Lex Fridman Podcast
#436 – Ivanka Trump: Politics, Family, Real Estate, Fashion, Music, and Life
Tue, 02 Jul 2024
Ivanka Trump is a businesswoman, real estate developer, and former senior advisor to the President of the United States. Please support this podcast by checking out our sponsors: - Cloaked: https://cloaked.com/lex and use code LexPod to get 25% off - Shopify: https://shopify.com/lex to get $1 per month trial - NetSuite: http://netsuite.com/lex to get free product tour - Eight Sleep: https://eightsleep.com/lex to get $350 off - ExpressVPN: https://expressvpn.com/lexpod to get 3 months free Transcript: https://lexfridman.com/ivanka-trump-transcript EPISODE LINKS: Ivanka's Instagram: https://instagram.com/ivankatrump Ivanka's X: https://x.com/IvankaTrump Ivanka's Facebook: https://facebook.com/IvankaTrump Ivanka's books: Women Who Work: https://amzn.to/45yHAgj The Trump Card: https://amzn.to/3xB22jS PODCAST INFO: Podcast website: https://lexfridman.com/podcast Apple Podcasts: https://apple.co/2lwqZIr Spotify: https://spoti.fi/2nEwCF8 RSS: https://lexfridman.com/feed/podcast/ YouTube Full Episodes: https://youtube.com/lexfridman YouTube Clips: https://youtube.com/lexclips SUPPORT & CONNECT: - Check out the sponsors above, it's the best way to support this podcast - Support on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/lexfridman - Twitter: https://twitter.com/lexfridman - Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/lexfridman - LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/lexfridman - Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/lexfridman - Medium: https://medium.com/@lexfridman OUTLINE: Here's the timestamps for the episode. On some podcast players you should be able to click the timestamp to jump to that time. (00:00) - Introduction (10:17) - Architecture (22:32) - Modern architecture (30:05) - Philosophy of design (38:21) - Lessons from mother (1:01:27) - Lessons from father (1:09:59) - Fashion (1:20:54) - Hotel design (1:32:04) - Self-doubt (1:34:27) - Intuition (1:37:37) - The Apprentice (1:42:11) - Michael Jackson (1:43:46) - Nature (1:48:40) - Surfing (1:50:51) - Donald Trump (2:05:13) - Politics (2:21:25) - Work-life balance (2:27:53) - Parenting (2:42:59) - 2024 presidential campaign (2:46:37) - Dolly Parton (2:48:22) - Adele (2:48:51) - Alice Johnson (2:54:16) - Stevie Ray Vaughan (2:57:01) - Aretha Franklin (2:58:11) - Freddie Mercury (2:59:16) - Jiu jitsu (3:06:21) - Bucket list (3:10:50) - Hope
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, Viktor Frankl, 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.
Through 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 4th 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 a chance to a silly kid like me. From the bottom of my heart, Thank you. I love you all. And now a quick few second mention of each sponsor.
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go to lexfreedman.com slash hiring. And now onto the full ad reads. As always, no ads in the middle. I try to make these interesting, but if you skip them, friends, I will not hold it against you. I will forgive you. In fact, I will continue to celebrate you. Because I don't like ads either.
I try to put personal stuff in these ads so it's at least interesting to you, worth listening, maybe if you're bored. But if you must skip them, you can. Just check out the sponsors. I enjoy their stuff. Maybe you will too. This episode is brought to you by Cloaked.
a platform that lets you generate a new email address and phone number every time you sign up for a new website, allowing your actual email and phone number to remain secret from said website. It's kind of amazing that we just give away that info to like every single website.
I try all kinds of services all the time and you never know which of those websites will sell you information and then you get a waterfall, a barrage, a chaotic storm of spam in your mailbox that will torture you endlessly. And it's just good to not allow your information, your contact information to spread throughout the web.
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Every time I do a Shopify read, I always want to talk about Toby, the CEO, who is an amazing person and brilliant in many ways, but also just an engineer at heart, still writes code, all that kind of stuff, and a philosopher. It's really nice. I got a chance to meet with him and talk to him. I've been a fan of his for a long time.
I don't even know if he knows that Shopify sponsors this podcast, which is... I guess an indication of a large, successful company where all of the stuff is delegated. I think we just connect as human beings. Anyway, he's a great leader, great person. And actually, that's a really good sign for a company when the leader is a good leader and the team is a good team.
Anyway, I set up a store there, lexfreeman.com slash store. And you can too. Sign up for $1 per month trial period at shopify.com slash lex. That's all lowercase. Go to shopify.com slash lex to take your business to the next level today. This episode is also brought to you by NetSuite. Speaking of businesses, it's an all-in-one cloud business management system.
It's the machine within the machine that helps find the common language between the different modules of a business. It's, I guess, called an ERP system, Enterprise Resource Planning. The fact that I don't really know And you think about ERP, the terminology of it is a kind of inkling from the Jungian shadow of capitalism that it's not enough to be a designer, an idea person, engineer.
You have to know so many parts of a business to actually get it to work. And yeah, I guess NetSuite helps you out with that. Manages financials, HR, inventory, supply, e-commerce, much more. Running a business is really tough. This is one of the things I've been really, really thinking a lot about. I love being an individual contributor.
Sort of an engineer as part of a small team that builds stuff. Or a creative person as part of a small team that builds stuff. And like love the people you work with and just collaborate, brainstorm, argue, all of that, and create together. And when you scale that business, man, so much pain starts to emerge. But the other side of the coin of that pain is you get to have impact.
You get to potentially make a lot of people in the world feel good if you put a lot of love in the product and they feel that love that makes people feel good. So it's a trade-off and it's something I think a lot about. I don't care about money. I don't care about any of that stuff. But it is something I care a lot about to have a positive impact in this world, on a small scale or a large scale.
Either one. All of it is magical. Anyway, over 37,000 companies have upgraded to NetSuite by Oracle. Take advantage of NetSuite's flexible financing plan at netsuite.com. That's netsuite.com. This episode is also brought to you by Eight Sleep and it's pod for ultra. I just recently woke up. Yes, I just recently woke up.
I'm not gonna tell you what time it is, because you will start criticizing me. But sometimes I work late, late into the night, because I love it. But when I get to the bed, and ahead of me, because it's scheduled, it just gets cold, and a warm blanket, and I could just disappear into the beautiful, beautiful abyss of dreams. And I stay there for six, seven, eight, sometimes nine.
I get crazy sometimes, I go nine. Sometimes I get 10 hours. I recently got 10 hours of sleep. I was like, what happened? It all went dark and I woke up, the light emerged from the windows and wow, it's a good feeling. Anyway, that disappearance, that teleportation procedure can only happen on a bed that's awesome. And Eight Sleep creates a bed that's awesome. That's all I can say.
Go to eightsleep.com slash Lex and use code Lex to get 350 bucks off the Pod 4 Ultra. This episode is also brought to you by ExpressVPN. I use them to protect my privacy on the internet. Julian Assange, Edward Snowden, these are people I would love to talk to on a podcast. And I don't mean for 15 minutes, I mean for a long time, in a relaxed way, going deep.
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It would be just such a fascinating conversation to have with them. Yeah, how do we build an internet that promotes freedom, that protects that freedom? I would love to talk to both of them. Anyway, lots of fun conversation to be had. But, you know, the basic lowest hanging fruit of protecting yourself on the internet is a VPN, a good VPN. And I've always used ExpressVPN.
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You said that ever since you were young, you wanted to be a builder, that you loved the idea of 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 at 15, I would look out over the city skyline from my bedroom window in New York and imagine where I could contribute and add value in a way that...
I look back on and completely laugh at how confident I was, but I've known since some of 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 it 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 school so I could come join them. So I had these positive associations, but it came from something within myself. I think that as I got older and as I got involved in real estate, I I realized that it was so multidisciplinary.
You have, of course, the design, but you also have engineering, the brass tacks 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 kind of like makes you blush as an adult. And I think it's fun. It's fun to like tap into that energy. Yeah.
Yeah, where everything is possible. I think some of the greatest builders I've ever met kind of 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 and have that sort of,
100%.
You know, going out to space or building a new company where, like 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.
Yeah.
We start to become insecure and we start to rely on the input or validation of others. And it takes us away from that sort of core drive and ambition. So it's fun to reflect on that and also to smile, right? Because whether you can execute or not, time will tell. But yeah, no, that was very much my childhood.
Yeah, of course it's important to also have the humility once you get humbled and realize that it's actually a lot of work to build. I still am 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, right? Like it's a testament to somebody's dream. Not somebody, a 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 there, 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 tricky one to work against. And that's where civil engineering is one of my favorite things. I used to build bridges in high school for physics classes. You have to build bridges and you compete on how much weight they can carry relative to their own weight. You study how good it is by finding its breaking point. Yeah.
That was a deep appreciation for me on a miniature scale of, on a large scale, what people are able to do with civil engineering. Because gravity is a tricky one to fight against.
It definitely is. And bridges, I mean, some of the iconic designs 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.
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 40 Wall Street or the Chrysler Building or Rockefeller Center. And then you'll have these unbelievable super modern examples or modernist examples like Lever House and Seagram's 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. Right.
And for who could create the greatest skyline, this sort of race 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 on X, Architecture and 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 old and the new mixed together. Do you like Gothic?
I think it's hard to look at something like the Tribune Tower and not be completely in awe. Like 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 in vogue in like the 1920s here in America. Actually, I mentioned the Woolworth Tower before.
The Woolworth Tower was actually referred to as the Cathedral of Commerce because it also was in that Gothic style. Amazing. So this was built maybe a decade before the Tribune building. But the Tribune building, to me, is... It's 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
and incredibly inspired. And now the reflective glass of the building reflects back not only the river, 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 Trump's Chicago is very beautiful.
It was designed by Adrian Smith of Skidmore, Owings & Merrill, 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. You have to get the shade right. You know, some glass has a lot of iron in it and gets super green sometimes. 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, if you sit with it, and then if you also go beyond the rendering, right? You have to live with the materials. So you don't build a 92-story building, glass curtain wall, and not...
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 and the goal is actually that the end result is much, much more compelling than what the architect or artist rendered. But oftentimes that's very much not the case.
You know, sometimes also you mentioned context. You know, sometimes I'll see renderings of buildings. I'm like, wait, what about the building right to the left of it that's blocking 80% of its views? You know, architects, they'll remove things that are inconvenient. So you have to You have to be rooted in reality. In reality, exactly.
And I love the notion of living with the materials in contrast to living in the imagined world of the drawings. So both are probably important because you have to dream the thing into existence, but you also have to be rooted in what the thing is actually going to look like in the context of everything else. 100%.
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 architecture. 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 glass boxes on the waterfront. But I think exceptional things shouldn't be the norm. You know, they're typically rare. And I think in modern architecture, you find... an abundance of amazing examples of super compelling and innovative building designs. I mean, I mentioned the Burj Khalifa. It is awe-inspiring.
This is an unbelievably striking example of modern architecture. You look at some older examples, the Sydney Opera House. So I think there's unbelievable... There you go. I mean, it'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 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 it. You know, there's example of robotic fabrication, there's 3D printing.
Your friend and who you introduced me to not too long ago, Neri Oxman, what she'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 in architecture.
And I think there are some incredible examples of that. modern design that 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 I'm most proud to have worked on was the historic old post office building in Washington, D.C.
You look at a building like that and it feels like it has no equal. Yeah.
Also, there's a psychological element where people tend to want to complain about the new and celebrate the old.
Always. It's like the history of time.
People are always 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 going to last. It's not going to stand the test of time. But some things will. And there's... Just like in modern art and 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.
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, you know, otherwise 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 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 in my career 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 tell you that they got engaged in something.
lobby of your building or they got married in the ballroom and share with you some of those experiences. So to me, that's equally as beautiful, the use cases for these unbelievable projects. But I think it's all of it. 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 this one effort. So to me, it's exciting to sort of flex in all those different ways.
Yeah, like he says, it's dreams realized, hard work realized. 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. 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 to the shape 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, life.
There's nothing about this that makes me feel, maybe they're just being ironic in the names.
Unless that function's really flawed.
Yeah, exactly. Nobody's ever successfully crossed. Who crossed the bridge, yeah. But I mean, to me, there's just iconic, I love looking at bridges 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 beauty.
Yeah. I remember when I was first learning about bridges, studying the cable stay versus the suspension bridge. I mean, you actually built many replicas, so I'm sure you'll have a point of view on this. But they really are... 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 seen in it.
What in general is your philosophy, philosophy of design and building in architecture today?
Well, some of the most recent projects I worked on prior to government service were the old post office building and almost simultaneously Trump Doral in Miami. So these were both two 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 within, especially when you're repurposing a use. So this, the old post office building on Pennsylvania Avenue.
So beautiful.
It's unbelievable. So this was a Romanesque revival building built in the 1890s on America's Main Street to symbolize American grandeur. And at the time, there were post offices being built in this style across the country, but this being really the defining one.
Still to this day, the tallest habitable structure in Washington, the tallest structure being the monument, the nation's only vertical park, which is that clock tower. But you've got these thick granite walls, those carved granite turrets everywhere. Just an unbelievable building. You've got this massive atrium that runs through the whole center of it that is topped with glass.
So having the opportunity to spearhead a project like that was so exciting. And actually, it was my first renovation project, so... I came to it with a tremendous amount of energy, vigor and humility about how to do it properly, ensuring I had all the right people. We had countless federal and local government agencies that would oversee every single decision we made.
But in advance of even having the opportunity to do it, there was a close to two-year request for proposal, like a process that was put out by the General Services Administration. So it was this really arduous government procurement process. that we were competing against so many different people for the opportunity, which a lot of people said it was a gigantic waste of time.
But I looked at that, and I think so did a lot of the other bidders, and say it's worth trying to put the best vision forward.
So you fell in love with this project.
I fell in love, yeah.
So is there some interesting details about what it takes to do renovation? Is there about some of the challenges or opportunities? Because you want to maintain the beauty of the old and now 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 the interior spaces were completely dilapidated. It had been a post office. Then it was used for a really rundown food court and government office spaces.
It was actually losing $6 million a year. When we got the concession to build it and when we won and became one of, I think, a great example of public-private partnerships working together. But I think the biggest challenge in having such a radical use conversion is... just how you lay it out.
So the amount of time I would get on that Acela twice a week, three times a week to spend day trips down in Washington, and we would walk every single inch of the building, laying out the floor plans, debating over the configuration of a room. There were almost 300 rooms and there were almost 300 layouts. So nothing could be repeated.
Whereas when you're building from scratch, you have a box and you decide where you want to add things. you know, potential elements 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 setback. So the setback then required you to move the plumbing. So there was no, it was really a labor of love.
And to do something like this, and that's why I think renovation, we had it with Doral as well. It was $700,000. rooms over 650 acres of property. And so every single unit was very different and complicated. Not as complicated in some ways. The scale of it was so massive, but not as complicated as the old post office. But it required a level of precision. And I think in real estate, you have a
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 that make something great and make something functional and you feel it in the end result um But I mean, blood, sweat, tears, years of my life for those projects. And it was worth it.
I enjoyed almost every minute of it.
100%.
What's design on plan? I'm learning new things 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,
or the shower. So there's a lot of things that are missed when you do something conceptually without sort of rooting it in the actual structure. And that's why I think even with ground-up construction as well, people who aren't constantly on their job sites, constantly walking the projects, there's just a lot that's missed.
I mean, there's a wisdom to the idea that we talked about before, live with the materials and walking the construction site, walk in the rooms. I mean, that's what you hear from people like Steve Jobs, like Elon. That's why you live on the factory floor. That's why you... constantly obsessed about the details, the actual, not of the plans, but the physical reality of the product.
I mean, the insanity of Steve Jobs and Johnny I working together on like making it perfect, making the iPhone, the early designs, prototypes, making that perfect, like what it actually feels like in the hand. You have to be there, like as close to the metal as possible to truly understand.
And you have to love it in order to do that.
Right. It shouldn't be about how much it's going to sell for and all that kind of stuff. You have to love the art.
Because for the most part, you can probably get 90, maybe even 95% of the end result, unless something has terribly gone awry by not caring with that level of almost like maniacal precision. But you'll notice that 10% for the rest of your life. So I think... I think that extra effort, that passion, I think that's what separates good from great.
If we go back to that young Ivanka, the confidence of youth, and if we could talk about your mom, she had a big influence on you. You told me she was an adventurer. Yeah. Olympic skier and a businesswoman. 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 and growing up in communist Czechoslovakia, as a fashion mogul, as a real estate executive and builder. And Just this all-around trailblazing businesswoman. I also learned from her, you know, aside 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 in the moment. Or dancing. She loved to dance. Yeah. And she really taught me a lot about living life to its fullest. And she had so much courage, so much conviction, so much energy, and a complete comfort with who she was.
What do you think about that? I mean, Olympic athlete, the trade-off between like ambition and just wanting to do big things and pursuing that and giving your all to that and being able to relax and just throw your arms back and enjoy every moment of life. Like that trade-off. What do you think about that trade-off?
I think because she was this unbelievable, formidable athlete and because of the discipline she had as a child, I think it made her value those moments more as an adult. I think she was a great balance of the two that we all hope to find. And she was able to find both incredibly serious and formidable. I remember as a little girl, I used to literally traipse 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. See? That's funny that that's the picture you pull up.
I'm sorry. The two of you just look great in that picture.
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. Whatever she was feeling, she was just very expressive and a lot of fun to be around.
So she, as you mentioned, grew up during the Prague Spring in 1968, and that had a big impact on human history. I mean, 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 why do you think the communist ideology failed?
I think fundamentally, as people, we desire freedom. We want agency. And my mom was like a lot of other people who grew up in similar situations where she didn't like to talk about it that often. So one of my real regrets is that I didn't push her harder. But I think back to the conversations we did have, and I try to imagine what it's like. She was at Charles University in Prague, which was...
really like a focal point of the reforms that were ushered in during the Prague Spring and the liberalization agenda that was happening. The dance halls were opening, the student activists, and she was attending university there right at that same time. So the contrast to this feeling of freedom and progress and liberalization in the spring.
And then it's so quickly being crushed in the fall of that same year when the Warsaw Pact countries and the Soviet Union rolled in to put down and ultimately roll back all those reforms. So for her to have lived through that, you know, she didn't come to North America until she was 23 or 24. So that was her life. As a young girl, she was on the junior national ski team for Czechoslovakia.
My grandfather used to train her. They used to put the skis on her back and walk up the mountain in Czechoslovakia because there were no ski lifts. She actually made me do that when I was a child. just to let me know what her experience had been. If I complained that it was cold out, she's like, well, you didn't have to walk up the mountain.
You'd be plenty warm if you had carried the skis up on your back up the last run.
I feel like they made people tougher back then. Like my grandma, and you mentioned, it's funny, they go through some of the darkest things that a human being can go through and they don't talk about it. And they have a general positive outlook on life like that's deeply rooted in the knowledge of what life could be. Like how bad it could get.
My grandma survived Holodomor in Ukraine, which was a mass starvation.
brought on by 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 you mentioned, just to humble you.
Like kids these days are soft kind of energy, which I'm deeply, deeply grateful for. on all fronts, including just having hardship and including just physical hardship flung at me. I think that's really important.
You wonder how much 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 her 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 another manifestation of it and one that I grew up with. I remember this 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 you wouldn't otherwise be afforded in these societies under communist rules. 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. Right. So give enough details 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 having to navigate the world that way. Yeah. 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. So she figured out the system pretty quickly. Yeah.
But it's a very different experience from what I was navigating and the pressures and challenges me as a 14-year-old was dealing with. So I have so much respect and admiration for her.
Yeah, hardship clarifies what's important in life. You and I have talked about Man's Search for Meaning, that book. Having kind of an ultimate hardship clarifies that finding joy in life is not about the environment, it's about your outlook on that environment. And there's beauty to be found in any situation.
And also in that particular situation, when everything is taken from you, the thing you start to think about is the people you love. So in the case of Man's Search for Meaning, Viktor Frankl, thinking about his wife and how much he loves her. And that love was the flame that the warmth that kept him excited. The fun thing to think about when everything else is gone.
So we sometimes forget that with the busyness of life, you get all this fun stuff we're talking about, like building and being a creative force in the world. At the end of the day, what matters is just like the other humans in your life, the people you love. It's the simple stuff.
Victor Frankl is somebody, I mean, that book and just his philosophy in general is so inspiring to me. But I think so many people, they say they want happiness, but they want conditional happiness. When this and this, a thing happens or under these circumstances, then I'll be happy.
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 meaning of life is the search for meaning in life. It's the relationships we have and we form. It's the experience we have. It's how we deal with the suffering that life inevitably presents to us.
And Viktor Frankl does an amazing job highlighting that under the most horrific circumstances. And I think it's just super inspiring to me.
He also shows that you can get so much from just small joys, like getting a little more soup today than you did yesterday. I mean, it's the little stuff. If you allow yourself to love the little stuff of life, it's all around you, it's all there. So you don't need to have these ambitious goals and the comparison being a thief of joy, that kind of stuff.
just like it's all around us, the ability to eat. 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 to drink. Like, I didn't care about anything else. Speaking of things that matter in life, I would start to fantasize about water. And that was bringing me joy.
You can tap into this feeling at any time. Exactly. I was just tapping in just to stay positive.
Just go into your bathroom, turn on the sink, watch the water. Oh, for sure.
For sure. I mean, people really... It's good to have stuff taken away for a 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 in Judaism you're supposed to say every morning, which is basically thanking God for your body working. It's something, you know, so basic, but it's when it doesn't that we're grateful. So just reminding ourselves every day the basic things of a functional body, of our health, of access to water, which...
so many millions of people around the world do not have reliably is very clarifying and super important.
Yeah. Health is a gift. Water is a gift.
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 in different capacities. A lot of times, um, 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 in, you know, four-and-a-half-inch heels with this bouffant. And so it was almost like an inaccessible visual experience. But I think for me, when I saw her experience, the most joy tended to be by the sea. Almost always. Not a pool. And I think I get this from her. Pools, eh, they're fine. I love the ocean. I love saltwater. I love the way it makes me feel.
And I think I got that from her. So we would just swim together all the time. And... It's a lot of what I love about Miami, actually, being so close to the ocean. I find it to be super cathartic. But a lot of my memories of my mom, seeing her really just in her bliss, is floating around 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 people. And so on job sites, it was not unusual for me to run into somebody whose grandfather had worked with my grandfather in Brooklyn or Queens or whose father had worked with my mother. And they'd always tell me these stories about her rolling in and they'd hear the heels first.
Yeah.
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 very exacting. You know, so I had 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 I don't know.
That's not the visual I have. Yeah. But I loved the fact that she so embodied femininity and glamour and was so comfortable being tough and ambitious and determined and this unbelievable businesswoman and entrepreneur at a time when she was very much alone, even for me in the development world and
So many of the different businesses that I've been in, there really aren't women outside of sales and of marketing. You don't see as many women in the development space, in the construction space, even in the architecture and design space. Maybe outside of interior design. And she was decades ahead of me. I love hearing these stories.
I love hearing somebody who's my peer tell me about their grandfather and their father and their experience with 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's a good one.
That would be her exact thing. And when I'd complain about wearing something, you know, it was like the early 90s. Everything was also like uncomfortable, these fabrics and materials. And I was like... go back and forth between being super girly and a total tomboy. But she'd, you know, dress me up in these things and I'd be complaining about it.
And she'd say, Ivanka, pain for beauty, which I happen to totally disagree with because I think there's nothing worse than being uncomfortable. So I haven't accepted or internalized all of this wisdom, so to speak, but it was just funny. You know, she had a very specific point of view.
And full of good lines, paint for beauty.
It's funny because, I mean, just even in fashion, if something's uncomfortable, to me, there's nothing that looks worse than when you see somebody like tottering around and like their heels hurt them. So they're kind of walking oddly. 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.
And that helps me be confident and in command.
a foundation for fashion for you is comfort. And on top of that, you build things that are beautiful.
And it's not comfort like dowdy. You know, there's that level of comfort, but- Functional comfort. But I think you have to, for me, I want to feel confident. And you don't feel confident when you're like pulling at a garment or, you know, hobbling on heels that don't fit you properly. And she was never doing those things either. So I don't know how she was wearing stuff like that.
That's like a 40 pound feet of dress. And I know this- Because I have it and I wore it recently. And I mean, I got a workout walking to the elevator. Like this is a heavy dress and you know what? It was worth it. It was great. Yeah.
She's making it look easy.
But she, uh, she makes it look very, very easy. So.
Do you, uh, miss her?
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, but it's hard.
It was beautiful to see. I've gotten a chance to spend time with your family to see so many generations together at the table. And there's so much history there.
She's 97. And until she was around 94, she lived completely on her own. No help, no anything, no support. And now she requires really sort of 24-hour care. And I feel super grateful that I'm able to give her that because that's what she did for me.
It's amazing for me to have my children be able to grow up and know her stories, know her recipes, Czech dumplings and goulash and kizalitsa and all the other things she used to make me in my childhood. But she really, she was a major, she was a major force in my life. My grandmother, she, you know, my mom was working.
So, you know, my grandmother was the person who was always home every day when I came back from school. Yeah. I remember I used to shower and it would almost be like comical.
I feel like in my memory, and there is no washing machine I've seen on the planet that 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, pressed. It was all my grandmother. She was like running after me, taking care of me. And so it's nice to be able to do that for her.
Yeah. Yeah.
I got from her reading. My grandmother, she devoured books, like devoured books. She loved the more sensational ones. So like some of these like romance novels, I would pick them up, the covers. But she could tell you, she could look at like any royal lineage across Europe and tell you all the mistresses.
All the drama.
All the drama. She loved it. But her face was always buried in a book. My grandfather, Dedo, he was the athlete. He swam professionally on the national team for Czechoslovakia, and 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 so that's something I remember a lot from my childhood, and she would always say, like, I got reading from her. Yeah.
I mean, speaking of drama, I had my English teacher in high school recommend a book for me by D.H. Lawrence. It's supposed to be a classic. She's like, this is a classic you should read. It's called Lady, Shadow, and His Lover. So I've read a lot of classics, but that one is straight up like a romance novel about a wife who like is cheating with a gardener.
And I remember reading this, like what, like in 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, do you know why she recommended it to you? I don't know.
I think she's sending a signal, hey, you need to get out more or something. I don't know.
Maybe she was seeking to inspire you.
Yeah, exactly. Anyway, I mean, I love that kind of stuff, too. But I love all the classics. And there's a lot of drama. Human nature, drama is part of it. Yeah. What about your dad growing up? What did you learn about life from your father?
I think my father's sense of humor is sometimes underappreciated. He had an amazing and has an amazing sense of humor. He loved music. I think my mom loved music as well. You know, my father always used to say that in another life he would have been a Broadway musical producer, which is hilarious to think about, but he loves music.
That is funny to think about.
Right? Now he DJs at Mar-a-Lago, so people get a sense of, you know, he loves Andrew Lloyd Webber and all of it, Pavarotti, Elton John. I mean, these were the same songs on repeat my whole childhood, so I know the playlist.
Probably Sinatra and all that.
Loves Sinatra, loves Elvis. You know, a lot of the greats. So I think I got a little bit of my love for music from him, but my mom shared that as well. I think one of the things, you know, in looking back that I think I inherited from my father as well is 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 job sites. I remember with the old post office building, there was this massive glass-topped 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 so that the temperature never varied. And it was enormously expensive as an undertaking.
And I remember one of his first times on the site because, you know, he had really empowered me with this project. And he trusted me to execute and to also, you know, rope him in when I needed it. But 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 we walk what they think of the system that the mechanical engineer has 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.
In the circumstance of a 1,000-year storm, you will have the exact perfect temperature if there's a massive blizzard or if it's unbearably hot. But 99.9% of the time, you'll never need it. And so I think it's just an enormous waste of money.
And so he 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 sticks out in my head because I'm like, oh my gosh, we're redesigning the whole system.
You know, we were actively under construction, so it was... But I would see him do that on a lot of different issues. He would ask people on the work level what their thoughts were, ideas, concepts, designs. And there was almost like a Socratic sort of mindset.
first principles type of way he questioned people, trying to get down to sort of trying to reduce complex things to something really fundamental and simple. So I try to do that myself to the best I can. And I think it's something I very much learned from him.
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 to push simplification.
Yeah.
Can we do this simpler? 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. It doesn't matter that's how it was done. What is the right way to do it? And usually the simpler it is, the more correct the way. Has to do with cost, has to do with simplicity of production manufacturer, but usually simple is best.
And it's oftentimes not the architecture, the engineers, it's in Elon's case, probably the line worker who sees things more clearly. So I think making sure it's not just that you're asking good questions, you're asking the right people those same good questions.
That's why a lot of the Elon companies are really flat in terms of organizational design where, Anybody on the factory floor can talk directly to Elon. There's not this managerial class, this hierarchy where it's travel up and down the hierarchy, which large companies often construct this hierarchy.
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.
So you're like, nobody knows what they actually do. So when it's flat, you can actually get as quickly as possible. When problems arise, you can solve those problems as quickly as possible. And also you have a direct interaction. iterative process where you're making things simpler, making them more efficient and constantly improving. So yeah, it's interesting.
Well, when large, I mean, you see this in government, a lot of people get together, a hierarchy is developed and that somehow, sometimes it's good, but very often just slows things down and you see great companies, great, great companies, Apple, Google, Meta, they have to fight against that bureaucracy that builds, the slowness that large organizations have.
And to still be a big organization and act like a startup is the big challenge.
It's super difficult to deconstruct that as well once it's in place, right? It's circumventing layers and asking questions, probing questions of people on the ground level is a huge challenge to the authority of the hierarchy. And there's tremendous amount of resistance to it.
So it's how do you grow something in the case of a company in terms of a culture that can scale but doesn't lose its connection to sort of real and meaningful feedback. It's not easy. Yeah.
I've had a lot of conversations with Jim Keller, who is this legendary engineer and leader. And he has talked about, like you often have to kind of be a little bit of an asshole in the room. Not in a mean way, but like it's uncomfortable. 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, nobody wants to be like, can we do it way different? Everyone wants just like this lunch is coming up. I have this trip planned on the weekend with the family. Everyone just wants comfort. When 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 and 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 and is ultimately seen as a threat. I mean, nobody really gets fired for maintaining the status quo, even if things go poorly. It's the way it was always done. Yeah.
Yeah, humans are fascinating. But in order to actually do great big projects, to reach for the stars, you have to have those people. You have to constantly disrupt and have those uncomfortable conversations.
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 as a form of self-expression, as a means to communicate either a truth or an illusion, depending on what kind of mood you were in, but 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 Wharton.
It was the day of my graduation and Anna Winter calls me up and offered me a job at Vogue, which is a dream in so many ways, but I was so focused. I wanted to go into real estate and I wanted to build buildings and I told her that. So I really thought that that was going to be the path I was taking. And then
very organically fashion, it was part of my life, but it came into my life in a more professional capacity by talking with my first of many different partners that I had in the fashion space about, he actually had shown me a building to buy. His family had some real estate holdings and And I passed 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 what about the woman who had a salary and was really excited to buy herself a great pair of earrings or had just received a great bonus and was going to use it to treat herself? So we thought there was a void in the marketplace. Yeah. And that was the first category I launched, Ivanka Trump Fine Jewelry. And we just caught lightning in a bottle.