Stuart Miller
speaker
308 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Feb 2025
last heard Feb 2025
Stuart Miller’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Appearances
Making it through that, over the course of the year, I got better at writing because of the paper a week, and I got my footing and decided I could make it. The confidence that that built, it felt formative. And then sophomore year, I read a paper by a professor, which implied that he was going to roll out this application of his political philosophy to a bunch of different domains.
And I remember sitting there thinking, oh, that's going to require a lot of work. I wonder if he needs help and if that's an opportunity to apprentice under him. His name was Ian Shapiro. And I emailed him at 11 p.m. at night and he emailed right back and said, yeah, actually, I do need people for exactly that project. And he and I grew very close over the subsequent two or three years.
And I did a ton of research and kind of learned a standard of research from him. But I think that sense of taking initiative and of being like, I wonder if you're just reading things that are in the public domain. Can you intuit what the next thing is from that?
He ended up writing a book, and I built, with my dad's help at the time, I built out a huge Lotus Notes database of all the literature around workplace democracy. And he ended up using a bunch of the things I had found there. And credited me in his book. And he became a real mentor. He's South African. He and I are still in touch.
And it was kind of an intellectual touchstone of quality that I could measure somehow.
Yeah, exactly. Like, oh, people are doing a thing at a standard I was not aware was a thing.
So he may be arguably the best at this. Yeah. It's that belief in what's possible, right? Sometimes I would interview analysts who I realized were not calibrated on what excellence was. They had been at mediocre banks and mediocre hedge funds, and they thought they knew the territory, but I was experiencing them as not. So yeah, I think it's super profound.
Yeah, yeah.
There's a great moment in an interview with, what's Serena Williams' husband's
Yeah. He talks about dating her and thinking he was kind of a tech guy in Cisco. And he thought he knew what hard work was and he thought he knew what training hard was. And so he's kind of macho about it. And then as he started to date her, he was like, oh, my God. The number of hours a day, the sheer intensity is at just a whole other level of what Serena does than what I thought was possible.
And I remember thinking, oh, he's capturing exactly that moment when you see a person do a thing, they're bringing something to it.
So Ian Shapiro, this professor, had done his PhD at Yale in the, I guess, in the 80s together with a guy named Richard Medley, who dropped out of his PhD program and went on and ended up working for Soros and being a partner at Soros, being his kind of in-house political intelligence guy. And so I remember there was this moment. I was sitting in my room senior year.
I had already selected all my classes and Ian Shapiro emailed me that there's this interesting professor, visiting professor, and I should check out his class. Actually, I gave him grief for this later. He didn't pound the table on it, but he was like, you might want to check it out. I was in my gym clothes and the class was in like an hour.
I remember thinking, okay, do I go to the gym or do I play out this option? And thank God I played out the option. I went to that class. I was like, oh, my God, this guy is in. It was a moment of ignition. This guy is in a world that is extremely interesting to me of financial markets meets politics. I didn't even know this was a thing. And it was a very small class.
And over the course of it, he offered me a job of after graduation, starting a company with him, which I ended up doing.
Larry Summers called us a private sector CIA. I felt like I'd built a business a little bit around a Tom Friedman-like character who was very good at narrating what's going on and a feel for how events might unfold. He was a really good writer. So we had, in essence, a newsletter business. At first, we tried... Different business models.
But I was out cold calling people and trying to sell them these services. And I had a... I think we were charging $400 a month. I wasn't getting any meetings. And on a lark, I decided to try saying, oh, actually, we charge $20,000 a month. And all of a sudden, I got five meetings right in a row. Because they were like... Who the hell has a... 20 grand worth of stuff involved.
And then eventually we charged even more than that. We built a big business. I remember I started to develop kind of a feel for how information leaks through a system. And I remember we were trying to track what was going on around in 97, 98, around the Russian emerging markets crisis. And...
What you're trying to do is find people that are in the rooms where stuff is going down and are willing to talk to you. It's like an intelligence operation. You're trying to figure out whether when somebody's telling you something, and they could be a journalist, they could be a professor, they could be a former central bank official, are they overstating what they know?
Are they telling you exactly what they know? Because there's an incentive to overstate it. And I realized I was good at finding people who were a credible threat at having access to an information stream that was relevant to a given thing. And in the Russian case, I found a woman who was a documentary filmmaker who just had bizarrely high signal reads of what was going down.
Showing 261–280 of 308 · page 14 of 16
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