“My deepest insecurity is that I have these intuitions about things that I cannot explain to anyone,” Kushner told Rubin as they sat in his garden overlooking the ocean. “Sometimes I see or experience something and it makes sense to me, I fall in love, but I cannot explain why. Like when Thrive invested in Instagram or Spotify or OpenAI. I could not explain to anyone why the products made sense to me.
After pacing his patio in Livingston with a tracker strapped to his ankle, Charles eventually turned to his son and said: “In life, sometimes we get so powerful that we start to think we’re the dealers of our own fate. We are not the dealers. God is the dealer. Sometimes we have to be brought back down to earth to get perspective on what is really important.”
“By the time I was in high school, my father had accomplished a tremendous amount,” he said. “He was deeply impactful in both the business and philanthropic worlds. And then overnight our family were outcasts. The world treated us all one way for the beginning part of my childhood, and then suddenly they treated us very differently. That experience showed me how the world works, and why you should not care too much about what people think.”
there are two ways you can deal with hardship. You can either feel sorry for yourself, or you can orient towards the idea that life is a set of experiences that train you for the next one.” “I also learned so much from my father in that moment,” he added. “I am thankful for everything he has taught me, but in that very specific, difficult moment, he taught me one of the most important lessons he ever has. In life, we all make mistakes, but it is how you deal with the consequences of your mistakes that enable you to move forward. When you get knocked down you always have to get back up.
The idea of having a fund that could build companies, invest in companies, invest in them early or late, and inside or outside the US, it was just deeply unconventional. I feel really grateful that Andy saw it and understood it.”
It is why every few generations, Americans have undergone a period of near-total cultural and political collapse, only to rewire themselves as freer, more tolerant, and richer than before. The cyclical periods in which Americans trash their operative form of national memory and identity in the hope of being reborn are, historically, dangerous for Jews; they are also both the cause and symptom of new technologies, new fortunes, and new machines.
