David Senra: Right now in your life today, what is the most exciting part of your work life?

Ivanka Trump: My work life, specifically, hmm. I think I have gotten to a place where I know myself, I know what I love, I know what I'm good at, I know what excites me, and where I can sustain this excitement over a long period of time, which is critical because I've really lived so many different lives.

Ivanka Trump: So, now everything I apply myself to, I can do it with a lot of vigor, but also a lot of confidence that this is something I'm passionate about. So the things I'm doing right now that I really love and that I spring out of bed each morning to do are super mission-driven.

Ivanka Trump: So, whether it's incubating companies from for-profit to non-for-profit businesses, investing in companies, and founders that are really right at the edge of transformation, whether that be AI, biotech, neurotech, robotics, even space.

Ivanka Trump: Really, things that I think satisfy huge curiosity for me and enable me to learn and grow and expand, and founders that are taking on meaningful problems. What inspires me is people really swinging for things. I love individuals with huge imaginations and huge ideas.

Ivanka Trump: The ability to learn from them, to spend time with them, to be expanded by them is, I think, super interesting. And then I've also gotten back to my real estate roots, which has been a lot of fun, and I'm working on an incredible project with my husband in the Mediterranean. It's massive in scale.

David Senra: I think that's an understatement. Can you explain?

Ivanka Trump: Yes, it is very-

David Senra: I mean, there's no power on this island.

David Senra: You're building everything from scratch.

Ivanka Trump: Yeah.

David Senra: Correct?

Ivanka Trump: Well, it's an unbelievable, beautiful 1,400-hectare private island in the middle of the Mediterranean. We were on a friend's boat, and we stopped for a swim. Effectively, that's how we found it. We swam to the island. We went on a hike, barefoot all the way up to the top, and we were just captivated, and it stayed with us ever since.

Ivanka Trump: And over the course of many years, we developed the opportunity to help realize its potential and transform it, but with a lot of restraint and care because the land is so beautiful that, really, the architecture has to be fully integrated into it, almost rise from it. It's not even a business for me, despite the scale of it.

Ivanka Trump: Not only the island, but we have five miles of beachfront directly across from the island, this beautiful peninsula with a lagoon on one side, the ocean on the other, beautiful white sand beaches. For me, it feels more like a challenge than anything else.

Ivanka Trump: The culmination of all of my experience in real estate, all of my travel, a lot of reflection on how I want to live, how I think people increasingly are wanting to live, and trying to really build something that's a tangible manifestation of that.

Ivanka Trump: That requires a lot of vision, the collaboration of some of the greatest masters that exist. So, I was just there walking the lands, really just trying to sort of be with it and experience it alongside some of the greatest living architects of our time, like true masters of their craft, people with integrity so absolute, like there will be no compromise. And that's something we want to create there. So, we're very excited.

David Senra: What does that mean? People with integrity so complete there's no compromise in their vision? Is that what you mean?

Ivanka Trump: When you work with real artists, regardless of their medium, whether it's a canvas or real estate, a home, music, they don't compromise. Their integrity is precise and absolute, and they'll push themselves; they'll push everyone around them.

David Senra: Are you guys hearing this? There's like six people off camera that I badger every day.

Ivanka Trump: That you drive absolutely crazy. But actually, that's where you get to something. And part of it, there is a push and pull. When you're working with an architect, unless they're building a monument, right? It's, they're building a space that people have to interact with, not just observe like a canvas. They have to live in it. They have to get married in it. If it's a hotel, it's their home. So there's certain functional elements, like there's nothing uglier than a beautiful non-functional space.

David Senra: Mm-hmm.

Ivanka Trump: To me, that's not a masterpiece because it wasn't fully thought through. So when you combine something that is architecturally incredibly meaningful and beautiful and intentional with a highly functional space, and one of the things I love about real estate is it's, well, first, it's tangible in a world where increasingly everything is not. You see the result of years of work, and really, to bring a project to life, it's years, sometimes a decade plus.

David Senra: It also must feel good because many of the buildings that you've been involved in, this new project, you know it's going to outlive you.

Ivanka Trump: Oh, yeah.

David Senra: Like to build something that you know lasts longer than your own lifetime.

Ivanka Trump: One of the things that I love so much and I've worked on a lot of incredible projects. The old post office in Washington, D.C. was my baby. We acquired this incredible building, built in the 1890s, and lovingly restored it and made it useful in its modern life.

David Senra: Wow.

Ivanka Trump: It was effectively a dilapidated post office and now is a thriving urban hotel. So that was an amazing project that took a very long period of time to bring to life, and just one example.

Ivanka Trump: But I think the thing I love the most, not only seeing it, because that's great, and experiencing it, and remember every decision you took through the design and development process, but also that people will stop me and tell me the story of a child's christening in one of the ballrooms, their daughter's wedding.

David Senra: Mm.

Ivanka Trump: Some experiences they had that was a milestone life moment that somebody chose to have that happen in a space that I conceived alongside many other talented people. So, that to me is something really beautiful. That's something very, very unique and special about being a builder.

Ivanka Trump: You're building the stage for people's lives and the realization of their dreams. And that's what we're going to do with this project, Sazan.

David Senra: Yeah. How do I say it?

Ivanka Trump: Sazan.

David Senra: Sazan. Okay. I want to go back to something you said that's very interesting. It's one of my favorite things about you. You said, "I know who I am."

Ivanka Trump: Mm.

David Senra: So, you were very kind. I was chasing Dana White to get him on the show forever, and he wasn't responding, and I text you, and you're very kind, and you set that up immediately. But Dana has this thing, like a simple genius to the way he operates his life, in my opinion, and his business. And the piece of advice that he would give to young entrepreneurs is, if you know who you are, which is very difficult to do and takes a long time, if you know who you are and what you want to do, he's like, "The rest of your life is easy."

Ivanka Trump: Yeah.

David Senra: You already know who you are. You know what you want to do. You just wake up, and you get after that goal. You started companies early. How old were you when you first started your first company?

Ivanka Trump: I was 22.

David Senra: You didn't know who you were at 22, correct?

Ivanka Trump: Yeah.

David Senra: So, can you talk about the process that you went through to now say truthfully that you know who you are?

Ivanka Trump: Well, I think if you don't know who you are, the world will tell you, and it may not be an answer you want, right? So, the world is noisy, especially when you have a certain level of visibility. It projects onto you as much as it receives you. So I think you have to do the work of really getting to know yourself and what feels right.

Ivanka Trump: Some of the hardest decisions I've taken, and sometimes it's really about saying no and setting boundaries or changing course. When those decisions, regardless of how hard they are, align with your values, it always feels good. Like, it's hard. It can be difficult, but you never question it. You never second-guess, and you don't look back and wonder what if.

Ivanka Trump: It's the decisions you take that don't fully feel right, that don't align with your true self, with those core values that you hold. Those are the things that I think you always regret.

David Senra: Yes.

Ivanka Trump: Oftentimes, people get there because they sort of forum shop decisions. They'll ask people about their life, "What should I do? What should I do?" And they almost make it like a process to make tough choices. And there's something very important about speaking to people who are knowledgeable and getting perspective and feedback. But ultimately, you can't outsource decision-making as it pertains to major decisions in your personal or professional life.

Ivanka Trump: You really have to sit with it. Actually, Dana, I think is a great example of somebody who he knows himself so well. He's so authentically who he is. Like, he would be wildly uncomfortable wearing a mask and performing in some other role. I think Rick Rubin, I think so many great people, Dolly Parton.

David Senra: Mm-hmm.

Ivanka Trump: I love her. She is who she is, and she's always been the same, and she really owns it. And I think we're drawn as people, if you look at sort of pop culture, I think we're naturally drawn to people who are extremely authentic, especially over time. I think if somebody's in the public eye for a long period of time, and yet so many people I know are really afraid to be themselves. The reality is you're going to get criticized either way. You might as well be the best version of you possible.

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David Senra: How did you get to the point where you're 22 when you start your first company.

Ivanka Trump: Yeah.

David Senra: You didn't know yourself. Now, several years later, you do. How did you do this?

Ivanka Trump: Well, I think people will say trust your instinct, but I think instinct has to be developed.

David Senra: Mm-hmm.

Ivanka Trump: So my instinct when I was 22 is different from my instinct today because I think instinct is honed and refined over time. I think first and foremost, you have to get started. So you have to try things, and those micro wins that felt as big as the massive ones today, you start to develop reps and patterns and confidence, which is so important.

Ivanka Trump: It's really hard to trust yourself or trust your gut if you're deeply insecure and you haven't developed a rhythm, or you haven't had some successes. And this could be in entry-level beginning positions.

David Senra: Mm-hmm.

Ivanka Trump: I started out in real estate working for a developer in Brooklyn, developing shopping malls, but those little wins I had with the construction teams, or times when I felt like I rose to the occasion, they set the foundation for my instincts and for the confidence that would come later.

Ivanka Trump: I also think, and I think this is increasingly true, especially the more demands there are on you and your time, and all of us have this to some degree with social media and text messages, and emails, and the access the world has into the private sanctuary of our homes and our lives just through the devices that we carry with us. I think it requires a tremendous amount of discipline to create stillness.

Ivanka Trump: I have to be much more intentional about creating a contemplative routine than I did maybe 20 years ago. There's just a lot more coming at me, so I have to create a lot of boundaries for myself in my day. I wake up, I cook the kids' breakfast. Jared and I cook the kids' breakfast. They prefer it when he does. In which case, I'm the one pushing them out the door. They like his pancakes better.

Ivanka Trump: Your team, by the way, witnessed us running, as always, roughly two minutes late for the bus. We always get there on time. But we leave two minutes later than we're supposed to.

Ivanka Trump: So we're currently in a moment where each of my three children like completely different breakfasts, so I'm basically a short order chef.

David Senra: This is great.

David Senra: Oh, no.

Ivanka Trump: And I've tried to find that one thing that they will all eat, unsuccessfully so far. It used to be easier.

David Senra: Yeah.

Ivanka Trump: I make breakfast, drop them off at the bus. They go to school quite early, so I normally have the ability right after drop off to sit by the ocean. I live here in Miami and meditate as the sun rises, and I'll pray. I'll reflect. I'll think.

Ivanka Trump: I keep that beautiful moment in my day as sort of an anchor to both offer sort of thanks and gratitude to God and the universe, but also to reflect on what my priorities are for the day ahead, and I've found that to be incredibly important and grounding. I come back to the house. I work out.

Ivanka Trump: And I do all of that in it's an hour and a half time span, a two-hour time span. But to me, that routine in the morning sets me up for success through the course of the day in terms of less reactivity, being much more proactive in terms of clear definition around what I want to accomplish that day, and then what everyone else wants me to learn about or accomplish will be secondary, as long as I sort of create clarity for myself around my goals.

Ivanka Trump: And then I have some version of that in the evening. A little more challenged, because the kids are all home and every night is a different adventure. But really trying to sort of find stillness so I can sort of hear what the universe is telling me.

Ivanka Trump: Rick Rubin talks about this in his book, "The Creative Act," that the creator ultimately is just super attuned with what the universe is saying, and that the deeper you listen, the more you hear. And part of listening is listening to oneself. And if you don't create space and time for that, then I find that it's very easy to just be on the hamster wheel and be a lot less creative in your pursuits.

Ivanka Trump: It's funny, I listen to so many people, and they have these eureka moments in the shower, which I do, too.

David Senra: Mm-hmm.

Ivanka Trump: But I think part of the reason that happens is because they don't have their cell phone in the shower.

David Senra: No.

Ivanka Trump: Whether it's five minutes or 20 minutes, they're there alone with their thoughts.

David Senra: Yeah.

Ivanka Trump: And suddenly the ideas start to come in.

David Senra: You mentioned "The Creative Act." One thing that you and I have bonded over the last several years is that we're both voracious readers. You've given me a ton of books. We talk about books all the time.

David Senra: The last three people I've recorded with before you, Rick Rubin, Dana White, and Ed Catmull, founder of Pixar. And I was on the phone with you yesterday, and what I realized that all four of you have in common, even though you work in vastly different industries in different ways, is you're essentially taking a lot of time to know yourself, and then once you did that, you're just building your business for you first.

Ivanka Trump: 100%. Naval, who is a friend of mine and of Jared's, he always says, "Escape competition through authenticity." If you're competing, it's because you're copying. Build something that fully comes from you, and that will feel most right, and it's also the thing that's least replicable. I love the idea of just escaping competition through authenticity, but you have to do the hard work of knowing who you are.

Ivanka Trump: You can't be authentically somebody else, right? I think part of the reason I like to read so much is we all wrestle with the same series of hard questions that all of humanity has wrestled with, right?

David Senra: For thousands of years.

Ivanka Trump: And there are not that many of them. Humanity, all of who we are, it just echoes over time with these same questions. So I love to look at books, and the reading I like to do tends to be things that take on those hard questions. What are the things worth sacrificing for?

Ivanka Trump: What are the gems of wisdom and insight that can be extracted from some of the most brilliant minds across so many fields? I love philosophy because they grapple with some of these tougher questions. And from each of these amazing thinkers. If I extract a few pieces of wisdom, that's just a gem I put on the chain with everything else. So to me, that's very, very interesting.

Ivanka Trump: And then I think if you look in business, you have some of these people, and obviously your life's work is trying to understand them and know them, whether they be living or dead. But you will have somebody who will distill sometimes 80 years of a life into a 300-page book that you can buy for 30 dollars.

David Senra: Mm-hmm.

Ivanka Trump: And they'll tell you everything they've learned, everything they've experienced. I think there's just so much value in opening that book and listening to them.

David Senra: It's silly not to. I really do think it's irresponsible not to. You're close to some of the Walton family members.

Ivanka Trump: Yeah

Ivanka Trump: Yeah.

David Senra: And I was just with one Sam's grandson, Sam Walton's grandson, at an event yesterday.

Ivanka Trump: Who's that?

David Senra: Steuart.

Ivanka Trump: Oh, yeah.

David Senra: Yeah.

Ivanka Trump: I know Steuart.

David Senra: Yeah.

Ivanka Trump: He's great.

David Senra: Yeah. And we were talking about that because there's actually some, like, I don't even know if I should say this publicly, but we'll see. There's some writing of the co-author that Sam had on his autobiography.

Ivanka Trump: Yeah.

David Senra: Because Steuart listens to my podcast Founders, my other podcast Founders, and he's like, "I'm going to try to get this to you, just I can't use it for public consumption, but just because I'm really obsessed with Sam Walton, and I admire him greatly."

Ivanka Trump: Yeah.

Ivanka Trump: Yeah.

David Senra: And he's like, "This will round out some things that you didn't know about him," which I thought was-

Ivanka Trump: And that's one of the best business books ever. Like, talk about a person who had a vision and just meticulously executed it over time.

David Senra: But it's also an act of service because what's so remarkable about that book is he was writing it when he knew he was dying.

Ivanka Trump: Yeah.

David Senra: He was in a great deal of pain. Cancer was all over his body. He had limited time left on this earth, and what did he do? He's like, "Hey, I had a 60-year experience as an entrepreneur. I learned some stuff. I'm going to put it into this book and then push it down the generations." And then people like Jeff Bezos happened to pick up the book and use some of those ideas to build Amazon, which made your life better and my life better. This act of service cannot be... It's just super important. It's so important that they do this.

David Senra: I just saw Gwynne Shotwell yesterday, and I was like, "Listen, I know you don't know me, but I know you. I've read every single book on the history of SpaceX."

Ivanka Trump: Yeah.

David Senra: "I've read every single biography of Elon." I was like, "Will you please write a book?"

Ivanka Trump: Mm.

David Senra: And she's like, "It's funny you bring that up," because she's had an offer for 10 years. And I was like, "First," just like, "You have such a unique lived experience working on one of the most important companies in the world."

Ivanka Trump: Yeah.

David Senra: "And don't do it right now. Wait after they appeal, but you should write a memoir detailing your experiences," because it's not just for her and her family. It's for everybody else that comes after her.

Ivanka Trump: It's a really hard thing to do. I mean, it's like an X-ray of the soul.

David Senra: Yeah.

Ivanka Trump: What do I reveal? I mean, great books, if you're not exposing vulnerability, if you're not really telling truth, they're not great books.

David Senra: Yeah.

Ivanka Trump: So you have to be comfortable revealing yourself, the good and the bad. And obviously, you see it in books.

David Senra: Yeah.

Ivanka Trump: There's a little revisionist history and a little shaping and smoothing of the edges.

David Senra: Yeah.

Ivanka Trump: But if it's really going to be great... Actually, "Shoe Dog" is a great one, another amazing book by Phil Knight.

David Senra: You just read my mind.

Ivanka Trump: Then you're really putting it out there and leaving it out there. And I know some incredibly successful people who have built enormous businesses, and then at 80, 85, they write a book, and they are petrified for the launch of that book.

Ivanka Trump: Like, more nervous than in acquiring a major company, because there's something so vulnerable about doing it.

David Senra: Yeah.

David Senra: Yeah.

Ivanka Trump: Plus, it takes a tremendous amount of discipline to distill the wisdom accumulated in a life into an understandable, relatable way, really pull out the principles. You ask a great musician how they do it, like sometimes the great musicians can't teach you to play the guitar, right?

David Senra: Yeah.

Ivanka Trump: It's like they don't know. They just do it.

David Senra: Yeah.

Ivanka Trump: So I think for a lot of people, it's an interesting exercise in even at a late stage in their journey, kind of discovering why what they've done has been so effective. What are the patterns over time? So some people recognize it while they're in it. Other people, it's just sort of like second nature.

David Senra: I'm obsessed, as you know, with people that do things for a long period of time. Everybody thinks I have a fetish for old people. It's not that I have a fetish for old people. It's just, if I sit down with a 70-year-old entrepreneur that's been building his business for 50 years, there's stuff that he, exactly what you said, he can't explain it, but it comes out in conversations, and you kind of piece it together. You read my mind with "Shoe Dog" because I just finished reading it for the third or fourth time.

Ivanka Trump: Yeah.

David Senra: And I just recorded another episode on it. It'll be out soon.

Ivanka Trump: That's one of the great opening lines. What's the opening line? It was something about the pioneers, "And then there was us." Some made it, some died along... and then the rest... Yeah.

David Senra: So he's in Oregon in the 1960s, and he thought people from Oregon, they didn't think big, so no one around him... In fact, everybody around him, including his father, is saying, "Don't do this weird, crazy idea that you have." But he says his track coach, his teacher, same person, and his co-founder of Nike, Bill Bowerman, took great pride in the fact that they were from Oregon because the Oregon Trail.

Ivanka Trump: Mm-hmm.

Ivanka Trump: Mm.

David Senra: And they said that, "The cowards never started. The weak died along the way. That leaves us."

Ivanka Trump: "And that leaves us."

Ivanka Trump: I love it. Yes.

David Senra: And he believed-

Ivanka Trump: I remember, it's been years, it's probably decades since I read that book, but I remember that opening. I'm like, what a great entry.

David Senra: The opening of the book is perfect because we were just talking about this when you were 22, when I was in my early 20s. The existential angst of a young man and woman in their 20s is universal.

Ivanka Trump: Yeah.

David Senra: It's like, "What is my life going to be?" So much of everything's ahead of you, and so he's on this run, and he just feels like... he's like, he's been away from his house for seven years. He's got an MBA. He served in the Army, and he's living in his childhood bedroom. And he's like, "What am I doing with my life? I'm a grown man. I feel like a kid."

Ivanka Trump: Yeah.

David Senra: And the first opening where he's running, he's just like, "I'm going to pursue this crazy idea," which turns into Nike.

Ivanka Trump: Yeah.

David Senra: But it ties to what you just said. In the book, it talks about getting his heart broken. Talks about the death of his son. Talks about the fact that he was a bad husband in the beginning. He was absent-minded.

Ivanka Trump: And the book ends way before peak, like way before peak.

David Senra: It ends at the IPO.

Ivanka Trump: Yeah.

David Senra: At the IPO.

Ivanka Trump: He's almost saying that, okay, you know what happens next, but this is how many decades of struggle to get there.

David Senra: The struggle.

Ivanka Trump: One of my favorite books that I recently reread, and I'm... It's interesting. I'm at a point now, and I'm reading a lot of new stuff, but I'm spending a lot more time revisiting things that had a profound impact on me. Because the act of rereading something at a different point in your life, you experience it a totally different way.

Ivanka Trump: So like with everything else, including you're asking me some of the things that I'm working on, for me, it's less and better. Less things, more focus, more intentionality, and the same is true of books, and it's been so beautiful at this point in my life to reread some of these great books. And one of my favorites is "Man's Search for Meaning" by Viktor Frankl.

David Senra: Mm.

Ivanka Trump: And I was thinking about it when you were talking about just hardship and struggle, and he certainly does not romanticize struggle. I mean, he endured the most difficult of human experiences, and he tells his story, Viktor Frankl, of having survived the Nazi concentration camps. But the idea that meaning can often be redeemed by the struggle. You don't find meaning when things are easy. You find meaning when things are difficult.

Ivanka Trump: And when things are extremely difficult, it's often that same meaning that helps you endure, and there's something so incredible about that. And I just think about it, and I've been talking to my children a lot about this book. I just gave it to my daughter, who's as voracious a reader as I am.

David Senra: Mm.

Ivanka Trump: It's amazing. I love it. She blows me away.

David Senra: That's a gift.

Ivanka Trump: She goes to the bookstore probably once a week to pick up something new, and she'll come back. She just came back with "War and Peace" under her arm. The book is like this, it's like a doorstop.

David Senra: Oh, my God.

David Senra: We should say she's 14.

Ivanka Trump: She's 14. She's amazing. So she's got a tremendous curiosity and thirst to learn, and she also loves reading. But we were talking about this book recently. I had just given her "Man's Search for Meaning," and this idea is so empowering that everything can be taken from you. And the people and Viktor Frankl himself in the concentration camp, really, it feels like everything's been stripped from you, your family, everything.

Ivanka Trump: And yet there is a sliver of sovereignty that is how you experience that, how you react to that, how your ability to show up, your attitude in the face of enormous struggle and challenge. And I think that's so empowering because that's such an extreme example.

Ivanka Trump: But he has this beautiful quote I just emailed to her, and this will be a paraphrase, that, "Between stimulus and response, there's a space. In that space lies the freedom to respond and react, and in that reaction is your freedom and growth." So it's like finding that space between stimulus and response.

Ivanka Trump: So, he encapsulates the idea of our ability to show up in great times and also in the hardest of times, and the ability to really control our own mindset, which is extremely powerful.

David Senra: Mm.

David Senra: I found one of my all-time favorite quotes when I was reading the book "Zero to One." The quote says, "The single most powerful pattern I have noticed is that successful people find value in unexpected places, and they do this by thinking about business from first principles instead of formulas." That is exactly what AppLovin has done with their advertising platform, Axon. Axon connects you with over a billion potential new customers inside mobile games. Axon allows you to capture undivided attention.

David Senra: Axon ads are full-screen video ads that are watched for an average of 35 seconds. That is retention that blows other ad platforms out of the water. You can launch on Axon in minutes. You set the goal, and Axon achieves it. There's no complex setup, no expertise needed, and Axon scales quickly. They can put your ads in front of over a billion potential customers.

David Senra: Other businesses have seen immediate results, have scaled to hundreds of thousands of dollars of spend per day, and increased their revenue by millions. So, you want to get started quickly before all your competitors are on Axon. And you can do that by going to axon.ai/senra. That is axon.ai/senra.

David Senra: What was the most difficult period of your life professionally, when you were going through the most struggle, or pain, or indecision?

Ivanka Trump: I think probably when I made the choice to go into government. It was incredibly challenging because I hadn't been planning to, and I was finally at that place where it was like a hockey stick.

David Senra: You had a thriving business.

Ivanka Trump: Things were going so well, and I feel like you spend your 20s really setting the foundation.

David Senra: Yeah.

David Senra: Mm-hmm.

Ivanka Trump: And then it was going... My fashion brand, we were doing over 800 million in sales annually. I was running all real estate acquisitions and development for the Trump Organization, so I was building the Old Post Office at the same time as I was building Trump Doral, which is 800 acres here in Miami. I had three young children, very young in one case. My son, Theo, was literally on my hip.

David Senra: Mm-hmm.

Ivanka Trump: He was six months old. And then my father won the presidency, and he said, "I need you." He'd never spent a night in Washington until his first night in the White House. And he didn't know anyone.

David Senra: Yeah.

Ivanka Trump: I mean, we lived in New York City. Half the politicians we knew, they were Democrats who would come annually to fundraise and introduce themselves.

David Senra: Mm-hmm.

Ivanka Trump: So, he really knew no one. He was going to a new city, and he trusted my ability and Jared's ability. He trusted our judgment. He trusted our instincts. He trusted our intentions. The fact that we would be honest and truthful with him, and he asked us to go. This was after he had won, around a week and a half after. And so, the complete change in trajectory of our whole lives.

David Senra: It's like a 180.

Ivanka Trump: There was nothing. Normally, when people run for office, they sort of set themselves up for it. They contemplated for 20 years. You know, they take on smaller challenges, state and local races.

Ivanka Trump: You know, my father started with the presidency, won the presidency, and then said, "Hey, I need you." And I think both Jared and I, in that moment, we looked at each other, and we said, "You know, we can stick our heads in the sand, and continue on as we had planned in developing our own lives and businesses." But would the 80-year-old version of ourselves look back and be proud of that choice, proud of the decision to not go in?

Ivanka Trump: And I think we both knew he was asking us for help. He's giving us an enormous opportunity to give back to a country we love so much. And even if it's like a decades ahead of schedule, we should be so honored to do it.

Ivanka Trump: You know, I'm pretty intense, and I was on a path, and now that path was bearing unbelievable fruit, and I was feeling I had those reps, and doing things and achieving things was just easier than it had been when I was 22, and I completely changed the trajectory of my life. So, that was like an adjustment, but an unbelievable period of growth for me. I think another period of growth for me was actually when I left government, and you kind of hand back the keys.

Ivanka Trump: You don't have a foot in the door and a foot out the door. So, you go through transition, you hand back the keys, and you're done. But now, we're in a new city. We had left our old lives. And suddenly, I'm at this point in my life where I have a lot of lived experience, like a crazy amount of lived experience, when you think about it, in the private sector and in government service, but the slate is completely clean for me. And so, that was an experience that was both frightening because I wasn't used to it.

Ivanka Trump: From when I was a little kid, I actually, have recently looked back. I saw a video somewhere that somebody had sent me, and it was me at 17, looking out over the New York City skyline, and I'm talking about how I'm going to impact this unbelievably iconic cityscape. And there was no humility about it.

David Senra: Yeah.

Ivanka Trump: It's just the confidence that you can only have when you're 17, you know?

David Senra: Yeah.

Ivanka Trump: It's like before you actually start working and realize, "Hey, this is pretty hard." But I just knew, and I was so sure my whole life that I would be a builder, that I would build incredible projects, towers, hotels, resorts, and alongside these great masters, and I was so, so confident in that. So, I always knew what I wanted to do, and then it took me different ways. I also started my fashion brand, and I had a bunch of tech ventures. So, it took me in a lot of unexpected places, but I felt like I had a clear path.

Ivanka Trump: When you leave, everything's all of a sudden wiped clean. So, you have to then... You talk about knowing yourself. The best thing I did was not just reconnect old wires and do the things I'd done before, because that's what I knew. So, I actually made the choice not to go back to our family business, not to restart my fashion brand, because I wanted a new adventure and a new experience, and I was a different person.

Ivanka Trump: I had been so expanded by those years. So, that was frightening, and incredibly exciting to really say, "Okay, well, now I'm building for the next portion of my life. What did I enjoy? What was I great at? What did I feel uniquely capable at? But really, what do I love, and how do I want to spend my time?"

Ivanka Trump: And that's where I've been ever since, really, setting an incredibly high bar for the places I'll commit my energy and time. Also, because now, it's like the opportunity cost is so real. I have three kids who need me very much. I have a 14-year-old daughter who I mentioned, a 12-year-old son, and a 10-year-old son, and they all need me in different ways.

David Senra: And it's going to go by like that.

Ivanka Trump: Yeah. I mean, with my 14-year-old, in four years, she'll be out of the house.

David Senra: Four years.

Ivanka Trump: And I think about what does she need from me right now? She's obviously at that age as a teenage girl where me being home with her upstairs and the door closed is as important as when she was a baby, me rocking her to sleep every night.

David Senra: Yeah.

Ivanka Trump: It's just being here, watching, listening, being available.

David Senra: Yeah.

Ivanka Trump: You know, a friend of mine said to me recently, "When teenage girls start talking, drop everything you're doing. It doesn't matter what you're doing. Drop everything you're doing and listen," because they don't talk that often.

David Senra: Mm-hmm.

Ivanka Trump: They talk a little bit less as they get older.

David Senra: Yeah.

Ivanka Trump: And so, that's what I want to make sure I'm here to do. So, when she feels like telling me what's on her mind, when she feels like talking, I have the capacity to really listen. I think the "Me" right now that's taking different challenges on, and they're no less ambitious, but I think the professional part of myself, that drive, that hunger, that ambition, it's much more fully integrated into me as a human being than it was when I was 20.

David Senra: Was it all work when you were 20?

Ivanka Trump: I really identified with achievement and success, and I got a lot of motivation from having these wins. So, I wouldn't necessarily say that, because I was always very family-oriented. I got married pretty young and started having children relatively young. I really had a lot of working woman energy.

David Senra: Yeah.

Ivanka Trump: And now, that energy... Like, I'm still as driven, but I feel like I'm much more aligned within myself. The need to achieve does not drive me in any meaningful way. Everything I'm doing is because it's something that is like a soul project. Something that I'm deeply inspired by.

David Senra: Mission-driven, something that gives you energy, something that you can put your soul into.

Ivanka Trump: For sure. Alan Watts, another one of my... He says, and I think about this all the time, because I'm always thinking about how to grow, how to become a better version of myself, and he says that, "You are under no obligation to be who you were two minutes ago."

David Senra: Yeah.

Ivanka Trump: And I think about that in the context that if you're not kind of a little bit embarrassed about who you were five years ago, you're not growing enough. So, I look back at me 10 years ago, like, "Oh, that's cringe." But there was nothing wrong. I was just in that developmental stage, and I hope that in 10 years, I look back and I view the "Me" sitting and talking to you as not evolved to the place that I am at that point in time.

Ivanka Trump: And maybe that's why also interviewing the 80-year-old, as you were saying. They've been through it. And hopefully they've emerged with perspective and context.

David Senra: They're just further down their edge like...

David Senra: Yeah.

Ivanka Trump: Yeah.

David Senra: There's just a lot of wisdom that you accumulate for six or seven decades of surviving, and in many cases, they were successful.

Ivanka Trump: Some accumulate. There's some wisdom. But the people who have that, boy, can you learn a lot from them.

David Senra: Yeah.

Ivanka Trump: You know, I think my grandmother, she lives with me. She's 99, and she's amazing. She's very different. She has no business interest, but she is one of the most...

David Senra: This is your mom's mom, correct?

Ivanka Trump: My mom's mom.

David Senra: Okay.

Ivanka Trump: But she's one of the most wise people I know, and she really taught me about love and the truly nurturing kind of devotion to another human being. So, I learned so much from her. I learn so much from my children. I view everyone, including the people who anger me, maybe especially the people who anger me, as teachers, right?

Ivanka Trump: If somebody triggers something, a reactive response within me, I actually take the time to think about what it is about that person that provoked this in me, so that it's an opportunity for me to learn. But I look at my kids, and I learn so much from them because they're so present in the moment. They're like Rick. They're so comfortable with who they are. You see a child, and there's an amazing phase where they're verbal, but before the outside world has conditioned them to be anything other than themselves.

David Senra: Yeah.

Ivanka Trump: Right? Including parents.

David Senra: Yeah.

Ivanka Trump: Right? There's this magic age where they're six, and they're seven, and then at eight, nine, ten, you start to see they're embarrassed if you give them a kiss in front of their school friends, or this is cool, and that's...

David Senra: Mm-hmm.

Ivanka Trump: They start to be responding to the feedback that they're receiving that's external to themselves. But it's magic, and with all human beings, I think in adults, you see it less, like, when they're in their flow, and they're really in their moment. You see it with great musicians when they're up on stage, and you see that they're lost in their craft, and they're just in it.

David Senra: Mm.

Ivanka Trump: But I think with kids, you see it most clearly. And I watch, I mean, with my daughter, it's when she's around animals, specifically horses. When she's out on her horse, she is so complete in herself.

David Senra: Mm-hmm.

Ivanka Trump: With my son, Joseph, it's when he's in nature. He's out on the ocean, and he just loses himself, and I see him just staring at... You know, it's beautiful, and it's something that I learn from. I actually feel myself decompressing. I'll put down my phone. I'll stop trying to take a picture of him experiencing this and be in it with him.

David Senra: Yeah.

Ivanka Trump: And then my youngest son, Theo, it's when he's playing games, any kind of game. I think it's because he's the third. He likes the undivided attention. But "Chess," "Poker," "Backgammon," "Dominoes," you name it, we play.

David Senra: Mm-hmm.

Ivanka Trump: So, that's why we have three different game tables around the house.

David Senra: Yeah.

Ivanka Trump: But it's a beautiful thing to see.

David Senra: Go back to this period of reflection. Now, it's almost like you had a second birth, like a rebirth.

Ivanka Trump: Mm.

David Senra: You have an opportunity as a grown adult, a mother, and very successful. Now, I get to choose. Everything in my past is gone, and I have a blank sheet of paper to work from, right?

Ivanka Trump: Yeah.

David Senra: How long was that time period till you figured out what your next move was going to be?

Ivanka Trump: Probably, the smartest thing I did was not just gravitate towards the playbook I knew. I actually wanted to really sit with it. So, I took around six months where I really was extremely proactive in saying "No" to old partners. People had ideas.

David Senra: Mm-hmm.

Ivanka Trump: And I really wanted to just be in the moment. I wanted to create and build a new life for my family here in Miami, which meant developing new routines and new habits, finding after-school activities that interested them, really connecting with them, and connecting with our new environment.

Ivanka Trump: And that was one of the greatest things I did, because it allowed me to set up my life here really intentionally and build something, build a reality that I love living every single day. My brother-in-law always says, "The most happy people are happy to go to work, and they're happy to come home from work."

David Senra: Oh, Josh?

Ivanka Trump: Yeah.

David Senra: I've seen this.

Ivanka Trump: And I think that's 100% right, and you're as happy as your least happy child, so making sure my family was set up. And then I think I started to become curious. And part of my process is to read, to study. Part of the reason I love investing is I have an insane curiosity for what's out there, like what could be, what is, what people are doing, what people are building.

David Senra: Yeah, I was going to go here next.

Ivanka Trump: I love being surrounded by, first and foremost, kind, good people, driven people, but also people with huge ambitions and wild imaginations, and who see what the world can be, and have their finger on the pulse of that.

Ivanka Trump: So, I think really spending time in a lot of different ecosystems that wouldn't have been necessarily natural to me coming out of a real estate and fashion background to really immerse myself in technology and robotics, and biotech, and even health tech. I think there are some amazing things that are happening now, where we can really leverage information to catalyze our changes in our own behavior.

Ivanka Trump: You see all the wearables like Whoop and other companies like that. So, I really wanted to spend a lot of time with these people, learning from them, and helping accelerate the businesses that I most believed in, and that put me on a beautiful path. And in some cases, that took me back to the beginning, like in the case with Sazan, and what we're building there. I sort of came full circle, and that project will ultimately be the culmination of all of my prior experience in real estate and with travel.

David Senra: Yeah. So, this is one thing that I would love for you to explain your thinking on. When you shut down your business, you went into government.

Ivanka Trump: Yeah.

David Senra: You resigned from 350 things.

Ivanka Trump: Yeah.

David Senra: Now, you have this...

Ivanka Trump: You literally sit with the Office of Government Ethics, and they review your whole life, and they tell you if anything could potentially be a conflict of interest. You either have to divest of it. You have to put it into trust. So, they go through everything, and they just determine it, and they tell you what to do, and then you go back. You've done it. You show it to them, and then they have to stamp it.

David Senra: Yeah.

Ivanka Trump: It was a wild untethering from the life you were building, in super small ways, and then much larger, you know, selling businesses and selling assets, in some cases, buildings. So, it was a very unique experience, but then you're really in it, and free of all you had been doing in the past.

David Senra: But I can't help but think that in this new reset, this new rebuilding of your life post-White House down in Miami, you wouldn't even be involved in 350 things today. Am I wrong about that? Because I feel the conversations we have, you have these recurring themes. It's like fewer, deeper; fewer, better.

Ivanka Trump: Yeah.

Ivanka Trump: For sure.

David Senra: Can you explain the change of decision-making there?

Ivanka Trump: You think about moments in your life, and I think that moment was an inflection for me in so many ways. I emerged as a very different person, but I think one of the things that also happened is that, at a time when I was really running and really happy with the trajectory my life was headed on, the treadmill stopped. I completely pivoted, and that afforded me the opportunity later to decide which races I was going to compete in versus not.

David Senra: Mm.

Ivanka Trump: So, there's something that doesn't typically happen to somebody when they're in their early 30s. That's when you're very tethered to the path that you've charted for yourself. So, I think in the end it was a great blessing. Do I think my life would have turned out great? Sure, right?

Ivanka Trump: But it did give me a lot of perspective, and it gave me the ability to really mark things in my mind to market, create a lot more simplicity for myself, and really only commit to building things that I would be passionate about over the long term.

Ivanka Trump: Some of the things I was working on were legacies of my early 20s, where I was just getting started. And I think part of what you should be doing when you're young is throwing a bunch of stuff against the wall, and seeing what fires you up, seeing... You have to have experience, and sometimes the best experiences are the horrible ones because you know that's not the right path for you. Some of the best bosses are the worst ones, because you learn from them how not to treat people, right?

Ivanka Trump: So, I think it's all good. But I think the whole experience of detaching from everything that I had built up to that point, and then, as a more fully formed adult, coming back and being super intentional, was very clarifying. Jared loves the book "Essentialism," and we talk about it all the time because, for him, simplicity is king.

Ivanka Trump: He loves distilling complex things, and ideas, and systems into the most simple version. And I think you can find a lot of peace in your life when you're able to do that, and it's hard. It's a very hard thing. There's the famous line, "I wrote a long letter because I didn't have time to write a short one." Like, I think about that. It's much harder to write something precise and to drill down on why it's so challenging to write a book, because you're distilling complicated ideas, a complicated life story, into 300 pages with clear takeaways.

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David Senra: Jared keeps hounding me to do an episode of Founders on the book "Essentialism."

Ivanka Trump: Yeah.

David Senra: And the more I talk to him about it, the more I think it's related to why he's so good at doing deals, because he's searching for the most important thing, the essential thing.

Ivanka Trump: Yep.

David Senra: And once you identify that... I got to have lunch with Sam Zell before he died.

Ivanka Trump: Yeah.

David Senra: Because our mutual friend Rick Gerson is the one who set up that lunch, and one thing that I talked to Rick about is that he was mentored by Sam for 25 years.

Ivanka Trump: Mm.

David Senra: And he's just like... I didn't know anything. I was in my early 20s when I met him, and I'd bring him a deal, and I'd be like, "You know, there's 10 things we have to take care of." And Sam Zell would look at it. He's like, "There's one."

Ivanka Trump: Yeah.

David Senra: "If we take care of point number five, then everything else will work itself out." And I asked Sam about that, and he's like, "I learned that from Jay Pritzker, which was, some people considered him the best deal guy of all time.

Ivanka Trump: Yeah.

David Senra: And he's like, "I used to bring him deals when I was in my early 20s." Like, this whole thing is replaying, and I'm like, "Look at all these things we have to do," and Jay's like, "No, you only have to do one. You have one problem here to solve, and the rest..."

Ivanka Trump: The best leaders, the best entrepreneurs, they can see clearly. They can find the signal and the noise. I think about it almost like the golden thread. There's one thread you can pull, and the sweater unravels. Or you can do a thousand different things. So, really honing in on what are the variables that matter most, and that's not just true of business. That's true in life.

Ivanka Trump: Like, what are the times that really matter, and that you need to be there for your kids? And are you showing up in those moments for your spouse, for your friends? And I think being able to see clearly, that's everything. So, you think about these great founders, and they're solving meaningful problems, oftentimes simply, right?

Ivanka Trump: Like, they're removing a lot of friction to people's lived experiences with products or services. And then they're distributing it aggressively, right? So, it's not just the idea. The idea is becoming known and being distributed to the consumer, and then they're enduring over the hardships that will inevitably come as they build a big, meaningful business. So, that ability to then do that but do it over time, with the same level of commitment, stamina, and passion. And fundamentally, that's what entrepreneurship is.

David Senra: I'm kind of obsessed now, about this idea of this reset that you got to have, because it happened after probably a great deal of pain, I would imagine.

Ivanka Trump: Mm.

Ivanka Trump: Not pain, just challenge, right? Like, intensity, growth. These were amazing life lessons. We went to D.C. completely green, including my father. We put a lot of lead on the board, and we left that experience really proud of what we had accomplished. But we were drinking water through a fire hose. We were learning everything in real time. What we could get done in the third year versus the first, or the fourth year versus the second, was a different game.

David Senra: What was the feeling when it ended? Relief?

Ivanka Trump: For me, this had not been my life plan.

David Senra: Yeah.

Ivanka Trump: But I think I responded in a way that I'm proud of to the moment. I look at a lot of people; they call it Potomac Fever. Once you're close to that level of action and power, you even see it with business leaders; they just gravitate towards it.

David Senra: Mm-hmm.

Ivanka Trump: It's very hard, and you see them; they hang around the hoop. They go into the private sector for around two weeks until they cycle back in at a slightly higher position. But for me, it was always about being asked to serve, being honored by that request, and feeling a great privilege in being able to do it, feeling really good about the body of work we were able to accomplish.

Ivanka Trump: I personally was entrusted to work on issues like workforce development, vocational education, and apprenticeship expansion, all things that are incredibly and increasingly meaningful in light of the disruptions that are coming with AI. Doubling the child tax credit; 40 million Americans benefited, on average, 2500 dollars a family, by the expansion of the child tax credit.

Ivanka Trump: That is incredibly meaningful work. Paid family leave, the first-ever national plan: federal employees having access to paid leave for the first time. So, human trafficking: nine pieces of legislation I championed that were passed into law to combat child exploitation and human trafficking. Environmental stewardship with the Great American Outdoors Act, which was the largest piece of environmental legislation passed since the creation of the national parks by Teddy Roosevelt.

David Senra: By Teddy Roosevelt.

Ivanka Trump: So, it was this unbelievable piece of legislation to help protect and be good stewards of our incredible national park system, and on and on in areas that I found to be deeply important and meaningful. But now, I'm in a new section of my life, and I know that, for me, the first time around, I could theoretically imagine it would be intense.

Ivanka Trump: And I would know, sort of, the sacrifice my children would have to bear. I would imagine it. But now, I know how intense it is. I know that you can't dabble, and I know that my children really need me there for them, and I'm not willing to make them bear the sacrifice of serving again. And I'm extraordinarily inspired by the ability to impact positive change in the private sector.

Ivanka Trump: So, most of the things I'm building, whether it's a company like Planet Harvest, which I co-founded with my good friend, Melissa Ackerman, that's helping find use for the 40% of fruits and vegetables we grow in this country every single year that don't even make it out of the field. They get plowed under because they don't meet a cosmetic specification that relates to size and shape.

Ivanka Trump: So, perfectly nutritious food that we literally plow into the ground, that's zero revenue for the farmer after they've spent all the money to bring it to the point where it's about to be picked, that's not going into communities that need this healthy and nutritious produce, and that has tons of environmental externalities associated with that amount of waste. And...

David Senra: So, how do you take something that was a waste product and turn it into an asset or something that's actually usable? How does Planet Harvest do that?

Ivanka Trump: Simply, it had been done that way because it had always been done that way. And there was no secondary market for any fruit or vegetable that didn't meet an exact specification in terms of size and color, sometimes, even though the taste and the quality were, in no way, compromised. So, there was just no market for it.

Ivanka Trump: So we said, "Well, that makes no sense at all, and let's stimulate the demand side and create demand so that we could support these small and medium-sized farmers." And this is going back to just listening. I started listening during the COVID pandemic to the challenges of farmers, small and medium-sized farmers, and that was an extreme situation because the supply chain just completely shut, right?

Ivanka Trump: So, if you had a farm and you had a perishable product like a strawberry, suddenly, all the restaurants are closed. Unless you had an account with Walmart, you had nowhere to sell your produce into, and so you tilled it into the ground.

Ivanka Trump: As part of COVID and as part of the CARES Act, I created something called the Farmers to Family Food Box program, where we created grants to buy this great product, and surge it into communities in need, keeping these small and medium-sized farms alive and thriving during this incredibly difficult time, saving the job of the distributors who would transport between communities and the farms, and obviously feeding a lot of people who were in need.

Ivanka Trump: But at that time, I started looking at the business more generally and realizing, why isn't there a secondary market? Like, why aren't these great strawberries going to a juicer if they can't be displayed in the fresh aisle at Walmart, because they don't meet the cosmetic specification that's really exact? It's like, everything is so uniform in size. It's very different in other areas of the world. In Europe, it's like organic.

David Senra: Yeah.

Ivanka Trump: Things are slightly bigger or smaller. So, we sought, me and my partner, to start to stimulate demand by working with large consumers, and sharing with them the issue, and getting offtake for these small and medium-sized farmers that's meaningful. So, companies from Chobani, now all of the fruit that we find in their beautiful yogurt products and smoothies is all sourced by Planet Harvest from small and medium farmers.

David Senra: Okay this is...

David Senra: It just makes sense.

Ivanka Trump: That would've been 100% waste. It would've been tilled under. So, it's an amazing thing that in America, we don't have a lack of produce being grown. We have an enormous amount of produce being wasted. 400 million pounds in strawberry alone, that's being tilled into the earth as opposed to going into yogurt or ice cream.

David Senra: Jesus.

David Senra: Why do they put it back into the earth?

Ivanka Trump: Well, because they can't even afford to give it away. That would mean somebody would have to pick it, and they would have to package it, and then they would have to ship it.

David Senra: Okay.

David Senra: Okay.

Ivanka Trump: And so, there's no incentive to do anything other than to look at its size and then throw it into a ditch, which also means more fertilizer. Oftentimes, the crops have to be sprayed more because the flies will be attracted to the waste that's left in the field. My partner today is with Fresh Express in Salinas, California, and it looks like you go after a lettuce harvest, and you look at the field, it looks like the field is full of lettuce.

Ivanka Trump: But how little of what's being grown is actually being taken and served to communities, and how much of it is being wasted, is horrific. And once you start to educate people on the problem, they want to be part of the solution. So, we're now partners with Chiquita Banana. We're partners with Chobani.

Ivanka Trump: We're working with large-scale restaurants and grocers, and everyone who wants to be part of the solution of how do we get this into pre-made food, into food service, into grocery stores, in a way that's sustainable and super beneficial for these farmers who have a very tough job to begin with. So, the incremental revenue to them is deeply meaningful.

Ivanka Trump: And oftentimes, it's the difference between a third-generation farm becoming a fourth-generation farm or not. So, that's work I'm really passionate about, and that's the type of problem that... Jared says something, and that I think about all the time, that he loves being contrarian by being obvious.

Ivanka Trump: And this is such an obvious waste, and there should be a market for this beautiful produce, and yet it's being discarded. So, I love solving problems that are obvious. I love talking with people like Hamdi from Chobani and saying, "Did you know this was happening? 40% of produce grown in America doesn't leave the field."

Ivanka Trump: And him saying, "How can I help?" So, that's a really mission-driven business that I'm deeply passionate about, but I think will scale in a very, very meaningful way while doing a lot of good. On the other side, I'm working on incubating a bunch of non-for-profits. So, something that I'm really excited about came from a conversation I had with a great friend, the technology investor who you know, Elad Gil.

David Senra: Yeah.

Ivanka Trump: This was years ago, and we were talking about what are some of the positive use cases for AI. What is the light in the force, if you will, and that isn't being executed upon currently. And we started talking about how so much of history's great works of information and literature are not accessible to so many people around the globe, due to a lack of access. Maybe they don't have a library in close proximity.

Ivanka Trump: Maybe they can't afford to buy a 30-dollar book from Simon & Schuster on the Stoics, and/or Marcus Aurelius' "Meditations." Maybe they live in a country where there's no translation for that work in their native tongue.

Ivanka Trump: So, we started thinking about how AI, specifically now that generative AI has gotten so good, that we could create high-fidelity translations of these incredible literary works that are in the public domain anyway. So you think about Dostoyevsky. You think about Brontë. You think about Marcus Aurelius or Epictetus. All of these works are available in the public domain.

Ivanka Trump: So, how can we use AI to translate them into all the world's commonly spoken languages and make them accessible for free to everyone in either text form or as an audiobook?

Ivanka Trump: So, we're working with a lot of the large language labs to do exactly that, to both do the translations in a really great high-fidelity way in most of the world's spoken languages, to make it accessible for free to everyone who has internet access, and to also have audio translations. You can actually even query into the text and ask questions as you read along.

Ivanka Trump: So there's no reason, whether it's a high school student in Philadelphia who can't afford to buy "Jane Eyre" for their eighth-grade class. There's no reason, if that's in the public domain, they shouldn't be able to have access to it in a beautiful, accessible way. And some of the stuff you can find online, but it's not for consumption.

David Senra: No, I go to these websites.

Ivanka Trump: Right?

David Senra: Obviously, I'm obsessed. I read more than almost anybody else, so I go to these websites, too, and the format's terrible. This is...

Ivanka Trump: They'll scan pages of a book and upload it into the universe. But this is a product that's meant for a consumer. We haven't launched yet, but we're about to launch with the first 1,000 works, and we're going to learn a lot, and people will give us feedback on each of the translations. But imagine now "Meditations" will be translated into most of the world's spoken languages. So, we're covering 95% of all languages spoken, and available for free if you have internet access.

Ivanka Trump: So, we're democratizing access to this incredible knowledge. We're calling it Alexandria. But that's just a really fun project, and that came out of a conversation that I had with Elad, where I'm like, "What are you most excited about that's not being done?"

David Senra: Mm-hmm.

Ivanka Trump: And he told me, he's like, "There are so many unbelievable works by the greatest thinkers humanity's ever produced that just still aren't accessible, and that doesn't need to be true." So, I've been helping him realize this dream of making it available.

David Senra: Yeah, anything I can do to help on that project, obviously, you know it's close to my heart. I would definitely volunteer if you need any help. I've been translating, using AI for the last few years, trying to translate books that are not in English to make episodes of Founders on them.

Ivanka Trump: Mm.

David Senra: And the translations are getting so much better, so I think you guys are perfectly timed.

Ivanka Trump: Yeah.

David Senra: Because I was doing this a few years ago, and I remember I translated one, I think it was from German. I remember the one line was supposed to be like, "This happened 15 years ago," and the translation was so bad it was like, "This happened three five-year periods ago."

Ivanka Trump: Yeah.

David Senra: Like, that's a funny way to say 15.

Ivanka Trump: Five years ago, we couldn't have done this well.

David Senra: Yeah.

Ivanka Trump: But now, the large language models are so good, and generative AI is really allowing us to do it affordably, do it with high fidelity.

David Senra: And the voices.

Ivanka Trump: The voices are amazing, so ElevenLabs is helping...

David Senra: I was going to say, have you spent time with Mati?

Ivanka Trump: Yeah.

Ivanka Trump: I have, yeah.

David Senra: Okay.

Ivanka Trump: He's amazing.

David Senra: Yeah.

Ivanka Trump: So, he's helping us with the audio books that will accompany each of these.

David Senra: Oh, perfect.

David Senra: Yeah.

Ivanka Trump: But it's amazing, and we are really working deep into some obscure languages where people really don't have access. They have internet. They won't have a library. They probably won't have a bookstore. Rural communities, but also for students.

Ivanka Trump: Right now, if you want to read Plato's "Republic," you go and pay a publisher 35 dollars for something that's in the public domain, that every six months they generate a new copy of, and slap on a new piece of artwork on the cover, and students go, and they pay for it.

David Senra: Mm-hmm.

Ivanka Trump: So this, to me, is just a fun way to give back, to share some of the books, obviously, that have so profoundly influenced me, but to create a holding place for some of this really important information produced by humanity.

David Senra: And these are huge forms of leverage for future generations, that... Like, there's going to be all these positive things that come out of this that you and Elad could not possibly predict.

Ivanka Trump: Yeah.

Ivanka Trump: We're having fun even the first... You know, it's really hard to choose 1,000 books.

David Senra: Yeah.

Ivanka Trump: And so, people will say, "Well, you missed this and you..." Of course we did.

David Senra: Yeah.

Ivanka Trump: So, even just the exercise of what are the most meaningful books for us? What should we translate next? How big is the scale of the project? Like how many? We're figuring out as we go.

David Senra: Mm.

David Senra: The answer to that question is, as big as you want it to be.

Ivanka Trump: Exactly.

David Senra: There's no limit. It's not a physical library, a physical space that you're restrained to 1,000 or 2,000 or even 10,000 books. But what I was saying is, the reason I think these kinds of things are very important... I also think podcasting plays a role in this, too, is I'm reading Kelly Johnson, who's the most famous and most successful aircraft designer in history.

Ivanka Trump: Mm-hmm.

David Senra: And in his autobiography, he says one of the most important things that ever happened to him was that Andrew Carnegie had the biggest impact on his life, and he never met Andrew Carnegie because Kelly Johnson grew up in exactly what you're describing, a very poor, rural community.

Ivanka Trump: Mm.

Ivanka Trump: Yeah.

David Senra: He doesn't have electricity, for God's sake. He doesn't have access to anything else, and this was when Carnegie was building all these free libraries and putting them all over the United States in these tiny communities, and Kelly would just go there, and he would just live in the library.

Ivanka Trump: Mm-hmm.

David Senra: And he's like, "I read every single thing about aviation. I read fiction. I read all of these things that impacted me, and I've used in my career many decades in the future." And I think you're going to hear a ton of examples like that when you guys do this project as well.

Ivanka Trump: How do we take this wealth of knowledge and make sure that kids all over the world, and adults, are able to have the same experience he did? You know, be able to learn from the amazing people who came before, even if you don't have direct mentors in your life, that can expand your thinking and inspire you.

David Senra: Do you know who didn't have a direct mentor?

Ivanka Trump: Who?

David Senra: Elon Musk.

David Senra: I remember watching this interview with him, that this guy Kevin Rose did back in 2012, and Kevin was trying to figure... It's like they're in Tesla's factory. This is where the interview's happening, and Kevin's like, "What the hell? You come from South Africa, you go to Canada, then you go from Canada to the Bay Area. You didn't have any money." He's like, "How did you learn business? Did you have mentors?"

Ivanka Trump: Yeah.

Ivanka Trump: Yeah.

David Senra: And Elon said something that changed my life, because then I started reading biographies. He goes, "No, I didn't have a lot of mentors. I looked for mentors in historical context. So I thought biographies and autobiographies were helpful."

Ivanka Trump: Yep.

David Senra: And I was like, "Huh, maybe I should start reading more autobiographies and biographies."

Ivanka Trump: Yeah.

David Senra: Turns out you can find mentors in historical context.

Ivanka Trump: There are very few people I look at, and I say, "I deeply want to emulate every aspect of their life."

David Senra: Probably, nobody.

Ivanka Trump: Probably, nobody.

David Senra: Yeah.

Ivanka Trump: You know, Jared's pretty close. For me, why I say that is because there are some people who I think are brilliant in business, right? They're true visionaries, and their private life is a wreck.

David Senra: Hmm.

Ivanka Trump: So, are they still brilliant or are they stupid? Like, if you're that smart, how do you not figure out how to create sort of a stable life for yourself, and that is good for the soul, good for the heart? Thank goodness they're doing what they're doing. It's a great gift to humanity. But I wouldn't want to emulate that, because I want to raise my children.

David Senra: Yeah, exactly.

Ivanka Trump: And I think that work is more important than that work. Or you'll have people all across the spectrum, but there are very few people, I say, wow, in every aspect of their life, their priorities feel calibrated, and they're doing well.

David Senra: Mm-hmm.

Ivanka Trump: Not flawless, because perfection is not possible, but they're doing well. And why I say Jared is he's really... You know, he can be going through the most intense experience, and the kids don't feel it. He's deeply present wherever he is and whatever he's doing. He's not always physically present, but he's always available emotionally, telephonically. He'll drop anything he's doing.

Ivanka Trump: It's like he somehow has the ability to always be in the right place, regardless of what he's juggling. And that's true for his partners as well. He's a very long-term thinker, and that he's outcome-oriented, so he's highly pragmatic and solution-oriented. But that doesn't mean he's transactional. He builds deep friendships, and you know this, actually.

David Senra: Yeah.

Ivanka Trump: You have one with him, and you've seen him with others that are truly built on trust, and that's because he's more of a giver than a taker. And over time, that ends up benefiting him in all sorts of incredible ways, but that's ancillary. He doesn't come at it from a place of thinking well over the long term, just who he is. And he's very comfortable with himself. He's just very comfortable being exactly who he is and very non-performative.

Ivanka Trump: So, I learn so much from him all the time. Although, given the fact that I know he's going to listen to this, I'm going to have to pull back. Can we edit this whole section out? Because I'm going to have created a monster.

David Senra: Well, but he talks...

Ivanka Trump: But that's the thing, he won't.

Ivanka Trump: No, he really has almost no ego. It's to the point where I'm incredulous by it. Like, I'll get upset about things for him, and he doesn't care. If somebody criticizes him and he doesn't know that person, it just doesn't affect him. It doesn't mean that he won't say, "Okay, well, that's warranted," and recalibrate. He cares about the opinions of those he loves.

David Senra: Well, we don't have to edit it because, as you just said, I spend a lot of time with him too, and he talks about you the same way.

Ivanka Trump: Mm-hmm.

David Senra: And it's legitimate when he doesn't think I'm going to go back and obviously tell you or anything like that.

Ivanka Trump: Yeah.

David Senra: And we've had a lot of dinners talking about this. So, you guys...

Ivanka Trump: By the way, key to life, right? Marry the right person.

David Senra: Yeah, for sure.

Ivanka Trump: Marry someone who sees you as... Puts you up on a pedestal and sees you as...

David Senra: I don't think I've ever heard...

Ivanka Trump: In a way that...

Ivanka Trump: He sees me in a way that I aspire to see myself.

David Senra: This is very rare, what you two have. This is actually really beautiful, what you just said about him, because I was sitting here thinking, as you were speaking. It's like, very few people would describe their spouse as almost perfect in their eyes, for lack of a better word. Like, that's actually incredible. So, there's two things that we mentioned that I want to come back to, I think are super important and that I'm super curious about. So you mentioned essentialism.

Ivanka Trump: Yeah.

David Senra: And you mentioned opportunity cost.

Ivanka Trump: Hmm.

David Senra: You have, essentially, in front of you, unlimited opportunities on who you can spend time with and what you work on. How do you make this decision? Is this intuition? Is this just energy? Is this vibes?

David Senra: Like, when you're deciding, "Hey, I want to meet this founder, I may invest with them."

Ivanka Trump: Mm-hmm.

Ivanka Trump: Yeah.

David Senra: Or, "I may want to partner with somebody on this project," like Planet Harvest in the profit domain or nonprofit domain like you did with Elad.

Ivanka Trump: Yeah.

David Senra: How are you making this decision?

Ivanka Trump: Well, I think first you have to be receptive to the inputs all around you. I joke with my partner, I'm like, "I'm a farmer." Who would've thought, right? And I'm investing in tech companies and helping build these amazing businesses that are so beyond what I would've ever imagined myself doing. Even the scope and scale and ambition of Sazan, this incredible project. We'll have hotels and resorts and wellness, all of it. It's almost daunting in its size.

David Senra: Yeah.

David Senra: And an apartment for me.

Ivanka Trump: Obviously. Well, community is at the heart of, I think, how people want to live, right? So, I'm thinking a lot about how to create a great community for families, for connection, because I think that's the currency. Like, attention, getting somebody's attention and keeping it, and creating an enabling environment for exactly that. But anyway, I think for me it's... I always just try to be receptive to conversations with others and what sparks something in me, and then I go deep.

Ivanka Trump: So, my daughter will joke with me. I mean, I have 100 ideas a week, and I start to go into them, and she's like, "Wait, you didn't do that?" And I got all excited about it. "What about this? What about that?" I'm like, "No, no, no, that's my process." I explore a lot of things, and then I go deeper and deeper. I do a tremendous amount of reading, so any challenge I'm about to take on, I become like a PhD in that subject.

David Senra: Mm-hmm.

Ivanka Trump: So, with the Sazan Project, I'm reading all the best Albanian writers, and I'm trying to understand the country through their eyes.

David Senra: Oh, that's smart.

Ivanka Trump: And fiction, nonfiction, all of it. And you immerse yourself in sort of the lived experience of these great observers of the truth, and then you get closer to it, right? You can't just impose yourself upon a country or culture. You have to understand it first, to do it in a beautiful, and delicate, and meaningful way. But that's the approach I take to everything.

Ivanka Trump: So, I listen to a lot of people. I try to surround myself with people that help facilitate growth in different areas. I ask them a lot of questions. I actually tell my kids... They laugh at me. In addition to what we were saying before about reading all the time and being interested in the world around you, I always tell them that only boring people get bored.

David Senra: Yeah.

Ivanka Trump: Like, there's too much to learn. But I also tell them in the context of this all the time that you never learn anything while you're talking. You only learn when you're listening and when you're observing. So, I really try to surround myself with people who are going to sort of open channels for me and help me grow. And sometimes that's in a very intimate way, people who are really just in touch with themselves and who can help me be a better mother, a better wife, a better human being. And other times, it's great business leaders.

David Senra: But how do you decide who to let in? Like, what kind of person do they have to be?

Ivanka Trump: First and foremost, a kind person. Like, life's too short. There are a lot of successful a*****es, but I'm just not interested. The worst thing in the world is when you partner with somebody who's not a good person. There is no contract in the world that will protect you from a bad partner.

David Senra: Yeah, that's a "Buffett and Munger." They say it over and over.

Ivanka Trump: No contract that you can…

David Senra: Yeah.

Ivanka Trump: Yeah, I would do a handshake with a good person over the most ironclad, white-shoe law firm-created contract, any day of the week. So, I'm just at a point in my life where I want to do good, important things. I want to be an additive force in the world. I want to be surrounded by people who are kind, good people who I admire and who I can learn from, and there are so many of them. So the choice will never be for me to partner with sort of the opposite of that.

Ivanka Trump: So, I try and find good people. I try and find people who can help me grow, who I can learn from. Then I dive deep into the subject matter through reading, through podcasts. Like, I listen to a ton of podcasts, yours being my favorite, obviously, on a variety of different people and subjects, and then you have to get going.

David Senra: Thank you.

Ivanka Trump: A mistake a lot of people make is they get so excited about the idea, they keep on ruminating on the idea. They keep on pitching the idea. They don't get to the point of actually doing it. And you learn a lot just in the early phases of bringing something to market. Like, that motion can completely reorient your business, right? Because you receive feedback around...

Ivanka Trump: Like, for example, Planet Harvest, we were creating demand for something that there was no demand for. I mean, even the farmers weren't even taking this produce out of the field because there was no market for it, so we had to create a market. So we had to speak with the consumers and find out what would they pay for it, and what would they get from it?

Ivanka Trump: They'd get the story of the small farmers they were supporting. They would get a diversified supply chain in terms of what was going into their product. They'd get the same caliber of product. But we had to go and explain to them, and then we had to hear from them what was that worth to them?

David Senra: I think it's really important to get that message out there. There's one of my favorite books. It's called "The Banana King," I think, Sam Zemurray. Or no, "The Fish Ate the Whale."

Ivanka Trump: I heard your episode on that.

David Senra: Yeah, yeah, Sam Zemurray.

Ivanka Trump: It's brilliant.

David Senra: I forgot the subtitle, but it's a biography of Sam Zemurray.

Ivanka Trump: We're working with Chiquita Banana now, which is the largest, and helping them think about their excess and utilizing it, and I shared that episode.

David Senra: It's fun.

David Senra: But he did something very similar, where there's a line in the book where they were... He started in bananas, obviously. And they were just throwing them away because they would rot in two days, and they couldn't sell them in the next two days.

Ivanka Trump: Yeah.

David Senra: Basically, there's a line in the book that I thought of when I hear you talk about Planet Harvest. Like, he saw an opportunity where others saw nothing.

Ivanka Trump: Yeah.

David Senra: And I think just being perceptive of the world around you. There's unlimited opportunity around us that people are just jumping, skipping over, or ignoring.

Ivanka Trump: Yeah.

David Senra: And in your case, you said that they just did it this way because it's the way it's always been done. So, if you just go into a new situation with fresh eyes, and you're just like, "Why? Why?" Just keep asking why. You'll eventually get to "Well, that's just because how it's always been done."

Ivanka Trump: 100%. And that's the best answer in the world, because that means there's ready for disruption.

David Senra: There's innovation they can do there.

Ivanka Trump: And I think that's what's so cool about doing the early-stage investing that I'm doing. Like, obviously Affinity does later stage investing, but some of the earlier stage, it's really about... You have to be a good listener. You sit down with the founder, and they don't have the track record. In some cases, they haven't even begun to execute their business plan, right? They haven't commercialized it. In some cases, they have. In some cases, they haven't. Either way, they're in the earliest innings of their company.

David Senra: Mm-hmm.

Ivanka Trump: So, you're listening, what's the idea, and what's the jockey like? Like, you're trying to understand, does the person have what it takes to build this thing, this concept, this product? Will they be in it for the long run?

Ivanka Trump: Do they have the flexibility, the mentality, the perseverance, the grit, the vision, the leadership skills, all of these traits that you have to have or have the humility to know you don't have, and supplement by hiring the right people, right? So, it's an assessment of the human being sitting across from you, and also of the idea that hasn't yet been proven.

Ivanka Trump: And in some cases, the more audacious, the better. Because I'm not interested in really investing in boring things. I like investing in things that have the ability to be transformational. So, these often tend to be big ideas, often tend to be unproven ideas. And you have to be a good listener because you don't have a lot of data to support what they're doing yet. And so, I think especially in the venture space, you have to have a lot of humility, and you have to be very interested in people and ideas.

David Senra: And I think you're perfectly suited as your personality, to be a champion for these new but fragile ideas. The reoccurring theme in all these biographies that I've read, the 400-plus biographies of history's greatest entrepreneurs I've read... It's just like, new ideas are so fragile.

David Senra: And it's so easy to kill an idea prematurely and to not let it grow, and you just have to give it room and time for it to grow, just like a human being, just like a...

Ivanka Trump: Yeah.

David Senra: I think Jeff Bezos uses the analogy of an acorn turning into an oak tree.

Ivanka Trump: Yeah.

David Senra: That doesn't happen in a week. It doesn't happen in a year. It's going to be a multiple-year process that we have to understand going into it.

Ivanka Trump: And you may end up at a place that's very different from where you started. You mentioned Jeff, like he was selling books, right?

David Senra: Yeah.

Ivanka Trump: So, that's where it becomes "It's the idea," and then "It's the founder." And what will that idea morph into? Very rarely is it a straight path. Most often, it's something completely beyond the original aspiration. Tobi, I heard him on your show.

David Senra: Yeah.

Ivanka Trump: So, there's a certain sort of neurological flexibility that these founders have that they can be so passionate about something, yet pivot it into something else they're equally passionate about, that becomes the ultimate manifestation of that original acorn.

David Senra: Mm-hmm.

David Senra: And I think your life and what you've shared with us so far in this conversation is the perfect example of that because you've done that in your second act as well. I'm honored to call you a friend. Thank you very much, Ivanka, for taking the time. This was absolutely perfect.

Ivanka Trump: Thank you.

David Senra: Thank you.

David Senra: I hope you enjoyed this episode. Please remember to subscribe wherever you're listening and leave a review, and make sure you listen to my other podcast, Founders. For almost a decade, I've obsessively read over 400 biographies of history's greatest entrepreneurs, searching for ideas that you can use in your work. Most of the guests you hear on this show first found me through Founders.