{"slug":"ivanka-trump-building-authentic-life","show_id":"davidsenra","title":"Ivanka Trump on Building an Authentic Life","display_title":null,"title_orig":"David Senra × Ivanka Trump","dek":"Ivanka Trump’s portfolio spans AI, biotech, neurotech, robotics, space, Sazan real estate, Planet Harvest and Alexandria. Planet Harvest’s secondary market for produce left in US fields has partners including Chobani, Chiquita and Fresh Express, while Alexandria’s imminent launch of free generative-AI translations of public-domain works is the key milestone to monitor.","lang":"EN","date":"2026-05-31","published_at":"2026-05-31T12:00:32+00:00","duration_min":84,"source_url":"https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VhsiMd9ZFNk","source_label":"YouTube","rss_url":null,"youtube_id":"VhsiMd9ZFNk","youtube_url":"https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VhsiMd9ZFNk","thumbnail_url":null,"chips":["person:David Senra","person:Ivanka Trump"],"provenance":[["SOURCE","YouTube captions"],["SYNTH","claude-fable-5"],["CLEAN","gpt-5.6-luna"],["VERIFY","gpt-5.6-luna"],["PARTICIPANTS","gpt-5.6-luna"],["TRANSLATE","gpt-5.6-luna"]],"title_alt":"Ivanka Trump：打造真实人生","display_title_alt":null,"dek_alt":"Ivanka Trump的版图覆盖AI、生物科技、神经科技、机器人、太空、Sazan地产、Planet Harvest与Alexandria。Planet Harvest为美国农田滞销农产品创造二级市场；Alexandria即将推出公版作品的免费生成式AI翻译。","lang_alt":"ZH","tldr_md":"- **Ivanka Trump's current body of work spans incubating for-profit and nonprofit companies, early-stage investing in founders \"right at the edge of transformation\" — AI, biotech, neurotech, robotics, space — and a return to real estate with Sazan, a 1,400-acre private Mediterranean island plus five miles of beachfront.** She calls the project \"the culmination of all of my experience in real estate\" and, tellingly, \"not even a business for me, despite the scale of it\" — a project with \"some of the greatest living architects of our time.\"\n- **Planet Harvest is her clearest scalable thesis: 40% of fruits and vegetables grown in the US never leave the field — 400 million pounds of strawberries alone are tilled under — because cosmetic specs leave no secondary market.** Co-founded with Melissa Ackerman, the company created demand where none existed: the fruit in the Chobani yogurt products and smoothies she mentioned is sourced through Planet Harvest, with Chiquita and Fresh Express as partners. Jared Kushner's line she keeps in mind: \"contrarian by being obvious.\"\n- **A second venture, Alexandria, uses generative AI to translate 1,000 public-domain works into languages covering 95% of all languages spoken, free with internet access.** Born from a conversation with Elad Gil on positive AI use cases, it works with large language model labs on high-fidelity translations and ElevenLabs on audiobooks; it is unlaunched but imminent. \"We're democratizing access to this incredible knowledge.\"\n- **She says she is not willing to return to government at the cost of making her children bear that sacrifice again: \"I know you can't dabble...** I'm not willing to make them bear the sacrifice of serving again.\" She names \"Potomac Fever\" — people near power and business leaders who \"hang around the hoop\" and cycle back in \"at a slightly higher position\" — and instead cites her ledger: doubled child tax credit (40 million Americans, $2,500 per family on average), the first-ever national paid-leave plan for federal employees, nine anti-trafficking measures passed into law, and the Great American Outdoors Act.\n- **The pivot into government came when commercial momentum was peaking — her fashion brand was doing over $800M in annual sales while she ran Trump Organization real estate acquisitions and development — and the exit forced a total reset she now calls \"a great blessing.\"** She spent six months proactively saying no to old partners, declined to restart either business, and rebuilt around \"less and better\": fewer, deeper commitments filtered by Essentialism-style focus.\n- **Her operating philosophy includes Naval's \"escape competition through authenticity\" — \"If you're competing, it's because you're copying\" — paired with the claim that instinct is developed through reps, not innate.** Partner selection is kindness-first: \"There is no contract in the world that will protect you from a bad partner,\" and early-stage investing is jockey assessment where \"the more audacious, the better.\"\n","digest_md":"### 1. Sazan: a private island as the culmination of a real estate life\n- The origin as told: on a friend's boat in the Mediterranean, they stopped for a swim — \"we swam to the island,\" hiked barefoot to the top, \"and it stayed with us ever since.\" Over years she and Jared developed the opportunity to realize the potential of the 1,400-acre island plus five miles of beachfront directly across, with a lagoon on one side, ocean on the other, and white-sand beaches. The brief: transformation \"with a lot of restraint and care,\" architecture that \"almost rises from\" the land.\n- Her definition of mastery, from working with \"true masters of their craft\": real artists' \"integrity is precise and absolute\" — but buildings aren't canvases. \"There's nothing uglier than a beautiful non-functional space. To me, that's not a masterpiece because it wasn't fully thought through.\"\n- Why real estate still pulls her: it's tangible \"in a world where increasingly everything is not,\" and it outlives you. Her exemplar is the 1890s Old Post Office in Washington — \"my baby\" — restored from dilapidation into a thriving urban hotel where strangers still stop her with stories of christenings and weddings. \"You're building the stage for people's lives and the realization of their dreams.\"\n\n### 2. If you don't know who you are, the world will tell you\n- Senra opens with Dana White's dictum — know who you are and \"the rest of your life is easy\" — and her answer sharpens it: \"If you don't know who you are, the world will tell you, and it may not be an answer you want.\" Her test: hard decisions aligned with core values never generate regret; \"it's the decisions you take that don't fully feel right... those are the things that I think you always regret.\"\n- Against \"forum shopping\" decisions: perspective from knowledgeable people is fine, but \"you can't outsource decision-making as it pertains to major decisions in your personal or professional life.\"\n- A principle she cites from Naval (\"a friend of mine and of Jared's\") is: \"Escape competition through authenticity. If you're competing, it's because you're copying.\" The catch — \"you can't be authentically somebody else\" — and the exemplars: Dana White, Rick Rubin, Dolly Parton. \"You're going to get criticized either way. You might as well be the best version of you possible.\"\n\n### 3. Instinct is developed, not innate — and stillness is engineered\n- She started her first company at 22 and qualifies \"trust your gut\" as advice for the young: \"instinct has to be developed... honed and refined over time.\" Her foundation was micro-wins working for a Brooklyn shopping-mall developer — \"those little wins I had with the construction teams... set the foundation for my instincts and for the confidence that would come later.\"\n- The daily architecture: cook breakfast (three kids, three different orders — \"I'm basically a short-order chef\"), bus drop-off, then sit by the ocean in Miami to meditate, pray, and set priorities before a workout — all inside a two-hour span. The payoff is \"less reactivity\" and clarity on her goals before \"what everyone else wants me to accomplish.\"\n- Her citation is Rick Rubin's *The Creative Act* — \"the deeper you listen, the more you hear\" — with a sharp aside on shower eureka moments: they happen \"because they don't have their cell phone in the shower.\"\n\n### 4. Memoirs as X-rays of the soul\n- The Sam Walton case, built jointly: he wrote his autobiography when he knew he was dying of cancer, distilling 60 years of entrepreneurship — Senra's framing is \"an act of service\" that he says Jeff Bezos later used in building Amazon. Her generalization: someone \"will distill sometimes 80 years of a life into a 300-page book that you can buy for 30 dollars...\" Senra calls it irresponsible not to open such books; she emphasizes the value of doing so.\n- Her caveat on why great memoirs are rare: \"it's like an X-ray of the soul... if you're not exposing vulnerability, if you're not really telling truth, they're not great books.\" She knows highly successful people at 80 or 85 who are more nervous for a book launch than for acquiring a major company — and notes great musicians often can't teach guitar; the book forces late-stage pattern discovery.\n- The shared touchstone is *Shoe Dog* and its Oregon Trail opening — \"The cowards never started. The weak died along the way. That leaves us\" — plus the structural point both flag: the book ends at the IPO, \"way before peak,\" because the struggle was the story.\n- Her deepest current reread is Frankl's *Man's Search for Meaning*, just given to her 14-year-old daughter (who came home with *War and Peace* under her arm): \"You don't find meaning when things are easy. You find meaning when things are difficult.\" The quote she emailed her daughter, paraphrased: \"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.\"\n\n### 5. The hardest professional period: a 180 at the hockey stick\n- Her answer to Senra's \"most difficult period\": the choice to enter government, precisely because momentum was peaking — fashion brand \"doing over 800 million in sales annually,\" running all Trump Organization real estate acquisitions and development (Old Post Office and 800-acre Trump Doral simultaneously), son Theo \"literally on my hip\" at six months.\n- The ask came a week and a half after her father won the presidency, from a father who \"never spent a night in Washington until his first night in the White House\" and \"really knew no one.\" The deciding question she and Jared asked each other: \"Would the 80-year-old version of ourselves look back and be proud of... the decision to not go in?\"\n- A grace note on youthful certainty: she recently saw video of herself at 17, overlooking the New York skyline, declaring she'd shape it — \"the confidence that you can only have when you're 17... before you actually start working and realize, 'Hey, this is pretty hard.'\"\n\n### 6. Handing back the keys: six months of no, then an intentional rebuild\n- Entering government meant an Office of Government Ethics review, divestitures, and selling businesses, assets, and in some cases buildings; Senra describes her as having resigned from 350 things. Leaving meant handing back the keys with a completely clean slate — \"a wild untethering.\"\n- She took roughly six months being \"extremely proactive in saying 'No' to old partners,\" building the Miami family life first. Her brother-in-law Josh's line: \"The happiest people are happy to go to work, and they're happy to come home from work\" — plus \"you're as happy as your least happy child.\"\n- Her retrospective read: the treadmill stopping in her early 30s — when most people are \"very tethered to the path\" — \"in the end was a great blessing,\" letting her mark things in her mind and create more simplicity, then commit only to long-term passions.\n\n### 7. Essentialism and the golden thread\n- Jared's favorite book is *Essentialism*, and Senra connects it to his dealmaking: searching for the one essential thing. Senra's Sam Zell story lands the point — Zell would look at a deal with ten open items and say \"There's one. If we take care of point number five, everything else will work itself out,\" a habit Zell said he learned from Jay Pritzker.\n- Her generalization: \"The best leaders... can find the signal in the noise. There's one thread you can pull, and the sweater unravels\" — true in business and in showing up for kids and spouse. Founders, in her compression: solve meaningful problems simply, distribute aggressively, endure.\n- On why distillation is hard, the famous line she reaches for: \"I wrote a long letter because I didn't have time to write a short one.\"\n\n### 8. The record — and the categorical no to serving again\n- She names \"Potomac Fever\": people near power who \"hang around the hoop,\" go private \"for around two weeks until they cycle back in at a slightly higher position.\" Her frame was different — being asked to serve, and the work: doubled child tax credit (\"40 million Americans benefited, on average, 2,500 dollars a family\"), the first-ever national paid-leave plan giving federal employees access to paid leave, nine pieces of anti-trafficking legislation championed and passed into law, and the Great American Outdoors Act — \"the largest piece of environmental legislation passed since the creation of the national parks by Teddy Roosevelt.\"\n- The refusal is unhedged: \"Now, I know how intense it is. I know that you can't dabble... I'm not willing to make them bear the sacrifice of serving again.\" The clock behind it: her daughter is out of the house in four years, and a friend's advice she lives by — \"When teenage girls start talking, drop everything you're doing and listen.\"\n\n### 9. Planet Harvest: manufacturing a market where none existed\n- The problem, as she tells it: 40% of fruits and vegetables grown in the US never leave the field — plowed under for failing cosmetic size-and-shape specs, \"perfectly nutritious food that we literally plow into the ground.\" Farmers can't afford to give it away: picking, packaging, and shipping cost more than zero revenue, and rotting waste attracts flies, forcing more spraying.\n- Origin: listening to small farmers during COVID, when she built the Farmers to Families Food Box Program under the CARES Act — then asking why no secondary market existed. The answer — \"it had been done that way because it had always been done that way\" — is, in her words, \"the best answer in the world, because that means it's ready for disruption.\"\n- The execution was demand-side: pitch large consumers on the story, diversified supply chain, and same-caliber product. The fruit in the Chobani yogurt products and smoothies she mentioned is sourced through Planet Harvest; Chiquita and Fresh Express are partners. The stakes for suppliers: incremental revenue is \"oftentimes the difference between a third-generation farm becoming a fourth-generation farm or not.\"\n\n### 10. Alexandria: free AI-translated classics covering 95% of all spoken languages\n- Born from asking Elad Gil \"what are you most excited about that's not being done?\" — the answer: humanity's greatest public-domain works (Dostoevsky, the Brontës, Marcus Aurelius, Epictetus) remain inaccessible by geography, price, or language. The project uses large language model labs for high-fidelity translation covering \"95% of all languages spoken,\" free with internet access, launching with the first 1,000 works — queryable text plus audiobooks with ElevenLabs' Mati helping.\n- The economics she's disrupting: publishers charge $35 for Plato's *Republic* — public domain — reissued \"every six months... slap on a new piece of artwork on the cover.\" Senra's resonant example: Kelly Johnson, whom Senra calls history's greatest aircraft designer, credited a Carnegie free library with opening access to knowledge while he grew up in a rural community without electricity — and Elon Musk's line from a 2012 Kevin Rose interview that turned Senra to biographies: \"I looked for mentors in historical context.\"\n\n### 11. Jared, partner filters, and jockey-first investing\n- Her mentorship standard is severe: some business visionaries have private lives that are \"a wreck. So, are they still brilliant or are they stupid?\" Jared is her near-exception — \"almost no ego,\" \"more of a giver than a taker,\" \"deeply present wherever he is.\" The marriage principle: \"Marry someone who puts you up on a pedestal\" and sees you \"in a way that I aspire to see myself.\"\n- The partner filter is kindness before capability: \"There is no contract in the world that will protect you from a bad partner\" — she'd take \"a handshake with a good person over the most ironclad, white-shoe law-firm-created contract, any day of the week.\"\n- Her process: \"100 ideas a week\"; for the ideas she pursues, she immerses herself deeply — for Sazan she's reading \"all the best Albanian writers\" because \"you can't just impose yourself upon a country or culture.\" Her maxims to her kids: \"only boring people get bored\" and \"you never learn anything while you're talking.\"\n- On early-stage investing (Affinity does later-stage investing): with no track record, it's jockey assessment — grit, vision, \"the humility to know you don't have\" skills and hire for them — and \"the more audacious, the better. Because I'm not interested in investing in boring things.\" She echoes Senra's fragile-acorn point with her own: founders need \"a certain sort of neurological flexibility\" to pivot the acorn into something beyond the original aspiration.\n","transcript_md":"David Senra\n\nRight now in your life today, what is the most exciting part of your work life?\n\nIvanka Trump\n\nMy work life, specifically. 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. 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.\n\nThe 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. Whether it's incubating companies, from for-profit to nonprofit businesses, investing in companies and founders that are really right at the edge of transformation—whether that be AI, biotech, neurotech, robotics, or even space—these are things that satisfy a huge curiosity for me and enable me to learn, grow, and expand, alongside founders who are taking on meaningful problems.\n\nWhat inspires me is people really swinging for things. I love individuals with huge imaginations and huge ideas. The ability to learn from them, to spend time with them, and to be expanded by them is super interesting. 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.\n\nDavid Senra\n\nI think that's an understatement. Can you explain?\n\nIvanka Trump\n\nYes, it is very.\n\nDavid Senra\n\nI mean, there's no power on this island.\n\nIvanka Trump\n\nYeah.\n\nDavid Senra\n\nYou're building everything from scratch. Correct?\n\nIvanka Trump\n\nWell, it's an unbelievable, beautiful, 1,400-acre 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, went on a hike barefoot all the way up to the top, and we were just captivated. It stayed with us ever since.\n\nOver 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 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. Not only do we have the island, but we have 5 miles of beachfront directly across from it: this beautiful peninsula with a lagoon on one side, the ocean on the other, and beautiful white-sand beaches.\n\nFor me, it feels more like a challenge than anything else. It's the culmination of all of my experience in real estate, all of my travel, and a lot of reflection on how I want to live, how I think people increasingly want to live, and trying to really build something that's a tangible manifestation of that. That requires a lot of vision and the collaboration of some of the greatest masters that exist.\n\nI was just there walking the lands, really trying to be with it and experience it alongside some of the greatest living architects of our time—true masters of their craft, people with integrity so absolute, there will be no compromise. That's something we want to create there. So we're very excited.\n\nDavid Senra\n\nWhat does that mean? People with integrity so complete there's no compromise in their vision? Is that what you mean?\n\nIvanka Trump\n\nWhen you work with real artists, regardless of their medium, whether it's a canvas, real estate, a home, or music, they don't compromise. Their integrity is precise and absolute, and they'll push themselves; they'll push everyone around them.\n\nAre you guys hearing this?\n\nDavid Senra\n\nThere's like 6 people off camera that I badger every day.\n\nIvanka Trump\n\nThat you drive absolutely crazy. But actually, that's where you get to something. Part of it is a push and pull. When you're working with an architect, unless they're building a monument, right, 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.\n\nThere are certain functional elements. There's nothing uglier than a beautiful, nonfunctional space. To me, that's not a masterpiece because it wasn't fully thought through. When you combine something that is architecturally incredibly meaningful, beautiful, and intentional with a highly functional space, you create something special.\n\nOne of the things I love about real estate is that 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 takes years—sometimes a decade-plus.\n\nDavid Senra\n\nIt 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.\n\nIvanka Trump\n\nOh, yeah.\n\nDavid Senra\n\nTo build something that you know lasts longer than your own lifetime.\n\nIvanka Trump\n\nOne of the things that I love so much is that 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, lovingly restored it, and made it useful in its modern life. It was effectively a dilapidated post office, and now it's a thriving urban hotel.\n\nThat was an amazing project that took a very long period of time to bring to life, and it's just one example. But I think the thing I love the most is not only seeing it, because that's great, and experiencing it, and remembering 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—\n\nDavid Senra\n\nMm.\n\nIvanka Trump\n\n—in one of the ballrooms, or their daughter's wedding. Some experience they had, a milestone life moment, that somebody chose to have happen in a space that I conceived alongside many other talented people. That, to me, is something really beautiful. That's something very, very unique and special about being a builder. You're building the stage for people's lives and the realization of their dreams. That's what we're going to do with this project, Sazan.\n\nDavid Senra\n\nYeah. How do I say it?\n\nIvanka Trump\n\nSazan.\n\nDavid Senra\n\nSazan. 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.\"\n\nIvanka Trump\n\nMm.\n\nDavid Senra\n\nI was chasing Dana White to get him on the show forever, and he wasn't responding. I texted you, and you were very kind and set that up immediately. Dana has this thing—a simple genius to the way he operates his life, in my opinion, and his business. 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.\"\n\nYou already know who you are. You know what you want to do. You just wake up and get after that goal. You started companies early. How old were you when you first started your first company?\n\nIvanka Trump\n\nI was 22.\n\nDavid Senra\n\nYou didn't know who you were at 22, correct?\n\nIvanka Trump\n\nYeah.\n\nDavid Senra\n\nCan you talk about the process that you went through to now say truthfully that you know who you are?\n\nIvanka Trump\n\nWell, 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? 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.\n\nSome of the hardest decisions I've taken are really about saying no, setting boundaries, or changing course. When those decisions, regardless of how hard they are, align with your values, it always feels good. 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?\"\n\nIt's the decisions you take that don't fully feel right, that don't align with your true self and those core values that you hold, that I think you always regret.\n\nDavid Senra\n\nYes.\n\nIvanka Trump\n\nOftentimes, people get there because they forum-shop decisions. They'll ask people about their life: \"What should I do? What should I do?\" They almost make it a process to make tough choices. 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. You really have to sit with it.\n\nActually, I think Dana is a great example of somebody who knows himself so well. He's so authentically who he is. 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.\n\nDavid Senra\n\nMm-hmm.\n\nIvanka Trump\n\nI love her. She is who she is, she's always been the same, and she really owns it. I think we're drawn, as people, if you look at pop culture, 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.\n\nDavid Senra\n\nI want to tell you about the presenting sponsor of this podcast, Ramp. I have been reading a lot about SpaceX lately. SpaceX is one of the most valuable private businesses in the world, and one of the main themes in the history of SpaceX is constantly attacking and questioning your cost. Ramp helps many of the most innovative businesses in the world do exactly that. The median company running on Ramp cuts their expenses by 5%, and one thing SpaceX has demonstrated is that a religious dedication to controlling costs can help actually increase revenue because you can pursue opportunities you couldn't otherwise, and we see that in the Ramp data, too. The median company running on Ramp also grows their revenue by 16%. So when you're running your business on Ramp and your competitors are not, you have a massive competitive advantage that compounds over time. Ramp is the only platform designed to make your finance team faster and happier. Many of the top founders and CEOs I know run their business on Ramp. I run my business on Ramp, and you should too. Go to ramp.com to learn how they can help your business save time, save money, and grow revenue. That is ramp.com.\n\nHow did you get to the point where, when you were 22 and started your first company, you didn’t know yourself, and now, several years later, you do? How did you do this?\n\nIvanka Trump\n\nI think people will say, “Trust your instinct,” but instinct has to be developed.\n\nDavid Senra\n\nMm-hmm.\n\nIvanka Trump\n\nMy instinct when I was 22 is different from my instinct today because I think instinct is honed and refined over time. First and foremost, you have to get started. You have to try things, and those micro-wins that felt as big as the massive ones do today help you develop reps and patterns and confidence, which is so important.\n\nIt’s really hard to trust yourself or trust your gut if you’re deeply insecure and you haven’t developed a rhythm or had some successes. This could be in entry-level, beginning positions.\n\nDavid Senra\n\nMm-hmm.\n\nIvanka Trump\n\nI 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, set the foundation for my instincts and for the confidence that would come later.\n\nI 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, text messages, and emails, and the access the world has into the private sanctuary of our homes and our lives through the devices that we carry with us—that it requires a tremendous amount of discipline to create stillness.\n\nI 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 and 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.\n\nYour team, by the way, witnessed us running, as always, roughly 2 minutes late for the bus. We always get there on time, but we leave 2 minutes later than we’re supposed to.\n\nDavid Senra\n\nThis is great.\n\nIvanka Trump\n\nSo we’re currently in a moment where each of my 3 children likes completely different breakfasts, so I’m—\n\nDavid Senra\n\nOh, no.\n\nIvanka Trump\n\n—I’m basically a short-order chef. I’ve tried to find that one thing that they will all eat, unsuccessfully so far. It used to be easier.\n\nDavid Senra\n\nYeah.\n\nIvanka Trump\n\nI make breakfast, drop them off at the bus, and then they go to school quite early. I normally have the ability right after drop-off to sit by the ocean. I live here in Miami, and I meditate as the sun rises. I’ll pray, reflect, and think.\n\nI keep that beautiful moment in my day as an anchor to offer thanks and gratitude to God and the universe, but also to reflect on what my priorities are for the day ahead. I’ve found that to be incredibly important and grounding.\n\nI come back to the house, work out, and do all of that in an hour-and-a-half to 2-hour time span. To me, that routine in the morning sets me up for success through the course of the day in terms of less reactivity and being much more proactive, with a clear definition around what I want to accomplish that day.\n\nWhat everyone else wants me to learn about or accomplish will be secondary, as long as I create clarity for myself around my goals. Then I have some version of that in the evening—a little more challenging because the kids are all home and every night is a different adventure—but I’m really trying to find stillness so I can hear what the universe is telling me.\n\nRick Rubin talks about this in his book, The Creative Act: the creator ultimately is just super-attuned to what the universe is saying, and the deeper you listen, the more you hear. Part of listening is listening to oneself. If you don’t create space and time for that, I find that it’s very easy to just be on the hamster wheel and be a lot less creative in your pursuits.\n\nDavid Senra\n\nIt’s funny. I listen to so many people, and they have these eureka moments in the shower, which I do, too.\n\nIvanka Trump\n\nMm-hmm.\n\nDavid Senra\n\nI think part of the reason that happens is because they don’t have their cell phone in the shower.\n\nIvanka Trump\n\nNo.\n\nDavid Senra\n\nWhether it’s 5 minutes or 20 minutes, they’re there alone with their thoughts.\n\nIvanka Trump\n\nYeah.\n\nDavid Senra\n\nAnd suddenly the ideas start to come in.\n\nYou 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.\n\nThe last 3 people I’ve recorded with before you were Rick Rubin, Dana White, and Ed Catmull, the founder of Pixar. I was on the phone with you yesterday, and what I realized is that all 4 of you have in common, even though you work in vastly different industries and in different ways, is that you’re essentially taking a lot of time to know yourself. Then, once you did that, you’re just building your business for you first.\n\nIvanka Trump\n\n100%. Naval, who is a friend of mine and of Jared’s, 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. It’s also the thing that’s least replicable.\n\nI love the idea of escaping competition through authenticity, but you have to do the hard work of knowing who you are. You can’t be authentically somebody else, right?\n\nI think part of the reason I like to read so much is that we all wrestle with the same series of hard questions that all of humanity has wrestled with, right?\n\nDavid Senra\n\nFor thousands of years.\n\nIvanka Trump\n\nAnd there aren’t that many of them. Humanity—all of who we are—just echoes over time with these same questions.\n\nI 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? What are the gems of wisdom and insight that can be extracted from some of the most brilliant minds across so many fields?\n\nI love philosophy because philosophers grapple with some of these tougher questions. 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. To me, that’s very, very interesting.\n\nThen 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’re living or dead—but you have somebody who will distill sometimes 80 years of a life into a 300-page book that you can buy for $30. They’ll tell you everything they’ve learned, everything they’ve experienced.\n\nI think there’s just so much value in opening that book and listening to them.\n\nDavid Senra\n\nIt’s silly not to. I really do think it’s irresponsible not to. You’re close to some of the Walton family members.\n\nIvanka Trump\n\nYeah.\n\nDavid Senra\n\nAnd I was just with one of Sam Walton’s grandsons at an event yesterday.\n\nIvanka Trump\n\nWho’s that?\n\nDavid Senra\n\nSteuart.\n\nIvanka Trump\n\nOh, yeah.\n\nDavid Senra\n\nYeah.\n\nIvanka Trump\n\nI know Steuart.\n\nDavid Senra\n\nYeah.\n\nIvanka Trump\n\nHe’s great.\n\nDavid Senra\n\nYeah. We were talking about that because there’s actually some writing from the co-author Sam had on his autobiography. Steuart listens to my other podcast, Founders, and he’s like, “I’m going to try to get this to you. I just can’t use it for public consumption, but just because I know you’re really obsessed with Sam Walton and admire him greatly.”\n\nIvanka Trump\n\nYeah.\n\nDavid Senra\n\nHe’s like, “This will round out some things that you didn’t know about him,” which I thought was—\n\nIvanka Trump\n\nAnd that’s one of the best business books ever. Talk about a person who had a vision and just meticulously executed it over time.\n\nDavid Senra\n\nBut it’s also an act of service, because what’s so remarkable about that book is that he was writing it when he knew he was dying.\n\nIvanka Trump\n\nYeah.\n\nDavid Senra\n\nHe 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 said, “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.”\n\nThen 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.\n\nIvanka Trump\n\nThis act of service cannot be overstated. It’s just super important. It’s so important that they do this.\n\nDavid Senra\n\nI 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. I’ve read every single biography of Elon.” I was like, “Will you please write a book?”\n\nIvanka Trump\n\nMm.\n\nDavid Senra\n\nAnd she’s like, “It’s funny you bring that up,” because she’s had an offer for 10 years. I was like, “First, you have such a unique lived experience working on one of the most important companies in the world. 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.”\n\nIvanka Trump\n\nIt’s a really hard thing to do. I mean, it’s like an X-ray of the soul. What do I reveal?\n\nGreat books—if you’re not exposing vulnerability, if you’re not really telling the truth—they’re not great books. So you have to be comfortable revealing yourself, the good and the bad. Obviously, you see it in books.\n\nDavid Senra\n\nYeah.\n\nIvanka Trump\n\nThere’s a little revisionist history and—\n\nDavid Senra\n\nYeah.\n\nIvanka Trump\n\n—a little shaping and smoothing of the edges. But if it’s really going to be great—\n\nDavid Senra\n\nActually, Shoe Dog is a great one, another amazing book by Phil Knight.\n\nIvanka Trump\n\nYou just read my mind.\n\nDavid Senra\n\nThen you’re really putting it out there and leaving it out there.\n\nIvanka Trump\n\nAnd I know some incredibly successful people who have built enormous businesses, and then at 80 or 85, they write a book and are petrified for the launch of that book.\n\nDavid Senra\n\nMore nervous than when acquiring a major company?\n\nIvanka Trump\n\nYeah, because there’s something so vulnerable about doing it. Plus, it takes a tremendous amount of discipline to distill the wisdom accumulated in a life into an understandable, relatable way and really pull out the principles. You ask a great musician how they do it. Sometimes great musicians can’t teach you to play the guitar, right?\n\nDavid Senra\n\nYeah.\n\nIvanka Trump\n\nIt’s like they don’t know. They just do it.\n\nDavid Senra\n\nYeah.\n\nIvanka Trump\n\nSo I think for a lot of people, it’s an interesting exercise, even at a late stage in their journey, to discover why what they’ve done has been so effective. What are the patterns over time? Some people recognize it while they’re in it. For other people, it’s just second nature.\n\nDavid Senra\n\nI’m obsessed, as you know, with people who 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 that if I sit down with a 70-year-old entrepreneur who’s been building his business for 50 years, there’s stuff that, exactly as you said, he can’t explain. It comes out in conversations, and you kind of piece it together.\n\nYou read my mind with “Shoe Dog” because I just finished reading it for the 3rd or 4th time.\n\nIvanka Trump\n\nYeah.\n\nDavid Senra\n\nAnd I just recorded another episode on it. It’ll be out soon.\n\nIvanka Trump\n\nThat’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 the way, and then the rest.\n\nDavid Senra\n\nYeah. So he’s in Oregon in the 1960s, and he thought people from Oregon didn’t think big, so no one around him did. In fact, everybody around him, including his father, was saying, “Don’t do this weird, crazy idea that you have.”\n\nBut he says his track coach and teacher—the same person—and his co-founder of Nike, Bill Bowerman—\n\nIvanka Trump\n\nMm-hmm.\n\nDavid Senra\n\n—took great pride in the fact that they were from Oregon because of the Oregon Trail.\n\nIvanka Trump\n\nMm.\n\nDavid Senra\n\nAnd they said, “The cowards never started. The weak died along the way.”\n\nIvanka Trump\n\n“And that leaves us.”\n\nDavid Senra\n\n“That leaves us.”\n\nIvanka Trump\n\nI love it. Yes.\n\nDavid Senra\n\nAnd he believed it.\n\nIvanka Trump\n\nI remember. It’s been years, probably decades, since I read that book, but I remember that opening. I thought, “What a great entry.”\n\nDavid Senra\n\nThe 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 or woman in their 20s is universal.\n\nIvanka Trump\n\nYeah.\n\nDavid Senra\n\nIt’s like, “What is my life going to be?” So much of everything is ahead of you. He’s on this run, and he feels like he’s been away from his house for 7 years. He has an MBA, he served in the Army, and he’s living in his childhood bedroom. He’s thinking, “What am I doing with my life? I’m a grown man. I feel like a kid.”\n\nIvanka Trump\n\nYeah.\n\nDavid Senra\n\nIn the opening, where he’s running, he’s thinking, “I’m going to pursue this crazy idea,” which turns into Nike.\n\nIvanka Trump\n\nYeah.\n\nDavid Senra\n\nBut it ties to what you just said. In the book, he talks about getting his heart broken. He talks about the death of his son and the fact that he was a bad husband in the beginning, that he was absent-minded. The book ends way before the peak, way before the peak.\n\nIvanka Trump\n\nIt ends at the IPO.\n\nDavid Senra\n\nYeah, at the IPO. He’s almost saying, “Okay, you know what happens next, but this is how many decades—”\n\nIvanka Trump\n\nThe struggle.\n\nDavid Senra\n\n—the struggle to get there.\n\nIvanka Trump\n\nOne of my favorite books that I recently reread—and it’s interesting, because I’m at a point now where I’m reading a lot of new things, but I’m spending a lot more time revisiting things that had a profound impact on me. The act of rereading something at a different point in your life means you experience it in a totally different way.\n\nAs with everything else, including some of the things you’re asking me about what I’m working on, for me, it’s less and better: fewer things, more focus, more intentionality. 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. One of my favorites is “Man’s Search for Meaning.”\n\nDavid Senra\n\nMm.\n\nIvanka Trump\n\nBy Viktor Frankl. I was thinking about it when you were talking about hardship and struggle. He certainly does not romanticize struggle. He endured the most difficult of human experiences, and Viktor Frankl tells his story of surviving the Nazi concentration camps.\n\nBut the idea is that meaning can often be redeemed by struggle. You don’t find meaning when things are easy; you find meaning when things are difficult. When things are extremely difficult, it’s often that same meaning that helps you endure, and there’s something so incredible about that.\n\nI’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.\n\nDavid Senra\n\nMm.\n\nIvanka Trump\n\nIt’s amazing. I love it. She blows me away.\n\nDavid Senra\n\nThat’s a gift.\n\nIvanka Trump\n\nShe 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.\n\nDavid Senra\n\nOh, my God.\n\nIvanka Trump\n\nThe book is like this—it’s like a doorstop.\n\nDavid Senra\n\nWe should say she’s 14.\n\nIvanka Trump\n\nShe’s 14. She’s amazing. She has a tremendous curiosity and thirst to learn, and she also loves reading.\n\nWe were talking about this book recently. I had just given her “Man’s Search for Meaning,” and this idea is so empowering: everything can be taken from you. The people in the concentration camps, and Viktor Frankl himself, really felt like everything had been stripped from them—their families, everything.\n\nAnd yet there is a sliver of sovereignty in how you experience that, how you react to that, and your ability to show up—your attitude in the face of enormous struggle and challenge.\n\nDavid Senra\n\nMm.\n\nIvanka Trump\n\nI think that’s so empowering because that’s such an extreme example. But he has this beautiful quote. I just emailed it to her, and this will be a paraphrase: “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.”\n\nIt’s about finding that space between stimulus and response. He encapsulates the idea of our ability to show up in great times and—\n\nDavid Senra\n\nMm.\n\nIvanka Trump\n\n—also in the hardest of times, and the ability to really control our own mindset, which is extremely powerful.\n\nDavid Senra\n\nWhat was the most difficult period of your life professionally, when you were going through the most struggle, pain, or indecision?\n\nIvanka Trump\n\nI 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 things were like a hockey stick.\n\nDavid Senra\n\nYou had a thriving business.\n\nIvanka Trump\n\nThings were going so well.\n\nDavid Senra\n\nYeah.\n\nIvanka Trump\n\nI feel like you spend your 20s really setting the foundation, and then it was going so well. My fashion brand was doing over 800 million in sales annually. I was running all of the 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.\n\nI had 3 young children, very young in 1 case. My son, Theo, was literally on my hip.\n\nDavid Senra\n\nMm-hmm.\n\nIvanka Trump\n\nHe was 6 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.\n\nDavid Senra\n\nYeah.\n\nIvanka Trump\n\nI mean, we lived in New York City. Half the politicians we knew were Democrats who would come annually to fundraise and introduce themselves. 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, our instincts, and our intentions—the fact that we would be honest and truthful with him—and he asked us to go.\n\nThis was around a week and a half after he had won. It was a complete change in the trajectory of our whole lives.\n\nDavid Senra\n\nIt’s like a 180.\n\nIvanka Trump\n\nThere was nothing. Normally, when people run for office, they set themselves up for it. They contemplate it for 20 years, and they take on smaller challenges, like state and local races.\n\nMy father started with the presidency, won the presidency, and then said, “Hey, I need you.” I think both Jared and I, in that moment, looked at each other and said, “We can stick our heads in the sand and continue on as we had planned, developing our own lives and businesses.”\n\nBut would the 80-year-old version of ourselves look back and be proud of that choice—proud of the decision not to go in? I think we both knew he was asking us for help. He was giving us an enormous opportunity to give back to a country we love so much. Even if it was decades ahead of schedule, we should be so honored to do it.\n\nYou know, I’m pretty intense, and I was on a path, and that path was bearing unbelievable fruit. I felt I had those reps, and doing things and achieving things was just easier than it had been when I was 22. I completely changed the trajectory of my life.\n\nThat was 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 hand back the keys. You don’t have a foot in the door and a foot out the door. You go through the transition, hand back the keys, and you’re done.\n\nBut 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—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. That was an experience that was both frightening, because I wasn’t used to it, and incredibly exciting.\n\nI’ve recently looked back to when I was a little kid. 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 talking about how I was going to impact this unbelievably iconic cityscape. There was no humility about it.\n\nDavid Senra\n\nYeah.\n\nIvanka Trump\n\nIt was just the confidence that you can only have when you’re 17.\n\nDavid Senra\n\nYeah.\n\nIvanka Trump\n\nIt’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. I was so, so confident in that.\n\nI 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.\n\nWhen you leave, everything’s all of a sudden wiped clean. You have to 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.\n\nI actually made the choice not to go back to our family business and not to restart my fashion brand, because I wanted a new adventure and a new experience, and I was a different person. I had been so expanded by those years.\n\nThat 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 of? But really, what do I love, and how do I want to spend my time?”\n\nThat’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 the opportunity cost is so real. I have 3 kids who need me very much: a 14-year-old daughter who I mentioned, a 12-year-old son, and a 10-year-old son. They all need me in different ways.\n\nDavid Senra\n\nAnd it’s going to go by like that.\n\nIvanka Trump\n\nYeah. I mean, with my 14-year-old, in 4 years she’ll be out of the house.\n\nDavid Senra\n\n4 years.\n\nIvanka Trump\n\nI think about what she needs 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 and I was rocking her to sleep every night.\n\nDavid Senra\n\nYeah.\n\nIvanka Trump\n\nIt’s just being here, watching, listening, and being available.\n\nDavid Senra\n\nYeah.\n\nIvanka Trump\n\nA 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.\n\nDavid Senra\n\nMm-hmm.\n\nIvanka Trump\n\nThey talk a little bit less as they get older.\n\nDavid Senra\n\nYeah.\n\nIvanka Trump\n\nThat’s what I want to make sure I’m here to do. When she feels like telling me what’s on her mind, when she feels like talking, I have the capacity to really listen.\n\nI think the me right now that’s taking on different challenges—they’re no less ambitious—but I think the professional part of myself, that drive, that hunger, that ambition, is much more fully integrated into me as a human being than it was when I was 20.\n\nDavid Senra\n\nWas it all work when you were 20?\n\nIvanka Trump\n\nI 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.\n\nDavid Senra\n\nYeah.\n\nIvanka Trump\n\nNow, that energy—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 like a soul project, something that I’m deeply inspired by.\n\nDavid Senra\n\nMission-driven, something that gives you energy, something that you can put your soul into.\n\nIvanka Trump\n\nFor sure. Alan Watts says—and I think about this all the time, because I’m always thinking about how to grow and how to become a better version of myself—that “you are under no obligation to be who you were 2 minutes ago.”\n\nDavid Senra\n\nYeah.\n\nIvanka Trump\n\nI think about that in the context that if you’re not a little bit embarrassed about who you were 5 years ago, you’re not growing enough. I look back at me 10 years ago and think, “Oh, that’s cringe.” But there was nothing wrong. I was just in that developmental stage.\n\nI hope that in 10 years I look back and view the me sitting and talking to you as not evolved to the place that I am at that point in time. Maybe that’s why also interviewing the 80-year-old, as you were saying. They’ve been through it, and hopefully, they’ve emerged—\n\nDavid Senra\n\nThey’re just further down their edge—\n\nIvanka Trump\n\n—with perspective and context.\n\nDavid Senra\n\nYeah.\n\nIvanka Trump\n\nThere’s just a lot of wisdom that you accumulate over 6 or 7 decades of surviving, and in many cases, they were successful.\n\nDavid Senra\n\nSome accumulate. There’s some wisdom. But the people who have that—\n\nIvanka Trump\n\nYeah.\n\nDavid Senra\n\nBoy, can you learn a lot from them.\n\nIvanka Trump\n\nYou 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—\n\nDavid Senra\n\nThis is your mom’s mom, correct?\n\nIvanka Trump\n\nMy mom’s mom.\n\nDavid Senra\n\nOkay.\n\nIvanka Trump\n\nBut she’s one of the wisest 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.\n\nI learn so much from my children. I view everyone, including the people who anger me—maybe especially the people who anger me—as teachers. If somebody triggers 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.\n\nI 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.\n\nYou see a child, and there’s an amazing phase where they’re verbal, but the outside world hasn’t yet conditioned them to be anything other than themselves.\n\nDavid Senra\n\nYeah.\n\nIvanka Trump\n\nRight? Including parents.\n\nDavid Senra\n\nYeah.\n\nIvanka Trump\n\nThere’s this magic age where they’re 6 and 7, and then at 8, 9, and 10, you start to see that they’re embarrassed if you give them a kiss in front of their school friends. They start responding to the feedback that they’re receiving that’s external to themselves.\n\nBut it’s magic. 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.\n\nDavid Senra\n\nMm.\n\nIvanka Trump\n\nBut I think with kids, you see it most clearly. 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.\n\nDavid Senra\n\nMm-hmm.\n\nIvanka Trump\n\nWith my son Joseph, it’s when he’s in nature. He’s out on the ocean, and he just loses himself. I see him staring at it. It’s beautiful, and it’s something that I learn from.\n\nI actually feel myself decompressing. I’ll put down my phone, stop trying to take a picture of him experiencing this, and be in it with him.\n\nDavid Senra\n\nYeah.\n\nIvanka Trump\n\nAnd 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.\n\nChess, poker, backgammon, dominoes—you name it, we play.\n\nDavid Senra\n\nMm-hmm.\n\nIvanka Trump\n\nThat’s why we have 3 different game tables around the house.\n\nDavid Senra\n\nYeah.\n\nIvanka Trump\n\nIt’s a beautiful thing to see.\n\nDavid Senra\n\nGo back to this period of reflection. Now it’s almost like you had a second birth, like a rebirth.\n\nIvanka Trump\n\nMm.\n\nDavid Senra\n\nYou have an opportunity as a grown adult, a mother, and a very successful person. Now I get to choose. Everything in my past is gone, and I have a blank sheet of paper—\n\nIvanka Trump\n\nYeah.\n\nDavid Senra\n\n—to work from, right? How long was that time period until you figured out what your next move was going to be?\n\nIvanka Trump\n\nProbably the smartest thing I did was not just gravitate toward the playbook I knew. I actually wanted to really sit with it. So I took around 6 months where I was extremely proactive in saying “no” to old partners. People had ideas.\n\nDavid Senra\n\nMm-hmm.\n\nIvanka Trump\n\nI 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.\n\nThat was one of the greatest things I did, because it allowed me to set up my life here really intentionally and build something—a reality that I love living every single day.\n\nMy brother-in-law always says, “The happiest people are happy to go to work, and they’re happy to come home from work.”\n\nDavid Senra\n\nOh, Josh?\n\nIvanka Trump\n\nYeah.\n\nDavid Senra\n\nI’ve seen this.\n\nIvanka Trump\n\nI think that’s 100% right. You’re as happy as your least happy child, so making sure my family was set up. Then I think I started to become curious.\n\nPart of my process is to read and study. Part of the reason I love investing—\n\nDavid Senra\n\nYeah, I was going to go here next.\n\nIvanka Trump\n\n—I have an insane curiosity for what’s out there: what could be, what is, what people are doing, and what people are building. I love being surrounded by, first and foremost, kind, good, driven people, but also people with huge ambitions and wild imaginations who see what the world can be and have their finger on the pulse of that.\n\nI think spending time in a lot of different ecosystems that wouldn’t necessarily have been natural to me, coming out of a real estate and fashion background, allowed me to really immerse myself in technology, robotics, biotech, and even health tech. There are some amazing things happening now where we can really leverage information to catalyze changes in our own behavior. You see all the wearables, like WHOOP and other companies like that.\n\nI 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. 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.\n\nDavid Senra\n\nYeah. This is one thing that I would love for you to explain your thinking on. When you shut down your business—\n\nIvanka Trump\n\nYeah.\n\nDavid Senra\n\n—you went into government. You resigned from 350 things.\n\nIvanka Trump\n\nYeah.\n\nDavid Senra\n\nNow you have this—\n\nIvanka Trump\n\nYou literally sit with the Office of Government Ethics, and they review your whole life and tell you if anything could potentially be a conflict of interest. You either have to divest of it or put it into a trust. They go through everything, determine it, and tell you what to do. Then you go back, show them that you’ve done it, and they have to stamp it.\n\nDavid Senra\n\nYeah.\n\nIvanka Trump\n\nIt was a wild untethering from the life you were building, in super-small ways and then much larger ones—selling businesses and selling assets, in some cases buildings. It was a very unique experience, but then you’re really in it and free of everything you had been doing in the past.\n\nDavid Senra\n\nBut 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, in the conversations we have—\n\nIvanka Trump\n\nYeah.\n\nDavid Senra\n\n—you have these recurring themes. It’s like fewer, deeper; fewer, better.\n\nIvanka Trump\n\nFor sure.\n\nDavid Senra\n\nCan you explain the change in your decision-making there?\n\nIvanka Trump\n\nYou think about moments in your life, and I think that moment was an inflection point 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 and which I wasn’t.\n\nDavid Senra\n\nMm.\n\nIvanka Trump\n\nThat’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, in the end, I think it was a great blessing.\n\nDo I think my life would have turned out great? Sure. But it did give me a lot of perspective, and it gave me the ability to really mark things in my mind and create a lot more simplicity for myself, and really only commit to building things that I would be passionate about over the long term. Some of the things I was working on were legacies of my early 20s, when I was just getting started.\n\nI 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. 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? So, I think it’s all good.\n\nThe 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. He loves distilling complex things, ideas, and systems into the simplest version.\n\nI 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.” I think about that. It’s much harder to write something precise and drill down on why it’s so challenging to write a book, because you’re distilling complicated ideas and a complicated life story into 300 pages with clear takeaways.\n\nDavid Senra\n\nDeel is how the best founders turn the world into their talent pool. I've been studying how history's greatest founders operate for a decade, and one thing they all have in common is they understand that recruiting and hiring the very best talent is your most important priority. A Players recognize other A Players, which is why top companies like Ramp, Shopify, ElevenLabs, and Uber, and DoorDash all use Deel. Many of the top founders I know have personally invested in Deel after using their product, and what they discovered is that Deel is the best company in the world at building infrastructure for global hiring. Deel will help your business hire, pay and manage any worker anywhere in the world, so you can retain the best talent anywhere and spend the rest of your time focusing on what you do best: delivering value to your customers. The founder of ElevenLabs has a great description of the value Deel can give your company. He said, “We built ElevenLabs to break down language and communication barriers. With Deel enabling us to hire and support exceptional talent anywhere, we can accelerate our innovation and bring more voices, stories, and ideas to every corner of the world.” Deel is trusted by over 40,000 businesses. Learn how they can help your business today by going to deel.com/senra. That is deel.com/senra.\n\nJared keeps hounding me to do an episode of Founders on the book Essentialism.\n\nIvanka Trump\n\nYeah.\n\nDavid Senra\n\nThe 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.\n\nIvanka Trump\n\nYep.\n\nDavid Senra\n\nOnce you identify that, I got to have lunch with Sam Zell before he died.\n\nIvanka Trump\n\nYeah.\n\nDavid Senra\n\nOur mutual friend Rick Gerson was 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.\n\nIvanka Trump\n\nMm.\n\nDavid Senra\n\nHe was like, “I didn’t know anything. I was in my early 20s when I met him, and I’d bring him a deal. I’d be like, ‘You know, there are 10 things we have to take care of.’” Sam Zell would look at it and say, “There’s 1.”\n\nIvanka Trump\n\nYeah.\n\nDavid Senra\n\n“If we take care of point number 5, then everything else will work itself out.” I asked Sam about that, and he said, “I learned that from Jay Pritzker,” whom some people considered the best deal guy of all time. He said, “I used to bring him deals when I was in my early 20s. 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 1. You have 1 problem here to solve, and the rest—’”\n\nIvanka Trump\n\nThe best leaders and the best entrepreneurs can see clearly. They can find the signal in the noise. I think about it almost like the golden thread: there’s 1 thread you can pull, and the sweater unravels. Or you can do 1,000 different things.\n\nReally honing in on the variables that matter most isn’t just true of business; it’s true in life. What are the times that really matter, when you need to be there for your kids? Are you showing up in those moments for your spouse and your friends? I think being able to see clearly is everything.\n\nYou think about these great founders, and they’re solving meaningful problems, oftentimes simply. They’re removing a lot of friction from people’s lived experiences with products or services. Then they’re distributing it aggressively. It’s not just the idea; the idea is becoming known and being distributed to the consumer. Then they’re enduring the hardships that will inevitably come as they build a big, meaningful business.\n\nThe ability to do that over time, with the same level of commitment, stamina, and passion—that’s fundamentally what entrepreneurship is.\n\nDavid Senra\n\nI’m kind of obsessed now about this idea of the reset that you got to have, because it happened after probably a great deal of pain—\n\nIvanka Trump\n\nMm.\n\nDavid Senra\n\n—I would imagine.\n\nIvanka Trump\n\nNot pain, just challenge, right? Intensity and 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.\n\nWhat we could get done in the 3rd year versus the 1st, or the 4th year versus the 2nd, was a different game.\n\nDavid Senra\n\nWhat was the feeling when it ended? Relief?\n\nIvanka Trump\n\nFor me, this had not been my life plan.\n\nDavid Senra\n\nYeah.\n\nIvanka Trump\n\nBut I think I responded in a way that I’m proud of to the moment. Now 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 toward it.\n\nDavid Senra\n\nMm-hmm.\n\nIvanka Trump\n\nIt’s very hard, and you see them; they hang around the hoop. They go into the private sector for around 2 weeks until they cycle back in at a slightly higher position.\n\nFor 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. I feel really good about the body of work we were able to accomplish.\n\nI 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 meant that 40 million Americans benefited—on average, $2,500 a family—from the expansion of the child tax credit. That is incredibly meaningful work.\n\nPaid family leave—the first-ever national plan—gave federal employees access to paid leave for the first time. On human trafficking, there were 9 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.\n\nDavid Senra\n\nBy Teddy Roosevelt.\n\nIvanka Trump\n\nSo, 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.\n\nBut 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. 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.\n\nI’m extraordinarily inspired by the ability to impact positive change in the private sector. 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, are 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.\n\nSo, 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.\n\nDavid Senra\n\nSo, 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?\n\nIvanka Trump\n\nIt had been done that way because it had always been done that way. There was no secondary market for any fruit or vegetable that didn’t meet an exact specification in terms of size and color, even though sometimes the taste and the quality were in no way compromised. So, there was just no market for it.\n\nWe said, “Well, that makes no sense at all. Let’s stimulate the demand side and create demand so that we could support these small and medium-sized farmers.” This goes back to just listening. I started listening during the COVID pandemic to the challenges of small and medium-sized farmers, and that was an extreme situation because the supply chain just completely shut down, right?\n\nSo, if you had a farm and you had a perishable product like a strawberry, suddenly all the restaurants were closed. Unless you had an account with Walmart, you had nowhere to sell your produce, and so you tilled it into the ground. As part of COVID and as part of the CARES Act, I created something called the Farmers to Families 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 jobs of the distributors who would transport between communities and the farms, and obviously feeding a lot of people who were in need.\n\nAt that time, I started looking at the business more generally and realizing: Why isn’t there a secondary market? 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 very exact cosmetic specification? Everything is so uniform in size. It’s very different in other areas of the world. In Europe, it’s organic.\n\nDavid Senra\n\nYeah.\n\nIvanka Trump\n\nThings are slightly bigger or smaller. So, my partner and I sought to stimulate demand by working with large consumers, sharing with them the issue, and getting meaningful offtake for these small and medium-sized farmers.\n\nSo, companies like Chobani—now, all of the fruit that we find in their beautiful yogurt products and smoothies—\n\nDavid Senra\n\nOh, yeah, because—\n\nIvanka Trump\n\n—is all sourced by Planet Harvest—\n\nDavid Senra\n\nYou can just mix it in.\n\nIvanka Trump\n\n—from small and medium-sized farmers. That would’ve been 100% waste. It would’ve been tilled under.\n\nSo, 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 of strawberries alone—\n\nDavid Senra\n\nOh, geez.\n\nIvanka Trump\n\n—that’s being tilled into the earth as opposed to going into yogurt or ice cream.\n\nDavid Senra\n\nWhy do they put it back into the earth?\n\nIvanka Trump\n\nBecause 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—\n\nDavid Senra\n\nOkay.\n\nIvanka Trump\n\n—and then they would have to ship it.\n\nDavid Senra\n\nOkay.\n\nIvanka Trump\n\nSo, 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.\n\nMy partner today is with Fresh Express in Salinas, California, and it looks like, after you go after a lettuce harvest, you look at the field and it looks like the field is full of lettuce. 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.\n\nOnce 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. We’re working with large-scale restaurants and grocers, and everyone who wants to be part of the solution: How do we get this into premade 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?\n\nThe incremental revenue to them is deeply meaningful. 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. Jared says something that I think about all the time: He loves being contrarian by being obvious.\n\nThis 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? Forty percent of produce grown in America doesn’t leave the field.” And him saying, “How can I help?”\n\nSo, 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.\n\nOn the other side, I’m working on incubating a bunch of nonprofits. 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. This was years ago, and we were talking about some of the positive use cases for AI. What is the light in the Force, if you will, that isn’t being executed upon currently?\n\nWe 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. Maybe they can’t afford to buy a $30 book from Simon & Schuster on the Stoics and/or Marcus Aurelius’s “Meditations.” Maybe they live in a country where there’s no translation for that work in their native tongue.\n\nSo, we started thinking about how AI—specifically now that generative AI has gotten so good—could create high-fidelity translations of these incredible literary works that are in the public domain anyway. So, you think about Dostoevsky. You think about the Brontës. You think about Marcus Aurelius or Epictetus. All of these works are available in the public domain.\n\nHow can we use AI to translate them into all the world’s commonly spoken languages and make them accessible for free to everyone, either in text form or as an audiobook? So, we’re working with a lot of the large language model labs to do exactly that: to do the translations in a really great, high-fidelity way in most of the world’s spoken languages, to make them accessible for free to everyone who has internet access, and to also have audio translations.\n\nYou can actually query the text and ask questions as you read along. There’s no reason that a high school student in Philadelphia who can’t afford to buy “Jane Eyre” for their eighth-grade class 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, right?\n\nDavid Senra\n\nNo, I go to these websites. Obviously, I’m obsessed. I read more than almost anybody else, so I go to these websites too, and the format’s terrible.\n\nIvanka Trump\n\nThey’ll scan pages of a book in 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. People will give us feedback on each of the translations.\n\nBut imagine now “Meditations” will be translated into most of the world’s spoken languages. We’re covering 95% of all languages spoken, and it will be available for free if you have internet access.\n\nSo, 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?”\n\nHe told me, “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.\n\nDavid Senra\n\nYeah, anything I can do to help on that project. Obviously, it's close to my heart. I would definitely volunteer if you need any help. I've been using AI for the last few years to translate books that are not in English to make episodes of Founders on them.\n\nIvanka Trump\n\nMm.\n\nDavid Senra\n\nThe translations are getting so much better, so I think you guys are perfectly timed.\n\nIvanka Trump\n\nYeah.\n\nDavid Senra\n\nBecause 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, “This happened 15 years ago,” and the translation was so bad, it was, “This happened three five-year periods ago.”\n\nIvanka Trump\n\nYeah.\n\nDavid Senra\n\nThat's a funny way to say 15.\n\nIvanka Trump\n\nFive years ago, we couldn't have done this well.\n\nDavid Senra\n\nYeah.\n\nIvanka Trump\n\nBut now, the large language models are so good, and generative AI is really allowing us to do it affordably—\n\nDavid Senra\n\nAnd the voices.\n\nIvanka Trump\n\n—to do it with high fidelity. The voices are amazing. So, ElevenLabs is helping—\n\nDavid Senra\n\nI was going to say—\n\nIvanka Trump\n\nYeah.\n\nDavid Senra\n\nHave you spent time with Mati?\n\nIvanka Trump\n\nI have, yeah.\n\nDavid Senra\n\nOkay.\n\nIvanka Trump\n\nHe's amazing.\n\nDavid Senra\n\nYeah.\n\nIvanka Trump\n\nSo, he's helping us with the audiobooks—\n\nDavid Senra\n\nOh, perfect.\n\nIvanka Trump\n\n—that will accompany each of these.\n\nDavid Senra\n\nYeah.\n\nIvanka Trump\n\nBut it's amazing, and we are 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 students.\n\nRight now, if you want to read Plato's Republic, you go and pay a publisher $35 for something that's in the public domain, that every 6 months they generate a new copy of and slap on a new piece of artwork on the cover. Students go and pay for it.\n\nSo, this, to me, is just a fun way to give back, to share some of the books that have so profoundly influenced me, but also to create a holding place for some of this really important information produced by humanity.\n\nDavid Senra\n\nAnd these are huge forms of leverage for future generations. There's going to be all these positive things that come out of this that you and Elad could not possibly predict.\n\nIvanka Trump\n\nWe're having fun. It's really hard to choose 1,000 books. People will say, “Well, you missed this and you missed that.” Of course we did. Even just the exercise of asking, “What are the most meaningful books for us? What should we translate next? How big is the scale of the project?”\n\nDavid Senra\n\nThe answer to that question is, as big as you want it to be.\n\nIvanka Trump\n\nExactly.\n\nDavid Senra\n\nThere's no limit. It's not a physical library or a physical space that restrains you to 1,000, 2,000, or even 10,000 books.\n\nBut what I was saying is, the reason I think these kinds of things are very important—and I also think podcasting plays a role in this, too—is that I'm reading Kelly Johnson, who's the most famous and most successful aircraft designer in history. 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.\n\nHe never met Andrew Carnegie, because Kelly Johnson grew up in exactly what you're describing: a very poor, rural community. He doesn't have electricity, for God's sake. He doesn't have access to anything else. This was when Carnegie was building all these free libraries and putting them all over the United States in these tiny communities.\n\nKelly would just go there, and he would live in the library. He said, “I read every single thing about aviation. I read fiction. I read all of these things that impacted me, and I've used them in my career many decades in the future.” I think you're going to hear a ton of examples like that when you guys do this project as well.\n\nIvanka Trump\n\nHow 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? To be able to learn from the amazing people who came before, even if you don't have direct mentors in your life who can expand your thinking and inspire you?\n\nDavid Senra\n\nDo you know who didn't have a direct mentor?\n\nIvanka Trump\n\nWho?\n\nDavid Senra\n\nElon Musk. I remember watching an interview with him that Kevin Rose did back in 2012. Kevin was trying to figure it out. They're in Tesla's factory—that's where the interview is happening—and Kevin's saying, “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. How did you learn business? Did you have mentors?”\n\nElon 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.”\n\nI was like, “Huh, maybe I should start reading more autobiographies and biographies.” Turns out you can find mentors in historical context.\n\nIvanka Trump\n\nThere are very few people I look at and say, “I deeply want to emulate every aspect of their life.”\n\nDavid Senra\n\nProbably nobody.\n\nIvanka Trump\n\nYeah. You know, Jared's pretty close.\n\nFor me, the reason I say that is because there are some people who I think are brilliant in business. They're true visionaries, and their private life is a wreck. So, are they still brilliant, or are they stupid? If you're that smart, how do you not figure out how to create a stable life for yourself that's good for the soul, good for the heart?\n\nThank 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.\n\nDavid Senra\n\nYeah, exactly.\n\nIvanka Trump\n\nAnd I think that work is more important than that work. You'll have people all across the spectrum, but there are very few people where I say, “Wow, in every aspect of their life, their priorities feel calibrated, and they're doing well.” Not flawless, because perfection is not possible, but they're doing well.\n\nThe reason I say Jared is that he's really—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. He somehow has the ability to always be in the right place, regardless of what he's juggling.\n\nThat's true for his partners as well. He's a very long-term thinker, and 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.\n\nDavid Senra\n\nYeah.\n\nIvanka Trump\n\nYou have one with him, and you've seen him with others that are truly built on trust. That's because he's more of a giver than a taker. 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. That's just who he is.\n\nHe's very comfortable with himself. He's just very comfortable being exactly who he is and very nonperformative. So, I learn so much from him all the time.\n\nAlthough, 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.\n\nDavid Senra\n\nWell, but he talks—\n\nIvanka Trump\n\nBut that's the thing: he won't. No, he really has almost no ego. It's to the point where I'm incredulous by it. 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.\n\nIt doesn't mean that he won't say, “Okay, well, that's warranted,” and recalibrate. He cares about the opinions of those he loves.\n\nDavid Senra\n\nWell, 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. It's legitimate when he doesn't think I'm going to go back and tell you or anything like that.\n\nIvanka Trump\n\nYeah.\n\nDavid Senra\n\nAnd we've had a lot of dinners talking about this.\n\nIvanka Trump\n\nBy the way, key to life: marry the right person.\n\nDavid Senra\n\nYeah, for sure.\n\nIvanka Trump\n\nMarry someone who puts you up on a pedestal—\n\nDavid Senra\n\nI don't think I've ever heard—\n\nIvanka Trump\n\nHe sees me in a way that I aspire to see myself.\n\nDavid Senra\n\nThis 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. Very few people would describe their spouse as almost perfect in their eyes, for lack of a better word. That's actually incredible.\n\nThere are 2 things that we mentioned that I want to come back to, that I think are super important and that I'm super curious about. You mentioned essentialism, and you mentioned opportunity cost.\n\nYou essentially have unlimited opportunities in front of you in terms of 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?\n\nWhen you're deciding, “Hey, I want to meet this founder. I may invest with them,” or, “I may want to partner with somebody on this project,” like Planet Harvest in the profit domain or a nonprofit like you did with Elad, how are you making this decision?\n\nIvanka Trump\n\nWell, 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? I'm investing in tech companies and helping build these amazing businesses that are so beyond what I would've ever imagined myself doing.\n\nEven the scope, 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. Community is at the heart of how people want to live, right? So I’m thinking a lot about how to create a great community for families and connection, because I think that’s the currency: getting somebody’s attention, keeping it, and creating an enabling environment for exactly that.\n\nBut anyway, for me, I always try to be receptive to conversations with others and to what sparks something in me, and then I go deep. My daughter will joke with me. I have 100 ideas a week, and I start to go into them, and she’s like, “Wait, you didn’t do that? I got all excited about it. What about this? What about that?” I’m like, “No, no, no, that’s my process.”\n\nI explore a lot of things, and then I go deeper and deeper. I do a tremendous amount of reading, so with any challenge I’m about to take on, I become like a PhD in that subject.\n\nDavid Senra\n\nMm-hmm.\n\nIvanka Trump\n\nWith the Sazan Project, I’m reading all the best Albanian writers, and I’m trying to understand the country through their eyes.\n\nDavid Senra\n\nOh, that’s smart.\n\nIvanka Trump\n\nFiction, nonfiction, all of it. You immerse yourself in 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, delicate, and meaningful way.\n\nBut that’s the approach I take to everything. I listen to a lot of people. I try to surround myself with people who 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, that only boring people get bored.\n\nDavid Senra\n\nYeah.\n\nIvanka Trump\n\nThere’s too much to learn. But I also tell them in this context 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 open channels for me and help me grow.\n\nSometimes that’s in a very intimate way: people who are really in touch with themselves and who can help me be a better mother, a better wife, and a better human being. Other times, it’s great business leaders.\n\nDavid Senra\n\nBut how do you decide who to let in? What kind of person do they have to be?\n\nIvanka Trump\n\nFirst and foremost, a kind person. Life’s too short. There are a lot of successful assholes, 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.\n\nDavid Senra\n\nYeah, that’s Buffett and Munger. They say it over and over again.\n\nIvanka Trump\n\nI 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 kind, good people whom I admire and can learn from, and there are so many of them.\n\nThe choice will never be for me to partner with the opposite of that. So I try to find good people. I try to find people who can help me grow, whom I can learn from. Then I dive deep into the subject matter through reading and through podcasts. I listen to a ton of podcasts—yours being my favorite, obviously—\n\nDavid Senra\n\nThank you.\n\nIvanka Trump\n\n—on a variety of different people and subjects. Then you have to get going. A mistake a lot of people make is that they get so excited about the idea, they keep ruminating on the idea. They keep pitching the idea. They don’t get to the point of actually doing it.\n\nYou learn a lot just in the early phases of bringing something to market. That motion can completely reorient your business, right? Because you receive feedback around it. For example, with Planet Harvest, we were creating demand for something for which there was no demand. Even the farmers weren’t taking this produce out of the field because there was no market for it, so we had to create a market.\n\nWe had to speak with the consumers and find out what they would pay for it and what they would get from it. 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 it to them, and then we had to hear from them what that was worth to them.\n\nDavid Senra\n\nI think it’s really important to get that message out there. One of my favorite books is *The Fish Ate the Whale*, about Sam Zemurray, the Banana King.\n\nIvanka Trump\n\nI heard your episode on that.\n\nDavid Senra\n\nYeah, Sam Zemurray.\n\nIvanka Trump\n\nIt’s brilliant.\n\nDavid Senra\n\nI forgot the subtitle, but it’s a biography of Sam Zemurray.\n\nIvanka Trump\n\nWe’re working with Chiquita Banana now, the largest banana company, and helping them think about their excess and utilizing it.\n\nDavid Senra\n\nWhich is fun.\n\nIvanka Trump\n\nHe did something very similar. He started in bananas, obviously, and they were just throwing them away because they would rot in 2 days, and they couldn’t sell them in the next 2 days.\n\nThere’s a line in the book that I thought of when I hear you talk about Planet Harvest: he saw opportunity where others saw nothing.\n\nDavid Senra\n\nYeah.\n\nIvanka Trump\n\nI think just being perceptive of the world around you—there’s unlimited opportunity around us that people are just jumping, skipping over, or ignoring.\n\nDavid Senra\n\nYeah.\n\nIvanka Trump\n\nIn your case, you said that they just did it this way because it’s the way it’s always been done. So if you go into a new situation with fresh eyes and ask, “Why? Why?” just keep asking why. You’ll eventually get to, “Well, that’s just how it’s always been done.”\n\nDavid Senra\n\n100%.\n\nIvanka Trump\n\nThat’s the best answer in the world, because that means it’s ready for disruption.\n\nDavid Senra\n\nThere’s innovation they can do there.\n\nIvanka Trump\n\nI think that’s what’s so cool about doing the early-stage investing that I’m doing. Obviously, Affinity does later-stage investing, but with some of the earlier-stage investments, it’s really about being a good listener.\n\nYou 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. 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.\n\nSo you’re listening: What’s the idea, and what’s the jockey like? You’re trying to understand whether the person has what it takes to build this thing, this concept, this product. Will they be in it for the long run? Do they have the flexibility, the mentality, the perseverance, the grit, the vision, and the leadership skills—all of these traits that you have to have, or the humility to know you don’t have and to supplement by hiring the right people?\n\nIt’s an assessment of the human being sitting across from you, and also of the idea that hasn’t yet been proven. In some cases, the more audacious, the better, because I’m not interested in investing in boring things. I like investing in things that have the ability to be transformational.\n\nThese often tend to be big ideas and often tend to be unproven ideas. You have to be a good listener because you don’t have a lot of data to support what they’re doing yet. 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.\n\nDavid Senra\n\nI think, given your personality, you’re perfectly suited to be a champion for these new but fragile ideas. The recurring theme in all these biographies that I’ve read—the 400-plus biographies of history’s greatest entrepreneurs—is that new ideas are so fragile. It’s so easy to kill an idea prematurely and not let it grow.\n\nYou just have to give it room and time to grow, just like a human being. I think Jeff Bezos uses the analogy of an acorn turning into an oak tree.\n\nIvanka Trump\n\nYeah.\n\nDavid Senra\n\nThat doesn’t happen in a week. It doesn’t happen in a year. It’s going to be a multiyear process that we have to understand going into it.\n\nIvanka Trump\n\nYou may end up at a place that’s very different from where you started. You mentioned Jeff—he was selling books, right?\n\nDavid Senra\n\nYeah.\n\nIvanka Trump\n\nSo that’s where it becomes, “It’s the idea,” and then, “It’s the founder.” 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.\n\nDavid Senra\n\nYeah.\n\nIvanka Trump\n\nThere’s a certain sort of neurological flexibility—\n\nDavid Senra\n\nMm-hmm.\n\nIvanka Trump\n\n—that these founders have, where 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.\n\nDavid Senra\n\nI 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.\n\nIvanka Trump\n\nThank you.\n\nDavid Senra\n\nI 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.","tldr_md_alt":"- **Ivanka Trump 当前的事业版图涵盖营利及非营利公司的孵化、对处在“变革前沿”的早期创始人进行投资——AI、生物科技、神经科技、机器人、太空——以及携手 Sazan 重返地产领域：一个拥有1,400英亩土地、外加5英里海岸线的地中海私人岛屿项目。** 她称这个项目是“我在地产领域全部经验的集大成”，同时坦言，“尽管规模如此之大，对我而言它甚至都不是一门生意”——项目汇聚了“这个时代最伟大的在世建筑师”。\n- **美国种植的水果和蔬菜有40%从未离开田地，仅草莓就有4亿磅被翻入土中，原因是外观标准过严，导致产品没有二级市场。** 这家公司由她与 Melissa Ackerman 共同创立，在原本不存在需求的地方创造了需求：她提到的 Chobani 酸奶产品和冰沙中的水果，均通过 Planet Harvest 采购；Chiquita 和 Fresh Express 是合作伙伴。她一直记着 Jared Kushner 的一句话：“因为显而易见，所以反共识。”\n- **另一项创业项目 Alexandria 利用生成式AI，将1,000部公版作品翻译成覆盖全球95%口语语种的版本，任何能上网的人都可免费使用。** 这个项目源于她与 Elad Gil 关于AI积极应用场景的一次对话，目前正与大型语言模型实验室合作，进行高保真翻译，并与 ElevenLabs 合作制作有声书；项目尚未正式发布，但已经临近上线。“我们正在让所有人都能平等获取这些不可思议的知识。”\n- **她表示，不愿让孩子再次承担自己重返政府所带来的牺牲：“我知道这件事不能浅尝辄止……我不愿再让他们承担从政的牺牲。”** 她提到“Potomac Fever”——身处权力核心的人和商界领袖“围着权力打转”，离开私人部门“待上大约2周”，随后以“略高一级的职位”重新回归；与之相对，她列举了自己的政绩：儿童税收抵免翻倍（惠及4,000万美国人，平均每户2,500美元）、美国联邦雇员首次获得全国性带薪休假计划、推动9项反人口贩运措施通过立法，以及 Great American Outdoors Act。\n- **她是在商业势头达到顶峰时转向政府——当时她的时尚品牌年销售额超过8亿美元，同时负责 Trump Organization 的地产收购和开发——而退出迫使她彻底重启，如今她称之为“巨大的祝福”。** 她花了6个月主动拒绝过去的合作伙伴，没有重启任何一项旧业务，而是围绕“少而精”重建生活：减少承诺、加深投入，并用类似 Essentialism 的专注原则进行筛选。\n- **她的做事哲学融合了 Naval 提出的“通过真实自我逃离竞争”——“如果你在竞争，说明你在复制别人”——以及一个判断：直觉靠反复实践培养，而非与生俱来。** 她选择合作伙伴时把善意放在首位：“世界上没有任何一份合同能保护你免受糟糕合作伙伴的伤害”；在早期投资中，她首先评估的是“骑师”——创始人越大胆，越好。","digest_md_alt":"### 1. Sazan：地产人生的集大成之作\n- 故事起点发生在一艘朋友的地中海游艇上：他们停下来游泳，“游到了那座岛上”，赤脚爬到山顶，此后这座岛一直留在他们心里。多年来，她与 Jared 推动这个机会落地，开发这座1,400英亩的岛屿，以及正对面、拥有5英里海岸线的土地——一侧是泻湖，另一侧是大海，还有白沙滩。项目要求是在“充分克制和悉心呵护”的前提下完成改造，让建筑“几乎从土地里生长出来”。\n- 她从与“真正的大师”合作中总结出的精通标准是：真正艺术家的“操守精准而绝对”；但建筑不是画布。“没有什么比一个漂亮却无法使用的空间更丑陋。对我而言，那算不上杰作，因为它没有经过完整的思考。”\n- 她之所以仍被地产吸引，是因为在“一个越来越不具象的世界里”，地产依然具体存在，而且能够超越个人寿命。她心中的范例是华盛顿的 1890年代 Old Post Office——“我的宝贝”——它从破败建筑被修复成繁荣的城市酒店，至今仍有人拦住她，讲述自己在那里举办洗礼和婚礼的故事。“你是在为人们的人生，以及他们梦想的实现，搭建舞台。”\n\n### 2. 如果你不知道自己是谁，世界会替你定义\n- Senra 以 Dana White 的格言开场：知道自己是谁，“你之后的人生就会变得容易”。她进一步补充：“如果你不知道自己是谁，世界会告诉你，而那个答案可能并不是你想要的。”她的检验标准是：与核心价值观一致的艰难决定不会带来后悔；“真正让你一直后悔的，是那些做出来却没有完全觉得对的决定。”\n- 她反对通过“论坛购物”来做决定：听取有经验者的观点当然有价值，但“涉及个人或职业生涯中的重大决定时，你不能把决策外包出去”。\n- 她引用 Naval——“我和 Jared 的朋友”——的一条原则：“通过真实自我逃离竞争。如果你在竞争，说明你在复制别人。”但关键在于，“你不可能真实地成为另一个人”。她举出的范例包括 Dana White、Rick Rubin 和 Dolly Parton。“无论怎样你都会受到批评。既然如此，不如尽可能成为最好的自己。”\n\n### 3. 直觉靠培养而非天生，静止状态也需要设计\n- 她22岁创办第一家公司，并把“相信直觉”限定为给年轻人的建议：“直觉必须经过培养……随着时间推移不断磨炼和打磨。”她的基础来自在一家布鲁克林购物中心开发商处积累的微小胜利——“我和施工团队一起取得的那些小胜利……为直觉以及后来会出现的自信打下了基础。”\n- 她设计的日常节奏是：做早餐（3个孩子、3种不同要求，“我基本上就是一个接单厨师”），送孩子坐校车，然后在迈阿密海边坐下来冥想、祈祷、确定优先事项，再去锻炼——全部安排在2小时内。这样做的回报是“更少的条件反射式反应”，并能在思考“所有其他人希望我完成什么”之前，先看清自己的目标。\n- 她引用 Rick Rubin 的《The Creative Act》：“你听得越深，听见的东西就越多。”她还补充说，人在淋浴时突然获得灵感，是“因为洗澡时手里没有手机”。\n\n### 4. 回忆录是灵魂的X光片\n- Sam Walton 的案例是两人共同搭建的例子：他知道自己即将因癌症去世时写下自传，把60年的创业经历提炼其中；Senra 将其称为“一种服务行为”，并说 Jeff Bezos 后来借鉴这本书来构建 Amazon。她由此概括：有人会把“80年的人生浓缩成一本300页、售价30美元的书”……Senra 认为，不打开这类书来读是不负责任的，并强调了这样做的价值。\n- 她解释了伟大回忆录为何稀缺：“它就像灵魂的X光片……如果你没有暴露脆弱，如果你没有真正讲述真相，它们就不会是伟大的书。”她认识的一些80岁或85岁的成功人士，在新书发布时反而比收购一家大型公司更紧张；她还指出，伟大的音乐家往往未必能教人弹吉他，而写书会迫使他们在职业后期发现自己的规律。\n- 两人的共同读本是《Shoe Dog》，以及开篇对 Oregon Trail 的描述：“懦夫从未上路。弱者死在途中。剩下的就是我们。”两人还特别指出其结构：全书在IPO处结束，远未到达事业巅峰，因为真正的故事是一路上的挣扎。\n- 她目前重读最深的一本书是 Frankl 的《Man's Search for Meaning》，刚刚送给14岁的女儿；女儿此前还抱着《War and Peace》回家。她说：“事情容易时，你找不到意义；事情困难时，你才能找到意义。”她发邮件给女儿的一段话，意译自那句名言：“刺激与反应之间存在一段空间。那段空间里有回应和反应的自由，而在这种回应中，存在你的自由与成长。”\n\n### 5. 最艰难的职业阶段：在增长曲线拐点完成180度转向\n- 当 Senra 问她经历过的最困难时期时，她回答是选择进入政府，恰恰因为当时势头正在达到顶峰：她的时尚品牌年销售额“超过8亿美元”，同时负责 Trump Organization 的全部地产收购和开发，Old Post Office 与800英亩的 Trump Doral 项目并行推进；6个月大的儿子 Theo 当时“就挂在我的胯上”。\n- 这项请求发生在她父亲赢得总统大选1个半星期后。她父亲“直到入住白宫的第一晚，才第一次在华盛顿过夜”，而且“确实谁也不认识”。她与 Jared 最终问彼此的问题是：“80岁的我们回头看时，会不会为……当初没有进入政府服务而感到骄傲？”\n- 她还谈到年轻时那种笃定感：最近她看到自己17岁时的一段视频，当时她俯瞰纽约天际线，宣称自己会塑造这座城市——“只有17岁时才有的自信……那时你还没真正开始工作，还没意识到，‘这事其实很难。’”\n\n### 6. 交还钥匙：先用6个月说“不”，再有意识地重建\n- 进入政府意味着接受 Office of Government Ethics 审查、进行资产剥离，并出售企业、资产，有时甚至包括建筑物；Senra 形容她辞去了350件事情。离开政府时，她交还所有钥匙，面对一张彻底干净的白纸——“一种疯狂的脱钩感”。\n- 她花了大约6个月，极其主动地对过去的合作伙伴说“不”，先把迈阿密的家庭生活搭建起来。她的姐夫 Josh 有句话：“最幸福的人，既开心去上班，也开心下班回家。”此外，“你的幸福程度取决于最不快乐的那个孩子”。\n- 她回头看，30岁出头时跑步机突然停下——那正是大多数人“与既定道路高度绑定”的时期——“最终是一种巨大的祝福”。这让她有机会在心里给过去做标记，创造出更简单的生活，然后只投入真正能长期坚持的热情。\n\n### 7. Essentialism 与那条黄金线索\n- Jared 最喜欢的书是《Essentialism》，Senra 将其与他的交易方式联系起来：始终寻找那件最关键的事情。Senra 讲了 Sam Zell 的故事：面对一笔还有10个问题悬而未决的交易，Zell 会说：“只有一个问题。只要我们解决第5点，其他一切都会自行解决。”Zell 说这是从 Jay Pritzker 那里学来的习惯。\n- 她的概括是：“最优秀的领导者……能够从噪音中找到信号。你只要抓住一根线，整件毛衣就会散开。”这既适用于商业，也适用于陪伴孩子和配偶。她对创始人的压缩式总结是：以简单方式解决有意义的问题，激进地铺开，长期坚持。\n- 她解释提炼为何如此困难时，引用了一句名言：“我写了一封长信，因为我没有时间写一封短的。”\n\n### 8. 政绩记录，以及对再次从政的明确拒绝\n- 她把“Potomac Fever”定义为一种围绕权力打转的现象：有些人“围着权力核心晃悠”，进入私人部门“待上大约2周”，随后以略高一级的职位重新回归。她认为自己的经历不同——她是被邀请去服务，并完成了多项工作：儿童税收抵免翻倍（惠及4,000万美国人，平均每户2,500美元）、制定首个让联邦雇员获得带薪休假的全国性计划、推动9项反人口贩运法案通过，以及推动 Great American Outdoors Act——“这是自 Teddy Roosevelt 创建国家公园以来通过的最大一项环境立法”。\n- 她的拒绝没有任何保留：“现在我知道这件事有多么高强度。我知道你不能浅尝辄止……我不愿再让他们承担从政的牺牲。”背后的时间压力是：她的女儿4年后就会离家；她始终遵循一位朋友的建议：“当十几岁的女孩开始说话时，放下手头的一切，听她说。”\n\n### 9. Planet Harvest：在不存在市场的地方制造市场\n- 按她的说法，美国种植的水果和蔬菜有40%从未离开田地：因为尺寸和形状不符合外观标准，它们被翻入土中，成为“营养完全合格、却被我们直接犁进土地里的食物”。农民也无法承受免费赠送：采摘、包装和运输成本高于零收入；腐烂的废弃物会招来苍蝇，迫使农民增加喷药。\n- 项目起源于新冠疫情期间她对小农户的走访。当时她依据 CARES Act 搭建了 Farmers to Families Food Box Program，随后开始追问为什么不存在二级市场。得到的答案是：“一直这么做，因为过去一直这么做。”在她看来，这是“世界上最好的答案”，因为这意味着行业已经准备好被颠覆。\n- 执行路径从需求端入手：向大型采购方讲清楚这套故事，提供多元化供应链，以及同等品质的产品。她提到的 Chobani 酸奶产品和冰沙中的水果，均通过 Planet Harvest 采购；Chiquita 和 Fresh Express 是合作伙伴。对供应商而言，这部分增量收入“往往决定了一家第三代农场能否延续到第四代”。\n\n### 10. Alexandria：覆盖95%口语语种的免费AI翻译经典\n- 这个项目源于她问 Elad Gil：“有什么事情是你最兴奋、但还没人做的？”答案是：人类最伟大的公版作品——Dostoevsky、勃朗特姐妹、Marcus Aurelius、Epictetus——仍因地理、价格或语言而无法被广泛获取。项目将借助大型语言模型实验室完成高保真翻译，覆盖“全球95%的口语语种”，任何能上网的人都可免费使用，首批上线1,000部作品，包括可检索文本和由 ElevenLabs 的 Mati 协助制作的有声书。\n- 她想要颠覆的商业模式是：出版商为公版作品、例如 Plato 的《Republic》收费35美元，然后“每6个月再版一次……只是在封面上换一张新插画”。Senra 举出的共鸣案例是 Kelly Johnson——他称其为历史上最伟大的飞机设计师——Kelly Johnson 曾说，自己成长于一个没有电力的乡村社区，是 Carnegie 免费图书馆让他获得了知识；Elon Musk 在2012年接受 Kevin Rose 采访时说的一句话，也让 Senra 开始阅读传记：“我在历史背景中寻找导师。”\n\n### 11. Jared、合作伙伴筛选与“骑师优先”的投资逻辑\n- 她对导师的标准近乎苛刻：有些商业天才的私人生活“一团糟。那么，他们究竟仍然是天才，还是其实很愚蠢？”Jared 几乎是她唯一的例外——“几乎没有自我意识上的自我中心”，“更像给予者，而不是索取者”，无论身处何地都“全神贯注”。她对婚姻的原则是：“嫁给一个把你捧上 pedestal 的人”，一个能以“我希望自己看待自己的方式”看待你的人。\n- 她筛选合作伙伴时先看善意，再看能力：“世界上没有任何一份合同能保护你免受糟糕合作伙伴的伤害。”无论什么时候，她都愿意选择“与一个好人握手”，而不是一份由顶级白鞋律所起草、看似固若金汤的合同。\n- 她每周会产生“100个想法”；对于真正推进的项目，她会深度沉浸其中。为了 Sazan，她正在阅读“所有最好的阿尔巴尼亚作家”，因为“你不能把自己强加到一个国家或一种文化之上”。她给孩子的两条格言是：“只有无聊的人才会感到无聊”，以及“你在说话时永远学不到任何东西”。\n- 在早期投资上——Affinity 做的是后期投资——由于创始人没有业绩记录，她首先评估的是“骑师”：韧性、愿景，以及“知道自己缺少哪些能力，并愿意为此招人”的谦逊。“越大胆越好，因为我没有兴趣投资无聊的事情。”她也呼应 Senra 关于脆弱橡果的观点：创始人需要“某种神经层面的灵活性”，才能把一颗橡果变成超越最初愿景的东西。","shows":{"name":"David Senra","hosts":"David Senra"}}