· Jeremy Stern
[00:00:00] S1: I think that is the other interesting thing, right? So, we talked before about how he's kind of the last man standing from his generation of founders. There's 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 engage in various forms of space exploration that have nothing to do with the original companies they built or philanthropic work that they 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 going to die as CEO. Like, something's going to happen, their heart's going to explode, and they're just going to die at their company. And I think they are pretty singular in that sense. And Zuckerberg does have the kind of canonical piece of evidence for that in Facebook's history, which is that in something like 2006, I think, Yahoo offers a billion dollars to buy it. The entire management team wants to say yes. 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 21, 22 years old. It's a billion dollars. He owns 70% of the company or whatever it is. It's not like a tortuous 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 in the face of opposition, he decides he's not going to sell or he's not going to walk away. And I think that's probably just going to be the case possibly forever.
· David Senra
[00:00:00] S0: The profiles that you write are some of my favorites. 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 want to go through a couple of the people that I'm most interested in, some of which I've been, like some of them are friends, some of them I've spent time with, and just go over what went into making them, because I do think I have a high respect for the amount of craft that you put into this. But also, what did you learn from not only the process of making these incredible profiles, but what did you learn from being around these people? So, let's start with Palmer. Why choose him as the first profile ever that you're going to write on a person?
· Jeremy Stern
[00:00:00] S1: Yeah. So up until that point, I'd been doing a lot of writing, but I'd never written a profile of a person. I'd never written anything that had anything remotely to do with technology or business. I was writing mostly on American politics and German politics and foreign policy and all this stuff that had to do with my previous life. Like I said before, 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 after October 7th in Israel. One of the interesting things about it was that the amount of technological overmatch that the Israeli military had over Hamas was basically infinite, right? And Israel, in a lot of ways, was thought to have had the most advanced fourth-generation hybrid warfare style 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 and all this other stuff. And then when Hamas invades on October 7th, 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 we were at that point already a year and a half into the war in Ukraine, which was this really interesting mix of next-generation warfare that was being fought by drone swarms. And on the other hand, you have hundreds of thousands or millions of 18-year-olds with sticks fighting in trenches, right? Which is a form of warfare that's like at least 150 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, 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 because this is only a couple years ago, and now I think he's a pretty ubiquitous figure, and he's the kind of person my mom will tell me she saw him on "60 Minutes" or something like that. But that was not the case back then.
· Jeremy Stern
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, it was this new company that was started by the guy who invented the Oculus, and they were going to build the first new prime defense technology company in 100 years or whatever. So, I mostly got interested in him insofar as I wanted to write a fairly short 3,000-word piece based on an interview with Palmer Luckey about where we actually were with defense technology. Again, 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 15,000-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 2024. 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 him the previous two times. And one really interesting thing about Palmer is that he had supported Trump, which 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 did it at a moment when it led to him getting fired by Facebook, which had bought his company, and he lost the company that he'd spent 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 ended up going in a bunch of different directions I never could have anticipated at the beginning.
· David Senra, Jeremy Stern
[00:00:00] S0: What was the most surprising direction it went into after the fact that you didn't expect at the beginning? [00:00:00] S1: 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 that I get like a hole in my brain that never gets filled back in, and I kind of forget a lot of the details. [00:00:00] S0: Yeah, we were talking before recording, because I have this 10-year history for my other podcast where I have every single note, every single highlight. I have all the transcripts. I use it all the time. I have an AI agent that just helps me remember all this stuff. And I was like, "What do you do with your stuff?" Like, nothing? [00:00:00] S1: I find it really hard. 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.
· Jeremy Stern, David Senra
[00:00:00] S1: I find it really hard. 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. [00:00:00] S0: Wait a minute, though. Because this is where I'm also interested. In addition to 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 the podcasts I make change me constantly. 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." Is that not the case for you?