Ivanka Trump: Politics, Family, Real Estate, Fashion, Music, and Life | Lex Fridman Podcast #436

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, uh, for those living in the United States, happy upcoming Fourth of July. It's both an anniversary of this country's declaration of independence and an anniversary of my immigrating here to the US. 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. This is the Lex Fridman Podcast. To support it, please check out our sponsors in the description. And now, dear friends, here's Ivanka Trump. 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 New York City. I love the New York City skyline. So, uh, 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-

(laughs)

... (laughs) at 15, I would look out over the city skyline from my bedroom window in New York and imagine where I could contribute and, and add value in a way that, you know, I look back on and, and completely laugh at, you know, how confident I was. But I've, 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, of beauty in so many different forms. Um, with architecture, there's the tangible, and I think that marriage of, 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 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, you live with them. So, it, um, it allowed me to flex a lot of areas of interest.