Jamison Firestone
speaker
299 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Jul 2026
last heard 9 Jul
Jamison Firestone’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Jul 2026 with 1.
Appearances
I learned to show them respect, to make them laugh, to make them think I was useless and hopeless, and to say no without being killed.
And that was a really big skill for going to Russia in the 90s.
So first of all, strangely enough, my father had forced me to study Russian in high school.
He thought that the Soviet Union would fall apart and I would go there and make money.
And I thought it was ridiculous, but he was paying the bill.
But then when I was in... I kind of forgot about Russia while I was in undergrad, but when I was in law school, it was Gorbachev and he was changing the whole world.
There was Perestroika and Glossnost and he was trying to modernize the system and make it more transparent and allow business.
And McDonald's was going over there.
And I was like...
wow.
And then I read this article by this tech investor, Esther Dyson, about her time there.
And she talked about how the most brilliant people in the country were available for like $10 a month, right?
You could hire physicists and programmers.
And I thought, I've got to be there.
How exciting.
And so I went there to take part in the Gorbachev miracle.
And of course, as soon as I got off the plane, the hardliners rolled the tanks in and tried to stop the Gorbachev miracle.
No, he lived till 91, but he died about five years back.
Did he get to see your success, I hope?
He did get to see my success.
Showing 41–60 of 299 · page 3 of 15
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