· 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.
· David Senra, Jeremy Stern
[00:00:00] S0: Yeah. [00:00:00] S1: Local New York paper. But what I knew at the time was their father and grandfather had built this New Jersey real estate principality that the children were getting involved in, and the father had all of these problems with the law, and the grandparents had their lives shattered in the Holocaust and came to the United States with literally nothing. And what was kind of interesting to me about the family was, in one generation, maybe now at this point in two generations, but in a very, very short period of time, these people had their lives completely shattered. And when their grandmother, who had basically her whole family executed in the Holocaust, tries for years to get to the United States, finally makes it here, and within her lifetime, Bill Clinton and Benjamin Netanyahu are coming to her home to have dinner with her family to basically kiss the ring and ask for the favor of her son, right? And there was this element in which this family had elements of the Kennedy family story, but it was also representative of this typical Holocaust story. And I think even among harrowing Holocaust survival stories, the story of the Kushner grandparents is kind of particularly harrowing. [00:00:00] S0: There's a movie based on it, right? It was- [00:00:00] S1: "Deliverance" is the- [00:00:00] S0: "Defiance." [00:00:00] S1: "Defiance," that's what it was. Not "Deliverance." That's the movie- [00:00:00] S0: With the guy that I should know his name. He played Bond. What is his name? [00:00:00] S1: Daniel Craig. [00:00:00] S0: Thank you.
· David Senra, Jeremy Stern
[00:00:00] S0: Thank you. [00:00:00] S1: That's right. [00:00:00] S0: Yeah, they're essentially hiding in a forest.
· Jeremy Stern
[00:00:00] S1: That's right. So they're in the forest of, I think it's Belarus, what's now modern-day Belarus. And the story of "Inglourious Basterds," I think, is also partially inspired by this collective of concentration camp escapees run by this man named Tuvia Bielski, who basically, they live in the forest, and they train each other with small arms, and they conduct a lot of these kidnappings and reprisal killings of Nazi soldiers in Eastern Europe. And yeah, the Kushner grandmother was part of the Bielski partisans, which is amazing, right? So that was kind of, I'd already had this longstanding interest in the family, going back to even before I think they became nationally famous in the Trump era. I think this permeates a lot of the stuff I've written in the last couple years, but I'm also the Jewish grandson of Holocaust survivors, and the idea of American national identity, it's the thing that allows all of us to be as Irish or as Sikh or as Korean as we want to be, right? You don't have to make any sacrifices to that part of your kind of sub-national identity, so long as you still subscribe to this idea of an American supra-tribe that transcends all of the others, which is basically a belief in the Constitution and individual liberty and freedom, and the values that all Americans kind of share in common. And so this thing is not like a kind of fairytale Disneyland story to me and my family. I think it's been very important for my whole life, and I think it's been fraying at the edges now for most of my adult life, and it's kind of coming unglued, and that has worried me a lot. And so part of what I've tried to do in a lot of these pieces I've written in the last couple of years is try to kind of check in with the current state of the American dream and try to figure out how live and true is it still, regardless of its various shortcomings and flaws, which we're all very familiar with. But is it still a live animating issue in America? Or as its various critics on the right and left like to say, it was always just a failure and a lie. And again, I think mining for evidence that it is still true and alive in business and technology at this particular moment in time is very fruitful.