· 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.
· Jeremy Stern, David Senra
And I thought, one slice of the market that was kind of there for the taking, and this is what Patrick and I originally discussed when we were talking about me coming to Colossus, was there is this great tradition of long-form American magazine writing, which my old colleague at Tablet, David Samuels, likes to say is America's only indigenous form of writing, right? We didn't invent the novel, we didn't invent poetry, we didn't invent verse, but we did invent the long-form magazine profile, which kind of belongs in the American vernacular. And this has a great tradition from The New Yorker in the 1940s and '50s, Esquire in the 1960s, Vanity Fair and Harper's in the 1980s and '90s, all of which kind of gets destroyed in the last 10 to 20 years, kind of starting with Facebook and the things that Zuckerberg built. And that there was a big opportunity to bring a lot of that literary ambition to bear on what we hope is the very best writing about people in business and technology. And so that is, I think, maybe one way of trying my best to answer your question. [00:00:00] S0: Okay, you just dig, because you're like, "David, no, I'm not taking ideas from Zuck or Scott Wu or Josh or Neil or any of the other people you've written on and we're going to talk about today. I'm taking it from fiction and from poetry, and I'm applying that craft to storytelling in what I think is one of the most important areas of American life and worldwide life today." [00:00:00] S1: That's right. Aspirationally, at least.
· Jeremy Stern, David Senra
[00:00:00] S1: That's right. Aspirationally, at least. [00:00:00] S0: Okay. There you go. I got my answer now. All right, we're going to move on. I want to go person by person. The first person I want to bring up to you now is Scott Wu. And I called you, I think I was driving to go meet Scott. And I've known Scott for a few years. Actually, there's a picture of me, him, and one of his co-founders the week before Cognition launched. And yet, I thought the way you... Again, that wasn't really a profile, right? This is very different from all the other pieces you wrote, where you're saying that this person, he's not trying to craft an image, in my opinion, right? And I can share some of my background for the episode that we did, what happened after the fact, that speaks to this. But I'm very curious, okay, let's go through why you set up the profile on Scott. It's almost like you had this introduction which was very unusual compared to the rest of your introductions. But then from there, it's almost like a transcript of the conversation you had. Why did you go that route?
· Jeremy Stern
[00:00:00] S1: So the thing that I was interested in that led me to Scott was, I think it was at the beginning of this last summer, the negative public response to a lot of the major AI figures was cresting at that point. It still hasn't quite receded. If anything, it's accelerated. But what I was noticing was a lot of the leading figures in this technology that's supposedly going to upend our world and our lives are people who the rest of us find very grating and irritating and annoying and unself-aware, and they're not the people we would welcome as our new overlords. So the question I had was, is there a major AI figure, or potentially a future major AI figure, who is not like that, who is obviously a technology nerd, but is also a humanist in a very fundamental way, someone who you might trust with this technology? So I went asking around, mainly through people that I'm sure we know in common, and the name that came up more than any other was Scott Wu. So, I decided I just wanted to go and talk to him. And for all of these pieces, what I usually ask for is a minimum of two different 90-minute conversations separated by some sizable interval in time, because I kind of want to catch them in two different environments. And often it ends up going a lot longer, or we'll do a lot more. But that's what I asked for from Scott. And what I did appreciate about Scott, which I think you were kind of suggesting in your question, is he's not stage-managed. He's not overly manicured as a figure. I think there's not layers of bureaucracy or PR or media training separating you from him, which is often a challenge of interviewing people like this. I liked him as a person, and so in the intro to the piece, I kind of went all in on this idea of Scott being a person who maybe most readers haven't heard of yet. ... whose opinions about AI and projections about the future they might find more valuable than what we hear out of the major labs. And then the second thing was, I just found his willingness to be introspective, which I think was hard for him, harder than it is for me, to be really interesting in good faith and at times profoundly moving and really interesting. And it was the first time I'd ever talked to someone where I kind of felt like me turning them into a character in a story actually wouldn't be as good here as the reader just hearing from them directly.