Josh Kushner
speaker
255 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Mar 2025
last heard Mar 2025
Josh Kushner’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
Trend
recordings per month · last 12 monthsNo recordings in the last 12 months.Older appearances are listed below; set an alert to hear about the next one.
Appearances
He always thought he wanted to be a doctor until he got to school and he ended up getting a summer internship at Blackstone and got exposed to the world of finance. But I think his love and appreciation for technology and software and his ability to combine those two in such an interesting way is what has made him so unique as he's built in that industry.
I think very similarly for others at the firm, their ability to understand the real world, but also kind of apply the lessons and the insights that we have around the traditional technology industry is what has made us ultimately be successful.
Firms that have independent thought, don't need validation from the outside world, are both pragmatic, but also contrarian and not distracted.
People always talk about this concept of the need for a common enemy in order to be successful. And my view has always been the way to be the best version of yourself is to only compete with yourself. And the way in which you can do that and realize your full potential is if you're entirely focused.
And I think there's something to be said for the difference between calming your mind and being distracted. I heard a great line the other day. This woman said to me, she grew up on a farm and she always said to her mother, that she was bored and her mother responded to her, well, being bored is the best way to figure out what to do. So I think there's a difference between calming your mind.
I actually think everyone who is a professional in some respects needs to take care of their mind and rest their mind. Tom Brady does physical therapy after a game, you need to erase the whiteboard. But I think the idea of being distracted by those rings, going back to the inner ring is the thing that I think needs to be avoided the most. What does the Sabbath do for you?
Every Friday night, I shut off my phone. Carly, myself, my son Levi are together. We are entirely present. I work a very intensive schedule and my wife does as well. What she does is so inspiring to me. But the ability to almost shut off the world and just be together with each other is something that we look forward to every week.
When I was in high school, I went to a concert in New York City. So I traveled in from where I grew up in a small town in Livingston, New Jersey. My mom's going to hate when she hears this story. And I was walking towards Rosen Ballroom, where the concert was, and I got held up at knife point. And the person took my tickets, and I was stunned and shocked.
And about 10 minutes later, someone came up to me and said to me, Hey, I just saw what happened from a distance. I have an extra ticket and here's that ticket. And. It was really, really, really stunning for me just to go through that experience. And about three years later, since I'm a little kid, I've always been obsessed with basketball.
I've always tried to go to the NBA draft, All-Star weekend. I love watching games. And one year someone took me to the NBA draft and I sat in my seat. And I look over to my left and the person who I had never seen since who gave me that ticket was sitting right next to me. Wow. And he was an artist. His name's Adam Port. And he actually is an artist that has...
painted pictures of famous NBA players. And he just saw me one day getting robbed and decided to do a generous thing. And I ended up sitting next to him. And I was so stunned by actually having the capacity to meet him and be able to actually thank him because That lesson for me at that moment in time was a really powerful thing. You see someone down, like do whatever you can to support them.
Through different moments of my life, I've been down and those that have bear hugged me at different moments of my life are the ones that I appreciate and love the most. He gave me his business card and it has sat on my desk for the last 10, 11 years of my life.
So I played basketball in high school and I started, I'm 6'3 now. I started my freshman year at 5'3 and I was constantly growing throughout high school. When I went to college, I played a lot of pickup in the gym. And the summer after my freshman year, I was playing with a bunch of friends and I dunked on one of them. And Patrick loves this story. My father joked with me in that moment.
He goes, I'm so glad you couldn't dunk in high school. And I said, what do you mean? That would have been amazing. I was terrible as a basketball player in high school. And he goes, well, if you would have dunked, you probably would have been a lot cooler than you were. And if you're a lot cooler than you were, you probably wouldn't have studied as much as you studied.
And if you didn't study as much as you studied, you probably wouldn't be where you are today. So I still wish I would have been able to dunk in high school.
Showing 241–255 of 255 · page 13 of 13
← Previous