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

**Lex Fridman** (0:00)
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, handing it off right away over our mutual love of reading, especially philosophical writings from Marcus Aurelius, Joseph Campbell, Alan Watts, Victor 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 US. I am forever grateful for this amazing country, for this amazing life, for all of you, who have given the chance to a silly kid like me. From the bottom of my heart, thank you. I love you all. Now, a quick few second mention of each sponsor. Check them out in the description. It's the best way to support this podcast. We got Cloaked for protecting your personal information, Shopify for e-commerce, NetSuite for business management, Eight Sleep for naps and ExpressVPN for privacy and security on the interwebs. Choose wisely, my friends. Also, if you want to work with our amazing team or just want to get in touch with me, go to lexfridman.com/hiring. And now, on to 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 Colloqt, 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. 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. It's just good to not allow your information, your contact information to spread throughout the web. Cloaked solved this problem in a way that I always thought that somebody needs to and they do it just really well. It's basically just a nice password manager, but it has that extra privacy superpower where it can generate the emails and the phone numbers. Anyway, go to cloaked.com/lex to get 14 days free or for a limited time use code LexPod when you are signing up to get 25% off an annual cloaked plan. This episode is also brought to you by Shopify, a platform designed for anyone to sell anywhere with a great looking online store. 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're just connected as human beings. Anyway, he's a great leader, great person. And that's actually 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, lexfridman.com/store, and you can too. Sign up for $1 per month trial period at shopify.com/lex. That's all lowercase. Go to shopify.com/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 anything 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, an 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/lex. That's netsuite.com/lex.