How Mark Zuckerberg, Palmer Luckey, Josh Kushner & Scott Wu Think | Jeremy Stern
Jeremy Stern’s profiles begin with a question, use a person as the vehicle, and discover their real subject only through immersion. The Zuckerberg piece took five or six months and nearly 40 interviews; Stern’s focus was not a management playbook but to tilt readers’ understanding of Zuckerberg’s life and psychology by “10%.” Once family, friends, colleagues, and books about the subject enter the frame, “a whole galaxy opens up.”
Zuckerberg’s durable advantage is controlled, methodical compounding rather than theatrical invention. Family, colleagues, critics, rivals, and enemies described someone far more ruthless than outsiders realize yet personally decent—an anonymous former employee called him “the freaking Terminator.” His own framing is deliberately boring: assemble teams, improve products over decades, avoid constantly raising capital, and avoid asking permission.
Meta’s implied AI thesis rests on distribution, infrastructure, and attention already accumulated across 20 years. Any model can potentially reach roughly half the planet through WhatsApp, Instagram, Facebook, Messenger, and Meta AI, while pure labs still rent much of the infrastructure and compute Meta owns. Skeptics may believe Meta is behind, but when asked whether they would bet against Zuckerberg solving it, their answer became: “No, no, I’m not going to bet against him.”
Zuckerberg’s fascination with Augustus offers a revealing model of founder-controlled empire. He retained Virgil from adolescent Latin classes, once ended meetings with “Carthage must be destroyed” or “Domination!”, and named his personal AI agent Agrippa. Stern notes the selectivity of Zuckerberg’s interpretation: Augustus replaced plunder with trade and civil war with peace—but also built a standing army and eliminated Roman political freedom.
Palmer Luckey became Stern’s vehicle for testing whether defense technology was substantive or hype. Israel’s sophisticated systems failed to prevent an attack using paragliders, bulldozers, and small arms, while Ukraine combined drone swarms with trench warfare 150 years old. Luckey’s sharper character signal was backing Trump when it led to his firing from Facebook, which had bought his company, and cost him the company he had built—not after Silicon Valley support became fashionable.
Scott Wu combines elite technical ability, natural leadership, and a conspicuous absence of media varnish. Even among mathematics, physics, and programming Olympiad winners, sources described him as the exceptional competitor, coach, and mentor—the obvious leader in any group photograph. His competitiveness extends to things that “don’t matter,” yet his accessible manner and apparent refusal to sell make his independence credible.
Josh Kushner’s story links entrepreneurial ambition to inherited fear that everything can disappear overnight. His question to Rick Rubin was what to do if the “magic” behind Thrive vanished; Stern read that vulnerability through a family history running from Holocaust survival and the Bielski partisans to extraordinary American power within two generations. The response is not complacency but an effort to “make yourself invulnerable while you can.”
Stern’s own distinctive contribution is applying literary ambition to the people currently shaping American life. He does not frame his work as a mine for reusable tactics, preferring to reveal singular lives, their self-protective myths, and their historical setting. His deepest transferable belief came from his Russian teacher Natalia Leshchanskaya: possessing a gift creates an obligation, and failing to use it is “sinning against yourself and against God.”
1. The question comes before the profile subject
Stern had written about politics and foreign affairs, not technology or business, before profiling Palmer Luckey. His method begins with an unresolved question, then finds the person best suited to open it up: the individual is initially “an excuse to explore that topic,” though prolonged exposure usually changes the article’s destination.
Zuckerberg’s team approached Stern despite his Luckey profile casting Zuckerberg as its “great villain.” After an unofficial lunch, Stern remained pessimistic: Zuckerberg had lived under a microscope for roughly 25 years. The opening appeared when Stern recognized him as the last operating founder of his generation and perhaps the only millennial founder at anything like Meta’s scale.
Stern estimated that the next-most-valuable millennial-founded company might be Stripe at $100 billion to $150 billion—roughly one-tenth Meta’s scale, though he explicitly had not checked. Over five or six months, he interviewed Zuckerberg and almost 40 others, moving from an abstract interest in censorship, social media, and regulation into the particulars of one life.
His governing metaphor came from the Talmudic idea that killing one person destroys a world. Family, friends, colleagues, books, “psychology, successes and failures” reveal multiple worlds inside a single subject; only then does the real article emerge. Senra wanted Zuckerberg’s operating knowledge, while Stern wanted to tilt the reader’s psychological gyroscope by 10%.
2. Augustus is Zuckerberg’s chosen mirror
Zuckerberg’s Roman interest predates Facebook. Stern traced it to ages 15, 16, and 17, when Zuckerberg was building computer games and memorizing Virgil’s Aeneid in Latin class; at 42, he could still recite passages. What Zuckerberg initially dismissed as compulsory schoolwork became visibly more animating as the conversation continued.
Early Facebook meetings reportedly ended with “Carthage must be destroyed,” and sometimes Zuckerberg shouting “Domination!” Sean Parker warned him to stop because the language could someday appear in an antitrust case. More recently, Zuckerberg called his personal AI agent Agrippa, after one of Augustus’s two chief lieutenants, whose death Augustus mourned for the rest of his life.
Zuckerberg emphasizes Augustus transforming an economy based on plunder into one based on trade, showing Romans they could live and work without endless civil wars. Stern’s corrective is the revealing omission: Augustus achieved stability through a standing army and the destruction of political freedom, replacing the republic with dependence on one man’s power.
3. The “boring” operating system may be Meta’s AI edge
Across Zuckerberg’s family, colleagues, critics, rivals, and enemies, two judgments repeated: outsiders underestimate his business ruthlessness, and he is not personally a jerk. A former AI researcher who worked for Zuckerberg and is now at a competing lab supplied the sharpest formulation: “Mark is the freaking Terminator.” He remains dissatisfied and simply keeps moving forward.
Zuckerberg described his advantage over figures such as Sam Altman and Elon Musk as almost intentionally dull: “I’m very good at putting a team together, taking something and improving it a lot over a long period of time.” Meta’s economics mean he need not continually raise capital or seek other people’s permission.
Stern began skeptical of Meta’s products and ambivalent about social media’s effects, but came to see Zuckerberg as a classic American business tycoon. Zuckerberg treats Meta primarily as a business and does not imply it will be “the last thing that will be built in the history of humanity”—a grandiosity Stern finds harder to escape among leading AI figures.
Senra preserved the counter-case to claims that Meta is irretrievably behind: critics have declared Zuckerberg finished for decades, yet refuse to wager against him. Stern’s inferred bullish thesis is distribution to roughly half humanity, coupled with infrastructure already built and attention already dominated through Meta’s applications; much AI value might accrue in applications and add-ons Meta already controls.
4. Zuckerberg appears structurally unbuyable
Zuckerberg repeatedly told Stern, “I’m addicted to building.” He did not initially think he was creating a company; the company was an outgrowth of his compulsion to make things. “I will never stop. I will not resign”—exactly the class of founder Senra values because money cannot redirect how they intend to spend their lives.
Stern sees Zuckerberg and Elon Musk as rare founders who may “die as CEOs,” rather than retire into yachts, unrelated exploration, or full-time philanthropy. Zuckerberg is effectively the last active founder of his generation besides Musk; Larry Page and Sergey Brin, Jeff Bezos, and Bill Gates stepped back, while Steve Jobs died.
The canonical proof came in 2006, when Yahoo offered $1 billion for Facebook. Zuckerberg was 21 or 22 and owned roughly 70%; Stern recalled that management and the small board urged acceptance, yet Zuckerberg immediately refused. The management team subsequently left—evidence that this was conviction under pressure, not a cultivated founder persona.
5. Palmer Luckey turned a technology question into a character study
Stern’s initial question after October 7 was blunt: “Is this whole defense technology thing basically nonsense?” Israel possessed drones, satellites, underground sensors, and smart fences, yet Hamas attacked with paragliders, bulldozers, and small arms. Ukraine presented the same contradiction—drone swarms alongside hundreds of thousands or millions of 18-year-olds fighting in trenches with methods at least 150 years old.
Luckey was then well known inside technology but not yet ubiquitous outside it. Stern intended a short, 3,000-word interview about whether defense technology worked; after spending months with Luckey and people around him, it became a roughly 15,000-word, cradle-to-grave profile, published around August 2024.
The decisive political fact was timing. Silicon Valley figures rallied behind Trump after the 2024 assassination attempt, but Luckey supported him when doing so led to his firing from Facebook, which had bought his company, and cost him the company he had built. Stern found the particulars of Luckey’s politics less interesting than his willingness to stand behind them “when it cost him everything.”
6. Stern is building literature, not a founder instruction manual
Senra treats Founders as a mining operation: biographies yield ideas listeners can apply to business and life. Stern resisted that model. His value proposition is making seemingly unreal figures intelligible as individuals, then locating their power, fame, and self-conceptions within the larger cultural and historical forces that made them possible.
When a profile leaves for proofreading, Stern feels “a hole in my brain” and deliberately exits the subject’s mind before the immersion becomes maddening. Senra pressed him repeatedly on why this apparently produces so little conscious personal change; Stern’s honest concession was that he may not be introspective enough to know.
What Stern can identify is the craft: writing is the one thing he is both good at and made happy by. He invoked David Foster Wallace’s image of writers as observers, voyeurs, and peeping Toms who covet being witnesses but fear the tables turning—the exact discomfort of becoming Senra’s interview subject.
Stern sees business and technology figures occupying the cultural position held by physicists and national-security officials in the 1940s, then musicians, filmmakers, and writers in the 1960s and 1970s. His opportunity is to bring the literary ambition of fiction and poetry, along with cinematic ambition and America’s long-form profile tradition, into a field whose prose is rarely designed to matter 5, 10, or 20 years later.
7. Scott Wu’s credibility comes from low distance between person and persona
Stern went looking for an AI leader who was not irritating, self-important, or eager to become society’s new master—someone technically formidable but “a humanist in a fundamental way.” Mutual contacts named Scott Wu most often. Stern’s standard request was two 90-minute conversations, separated in time to catch a subject in different environments.
Wu lacked the layers of public relations and media training that often obstruct Stern’s interviews. Their immediate rapport, Wu’s sincere if difficult introspection, and the natural movement of their conversation convinced Stern that an edited exchange would outperform an omniscient third-person portrait: readers should feel present in the room.
Sources described Wu as exceptional even among International Olympiad medalists: the best competitor, coach, and mentor, already a father figure while not yet 30. His leadership is visually obvious—show a stranger a photograph of Wu among 12 comparably brilliant colleagues, Stern argued, and they will identify him as the leader.
Senra distinguished Zuckerberg’s concentrated competitive ferocity from Wu’s Michael Jordan-style need to win at everything, including trivial games filling five spare minutes. Yet Wu also has a “user-friendly interface.” Senra says lucrative acquisition approaches have been refused; Stern found Wu’s stated desire to see his own company through as an independent company plausible.
8. Josh Kushner’s ambition is inseparable from family fragility
Stern’s interest began with the Kushner family, not venture capital. Josh’s grandparents survived the Holocaust; his grandmother was part of Tuvia Bielski’s partisans in the forests of what is now Belarus. Within her lifetime, Bill Clinton and Benjamin Netanyahu came to the family home—an almost incomprehensible journey from total destruction to access and influence.
As the Jewish grandson of Holocaust survivors himself, Stern used the profile to test the American Dream. His ideal is an American “supratribe” grounded in constitutional liberty, within which people remain fully Irish, Sikh, Korean, or Jewish. He believes that compact is fraying and rejects both the fairy-tale version and the claim that it was always a lie.
Senra objected to describing Josh as merely a venture capitalist: Kushner looks toward founders rather than other investors and sees himself as a builder with broader ambitions. Stern agreed with the broader critique that an era of oversaturation has encouraged venture capitalists to overestimate how interesting they are to everyone else.
The profile found its center when Josh described visiting Rick Rubin during a personal crisis. Having captured “magic in a bottle” with Thrive, he feared it might disappear and everything would collapse. Stern connected that vulnerability to the family’s Holocaust history: make the most of success now, while doing everything possible to become invulnerable before circumstances take it away.
9. A teacher gave Stern his deepest theory of talent
Senra’s questioning finally surfaced Stern’s own Rick Rubin figures: first his older brother Josh, then his college Russian teacher, Natalia Leshchanskaya. Stern chose Russian only because poor high-school Spanish left him with a language requirement; it became his specialty, took him to Russia for a year and a half, and changed his life completely.
Natalia believed a gift creates an obligation. If someone fails to develop and share it, that person is “sinning against themselves and against God.” She told an 18-, 19-, or 20-year-old Stern that excessive drinking, drugs, and neglect of his future were not merely foolish—they were betrayals of potential. He now recognizes that lens in his attraction to driven founders.
Natalia opposed his joining the army after spending decades escaping the Soviet Union with her young daughter: choosing physical danger from a safe life looked like throwing away life’s most valuable asset. She died of Lou Gehrig’s disease in 2015; Stern preserved her voicemails across multiple cloud accounts and named his one-year-old daughter after her.
Full transcript
Great, you're here because I'm a big fan of yours. I think you're the best in the world at what you're doing right now, which is writing these amazing, in-depth profiles about many of the world's best investors and entrepreneurs. I just finished reading the one you did about Mark Zuckerberg. I thought it was very good. In fact, I did an episode about it for my other podcast, Founders.
So I want to get straight to the point: If you could go behind the scenes, how long did it take you to write that article? How much time did you spend with him and his entire environment?
His team originally contacted me, I think, toward the end of last year, which surprised me quite a bit because a couple of years ago I wrote this profile of Palmer Lucky, who founded Anduril and Oculus. In that profile, the great villain of the story is Mark Zuckerberg. Zuckerberg had commented on the article, which I think ultimately led to a sort of reconciliation between Palmer and Zuckerberg because, after 2016, Zuckerberg had fired or failed to prevent the firing of Palmer Luckey after he made a small contribution to a pro-Trump group. So they had a huge breakup, and that breakup had become legendary at the time in Silicon Valley. It was a big part of the article I wrote.
That's why I was a little surprised to learn from his team that he would be interested in talking to me. At the beginning of this year, we were both a little skeptical about the idea and decided to just have lunch for a couple of hours unofficially, to get to know each other, say hello, and say everything that was on our minds. Initially, I left there feeling a bit pessimistic about the article, simply because he's one of the most overexposed people on the planet. He's been under the microscope for 25 years, but I finally found a number of things that really made it interesting, which are some of the things we've talked about before.
In many ways, he's the last one standing of his generation of founders. Larry and Sergey finally retired, Bezos retired, obviously Bill Gates retired, Jobs died; Zuckerberg, in many ways, is the last one left. He is also, in a strange way, representative of millennials as founders, because there are literally no others at his level, on his scale. I haven't looked this up, so maybe I'm a little off, but I think the second most valuable company founded by a millennial would be Stripe, which I think is worth 100 or 150 billion dollars, something like that. That's about a tenth of Zuckerberg's company.
So I thought maybe there was some uncharted territory there with him. As happens with many of these articles, the things that interest you at first end up appearing in the text, but once you talk to someone, a whole galaxy opens up in many different directions. Over the course of about 5 or 6 months, I spoke with him and with almost 40 other people for the article.
Wait, explain that to me. When you start talking to someone, you realize that a whole galaxy opens up. What does that mean?
Normally, with these articles, I start with something that interests me before finding the right person to use as an excuse to explore that topic. With Zuckerberg, there was still a lot of raw emotion and open wounds from the period of 2016 to 2020, when there was a huge amount of government and other pressure to censor social media. Since then, there has been this huge national debate about whether social media is a good thing in the first place, whether it is extremely harmful and comparable to alcohol and cigarettes, and whether it should be regulated as such. There were several different topics that interested me in general before I became interested in Zuckerberg himself.
With many of these people I write about, there's this ancient idea in the Talmud. There's a rabbi who basically says that when you kill a person, you destroy a world. I think it points to the idea that each individual life contains many different worlds within it. Once you spend a lot of time with someone, talking to their family, friends, and colleagues, thinking about them, and reading every book that has been written about them, this whole universe of relationships, work, psychology, successes, and failures simply opens up. It's usually not until that moment that you discover what the article will actually be about.
You said you thought he was overexposed. I would say the opposite. Considering how powerful he is and what you just said, I think he's a unique character. I spent a few days with him, and this is the conversation I had with him:
“I've read all the books about Facebook. They're terrible. I've seen all your interviews. What I was trying to do was this: You have all these things in your head. You have a unique level of experience. There's nobody your age who's remotely close to achieving what you've achieved. And yet, I still don't understand how you think about product creation or how you think about talent acquisition. Essentially, I'm just interested in how you've built this phenomenal company. Nothing else. Nothing about your personal life. Nothing about all the lawsuits or the other controversies. Just this. I feel like that hasn't been done yet. There's so much information inside his head that he hasn't revealed yet.”
Did you go into this thinking he was overexposed? Did you change your mind when you started spending time with him?
There's a partial difference between how you and I do something similar in terms of our work: you on the podcast side, me on the prose side. But I think the angle of focus we each use is a little different. What you just described, I totally agree, is really underexplored. I don't think anyone has addressed it, and anyone primarily interested in that was probably a little disappointed by the article I wrote about him.
Normally, what interests me is who this person is, what it's like to be them, and what it's like for the people in their lives to be around them. If I can tilt the gyroscope that people have about this person's life and psychology by 10%, I feel like I've accomplished something, especially if the person is culturally central and relevant in an important way, which Zuckerberg obviously is.
The article begins with an interview I did with his parents. It ends with the time I spent with his family and his wife, and I think those two extremes explain the perspective I gave it better than trying to get into the technical details of the business he built. I agree that those details are somewhere in his head, but he's not the best spokesperson to explain them.
1. Why Zuckerberg identifies with Augustus
Why did you choose the approach of essentially comparing him to an emperor or a Caesar?
He has a long-standing interest in the Romans and in Augustus. In particular, Augustus was the first emperor of Rome and transformed it from a republic into an empire. I think many of these figures—I remember Elon comparing himself to Napoleon at one point—think about these historical parallels, but they tend to be quite superficial.
When I researched Zuckerberg, it turned out this was a very, very old interest of his, going back to when he was 15, 16, or 17 years old. He was creating computer games. One thing I realized when talking to him is that the Latin classes he took in high school, where they had to read and memorize verses from Virgil's Aeneid, are still with him now at 42, and he can recite them. Augustus is a big figure in that.
One of my favorite parts of the article was something I don't think I remembered. At least, I don't remember it from any of the books I read because it was quite a while ago. But when Facebook and Google were just starting out, the meetings would end with him saying something like, “Carthage must be destroyed,” which is also in your article.
Yes. There's another curious thing: He used to end the meetings shouting, “Domination!” Sean Parker, Facebook's first president, told him he had to stop because he could one day be cited in an antitrust lawsuit. When you ask him about it, I think he says, “Well, that's a bit of an exaggeration.”
“I only took Latin because I was so bad at French.” When you take Latin, of course, you're forced to read these things. But the more time we spent talking about it, the more animated you could see him get about it.
Just recently, in his main presentation, he brought out his personal AI agent and referred to it as Agrippa. Agrippa was one of Augustus's two chief lieutenants, whose death Augustus mourned until the end of his life. So obviously, this is something really important to him.
Augustus is also a very interesting choice because he's, in some ways, the most level-headed of the Roman emperors. He doesn't fall into many of the excesses of his successors.
What do you mean by excesses?
A lot of the later emperors illustrate the usual problem with succession plans throughout history. When you have a good king, and then the sons and grandsons come along, followed by the sons' friends or advisers, you get these egomaniacs who don't have the right political mindset to build an empire. They end up wasting much of the trust they've built with their constituents. They don't really have that founder's gene that enables them to build a state, a standing army, and a trade-based economy—all of that. Augustus did have it.
Zuckerberg's interpretation of what Augustus did is really interesting. When he talks about it, he says, “One of the things Augustus did was take an economy based on plunder and turn it into a trade-based economy.” He was able to show the Roman citizens that they didn't have to wage endless civil wars decade after decade.
They could live, trade, and work in peace, which is a rather selective interpretation of what Augustus did. One of the ways he was able to accomplish that was by creating a standing army, which Rome didn’t previously have, and by completely eliminating political freedom in Rome. He turned the republic into a system that was entirely dependent on the power of 1 man.
The way his own interpretation and his memory combined to give him a rather idiosyncratic understanding of who Augustus was and what his contribution was to the story, I found to be a pretty interesting and revealing insight into perhaps how Zuckerberg sees himself.
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2. The competitive drive people still underestimate
When you talk to him or the people around him, do they talk about this ruthless competitive drive of his? If you were to ask many of these people, “What are the 2 things that people still don’t understand about him, even though he’s been a public figure in our lives for almost a quarter of a century?”
The 2 things they always say are: “Maybe you think you understand how competitive and ruthless he can be in a business sense, but you’re probably underestimating him.” The second thing is that he’s actually not a jerk. He doesn’t treat people badly, and he’s actually a pretty nice guy.
I didn’t include those quotes in the article because a lot of his family members and colleagues said things like that. Even his critics, rivals, and enemies, whom I also interviewed, said many of the same things. His competitive drive really can’t be underestimated, and it’s also interesting that most people who are that competitive have that gene where they’re also pretty monstrous to those around them.
One of my favorite quotes in the article is from a former AI researcher who used to work for Zuckerberg and is now at a competing lab. He remains anonymous in the text, but he said exactly that. He said, “He’s Mark... Mark is the freaking Terminator.” He just doesn’t stop.
One of his strengths is that he’s always dissatisfied. He’s dissatisfied, but I think what he’s saying is that he’s not an idiot. He just keeps moving forward.
There’s something else that I found interesting about Mark. It was a direct quote from Mark, if I remember correctly, and he was talking about his advantage in relation to people like Sam Altman and Elon Musk. He simply says, “The things I do are kind of boring.”
“I’m very good at putting a team together, taking something, and improving it a lot over a long period of time. And then, because of the structure of the business I have, I don’t have to be raising more and more money, and I don’t really have to ask other people for permission to do what I’m doing.”
That was something I found very interesting about him and that I think I came to appreciate during the course of writing the article. I started out skeptical about many of the products Meta has created and feeling quite ambivalent about the impact social media has had on society, and many things like that.
One of the things I came to appreciate about him is that I see him a bit like a classic American business tycoon, as opposed to the more recent generation of AI founders. In that quote, I think he says something like: “My advantage in the world is sitting down with a team and methodically improving a single product over decades and adding more and more value to it.”
He doesn’t do all those flashy things. I think one of the things I appreciated about that was that, regardless of what you think about Meta and the products it makes and offers, Zuckerberg as a figure is ideologically consistent and clear in a way that many of the big names in AI are not.
He sees Meta as a business, first and foremost. I know it’s a cutting-edge, comprehensive technology company and all that other stuff, but I don’t think I overestimate the impact the business has on history. However, if you talk to many of the important figures in AI, it’s very difficult to convince them that their company is not the last thing that will be built in the history of humanity. I appreciate that Zuckerberg doesn’t go to that extreme.
Yes, you did a great job, because I’ve heard the same thing. They say, “Oh, they’re so far behind in AI, they’ll never catch up. He can’t buy it; he just doesn’t understand it.”
Then they say, “Well, let’s defend the other position.” For decades, everyone has said that this guy is finished, that he’s going to fail, and he just keeps getting up, keeps moving forward, and you can’t finish him off.
So what’s the AI equivalent of that? I think at 1 point in the article it says, “Would you like to bet that he won’t solve it?” And they answer, “No, no, no.” Suddenly, their confidence changes: “No, no, I’m not going to bet against him.”
Yes, and I think that’s probably reflected to some extent in the markets. Although he never explicitly stated it, a large part of Meta’s bullish thesis on AI would basically be that their potential user base for any model they have, no matter how good it is, is roughly half of all human beings living on planet Earth at any given time.
That’s the number of people who use WhatsApp, Instagram, Facebook, Messenger, and Meta AI. So they have the distribution. He spent 20 years doing all these really boring and tedious things, like negotiating contracts for infrastructure projects with municipal and state governments, working out tax incentives, and determining how much of the revenue generated by the data center will be used to pay for other public works in that community.
All this unappealing work is something that he and a fairly small team of people have spent the last quarter of a century negotiating. I think all of this resulted in them basically having the distribution, the infrastructure, and, of course, the attention they dominate through their applications.
3. Why Zuckerberg won’t walk away
They simply have many of the things where much of the value generated by AI will likely accumulate in the add-ons that Meta already dominates. When I spoke with those people and they said they wouldn’t be willing to bet on Zuckerberg or Meta losing the AI race, I think they’re basing that on the fact that he’s built a business that’s arguably perfectly positioned to win the race in a significant way, whereas pure AI labs don’t have anything like it and still have to pay to rent much of the infrastructure, computing power, and everything else he already owns.
In the article, there are several times when he says, “I’m addicted to building. I simply like building things. I didn’t even think I was creating a company. This is just a natural evolution of the simple fact that I build. I will never stop. I will not resign.”
Those are my favorite founders. You and I have discussed this privately. I’m very interested in people who cannot be bought. They do it for other reasons. They’re not looking to be acquired. It’s as if they were saying, “This is how I want to spend the little time I have on this planet, and there’s nothing else.” They will not succeed in making me stray from the path I’m on.
Based on the time you spend with him and talking to everyone around him, including his family, what would have to happen for him to say, “Hey, I’m going to step aside at Meta”?
I think that’s the other interesting thing, isn’t it? As we discussed earlier, he’s practically the last one remaining from his generation of founders.
Obviously, there is one very big exception to that, which is Elon. But I think what unites Zuckerberg and Elon Musk is that it's unimaginable that they would simply retire to live the rest of their lives on a yacht, engage in various forms of space exploration that have nothing to do with the original companies they founded, or do full-time philanthropic work with their partners or something like that. I think they are the 2 types of people you imagine will die as CEOs—as if their hearts were going to explode and they would simply die at their companies. I think they're quite unique in that sense, and Zuckerberg has a canonical example of that in Facebook's history: in 2006, I think, Yahoo offered $1 billion to buy it.
The entire management team wanted to say yes. The board, which I believe consisted only of Don Graham and Peter Thiel at that time, really encouraged him to say yes. He's 21 or 22 years old. It's $1 billion. He owns 70% of the company or whatever. It's not like a tortuous negotiation where you're considering both sides; he simply says no immediately.
That's the kind of thing I think you probably can't fake, right? When you're that young, it's so much money, you're under so much pressure, and the entire Facebook management team at that time ended up leaving because he didn't want to accept the money. I believe there have been similar episodes periodically throughout the company's history where, faced with opposition, he decides that he will not sell or leave. I think that will probably be the case, possibly forever.
4. How Palmer Luckey became Jeremy’s first profile
The profiles you write are some of my favorites. I still think Zuck's was excellent, but my favorite profile of the ones you've done is Palmer Luckey's, which you told me last time was the first one you ever wrote about a person. That's crazy. I want to go over a couple of people who interest me more. I've met some of them, some were my friends, and I spent time with others, and I want to see what went into making them because I really have a lot of respect for the amount of craftsmanship you put into this.
But also, what did you learn not only from the process of creating these amazing profiles, but what did you learn from being surrounded by these people? Let's start with Palmer. Why choose him as the first person profile you were going to write?
Yes. Up until that moment, I had written a lot, but I had never written a profile about a person. I had never written anything that had anything remotely to do with technology or business. I mainly wrote about American politics, German politics, foreign policy, and all that stuff related to my previous life. As I said before, I usually start with something that interests me and then go in search of the person who would be the best way to explore that topic.
In Palmer's case, after October 7 in Israel, one of the interesting things about it was that the technological superiority the Israeli army had over Hamas was basically infinite, right? It was thought that Israel, in many ways, had the most advanced fourth-generation, hybrid-warfare-style army on the planet. Their fleets of drones, the use of satellites, underground sensors, and smart fences— they basically thought they had been able to circumvent the need for more classic forms of military equipment, such as tanks, artillery, and all the rest.
And then, when Hamas invades on October 7, they do so with paragliders, bulldozers, and small arms. One of the interesting questions that arose from that was: Is this whole defense-technology thing basically nonsense? Does any of it actually work? It seems it didn't work in this particular case, but that doesn't mean it won't work elsewhere.
We were already, at that point, a year and a half into the war in Ukraine, which was this really interesting mix of next-generation warfare being fought with swarms of drones. On the other hand, you have hundreds of thousands or millions of 18-year-olds with sticks fighting in trenches, right? That's a form of warfare that is at least 150 years old. So the question I started with was: Is defense technology real, or is it nonsense? And if it's real, how far are we from deciphering it?
Palmer, I think, was already a legend and an icon within technology at that time, but he wasn't very well known outside of it. That's interesting because this was only a couple of years ago, and now I think he's a pretty ubiquitous figure. He's the kind of person my mom tells me she saw on 60 Minutes or something. But that was not the case back then.
I had only heard a little about him when I was in the Army. I think I remember hearing about Anduril when I was deployed. It was this new company started by the guy who invented the Oculus, and they were going to build the first major new defense-technology company in 100 years or whatever.
So I became interested in it mainly to the extent that I wanted to write a fairly short, 3,000-word article based on an interview with Palmer Luckey about where we really were with defense technology. Again, you start spending time with someone, you start thinking about them a lot, you talk to everyone in their life, and a whole universe opens up. It becomes this 15,000-word cradle-to-grave article about basically their entire life, which I thought was particularly relevant at the time because I think the article came out around August 2024.
This was only a month or two—maybe a month—after the assassination attempt on Trump, after which almost all of Silicon Valley—a bunch of founders and venture capitalists—ended up aligning themselves behind Trump after not having aligned themselves behind him the previous 2 times. One really interesting thing about Palmer is that he had supported Trump, although the details of his support for Trump, I just didn't think, were particularly interesting.
What was really interesting is that he did it and was willing to stand behind it, not at a time when everyone else in his industry was doing the same thing, but when it cost him everything, right? He did it at a time when it caused him to be fired from Facebook, which had bought his company, and he lost the company he had spent his short adult life building. So I thought that also suggested something interesting about his character, his integrity, or his belief in himself or in what was right. In short, it ended up going in many different directions that I could never have anticipated at the beginning.
What was the most surprising direction it took after the event, one you didn't expect at first?
I usually spend 6 months to a year working on each of these articles and thinking about these people. When the article is taken away from me, it's in the hands of the proofreader, and then it's published, there's a way in which it leaves me with a hole in my brain that never gets filled again, and then I forget many of the details.
We were talking before recording about the fact that I have about 10 years' worth of history from my other podcast, where I have every note, every highlight, and all the transcripts. I use them all the time. I have an AI agent that helps me remember all that, and I thought: What do you do with your material? Nothing?
I find it very difficult. I can only do my best to get inside another person's head for a limited period of time. But if I stay there too long, I feel like I'm going crazy. So the day the article ends, I feel like it's the day I have to leave.
But wait a minute. I want us to do it, because this is where I'm interested too. Besides you covering fascinating people, spending a lot of time with them, and writing these amazing articles, I'm also curious to know how your work shapes you. The podcasts I make are constantly changing. You can listen to them and notice how I change my mind and how I adopt new ideas, realizing that an idea is very important and that I need to keep it with me. Isn't that the case for you?
I think perhaps where we differ is that I see the founders in this program as a kind of mining operation for very interesting people, looking for ideas that others can use in their lives and consider as they build their businesses or whatever else they do. I think that, probably, what I write has no value in that sense.
If it has any value, it would be more in trying to understand the lives of individual people who, from the outside, seem almost unreal, whether because of the power, fame, celebrity, or political relevance of what they do, which is unimaginable for many people. It's about trying to get to know who they are as individual human beings, which I think is valuable in itself, and also understanding the broader cultural and historical dynamics in which they are immersed and how that impacts their lives.
I think one of the things many of them feel is that they are figures who transcend time and that, if they had existed 500 years ago, they wouldn't be creating a technology company, but rather raising an army and becoming emperors or something like that.
That's definitely true. I can't tell you who, but I had a conversation with someone and I said, "You give me Genghis Khan vibes." And I said to him, "If we were 1,100 years ago, you'd be on horseback, cutting off heads, right?" That's what I told this guy in a private meeting, and he replied, "Absolutely."
Yes, I think Andreessen has this phrase that he uses with Zuckerberg and probably with others: "Now you raise venture capital, but 500 years ago you would have been raising armies or something." And perhaps there is a way in which that is true, but I also see many of these people as historically contingent in many important aspects, which does not diminish their merit in any way.
But I think that when these people are examined and written about in 100, 200, or 500 years' time—and I think some will be, like Zuckerberg—they will be understood in the context of the world we all live in.
How did we get to what you're saying now based on the question I asked you, where I say, “How does your job change you?” I think you're saying that these people are simply too different from how you see yourself?
I think mostly it's that, perhaps to an extreme, I find it valuable and interesting to try to understand and reveal individual human lives and how chaotic and shocking they can be. I love doing that on its own merits.
I think I'm much less capable of gathering different perspectives on people's lives and applying those lessons to my own life. I think if I learn from these people in an important way, it's that the stories we all tell ourselves about our lives have ways in which they are truly valuable, important, and accurate, and ways in which they are constructed to protect us against the uncomfortable thought that at some point, we're all going to die and we'll all be forgotten, and all this hard work will end up being irrelevant.
So I like being able to glimpse that in people who, from the outside, seem unreal in a way because they are so powerful, rich, and important.
Are you introspective?
This is a minefield. I think I'm very introspective, although it might say something that I prefer to spend most of my time thinking about others rather than myself.
I keep asking this question in half a dozen different ways—by text, by phone, sitting on the patio a while ago. It's like you're not budging on this at all. I don't think you're introspective. And it's not that it's the main thing I'm trying to understand about you. It's just that you—yes, just say no.
I simply like writing these articles. I am intensely interested in them. As soon as they're over, I forget about them completely. I'll move on to the next one.
It doesn't seem to change you, which is fucking amazing to me, considering how good you are at what you do. Again, I think you're the best in the world at what you're doing right now, and you simply don't give me any of this. It's like, “No, I don't get anything out of it.”
So, yes, maybe the answer to your question is that I'm not introspective enough to understand how it changes me.
If I asked your wife, would she say you're different today than when you started writing Colossus?
No, I don't think so. I don't think my parents did either.
Are you fully formed? What is this? What's going on right now?
I think it's one of those things where maybe there are some things I'm good at and maybe there are some 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 quite happy.
And I think that, over the last few years, I've been so focused on the craft of writing prose, telling stories and narrative, and bringing a certain kind of literary or cinematic ambition to the lives of these key figures in business and technology—and eventually in other fields—that I've concentrated more on the success of the craft than on what I try to absorb from these individual people.
There's a great essay by David Foster Wallace that I really like, where he talks about writers as natural observers, voyeurs, and peeping Toms. What they covet is this image of themselves as witnesses to other things and other people. Therefore, what they fear most in life is that the tables will turn, which is exactly the situation we are in now: They are the ones being observed, questioned, and looked at.
And then I think it's also simply that I'm like that by nature. I probably have less access to that part of myself. Besides, all of this is relatively new to me. Just 7 or 8 years ago, I had a completely different life, where I was in the military and 8,000 miles away from where we are now. Suddenly, I'm doing things in public, and all of that is new to me.
I came across one of my all-time favorite quotes while reading the book Zero to One. The quote says: the most powerful pattern I've ever noticed is that successful people find value in unexpected places and do so by thinking about business from fundamental principles rather than formulas. That's exactly what AppLovin has done with its advertising platform. AppLovin connects you with over a billion new potential customers in mobile games. AppLovin lets you capture total attention. AppLovin ads are full-screen videos that are viewed for an average of 35 seconds. That's retention that leaves other advertising platforms behind, and you can get started on AppLovin in minutes. You set the goal and AppLovin achieves it. No complex setup, no experience required, and AppLovin scales quickly. They can put your ads in front of more than a billion potential customers. Other companies have seen immediate results, scaling up to hundreds of thousands of dollars in daily spending and increasing their revenue by millions. So you want to get started quickly before all your competitors are on AppLovin, and you can do that by going to applovin.com. That's applovin.com.
5. Bringing literary ambition to business writing
I still don't understand, other than you said it makes you happy and you're good at it, right? In other words, I don't understand your approach. What I'm trying to figure out is how you think about your own work.
I spent my entire previous life doing and thinking about things that had absolutely nothing to do with business or technology. It wasn't an area of interest for me at all.
The way it became an area of interest was that it started with this profile I wrote about Palmer Luckey a couple of years ago. But people in business and technology had recently become many of the most interesting, most interdisciplinary, most culturally central, and most prominent figures in American life. That wasn't always the case, and it won't always be, but it is the case right now.
So maybe if you think, for example, about the 1940s, who were those people? They were either physicists or people who worked in the national security bureaucracy. In the 1960s and 1970s, I think they were probably musicians, filmmakers, and writers. You can go on and on. I think that in the last 10 to 20 years, it's clearly been the technologists and businesspeople.
What I started with was an interest in who the people are who determine the world we live in and who are most shaping the future. That, again, has nothing to do with an inherent interest in tech founders or venture capitalists per se, but I think they are simply the answer to that question right now. So I'm more interested in them.
However, my whole previous life was what I love and what has always interested me: books, fiction, literature, poetry, and writing. I've probably spent more time reading books than doing any other activity in my life. I think that probably you and I share that to some extent.
As I realized that people in technology and business are the most central figures in American life right now, you take a look around, and one thing you notice is that the most talented prose stylists—the people who bring real literary ambition to what they write—tend not to be in this space. That's not a universal statement. There are many excellent and wonderful writers who write about this, but overall, there aren't many, and the quality of the prose that covers much of what I cover simply isn't very good.
It's not made to last. It isn't of interest a year after it was written, much less 5, 10, or 20 years later. And I thought that a portion of the market was ripe for the taking. This is what Patrick and I originally discussed when we talked about me coming to Colossus.
There's this great tradition of long-form American journalistic writing, which my old colleague at Tablet, David Samuels, often says is the only form of writing indigenous to America. We didn't invent the novel, we didn't invent poetry, and we didn't invent verse, but we did invent the long-form journalistic profile, which somehow belongs to the American vernacular.
And this has a great tradition, from The New Yorker in the 1940s and 1950s, Esquire in the 1960s, and Vanity Fair and Harper's in the 1980s and 1990s—all of which were destroyed in the last 10 to 20 years, starting more or less with Facebook and the things that Zuckerberg built.
There was a great opportunity to apply much of that literary ambition to what we hope will be the best writing about people in business and technology. So that is, I think, perhaps one way to try to answer your question as best as possible.
Okay, you just did it, because you're thinking, “David, no, I'm not taking ideas from Zuck, Scott Wu, Josh, Neil, or any of the other people you've written about and that we're going to talk about today.”
I am taking them from fiction and poetry and applying that craft to storytelling in what I consider one of the most important areas of current American and world life. That's how it is. Aspirationally, at least.
All right. There you have it. I already have my answer. Okay, let's continue.
6. Why Scott Wu stood out among AI founders
I wanted to go person by person. Another person I want to mention—the first person I want to mention to you now—is Scott Wu. I called you, I think—I think I was driving to go meet Scott. I've known Scott for a few years. In fact, there's a picture of me, him, and one of his co-founders from the week before Cognition launched.
And yet, it seemed to me that the way you—again, that wasn't really a profile, was it? This is very different from all the other articles you wrote, where you say that this person—he's not trying to create an image, in my opinion, right? And I can share some of my background for the episode we did, What Happened Next, which talks about this.
But I'm very curious. Let's go over why you structured Scott's profile like that. It's almost as if you had this introduction that was very unusual compared to the rest of your introductions. But after that, it's almost like a transcript of the conversation you had. Why did you choose that path?
What interested me and led me to Scott was that, I think at the beginning of this past summer, the negative public response to many of the leading figures in AI was at its peak. It hasn't completely decreased yet. If anything, it has accelerated. What I was noticing was that many of the leading figures in this technology, which is supposed to change our world and our lives, are people who the rest of us find very annoying, irritating, tiresome, and lacking in self-awareness. They are not the people we would welcome as our new masters.
The question I had was: Is there a major figure in AI, or potentially a future major figure in AI, who isn't like that? Someone who is obviously a tech nerd but is also a humanist in a fundamental way—someone you could trust with this technology? So I started asking around, mostly people I'm sure we have in common, and the name that came up more than any other was Scott Wu.
I decided I just wanted to go and talk to him. For all these articles, what I usually ask for is a minimum of 2 different 90-minute conversations separated by a considerable time interval, because I want to capture people in 2 different environments. It often ends up lasting much longer, or we do much more, but that's what I asked Scott for.
7. Josh Kushner’s family history and the American dream
What I appreciated about him, which I think is what you were suggesting in your question, is that he's not a designed, overly polished figure. I don't think there are layers of bureaucracy, public relations, or media training that separate you from him, which is often a challenge when interviewing people like that. I liked him as a person, so in the introduction to the article, I went all in on the idea that Scott is someone most readers may not have heard of yet, whose views on AI and projections about the future could prove more valuable than what we hear from the big labs.
The second thing was that his willingness to be introspective—something I think he found difficult, more difficult than it is for me—struck me as really interesting, sincere, and sometimes deeply moving. It was the first time I spoke to someone and felt that turning him into a character in a story wouldn't be as good as the reader hearing him directly.
A lot of it also depends on the connection. When you interview people, you don't always develop a good, healthy connection with all of them. I felt that Scott and I connected immediately. We had a good exchange, understood each other's jokes, and liked following each other in the direction our thoughts took us. There were a couple of other people in the room when we were talking, and they seemed to agree.
I thought, "Perhaps this is a good opportunity for the reader to feel more as if they are in the room with us as we speak, rather than relying solely on me as an omniscient third-person narrator."
What did the people you interviewed say about Scott?
He's a true math genius, which is a relatively obvious point. But I think what impressed me was that, even among others who have won gold in international Olympiads in mathematics, physics, and computer programming, he is considered the best of all time. He's the best competitor, the best coach, and the best mentor to those who came after him. He's a kind of father figure to many of them, which is funny because he's not even 30 yet.
He just has something that the rest of us don't have. You can put him in a picture with 12 other people who worked at the company and competed in those Olympiads, and show the picture to someone who's never heard of any of them. You ask them, "Who do you think is the leader of this group?" They will immediately point a finger at Scott. It's simply obvious. He has something special.
I think that was something that came up time and time again, even in this group of people who are mathematical geniuses, whose genius in that field is on another level. To find that natural leadership ability along with that level of genius in one person is exceptionally rare.
I know you tend to forget about people once you write about them, but did you draw any parallels between Zuckerberg's ruthless competitive drive and Scott Wu's?
I don't think so, not entirely. For Wu, maybe there's a sense in which he's ruthlessly competitive in the business world, wanting to crush all of his company's rivals. No, I think he's competitive in everything.
There's a great anecdote in which Kobe was being interviewed by one of the late-night talk-show hosts, and they asked him, "Who is more competitive, you or Michael Jordan?" He simply said, "Obviously, Michael." They asked him, "What do you mean?" He said, "I'm competitive in basketball. Michael Jordan is competitive in things that don't matter, like who can eat this salad faster." Things like that. Scott wants to win at everything.
I think so. That could be a significant difference. My understanding of both is probably imperfect, but I think Zuckerberg is probably the most competitive person in the world at what he does. I don't think he's trying to destroy his children in a quiz game. Scott Wu, from what I understand, has that Michael Jordan thing about saying, "Okay, we're sitting in this room. It's 5 minutes until what we came here to do starts. Anyone got any change? Let's play. Anyone got any dice?"
It's as if he wants to use every moment of the day to beat someone at something. From what I understand, Scott is like that. This is what's fascinating. I told him we had a great time and said, "You have to come on the program every 3 or 6 months," simply because he's one of those people who, I believe, has a gift for explaining complex things in a simple way.
He's obviously brilliant, but he also has a very user-friendly interface. He can talk and talk nonstop. But underneath that, as he said time and time again on the podcast I did with him, he's very competitive. He has that constant need to compete, to win.
I know this firsthand. I know all the people involved there. I know some things behind the scenes. They're offering that guy a lot of money, and he says no to each and every acquisition offer. He simply says, "No." I don't think he considers himself someone who can be won over.
Exactly. That was another thing that interested me about him and that I appreciated when I contacted him for that article, shortly after Cursor made the deal with XAI, or whatever it was called at the time. He seemed, at least at that moment, to be a kind of "last of the Mohicans" in this world of AI.
Who knows what will happen, but when he explained the reasons why he has no interest in selling and why he wants to see this through to the end as his own company, it seemed plausible. You believe him.
Do you think that, of the people you spend the most time with, he has the least difference between who he really is and who he appears to be to the world?
It's always difficult to answer that question because I don't usually meet these people in any context other than interviewing them and writing a profile. I have never written about someone I was friends with before, or really since then.
But what's your perception of this?
My impression is that, again, since he doesn't have all these years of media training under his belt and doesn't seem interested in developing that part of his brain, which I appreciate, he seems to be the same person whether I'm interviewing him, watching him review a product, seeing him walk into a meeting, watching him fundraise, or seeing him come home to his girlfriend.
I think he's the one who is most likely to seem like the same person in all aspects.
I want to move on to your article about Josh Kushner, which I think was the most-viewed profile so far on Cossack before the article about Zuck—
It still is.
Ah, okay. I thought that—
Which is interesting, and I never would have expected it.
Okay, interesting. What was that you said earlier about not being interested in the person first, but rather in the issue, and then, in order to understand and explain the issue, looking for the person who can do it? What was that in Josh's case?
There is a specific answer, and then there is a more general perspective, from 50,000 feet up. The specific thing is that I've been interested in the Kushners for several years, even before their older brother, Jared, got involved in the White House after Trump won in 2016.
Wait, wait. You were interested in Jared before he went to the White House?
I was interested in the family as a whole. At that time, I had no idea who Josh was. I don't think I even knew he existed. Jared at that time I think was the editor of the New York Sun or, you know, I...I...I... or something like that. The Observer, a local New York newspaper, but what he knew at the time was that his father and grandfather had built this real-estate principality in New Jersey that the children were getting involved in, that his father had all these problems with the law, and that his grandparents had seen their lives destroyed in the Holocaust and came to America literally with nothing.
What I found interesting about this family was that, in 1 generation—or now, at this point, in 2 generations—in a very, very short period of time, these people saw their lives completely shattered.
When his grandmother, whose entire family was practically executed in the Holocaust, tried for years to reach the United States, she finally succeeded. During her lifetime, Bill Clinton and Benjamin Netanyahu came to her house to have dinner with her family—to basically kiss the ring and ask her son for a favor, right? There was this element in which the family had elements of the Kennedy family history, but was also representative of the typical Holocaust story. I think that, even among the heartbreaking stories of Holocaust survival, the story of the Kushner grandparents is particularly heartbreaking.
It was based on that, right? Deliverance is a—Defiance. Defiance, that's what I was thinking. The guy whose name I should know played Bond. What's his name?
Daniel Craig.
Thank you. That's right. Yes, they basically hide in a forest.
They're in the forest of what is now modern-day Belarus. The story of Inglourious Basterds, I believe, is also partly inspired by this collective of concentration-camp escapees led by a man called Tuvia Bielski, who basically lived in the forest, trained each other with small arms, and carried out many kidnappings and retaliatory killings against Nazi soldiers in Eastern Europe. Grandma Kushner was part of Bielski's partisans, which is incredible, isn't it?
I already had this long-standing interest in the family, even before they became nationally famous in the Trump era. I think this permeates much of what I've written in recent years. But I'm also the Jewish grandson of Holocaust survivors, and the idea of American national identity is what allows us all to be as Irish, Sikh, or Korean as we want to be, right?
You don't have to sacrifice that part of your identity, so to speak, as long as you continue to subscribe to this idea of an American supratribe that transcends all others. That's basically a belief in the Constitution, individual liberty, and the values that all Americans share in common. That's why this isn't some kind of Disneyland fairy tale.
For me and my family, this has been very important throughout my life. I think it has been fraying at the edges for most of my adult life and is falling apart, and that has worried me a lot. Part of what I've tried to do in many of these articles over the past few years is assess the current state of the American Dream and try to find out how alive and real it still is, regardless of its various flaws and shortcomings, with which we are all very familiar.
Is it still an idea that inspires the United States? Or is it, as its various critics on the right and left like to say, something that has always been just a failure and a lie? Again, I think looking for evidence that it is still real and alive in business and technology at this particular moment is very fruitful.
I thought that, given my own prior interest in the Kushner family and Josh's success over the last decade—as a kind of next-generation venture capitalist and one of the biggest investors in many of the biggest companies—
No, don't tell him you call him a venture capitalist. He'll be offended by that.
Yes, well, yes. Many of these venture capitalists, I think—
No, but listen, I'm overcomplicating what they—maybe you share this. In fact, wait. I have to pull out one of my favorite quotes. I think I was interviewing you, if I remember correctly, but you were talking about why your first article, I think the first one you wrote for Class This, was about Neil Mehta, right?
That's a friend. In fact, I just spent a few days with him last week.
But you said something that was hilarious. You said, “I've never really had much contact with technology investors. I've always found those types of personalities a bit annoying. As a group, I feel like they're full of shit. So I asked around, ‘Who was the guy who wasn't full of shit?’ and that led me to you, Neil.”
I would say that Josh has much broader and grander ambitions. I've spoken to him about it, and I don't consider him a venture capitalist. You can think of him as an investor, but he's really a builder, a founder, and everything else. He simply doesn't—
And I think that's what I like so much about him. That's what you captured, or demonstrated, in your article. I think this was fascinating, when it starts with Rick Rubin: Josh goes to visit him, essentially giving him a rundown of his thoughts and asking, “Am I crazy for thinking this way?”
Josh doesn't seek, just as you don't seek, for the people you profile to influence your work. It's like saying, “I'm looking the other way.” I feel like Josh is the same. He doesn't look at other investors; he looks to other founders.
Here's a good example of that. I think Neil is the same, too.
We've entered this era of oversaturation from various venture capitalists who, I believe, overestimate how interesting they are to other people. We've reached this point where they're out there offering—
It's very funny. I don't want to—well, I have to listen, and then they overestimate how interesting they are to others.
To be clear about what I'm trying to say, I'm very curious to know how people think about themselves and their work. We can all say, “Jeremy is a writer,” or whatever, but I was trying, unsuccessfully, to delve into what lies beyond that—how it relates to your life, how it changes you, and all that. So I think sitting down to do that with Zuck was great.
When I talked to Zuck, I felt that he doesn't see himself as a CEO. He gave me emperor vibes, and then, 6 months later, your article comes out and it's like, “This guy is actually Augustus reincarnated.”
8. Asking Rick Rubin: What if I lose the magic?
Yes. That's what I mean. It's very fascinating. It doesn't mean you have to agree with their perception of what they do, but I think you should at least understand how they see what they do. I can assure you that he definitely doesn't consider himself a venture capitalist.
I thought the interesting thing—the reason I wanted to start the article with that anecdote about him asking Rick Rubin for advice—was that, at that point in our interview, I still hadn't figured out what the article was going to be about. I really had no intention of going over the entire family history, which is what I ended up doing.
He was telling me about the time he went to see Rubin, the personal crisis Josh felt he was having, and why he sought out Rick Rubin in particular. He was trying to get me to recreate that morning and the scene: where they were, what was really bothering him, and what question he was hoping Rubin would answer.
I don't remember exactly what it was, but it was something like the idea that Kushner felt he had somehow captured magic in a bottle with Thrive. He had also built companies on his own, and he was having a really good run. He went to Rubin basically to ask, “What do I do if I lose the magic? I'm afraid that one day it will slip away, and I'll be left without it and everything will fall apart.”
I found it very interesting. I identified with it and recognized it immediately. I know that same thought occurs to all kinds of people, but in my mind it was a very specific question from a Holocaust family: the fear that everything you have built can be taken away overnight, and the experience of living in constant fear, even in America, of being stripped of everything you value and love and having to start all over again somewhere else. I felt it was a particularly deep and vulnerable moment that he shared with me, and that ended up determining the rest of the article.
Something I really appreciate about Josh, going to your question, is that I think he recognizes, even if it's in an ultimate sense, that things eventually fall apart and you have to make the most of them while you can. You also have to try to do everything possible to make yourself invulnerable while you can. Whereas I think many other people in this space may give the impression that they're on a roller coaster and are just having as much fun as they can while they can.
You just did a livestream where you presented your pieces. Listen to the Founders episode I just did about Mark Zuckerberg, based on your piece. It came out just today while we were recording this, so you haven't heard it yet.
I say in the episode that we started with the Holocaust, then went off on a tangent, started talking about something else, and then you went straight back to the Holocaust in a way that makes you forget where it all began. You do this when you write, which is really very good.
You did it when you started by sitting down with Zuckerberg's parents. Then you go off on a tangent and come back to close the circle about his parents. When he starts fighting, you forget that the scene you set up was that we were fighting. Then you get into all these other details, and you feel fascinated.
I was like, “Oh, damn.” Then Jeremy brought us back to the fact that, no, we're here. Why does this guy choose to wake up every day and fight with people for 2 hours? The way you do that is fascinating.
I want to go back to the hiring thing because he came to this program. What was also interesting, related to what you and I were talking about, is how people think about what they do. It was like, “Oh, Rubén is a producer.” He is—he's in the music business. He founded a record label.
And he says, “I simply consider myself a professional researcher.” Every day, I wake up and do intense research on whatever interests me most at that moment. Sometimes it’s music, sometimes it’s podcasts, and sometimes it’s different people I talk to. He simply says, “I’m just doing research all day.” That’s really interesting.
Sometimes I think, especially because of how many venture capitalists discuss it, that something they look for in a founder is that the seed of their inspiration to create their company can be traced back to something early in their life. In other words, they like the idea for the company to have emerged as early as possible. I understand that because it suggests a lot of discipline and commitment to a single idea, relentlessly pursuing it.
But there is an opposite side that I also find very interesting in many of the people you interview and that I have interviewed. I also like it when many of these things end up being much more fortuitous. I think you end up with a lot more people who aren’t primarily motivated by money itself, and the idea of starting a company or being an investor only occurred to them much later, after they had pursued their real interests and spent time with the people they loved and appreciated throughout their teenage years and even part of their adult lives.
9. The mentor who taught Jeremy to use his gifts
Creating a company or becoming an investor was the logical endpoint of all those other things. But I suppose I would also say that there is value in many people who come into this world a little later than, perhaps, some of the “Zuckerbergs” of the world, who had an idea when they were very young and will never do anything else. Something just crossed my mind, and I’m very personally curious about it. In the same way that Josh Kiszka goes to Rick Rubin for advice or guidance, or whatever you want to call it, do you have someone in your life who fulfills that role for you?
When I was growing up and was a little kid, it was my older brother, Josh. When I was at university, my Russian teacher was named Natalia Leshchanskaya. I now have a 1-year-old daughter who bears his name. She was the most important person in my life, and she was a classic woman, like a Soviet grandmother, who was very good at pointing out all the ways in which I was an idiot, made bad decisions, ruined my life, and didn’t think about the future.
Really? How old were you when you met her?
18 years old.
And it had such a profound impact on your life that you named your daughter after her?
Yes, that’s how it is. The basic story is that I did so badly in Spanish in high school that I couldn’t get exempted from the language requirement for my first year of college. Knowing that I was going to be forced to take a language for a year, I decided to choose the weirdest-sounding thing that I could deal with for 2 semesters. That’s why I chose Russian.
It ended up changing my life completely. I fell in love with the language. It was my specialty. I decided to spend a year and a half of my 4 years of university living and studying in Russia, and I spoke to her, I think, every Sunday during that entire year and a half that I was there. Sadly, she died a few years later, but throughout that whole stage of my early adult life, she was definitely my Rick Rubin-type figure.
What did you learn from her?
She believed that people have a gift. This is something I write about in Scott Wu’s article: If people have a gift, they have an obligation with that gift. If they do not do everything in their power to share and exploit that gift, then they are actually sinning against themselves and against God in a significant way.
I think I was very fortunate that she saw something in me, and she thought that by behaving and acting the way I did in that part of my life—which involved too much alcohol and too many drugs, and not enough focus on my work and my future—I wasn’t just being an idiot. I was sinning against my own future.
It’s an incredible thing to say to a young guy of 18, 19, or 20 years old with a lot of potential, isn’t it? It changed my life completely and changed the way I think about others. I’d never thought about this before, but now that we’re talking about it, I think it’s probably the reason why I’m interested in many of these people we’ve talked about during this conversation.
It’s also simply the lens I can now apply to the people I meet, the people I become friends with, and the people I work with. I would say that up to that point in my life, it was the most important thing anyone had ever done for me.
Did you keep in touch with her after college?
I worked for a year after college and then joined the army, which upset her a lot.
Because?
She had her own harrowing story about escaping the Soviet Union, which took her decades to accomplish. She left alone with her young daughter and managed to reach the United States. I think that, in her mind, if you are born into safe and comfortable circumstances, it’s stupid to choose something as physically risky and dangerous as joining the army. It’s like throwing away the most valuable thing you can have in life.
That made a lot of sense to her, but it didn’t make sense to me at the time, and I was looking for something different. I joined at an interesting time. It was during the end of the Obama administration, during the "hijacking," that he practically gutted the defense department's budget.
One of the consequences was that when I signed my contract for basic training, normally a couple of days or weeks later they send you to training. But when I did, there were so few spots available because most of the funds had run out that I had an 8-month period between signing the contract and the start of boot camp.
During those 8 months, she and I talked all the time. She died of Lou Gehrig’s disease in 2015, so I saved all the voicemails she left me during that time on my phone, and I still have them. I uploaded them to several cloud accounts to ensure that if one of these companies disappears, I don’t lose any of those recordings.
We kept in touch, and I wrote to her, since in basic training they take away your phone and you can only communicate with the outside world by writing letters by hand. The 2 people I was writing to were my girlfriend at the time, who is now my wife, and Natasha, with whom I kept in touch while I was there.
I love that idea of her holding someone else accountable, as if to say that you have gifts that are greater than yourself. Not using them and not expressing those gifts is a sin, but in reality it is a service to society and to other human beings in the world. That’s it. Thanks for sharing that story. That was incredible, really—one of the most incredible things. I didn’t even know that about you.
I think about it all the time, but it’s been a very long time since I talked about all this, so a lot of it was new to me, too.
I really appreciate you taking the time to do this. You’re a very solid guy. I’m a big fan of your work. I hope everyone listening will go and check out each of your profiles.
Thank you, David.
Thank you. I hope you enjoyed this episode. Please remember to subscribe wherever you're listening and leave a review. And be sure to listen to my other podcast, Founders. For almost a decade, I have obsessively read over 400 biographies of the greatest entrepreneurs in history looking for ideas you can use in your work. Most of the guests you hear on this show first found me through Founders.