· 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.
· David Senra
[00:00:00] S0: I found one of my all-time favorite quotes when I was reading the book "Zero to One." The quote says, "The single most powerful pattern I have noticed is that successful people find value in unexpected places, and they do this by thinking about business from first principles instead of formulas." That is exactly what AppLovin has done with their advertising platform. AppLovin connects you with over a billion potential new customers in mobile games. AppLovin allows you to capture undivided attention. AppLovin ads are full-screen videos that are watched for an average of 35 seconds. That is retention that blows other ad platforms out of the water. And you can launch on AppLovin in minutes. You set the goal, and AppLovin achieves it. No complex setup, no expertise needed. And AppLovin scales quickly. They can put your ads in front of over a billion potential customers. Other businesses have seen immediate results, scaled to hundreds of thousands of dollars of spend per day, and increased their revenue by millions. So you want to get started quickly before all of your competitors are on AppLovin, and you can do that by going to applovin.com. That's applovin.com. I still don't understand, other than you said it makes you happy and you know you're good at it, right? I don't understand your approach, though. What I'm trying to get out of is how you think about your own work.
· Jeremy Stern
[00:00:00] S1: I spent my whole previous life doing and thinking about things that had absolutely nothing to do with business or technology. It was not an area of interest for me whatsoever. The way it became an area of interest was, it started with this profile I wrote of Palmer Luckey a couple years ago, but people in business and technology had somewhat recently become a lot of the most interesting, the most interdisciplinary, the most culturally central and salient figures in American life. And that was not always the case, and it's not always going to be the case, but it's the case right now. So maybe if you think about in the 1940s, who are those people? They're physicists or they're people who work in the national security bureaucracy. In the 1960s and '70s, I think it's probably musicians, filmmakers, and writers. You can go on and on. I think in the last 10 to 20 years, I think it's clearly technologists and business people. What I kind of began with was an interest in who are the people- ... determining the world that we live in and shaping the future the most? Which, again, has nothing to do with an inherent interest in technology founders or VCs per se, but I think they're just the answer to that question right now. So I am most interested in them. However, my entire previous life was the thing that I love and that I've always been interested in is books, and fiction, and literature, and poetry, and writing. I've spent probably more time reading books than I've spent doing any other activity in my life. I think we probably, you and I share that in common to an extent. And having realized that people in technology and business are the kind of most central figures in American life at this point, you read around, and one thing you notice is that the most talented prose stylists, the people who bring real literary ambition to the things they write, tend not to be in this space. Which is not a blanket claim. There's plenty of excellent, amazing writers who write about this stuff. But as a whole, there's just not many, and the quality of prose that covers a lot of the stuff that I cover just isn't great. It's not built to last. It's not of interest a year after it's written, let alone five or 10 or 20 years later.