· 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.
· Jeremy Stern, David Senra
A lot of it also just depends on rapport, right? Like, when you interview people, you don't develop a good, healthy rapport with all of them. Scott and I, I felt like just kind of hit it off, and we had a good back and forth, and we got each other's jokes, and we liked following each other in the direction that our thoughts were taking us. And there was a couple other people in the room when we were talking to each other, and they seemed to agree, and I thought, "Maybe this is actually a good opportunity for the reader to kind of feel more like they're in the room with us while we're talking, rather than just trusting me as a third-person omniscient narrator." [00:00:00] S0: What did the people that you interviewed around Scott say about him? [00:00:00] S1: He's an authentic mathematics genius, which is a relatively obvious point, but I think what impressed me about it was even among the other people who have won gold at the international math and physics and computer programming Olympiads, even among those people, he's kind of considered the GOAT. He's the GOAT competitor, he's the GOAT coach and mentor of the people who came after him, and he's kind of this godfather figure to a lot of those. [00:00:00] S0: Which is funny because he's not even 30 yet.
· David Senra, Jeremy Stern
[00:00:00] S0: Which is funny because he's not even 30 yet. [00:00:00] S1: He's not even 30, but he does have this kind of, I think I said it in one of the lines of the piece, but he just does have that thing that the rest of us don't have, where it's like, you just put him into a picture with 12 other people who work at the company who competed in those Olympiads, and you show the picture to someone who's never heard of any of them. You'll be like, "Who do you think the leader is in this group?" And they'll point immediately at Scott. It's just obvious. He's got something. I think that was something that came up over and over. Even in this collective of people who are math geniuses, that his genius was kind of, in that realm at least, is kind of on a different level. And also to find both that and that natural leadership capability, finding both of those things in one person is just exceptionally rare. [00:00:00] S0: I know you tend to forget about the people once you write about them, but did you draw any parallels between the ruthless competitive drive of Zuckerberg and the ruthless competitive drive of Scott Wu? [00:00:00] S1: I don't think so. Not quite. For Wu, maybe there is a sense in which he's ruthlessly competitive in a business sense, and he wants to crush all of his company's rivals.
· Jeremy Stern, David Senra
[00:00:00] S1: I don't think so. Not quite. For Wu, maybe there is a sense in which he's ruthlessly competitive in a business sense, and he wants to crush all of his company's rivals. [00:00:00] S0: No, I think he's competitive in everything. There's a great line where Kobe was being interviewed by one of the late night hosts, and they're like, "Who's more competitive, you or Michael Jordan?" And he's just like, "It's obviously Michael." And they're like, "What do you mean?" He goes, "I'm competitive at basketball. Michael Jordan's competitive at shit that doesn't matter, like who can eat this salad the fastest." [00:00:00] S1: Right. [00:00:00] S0: Stuff like that. Where Scott wants to win at everything. [00:00:00] S1: I think so that might be an important difference. My understanding of both of them is probably imperfect, but I think Zuckerberg is probably the most competitive person in the world at the thing that he does. I don't think he's trying to destroy his children in Quiz Bowl. Scott, from what I understand, does have that Michael Jordan thing where it's like, "Okay, we're sitting in this room. We have five minutes until the thing that we're here for starts. Does anyone have some quarters? Let's play. Does anyone have some dice?" [00:00:00] S0: Yeah. [00:00:00] S1: He just wants to use every moment of every day destroying people at something. From what I understand, Scott is like that.