· Jeremy Stern
[00:00:00] S1: Yeah. I thought the interest, I think the reason that I wanted to start the piece with that anecdote about him kind of asking for advice from Rick Rubin, at that point in our interviews, I hadn't really figured out yet what the piece was going to be about. By that point, I really didn't have any intention of going through the entire family history first, which I ended up doing. But he was telling me about this time that he went to go see Rubin and the kind of crisis that he felt like, the personal crisis that Josh felt like he was having and why he sought out Rick Rubin in particular. And I was trying to get him to kind of recreate that morning and the scene and where they were and what was actually bothering him and what was the question that he was hoping Rubin would answer for him. And again, I can't remember exactly what it was, but it was something like the idea of Kushner felt like he had captured magic in a bottle in some way with Thrive. He's also built companies himself, but that he was kind of on a really good run. And he went to Rubin to basically ask, "What do I do if I lose the magic?" Right? "I'm afraid that it's going to escape me one day and I'm going to be without it, and things are going to fall apart." And I thought that was really interesting, and I sympathized with it, and I kind of recognized it immediately. I know the same thought occurs to all kinds of people, but at least in my mind, it was a very specifically Holocaust family type question, where the fear of everything you've built can be taken away from you overnight, and living in constant fear, even in America, that you'll be stripped of everything that you value and that you love and you'll have to go figure it out again somewhere else. I felt like that was a kind of particularly deep and vulnerable moment that he shared with me, and then that ended up kind of determining the rest of the piece. So one thing I really appreciate about Josh, more to your question, is that I think he does recognize, even if only in some ultimate sense, that things do eventually fall apart and you have to make the most of it while you can, and you also have to do everything you can do to make yourself invulnerable while you can.
· Jeremy Stern
Whereas I think a lot of other people in the space can often give the impression of they're on a rollercoaster and they're just having as much fun as they can while they can.
· David Senra
[00:00:00] S0: You just did live what you do in your pieces. Listen to the Founders episode I just did on Mark Zuckerberg on your piece. I know it just came out today when we're recording this, so you haven't heard it yet. But I say in the episode, so we started with the Holocaust, then we went on this tangent, we started talking about it, and then you brought it right back around to the Holocaust where you forget where it started. You do this in writing that's really, really good, and you did it when you started with sitting with his parents, Zuckerberg, and then you go on a tangent, you go bring it back, and you close the loop on his parents. When he starts fighting, you forget that the scene that you laid out was, "We were fighting," and then you go into all these other details and you're fascinated. Then I was like, "Oh, shit." Then Jeremy brought us back to the fact that, no, we're in here. Why is this guy choosing to wake up every day and beat the shit out of people for two hours? It's a very fascinating thing the way you do that. I want to go back to the Rick Rubin thing because he came on this show, and what was also interesting is tied to what you and I were just talking about is like, how do people think about what they're doing? And it was like, "Oh, Rick Rubin's a producer. He's in the music business. He founded a record label." And he's like, "I just think of myself as a professional researcher. Every day I just get up and research intently about what I'm most interested in at that point. And sometimes it's music, sometimes it's podcasts, sometimes it's different people I'm talking about." He's like, "I'm just researching all day long."
· Jeremy Stern
[00:00:00] S1: That's really interesting. I sometimes think, especially the way a lot of VCs discuss it, is like one thing they look for in a founder is that the kernel of their inspiration to build their company is traceable back to some early thing in their life, or they like it when the idea for the company came as early in their life as possible. And I understand that because it suggests quite a lot of discipline and commitment to a single idea and pursuing it ruthlessly. But there's a flip side to that, which I also think is really interesting in a lot of these people that you interview and that I've interviewed, is I often like it when- A lot of these things end up just being a lot more contingent, and I think you end up with a lot more people who are not motivated primarily by money per se, and the idea of building a company or becoming an investor only actually occurred to them much later after they were just pursuing their actual interests and spending time with the people that they really liked and cared about for their entire adolescence and even part of their adult life. And ending up at building a company or becoming an investor was kind of like the logical endpoint of all these other things. But I guess it's all to say, I think there's actually value in a lot of people who come to this world a little bit later than maybe some of the Zuckerbergs of the world who had this one idea when he was very, very young and will never do anything else.
· David Senra, Jeremy Stern
[00:00:00] S0: Something just popped in my mind that I'm very personally curious about. So the same way that Josh Kushner goes to Rick Rubin for advice or counsel, whatever you want to call that, do you have anybody in your life that plays that role for you? [00:00:00] S1: When I was growing up and I was a little kid, it was my older brother, Josh. When I was in college, it was my Russian professor, whose name was Natalia Olshanskaya. I now have a one-year-old daughter who's named after her. She was the biggest person in my life, and she was this kind of very classically Soviet grandmotherly woman who was very good at pointing out all of the ways in which I was an idiot and I was making bad decisions and destroying my life and not thinking about the future and- [00:00:00] S0: Wait, how old were you when you met her? [00:00:00] S1: Eighteen years old. [00:00:00] S0: And she had such a profound impact on your life that you named your daughter after her?
· David Senra, Jeremy Stern
[00:00:00] S0: And she had such a profound impact on your life that you named your daughter after her? [00:00:00] S1: Yes. Yeah. The basic story there is I did so badly in high school Spanish that I could not place out of the freshman year language requirement that my college had. So I knew they were going to make me take a language for a year, so I just decided to pick the kind of weirdest sounding thing that I could suffer through for two semesters. So I picked Russian. It ended up completely changing my life. I fell in love with it. It was my major. I decided to spend a year and a half of my four-year college experience living and studying in Russia. And she, I spoke to, I think, every Sunday for the entire year and a half that I was there. And then she unfortunately died a few years later. But I think for that whole kind of part of my early adult life, she was definitely my Rick Rubin figure. [00:00:00] S0: What did you learn from her?