· 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?
· David Senra, Jeremy Stern
[00:00:00] S0: You're saying these people are just too different from the way you view yourself? [00:00:00] S1: I think mostly it's that I, maybe to a fault, I find it valuable and interesting just to try to understand and reveal individual human lives and- How messy, how impactful they can be. I love doing that kind of on its own terms. I'm much less, I think, able to kind of gather different insights from people's lives and apply those lessons to my own life. I think if I learn from these people in an important way, I think it's that the stories that we all tell ourselves about our lives, there are ways in which they're really valuable and important and accurate, and there are ways that they're kind of constructed in order to protect us against the uncomfortable thought that at some point, we're all going to die and we're all going to be forgotten, and all of this hard work is going to end up being meaningless. So, I like being able to glimpse that in people who I think from the outside seem unreal in a certain way because they are so powerful and so wealthy and so important. [00:00:00] S0: Are you introspective? [00:00:00] S1: This is a minefield. I think I'm very introspective, although it might say something that I like to spend most of my time thinking about other people rather than thinking about myself.
· Jeremy Stern, David Senra
[00:00:00] S1: This is a minefield. I think I'm very introspective, although it might say something that I like to spend most of my time thinking about other people rather than thinking about myself. [00:00:00] S0: I keep asking this question in half a dozen different ways, through texts, through phone calls, by sitting in the backyard earlier. You don't give on this at all. I don't think you are introspective. And that's not the main thing I'm trying to figure out from you, but it's just like, yeah, you're just like, "No, I'm just like, I like writing these pieces. I'm intensely interested in them. As soon as they're done, I forget about them completely and move on to the next." It doesn't seem to change you, which is fucking shocking to me, that you're so good at what you do. Again, I think you're the best in the world at what you're doing right now, and you just will not give me any of this. Like, no, I'm taking nothing from this. [00:00:00] S1: Yeah, so maybe the answer to your question is I'm not introspective enough to understand how it does change me. [00:00:00] S0: If I asked your wife, would she say that you're different today than you were when you started writing at Colossus? [00:00:00] S1: No, I don't think so. [00:00:00] S0: Okay. [00:00:00] S1: I don't think my parents would either. But I think it's- [00:00:00] S0: You think you're fully formed? What is this? What's happening right now?
· David Senra, Jeremy Stern
[00:00:00] S0: You think you're fully formed? What is this? What's happening right now? [00:00:00] S1: I think it's one of these things where I think there's maybe a few things that I'm good at, and maybe there's a few things that make me happy, but there's only one thing that's both, right? I think I'm pretty good at writing, and it makes me pretty happy. And I think over the last several years, I've been so focused on the craft of writing prose and storytelling and narrative and bringing some sort of literary or cinematic ambition to bear on the lives of these core figures in business and technology, and eventually elsewhere, that I've been more focused on the success of the craft rather than on what I'm trying to absorb from these individual people. There's this great David Foster Wallace essay that I really like where he talks about writers as natural-born watchers and lurkers and starers, and what they kind of covet is this image of themselves as witnesses of other things and other people. And therefore, what they're most afraid of in life is for the tables to be turned, which is the exact situation we're in right now- ... where they're the ones being watched and interrogated and stared at. And so I think it's also just, I'm kind of by nature, I probably have less access to that part of myself. And also, this is all relatively new to me. It was only seven or eight years ago, I had a completely different life where I was in the army and I was 8,000 miles from where we are right now, and all of a sudden now I'm doing things in public, and that's all brand new to me.