfort like doubty you know there's that level of comfort
but um 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 um you know hobbling on heels that don't fit you properly um and she was never doing those things either so I don't know how she was wearing
stuff like that that's like a 40 pound V-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 um she's making it look easy but she uh she makes it looks
very very easy so do you uh miss her I'm so much it's unbelievable how dislocating the loss of a of a parent is and um 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 it was beautiful to see a garden chance to spend time with your family to see so many generations together at the table and there's so much history there no she's 97 and um until uh she was around
94 she lived completely on her own no help no anything no support and um and now she requires really sort of 24 hour care and I 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 crop and and know her
stories know her recipes um check dumplings and and goulash um and kitesalista and all the other things she used to make me and my childhood but but she really she was a major she's a major force in my life my grandmother she um 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 um I remember I used to shower and it would almost be like comical I I feel like in my memory and there was no washing machine I've seen on the planet that can actually do this but in my memory I'd go to shower you know and I'd
drop something on the bed and I'd come back into the room after my shower and it was like folded press it was all my grandma's like running after me um taking care of me um and uh so it's nice to be able to do that for her yeah I got from her reading my grandmother she would she devoured books
like devoured books she loved the more sensational ones so she 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 all the drama all the drama she loved
it um but her face was always buried in a book you know my grandfather Deito he was the athlete he was um he swam professionally for or you know on the national team for check a Slovakian he helped train my mom as I was saying before in skiing so he was a great
athlete and she was at home and she would read and cook and um and so that's that's something I I remember a lot from my childhood and she would always say like I got I got reading from her I mean like speaking a drama I had uh my English teacher in high school
they recommended a book for 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 we like just cheating 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 in retrospect you know why she recommended it I just have no I think it's just saying the signal hey you need to get
out more or something I don't know maybe maybe she's seeking to inspire you exactly um anyway I mean I love that kind of stuff too but I love I love all the classics and 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 sense of humor is sometimes under appreciated so he had an amazing and has an amazing sense of humor he loved music I think my 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 he loves music I that is fun he's like about right he does now he DJs at Mar-a-Lago so people get a sense of you know he loves Andrew Lloyd Weber 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 a lot of the greats so I think I got a little bit of my love from music from from him but my mom shared that as well I think one of the things you know
and 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 and I saw this a lot on 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 herculean lift we had the mechanical engineers provide their thoughts on how we could do it efficiently and and so that the temperature never varied and it was enormously expensive as an as an undertaking
and I remember one of his first times on on a site because you know he had really empowered me with this project and he trusted me to execute and to also you know we're open and 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 first 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 and 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 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 that one really takes out of my head because I'm like oh my
gosh we're redesigning the whole system you know we were actively under construction so is um but I would see him do that on a lot of different issues he he would ask people on the work level what their thoughts were ideas concepts designs and um there was almost like a secratic sort of
first principles type of way he he questioned people trying to get down to sort of trying to reduce complex things to something really fundamental and and simple so I try to do that myself to the to the best I can and I think it's something I very much learned from him yeah I've
seen great engineers great leaders do just that you see you want to do that a lot which is basically ask questions uh to push simplification yeah can we do this simpler and like why 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 not along yourself like 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
uh of production manufacturer but usually simple is best and it's oftentimes not the architecture than the engineers it's you know in Elon's case probably the line worker who sees things yes 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 like a lot of the Elon companies are really flat in terms of organizational design where the the any anybody on the factory floor can talk directly to you on there's no there's not 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 the question of like what have you done this week the answer is
like it's really hard to come up with usually it's going to be a bunch of paperwork yeah uh so you like nobody knows what they actually do so when it's flat you can actually get as quickly as possible when problems arise you 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 can 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 and you see great companies great great companies apple google meta they have to fight against that bureaucracy that builds the slowness the 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 it's circumventing layers and asking questions probing questions of of people on the ground level is a huge challenge to the authority of the hierarchy and there's tremendous amount of resistance to it so it's how do you grow something in in the case of a company
in terms of a culture that can scale but doesn't lose its connection to to sort of real and meaningful feedback it's it's not not easy I've had a lot of conversations with Jim Keller who's this legendary engineering leader and he 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 like it's uncomfortable yeah like a lot of these questions they're 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 uh 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 the the humans get together they
kind of gravitate towards comfort nobody wants that one person that comes in and says hey can we like do this way better way different and everything we've gotten comfortable 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 yeah and as ultimately seen as as a threat I mean nobody really gets fired for maintaining the status quo right even if things go poorly it's the way it was always done yeah humans are fascinating uh but in order to actually do great big projects
yeah to reach for the stars you have to have those people you have to you have to constantly disrupt and have those uncomfortable conversations and 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 um as a form of self expression as a means to to communicate either a truth or an illusion depending on what kind of mood you're in but um this like 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 and and a will winter calls me up
and um and offered me a job at vogue which is a dream in so many ways but I was so focused I I wanted to go and to real estate and I wanted to build buildings and um and I 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 it came into my life in a in a more professional capacity by talking with my first of of many different partners that I had in the fashion space about he he actually had shown me a building um to buy his family had some real estate holdings and
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 so 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 and what about the woman who had a salary and was really excited to buy herself a great pair of
earrings or um or had just received a great bonus and and was going to use it to treat herself so we thought there was a void in the marketplace and um and that was the first category I launched Ivanka Trump fine jewelry and we just caught lightning in a bottle it was really quickly after that
I met my partner who had founded nine washues really capable partner and we launched a shoe collection which which took off and I did enormously well and then a clothing collection and handbags and sunglasses and fragrance so so we caught a moment and um 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 you know taking pictures of like what
they were wearing to work and um and 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 so we started creating this clothing that was feminine that was beautiful that was
versatile that would take a woman from uh the boardroom to an afterschool soccer game to a date night with a boyfriend to uh to walk in the park with her husband like all the 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 and it was it was really compelling we started creating great brand content and we had incredible um contributors like Adam Grant who was who was blogging for us at the time and and creating aspirational content for for working women
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 were buying these um these different categories
and and we came up with a website called Women Who Work and I went to a marketing agency you know one of the fancy firms in New York and I said you know we want to create a brand campaign around this multi-dimensional woman who works and um 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 we 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 um to sort of lean into to working at
at all aspects of our lives was just fascinating to me but showed that that was part of the problem and and I think that's why ultimately I mean when the business grew to be hundreds of millions of dollars in in sales we were distributed at all the best retailers across the country from you
know Neiman Marcus to SACs to to Bloomingdale's and Beyond and and I think we it really resonated with people in an amazing way and and probably not dissimilar to how I have this incredible experience every time somebody comes up to me and tells me that um that they were married in a
space that I had painstakingly designed I have that experience now with with my fashion company the number of women who will come up tell me that they they loved my shoes or they loved the handbags and I've had women show me their engagement rings they got engaged with us and um it's
really rewarding it's really beautiful yeah when I was hanging out with you in Miami the number of women they came up to you saying they love the the clothes and they love the shoes is 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 what's that 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 it's a great a thing that you want to wear
I feel like the the product I think first and foremost you have to have the the right partner so shoe 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 that
is an engineering feat and so I found great partners in everything that I did my my shoe partner um had found in nine west so he really knew what went into making a shoe wearable and comfortable and then you overlay that with great design and uh and we also created this really comfortable
beautifully designed super feminine um product offering that was also affordably priced so I think it was like the trifect of those of those three things that 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 my idea to the final thing like what you go through to bring an idea to life so 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 in fashion the same I was kind of like a
conductor I was 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 then 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 um of what resonates with you and and then as in the case of of my fashion business as it grew and became um quite a large business and I had so many different categories everything had to work together so I had individual partners for each
category but if we were selling it name and 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 um as time passed I 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 I needed to create an overlay that allowed for cohesion as the collection grew and and 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 print makers and um and copy writers and so I had this you know almost like that conductor analogy I this incredible group of in this case women assembled who had very strong points of you
themselves and and it created a great team so yeah I mean great team is really sort of a central it's it's it's the essential thing behind any successful story but there's this thing of taste really interesting it's hard to kind of articulate what it takes but basically knowing a versus b
what looks good or without a b 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 going to look good
and it's not actually again Steve Jobs thing is not the opinion pull like you can't uh pull people asking what looks better it'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 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 mix it makes
sure great taste as you develop over time and the confidence and and that's a really hard thing especially and I think one of the things I love most about all of these creative pursuits is that ability to to work with the best people right now I'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 and 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 um and and it's hard
so these are actually just internal early rendering 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 and we have carbon who's
going to be doing the food and beverage and but it's it's amazing to bring together all of this talent and for me to be able to play around and flex the the real estate muscles again and and have some fun with it is the design the art how hard is it to bring something like that to life because
that's like that looks surreal out of this world well especially on an island it's it's challenging meaning the logistics and even getting the building materials to an island or no joke but um but we will execute on it so and it may not be this this is sort of as I said early conceptual drawings
but it gives a sense of sort of wanting to honor the topography that exists and you know this is obviously very modern but making it feel right in terms of the context of um of the vegetation and and the train that exists is and not just have you know a beautiful glass box obviously you want glass
you want to look out and see that gorgeous blue ocean but um 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 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 that it evolves from there right yeah and so much I mean so much of architecture you don't see
but it's decisions made so how do you 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 um 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 and 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 and of the island it's almost like a mathematical problem that's like a class competition geometry in grad school where you have to think about these view corridors it's like a math problem yeah well but it's also an art problem because it's not
just about making sure that there's not occlusions to the view you have to figure out when there's occlusions like what the vegetation is it you have to figure all that out and there's probably so every single every single room every single building is a thing that adds extra complexity
and then the choice is like how does the sunrise and set yeah so how do you want to angle the hotel and relation that's awesome to the sunrise and the sunset do you obviously want people to experience those so which do you favor the directionality of the wind and on on an
island and you know 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 you know the horseback riding trails and amenities up towards the north so there are these really interesting decisions and
choices you get to reflect on the sophistication sort of discussion to be having and probably there's like actual constraints on like infrastructure issues so all the will 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 it's fun it's 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 they're every single room is different so every single room
is a puzzle when you're doing their renovation yeah that's fascinating and if you're not thoughtful like it's like at best really quirky at worst completely ridiculous quirky is such a funny word it's such a like you walked into I'm sure you've walked into your fair share of like quirky rooms yeah you know and sometimes like that's charming but most often it's charming when it's intentional yeah through like smart design yeah you can tell if it's by accident or if it's intentional yeah you
could you can tell 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 yeah the culture of the place and 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 or your own home you want to think about like the warmth of a space as well and especially with super modern design sometimes like warmth is
sacrificed and I think there is a way to sort of marry both and and that's where you get into sort of the interior design elements and disciplines and how fabrics can create tremendous warmth in a space which is otherwise sort of colder raw building materials and 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 yeah especially when it's working together with a
well the architecture yeah fabrics and color is so interesting finishes you know the choice of wood that's making me feel horrible about the space we're sitting black curtains the warmth I need to work on this this is a big two this is a big two item you're making me listen back to this over
me there may be like a woman's touch me a lot but I actually I appreciate the vegetation yeah fake plans 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 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 or we'll see the joy radiate through it but I appreciate you were grasping for compliments you eventually got no I actually I love it I love it you have like a little I love this guy there's yeah you're holding on to a monkey looking
at a 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 yeah there's there's robot I don't know I mean I don't know how much you looked into robots but there's 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 like entities if to bring out the joy so with Wally or robots and and Star Wars to be able to communicate emotion to anger and excitement throw robots really
interesting to me and 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 as you bring them your projects to life I think there's 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 a dog is the excitement that a dog has when it when you first show up just they're 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 his body that that moment of recognizing something yeah it's the double take that you're that 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 you both get excited together it's kind of like that feeling uh what would I put it you know like when you go to airports and you get to see people uh who haven't seen each other for a long time also and recognize each other in their meeting and they're all like
run towards each other in the hug and that moment uh whether that's awesome to watch this so much joy and 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 yeah so I love
replicating that in robots 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 a few seconds prior um there's a there's a term for it but I remember is um when 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 you know gone for four hours and uh we grew out of that we become very used to one another I kind of went up forever be excited by the peekaboo phenomena the simple joys we were 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 um 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 uh self-doubt and imperfection
so is there some battle within yourself that you have on sort of um 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 i 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 to be physically stronger and um and so that very much lives within me all the time you know i think i 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 i'm in 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 um and i harnessed it to make me better um and and to push me outside of my comfort zone so i think that's always lived with me and and and i think it probably always will i think you have to have humility in anything you do that you could be better and 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 of having been thrown in the deep end um and figured out how to swim you 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 the fear um the other thing he writes about is intuition that you need to trust your instincts and intuition uh that's a very recruitment thing to say but so what percent of your decision making is intuition
or what percent is through rigorous careful analysis would you say i think it's both it's like trust would verify you know i think you 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 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 um or 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 of your sort of integrity or core values it doesn't feel good and and you know your intuition um we'll signal that to you you'll never be you'll never be comfortable so i think because
because of that i i start oftentimes with my intuition and then i and then i put it through like a rigorous test of of whether that is in fact true um very seldom do i go against what my initial instinct was not at least at this point in my life yeah i had a actually a discussion yesterday
with a big-time business owner investor who who's talking about being impulsive and following that like on a phone call shifting like the entire everything like giving away a very large amounts of 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 yeah feeling and he said now that you know he has has a 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 you won't do it it's interesting it's the confidence is 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 there is but i actually think in this case as you get older you may act less impulsively but i think you're more like attuned with um you have more experience so your your gut is like more well-honed you know so your instincts
are more well-honed i think um i i found that to be true for me you know it doesn't feel as like reckless as when i was younger amongst many other things you were on the apprentice people love you on there people love the show so what did you learn about business
about life from the various contestants on there well i think you can learn everything about life from showers so i'm just i'm got it just from just that one human yeah amazing um but you know i it was it was such a wild experience from me because i was i was quite young um 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 wilds like phenomenal success you know a business show had never um had never crossed over in this sort of way
so it was really a moment in time and um you had regular apprentice and then the celebrity apprentice but but the tasks i mean they 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
and um talked to classes and this university in Boston or you know so it was extraordinary and 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 you know 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 you know the short duration of time they had to execute um a lot of um 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 um with this herculean lift ahead of them so so it was it was a fascinating it was a fascinating experience for me and and we would be filming i mean we would film first thing in the morning at like five or six a.m. in trump tower oftentimes like in
the lobby of trump tower that's where the war rooms um and boardrooms of the candidates were the contestants were um 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 tasks it was this weird like real-life
television thing experience um in the middle of our sort of on the book ends of our workday um so it was intense um so you're you're like curating the television version of it and also living it well living the 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 um or um or design challenges related to you know a hotel it was responsible for for buildings so there was this unbelievable crossover that was obviously great for us from a business perspective but um it's
sometimes surreal to to experience well what was it like was it was it scary to be in front of a camera when you know so many people watch i mean that 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 like i really i still to this day like television as a medium like the fact that we're taping this yeah i'm more self-conscious than if we weren't i i just it's um hey i have to watch myself as after 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 i still i feel myself i'm like does my voice really sound like that um you know why do i do this thing or that thing and i i find it some people are super at ease and and who knows maybe they're
not either but some people feel like they're so pretty 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 uh because he was just himself and he was totally unself-conscious i was not i was totally self-conscious so it was uh it was extraordinary but um but also a little challenging for me i think certain people are just like born to be entertainers like 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've always dreamed of being this is where they want to be forever Michael Jackson was like that i thought Jackson sub pictures of you hanging out like Jackson out of school he came once to a performance i wanted to be one moment in time i wanted
professional ballerina okay yeah um 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 knuck cracker i was super serious you know nine ten-year-old and um and my parents came to a christmas performance of the
knuck cracker 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 um when you'd see him uh like in in smaller group settings and then you'd watch him walk on to stage and it was like
a completely different person like the vitality that came into him and you say that's like someone who was born to do what he did and and i think there are a lot of performers like that and i i just in general love to see people that have found the thing that
uh makes them come alive yeah like i um 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 ice 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 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 with his calling friends and probably dances around in the trees with the monkeys so he like he this is this is this is where he belongs
and i love seeing that you felt that i mean i i watched the interview you did with him and and you felt that like you his passion and enthusiasm like it radiated and capped i mean i'm i i love animals like i love all animals never loves snakes so much and he almost made me now i
appreciate the beauty of them much more than i did um 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 and 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 look 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 it was a 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 you feel the history the stories emanate i 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 now among the trees among the
animals you remember the year forever apart in nature you're you're fundamental our nature that this isn't uh earth is a living organism and you're a part of that organism and that's humbling this beautiful and you get to experience that in a real real way it sounds simple to say but when
you actually like experience it it stays with you for a long time especially if you're out there alone i got i got a chance to spend time in the jungle solo just by myself and 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 romance i mean i'm romanticized everything there's like birds that are monogamous for life like mokas you could 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 length that's very fun you just have these like two birds that you know have been together for a long time and they're just screaming at each other and they're 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 um but um amidst all that it's 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 um you know you just it's it's really humbling to be so small amidst that vast sea and it feels um it feels really beautiful you know with no
noise no chatter no distractions just um just being in the moment and it sounds like you experienced that in a very very real way in in the amazon yeah the power of the waves is cool i love swimming out into the ocean feeling the power of the ocean 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 feel like a lot of water sports are like manipulating the environment
you know um and there's something that can be a little like violent about it like you look at wind surfing and um whereas with surfing you're like in harmony with it so um you're not fighting it you're you're flowing with it and you still have like the agency of choosing which waves you're going to
surf and um you sit there and you you read the ocean and and and you learned 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
like i always see videos of whenever thing goes great i just wonder like when it doesn't those are the ones people post no um well i actually had the unique experience of one of my first times 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 the everything about it the hardest thing with surfing is paddling out because when you're like committing you catch a wave obviously sometimes like you know you flip over your board and that doesn't feel great but when you're in sort of 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 you 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 and the worst thing you can do is get reactive and you know um and scared and and try and fight against it you kind of just have to flow with it until inevitably there's a break and then paddle like hell back out to the line um order the beach whatever you know whatever you're feeling but it's that's to me that's
the hardest part um the paddling out how did life change when your father decided to run for president wow everything changed you know almost almost overnight we learned that he was planning to announce his candidacy two weeks before he actually did and 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 and maybe maybe you know congress senator um ultimately the presidency so it was unheard of
to for him never to have run a campaign and then run for president and and win so it was um um it was an extraordinary experience there there was so much intensity and so much scrutiny and um and and so much noise so that took for sure like a moment acclimatio not sure i ever fully
acclimated but it it definitely was um it was a super unusual experience but i think then the the process that unfolded over 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 gravestphere 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 and i done the apprentice before people may know um 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 own spouses wouldn't know and they wouldn't do so within 30 seconds so you learned so much about what motivates people what drives people what their concerns are and you grow so much as a result
that 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 and and and they do so in such a raw vulnerable and real way it's
it's shocking and eye opening and and super motivating i remember once i was in new hampshire and i'm early on right after my father had had announced his candidacy and a man walks up to me in 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 um and how he was worried his son was also addicted to opioids his daughter's friends his son's friends and and it's heartbreaking it's heartbreaking and it's it's something that i would experience every day in talking with people and those stories just stay
with you always you know i i uh took a long road trip around the United States in my 20s and i'll kind of think about doing it again just 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's it reminds you of like how beautiful the country is it reminds you several things one that people well it shows you that there's a lot of different accents that's for one uh but aside from that the people are struggling with all the same stuff
yeah and um at least at that time i wonder what it is now but at that time i don't remember on the surface there's like political divisions there's uh republicans and 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 the surface division has been amplified even more maybe because of social media i don't know why uh 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 with the social media shows um but what did you experience in terms of the the the division i think a couple reactions to what you just said i think the first is your when you connect with people like that you are so um inspired by their courage you know in the
face of adversity and um their 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 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 so there was a lot of there was a lot of growth in that as well but i do think you know you think about the vitriol
on politics and um 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 duels and 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 um there are there's more sort of democratization around participating in it perhaps um and it seems like the voices are louder but it's always been it feels like it's always been that um but i don't believe most people are
like that and and you know you you meet people along the way and they're not leading with what their politics are you know they're they're telling you about their hopes for themselves and their communities and uh and it makes you feel that we are a whole lot less divided than um you know
the media and uh others would have us believe although i have to say having duels that sounds pretty cool maybe i just romanticize westerns anyway all right my miscleanse 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 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 so all like the fake news all of that that's not recent it's it's been nonstop you know i look at the surface
division the surface bickering and that might be like just a feature of democracy that's it's not a bug of democracy it's a feature we're in the constant conflict and it's the way we result 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 we're 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 but 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 i think that the vast majority of people aren't participating in it sure yes that's true awesome you know 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 want their communities to thrive and want to be able to realize their dreams and aspirations so i saw a lot more of that then 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 you 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 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 and fashion and working alongside my brothers running the trump hotel collection and with so many my life was full and busy and um
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 um but when my father won he asked Jared and i to join him and in asking that question you know 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 to see you before yeah staying in the white house and so when he asked us to join him he trusted us he
trusted in our ability to 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 um but but just the idea of of of not saying yes wherever that would lead me and um and so i i dove in you know i was also during the course of the campaign i was just much more sensitive to the problems and experiences of americans i i gave you an example
before of of the the father and new hamster but i mean even just in my consumption of information you know i had a a business um that was predominantly young women you know many of which were thinking about having a kid had just had a child um we're we're planning on on that life event and i knew what they needed to be able to show up every day and and realize the stream for themselves and and the support structures they would need to have in place and i remember reading this article
at the time in uh one of the major newspapers of of a woman she had had a very solid job working at one of the blue chip um accounting firms and the recession came she 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 gets a callback 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 child care for her
two young children with with a neighbor um in her old apartment block and the morning of the interview she shows up and the neighbor doesn't answer the doorbell and stancer five ten minutes doesn't answer so 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 two 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
and i i probably would have and that is not like an acceptable situation you know so you you hear stories like that and then you get asked well you come with me and it's really hard to say no i spent four years in washington i feel like i left it all in the field i feel really good
about it and and i'm i feel really privileged to have been able to do what i did i chance to help to help many people saying no means uh 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 um what was it like trying to get stuff done in washington and this uh place where politics is a game uh 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 sleeves and do the
work it takes to build coalitions of support and find people who are willing to compromise and move the ball and so it's extremely difficult and you know charred and i talk about all the time it 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 um with tax cuts and and the work i did to um 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 um going into their districts campaigning in their districts helping them convince their constituents of of why it's important of why child care support is important
of why paid family leave is important um of different policies that impact working American families so it's um it's hard but it's uh it's it's really rewarding and then to get it done i mean just the child tax credit alone 40 million American families got an average of $2,200 each year
as a result of the doubling of the child tax credits that one component of tax cuts when i was like 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 the story as 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 support and 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 it's uh uh you can lose your your home your
security you can lose your job uh you can scoosh 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 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 you know during the campaign it was what they hoped to see happen when she were in there it was what they were seeing what they were experiencing the result of the
policies and and that was 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 a 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 to 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 to the stage she 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 um that really like powers
you through tough moments when you're in Washington well what can you say about the process of like bringing that to life so uh 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 i'm sure there's
a lot of politicians playing games with that because maybe it's a Republican that came up with an idea or a Democrat that came up with an idea and so they don't want to give credit to the idea and that'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 if you get 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 you know 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 so there'd be something really cynical about thinking they forget but you know some do you hope 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 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 um we create an impossibility for that you know some people don't even have access to to one paid leave um if
they're part-time workers and so that and um and then we also put in place the first ever national tax credit for workers making under seventy two thousand dollars 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 is really
taking 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 um on certain policy issues that i thought would have been well-socialized the policies that existed were never shared across the aisle so 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 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 for changes um not believing that you have a monopoly on good ideas and and i think there has to be a lot of humility in in architecting these things and um and a policy should benefit from that type of well-rounded input
yeah be able to see like you said well-designed policies there's probably like the details are important to like there's just 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 uh money or resources to families they needed and is not a waste of money so like that there's a probably really nice designs there nice ideas that are bipartisan that has nothing to do with politics has to do with just great economic policy it's great policies and that requires listening first trust too like i learned tax cuts was really interesting for me because i met with so many people oh across the political spectrum on advancing that policy i really figured out who was willing
to deviate from their talking points when the door was closed and who wasn't you know and it takes some courage to do that um especially without surety that it would actually get done you know especially if they've campaigned on something
that was slightly different and uh you know not everyone has that courage so through tax cuts i i learned the people who did have that courage and i went back to that well time and time again on policies that that i thought was were important you know some were were bipartisan the great
american outdoors act is something um it's incredible policy that yeah 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 the vast 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 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 um and and help lead lead the charge on um i think in in america for a really long period of time we've really believed that education stops when you leave high school or college and 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 they know are 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 um the private sector to join us in
in in that effort so whether it's the legislative side like the actual legislation of of perkins cte which was focused on 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 re-skill workers into the jobs of tomorrow yeah there's so many aspects of education that you're helped on access to the stem and computer science education so the the CT thing you're mentioning modernizing career and technical education that's millions millions of
people the act provided nearly one point three billion dollars annually to more than 13 million students to better align the 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 in politics when there's something that is good policy sometimes it has no momentum because it doesn't have a cheerleader so where areas of good policy that you can like literally just 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 on the front pages of papers and there's so many issues that they 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 want to eradicate one of the greatest evils that the mind can even imagine you know the trafficking of people the exploitation of children and 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 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 and to work well with we were able to get legislation which the president designed past nine pieces of legislation combating trafficking at home in 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 men's save at all was that hard to walk around with that just knowing how much suffering there's in the world as you're trying to help all of it as you're trying to design government policies to help all of 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 was 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 he 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 not the perpetrator so we did a lot with DOJ around changing that and but now she's helping other survivors get skills and job training and
the therapeutic interventions they need but you you speak with people like Andrea and so many others and I mean you can't not your your part gets seized by it and it's 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 yeah 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're there are a lot of others that don't choose that particular field because of those low success rates but 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 just you feel the
immensity of that and you you you feel the heartbreak involved with mortality in that case and we're suffering also in that case and generally all these in 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 but 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 and family and and I never I never liked that question because balance it's like elusive right you're you're one fever away from like no balance you know like your child
sick one day what do you do there goes balance or you know you have a huge project with a deadline there goes balance like 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 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 your building for duration you know and then you go into the White House and it is santa in our glass whether it's four years or eight years it'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 and to the best of your capacity and that's a hard that's a hard
thing that's a really hard feeling as a parent and it's really challenging then to be to be present to always need to answer your phone you'll always need to be available it's it's very difficult it's taxing but it's it's also the greatest privilege in the world so 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 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 in New York I lived ten 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 and 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 so Theo 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
but I've convinced him that I have no idea how to work the coffee machine now I'm going to be fun but it's a skill I don't want to learn because it's 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
he was so cute coming down the hallway with my like perfectly foamed cappuccino now I try to get him to make me coffee and he's like come on mom I like that 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 it's um yeah it's really joyful yeah I could see how that could be an escape from the madness of Washington of the adult life and they were young enough 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
and uh and they brought me lately and continued to bring me so much so much joy but they were I mean without shared and without the kids it it would have been much more lonely so three kids you've now upgraded two dogs and a hamster uh well our second dogs we we rescued him
thinking he we thought he 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 yeah basically horse Simba so I don't think he has much lab in him I think
we Joseph has not wanted to do a DNA test um because he really wanted a German shepherd so German shepherd yeah he's he's gigantic and we also have a hamster who's the newest edition because my son Theo he tried to get um he tried to get a dog as well our first dog winter
um 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 got 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 advise yourself huh if you're hearing out this puzzle I think being a parent um you have to cultivate within yourself like hide-in levels of empathy
you have to really look at each child and see them for who they are what they enjoy what they love and and 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 um but it's it really I think it's actually made me a much softer person a much better listener I think I see people more truly for 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 has enabled that in me I think for for me though they've also been like some migratus teachers in that we were talking about the the presence you felt when you were in the jungle and the the
connectivity you felt and sort of the simple joy and I think for for us as we grow older we kind of disconnect from that like my kids have taught me how to play again um and that's beautiful I remember just a couple of weeks ago we had one of these crazy Miami torrential down for us and
arabella comes down it's around eight o'clock at night it's it's really raining and she's got rain boots and pajama pants on and she's gonna take the dogs for a rain which you know she had all day to walk but she but she wasn't doing it because they needed to go for a walk she was like
this would be fun yeah and I'm standing in the doorstep watching her and she goes out with simba and winch her 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 would normally you know she like allowed me to experience the joy with her um and it was it was amazing we can be so much more fun if we allow ourselves to be more playful we can be so much more present I look at a Theo loves
games so we play a whole lot of board games any kind of game um so it started with board games we do a lot of puzzles uh that it became card games I just taught him how to play poker nice he loves back am in 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 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 uh and experiencing joy they always give you permission to sort of uh reignite the inner child yeah get again yeah and it's interesting what 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 like I often see that um 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
with some you need a softer approach like with me I always like like a dictatorial approach I like the coach to be this like menacing figure that's one that that brought out the best of me I didn't want to be friends with the coach like I want to almost I'm weird to say we yelled at like put to be
pushed but that doesn't work for everybody uh and that's a risk you have to take is in the coach context of like because you can't just yell at everybody yeah you have to figure out like what does each person need and when uh you have kids I imagine the puzzle is even harder and when they all
need different things but yet coexist and are sometimes competitive with one another so you'll be at a dinner table the amount of times I get well that's not fair why did you let and I'm like life isn't fair and by the way like I'm not here to be fair I'm like I'm trying to give you each
what you need especially when I've been working really hard and you know I in the White House I'd say okay well now we have a Sunday and we have these hours and I'll have like a grand plan you know and we're gonna make it count and it's gonna involve you know hot chocolate and sleds you know
whatever whatever it is at like my great adventure they we're gonna go play mini-gall and then I come down all psyched up all ready to go and uh the kids of zero interest and there have been a lot of times I've been like we're doing this thing and
and then I realize wait is that good you know like sometimes you just like plop down on the floor and start playing magnetiles you know and like that's where they need you and so so those of us who have sort of like alpha personalities who sometimes it's just 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 just be with them observe them and 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 uh they fight a lot and she 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 break them up because I'm told that it's okay for the 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 uh at the same time it's also part of the play part of the dynamics that that's a puzzle you also have to figure out and plus you're probably worried that they're gonna get hurt if they're well I think
there's like when it gets physical yeah that's like okay we have to intervene I know you're into martial arts but that's normally like the red line um you know once it 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 inner personal conflict is 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 um 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 and 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
gonna 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 uh 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 very 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 just 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 of of the attacks um and there were times when it was it was so easy to counter it I'd even write something out and and say well I'm gonna I'm
gonna press send and never did I I 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 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 internalize there's a concept in Judaism called Lush and Harrah 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 you can apologize but you can't repair it another component of that is that it does as much damage to the person saying the words
then it does to the person receiving them and I think about that a lot I talk about this concept with 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 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 contrarian viewpoint to to not get into the fray actually someday I love Dolly Parton says that
she doesn't condemn or criticize she loves and accepts and I like that it feels 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 out 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 they're almost like we don't intend to but it destroys everybody in the process you quote it Alan Watts I love him in 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 Watts too I listen to his lecture sometimes falling asleep he's got like an on planes he's got like the most soothing voice but 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 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 so 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 into hopefully you know sort of a better version of yourself and I hope and feel that that's been that's been true for me as well I think the person I
am today you know we spoke in in the beginning of our discussion about some of my earliest ambitions and real estate and in fashion and those were amazing adventures and 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 like 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 and
I think that's where you know my kids have been my teachers just being fully present and enjoying like the little moments and it doesn't mean I'm any less like driven than I was before it's just more a part of me than being sort of the all-consuming energy one has in their 20s
yeah just like you said will your mom be able to let go enjoy the water the sun the beach yeah and enjoy the moment the simple the simplicity of the moment I think a lot about the fact that you know for for a lot of young people they they really know what they want to do
but they don't actually know who they are and 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 I'm grateful to have had the honor of serving the American people and I will always be proud of many of our administrations 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 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 or all out and I know today the cost they would pay for me being all in emotionally in terms of my absence at such a formative point in their life and I'm not willing to make them bear that cost I serve for four years and and feel so privileged to
have done it but as their mom I think it's it's it's really important that I do what's right for them and and I think there are a lot of ways you can serve you know I think there's obviously we talked about the enormity the scale of what can be accomplished in in government service but
you know I think there's something equally valuable about helping within your own community and I volunteer with the 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 I also
think from you know politics is is a it's a pretty dark world like 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 you know it is it's a really it's a really rough business so 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 outsider's 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 on a human level it's my father and I love them very much so it's 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 that's so true it is it is family uh and I hope uh amiss all this turmoil love is the thing that wins it usually does in the end yes but 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 parton that's a segue that's this listen I'm not very good at this thing I'm trying to fix it okay that we both love dolly part um I mean so you're you're big into live music so maybe you can mention why you love dolly parton
I definitely would love to talk I would love to interview her she's such an icon she's I hope you do 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 um 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 and it's super refreshing and and really beautiful to observe somebody um somebody who's so in the public eye being so fully secure and
and who they are what their talent is and and what drives them so I think she's she's amazing and she leads with a lot of like 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 she like enjoys what she does
and you also have the sense that if she didn't she won'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 a doll 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's actually the first concert aerobel ever went to and Madison Square Garden when she wish she was around four and nine year olds love her music and that's
pretty rare to have that kind of band with a resonance so so 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 my father commuted her sentence her her case
was brought to me by a friend Kim Kardashian and 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 in a car on the
way to the show and and she talked to my kids about her experience and her story and how her case found its way to me and and 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 for me to do it actually Alice told them the most beautiful story about the place 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 and but for the people who were in them a lot of those men and women had never experienced a pause nobody had ever shown up at their games or at their plays or and and clapped for them and the emotional experience of
just being able to give someone that you know being able to stand and and applaud for someone and how meaningful that was and she was showing us pictures from these different productions and it was a really it was a beautiful moment Alice actually after um her sentence was commuted and
and she came out of prison together we worked on 23 different partings or commutations so so the impact of of her experience and how she was able to to take her her opportunity and create that same opportunity for others who who were deserving and and who she believed in was
was very beautiful so anyway that was an extraordinary concert experience for my kids to be able to have that moment what a story so just that's the sort of the uh because then here we are dancing at a del exactly exactly like that turning point six years later was almost to the day so that
that policy that meeting meaning of the minds resulted in a major turning point in her life analysis life and all your dancing and now we're at a del yeah I mean you mentioned also there I 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 um I can case is when it's nonviolent crime and drug offenses there's a case of a person you mentioned that received a life sentence for selling weed it you know and it's just the number it's like hundreds of thousands of people are in
the federal president jail and system for drug for selling drugs that's the only thing with no violence on their record whatsoever and it's 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 Jared and I helped in a small way on his effort but he really spearheaded the effort on 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 was a beautiful thing for us to also experience together but in the final days of the administration you know you're not getting legislation passed
and anything you do administratively is going to be probably overturned by an incoming administration so you know how do you use that time for maximum results and I really like dug in on on partens and commutations that I thought were we're um we're overdue and we're worthy and
um and my last night in Washington DC I the gentleman you mentioned Corvon 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 you know so and it felt really it's it's one person but you see with Alice like the ripple effect
of you know the commutation granted to her and her ability and the impact she'll have within her family with her grandkids um 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 and give them the news that a loved one was coming home and I'll just love the cool image of you Kim Kardashian now it's just dancing on a del show with the kids I love it well Kim wasn't at the adelaire show but but she's the
god she had connected as it was beautiful yeah the way the word dealt like can hold just like the bad-assness she has on stage like uh she does like hard break songs like but if anyone or no it's not even hard break like what's 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 yeah just the power of her voice you know I think about that one of the things we're talking about
live music I 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 um we both love stevey ray von like watching him perform you can even find old videos of like
Django Reinhardt got me got me Texas flood at this moment which is hilarious that you said like one of the songs you really like of stevey's just Texas flood well my bucket list is to learn how to play it's bucket list this bucket list that you made me feel so good because for me Texas flood was
the first solo and guitar ever learned because for me it was the like the impossible solo yeah and then that was so I worked really hard to uh 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 blues song you can have fun with it I hope you do do that throw on stevey ray want regardless I want you to play it for me 100% but he's he's amazing
and and you know there's so many great performers that are playing live now um you know I just saw Chris Stapleton show he's an amazing country artist he's too good he's so good uh 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 uai two monomore his one of his songs was and it was like finger style and I was just going through and and grinding it out and 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 and and the skill and the dexterity one of my favorite live performances is actually who really influenced Adele as a wreath of Franklin um 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 well you could do one note and you could just kill it the pain the soulfulness the spirit you feel like in her when you watch this that's true Adele carries some of that spirit also right yeah
yeah and you can take away all the instruments with the delin just have that voice and it's so commanding and it's so um mate anyway you watch this and you see like the arc of also the experience of the people in the choir and them starting to join in and it's anyway it's it's amazing I love
watching a queen like for freedom mercury queen performances yeah like in terms of vocals and just like great stage presence that live eight performances like considered one of the best of all I've watched so many times he's so cool and we pull up that for a second go to that part where
where he's saying radio gaga and they're all um mimicking in his arm it's so cool look at that oh yeah 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 to you did sue I think live music is one of those
kind of rare moments where you can really be present um 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 um and then allowing yourself to
sort of fall into it is is incredible so you've been training jiu jitsu trying um I mean I've seen you do jiu jitsu you're extremely you're you're you're very athletic you know you know how to use your body to commit violence but a ways of phrasing that but anyway uh in a skill that's
been honed over yeah I mean um what do you like about jiu jitsu well first of all I love the way I came to it it was my daughter um I think I told you this story is she's at 11 she told me that she wanted to learn self-defense and um 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 you know I loved that she had sort of that desire and awareness um so I I called some friends actually a mutual friend of ours and asked around for for people who I could work with in Miami and they
recommended the valentay brothers studio and um 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 her a bella used to take her and then she'd kind of encourage me and she'd sort of pull me into it
and I started doing it with her and then um Joseph and Theo saw us doing it they wanted to start doing it so now they joins and um then Jared joins and now we're we're all doing jiu jitsu and for me there's something really empowering knowing that I have some basic skills um to defend myself I
think it's something as humans we've kind of gotten away from you look at any other animal and you know 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
it gives you a sense of confidence and also gives you kind of a sense of calm you know knowing how to deescalate rather than an escalate a situation I also think as part of the training you um you develop more natural awareness when 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 which is really healthy and good as well but it's been beautiful they actually the valente brothers they have this seven five three code that was developed with some of the sort of samurai principles in mind and all of my kids have memorized
it and they'll talk to me about it at theo 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 benevolence respect honesty honor loyalty so this is not about jiu jitsu techniques or fighting techniques is this bottle wave life about the way you interact with the world with other people exercise nutrition rest hygiene positivity that'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 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 were in a line with the seven five three 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 and it's been
beautiful so so i do think that like body mind connection is super strong and and jiu jitsu so there's many things i love about the valentine 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 the actual fighting routes so it's not just the 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 body and awareness about others yeah it is you know sadly we forget but there's 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 100 percent i i've seen it with all of my kids they've been 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 woo way
and sort of soft resistance and and some of these sort of more eastern philosophies that they get exposed to through through their practice there that are sort of non-resistance that that are beautiful and hard concepts to internalize as an adult but but especially you know when
you're 12 10 and and eight respectively so it's it's and it's been an amazing experience for us all I love people like Pedro because he's like finding books they're like in Japanese and translating them to figure out like the details of a particular history like he's a 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 you know people have been fighting each other for a very long time and I love from the call of semen on you can't fake anything you can't lie about anything
yeah it's it's truly honest you're there and you either win or lose and simple and that's like it's also humbling that yeah the reality of that is humbling and oftentimes in life things are not that simple not that black and white so it's nice to have that sometimes that's that's
the biggest thing I gained from jiu jitsu is getting my in my ass kicked which is the humbling and it's nice to just get humbled in a very clear way sports in general great for that I think surfing probably because I can imagine yeah just you know yeah face planting not being able to
stand 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 your bucket list is probably like 120 pages but is there things like just pop to mind that you're like thinking about especially in the near future just saying
well I hope it always is long you know I hope I've never like 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 like there's too much to learn there's too much to learn so I've got a long one I you
know I think obviously there are some like immediate tactical you know interesting things that I'm doing I'm incubating a bunch of businesses I'm investing in a bunch of companies that hopefully I'll always can 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 yeah continuing to explore and learn but in terms of the like the the ones or more pure sort of adventure or hobby I think I'd like to climb out Kilimanjaro actually I know I would and I 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 and learn how to play Texas flood I want to see the northern lights like I want to go and and experience that I feel like that would be really beautiful I want to get my black belt like you have
black belt 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 um yeah a lot of things you know I'd love to go to space I thought not just space I think I'd
love 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 uh this face dude I feel like Mars is at this point in my life well the moon's like four days feels more more manageable I 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 yeah let me know how good let me know I guess I think actually just even go to space where you 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 look at it yeah it's just being all 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 um I hope that it I hope that it has that effect uh because I you know I think there's a big component to to interplanetary travel that kind of taps into this kind of manifest destiny inclination like the human desire to conquer territory and expand um the footprint of civilization
that sometimes feels much more rooted in like dominance and conquest than curiosity wonder and um and obviously I think there's you know maybe an existential imperative for it at some point or um a strategic or and security one but um 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 uh it's a when at this point I hope it also underscores like the need to protect what we have here yeah and it's 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 uh 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 I'm experiencing people who are good and honest and pure and true and passionate and that's not an uncommon experience so those experiences give me hope yeah other humans were pretty cool
I love humanity we're awesome you know not always but um but we're pretty good species yeah for the most part I'm the whole we do all right we do all right we we create some beautiful stuff and uh 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 uh and I hope you keep building and creating and uh doing a lot of beautiful things in this world evanka thank you so much for talking today thank you Lex thanks for listening to this conversation with evanka trump the support this podcast please check
out our sponsors in the description and now let me leave you with some words from marcus rillius dwell on the beauty of life watch the stars and see yourself running with them um thank you for listening i hope to see you next time