· 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?
· Jeremy Stern, David Senra
[00:00:00] S1: I think maybe one place where we differ is 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 whatever else they're doing. I think probably 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 relevance of what they're engaged in is kind of unimaginable to a lot of people on the outside, to try to 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 what the larger cultural and historical patterns that they're swept up in, how those things impact their lives. I think one of the things that I think a lot of these people feel is that they are kind of time-spanning figures, and that if they would have existed 500 years ago, they wouldn't be building a technology company, but they would have been raising an army and become an emperor or something like that. [00:00:00] S0: That's definitely true. So I can't tell you who, but I've had a conversation with... I was like, "I'm getting Genghis Khan vibes off of you." And I go, "If this was 1,100 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. He goes, "Absolutely."
· David Senra, Jeremy Stern
[00:00:00] S0: That's definitely true. So I can't tell you who, but I've had a conversation with... I was like, "I'm getting Genghis Khan vibes off of you." And I go, "If this was 1,100 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. He goes, "Absolutely." [00:00:00] S1: Yeah, I think Andreessen has this line that he used with Zuckerberg and probably some others that, "Now you raise venture capital, but 500 years ago you would have been raising armies," or something like that. And 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 when these people are examined and written about 100, 200, 500 years from now, and I think some of them will be, Zuckerberg would be one, I think they're going to be understood in the context of the world that we all live in. [00:00:00] S0: 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? [00:00:00] S1: I think- [00:00:00] S0: You're saying these people are just too different from the way you view yourself?