How Mark Zuckerberg, Palmer Luckey, Josh Kushner & Scott Wu Think | Jeremy Stern

1. 0:00 – 6:39

   Jeremy’s Zuckerberg profile

   1. DSDavid Senra0:00

      [typewriter clacking] All right, you're here because I'm a massive fan. Uh, I think you are the best in the world at what you're doing right now, which is writing these incredible long-form profiles on a lot of the top investors and entrepreneurs in the world. I just finished reading the one you did on Mark Zuckerberg. I thought it was so good, I actually did an episode on it for my other podcast, Founders. So I wanna just like jump into what it was like spending-- If you just like go behind the scenes of like, okay, how long did that piece take to write? How much time did you spend with him, and, and like his entire world?

   2. JSJeremy Stern0:32

      So his team reached out to me first originally, I think, toward the end of last year, which surprised me quite a bit, 'cause a couple years ago, I wrote this profile of Palmer Luckey, who started Anduril and Oculus, and in that profile, the big villain in the piece is Mark Zuckerberg. Zuckerberg had provided a comment for it, which I think eventually led to some sort of reconciliation between Palmer and, and Zuckerberg because, you know, after twenty sixteen, Zuckerberg had fired or didn't block the firing of, of Palmer Luckey after he'd made this small contribution to a, a pro-Trump group. So they'd had a big falling out, and that falling out had become legendary at that point in Silicon Valley, and it was a big part of this piece I'd written. So I was kind of surprised to hear from his team, uh, that he would be interested in talking to me. So I think, you know, earlier this year, uh, I think we were both a little bit skeptical about the idea, and we decided just to have lunch for a couple hours off the record just to meet and say hi and say everything that was on our minds. I initially came away from it feeling, uh, a l- a, a little bit pessimistic about a piece just because, you know, he's one of the most overexposed people on planet Earth. He's been under a microscope for twenty-five years. But eventually I did land on, you know, a number of things that I thought really made him interesting, which is some of the stuff that we've talked about before. In a lot of ways, he's kind of the last man standing from his generation of founders. So, you know, Larry and Sergey, they eventually step away. Bezos steps away. Obviously, Bill Gates stepped away. Jobs died. Zuckerberg, in a lot of ways, is kind of, you know, the last one. He's also kind of weirdly representative of millennials as, as founders, 'cause there are literally no others at his level, at his scale. I haven't looked this up, so maybe this is a bit wrong, but I think, you know, the second most valuable company started by a millennial would be Stripe, which I think is worth, I don't know, a hundred, hundred and fifty billion dollars, something like that, so like one-tenth of Zuckerberg's company. So I thought maybe there was some, you know, underexplored territory there with him. And then, like with a lot of these pieces, the things that you start out being interested in, you know, they still make their way into the piece. But once you talk to someone, a kind of whole galaxy opens up. Uh, and so I think it ended up going a lot of different directions, and over the course of about five or six months, I spoke to him. I spoke to almost forty other people for the piece.

   3. DSDavid Senra2:53

      Wait, explain that when you start to talk to somebody, you realize a whole galaxy opens up. What does that mean?

   4. JSJeremy Stern2:58

      Usually with these pieces, I begin with a thing that I'm interested first, in first, before I find the right person to use as an excuse to explore the thing. You know, I think with Zuckerberg, there was still a lot of kind of rawness and open wounds from the twenty sixteen to twenty twenty period, where there was an enormous amount of, you know, government and other types of pressure to censor social media. Obviously, since then, there's been this huge national debate about, you know, whether social media is a good thing in the first place, whether it's extremely harmful and comparable to alcohol and cigarettes and should be regulated as such. There was a number of different themes I think I was broadly interested in before I was interested in Zuckerberg per se. But I think like, you know, with, with, uh, with a lot of these people that I write about, there's this, you know, the old, uh... In, in the Talmud, there's a rabbi who basically says, "When you kill a person, you destroy a world." And I think, you know, it basically gets at the idea that every individual life contains, you know, many, many different worlds within it. Um, and so once you spend a lot of time with someone and spend a lot of time talking to their family, their friends, their colleagues, thinking about them, reading every book that's been written about them, this entire universe of relationships and work and psychoses and successes and failures just opens up, and then it's usually not until that point that you kind of figure out what the piece is really gonna be about.

   5. DSDavid Senra4:24

      You said that you think-- you thought he was overexposed. I would take the opposite. I actually think he's like... W-we know so-- Considering how powerful he is and what you just said, he is a singular character. I, I, I spent a few days with him, and this is the conversation I had where it's just like, "Listen, I've read every single book on Facebook. They're fucking terrible. Uh, I've seen all your interviews." Just like what I was trying to, to, to do is like I wanna-- basically, you have all this stuff in your head. You know, you have a singular lived experience. There's nobody your age that's even remotely close to achieving what you've achieved, and yet like I still don't understand like how you think about building products, how you think about recruiting talent, how you think... Essentially, how-- I'm only interested in like how you've built this phenomenal company. Nothing else. Nothing about your personal life, nothing about the, the, the lawsuits and the, you know, all the other, um, like, controversies. So like just this. And I feel like that still hasn't been done. Like, there's so much information inside of his head that he has not let out yet. Was there... W- You went into this saying he, he's overexposed. Did you, did you change your mind when you started spending time with him?

   6. JSJeremy Stern5:25

      There's partially like a difference in the way... Like you and I kind of do a similar thing in terms of our work, you on the podcast side, me in, in prose. Um, but I think the angle that, of approach that we, that we each use is like a little bit different. So what you just, just described, I totally agree is like really underexplored, and I don't think anyone's gotten at it. And anyone who is primarily interested in that is probably like a bit disappointed by the piece about him that I wrote. Usually, what I'm interested in is like who this person is and what it's like to be them and what it's like for the people in their lives to be around them. If I could like Tilt the gyroscope that people have on this person's life and their psychology by ten percent, I feel like, you know, I've, I've accomplished something. If, if the person is, you know, kind of culturally central and salient in an important way, which obviously Zuckerberg is. The piece opens with this interview I did with his parents. It closes with, um, you know, time I spent with his family and his wife, and I think those two bookends kind of explain the lens that I, I brought to him a bit more than trying to get into the hardcore details of the business he's built, which, you know, I, I agree, it's all somewhere in his head, but he's, you know, he's not the, he's not the best spokesman for it.

2. 6:39 – 13:03

   Why Zuckerberg identifies with Augustus

   1. DSDavid Senra6:39

      Why did you choose the angle of, like, essentially comparing him to, like, an emperor or Caesar?

   2. JSJeremy Stern6:44

      He has this long-standing interest in the Romans and in Augustus in particular. Augustus was the first emperor of Rome and turned it from a republic into an empire. I think a lot of these figures, uh, you know, I, I, I remember at some point Elon compared himself to Napoleon, so I, I think a lot of these, like, world-straddling figures at that level, they do think in these historical parallels, but they're mostly pretty superficial. When I looked into the Zuckerberg thing, you know, this is actually at a very, very long-standing interest of his going back to when he's fifteen, sixteen, seventeen years old.

   3. DSDavid Senra7:21

      He's making computer games.

   4. JSJeremy Stern7:23

      He's making computer games. He, you know, one thing I, I realized when talking to him is that, you know, courses he took in Latin in high school where they had to read and memorize verses from Virgil's Aeneid, he still remembers now at the age of forty-two and can, and can recite them. Augustus is, like, a big figure in that.

   5. DSDavid Senra7:43

      One of my favorite parts of the piece was... I didn't [laughs] I don't think I remember this, at least I don't remember from any of the books I read because this was quite a while ago, but he-- when, you know, Facebook and Google at the very beginning of earliest Facebook, and he would end these meetings by saying, like, "Carthage must be destroyed [laughs] which is also in your piece.

   6. JSJeremy Stern8:01

      Yeah. There was an- another funny thing is, uh, he used to end the meetings by shouting, "Domination," and Sean Parker, the early president of Facebook, told him he had to stop doing it 'cause it could be cited one day in an antitrust suit.

   7. DSDavid Senra8:12

      [laughs]

   8. JSJeremy Stern8:13

      When you ask him about it, I think, you know, he says, "Well, it's, like, a little bit overdetermined. I only took Latin 'cause I was really bad at French, and when you take Latin, of course, they make you read these things, and..." But then kind of the more time we spent talking about it, the more animated you could see him getting about it. And, you know, just recently at their keynote, you know, he, he brings out his personal muse agent, and he refers to it as Agrippa. The name Agrippa is-- was one of the two key early lieutenants for Augustus, who until the end of his life, he mourned the, the, the death of.

   9. DSDavid Senra8:45

      [laughs] Oh.

   10. JSJeremy Stern8:45

       So obviously, this is, like, a really salient thing for him. Augustus is also just a very interesting choice because he's kind of... He's, he's the most sensible of the Roman emperors. He doesn't go into a lot of the excesses of, of his successors.

   11. DSDavid Senra9:01

       What do you mean by excesses?

   12. JSJeremy Stern9:03

       You know, I think a lot of the later emperors, uh, you know, it's like it's, i-it's kind of the, it's, it's the usual, you know, succession plan problem throughout history. Like, you have the one good king, and then you get the sons and the sons of the sons, and then you get the friends or the advisors of the sons, and you get these egomaniacs who don't have the right political mind for empire-building. They end up wasting a lot of the trust they've built with their constituencies. They don't actually have that, like, founder gene to be able to build a state, a standing army, a trade-based economy, all this. Augustus did have it. Zuckerberg's interpretation of what Augustus did is really interesting 'cause when he talks about it, he says, you know, one of the things that Augustus did was he took a pillage-based economy and turned it into a trade-based economy, and he was able to kind of show, you know, Roman citizens that they didn't just have to be fighting endless civil wars decade after decade. They could actually live and trade and work in peace, which is a pretty selective interpretation of what Augustus did because, you know, one of the ways Augustus was able to do that was by, you know, st- uh, erecting a standing army, which Rome had not previously ha-had, and, you know, also by entirely eliminating political liberty from Rome. He turned it from a republic into a system that was entirely based on the power of one man. The ways in which his own interpretation and his memory kind of colluded to give him, uh, a pretty idio-idiosyncratic understanding of who Augustus was and what his contribution to history was, I thought was, like, a pretty interesting and revealing insight into maybe how Zuckerberg sees himself.

   13. DSDavid Senra10:40

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3. 13:03 – 18:49

   The competitive drive people still underestimate

   1. DSDavid Senra13:03

      his?

   2. JSJeremy Stern13:03

      You know, i-if you were to ask a lot of these people, like, what are the two things that people still don't understand about him, even though he's been a public figure in, in our lives for, you know, close to a quarter century now, the two things they always say are, you know, you might, uh, think you understand how competitive and ruthless he can be in a business sense, but, like, you're probably underestimating that. And then the second one is that he's actually not an asshole, and he doesn't treat people badly, and he's actually, like, a pretty nice guy. I didn't include those quotes in the piece 'cause, you know, you would... A lot of, you know, members of his family and his colleagues, like, would say things like that. Even his critics and his rivals and his enemies, who I did also interview, said a lot of the same stuff. His competitive drive can't really be underestimated, and it's also interesting that, you know, most other people who are that competitive just have this gene where they also are pretty monstrous to the people around them.

   3. DSDavid Senra13:58

      One of my favorite quotes in the, in, in the piece is there was a former AI researcher that used to work for Zuck, and now is at a competing lab, and he's-- goes unnamed in the piece, but he's just like-- he said exactly. He's like-- He's Mark-- He said, "Mark is the fucking Terminator. He just doesn't stop. One of his advantages is that he's always discontent, he's always unhappy, but he's not..." I think he says, "He's not an asshole. He just keeps moving forward." And then there's another thing that, that Mark I thought was interesting. It was Dirk with Mark, if I remember correctly, and he was talk, talking about his advantage relative to, like, Sam Altman and Elon, where he's just like, "You know, the things I do are kind of unsexy. I'm just very good at getting a team and taking something and improving it o- a, a lot over a long period of time. And then because of the, the structure and the business that I have, I don't have to essentially keep raising mo- more money, and I don't really have to ask other people's permission to do what I'm doing."

   4. JSJeremy Stern14:44

      Yeah, that was something that I, I found very interesting about him and that I think I came to appreciate about him in the course of reporting the piece. I think I, you know, I began it with skepticism about a lot of the products that Meta's built and feeling pretty ambivalent about the impact on society that social media's had. Lots of things like that. One of the things I, I did come to appreciate about him is that I do kind of see him in the mold as, like, a classical American business mogul, as distinct from the more recent generation of, like, AI founders. In that quote, I think he says something to the effect of, you know, my, my edge in the world is sitting down with a team and methodically improving a single product over the course of decades and building, like, more and more value into it. And he doesn't go out and do all these, like, big splashy things. I think one of the things I appreciated about that was regardless of what you think about Meta and the products it makes and, and, and offers, Zuckerberg as a figure, I think is ideologically coherent and unconfused in a way that a lot of the major AI figures are not. He sees Meta as kind of a, you know, it's, it's a business, like, you know, first and foremost, and, uh, I know it's like a, you know, full stack, deep technology company and all these other things, but I don't think he overestimates the impact that the business has on history. Whereas, you know, if you talk to a lot of the major AI figures, um, it's really hard to talk them off this cliff of thinking that their company is the last thing that will ever be built in human history. And I appreciate about Zuckerberg that he doesn't go there.

   5. DSDavid Senra16:31

      Yeah, you did a great job of like, okay, 'cause I've heard the same thing. You know, it's like, oh, like you're so far behind in AI, they'll never catch up. Like this is-- he can't buy it. He doesn't get it. And you're like, okay, well, let's just like steel man the other side where for decades everybody says this guy's dead, he's gonna fail, and he just like keeps rising, keeps walking forward, and like you cannot kill him. So like what, what is the AI equivalent of that? And I think in one part of the piece, like would you wanna bet against him not figuring this out? And they're like, "No, no, no." Like suddenly their confidence like, "No, no, I, I, I'm not betting against him."

   6. JSJeremy Stern17:03

      Yeah. And I, I think that's probably reflected to some extent in the markets. But yeah, I think, you know, he never said this explicitly, but I think, you know, a big part of the, the bull case for Meta in AI would basically be that, you know, their potential ins-install base for whatever model they have, regardless of how good it is, is approximately half of all human beings that live on planet Earth at any given time. That's how many people use WhatsApp, Instagram, Facebook, you know, uh, Messenger, Meta AI. So they have the distribution. You know, he spent twenty years doing all of these really boring You know, mind-numbing things like negotiating contracts for infrastructure projects with municipal and state governments and figuring out the tax incentives and how much of the revenue that the data center generates is gonna be used to pay for other public works in that community, blah, blah, blah. All this really unsexy stuff that again, like he and a fairly small team of people have been-- have spent, you know, the last quarter-century negotiating. I think it's all resulted in, you know, they, they basically have the distribution, the infrastructure, and then, of course, the attention that they dominate th-uh, through the apps. They just have a lot of the things where probably a lot of the value that AI generates, it's gonna accrue at the complements that Meta already dominates. When I spoke to those people, and they said, you know, they would not be willing to bet that Zuckerberg or Meta loses the AI race, I think it's based on the fact that he's just built, you know, this business that's kind of possibly perfectly positioned to win the race in an important way, whereas the pure AI labs don't have anything like this and still have to pay to rent a lot of the infrastructure and the compute and, and all the stuff that he owns.

4. 18:49 – 21:11

   Why Zuckerberg won’t walk away

   1. DSDavid Senra18:49

      So in the piece, there's several times where he says, like, "I'm addicted to building. I just like building things. I didn't even think I was starting a company. I was just... You know, this is like a natural evolution of just the fact that I build. I'll never stop. I won't quit." Those are my favorite kind of founders. You and I have talked about this privately over and over again. I'm just super interested in the people that cannot be bought, that they're doing it for other reasons. They're not, like, looking to be acquired. They're just like, "This is how I wanna spend the short amount of time that I have on this planet, and there's nothing else. Like, you're not gonna get me off the path that I'm on." Based on the time you spent with him and talking to all the people around him, including his family, like, what would it take for him to, like, say, "Hey, I'm just gonna step, step back from Meta"?

   2. JSJeremy Stern19:25

      I think that is the other interesting thing, right? So, like, we, we talked before about how he's kind of the last man standing from his generation of founders. There's obvious-obviously one very big exception to that, which is Elon. But I think the thing that ties Zuckerberg and Elon Musk is that it's unimaginable that they would just step back and live the rest of their life on a yacht and, you know, engage in various forms of, you know, space exploration that have nothing to do with the, like, original companies they built or philanthropic work that they, you know, do full-time with their spouse or something like that. I think those are the two people that you would imagine, like, they're just gonna die as CEO. Like, something's gonna happen, their heart's gonna explode, and they're just gonna, like, die at their company. And I think they are pretty singular in that sense. And, you know, Zuckerberg does have, like, the kind of canonical piece of evidence for that in Facebook's history, which is that in something like two thousand and six, I think, Yahoo offers a billion dollars to buy it. The entire management team wants to say yes. Y-you know, the board, which I think just consisted of Don Graham and Peter Thiel at that time, really were encouraging him to say yes. He's twenty-one, twenty-two years old. It's a billion dollars. He owns seventy percent of the company or whatever it is. It's not like a torturous negotiation where he's considering both sides. He just says no immediately. That's the kind of thing I think you probably can't fake, right? When you're that young, it's that much money, you're under that much pressure, and the entire management team at Facebook at the time ends up walking away because he wouldn't take the money. And there's, I think, kind of periodically been episodes like that throughout the history of the company where, you know, in the face of opposition, he decides he's not going to sell, um, or he's not going to walk away. And I think that's probably just going to be the case possibly forever.

5. 21:11 – 35:05

   How Palmer Luckey became Jeremy’s first profile

   1. DSDavid Senra21:11

      The profiles that you write are some of my favorites. Uh, I still think the Zuck one was excellent, but I still think my favorite profile you've ever made was the one on Palmer Luckey, which you told me last time that was the first profile you ever wrote on a person, which is insane. I just wanna go through a couple of the people that I'm most interested in, some of which I've been, uh, like, some of them are friends, some I've spent time with, and just go over, like, what went into making them, 'cause I do think I have a, a high, uh, like, a high respect for the, the amount of craft that you put into this. But also, like, what did you learn from not only the process of making these incredible profiles, but, like, what did you learn from being around these people? So, like, let's start with Palmer. Why choose him as the first profile ever that you're gonna write on a person?

   2. JSJeremy Stern21:56

      Yeah. So u-up until that point, I'd been doing a lot of writing, but I'd never written, like, a profile of a person. I'd never written anything that had anything remotely to do with technology or, or business. I was writing mostly on, like, American politics and German politics and foreign policy and all this stuff that had to do with my, my previous life. Like I said before, I, I usually start with a thing that I'm interested in, and then I kind of go in search of the person who would be the best way to explore the thing. And in the case of Palmer, it was, you know, after October seventh in Israel. You know, o-one of the interesting things about it was that the amount of technological overmatch that the Israeli military had over Hamas was, you know, basically infinite, right? And Israel, in a lot of ways, was thought to have had the most advanced fourth-generation hybrid warfare style of military on the planet. Their drone fleets, the use of satellites, underground sensors, smart fences. They'd basically thought of themselves as having been able to obviate the need for more classical forms of military hardware like tanks and artillery, uh, and all this other stuff. And then when Hamas invades on October seventh, they do it with hang gliders and construction equipment and small arms. One of the interesting questions I thought came out of that was, is this whole defense tech thing basically bullshit? Like, does any of this stuff actually work? It didn't seem to work in this one case. Doesn't mean it doesn't work elsewhere. But, you know, we were at that point already, you know, a year and a half into the, the war in Ukraine, which was this really interesting mix of, you know, next generation warfare that was being fought by drone swarms. And on the other hand, you have, you know, hundreds of thousands or millions of eighteen-year-olds with sticks fighting in trenches, right? Which is a form of warfare that's, like, at least a hundred and fifty years old. So the question I started out with was, is defense tech real, or is it bullshit? And if it's real, how far away are we from figuring it out? And Palmer, you know, I think at that point, he was Already a legend and an icon within tech, but he wasn't well known outside of it yet, which is interesting 'cause this is only a couple years ago, and now I think he's a pretty ubiquitous figure, and it's the kind of person my mom will tell me she saw him on 60 Minutes or something like that. Uh, but that was not the case back then. And I'd heard only a little bit about him when I was in the Army. I think I remember hearing when I was deployed about Anduril, you know, it was this new company that was started by the guy who invented the Oculus, and they were going to start, you know, they were gonna build the first new prime defense technology company in, you know, a hundred years or whatever. So I mostly got interested in him insofar as I wanted to write, you know, a pr- fairly short three thousand word piece based on an interview with Palmer Luckey about where we actually were with defense technology. Again, it's you, you start spending time with someone, you start thinking a lot about them, you talk to everyone in their life, and a whole universe opens up and it turns into this fifteen-thousand-word cradle to grave piece about basically his entire life, which I thought was particularly salient at the time because-- So I think the piece came out something like August twenty twenty-four. So this was only a month or two, maybe one month after the assassination attempt on Trump, after which kind of all of Silicon Valley, a bunch of founders and VCs end up aligning behind Trump, having not aligned behind them, you know, the, the, the previous two times. And one really interesting thing about Palmer is that, you know, he had supported Trump, which w- his, you know, the specifics of his support for Trump I thought were just not particularly interesting. What was really interesting was that he did it and was willing to stand behind it, not at a moment when everyone else in his industry was also doing the same thing, but when it cost him everything, right? He, he did it at a moment when it w- you know, it led to him getting fired by Facebook, which had bought his company, and he lost the company that he'd spent, you know, his brief adult life building. And so I thought that also suggested something interesting about his character, or his integrity, or his belief in himself, or belief in what was right. Anyway, it, it ended up going in a, in a bunch of different directions I never could've anticipated at the beginning.

   3. DSDavid Senra26:09

      What was the most surprising direction it went in to after the fact that you didn't expect at the beginning?

   4. JSJeremy Stern26:14

      I usually spend like six months to a year working on each of these pieces and thinking about these people, and it's like the day it's taken away from me, and it's with the copy editor, and then it gets published, it's like there's a way in which I l- that I, I get like a hole in my brain that never gets filled back in, and I kind of forget a lot of the details.

   5. DSDavid Senra26:31

      Yeah, we, we, we were talking before recording, 'cause like I have this like ten-year history of, for my other podcast where I have like all, every single note, every single highlight. I have all the transcripts. I like use it all the time. I have an AI agent that just helps me like remember all this stuff, and I was like, "What do you do with your stuff?" Like, "Nothing." [laughs]

   6. JSJeremy Stern26:49

      I find it really hard. So I, I find it-- What I can do is I can try my best to enter the psychology of a different person for a finite period of time. But if I stay there too long, I feel like I'm going insane. So the day the piece is done, I feel like is the day I have to get out.

   7. DSDavid Senra27:05

      Wait a minute though. I wanna s-s-- because this is where I'm also interested. In addition to like you covering very fascinating people, spending a lot of time with them, writing these incredible pieces, I'm also curious how your work shapes yourself. And like the podcasts I make change me constantly. Like I-- you can, if you just listen to them over, you can hear me changing my opinion and kind of being shaped into new thinking and realizing, oh, this is a really important idea, I need to keep that with me. Like is that not the case for you?

   8. JSJeremy Stern27:30

      I think maybe one, one place where we differ is, you know, I, I see founders in this show as kind of strip mining very interesting people for insights that then other people can use in their lives and think about as they're building their businesses or, or, or whatever else they're doing. I think probably my, the things I write are not valuable in that sense, and if they are valuable, it would be more in trying to understand the lives of individual people that from the outside seem almost unreal in a way because of either the power or the fame or the celebrity or the political, you know, relevance of what they're engaged in is kind of unimaginable to a lot of people on the outside to try to, um, you know, get at who they are as individual human beings, which I think is valuable in its own right, and also to just kind of figure out like what the larger cultural and historical patterns that they're swept up in, how those things impact their lives. I think, you know, one of the things that I think a lot of these people feel is that they are kind of time spanning figures and that, you know, if they would have existed five hundred years ago, you know, they wouldn't be building a technology company, but they would have been raising an army and become an emperor or something like that.

   9. DSDavid Senra28:56

      That's definitely true. So I can't tell you who, but I've had a conversation with-- I was like, "I'm getting like Genghis Khan vibes off of you." And I go, "If this was eleven hundred years ago, you'd be on a horse chopping people's heads off, wouldn't you?" And this is what I said to this guy in private, and he goes, "Absolutely." [laughs]

   10. JSJeremy Stern29:09

       Yeah, I think, you know, Andreessen has this line that he's, that he used with Zuckerberg and probably some others that, you know, now you raise venture capital, but five hundred years ago you would've been raising armies or something like that. And, you know, maybe there's a way in which that's true, but I also see a lot of these people as just being historically contingent in a lot of important ways, which is not to take anything away from them. But I think, you know, when these people are examined and written about a hundred, two hundred, five hundred years from now, and I think some of them will be, Zuckerberg would be one, I think they're gonna be understood in the context of the world that we all live in.

   11. DSDavid Senra29:42

       How did we get to what you're saying now, based on the question I just asked you, which is like how does your work change you?

   12. JSJeremy Stern29:47

       I think-

   13. DSDavid Senra29:48

       You're saying these people are just too different from the way you view yourself?

   14. JSJeremy Stern29:51

       I think mostly it's that I, maybe to a fault, I find it valuable and interesting just to try to understand and reveal individual human lives and How messy, how impactful, uh, they can be. I love doing that kind of on its own terms. I'm much less, I think, able to, uh, you know, kind of gather different insights from people's lives and apply those lessons to my own life. I think if I learn from these people in an important way, I think it's, it's that, you know, the stories that we all tell ourselves about our lives, you know, there's, there are ways in which they're really valuable and important and accurate, and there are ways that they're kind of constructed in order to protect us against the uncomfortable thought that at some point, like, we're all gonna die and we're all gonna be forgotten and all of this hard work is going to, you know, end up being meaningless. So I, I like s- being able to glimpse that in people who I think from the outside seem unreal in a certain way because they are so powerful and so wealthy and so important.

   15. DSDavid Senra31:01

       Are you introspective?

   16. JSJeremy Stern31:03

       [laughs] This is a minefield. Uh, I think I'm very introspective, although it might say something that I like to spend most of my time thinking about other people rather than thinking about myself.

   17. DSDavid Senra31:18

       I keep asking this question in, like, half a dozen different ways, through texts, through phone calls, by sitting in the backyard earlier. Like, you don't give on this at all. I don't think you are introspective. Like, and I'm not-- Like, that's not the, the main thing, thing I'm trying to figure out from you, but it's just like you, yeah, you're just like, "No, I'm just like, I like writing these pieces. Uh, I'm intensely interested in them. As soon as they're done, I forget about them completely and move on to the next." It, it doesn't seem to change you, it-- which is fucking shocking to me, like, that you're so good at what you do, that, again, I think you're the best in the world at what you're doing right now, and, like, you just will not give me any of this. Like, no, I'm taking nothing from this. [laughs]

   18. JSJeremy Stern31:56

       So, yeah, I mean, I, so maybe the answer to your question is I'm not introspective enough to understand how it does change me.

   19. DSDavid Senra32:03

       If I asked your wife, would she say that you're different today than you were when you started writing at Colossus?

   20. JSJeremy Stern32:09

       No, I don't think so.

   21. DSDavid Senra32:10

       Okay. [laughs]

   22. JSJeremy Stern32:11

       And I don't think my parents would either. Um, but I, I think it's, you know-

   23. DSDavid Senra32:15

       You think you're fully formed? What is this? What's happening right now?

   24. JSJeremy Stern32:18

       [laughs] I think it's one of these things where I, I, I think there's, you know, there's maybe a few things that I'm good at, and maybe there's a few things that make me happy, but there's only one thing that's both, right? I think I'm pretty good at writing, and it makes me pretty happy. And I think over the last several years I've been so focused on the craft of writing prose and storytelling and narrative and bringing some core-- sort of literary or cinematic ambition to bear on the lives of these core figures in business and technology and, you know, eventually elsewhere, that I've been more focused on the success of the craft rather than on what I'm trying to absorb from these individual people. There's this great, um, David Foster Wallace essay that I, I really like where he talks about writers as natural born watchers and lurkers and starers, and what they kind of covet is this image of themselves as witnesses of other things and other people, and therefore, what they're most afraid of in life is for the tables to be turned, which is the exact situation we're in right now-

   25. DSDavid Senra33:32

       [laughs]

   26. JSJeremy Stern33:33

       ... where they're the ones being watched and interrogated and, and stared at. And so I think it's also just I'm kind of by nature, I probably have less access to that part of myself, and also, you know, this is all relatively new to me. Like, it was, you know, only seven or eight years ago, I had a completely different life where I was, you know, in the army and I was eight thousand miles from where we are right now, and all of a sudden now I'm, like, doing things in public and that's all brand new to me.

   27. DSDavid Senra34:00

       I found one of my all-time favorite quotes when I was reading the book Zero to One. The quote says, "The single most powerful pattern I have noticed is that successful people find value in unexpected places, and they do this by thinking about business from first principles instead of formulas." That is exactly what AppLovin has done with their advertising platform. AppLovin connects you with over a billion potential new customers in mobile games. AppLovin allows you to capture undivided attention. AppLovin ads are full-screen videos that are watched for an average of thirty-five seconds. That is retention that blows other ad platforms out of the water, and you can launch on AppLovin in minutes. You set the goal and AppLovin achieves it. No complex setup, no expertise needed, and AppLovin scales quickly. They can put your ads in front of over a billion potential customers. Other businesses have seen immediate results, scaled to hundreds of thousands of dollars of spend per day and increased their revenue by millions. So you wanna get started quickly before all of your competitors are on AppLovin, and you can do that by going to applovin.com. That's applovin.com.

6. 35:05 – 39:20

   Bringing literary ambition to business writing

   1. DSDavid Senra35:05

      I still don't understand, other than you said it makes you happy and you, you know you're good at it, right? Like, I don't understand your approach, though. What I'm trying to get out of is, like, how you think about your own work.

   2. JSJeremy Stern35:18

      I spent, you know, my whole previous life doing and thinking about things that had absolutely nothing to do with business or technology. Um, it was not an area of interest for me whatsoever. The way it became an area of interest was, you know, it, it started with this profile I wrote of, of Palmer Luckey a couple years ago, but people in business and technology had somewhat recently become, uh, a lot of the most interesting, the most interdisciplinary, the most, uh, culturally central and salient figures in American life, and that was not always the case, and it's not always going to be the case, but it's the case right now. So maybe if you think about, like, in the nineteen-forties, who are those people? They're, they're physicists or they're people who work in the national security bureaucracy. In the nineteen-sixties and seventies, I think it's probably musicians, filmmakers, and writers. Um, you can go on and on. I think in the last, like, ten to twenty years, I think it's, it's clearly technologists and, and business people. What I kind of began with was, you know, an interest in who are the people Determining the world that we live in and shaping the future the most. Which, again, has nothing to do with an inherent interest in, you know, technology founders or VCs per se, but I think they're just the answer to that question right now. So I am most interested in them. However, you know, my entire previous life was, you know, the thing that I love and that I've always been interested in is books and fiction and literature and poetry and writing. You know, I've spent more-- probably more time reading books than I've spent doing any other activity in my life. I think we probably, you know, you and I share that in common to an extent. And, you know, having realized that people in technology and business are the kind of most central figures in American life at this point, you read around, and one thing you notice is that the most talented prose stylists, the people who bring real literary ambition to the things they write, tend not to be in this space. Which is not a blanket, you know, claim. There's, there's, there's plenty of, uh, excellent, amazing writers who, who write about this stuff. But as a whole, there's just not many, and the quality of prose that covers a lot of the stuff that I cover just, like, isn't great. It's not, like, built to last. It's not, uh, of interest a year after it's written, let alone five or ten or twenty years later. And I thought, you know, one slice of the market that was kind of there for the taking, and this is what Patrick and I originally discussed when we were talking about me coming to Colossus, was, you know, there was this great tradition of long-form American magazine writing, which my, my old colleague at Tablet, David Samuels, likes to say is the-- America's only indigenous form of writing, right? Like, we didn't invent the novel, we didn't invent poetry, we didn't invent verse, but we did invent the long-form magazine profile, which kind of belongs in the American vernacular. And this has, like, a great tradition from The New Yorker in the nineteen-forties and fifties, Esquire in the nineteen-sixties, Vanity Fair and Harper's in the nineteen-eighties and nineties, all of which kind of gets destroyed in the last ten to twenty years, kind of starting with Facebook and, you know, the things that Zuckerberg built. And that there was, like, a big opportunity to bring a lot of that literary ambition to bear on the-- what we hope is the very best writing about people in business and technology. And so that is, I think, maybe one way of trying my best to answer your question.

   3. DSDavid Senra38:46

      Okay, you just did, 'cause you're like, "David, no, I'm not taking ideas from Zuck or Scott Wu or Josh or Neil or any of the other people we're-- you've written on and we're gonna talk about today. I'm taking it from fiction and from poetry, and I'm applying that craft to storytelling in what I think is one of the most important areas of American life and gl-- and worldwide life today."

   4. JSJeremy Stern39:11

      That's right. Aspirationally, at least.

   5. DSDavid Senra39:12

      Okay. I-- There you go. I got my answer now.

   6. JSJeremy Stern39:14

      [chuckles]

   7. DSDavid Senra39:15

      All right, we're gonna move on. I wanna go person by person. Uh, another person that I

7. 39:20 – 48:29

   Why Scott Wu stood out among AI founders

   1. DSDavid Senra39:20

      wanna-- the first person I wanna bring up to you now is Scott Wu. And I called you, I think, I think I was driving to go meet Scott. I've-- And I've known Scott for a few years. Actually, uh, there's a picture of me, him, and one of his co-founders the week, uh, before, uh, Cognition, um, launched. And yet, I thought the way you-- Again, that wasn't really a profile, right? This is very different from all the other pieces you, you, you wrote, where you're saying that, like, this person is the o-- he's not, like, trying to craft an image, in my opinion, right? And I can share some of, like, my background for the episode that, that we did, what happened after the fact that speaks to this. But, like, I'm very curious, okay, l- let's go through, like, why you set up the profile on Scott. It's almost like you had this, this introduction which was very unusual compared to the rest of your introductions. But then from there, it's almost like a transcript of the conversation you had. Why'd you go that route?

   2. JSJeremy Stern40:15

      So the thing that I was interested in that led me to Scott was, you know, it was kind of, I think it was at the beginning of this, this last summer, the negative public response to a lot of the major AI figures was cresting at that point. It, it, it still hasn't quite receded. If anything, it's accelerated. But, you know, what I was noticing was a lot of the leading figures in this technology that's supposedly going to upend our world and our lives, uh, are people who, you know, the rest of us find very grating and irritating and annoying and unself-aware, and they're not the people we would welcome as our new overlords. So the kind of question I had was, is there a, a major AI figure or potentially a future major AI figure who, uh, is not like that, who, you know, is obviously a technology nerd, but is also, like, a humanist in a very fundamental way, who, you know, someone who you might trust with this technology? So I went asking around, you know, mainly through people that I'm sure we know in common, and the name that came up more than any other was Scott Wu. So, you know, I decided I just wanted to go and talk to him. And for all of these pieces, what I, what I usually ask for is a, is a minimum of two different ninety-minute conversations separated by, you know, some sizable interval and time 'cause I kind of wanna catch them in, like, two different environments. And often it ends up going a lot longer or, or, or we'll do a lot more. But that's what I asked for from Scott. And what I did appreciate about Scott, which I, I think you were kind of suggesting in your question, is he's not stage-managed. He's not overly manicured as a, as a figure. I think there's not layers of bureaucracy or PR or train-- media training separating you from him, which is often a challenge of interviewing people like this. I liked him as a person, and so in the intro to the piece, I kind of went all in on this idea of Scott being a person who, you know, maybe most readers haven't heard of yet. whose opinions about AI and projections about the future they might find more valuable than what we hear out of, uh, out of the major labs. And then the second thing was I just found his willingness to be introspective, which I think was hard for him, you know, uh, har-harder than it is for me, to be really interesting, in good faith, and at times profoundly moving and, and really interesting. And it was the first time I'd ever talked to someone where I kind of felt like me turning them into a character in a story actually wouldn't be as good here as the reader just hearing from them directly. A lot of it also just depends on rapport, right? Like, when you interview people, you don't develop a good, healthy rapport with all of them. Scott and I, I felt like just kind of hit it off, and we had a good back and forth, and, like, we got each other's jokes, and we liked following each other in the direction that, you know, our thoughts were taking us. And there was a couple other people in the room when we were talking to each other, and they seemed to agree, and I thought, "Maybe this is actually, like, a good opportunity for the reader to kind of feel more like they're in the room with us while we're talking, rather than just trusting me as a third-person omniscient narrator."

   3. DSDavid Senra43:32

      What did the people that you interviewed around Scott say about him?

   4. JSJeremy Stern43:36

      You know, he's an authentic mathematics genius, which is, like, a relatively obvious point, but I think, uh, what impressed me about it was even among the other people who have won gold at the International Math and Physics and, you know, and, uh, computer programming Olympiads, even among those people, he's kind of considered the GOAT. He's the GOAT competitor. He's the GOAT coach and mentor of the people who came after him, and he's kind of this godfather figure to, to a lot of those.

   5. DSDavid Senra44:03

      Which is funny 'cause he's not even 30 yet.

   6. JSJeremy Stern44:05

      He's not even 30, but he, you know, he does have this kind of... I, I, I think I, you know, said it in one of the lines of the piece, but he just does have that thing that the rest of us don't have, where it's like, you know, you just put him into a picture with, like, 12 other people who work at the company or who, who competed in those Olympiads, and you show the picture to someone who's never heard of any of them. You'll be like, "Who do you think the leader is in this group?" And they'll point immediately at Scott. It's just, like, obvious he's got something. I think that was something that came up, up over and over, like e-even in this, you know, collective of people who are math geniuses, that his genius is kind of, uh, you know, in that realm at least, is kind of on a di-different level. And also to find both that and that n-natural leadership capability, finding both of those things in one person is just exceptionally rare.

   7. DSDavid Senra44:56

      I know you tend to forget about the people once you write about them, but did you draw any parallels between the ruthless competitive drive of Zuckerberg and the ruthless competitive drive of Scott Wu?

   8. JSJeremy Stern45:07

      I don't think so, not quite. Um, you know, for, for Wu, I, you know, maybe there is a sense in which he's ruthlessly competitive in a business sense, and he wants to crush all of his company's rivals. Um-

   9. DSDavid Senra45:22

      No, I think he's competitive in everything. There's a great line where, um, Kobe was being interviewed by one of the late, late sh- night hosts, and they're like, "Who's more competitive, you or Michael Jordan?" And he's just like, "It's obviously Michael." And they're like, "What do you mean?" He goes, "I'm competitive at basketball. Michael Jordan's competitive at shit that doesn't matter, like who can eat this salad the fastest?" [chuckles]

   10. JSJeremy Stern45:39

       Right.

   11. DSDavid Senra45:40

       Like, stuff like that.

   12. JSJeremy Stern45:41

       Right.

   13. DSDavid Senra45:42

       Where Scott wants to win at everything.

   14. JSJeremy Stern45:43

       I think, so that might be, like, an important difference. I, you know, I, my, my understanding of both of them is probably imperfect, but I think Zuckerberg is probably the most competitive person in the world at the thing that he does. I don't think he's, like, trying to destroy his children in quiz bowl. Scott, you know, from what I understand, does have that Michael Jordan thing where it's like, okay, we're sitting in this room, we have five minutes until the thing that we're, we're here for starts. Does anyone have some quarters? Let's play. You know, does anyone have some dice?

   15. DSDavid Senra46:11

       Yeah.

   16. JSJeremy Stern46:11

       Like, he just wants to use every moment of every day destroying people at something. I, from what I understand, Scott is like that.

   17. DSDavid Senra46:17

       This is what's fascinating. I told him we had such a good time, um, and I was like, "You just need to come on, like, the show every, like, three months, every six months," just 'cause he is one of the people where, again, he, I think he- his, one of his gifts is he can explain very complex things in a very simple manner. Uh, he's obviously brilliant, but he also has this, like, very friendly UI where-- and, like, he can just talk and talk and talk. Um, but then underneath that is just-- He, he said on the, the, the podcast today with him over and over, he's just like, "I'm really salty. I'm really salty." He's just, like, constantly has to compete, has to win. 'Cause I, I know from firsthand, I, like, know all the people involved there. I know, like, some behind-the-scenes stuff, so, like, the- they're throwing so much money at that dude, and he's just saying no to every single acquisition offer. He's just like, "No, I, I don't think he thinks of himself as being conquerable."

   18. JSJeremy Stern46:59

       Right. That, that was another thing that got me interested in him and that I appreciated is I approached him for that piece shortly after Cursor did the deal with xAI or whatever it was called at the time.

   19. DSDavid Senra47:11

       Mm-hmm.

   20. JSJeremy Stern47:12

       And so, you know, he was kind of like the-- Scott seemed, at least at the time, to be the sort of less the Mohican fig- you know, figure within this AI world. And who knows what'll happen, but when he explained the reasons for why he has no interest in selling and why he just wants to ride this thing all the way to the end as his company, um, you know, it, it, it does seem kind of plausible. You believe him.

   21. DSDavid Senra47:35

       Do you think out of the people that you spend the most time with, he has the, the shortest gap between who he actually is and who he presents to w- himself to the world to be?

   22. JSJeremy Stern47:43

       It's always hard to answer that question because I tend not to know these people in any other context outside of interviewing them and writing a profile. I've never yet written about someone that I've been friends with before or even really since. But-

   23. DSDavid Senra47:55

       But what's your sense of it?

   24. JSJeremy Stern47:56

       Yeah, my, my, my impression is that, like, again, because he does not have all these years of media training under his belt and also he doesn't seem to be interested in developing that part of his brain, which I appreciate, he was the one who seemed to be, yeah, the kind of the same person while I was interviewing him that he was when he did a product review or went into some sort of meeting or was raising money or went home to his girlfriend or whatever. Like, I think, yeah, he's, he's the one who's kind of most plausibly the same person

8. 48:29 – 56:36

   Josh Kushner’s family history and the American dream

   1. JSJeremy Stern48:29

      across the board.

   2. DSDavid Senra48:29

      I wanna go to your piece On Josh Kushner, which before the Zuck piece was, I think, the most viewed profile so f-so far on Colossus, if I, if-

   3. JSJeremy Stern48:40

      Still is

   4. DSDavid Senra48:41

      Oh, okay. I thought-

   5. JSJeremy Stern48:42

      Which is interesting, and I never would have expected.

   6. DSDavid Senra48:43

      Okay, interesting. Okay. What was the thing that you, you, you, you said before, "I'm not interested in the person first. I'm interested in the thing," and then to, to understand and explain the thing, I look for the person that can do that. What was that in Josh's case?

   7. JSJeremy Stern48:58

      There's a kind of like specific answer here, and then there's a more kind of like 50,000-foot bird's-eye view. The specific thing is that I'd just kind of been interested in the Kushners going back several years, going back even to before his older brother, Jared, was involved in the White House after Trump won in 2016.

   8. DSDavid Senra49:14

      Wait, wait, you were interested in Jared before he went to the White House?

   9. JSJeremy Stern49:17

      I was interested in the family as a whole. At that point, I had no idea who Josh was. I, I think I didn't even know that he existed. Jared, at the time, I think, was the publisher of The New York Sun or, you know, a, a, a-

   10. DSDavid Senra49:29

       The Observer or something

   11. JSJeremy Stern49:29

       ... The Observer.

   12. DSDavid Senra49:30

       Yeah.

   13. JSJeremy Stern49:30

       Local New York paper, but what I knew at the time was their father and grandfather had built this New Jersey real estate principality that the children were getting involved in, and the, the, you know, the father had all of these problems with the law, and it was, uh, the grandparents had, had their lives shattered in the Holocaust and came to the United States with literally nothing, and what was kind of interesting to me about the family was, you know, in one generation, maybe, you know, in n-now at this point in two generations, but in a very, very short period of time, you know, these people had their lives completely shattered and, you know, when their, their grandmother who, you know, had her, basically her whole family executed in the Holocaust, uh, you know, tries for years to get to the United States, finally makes it here, and within her lifetime, uh, you know, Bill Clinton and Benjamin Netanyahu are coming to her home to have dinner with her family to basically kiss the ring and ask for the favor of her son, right? And there was this element in which this family had, uh, you know... Uh, they, they had elements of the Kennedy family story, but it was also representative of this typical Holocaust story, and I think, you know, e-even among harrowing Holocaust survival stories, um, the story of the, the Kushner grandparents is, is kind of particularly harrowing.

   14. DSDavid Senra50:57

       There's a movie based on it, right? It was Luc-

   15. JSJeremy Stern51:00

       Deliverance is, is a movie-

   16. DSDavid Senra51:02

       Or Defiance.

   17. JSJeremy Stern51:02

       Defiance. That's what it was.

   18. DSDavid Senra51:03

       With, um-

   19. JSJeremy Stern51:04

       Not Deliverance. That's the one with-

   20. DSDavid Senra51:05

       With the guy that, I should know his name. He played Bond. What is his name?

   21. JSJeremy Stern51:08

       Daniel Craig.

   22. DSDavid Senra51:08

       Thank you.

   23. JSJeremy Stern51:09

       That's right.

   24. DSDavid Senra51:09

       Yeah, they're like, essentially hiding in a forest.

   25. JSJeremy Stern51:11

       That's right. So they're in the, in the forest of, you know, I think it's Belarus, what's now modern-day Belarus, and the story of Inglourious Basterds, I think, is also partially inspired by this, you know, collective of esc- of, you know, concentration camp escapees run by this man named Tuvia Bielski, who basically, you know, they live in the forest, and they train each other with small arms, and they conduct a lot of these kidnappings and reprisal killings of N-Nazi soldiers in, in Eastern Europe. And yeah, the Kushner grandmother was part of the Bielski Part-Partisans, which is amazing, right? So that was kind of... I'd already had this long-standing interest in the family, um, going back to even before I think they became nationally famous in the Trump era. I think this permeates a lot of the stuff I've written in the last couple years, but I'm also the Jewish grandson of Holocaust survivors, and the idea of American national identity, it's the thing that allows all of us to be as Irish or as Sikh or as Korean as we want to be, right? You don't have to make any sacrifices to that part of your kind of like subnational identity, so long as you still scr- you know, subscribe to this idea of an American supra tribe that transcends all of the others, which is basically a belief in the Constitution and individual liberty and freedom, um, and, and, you know, the values that all Americans kind of share in common. And so this thing is not like a kind of fairy tale Disneyland, you know, story to me and my family. I think it's been very important for my whole life, and I think it's been fraying at the edges, um, now for most of my adult life, and it's kind of coming unglued, and that has worried me a lot. And so part of what I've tried to do in a lot of these pieces I've written in the last couple years is try to kind of check in with the current state of the American dream and try to figure out how live and true is it still, regardless of its various shortcomings and flaws, which we're all very familiar with. But like, is it still a live animating issue in, in America? Um, or as, you know, as its various critics on the right and left like to say, like it was al-always just a failure and a lie. And again, I think mining for evidence that it is still true and alive in business and technology at this particular moment in time is very fruitful, and I thought, you know, given my own, you know, prior interest in the Kushner family already, and then given all of, uh, Josh's success now in the last decade plus, you know, as a kind of new generation VC and, you know, one of the most important investors in a lot of the most important companies that-

   26. DSDavid Senra53:58

       Don't, don't tell him you called him a VC. He'll take offense to that. [laughs]

   27. JSJeremy Stern54:00

       Yeah, well, yeah. A lot of these VCs, uh, I think-

   28. DSDavid Senra54:03

       No, but I-- Listen, I-

   29. JSJeremy Stern54:04

       You know, overcomplicate what they actually do

   30. DSDavid Senra54:05

       ... may we share this? In fact, hold on. I gotta pull up one of my favorite quotes. I, I think you were being interviewed by Lulu, if I remember correctly. But, um, you were talking about, uh, 'cause I thought it was interesting, like why the hell are your first piece-- I think the first piece you wrote for Colossus is on Neil Mehta, right? Who's a friend. I just actually spent a few days with him like, like last week. But, uh, you, you said something that was hilarious. You're like, "I had never really encountered technology investors much. I had always found the personality [chuckles] types kind of annoying. As a class of people, they feel like they're full of shit. So I was asking around who's the guy who's not full of shit," and that led you to, to, to Neil. But I would say like Josh has way wider and grander ambitions, and I've talked to him about this, than like, I don't consider him a VC. You can consider him an investor, but like he really, he, he's a builder and a founder and everything else, so he just is not-- And this is what I like so much about him, is he kind of, um, what I think you, you picked apart in your, uh, you demonstrate in your piece rather, and I think this is, was fascinating is to, to when it starts with the Rick Rubin, him going to visit Rick Rubin, essentially asking him, you know, giving him a download of his thoughts and like, "How, am I crazy in the, the way I'm thinking about this?" Is Josh kind of doesn't really care. He's not search-- Just like you're not searching for the people you profile to influence your work. You're like, "I'm looking out over here." I feel Josh is the same way. He's like not looking around to other in-investors. He's looking around to other founders.
9. 56:36 – 1:01:44

   Asking Rick Rubin: What if I lose the magic?

   1. JSJeremy Stern56:36

      Yeah, I, I thought the interest, I mean, I think the, the reason that I wanted to start the piece with that anecdote about him kind of, you know, asking for advice from Rick Rubin, you know, at that point in our interviews, like I hadn't really figured out yet like what the piece was gonna be about. By that point, I really didn't have any intention of going through the entire family history first, which I ended up doing. But he was telling me about this time that he went to go see Rubin and the, you know, kind of crisis that he felt like, the personal crisis that Josh felt like he was having and why he sought out Rick Rubin in particular, and I was trying to get him to kind of recreate that morning and the scene and where they were and what was actually bothering him and what was the question that he was hoping Rubin would answer for him. And again, I can't remember exactly what it was, but it w- it was something like the idea of Kushner felt like he had captured magic in a bottle in some way with Thrive. He's also built companies himself, but that he was kind of on, on a really good run, and he went to Rubin to basically ask like, "What do I do if I lose the magic," right? Like, I, I, "I'm afraid that I'm gonna, it's gonna escape me one day, and I'm gonna be without it, and things are gonna fall apart." And I thought that was really interesting, and I sympathized with it, and I kind of recognized it immediately. I know the same thought occurs to all kinds of people, but at least in my mind, it was a very specifically Holocaust family-type question, where the fear of everything you've built can be taken away from you overnight and living in constant fear, even in America, that, you know, you'll be stripped of everything that you value and that you love, and you'll have to go figure it out again somewhere else. I felt like that was a kind of particularly deep and vulnerable moment that he shared with me, and then that ended up kind of determining the rest of the piece. So one thing I really appreciate about Josh, more to your question, is that I think he does recognize, even if only in some ultimate sense, that, you know, things do eventually fall apart, and you have to like, make the most of it while you can, and you also have to tr- you know, do everything you can do to make yourself invulnerable while you can. Whereas I think a lot of other people in the space, uh, you know, can often give the impression of like they're on a roller coaster and they're just having as much fun as they can while they can.

   2. DSDavid Senra59:07

      You just did live what you do in your pieces. Listen to the Founders episode I just did on Mark Zuckerberg on your piece. I d- didn't know, um, it just came out today when we're recording this, so you haven't heard it yet. But I say in that ep- i-in the episode, you'll start, so we started with the Holocaust. Then we went on this tangent. We started talking about it, and then you brought it right back around to Holocaust where you forget where it started. You do this in writing that's really, really good, and you did it when you started with sitting with his parents, Zuckerberg, and then you go on a tangent, and you go bring it back, and you close the, the loop on his parents. When he starts fighting, you forget that the scene that you laid out was, we were fighting, and then you go into all these other details, and you're fascinated, and then you-- I was like, oh, shit, then Jeremy brought us back to the fact that, no, we're in here. Why is this guy choosing to wake up every day and beat the shit out of people for two hours? Like, it's a very fascinating thing the w- the way you do that. I wanna go back to the, the R- the Rick Rubin thing 'cause he came on this show, and what was also interesting is tied to what you and I were just talking about is like, how do people think about what they're doing? And you know, it was, oh, Rick Rubin's a producer. He's, he's a, uh, like he's, he's in the music business. He founded a record label. And he's like, "I just f-think of myself as a professional researcher. Like every day, I just get up and research intently about what I'm most interested in at that point, and sometimes it's music, sometimes it's podcasts, sometimes it's different people I'm talking to." He's like, "I'm just researching all day long."

   3. JSJeremy Stern1:00:21

      That's really interesting. I, like, I sometimes think, you know, especially the way a lot of VCs discuss it, is like o-one thing they look for in a founder is, you know, that the, the kernel of their inspiration to build their company is traceable back to some early thing in their life or, you know, they like it when the idea for the company came as early in their life as possible. And I understand that 'cause it suggests quite a lot of discipline and commitment to a single idea and pursuing it ru-ru-ruthlessly. But there's like a flip side to that which I also think is really interesting in a lot of these people that you interview and that I've in-interviewed, is I often like it when You know, a lot of these things end up just being a lot more contingent and you, I think you end up with a lot more people who are not exact- you know, they're not motivated primarily by money per se, and the idea of building a company or becoming an investor only actually occurred to them much later after they were just, like, pursuing their actual interests and meeting and spending time with the people that they really liked and cared about for, you know, their entire adolescence and even part of their adult life. And ending up at building a company or becoming an investor was kind of like the, the logical endpoint of all these other things. But, you know, I guess it's all to say, like, I, I think there's actually value in a lot of people who come to this world a little bit later than, you know, maybe some of the Zuckerbergs of the world who, you know, had this one idea when he was very, very young and has been doing-- will never do anything else.

10. 1:01:44 – 1:08:10

    The mentor who taught Jeremy to use his gifts

    1. DSDavid Senra1:01:44

       Something just popped to my mind that I'm very cur- personally curious about. So the same way that Josh Kushner goes to Rick Rubin for, like, advice or counsel, whatever you wanna call that, do you have anybody in your life that plays that role for you?

    2. JSJeremy Stern1:01:57

       When I was growing up and I was a little kid, it was my older brother, uh, Josh. When I was in college, it was my Russian professor, wh- whose name was Natalia Olshanskaya. I now have a one-year-old daughter who's named after her. She was the biggest person in my life, and, uh, she was this kind of very classically Soviet grandmotherly woman who, um, was very good at pointing out all of the ways that, uh, in which I was an idiot, and I was, uh, making bad decisions and destroying my life and not thinking about the future and-

    3. DSDavid Senra1:02:31

       Wait, wait, how old were you when you met her?

    4. JSJeremy Stern1:02:33

       Eighteen years old.

    5. DSDavid Senra1:02:34

       And she had such a profound impact on your life that you named your daughter after her.

    6. JSJeremy Stern1:02:38

       Yes. Yeah. I, I mean, the, the basic story there is I, I did so badly in high school Spanish that I could not place out of the freshman year language requirement that my college had. So I knew I was gonna-- they were gonna make me take a language for a year, so I just decided to pick the kind of weirdest sounding thing that I could suffer th- through for, for two semesters. So I picked Russian. It ended up completely changing my life. I fell in love with it. It was my major. I decided to spend a year and a half of my four-year college experience living and studying in Russia, and she, I spoke to, I think every Sunday for the entire year and a half that, that I was there. And then she unfortunately died a few years later. But, you know, I think for that whole kind of part of my early adult life, she was definitely, you know, she was my Rick Rubin figure.

    7. DSDavid Senra1:03:26

       What did you learn from her?

    8. JSJeremy Stern1:03:28

       She thought people have a gift. This is something I write about in the Scott Wu piece, that if people have a gift, then they have an obligation to that gift. And if they do not do everything in their power to, uh, share and exploit that gift, then they're actually s- sinning [chuckles] against themselves and against God, uh, in an important way. And I think I was very fortunate that she saw something in me, and she thought that by behaving and acting, uh, the way I did that part of my life, which involved too much drinking and too much drugs and not enough, uh, you know, focusing on my work and my future, that I was not just being an idiot, but I was actually sinning against my own future. And-

    9. DSDavid Senra1:04:17

       That's a fucking incredible thing to tell a young eighteen, nineteen, twenty-year-old kid with a lot of potential, though.

    10. JSJeremy Stern1:04:24

        It completely changed my life and it, it, it, it changed how I think about other people. I mean, I've never thought about this before, but now that we're talking about it, I think it's probably why I'm interested in a lot of these people that we've been talking about during this conversation. And it's also just, it's now the lens that I can bring to the people I meet, that I become friends with, that I work with at Colossus. I would say up until that point in my life, it was the single biggest thing that anyone did for me.

    11. DSDavid Senra1:04:55

        Did you keep in touch with her after college?

    12. JSJeremy Stern1:04:58

        I worked for a year after college, and then I joined the Army, um, which was, she, she, she was very, very upset about.

    13. DSDavid Senra1:05:03

        Why?

    14. JSJeremy Stern1:05:04

        She had this, you know, her own harrowing story about escaping the Soviet Union, which took decades for her to be able to do. She left just with her, like, infant daughter, made it to America. I think in her mind is, you know, if you are born into circumstances of safety and comfort, then it's in, you know, it's idiotic to choose something as kind of physically risky and dangerous as joining the military. It's like throwing away the most precious thing that you could have in life. Which, you know, I think for her made a lot of sense, and for me it, it didn't make sense at the time, and I was kind of searching for something else. I joined at an interesting time. It was dur- during the late Obama administration, during sequestration, which was kind of gutted the Defense Department budget. One of the consequences of that was when I signed my contract to go to basic training, you know, the way it ordinarily works is like a couple days or a couple weeks later, y- they ship you off to basic training. But when I did it, there were so few slots available because so much of the funding had, had dried up, that I had an eight-month period between when I signed the contract and when I actually went to, to, to boot camp. And for those eight months, she and I talked all the time. And, uh, I still... You know, she, she died of, uh, of Lou Gehrig's disease, um, in twenty fifteen. So I, I kept all of the voicemails that she left me from that period of time on my phone, and I still have them and I've uploaded them to, like, various cloud accounts to make sure, like, you know, if one of these companies implodes, then I don't end up, uh, losing any of those, those recordings. Yeah, we kept in touch, and I, I wrote her... Uh, you know, in basic training, they take your phone away, and you can only communicate with the outside world still by writing letters by hand. And so the two people I wrote to were my girlfriend at the time, who's now my wife, uh, and, and, and Natasha, who was the person I kept in c- in, in contact with while I was there.

    15. DSDavid Senra1:07:08

        I love this idea of her, like, holding somebody accountable, that, like, you have gifts that are bigger than yourself, and that utilizing them and expressing those gifts is, refusing to do is sin, but it's really like a, a service to society and other humans in the world. But, uh, that-- thanks for sharing that story. That was, like, freaking incredible. One of the most incredible things. I didn't even know that about you.

    16. JSJeremy Stern1:07:30

        I think about it all the time, but, uh, it's, it's been a very, very long time since I've talked about it out loud, so a lot of it was new for me too.

    17. DSDavid Senra1:07:38

        Really appreciate you taking the time to do this. You're a real soulful dude. Huge fan of your work. I hope every single person listening goes and checks out every single one of your profiles.

    18. JSJeremy Stern1:07:45

        Thanks, David.

    19. DSDavid Senra1:07:46

        Thanks. I hope you enjoyed this episode. Please remember to subscribe wherever you're listening and leave a review, and make sure you listen to my other podcast, Founders. For almost a decade, I've obsessively read over four hundred 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. [upbeat music]

Episode duration: 1:08:10