· 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.
· Jeremy Stern, David Senra
[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. [00:00:00] S0: This is what's fascinating. I told him we had such a good time, and I was like, "You just need to come on the show every three months, every six months." Just because he is one of the people where, again, I think one of his gifts is he can explain very complex things in a very simple manner. He's obviously brilliant, but he also has this very friendly UI, where he can just talk and talk and talk. But then underneath that is just, he said on the podcast I did with him over and over again, he's just like, "I'm really salty. I'm really salty." He just constantly has to compete, has to win. Because I know from firsthand, I know all the people involved there. I know some behind-the-scenes stuff. They're throwing so much money at that dude, and he's just saying no to every single acquisition offer. He's just like, "No." I don't think he thinks of himself as being conquerable. [00:00:00] S1: Right. That was another thing that got me interested in him and that I appreciated is, I approached him for that piece shortly after Cursor did the deal with xAI or whatever it was called at the time. [00:00:00] S0: Mm-hmm.
· David Senra, Jeremy Stern
[00:00:00] S0: Mm-hmm. [00:00:00] S1: And so, Scott seemed, at least at the time, to be the sort of last of the Mohicans figure within this AI world. And who knows what'll happen, but when he explained the reasons for why he has no interest in selling and why he just wants to ride this thing all the way to the end as his company, it does seem kind of plausible. You believe him. [00:00:00] S0: Do you think out of the people that you spend the most time with, he has the shortest gap between who he actually is and who he presents himself to the world to be? [00:00:00] S1: It's always hard to answer that question because I tend not to know these people in any other context outside of interviewing them and writing a profile. I've never yet written about someone that I've been friends with before or even really since. [00:00:00] S0: But what's your sense of it? [00:00:00] S1: Yeah. My impression is that, again, because he does not have all these years of media training under his belt, and also he doesn't seem to be interested in developing that part of his brand, which I appreciate, he was the one who seemed to be, yeah, the same person while I was interviewing him that he was when he did a product review or went into some sort of meeting or was raising money or went home to his girlfriend or whatever. I think, yeah, he's the one who's kind of most plausibly the same person across the board. [00:00:00] S0: I want to go to your piece- On Josh Kushner, which before the Zuck piece was, I think, the most viewed profile so far on Colossus. [00:00:00] S1: It still is.