How Mark Zuckerberg, Palmer Luckey, Josh Kushner & Scott Wu Think | Jeremy Stern

David Senra

Jeremy Stern discusses his methodology for writing long-form profiles of tech leaders like Mark Zuckerberg, Palmer Luckey, Scott Wu, and Josh Kushner at Colossus. He explains how his journalistic approach blends literary ambition

Key takeaways

• Mark Zuckerberg views himself through the lens of Augustus Caesar, ending early Facebook meetings by shouting 'domination' and leveraging decades of unsexy infrastructure negotiations to secure Meta's AI distribution advantage.
• Palmer Luckey supported Donald Trump during a period when Silicon Valley was largely aligned against him, an act that cost him his company after Facebook acquired Oculus but demonstrated his unwavering personal integrity.

Main topics

• Long-form tech journalism methodology
• Mark Zuckerberg's leadership and AI strategy

Notable quotes

"I think, you know, one of the things that Augustus did was he took a pillage-based economy and turned it into a trade-based economy."

Conclusion

The episode offers a rare behind-the-scenes look at the methodology of elite tech journalism while revealing how deep

Transcript preview

Speaker 1 (0:02) All right, you're here because I'm a massive fan. I think you are the best in the world at what you're doing right now, which is writing these incredible long form profiles on a lot of the top investors and entrepreneurs in the world. I just finished reading the one you did on Mark Zuckerberg. I thought it was so good. I actually did an episode on it for my other podcast founders. So I want to just like jump into what it was like spending. If you just like go behind the scenes of like, okay, how long did that piece take to write? How much time did you spend with him and like his entire world? Speaker 2 (0:31) So his team reached out to me first originally, I think, toward the end of last year, which surprised me quite a bit because a couple of years ago, I wrote this profile of Palmer Luckey, who started Andral and Oculus. And in that profile, the big villain in the piece is Mark Zuckerberg. Zuckerberg had provided a comment for it, which I think eventually led to some sort of reconciliation between Palmer and Zuckerberg because, you know, after 2016, Zuckerberg had fired or... didn't block the firing of Palmer Luckey after he'd made this small contribution to a pro-Trump group. So they'd had a big falling out and that falling out had become legendary at that point in Silicon Valley. And it was a big part of this piece I'd written. So I was kind of surprised to hear from his team. that he would be interested in talking to me. So I think, you know, earlier this year, I think we were both a little bit skeptical about the idea. And we decided just to have lunch for a couple hours off the record, just to meet and say hi and say everything that was on our minds. I initially came away from it feeling a little bit pessimistic about Apice just because, you know, he's one of the most overexposed people on planet Earth. He's been under a microscope for 25 years. But eventually I did. land on, you know, a number of things that I thought really made it interesting, which is some of the stuff that we've talked about before. In a lot of ways, he's kind of the last man standing from his generation of founders. So, you know, Larry and Sergey, they eventually step away. Bezos steps away. Obviously, Bill Gates stepped away. Jobs died. Zuckerberg, in a lot of ways, is kind of, you know, the last one. He's also kind of weirdly representative of millennials as founders, because there are literally no others at his level, at his scale. I haven't looked this up, so maybe this is a bit wrong, but I think, you know, the second most valuable company started by a millennial would be Stripe, which I think is worth, I don't know, $100, $150 billion, something like that. So like one-tenth of Zuckerberg's company. So I thought maybe there was some, you know, underexplored territory there with him. And then, like with a lot of these pieces, the things that you start out being interested in, you know, they still make their way into the piece. But once you talk to someone, a kind of whole galaxy. opens up. And so I think it ended up going a lot of different directions. And over the course of about five or six months, I spoke to him. I spoke to almost 40 other people for the Speaker 1 (2:52) piece. Wait, explain that when you start to talk to somebody, you realize a whole galaxy opens up. What does that mean? Usually with these pieces, I begin with a thing that I'm interested in first Speaker 2 (3:02) before I find the right person to use as an excuse to explore Speaker 1 (3:07) the thing. Speaker 2 (3:08) You know, I think with Zuckerberg, there was still a lot of kind of rawness and open wounds from the 2016 to 2020 period where there was an enormous amount of, you know, government and other types of pressure to censor social media. Obviously, since then, there's been this huge national debate about, you know, whether social media is a good thing in the first place, whether it's extremely harmful and comparable to alcohol and cigarettes and should be regulated as such. There was a number of different themes I think I was broadly interested in before I was interested in Zuckerberg per se. But I think like, you know, with a lot of these people that I write about, there's this, you know, the old, in the Talmud, there's a rabbi who basically says, when you kill a person, you destroy a world. And I think, you know, it basically gets at the idea that every individual life contains, you know, many, many different worlds within it. And so once you spend a lot of time with someone and spend a lot of time talking to their family, their friends, their colleagues, thinking about them, reading every book that's been written about them, this entire universe of relationships and work and psychoses and successes and failures just opens up. And then it's usually not until that point that you kind of figure out what the piece is really going to be about. Speaker 1 (4:23) You said that you thought he was overexposed. I would take the opposite. I actually think he's like. We know so considering how powerful he is and what you just said, he is a singular character. I spent a few days with him and this is the conversation I had where it's just like, I said, I've read every single book on Facebook. They're fucking terrible. I've seen all your interviews. Just like what I was trying to do is like, I want to basically, you have all this stuff in your head. You know, you have a singular living experience. There's nobody your age is even remotely close to achieving what you've achieved. And yet, like, I still don't understand, like, how you think about building products, how you think about recruiting talent, how you think, essentially, how I'm only interested in, like, how you've built this phenomenal company. Nothing else. Nothing about your personal life. Nothing about the lawsuits and, you know, all the other, like, controversies. So, like, just this. And I feel like that still hasn't been done. Like, there's so much information inside of his head that. He has not let out yet. Was there, you went into this saying he's overexposed? Did you change your mind when you started spending time with him? Speaker 2 (5:25) There's partially like a difference in the way, like you and I kind of do a similar thing in terms of our work, you on the podcast side, me in prose. But I think the angle of approach that we each use is like a little bit different. So what you just described, I totally agree, is like really underexplored. And I don't think anyone's gotten out of it. And anyone who is primarily interested in that is probably like a bit disappointed by the piece about him that I wrote. Usually what I'm interested in is like who this person is and what it's like to be them and what it's like for the people in their lives to be around them. If I could like tilt the gyroscope that people have on this person's life. and their psychology by 10%, I feel like I've accomplished something. If the person is kind of culturally central and salient in an important way, which obviously Zuckerberg is, the piece opens with this interview I did with his parents. It closes with time I spent with his family and his wife. And I think those two bookends kind of explain the lens that I brought to him a bit more than trying to get into the hardcore details of the business he's built, which... Speaker 1 (6:32) I agree, it's all somewhere in his head, but he's not the best spokesman for it. Why did you choose the angle of essentially comparing him to an emperor or a Caesar? Speaker 2 (6:44) He has this longstanding interest in the Romans and in Augustus in particular. Augustus was the first emperor of Rome and turned it from a republic into an empire. I think a lot of these figures... You know, I remember at some point, Elon compared himself to Napoleon. So I think a lot of these like world straddling figures at that level, they do think in these historical parallels, but they're mostly pretty superficial. When I looked into the Zuckerberg thing, you Speaker 1 (7:15) know, this is actually at a very, very long standing interest of his going back to when he's 15, 16, 17 years old. He's making computer games. Speaker 2 (7:22) He's making computer games. He, you know, one thing I realized when talking to him is that, you know, courses he took in Latin in high school where they had to read and memorize verses from Virgil's Aeneid, he still remembers now at the age of 42 and can recite them. Augustus is like a big figure in that. Speaker 1 (7:42) One of my favorite parts of the piece was, I didn't, I don't think I remember this. At least I don't remember from any of the books I read because this was quite a while ago. But when, you know, Facebook and Google at the very beginning of early Facebook, and he would end these meetings by saying like, Carthage must be destroyed, which is also in your piece. Speaker 2 (8:00) Yeah. There's another funny thing is he used to end the meetings by shouting domination. And Sean Parker, the early president of Facebook, told him he had to stop doing it because it could be cited one day in an antitrust suit. Speaker 1 (8:13) When you ask him about Speaker 2 (8:14) it, I think, you know, he says, well, it's like a little bit overdetermined. I only took Latin because I was really bad at French. When you take Latin, of course, they make you read these things. But then kind of the more time we spent talking about it, the more animated you could see him getting about it. And, you know, just recently at their keynote, you know, he brings out his personal muse agent and he refers to it as Agrippa. The name Agrippa was one of the two key early lieutenants for Augustus, who until the end of his life, he mourned the death of. So obviously this is like a really salient thing for him. Augustus is also just a very interesting choice because he's kind of, he's the most sensible of the Roman emperors. He doesn't Speaker 1 (8:57) go into a lot of the excesses of his successors. What do you mean by excesses? Speaker 2 (9:03) You know, I think a lot of the later emperors, you know, it's like it's kind of the it's the usual, you know, succession plan problem throughout history. Like you have the one good king and then you get the sons and the sons of the sons. And then you get the friends or the advisors of the sons. And you get these egomaniacs who don't have the right political mind for empire building. They end up wasting a lot of the trust they've built with their constituencies. They don't actually have that like founder gene to be able to build a state, a standing army. a trade-based economy, all this. Augustus did have it. Zuckerberg's interpretation of what Augustus did is really interesting because when he talks about it, he says, you know, one of the things that Augustus did was he took a pillage-based economy and turned it into a trade-based economy. And he was able to kind of show, you know, Roman citizens that they didn't just have to be fighting endless civil wars decade after decade. They could actually... live and trade and work in peace, which is a pretty selective interpretation of what Augustus did because, you know, one of the ways Augustus was able to do that was by, you know, erecting a standing army, which Rome had not previously had. And, you know, also by entirely eliminating political liberty from Rome. He turned it from a republic into a system that was entirely based on the power of one man. The ways in which his own interpretation and his memory kind of colluded to give him a pretty idiosyncratic understanding of who Augustus was and what his contribution to history was, I thought was like a pretty interesting and revealing insight into maybe how Zuckerberg sees himself. Speaker 1 (10:39) I want to tell you about the presenting sponsor of this podcast, Ramp. I have been reading a lot about SpaceX lately. SpaceX is one of the most valuable businesses in the world. And one of the main themes in the history of SpaceX is constantly attacking and questioning your costs. Ramp helps many of the most innovative businesses in the world do exactly that. The median company running on Ramp. cuts their expenses by 5%. And one thing SpaceX has demonstrated is that a religious dedication to controlling costs can help actually increase revenue because you can pursue opportunities you couldn't otherwise. And we see that in the ramp data too. The median company running on ramp also grows their revenue by 16%. So when you're running your business on ramp and your competitors are not, you have a massive competitive advantage that compounds over time. Ramp is the only platform designed to make your finance team faster and happier. Many of the top founders and CEOs I know run their business on Ramp. I run my business on Ramp and you should too. Go to ramp.com to learn how they can help your business save time, save money, and grow revenue. That is ramp.com. Deal is how the best founders turn the world into their talent pool. I've been studying how history's greatest founders operate for a decade. And one thing they all have in common is they understand that recruiting and hiring the very best talent is your most important priority. A players recognize other A players, which is why top companies like Ramp, Shopify, Eleven Labs, Uber, and DoorDash all use Deal. Many of the top founders I know have personally invested in Deal after using their product. And what they discovered is that Deal is the best company in the world at building infrastructure for global hiring. Deal will help your business hire, pay, and manage any worker anywhere in the world so you can retain the best talent anywhere and spend the rest of your time focusing on what you do best, delivering value to your customers. The founder of Eleven Labs has a great description of the value Deal can give your company. He said, We built Eleven Labs to break down language and communication barriers. With Deal enabling us to hire and support exceptional talent anywhere, we can accelerate our innovation and bring more voices, stories, and ideas to every corner of the world. Deal is trusted by over 40,000 companies and growing fast. Learn how they can help your business by going to deal.com forward slash Senra. That is deal.com forward slash Senra. Senra. When you talk to either him or the people around him, do they talk about like this ruthless competitive drive of his? Speaker 2 (13:03) You know, if you were to ask a lot of these people, like, what are the two things that people still don't understand about him, even though he's been a public figure in our lives for, you know, close to a quarter century now? The two things they always say are, you know, you might think you understand how competitive and ruthless he can be in a business sense, but like, you're probably underestimating that. And then the second one is that he's actually not an asshole. He doesn't treat people badly. And he's actually like a pretty nice guy. I didn't include those quotes in the piece because, you know, a lot of members of his family and his colleagues would say things like that. Even his critics and his rivals and his enemies, who I did also interview, said a lot of the same stuff. His competitive drive can't really be underestimated. And it's also interesting that... you know, most other people who are that competitive just have this gene where they also are pretty monstrous to the people around them. One Speaker 1 (13:58) of my favorite quotes in the piece is there was a former AI researcher that used to work for Zuck and now is at a competing lab and he goes on naming the piece, but he's just like, he said exactly that. He's like, he said, Mark is the fucking Terminator. He just doesn't stop. One of his advantages is that he's always discontent. He's always unhappy, but he's not, I think he says he's not an asshole. He just keeps moving forward. And then there's another thing that Mark, I thought was interesting. It was a direct quote from Mark, if I remember correctly. And he was talking about his advantage relative to like Sam Oldman and Elon. Well, he's just like, you know, the things I do are kind of unsexy. I'm just very good at getting a team and taking something and improving it a lot over a long period of time. And then because of the structure and the business that I have, I don't have to essentially keep raising more money. And I don't really have to ask other people's permission to do what I'm doing. Speaker 2 (14:44) Yeah, that was something that I found very interesting about him and that I think I came to appreciate about him in the course of reporting the piece. I think, you know, I began it with skepticism about a lot of the products that Meta's built and feeling pretty ambivalent about the impact on society that social media has had, lots of things like that. One of the things I did come to appreciate about him is that I do kind of see him in the mold as like a classical American business mogul, as distinct from the more recent generation of like AI founders. In that quote, I think he says something to the effect of, you know, my edge in the world is sitting down with a team and methodically improving a single product over the course of decades. and building more and more value into it. And he doesn't go out and do all these big splashy things. I think one of the things I appreciated about that was, regardless of what you think about Meta and the products it makes and offers, Zuckerberg as a figure, I think is ideologically coherent and unconfused in a way that a lot of the major AI figures are not. He sees Meta as kind of a, you know, it's... it's a business like, you know, first and foremost. And I know it's like a, you know, full stack, deep technology company and all these other things. But I don't think he overestimates the impact that the business has on history. Whereas, you know, if you talk to a lot of the major AI figures, it's really hard to talk them off this cliff of thinking that their company is the last thing that will ever be built in human history. And I appreciate about Zuckerberg that he doesn't go there. Speaker 1 (16:30) Yeah, you did a great job of like, okay, because I've heard the same thing. You know, it's like, oh, like, you're so far behind in AI, they'll never catch up. Like, this is, he can't buy it. He doesn't get it. And you know, okay, well, let's just like steel man the other side where for decades, everybody says this guy's dead. He's going to fail. He just like keeps. rising, keeps walking forward, and you cannot kill him. So what is the AI equivalent of that? And I think in one part of Speaker 2 (16:55) the Speaker 1 (16:55) piece, would you want to bet against him not figuring this out? And they're like, no, no, no.