本物の人生を築く——イヴァンカ・トランプ

My 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 excitement over a long period of time, which is which is critical because I've really lived so many different lives. So now everything I apply myself to, I I can do it with a lot of vigor, but also a lot of confidence that this is something I'm passionate about. So the things I'm doing right now that I really love and and and that I spring out of bed each morning to do are super mission driven. So whether it's incubating companies from for-profit to to non-for-profit businesses, um investing in companies and and founders that are really right at the edge of of transformation, whether that be AI, biotech, neuroche, robotics, uh even space, really things that I think satisfy huge curiosity for me and enable me to to learn and grow and expand and founders that are taking on meaningful problems. What inspires me is is people really swinging for things. I I love individuals with huge imaginations and huge ideas. The ability to learn from them, um to spend time with them, to be expanded by them is, I think, super interesting. And then I've also gotten back to my real estate roots, which has been a lot of fun. and I'm working on an incredible project with my husband in the Mediterranean. It's it's massive in scale.

There's no power on this island. You're building you're building everything from scratch. Correct.

What does that mean? people with integrity so complete there's no compromise in their vision. Is that what you mean?

Are you guys hearing this? there's like six people off off camera that I badger every day

thought through. So when you can combine something that is architecturally incredibly meaningful and beautiful and intentional with a highly functional space. And one of the things I love about real estate is it's well first it's tangible in a world where increasingly everything is not um you see the result of years of work and really to bring a project to life it's years sometimes a decade plus.

Oh yeah. like to build something that you know lasts longer than your own lifetime.

Yeah. How do how do I say it?

So, you were very kind. I was chasing Dana White to get him on the show forever and he wasn't responding. And I text you and you're very kind and like you set that up immediately. But Dana has this thing. This is like a simple genius to the way he operates his life in my opinion in his business.

You started companies early. How old were you when you f first started your first company? I was 22.

Well, I think if you don't know who you are, the world will tell you and it may not be an answer you want, right? So, the world is noisy. Especially when you have a certain level of visibility. It projects onto you as a as much as it receives you. So, I think you have to do the work um of of really getting to know yourself and what feels right. Some of the hardest decisions I've taken, and sometimes it's really about saying no and setting boundaries or um changing course, when those decisions, regardless of how hard they are, align with your values, it always feels good. Like, it's hard. It can be difficult, but you never question it. You never second guess and you don't look back and wonder what if. It's the decisions you take that don't fully feel right that don't align with with your true self with that those core values that you hold. Those are the things that I think you always regret. Often times people get there because they sort of forum shop decisions. They'll ask people about their life. What should I do? What should I do? when they they almost make it like a process to make tough choices. And there's something very important about, you know, speaking to people who are knowledgeable and getting perspective and feedback, but ultimately like you can't outsource decision-m as it pertains to major decisions in your personal or professional life. You really have to like sit with it. Actually, you know, Dana um I think is is a great example of somebody who he knows himself so well. He's so authentically who he is. Like he would be wildly uncomfortable like wearing a mask and performing as in some other role. I think Rick Rubin, I think so many great people. Dolly Pardon,

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

like completely different breakfast. So, I'm like basically a short order chef. And I've tried to find like that one thing that they will all eat unsuccessfully so far. It used to be easier. I make breakfast, drop them off at the bus. They go to school quite early, so I'm normally have the ability right after drop off to sit by the ocean. I live here in Miami, and meditate as the sun rises. And I'll pray, I'll reflect. I'll I'll think. I keep that beautiful moment in my day as sort of an anchor to to both offer sort of thanks and gratitude to God and and the universe, but also to reflect on what my priorities are for the day ahead. And I found that to be incredibly important and grounding. I come back to the house, I work out, and I do all of that in, you know, it's like an hour and a half time span, uh, two hour time span. But to me that routine in the morning sets me up for success through the course of the day in terms of less reactivity um more being much more proactive and um in terms of clear definition around what I want to accomplish that day and then what everyone else wants me to learn about or accomplish will be secondary as long as I sort of create clarity for myself around around my goal. So, and then I have some version of that in the evening, a little more challenged because the kids are all home and every night is a different adventure, but um but really trying to sort of find stillness so I can I can sort of hear what the universe is is telling me. Rick Rubin talks about this in in his book, the the creative act, that the creator ultimately is just super attuned with what the universe is saying and that the deeper you listen, the more you hear. And part of listening is listening to oneself. And if you don't create space and time for that, then I find that it's very easy to just be on the hamster wheel and be a lot less creative in your pursuits. It's funny. I I listen to so many people and they have these Eureka moments in the shower, which I do too.

Like they liter whether it's 5 minutes or 20 minutes, they're there alone with their thoughts.

And suddenly um the ideas start to come in.

100%. I Naval who is a friend of mine and and of Jared's he always says escape competition through authenticity. If you're competing it's because you're copying. You know build something that fully comes from you and that will feel most right and it's also the thing that's least replicable. I love the idea of just escaping competition through authenticity. But you have to do the hard work of knowing who you are. You can't be authentically somebody else, right? I think part of the reason I like to read so much is,

It's and they're not that many of them. You know, there's humanity like all of um who we are. It just um like echoes over time with with these same questions. So, I love to look at books and and the reading I like to do tends to be things that take on those hard questions. You know, what are the things we're 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? I love philosophy because they grapple with some of these tougher questions. And from each of these amazing thinkers, you know, if I extract a few pieces of wisdom, that's just like a gem I put on um the chain with everything else. So, you know, to me that's very very interesting. And then I think if you look at in business, you have some of these people and obviously you your life's work is trying to understand them and know them whether they be living or dead. But you will have somebody who will distill sometimes 80 years of a life into a 300page book.

That you can buy for $30 and they'll tell you everything they've learned, everything they've experienced. I think there's just so much value in opening that book and listening to them.

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

Uh Stuart.

Yeah,

Yeah. And we were talking about that because there's actually some like I I don't even know if I should say this publicly, but we'll see. There's uh there's some writing of the co-author that Sam had on his uh autobiography cuz Stuart listens to my podcast founders, my other podcast founders, and he's like, "I'm going to try to get this to you just I can't use it for like public consumption, but just cuz you I'm really obsessed with Sam Walton. I admire him greatly." And he's like, "This will kind of like round out some things that you didn't know about him, which I

But it's also an act of service because what's so remarkable about that book is he was writing it when he knew he was dying. He he was in great deal pain. Cancer was all over his body. He knew he did not have he had limited time left on this earth. And what do you do? He's like, "Hey, I had 60-year experience as an entrepreneur. I learned some stuff. I'm going to put it into this book and then push it down the generations." And then people like Jeff Bezos happen to pick up the book and use some of those ideas to build Amazon which made your life better and my life better. Like this is such this act of service cannot be like it's just super important. It's it's so important that they do this. I just saw um Gwen 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 like will you please write a book? And she's like it's funny you bring that up because she's had an offer for like 10 years. It's like for it's like you 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 the IPO, but you should write a memoir detailing your experiences because it's a it's not just for her and her family. It's for everybody else that comes after her.

Yeah.

by Phil Knight then you're really putting it out there and leaving it out there and and I know some incredibly successful people who have built enormous businesses and then at 80 85 they write a book and they are petrified for the launch of that book like more nervous than in acquiring a major company or you know because there's something um so vulnerable about doing it plus it takes a tremendous amount amount of discipline to distill the wisdom um accumulated in our life into an understandable relatable way really like pull out the principles. You ask a great musician how they do it. Like sometimes the great musicians can't teach you to play the guitar, right? Like it's it's like they don't know they just do it. So I think for a lot of people it's like an interesting exercise in even at a late stage in their journey kind of discovering like why what they've done has been so effective. What are the patterns over time? So some people recognize it while they're in it. Other people it's just sort of like second nature.

Yeah.

That's one of like the great opening lines. What's the opening line? It was something about, you know, the pioneers and

and then there was us like some died along the some made it some died along and then there were

took great pride in the fact that they were from Oregon because of the Oregon Trail and they said that uh the the the cowards never started the weak died along the way. That leaves us.

The opening of the book is perfect because we were just talking about this when you were 22, when I was in my early 20s. The existential angst of a young man and woman in their 20s is universal. It's like, what is my life going to be? What like so so much of everything's ahead of you. And so he's on this run and he just feels like he's like he's been away from his house for seven years. He's got an NBA. He served in the army. And he's living in his

And the first opening where he's running, he's just like, "I'm going to pursue this crazy idea which turns into Nike." But it it ties to what you just said in the book talks about

And the book ends way before peak. like at the IPO at the IPO

the struggle

Um she goes to the bookstore probably

she's 14.

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You had a thriving business. things were going so well and I feel like you spent your 20s like really setting the foundation

And then my father won the presidency and he said, "I need you." He had never spent a night in Washington until his first night in the White House. And he didn't know anyone.

It was there was nothing. Normally when people run for office, they sort of like set themselves up for it. They contemplated for 20 years, you know, they take on smaller challenges, state and local races. You know, my father started with the presidency, won the presidency, and then said, "Hey, I need you." And I think both Jared and I in that moment, we looked at each other and we said, you know, we can stick our head in the sand and like continue on as we had planned in developing our own lives and businesses. But would the 80-year-old version of oursel look back and be proud of that choice, proud of the decision to to not go in? And I think we both knew like he's asking us for help, he's giving us an enormous opportunity to give back to a country we love so much. And even if it's a decades ahead of schedule, we should be so honored to do it. you know, I'm pretty intense and I was like on a path and now that path was like bearing unbelievable fruit and I was feeling I had those reps and doing things and achieving things was just easier than it had been when I was 22 and I completely changed the trajectory of my life. So that was like an adjustment but an unbelievable period of growth for me. I think another period of growth for me was actually when I left government and you kind of like hand back the keys, you know, there's no you don't have like a foot in the door and a foot out the door. So, you go through transition, you hand back the keys and you're done. But now we're in a new city. We had left our old lives and suddenly I'm at this point in my life where I have a lot of lived experience like a crazy amount of lived experience when you think about it in the private sector and um in government service but the slate is completely clean for me. And so that was an experience that was both frightening because I wasn't used to it from when I was a little kid. I actually have recently looked back. I saw a video somewhere that somebody had sent me and it was me at 17 looking out over the New York City skyline and I'm talking about like how I'm going to impact this unbelievably iconic cityscape and there was no humility about it. Just like the the confidence that you can only have when you're 17, you know, it's like before you actually start working and realize, hey, this is pretty hard. But I just knew and I was so sure my whole life that I would be a builder that I would build incredible projects, towers, hotels, resorts and um alongside these great masters and I was so so confident in that. So I always knew what I wanted to do and then it took me different ways. I also started you know 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. When you leave, everything's all of a sudden like wipe clean. So you have to then you talk about like knowing yourself. The best thing I did was not just like reconnect old wires and do the things I'd done before because that's what I knew. So, I actually made the choice not to go back to our family business, not to restart my fashion brand because I wanted a new adventure and a new experience and I was a different person. I had been so expanded by by those years. So, that was frightening and incredibly exciting to really say, okay, well, now I'm building for the next portion of my life. What did I enjoy? What was I great at? What did I feel uniquely capable at? Um, but really like what do I love and how do I want to to spend my time? And that's where I've been ever since. Really like having setting an incredibly high bar for um the places I'll commit my energy and time. Also, because now it's like the opportunity cost is so real. I have three kids who need me very much. I have a a 14-year-old daughter who I mentioned a 12-year-old son and a 10-year-old son and they all need me in different ways Yeah, it's I mean with my 14-year-old in 4 years she'll be out of the house and I think about like what does she need from me right now? You know, she's obviously like at that age as a teenage girl where me being home with her upstairs and the door closed is as important as when she was a baby. Me like, you know, rocking her to sleep every night. It's just being here, watching, listening, being available. You know, a friend of mine um 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. You know, they talk a little bit less as they get older. Was it all work when you were 20? you know, I really like 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, started having children relatively young. I really had a lot of working woman energy. And now that energy like I'm still as driven um but I feel like I'm much more aligned within myself. The need to achieve does not drive me in any meaningful way. Everything I'm doing is because it's something that is like soul project, you know, something that I'm deeply inspired by. For sure. I mean, Alan Watts, another one of my he says, and I think about this all the time, um, because I'm always thinking about like how to grow, um, how to, um, become a better version of myself. And he says that you are under no obligation to be who you were 2 minutes ago. And I think about that in the context that if you're not kind of a little bit embarrassed about who you were 5 years ago, you're not growing enough. So like I look back at me like 10 years ago like, oh, you know, that cringe. But there was nothing wrong. I was just like in that developmental stage. And and I hope that in you know 10 years I look back and I view the me sitting and talking to you as not evolved to the place that I am at that point in time. And maybe that's why also interviewing like the 80-year-old as you were saying, just further down the perspective and context. Yeah. There's just a lot of wisdom that you know you accumulate for six or seven decades of surviving and in many cases they were successful boy can you learn a lot from them. I you know I think my grandmother um she lives with me. She's 99 and she's amazing. She's very different. She has no business interest but she is one of My mom's mom. Okay. but she's one of the most wise people I know and she really taught me about like love and like the truly like nurturing kind of devotion to another human being. So I learned so much from her. I learned so much from my children. Like I view everyone including the people who like anger me especially the people that anger me as teachers, right? like if somebody triggers something, a reactive response within me, like I actually take the time to think about like what is it about that person that provoked this in me um so that it's an opportunity for me to learn. But I look at my kids and I learn so much from them because they're so present in the moment. They're like Rick, you know, they're they're they're so comfortable with who they are. You see a child um and there's an amazing phase where they're verbal, but before the outside world has conditioned them to be anything other than themselves, right? Including parents. Yeah. Right. There's and there's this like magic age where they're six and they're seven Um, you know, he's out on the ocean and he just So that's why we have like three different game tables around the house. But it's a beautiful thing to see. Probably the smartest thing I did was like not just gravitates towards the playbook. I knew I actually wanted to really like sit with it. So I took around six months where I really was I was extremely proactive in saying no to all partners. People had ideas and I really wanted to just like be in the moment. I wanted to um create and build a new life for my family here in Miami, which meant developing new routines and um new habits, finding um after school activities that interested them, really connecting with them and connecting with our new environment. And that was one of the greatest things I did because it allowed me to set up my life here really intentionally and build something build a reality that I love living every single day. My brother-in-law always says, "The most happy people are happy to go to work and they're happy to come home from work." Yeah, And I think that's 100% right. And you're as happy as your least happy child. So, making sure my family was set up. And then I think I started to become curious and and part of my process is to read, to study. Part of the reason I love investing. is I have a insane curiosity for what's out there. Like what could be, what is, what people are doing, what people are building. I love being surrounded by first and foremost like kind, good people, driven people, but also people with huge ambitions and wild imaginations and who see what the world can be um and and have their finger on the pulse of that. So I think really spending time in a lot of different ecosystems that wouldn't have been necessarily natural to me coming out of a real estate and fashion background to really immerse myself in in technology and robotics and um and biotech and and even you know health tech. Um I think there are some amazing things that are happening now where we can really like leverage information to catalyze our changes in our own behavior. you see all the wearables like WO and other companies like that. So I really wanted to spend a lot of time just with these people learning from them and helping accelerate the businesses that I most believed in and and that put me on a a beautiful path and in some cases that took me back to the beginning like in in the case with Seson and and and what we're building there. I sort of came full circle and and that project will ultimately be the culmination of all of my experience prior in in real estate and and with travel. Yeah. you literally sit with the office of government ethics and they review your whole life and they tell you if anything could potentially be a conflict of interest. You either have to devest of it, you have to put it into trust. So they go through everything and they're they just determine and they tell you what to do and then you go back, you've done it, you show it to them and then they have to stamp it. It was like a wild unteathering from the life you were building, you know, in like super small ways and then much larger, you know, selling businesses and selling assets in some cases, building. So, it was a very unique experience, but then you're really like in it and free of of all you had been doing in the past. But I can't help but think in this like new reset, this new like 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? Cuz like I feel the conversations we have, you're you have these reoccurring themes. It's like fewer, deeper, fewer better. Can you explain the change of decision-m there? Jared keeps hounding me to do an episode of Founders on the Book Essentialism. Yeah. And the more I talk to him about it, the more I think it's related to why he's so good at doing deals because he's searching for the most important thing, the the essential thing. And once you identify that, um, I got to have lunch with Sam before he died And one thing that I talked to Rick about is like he was mentored by Sam for 25 years. And he's just like I would I didn't know anything. I was in my early 20s when I met him. And I'd bring him a deal and I'd be like, you know, there's like 10 things we have to take care of. And Sam would Sam would look at it. He's like, "There's one." Yeah. Which is some people consider the best deal guy of all time. And he's like, "I would used to bring him deals when I was in my early 20s." Like this whole thing is replaying. And I'm like, "Look at all these things we have to do." And Jay's like, "No, you only have to do one. You have one problem here to solve and the rest." Not pain, just challenge, right? Like intensity, um, growth. These were amazing life lessons. Like we went to DC 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 real time. What we could get done in the third year versus the first or the fourth year versus the second. It was a different game. For me, this had not been my life plan. It's very hard. And you see them, they hang around the hoop, they go into the private sector for around two weeks until they cycle back in at like a slightly higher position. But for me, it was always about being asked to serve, being honored by that request, and feeling a great privilege in being able to do it, feeling really good about the body of work we were able to accomplish. Like I, you know, I personally was entrusted to work on issues like workforce development, vocational education, apprenticeship expansion, all things that are incredibly and increasingly meaningful in light of the disruptions that are coming with AI. doubling the child tax credit. 40 million Americans benefited on average $2,500 a family by the expansion of the child tax credit. That is incredibly meaningful work. Um paid family leave, the first ever national plan. Um federal employees having access to paid leave for the first time. So, you know, human trafficking, nine pieces of legislation I champions that were passed into law to combat child exploitation and human trafficking. Um, 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. so how do you take something that was a waste product and turn it into an asset or something that's actually usable? How does Plan Harvest do that? simply it it had been done that way because it had always been done that way and there was no secondary market for any fruit or vegetable that didn't meet an exact specification in terms of size and color sometimes even though the taste and the quality were in no way compromised. So there was just no market for it. So we said well that makes no sense at all and let's stimulate the demand side and create demand so that we could support these small and medium-sized farmers. And this is, you know, going back to just like listening. I started listening during the COVID pandemic to the challenges of farmers, small and medium-sized farmers. And that was an extreme situation because the supply chain just completely shut, right? So, if you had a farm and you had a perishable product like a strawberry, suddenly all the restaurants are closed. Unless you had an account with Walmart, you had nowhere to sell your produce into. And so you'd till it into the ground. As part of COVID and as part of the care act, I created something called the farmers to family food box program where we created grants to buy this great product and surge it into communities in need, keeping these small and medium-sized farms alive and thriving during this incredibly difficult time, saving the job of the distributors who would transport um between communities and and the farms and and obviously feeding a lot of people who were in need. But at that time, I started looking at the business more generally and realizing like, why isn't there a secondary market? Like, why aren't these great strawberries um going to a juicer if they can't be displayed in the fresh aisle at Walmart because they don't meet cosmetic specification that's really exact? You know, it's like everything is so uniform in size. It's very different in other areas of the world. In Europe, it's like organic. Things are slightly bigger or smaller. So we sought me and my partner to uh start to stimulate demand by working with large consumers and sharing with them the issue and getting offtake for these small and medium-sized farmers that's meaningful. So companies from Chobani now all of the fruit that we find in their beautiful yogurt products and smoothies is all sourced by Planet Harvest from small and medium farmers. That would have been 100% waste. it would have been tilled under. So, you know, it's an amazing thing that in America, we don't have a lack of produce being grown. We have an enormous amount of produce being wasted. 400 million pounds in strawberry alone um that's being tilled into the earth as opposed to going into yogurt or ice. Well, because they can't even afford to give it away. That would mean somebody would have to pick it and they would have to package it and then they would have to ship it. And so there's no incentive to do anything other than to look at its size and then throw it into a ditch, which also means more fertilizer. Often times the crops have to be sprayed more because of the um the flies will be attracted to the waste that's left in the field. My partner today is with Fresh Express in Selenus, California. And it looks like you go after a lettuce harvest and you look at the field, it looks like the field is full of lettuce. But how little of what's being grown is actually being taken and served to communities and how much of it is being wasted is horrific. And once you start to educate people on the problem, they want to be part of the solution. So we're now partners with Chikita Banana. We're partners with Chobani. We're working with large-scale restaurants and grocerers and everyone who wants to be part of the solution of how do we get this into um pre-made food into food service into grocery stores in a way that's sustainable for and and super beneficial for for these farmers who have a very tough job to begin with. So the incremental revenue to them is is is deeply meaningful. And oftentimes it's the difference between a third generation farm or or not. So that's work I'm really passionate about and that's the type of problem that Jared says something that I think about all the time that he loves being contrarian by being obvious and like this is such an obvious waste and there should be a market for this beautiful produce and yet it's being discarded. So I love solving problems that are obvious. I love talking with people like Hamdi from Chobani and saying, "Did you know this was happening? 40% of produce grown in America doesn't leave the field and him saying, "How can I help?" So that's a really like missiondriven business that that I'm I'm deeply passionate about, but I think will scale in a very very meaningful way while while doing a lot of good. You know, on the other side, I'm working on incubating a bunch of nonforprofits. So something that I'm really excited about came from a conversation I had with a great friend um the technology investor who you know Aad Gil 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. This is anything I can do to help on that project. Obviously, you know, it's like close to my heart, I would definitely, you know, volunteer if you need any help. I've been translating using AI for the last few years trying to translate books that are not in English to make episodes of Founders on them. because I was doing this a few years ago and I remember I translated one, I think it was from German. I remember the one line was supposed to be like, "This happened 15 years ago." And the translation was so bad. It's like this happened three 5year periods ago. Like that's a funny way to say 15. But now um the large language models are so good. Um and generative AI is really allowing us to do it affordably with high fidelity. The voices are amazing. So 11 Labs is helping. I have. Yeah. He's amazing. But it's amazing and and and we are really like working deep into some obscure languages where people really they don't have access. They they have internet. They won't have a library. They probably won't have a bookstore. rural communities, but also for students. You know, right now, if you want to read Plato's Republic, you know, you go and pay a publisher $35 for something that's in the public domain that every six months they generate a new copy of and slap on a new piece of artwork on the cover and and students go and they pay for it. So, so this to me is just a fun way to to give back, to share some of the books obviously that have so profoundly influenced me, but to create a holding place for some of this really important information produced by humanity. the answer to that question is as big as you want it to be like there's no limit you're not it's not a physical library physical space that you're restrained to a thousand or 2,000 or even 10,000 books but what I was saying is like the reason I think these kind of things are very important I also think podcasting plays a role in this too is I'm reading Kelly Johnson who's the the most famous and most successful uh aircraft designer in history. And in his autobiography he says the the the most one of the most important things that ever happened to him was the Andrew Carnegie had the biggest impact on his life and he never met Andrew Carnegie because Kelly Johnson grew up in exactly what you're describing very poor rural community. Yeah. you know who didn't have a direct mentor? Elon Musk. I remember watching this interview with him that this guy Kevin Rose did back in 2012. And Kevin was try trying to figure it's like they're in Tesla's factory. That's where the the interview's happening. And Kevin's like, "What the hell?" Like, "You come from South Africa, you go to Canada, then you go from Canada to the Bay Area. You didn't have any money." He's like, "How did you learn business? Did you have mentors?" And Elon said something that changed my life because then I started reading biographies. He goes, "No, I didn't have a lot of mentors. I looked for mentors and historical context. So, I thought biographies and autobiographies were helpful." There are very few people I look at and I say I want deeply want to emulate every aspect of their life. Yeah. Exactly. and they're doing well not flawless because perfection is not possible but but they're doing well and and why I say Jared is he's really you know he can be going through the most intense experience and like the kids don't feel it like He's deeply present wherever he is and whatever he's doing. He's not always physically present. Um, but he's always available emotionally, uh, telephonically. He'll drop anything he's doing. Like, he somehow has the ability to always be in the right place regardless of of what he's juggling. And that's true for his partners as well. He's a very long-term thinker in that he's, you know, he's outcome oriented. So, he's highly pragmatic and solutionoriented, but that doesn't mean he's transactional. He builds deep friendships. And you notice actually, you've seen you have one with him and um and you've seen him with others that are truly built on trust. And that's because he's more of a giver than a taker. And over time that ends up benefiting him in all sorts of incredible ways, but that's like ancillary. You know, he doesn't come at it from a place of thinking well over the long term, just who he is. And he's very comfortable with himself. He's just very comfortable being exactly who he is and and very like non-performative. So, I learned so much from him all the time. Although, given the fact that I know he's going to listen to this, I'm going to have to um going to have to pull back. Can we edit this whole section out? I'm going to have created a monster. But that's the thing. He won't like No, he really has like almost no ego. It's to the point where like I'm incredulous by it. Like I'll get upset about things for him and he like doesn't care if like if somebody criticizes him and he doesn't know that person, it just doesn't affect him. It doesn't mean that he won't like say, "Okay, well, that's warranted and like recalibrate, but it's just not going to, you know, he he cares about the opinions of those he loves." And it's legitimate when he doesn't think I'm going to go back and obviously tell you or anything like that. And we've had a lot of dinners talking about this. Um, so you, Yeah, for sure. marry someone who sees put you up on a pedestal and sees you as in a way that I he sees me in a way that like I aspire to see myself. Yeah. You have essentially in front of you unlimited opportunities on who you can spend time with and what you work on. How do you make this decision? Is this intuition? Is this just energy? Is this vibes? Like when you're deciding, hey, I want to meet this founder. I may invest in in with them How are you making this decision? apartment for me Um, so with the with the Seaison Project, I'm reading all the best Albanian writers and I'm trying to understand the country through their eyes. Um, that's smart. First and foremost, like a kind person. Like life's too short. Like there are a lot of successful but I'm just not interested. Like 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. Thank you. I think it's really important to get that message out there. There's there's one of my favorite books um it's called uh the banana king I think Sam Murray or no the fish ate the whale. but he did something very similar where there's a line in that book where you know they were he started in the bananas obviously uh and they were just throwing them away because they would rot in like two days and they couldn't sell them in the next two days and so he basically there's a line in the book that I'm that I thought of when I hear you talk about Plane Harvest like he saw opportunity where others saw nothing. 100%. And like that's the best answer in the world because that means like there's ready for And I think you're perfectly suited as your personality to be a champion for these new but fragile ideas. the reoccurring theme in all these biographies that I've read, the 400 plus biographies of fish entrepreneurs I've read, it's just like new ideas are so fragile and it's so easy to kill an idea prematurely and to not let it grow and you just have to give it room and time for it to grow just like a human being just like I think Jeff Bezos uses the idea uh the analogy of like an acorn turning into an oak tree. It does not happen in a week, doesn't happen in a year. It's going to be a multiple year pro uh process that we have to understand that going into it. And you may end up at a place that's very different from where you started. You mentioned Jeff like he was selling books, right? So that's where it becomes it's the idea and then it's the founder and what will that idea morph into very rarely is it a straight path. Most often it's something completely beyond the original aspiration. Toby, I heard him on your show. But you know these so there's a certain sort of neurological flexibility you know that and I think your life what you've shared with us so far in this conversation is a 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, for taking the time. This was absolutely perfect.