· 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.
· Jeremy Stern, David Senra
[00:00:00] S1: It still is. [00:00:00] S0: Oh, okay. [00:00:00] S1: Which is interesting, and I never would have expected. [00:00:00] S0: Okay, interesting. Okay. What was the thing that you said before, "I'm not interested in the person first. I'm interested in the thing, and then to understand and explain the thing, I look for the person that can do that." What was that in Josh's case? [00:00:00] S1: There's a kind of specific answer here, and then there's a more kind of 50,000-foot bird's-eye view. The specific thing is that I'd just kind of been interested in the Kushners going back several years, going back even to before his older brother, Jared, was involved in the White House after Trump won in 2016. [00:00:00] S0: Wait, you were interested in Jared before he went to the White House? [00:00:00] S1: I was interested in the family as a whole. At that point, I had no idea who Josh was. I think I didn't even know that he existed. Jared, at the time, I think, was the publisher of the New York Sun or- [00:00:00] S0: The Observer or something. [00:00:00] S1: The Observer. [00:00:00] S0: Yeah.