· David Senra, Jeremy Stern
[00:00:00] S0: What did you learn from her? [00:00:00] S1: She taught people have a gift. This is something I write about in the Scott Wu piece, that if people have a gift, then they have an obligation to that gift. And if they do not do everything in their power to share and exploit that gift, then they're actually sinning against themselves and against God in an important way. And I think I was very fortunate that she saw something in me, and she thought that by behaving and acting the way I did that part of my life, which involved too much drinking and too much drugs and not enough focusing on my work and my future, that I was not just being an idiot, but I was actually sinning against my own future. And- [00:00:00] S0: That's fucking incredible thing to tell a young 18, 19, 20-year-old kid with a lot of potential, though. [00:00:00] S1: It completely changed my life, and it changed how I think about other people. I've never thought about this before, but now that we're talking about it, I think it's probably why I'm interested in a lot of these people that we've been talking about during this conversation. And it's also just, it's now the lens that I can bring to the people I meet, that I become friends with, that I work with at Colossus. I would say up until that point in my life, it was the single biggest thing that anyone did for me. [00:00:00] S0: Did you keep in touch with her after college? [00:00:00] S1: I worked for a year after college, and then I joined the army, which she was very, very upset about. [00:00:00] S0: Why?
· Jeremy Stern
[00:00:00] S1: She had her own harrowing story about escaping the Soviet Union, which took decades for her to be able to do. She left just with her infant daughter, made it to America. I think in her mind is, if you are born into circumstances of safety and comfort, then it's idiotic to choose something as kind of physically risky and dangerous as joining the military. It's like throwing away the most precious thing that you could have in life. Which I think for her made a lot of sense, and for me, it didn't make sense at the time, and I was kind of searching for something else. I joined at an interesting time. It was during the late Obama administration, during sequestration, which was kind of gutted the Defense Department budget. One of the consequences of that was when I signed my contract to go to basic training, the way it ordinarily works is a couple days or a couple weeks later, they ship you off to basic training. But when I did it, there were so few slots available because so much of the funding had dried up that I had an eight-month period between when I signed the contract and when I actually went to boot camp. And for those eight months, she and I talked all the time. And she died of Lou Gehrig's disease in 2015. So I kept all of the voicemails that she left me from that period of time on my phone, and I still have them, and I've uploaded them to various cloud accounts to make sure if one of these companies implodes, then I don't end up losing any of those recordings. Yeah, we kept in touch, and I wrote her. In basic training, they take your phone away, and you can only communicate with the outside world still by writing letters by hand. And so the two people I wrote to were my girlfriend at the time, who's now my wife, and Natasha, who was the person I kept in contact with while I was there.
· David Senra, Jeremy Stern
[00:00:00] S0: I love this idea of her holding somebody accountable, that you have gifts that are bigger than yourself, and that utilizing them and expressing those gifts is... Refusing to do is sin, but it's really like a service to society and other humans in the world. But thanks for sharing that story. That was freaking incredible. One of the most incredible things. I didn't even know that about you. [00:00:00] S1: I think about it all the time, but it's been a very, very long time since I've talked about it out loud, so a lot of it was new for me, too. [00:00:00] S0: Really appreciate you taking the time to do this. You're a real soulful dude. Huge fan of your work. I hope every single person listening goes and checks out every single one of your profiles. [00:00:00] S1: Thanks, David. [00:00:00] S0: Thanks. I hope you enjoyed this episode. Please remember to subscribe wherever you're listening and leave a review, and make sure you listen to my other podcast, "Founders." For almost a decade, I've obsessively read over 400 biographies of history's greatest entrepreneurs, searching for ideas that you can use in your work. Most of the guests you hear on this show first found me through "Founders."