#238 Sriram Krishnan - Senior White House Policy Advisor for AI

Sriram Krishnan is an entrepreneur, venture capitalist, and former senior product leader at tech giants like Microsoft, Facebook, Twitter (now X), and Snap. Born in Chennai, India, he began his career at Microsoft before moving to Silicon Valley, where he contributed to product development at leading companies and later transitioned to venture capital as a General Partner at Andreessen Horowitz from 2021 to 2024, focusing on consumer and enterprise investments. In December 2024, President-elect Donald Trump appointed him as Senior Policy Advisor for Artificial Intelligence at the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, tasked with advancing U. S. dominance in AI amid global competition. Krishnan co-hosted "The Aarthi and Sriram Show" podcast with his wife Aarthi Ramamurthy, interviewing tech leaders and exploring innovation topics. A prolific writer and speaker, he advocates for immigration reform to attract global talent, ethical AI development, and bridging technology with policy to foster economic growth. Shawn Ryan Show Sponsors: https://betterhelp.com/srs This episode is sponsored. Give online therapy a try at betterhelp.com/srs and get on your way to being your best self. https://bruntworkwear.com – USE CODE SRS https://calderalab.com/srs Use code SRS for 20% off your first order. https://meetfabric.com/shawn https://shawnlikesgold.com https://helixsleep.com/srs https://www.hulu.com/welcome https://ketone.com/srs Visit https://ketone.com/srs for 30% OFF your subscription order. https://moinkbox.com/srs https://patriotmobile.com/srs https://rocketmoney.com/srs https://ROKA.com – USE CODE SRS https://ziprecruiter.com/srs Sriram Krishnan Links: X personal - https://x.com/sriramk X official - https://x.com/skrishnan47 Website - https://sriramk.com Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Speaker 00

  Mr. President, my company told me of the explosion on our rig.

• 0:03Speaker 01

  On October 2nd.

• 0:04Speaker 00

  Causing massive water displacement and triggering a tsunami. They all heap the blame on me.

• 0:09Speaker 01

  Tom Cruise is.

• 0:10Speaker 02

  Digger got us into this mess, and Digger's gonna dig us up.

• 0:14Speaker 01

  From the director of Birdman and The Revenant.

• 0:16Speaker 03

  What would happen if I stopped doing it? You're stalled, you're freezing there, that's what.

• 0:20Speaker 01

  With great power comes great deniability.

• 0:24Speaker 03

  I'm not the first then.

• 0:25Speaker 01

  Digger. See the trailer online. Only in theaters October 2nd. Rated R. Under 17. Not admitted without parent.

• 0:30Speaker 04

  Espolone Tequila. Balanced. Delicious. 100% acave. 0% ego. Just add ice, lime, and your mouth. For real margarita. Ride the rooster.

• 0:40Speaker 05

  Espolone Tequila. 40% alcohol by volume. 80% proof. Copyright 2026. Compendia America, New York, New York. Drink responsibly.

• 0:50Shawn Ryan?

  Shri Ram Krishnan. Am I saying that right? Perfect. Nailed it, Sean. Perfect. I'm sorry. But, um, man, we've become, we've become friends over the, the course of the year and, and, man, I've just been super excited to get you in here. I didn't think it was gonna happen until, to be honest, until the next election, because I know you're so busy with all the AI stuff within the White House. So I just want to say, man, it is, it is an honor to have you here. I've been looking forward to talking to you on the show about all the stuff that you're doing with the AI race with China and just AI in general. Lots of questions throughout the country and lots of fear, lots of excitement. Uh, a mixed bag of emotions here, but, um, but,

• 1:35Shawn Ryan?

  like I said, I'm just, I am really excited and I love your backstory. You know, we were talking at breakfast about the American dream and you came here from India and, and, and have been a part of many empires and, and, and you just, you've done. Really well for yourself and your family. And and that's what I love to to showcase here is the American dream. And you are very much a big part of that, of what that represents. And and all things are possible in this country. So, thank you.

• 2:04Speaker 07

  Man, uh, well, thank you. And thank you, Sean. I mean, it's an honor. It's an honor for me to be here. And I've watched you for, I think, over a year and a half, you know, when we first met up. And I've just been blown away by just, you know, the stories, you know. Uh, we both talked about it at breakfast, so many amazing people, men and women, who've just done some amazing things for this country. And I just kind of love this space and the environment you have created. So the honor is mine. I'm nervous. I'm intimidated to kind of be in this room, which is kind of one of the probably one of the badass, most patriotic rooms I've ever been in, by the way. Uh, no, but thank you. I'm super excited.

• 2:43Shawn Ryan?

  Thank you. Well, if it helps, I'm I'm also nervous. I get nervous for every one of these things.

• 2:49Speaker 07

  Especially wearing a jacket, I feel so bad because I I gotta I I gotta wear this. I gotta wear a suit, uh, because it's part of the job. It's part of the office, right? Like, uh, and I'm like, man, I'm gonna go to Shandown and look like a dork out there in a suit, right? Like, I appreciate you, like, uh, you know, wearing the jacket.

• 3:08Shawn Ryan?

  Thank you. Thank you. But, uh, everybody starts off with an introduction here. So here we go. Sri Ram Krishnan, appointed by President Trump, you are the Senior White House Policy Advisor for Artificial Intelligence. You're a leader in Silicon Valley with a with product leadership career spanning Microsoft, Facebook, and Twitter, helping shape everything from Windows Azure to Facebook's Audience Network and Twitter's Home Timeline. In 2021, you joined Andreessen Horowitz as a General Partner, opening the firm's first international office in London, focused on investing in AI and crypto.

• 3:48Shawn Ryan?

  You grew up with humble beginnings in Chennai, India, where your love for technology began when you convinced your father to buy you a computer. With no internet access, you taught yourself to code from books. When a Microsoft executive in India discovered one of your blog posts, you were invited to interview, an opportunity that marked the beginning of an exciting professional journey in the United States. You also co-hosted the Arthi and Sriram Show with your wife. The show grew from a clubhouse talk show into a widely downloaded top tech app and top tech and business podcast. Today at the White House, you are a key architect in America's AI action plan,

• 4:30Shawn Ryan?

  leading efforts to extend the US's global dominance in AI. You have also participated in high-level diplomatic efforts, including AI delegations to Paris and the Middle East, advocating for the global usage of US AI tech stack. Most importantly, you're a family man. You've been together with your wife for 22 years, and you even hosted a podcast together. And you're a huge pro wrestling fan. So we'll get into all that. But, but like I said, I want to do, I want to do your backstory. You're coming to the US, how you got into the tech, which we just covered a little bit. But, and then everything you're doing now with AI.

• 5:14Shawn Ryan?

  So like I said, a lot of excitement, a lot of fear, a lot of mixed emotions about it. So it's going to be an amazing interview. Thank you, and thank you for that. That was super kind of you. Thank you. Oh, my pleasure, my pleasure. So we got a couple of things to crank out here real quick. All right. One of them is I have a Patreon community and it's a subscription network, but they've been with me actually before I even started the podcast. Then when I did the podcast, started it in my attic. And now here we are in a brand new studio. And so one of the things that, that I offer them to do is I offer them the opportunity to ask each and every guest a question. So this is from Andre.

• 5:59Shawn Ryan?

  What emerging technology or trend do you believe will have the most transformative impact on society in the next five to 10 years? And how can policymakers and innovators collaborate to maximize its benefits while addressing potential risks?

• 6:16Speaker 07

  Well, thanks, Andre. I think, you know, sort of the obvious answer for me is all things AI and artificial intelligence.

• 6:26Speaker 07

  I think if you look at the last 60 to 80 years, there has been a few huge technology trends. In the 60s and 70s, the first microprocessor was invented in Silicon Valley. And the transistor, the microprocessor, which kind of powered Intel, the Moore's Law, and things which power every single phone, every single laptop. Then in the 90s, you had the internet, starting with dial-up internet, you know, using the phone line, which is kind of how I started. People of our age group probably started. And then, of course, you know, you don't talk of logging off anymore. The internet is just everywhere. So I think that was transformational for society in some good, really good ways,

• 7:10Speaker 07

  and some maybe questionable bad ways. Then you had the mobile phone happen in, I'm guessing, say, 2008, when the iPhone came out, and everything, just people just moving everything onto their phone. But I don't think AI now is the next big platform. And we are in the early days of it, right? Like, I would say the AI revolution, you know, we can go back to the history, if we can get into that, but I think it really started with the launch of ChatGPT about two and a half years ago, where it sparked, captured people's imagination. And now we're just starting to see, wow, like, what can we do when this thing is advancing so quickly? So I think AI is the game in town that I think is most important. I think crypto is also really interesting, but I really spend a lot of my time thinking on AI.

• 7:54Speaker 07

  And I think my job and working with others in the administration is to harness it for the American people. Like, how do we make sure that it makes every individual's lives better, whether it's like... You know, dad, you know, trying to make sure they provide for the family, somebody trying to teach their kids, whatever it is, you want to make sure it makes their lives better. The same time, you know, we're also in this very intense race with China on all things AI, which we can get into in detail. So I think the way I see my job is, one, we need to win the AI race with China. I think the consequences are catastrophic if we don't.

• 8:37Speaker 07

  And second, equally important, is making sure like AI benefits every single American, like every single person watching this. Andre, who asked the question, my hope is, you know, when my time demonstration is done, they are like, okay, AI is helping me in my life just a little bit. That's the goal anyway.

• 8:54Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah, you know, I feel like with AI, this is, this is, I mean, we were talking about it at breakfast, but, you know, you had mentioned this, like when the automobile was invented. I feel like this is, this is a moment in humanity, like when the wheel was invented. Everything's going to change. You know what I love about our conversation at breakfast and what I love about you is, you know, you understand the importance to win the AI race against China, but you also understand the balance that needs to happen within, you know, within not just the US but within the world and, and there is a lot of fear of AI is going to take all of our jobs.

• 9:32Shawn Ryan?

  AI is going to, you know, crush everything and, and you are the guy that has to navigate through all of that and make sure benefits American citizens and humanity as a whole, while simultaneously winning the race against China, which is, is no easy task because China plays by damn near zero rules. And so it's going to be a fascinating discussion.

• 9:57Speaker 07

  Yes, it is. It's super fun.

• 9:59Shawn Ryan?

  But got a couple gifts for you.

• 10:01Speaker 07

  Oh, wow. Okay.

• 10:02Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah. One.

• 10:04Speaker 07

  This is the part I was looking forward to the most. I have no shame. I want the gifts.

• 10:09Speaker 07

  There we go.

• 10:10Shawn Ryan?

  Those are Vigilance League gummy bears made here in the USA, legal in all 50 states, no THC or anything like that in there.

• 10:18Speaker 07

  Can I eat them?

• 10:19Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 10:19Speaker 07

  Let's do it.

• 10:24Shawn Ryan?

  Dying to know what you think here.

• 10:27Speaker 07

  Okay.

• 10:28Shawn Ryan?

  One out of five, five being the best.

• 10:30Speaker 07

  Um, I'm gonna say five.

• 10:31Shawn Ryan?

  Nice.

• 10:33Speaker 07

  Wow.

• 10:33Shawn Ryan?

  Good answer, good answer. And I got you another gift.

• 10:38Speaker 07

  Oh, man.

• 10:39Shawn Ryan?

  So. I think you're really gonna like this one.

• 10:42Speaker 07

  Okay, wow.

• 10:44Shawn Ryan?

  Here you go. So I got a friend over at Sig Sauer. Do you know what Sig Sauer is? His name's Jason. I told him you were coming on.

• 10:52Speaker 07

  Hmm.

• 10:53Shawn Ryan?

  He's trying to figure out AI. So he's really looking forward to this episode, but he wanted me to give you this.

• 10:59Speaker 07

  Wow. But hold on. How do I get this open? Here we go. Oh, my goodness. Okay, what am I, tell me, explain this to me.

• 11:08Shawn Ryan?

  All right, so that is the, you wanna hold it up?

• 11:11Speaker 07

  Yeah.

• 11:11Shawn Ryan?

  It's unloaded. I'm gonna teach you how to use that.

• 11:13Speaker 07

  Yeah.

• 11:14Shawn Ryan?

  Maybe you can teach me some AI stuff and I'll teach you how to shoot.

• 11:17Speaker 07

  Yeah.

• 11:18Shawn Ryan?

  But, um, so that is the Sig Sauer 211 GTO 9mm.

• 11:23Speaker 07

  Mm-hmm.

• 11:24Shawn Ryan?

  It's got 21 rounds in the magazine, plus one in the pipe, so 22 round capacity. It's got that, see those slits in the front?

• 11:32Speaker 07

  Yeah.

• 11:33Shawn Ryan?

  So that is to help with, uh, with recoil management, so it's gonna keep your gun down when you shoot. It'll minimize recoil a little bit, keep your gun a little bit flatter. They're redoing their whole optics line. That's their latest red dot, so.

• 11:47Speaker 07

  Wow.

• 11:47Shawn Ryan?

  Using a red dot makes shooting a lot easier to hit the target. And, um, so in the gun industry, there's this rage about these 2011 pistols. Everybody wants a 2011 pistol and.

• 11:59Speaker 07

  Mm-hmm.

• 12:00Shawn Ryan?

  Sig was, Sig was, I don't wanna say late to the game, but everybody's been really excited about what they're gonna release in the 2011 series. And, uh, and so that is their, their first model.

• 12:12Speaker 07

  This is gorgeous.

• 12:13Shawn Ryan?

  Came out.

• 12:13Speaker 07

  Well, I'm gonna ask you a favor. And, uh, after we're done, you gotta, you know, show me some ropes and how to use this properly.

• 12:19Shawn Ryan?

  Hey, I would love to do it.

• 12:21Speaker 07

  Do this. You know, you know, one of the things is a federal, this is gorgeous, so thank him, um, for me. This is gorgeous. And, uh, you know, as a federal employee, you know, you gotta declare like every single gift you get. And this is gonna be, I think, probably the most interesting declaration for sure. Uh, you know, when I file in the paper, but no, this is, uh, gorgeous, so thank you. And you're gonna teach me how to use this.

• 12:41Shawn Ryan?

  I will. We'll do it on a break.

• 12:43Speaker 07

  There we go. All right, now, before, well, before we. Now, I have a gift for you. I love gifts. And, um, thank you, just keep it right here. Now, outside of, I would say, technology, I would say the one of the most important things in my life is professional wrestling. I got hooked to it as a young kid, started watching it. I think it was my introduction to America. It was my introduction to sort of sports and entertainment. It's been a huge part of my life, so.

• 13:22Speaker 07

  I got you. Oh, let me get this out of here.

• 13:26Speaker 07

  This guy. No way. Here, hold on. Okay. So this is a WWE title belt. It's not just any WWE title belt. You know, fans, you know, who are watching this will know this is known as the Winged Eagle WWE Championship Belt, because, or back to WWE. So in the 90s, right, like they had, like WWE has had, WWE back then has had many, many championship title belts. But connoisseurs or fans might say, and there may be some controversy on this, the best one of all time was this guy, right here, right?

• 14:08Speaker 07

  It has been held by greats like Bret the Headman Hart, who is my favorite guy, uh, growing up, uh, The Undertaker, Shawn Michaels, a lot of greats. They actually had a comeback where Cody Rhodes wore it recently. It was a core, core part of my childhood. I had it on t-shirts, everything else. And this guy, particularly the one I'm holding in my hand, when my wife and I had this podcast for the last four years under this job, if you watch episodes, you'll see a title behind me on the shelf. And, uh, so I grabbed that. That's it? Oh, yeah. Oh, man. So, uh, you know, this is like some classic pro wrestling history, like right here. Oh, man, I love this. There you go.

• 14:51Speaker 00

  Wow, thank you. That is amazing.

• 14:56Shawn Ryan?

  So that'll be displayed to the studio from here till, till it's over.

• 15:00Speaker 07

  Yeah, well, Sean, Sean's title reign starts right now. Did you, did you watch wrestling much as a kid now?

• 15:07Shawn Ryan?

  I watched, actually I watched it in the 90s.

• 15:10Speaker 07

  Okay, who was your favorite?

• 15:13Shawn Ryan?

  Who's my favorite? I don't know, it was probably, I went back and forth, but I really liked Hulk Hogan and the Ultimate Warrior.

• 15:19Speaker 07

  Hmm. Oh, R and B, Hulk Hogan, Terry Bollier.

• 15:23Shawn Ryan?

  Rick Blair, Shawn Michaels, Jake the Snake, all of them.

• 15:27Speaker 07

  What is your favorite match that you remember?

• 15:30Shawn Ryan?

  You know what I always liked was the, uh, the Survivor Series cage matches.

• 15:35Speaker 07

  Yes, yes. Uh, which one? Do you remember, like, for example, like, well, there was the SummerSlam one between Bret and his brother Owen, but which, which one?

• 15:44Shawn Ryan?

  I don't remember exactly which one, but those were always my favorite when it, when it, when it, when they would all show up.

• 15:50Speaker 07

  Yeah, like, I think when I was a kid, I loved those. And I don't know what I was watching, it was like, you know, these larger than life characters. You had Hulk Hogan, Eat your vitamins, say your prayers, train every day, uh, you know, the, the red and yellow coming out. There, my guy was Bret Hart. So Bret Hart, uh, do you know Bret?

• 16:08Shawn Ryan?

  Oh, yeah.

• 16:09Speaker 07

  Yeah, Bret the Hitman Hart, uh, he, I would say if you ask people for the Mount Rushmore of professional wrestling, Bret will always be in there. Um, he was one of the most technically savvy wrestlers of all time. Fantastic at, uh, telling stories, uh, with his body and in the ring. Even if you watch his matches now, it is just incredibly crisp and smooth. And, uh, I know we're talking breakfast, you mentioned Stone Cold, you know, uh, Steve Austin. Brett was involved in maybe one of the most important matches of Stone Cold's career, right? Like the, the I quit, uh, WrestleMania match. Uh, have you, have you seen this?

• 16:53Shawn Ryan?

  No.

• 16:54Speaker 07

  Oh, okay. So this is great, right? Like, so, um, so I'm, I forget which year, I'm going to say 96, but I may be off, but, so. Do you know what a heel and a face is in pro wrestling?

• 17:06Shawn Ryan?

  Hmm hmm.

• 17:07Speaker 07

  Okay, so in professional, okay, in professional wrestling, right? Uh, by the way, folks, spoiler, it's not real, it's scripted. Um, and it's kayfabe, as they would say. Uh, kayfabe is sort of the reality inside professional wrestling. And inside kayfabe, a face or a baby face is the good guy. And a heel is the bad guy, right? Like, so Hulk Hogan, right, for years was always the face, the red and yellow, right? He slams, slams Andre, right? Like, you know, he was the face. Um, and then the heel would be the bad guy. And the heels would do evil, conniving things, you know? Uh, they would, you know, do a low blow or throw something in your eye. Or, you know, it's one of those things where they kind of cheat to it.

• 17:52Speaker 07

  Those are the bad guys. And in the nineties, what was happening was the WWE was kind of going, maybe along with pop culture, was going through the shift where often sometimes the bad guys would start to get cheered a little bit more. There were these anti-authority figures and, you know, you know, uh, and the good guys, what people would call the classic, uh, white meat baby face, right? Like, you know, we're not getting enough cheers. And so in ninety six, you know, Brett, um, you know, was, I, I think, was the, I'm not sure whether he was the champion at this match, but Brett was a good guy. He was a face, he was one of the lead faces at the time. And Stone Cold Steve Austin was kind of coming up then was a heel. He was a bad guy.

• 18:34Speaker 07

  And they kind of set out this match, it's called the, you know, the I quit match. And the idea behind this was that, you know, uh, the only way for you to win is the other guy has to say, I quit. No tapouts, no counter, you gotta say, I quit. And I think the match was in Chicago, it's WrestleMania, but WrestleMania is sort of WWE's, you know, big extravaganza. It's like the Super Bowl, it's a big event, there's been, I think, forty one, um, so far. And so they have this guest referee, Ken Shamrock, who's from, I think, a mixed martial arts background back then. So, and Brett and Steve had this amazing idea, right? So. What happens is they fight all over the ring, all over the crowd.

• 19:18Speaker 07

  It's bloody, you know, Steve Austin, you know, he starts bleeding, cut open the hard way. It got juice, as the wrestlers would say. And at the end, you know, Brett had his finishing move, the sharpshooter, right? And, you know, and the sharpshooter, once you're in the sharpshooter, when I was a kid, right? Like, even though you had this thing where they do not try this at home, right? Like, when my cousins were over, like, I'm putting them in the sharpshooter. Kids, don't try this at home. And, but at the end of the match, you know, you know, and Steve's in this bloody mess. Brett puts him in the sharpshooter, right? And, you know, and there's this iconic image of Steve just yelling out in pain, blood in his face. But he's not saying, I quit. He's not saying, I submit.

• 20:03Speaker 07

  And Ken Shamrock, you know, it's like, do you quit, Steve? And he's like, no, right? And after like minutes of Steve in agony, he refuses to quit and he passes out, right? And, you know, and, you know, and they end the match there. So, so that match was crucial for both their careers. Because it's one of the rare matches where they did what was known as a double turn. So a turn in pro wrestling is when a good guy becomes a bad guy, right? Like a face becomes a heel or vice versa. And in this match, because Brett would not let go of the hold, right? And, and he would then push Shamrock. He kind of became a bad guy. At the same time, because Steve did not give up. He was bleeding, he was in pain. He never said, I quit, right?

• 20:48Speaker 07

  He became a good guy and it launched Steve's career. So that is sort of one of the, even people ask you for their like top five matches in history. Like, that's, that's like one of the top ones. So anyway, so Brett, so that's a great part of WWE history right there.

• 21:01Shawn Ryan?

  Man, thank you. This is, this is a, totally unexpected. This is awesome.

• 21:06Speaker 07

  I was excited, I was excited for this. You know, wrestling has been like a big, big part of my life. I've learned so much from it. You know, I've learned storytelling. I've learned, you know, what connects to audiences. Because a lot of people think about it and they go. Oh, it's just like grown men and spandex, like throwing each other around, right? Or they say what you did, which is I used to watch it as a kid. Mm hmm. And I used to watch it, it's great. You watch it, it's super fun. I'm trying to getting my kids to watch it. It's great. It's spectacle. Good guys, bad guys, they're larger than life, they're huge, they're characters. But as I got older, right, I saw the sophistication and the art form, right? Like, because number one, it requires serious athletic ability.

• 21:51Speaker 07

  Mm hmm. Like, these guys and and women, you know, are incredibly athletic. They're taking real risks, right? Like, when they jump, you know, you know, off the uh off the corner and onto a table. Well, that's a real table, that's a real corner, and people have hurt themselves and, you know, some really bad thing happens. So they're taking real risks, right? And then they're trying to tell a story, right? And instead of a story which is through CGI and dialogue, right? It is a story they're telling with their bodies, with some, you know, promos and dialogue, but also with the audience together. Okay, so wrestling only works because the audience is in there with you.

• 22:32Speaker 07

  And often, the greatest wrestlers know to change what they're doing to get a different reaction. Or sometimes change something what they're doing uh on the fly because of the audience. And there's a famous example of this. Um, you know who The Rock is, obviously. Oh, yeah. Okay, so, uh, by the way, I don't know what we're talking about here, but we want to get into wrestling first, okay? And uh, so uh, but one of the greatest WrestleMania matches of all time was in WrestleMania seventeen in Toronto. And The Rock is a good guy, and Hulk Hogan, uh, and The Rock's a young guy, I think it was maybe late twenties or thirties. He's kind of the peak of his young career, he's a great guy, and uh Hulk Hogan had come back as a bad guy. And I think Hulk Hogan was maybe in his late forties. He's kind of in the slightly the tail end of his career, right?

• 23:16Speaker 07

  Like, he was not the red and yellow. And this is WrestleMania, right? And, you know, you you should watch it on YouTube. They come to the middle of the ring, they look at each other, and, you know, it's like light bulbs going off everywhere. Like hundred thousand people flashing and, you know, and this. Around, look at the audience and people like, oh my god. You get Hulk Hogan, one of the greats, the greatest of all time, slammed Andre the Giant. And then you have the people shamp, you know, The Rock, like. And so what happens, remember, The Rock went in as the good guy. Hogan is the bad guy. Within the first thirty seconds, right? It becomes very clear that the crowd doesn't care who the good guy or the bad guy is.

• 23:58Speaker 07

  They wanna cheer Hulk, they wanna cheer Hogan, they wanna cheer their childhood hero, right? And one of the amazing things which happens is in the first thirty seconds to a minute, The Rock does good guy moves. A good guy is supposed to do a work in a certain way, right? You do legitimate moves, you don't cheat, etc. The bad guy works in a particular way. But these guys, without even talking to each other, they realize, oh wow, like, this is something different. And they call an audible. And they, without even talking to each other, they say, we're gonna flip the story, right? And for the rest of the match, The Rock, right, acts physically as the bad guy. And if you watch it, you can see that happen, right?

• 24:38Speaker 07

  And there is this amazing moment, uh, which happens where, uh, like about near the end of the match, The Rock hits Hogan with his finisher, uh, you know, the rock bottom, and Hogan kicks out. And he hulks up, he's like, and he's sucking in the Hulkamaniacs, sucking in the energy. And, and people like connected to their childhood. I remember watching, I was connected to my childhood, right? People like, oh my god, Hulk man, no, The Rock eventually, you know, winds up, uh, uh, winning. But it is one of those amazing moments, I was watching it recently because obviously tragically Hogan passed away, uh, recently. So I went back and watched a lot of these old matches. And it's one of those amazing things where you're like hundred thousand people, right? Feeling something together, two iconic superstars, right?

• 25:23Speaker 07

  Like knowing how to navigate them. And in the fly, without even talking to each other, redoing the storytelling and creating, you know, something which any wrestling fan would tell you, if you're watching that, and if you don't have goosebumps, like, you know, something's wrong with you, right? And, uh, so anyway, so I'm a big fan of wrestling, I still watch it now. I'm fortunate to become friendly with some of the people who do it for a living, I have a lot of respect. I learn a lot from it.

• 25:50Shawn Ryan?

  Interesting, interesting. You know, we have a saying here, it, uh, it has, or as the whole team, we, we compare US politics to professional wrestling.

• 26:00Speaker 07

  So. That is true. Do you see any, uh, do you see any similarities? Absolutely. Um, first of all, the, the person I work for, the person in the United States is in the WWE Hall of Fame. Okay, so let's just start there. Uh, and I think that, you know, a lot of people in politics and other parts of the world, other domains learn from pro wrestling. For example, right? Uh, you know what cutting a promo is? No. Okay, so cutting a promo is, uh, when, let us say you and I, I'm a good guy, you're a bad guy, and we have this big match coming up this weekend, right? And we want to get everyone to buy it. Back in the day, you would pay sixty bucks, get it on pay-per-view, you know, these days you probably subscribe on Netflix or something.

• 26:44Speaker 07

  A promo is us trying to hype up the match. And you'd be like, I'd be like, Sean, I respect you for everything you've done, but this Sunday, you're going down, right? Like, or something like that. That was a bad promo, right? Like, don't judge me. And, but you kind of build up to it. And you, you basically, you know, put over, the other person, put over, meaning, you make sure the other person looks a legitimate threat, because nobody wants to see you fight someone who's not a legitimate threat. So you've got to put over the other person, right? And then at the same time, you're trying to build interest, you know, um, for this match, right? And I think, you know, if you look at a lot of people in politics, they have learned from that, like, and even outside politics.

• 27:23Speaker 07

  For example, Floyd Mayweather, uh, Money Mayweather, um, he took a lot of how we constructed the TMT, the Money character, from pro wrestling, right? Conor McGregor. Exactly, right? The, uh, the walk, the whole thing, right? Like, a lot from pro wrestling, kind of, because people want to be invested. They want to see the story, you know, they want to be invested in you, right? They want to see you kick someone's ass, or see your ass get kicked because, you know, you're the jerk, whatever. But ultimately, you're trying to get people to invest in the story, and I guess, you know, uh, watch the fight. And I think some of the best people to do it,

• 28:01Speaker 07

  find a way to do it where you're like, man, I'm going to watch history, and I got to watch it. So, and maybe we'll stop at this, you know, uh, People ask me, you know, what if I'm going new to pro wrestling, right? Okay, you're gonna teach me how to use a six R. I'm gonna get you back into pro wrestling. Right on. And the the match, I'm gonna have two matches I'm gonna have you watch. And these are from two thousand nine and two thousand ten, okay? And they're Shawn Michaels and The Undertaker. Okay, two matches in a row. So the quick story there is that Shawn Michaels and The Undertaker, I'm sure you know who they are, you've seen them growing up. Oh, yeah. Right? Now, The Undertaker had what was called the streak.

• 28:41Speaker 07

  And the streak was this was the sequence of matches at every WrestleMania that he had won. He was the only person, and at the time, I think he had won maybe eleven or twelve years in a row. Imagine one football team winning every Super Bowl for eleven years in a row. He eventually wanted to get the streak broken, I think at eighteen years, but at the time, the streak was this magical thing, you know? It's like, next person up, who's gonna take him down? You know, he doesn't get taken down. Shawn Michaels, right, like, you know, Mr. WrestleMania, right? Like, he was somebody who's iconic, went up against The Undertaker. So WrestleMania twenty five, right, I think this was two thousand nine, they have this epic contest, right? Just epic contest, one of the greatest matches of all time, right?

• 29:26Speaker 07

  You watch it, right, you know, it's just a storytelling they do. Hundred thousand people again invested, you know, I get goosebumps just talking about it, right? Now, amazing match. Now, what happens after that? Shawn Michaels, basically the character, goes crazy. He's like, I came so close and I couldn't get it done. And so he challenges The Undertaker again for a rematch at the next year's WrestleMania, a year later. And Taker says, no. And Shawn just does a lot of these things to get him to say yes. And so he goes on and Taker says, okay, fine, I'm gonna give you a rematch, but it's not gonna be any match. You know, if you win, you're gonna break the streak. Nobody has ever done this before. But if I win. You're gonna end your career, okay?

• 30:12Speaker 07

  So now you can think of this as a wrestling storyline, right? It's like two people in a room wrote it up. On the other hand, it is real because we grew up with watching Taker win every match for through our childhood. It is a part of my story growing up, right? It is part of history. At the same time, we grew up with Shawn Michaels, right? Like I loved Shawn Michaels, I hated Shawn Michaels, I loved Shawn Michaels again. So you knew when you watch that WrestleMania, something beautiful, which was real, was going to end that evening, right? When somebody counted one, two, three. And anyway, so you should watch it. At the end of the match, you know, it is huge and emotional.

• 30:55Speaker 07

  And Shawn is beaten down and Taker tells him, you gotta stay it on, man. Like you be, I'm just, you know, it's too much, you gotta stay on. And Shawn gives him this throat slash gesture, which basically says like,

• 31:09Speaker 07

  you gotta put me down, otherwise I'm gonna keep coming back. And then Taker does this big move, wins. And then there is a sense of sadness there. Because you know, you're like, wow, this amazing match ended, but Shawn's career did really end. He retired after that match. And it was one of those sort of this epic mythological feelings, like these two amazing gladiators who had never been beaten. So anyway, so when I tell people to watch wrestling, like, you know, you should watch that, you should watch Rock vs. Hogan, it'll make you feel something.

• 31:42Shawn Ryan?

  I will, I will.

• 31:46Shawn Ryan?

  Incredible. Let's move into your story.

• 31:49Speaker 07

  Yeah.

• 31:50Shawn Ryan?

  You ready?

• 31:50Speaker 07

  Mm-hmm.

• 31:51Shawn Ryan?

  All right, where did you grow up?

• 31:53Speaker 07

  I grew up in India, in a city called Chennai. It was called Madras when I grew up. India has four major cities, Delhi, Mumbai, Kolkata and Chennai. And we are in the south. And you know, what I would call, what Indians would call like a lower middle class, middle class upbringing. My mom stayed at home, you know, took care of the kids. She was very focused on family, very religious in a lot of ways. Very focused on just raising us in sort of the proper way with. Lot of right values. My dad kind of had the same job for forty years.

• 32:37Speaker 07

  He worked in this this nationalized company. And we were one of those people where, you know, I think my dad, when you're a kid growing up, you don't really think about how your parents are acting towards you. It's just like the way they are. But looking back now, and especially, you know, we're just kind of talking about sort of our parenting journey in a way. I see how much they gave me in so many ways. So my dad, you know, we never had like real money of any kind. But he always made sure that, you know, we were comfortable. And that, you know, we never felt like, you know, we we were left out.

• 33:20Speaker 07

  But I now know, just knowing some of the numbers, like, that must have not been super easy. I also really respect now because I took for granted then, you know, he he passed away. He died in two thousand and six. But he was just there all the time, you know. Took me to school like every single day. Came back from work, a long day of work, hung out with us every single day. And back then, you know, you're just like that, just the way things you you when you're a kid, you're five, seven, eight, you're like that's all everyone else. But now I know how fortunate I was to kind of have that stable grounding experience. And my mom was just sort of this huge source of strength, you know. She was taking care of us without a lot of resources.

• 34:06Speaker 07

  And, you know, she was incredibly focused on my education. Because when she grew up, you know, they didn't have any access to books or, you know, they had really struggled economically. And she was like, I'm just gonna make sure you had a good education. And she would save up money and, you know, I used to get really into reading a lot. And she would make sure I could always buy things. And again, at the time, I didn't really appreciate all the sacrifices they were going through to make that happen for me.

• 34:38Speaker 07

  But I'm just very, very grateful for the experience I had because I think like that grounded me, taught me, you know, what being a great parent who's dependable, who's always there, you know, looks like. And I've been so much more fortunate in so many ways. But but yeah, that was a, I'd say I had a pretty great childhood.

• 34:58Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah, you know, I watch your socials and I mean, it's just, it's really, it's nice to see somebody in the position that you're in that is so focused on family. See all the stuff that you're posting with your kids and your wife and, and you take your family time very seriously. But, um, and I commend you for that. I think that, I think you're a very positive example of what it means to be a husband and a father and a family man. And, um, you know, what, one thing I would like to talk about with you is, you know, this, I mean, you're raising your kids here in the United States. You've done very well for yourself. And that is a, I probably shouldn't assume anything, but I think that looks very different to,

• 35:41Shawn Ryan?

  than how you grew up in India. So could, could you go into, you know, some of the differences or what, what your childhood was like growing up in India?

• 35:51Speaker 07

  Uh, well, very obviously I've just been very fortunate here and you know, I think, you know, my kids are very young. So, uh, uh, I think this very, very different childhood from what I had. But let's see. So, you know, um, we, uh, you know, we, we, we, what India has this term, which I don't think is as popular in the United States called middle class. And, you know, in my family, education was a huge priority. Uh, you know, they kind of, I think my family kind of pinned all their hopes and dreams on me in a lot of ways. They were really focused on education and it was very high pressure. Uh, i- i- i- if you didn't do well academically, you know, you were really going to struggle, or at least that was what I thought.

• 36:35Speaker 07

  No, I don't think this is actually true. And I've seen a lot of folks kind of, you know, have great successful careers and whatnot. But that was what I was told, like this is the way out. And when I was 18 or 19, you know, I convinced my dad to buy me a computer. Um, uh, one of these old, again, dating myself here, uh, a Pentium three box. Like, you know, back when like, you know, a CPU was one of these big beige boxes that showed up and you stuck it on a table. And it was a big deal for him. Uh, I recently disconnected with somebody who knew him at the time and it cost him like, like a year's paycheck or something. Wow. This is a big deal, right? Uh, and uh, again, my kids, I'm like, you guys have it so easy, right?

• 37:20Speaker 07

  Like, you know, but you know, it was a big deal for him and I begged and pleaded for a long time. No, again, he, he was a lot of great things. He was a rebel in a lot of ways. Uh, I get some attitudes from him, but he didn't really understand technology. It was like, he was not of that generation, right? He, he just didn't understand computers, but so he kind of, but he took a bet, you know? He spent this, you know, serious amount of money, you know, on me. And then I, uh, even though he didn't know what I was going to do with it, uh, and then I convinced him to get dial-up internet, uh, which was kind of a big deal. Uh, and I would say like my whole story exists because of that and America. Because like, you know, well, and I guess pro wrestling because that's kind of how I grew up. Like really, you know, understanding America in so many ways.

• 38:04Speaker 07

  But, you know, I grew up, you know, I would spend every single night, uh, learning computer, the computer and learning to write code. Uh, and way back then, it was a bit hard to kind of get, you know, you can get online and you run up the phone bill. There's a concept which kids these days don't know, which is you log off the internet. Do you remember that when you used to log off? I do remember. Yeah, do you, do you, do you used to like run up the phone bill back home? Oh, yeah.

• 38:31Speaker 07

  Yeah. And people like, Sean, get off the PC, you know, we have to make a phone call, right? Like, oh, you're like, you're doing, you, you have a big download and then somebody picks up the phone. Anyway, so a kid these days, uh, but, uh, uh, yeah, but I would, I would have to do it late at night because that is when the internet would be faster. Because during the day, other people would be using these phone lines that would be slower. And I would get, uh, you know, all these kind of, you know, coding guides. Uh, I would get all these used books on writing code. And at the time I was a bit lost, I would say, uh, in what I wanted to do with my life, you know, how I fit in, uh, I wasn't very social, uh, and I was kind of lost. But then I realized that.

• 39:13Speaker 07

  This code was something that brought me joy. And one of the things I think people who don't do computer science don't understand is the deep joy of creating something on your computer with computer science code, right? Because the computer is unforgiving. You have to figure out a way to get it to understand you. You have to solve mental intellectual problems. You never get it right in the beginning, but AI is now helping with that, which we can get to later. And it is an intellectual exercise. And and once you get it working, it's just amazing, right? You just feel so good because you've created something and no one can take that away from you. So I was just doing this every single night.

• 39:55Speaker 07

  I would stay up from like ten P M. till four A M. You know, and then go late to school the next day. I would just be writing code online. And this is where I think two amazing, amazing things, you know, want to happening. One is my now wife, Arthi. You know, she was very similar to me because, you know, she came from, you know, she was kind of one of the first people in her family to go to school in another city. She was one of the first people to be kind of good with computers. And and she was in a different city and she was learning how to write code herself. Now, at the time, I'd kind of built a little bit of a reputation myself in my town as the computer science guy. I'd written some piece of code. Do you know what a virtual machine is?

• 40:40Speaker 07

  A virtual machine? Yeah. No. Okay, so a little nerdery here, you know, if you're going to nerd out for a bit. So people usually write, manipulate computers using programming languages. You might have heard of that, right? And but, you know, but one of the things people figured out is if you directly have a programming language access the computer, it might be unsafe or, you know, or it might be sort of hard to manipulate in lots of ways. So they came as ideas virtual machine, which is a computer that runs inside a computer. Okay, and the reason you do it is you're not giving it access to all of it. It's a sandbox, okay, which runs in a computer, but you can.

• 41:23Speaker 07

  And run any sort of code on it. You can write a game, you can write all these amazing things on it. Now it's some very sophisticated piece of technology because you've got to be really fast. Because you've got to run it like a computer. Um, you know, you've got to know all the things a computer does. And you've got to make sure it doesn't sort of break out of the sandbox and then does maybe evil things on the actual. Computer underneath and for a lot of reasons, you know, um, I got really into building. Virtual machines and how they work and how to make them fast, how to make them. Um, you know, performant and all these kinds of things. And I kind of had a little bit of a reputation like. Think of it like, you know, like, think of the guy, you know, in your high school who can maybe dunk or athletic and, you know. You know, the schools are on him. I was kind of like that guy.

• 42:05Speaker 07

  And so the wife and I, you know, we started chatting online because somebody had introduced us, say, hey, you guys are these two. Nerdy computer science kids who seem to know how to do stuff with computers and can you help me? And at the time, I didn't even know. She was a girl. I didn't know what her age was, but she was like, I was just this friend who has similar interests to me. So we would chat every single night. We would stay up night chatting and then after six months, you know, she's asking me, hey, you know, like, who are you? I'm chatting with you. Who are you? And I'm like, oh, I live in the city, which is kind of nearby. And then we wound up meeting a few months after that. Uh, first time we met, um, and uh, we've been together ever since, uh, that this was for the last twenty three years now. Twenty three years. Yes.

• 42:49Speaker 07

  Twenty three years. When did you get married? We got married in twenty ten and uh, but we, we, we met each other in two thousand two, started dating in two thousand five, two thousand six. Then in twenty ten, our parents were like, you folks are both crazy. You'll never find anyone better than each other. You know, you've got to get married and, you know, got married in twenty ten, you know, have two kids, the whole thing. So, yeah, so. So I'm always have to say the best thing computers have brought me is Arthi because without that, you know, I wouldn't have her. I wouldn't, you know, and none of this would be possible. The second thing which wound up happening, um, is that I was writing all this code. And at the time, you know, there was a Microsoft executive who was touring. India and they wanted some student who could do the some of the things.

• 43:33Speaker 07

  Things I was doing and somebody had written seen something I'd written online. And I get this cold email saying, hey, uh, you know, do you want to come out and do this little uh sort of event for us? Because they wanted a student to come do a demo with this kind of this big shot exec. And at the time, you know, I couldn't really like speak English. I was kind of living in my bedroom, doing these things on my computer. And this is like, this is amazing. So I remember I got on my very first plane ride ever. I'd never been on a plane before and my first fancy hotel room and we were like, I'm guessing, what's up? Maybe twenty at the time. It's like crazy, like in this fancy hotel room, my mics are paying for it.

• 44:15Speaker 07

  Uh, it went early on and this executive, you know, who's now retired, but it was amazing was like, you kids, he met me and my now wife. I think it was like, you kids should work at Microsoft. I was like, sir, uh, we would love to, you know, but we're here, we don't even know how to find you. So, you know, he, he, long story short, you know, you know, he said, you know, um, let's find a way to get you in. Because he was kind of impressed by all the things I was doing. And it was very connected to some of the things Microsoft was also working on at the time, like cloud computing. So he was like, hey, there's this kid who's doing these things that we're also working on. Let's just find a way to connect the dots. And uh, so a year later, um, uh, they flew me to Seattle. Uh, Redmond, uh, where Microsoft is off and I remember flying in, you know, and Seattle is a beautiful place.

• 45:00Speaker 07

  You know, uh, the Pacific Northwest is beautiful and I just fell in love. I was like, man, this is all I want to do. I've grown up, you know, watching Hulk Hogan, watching The Rock, watching Star Trek, watching these movies and I'm now here. And even though I couldn't really speak English very well, even though I didn't really fit in very well. I was like, computers I can do and let me figure this out. So that sort of, you know, started my whole journey. So I think without sort of the, my parents, sort of the environment I had, without like my dad spending, taking this bet on me. You know, he was not sure what a teenager, teenage son's on the internet late at night, right? He was like, I don't know what's happening there in the closed door. Like, I don't know, right? Like, you know, uh, uh, it, uh, so, uh. He's like, the door is closed.

• 45:46Speaker 07

  Yeah, but they took a bet on me. And one of the things you realize as you get older is how fortunate you are, right? Like, so without my parents, you know, being so focused on me and making sure I had a better life than they had, giving me these opportunities, without, you know, these people who just saw me and they were like, hey, I see something in this kid, let's take a bet on him. And I would say mostly, I would say this country, right? You know, every single thing I have professionally, my wife has, has been possible because of America. We live in Seattle, in San Francisco, now live in Washington DC, right?

• 46:29Speaker 07

  Like, so I'm so grateful for all these things and I've just been very fortunate, right? Like, I've been in the right time, right place, and I've been very, very fortunate.

• 46:39Shawn Ryan?

  Yes, yes, yes, you have. And wildly, both you and your wife are the wildly successful. Are your parents still alive?

• 46:47Speaker 07

  No, my, you know, my father died in two thousand six and not, and my mom died three years ago. And I had sort of, I think, you know, one of the things you don't realize, so two thousand six, I was, what, twenty or twenty-three when my dad passed away. It's sort of a big regret in a way, because I never got to show him some of the success I wound up having later. Like, I think, you know, a lot of ways, you want to show your parents that, oh, my gosh, mom, dad, like, look what I've made of myself. Look what I've become. And at the time, I had just gotten this job and he knew it was a big deal because it was, you know,

• 47:29Speaker 07

  I was doing these cool things and I was in the newspapers and whatnot. But I never kind of got to show him, you know, that, man, like, you know, all the investments that you made in me, right? Like, you know, look, I've done something with that, right? I also, I kind of missed out on having an adult relationship with him, which I think is quite important.

• 47:53Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 47:53Speaker 07

  Right? I do think, you know, I grew up in my twenties with my dad. So, and I always look, you know, a lot of people don't have parents at all, or, you know, they didn't have the benefit of the childhood I had. But I sort of feel like I missed out because I never, I was a kid growing up. I had, you knew your dad in that facility, but I'm saddened to me that he never saw me, you know. You know, have my career, that's why I get married, have my kids. So I never had a sort of an adult relationship with him. I never, I never got a chance to provide for him. You know, I would have loved, so he, uh, he was a rebel, by the way, so he, uh, back in the community I grew up in, right? It was very community oriented, et cetera. But you're kind of supposed to stick to your lane, right? You, but he was a bit of a rebel. He was like, I want to be a writer. Uh, I want to write my own books.

• 48:38Speaker 07

  Uh, he wrote, he, he was kind of, he, he had all these creative ideas. I, I, I think if he was just, if he didn't alive five years later, he would have self-published on the internet. And, you know, probably, you know, yeah, you know, being on YouTube comments with conspiracy theories. Uh, uh, he was that person, uh, but he missed out, right? And, uh, but I think I have some of that nature in me to be like, to speak out. So one of the things he really taught me, uh, is that, you know, a lot of people would be like, you know, if you see something wrong, you mind your own business. But if he saw something wrong in our community, he'd be the first person to go speak up and try and help one. And as a kid, you're like, man, like, I don't want to get into trouble. Like, what is this? Like, I don't want to keep my head down, but he was always good at that. So I miss him. I feel sad that I didn't get the chance to kind of show him everything and maybe provide for him.

• 49:23Speaker 07

  My mom, you know, um, you know, she passed me three years ago, but, you know, I'm very fortunate. And she got to kind of see my family, you know, she built a very close relationship with my wife, you know, my first, uh, my first kid and yeah.

• 49:36Shawn Ryan?

  What would you, I mean, what would you say to your dad if he was here today?

• 49:42Speaker 07

  Man.

• 49:50Speaker 07

  Think about this.

• 49:58Speaker 07

  That I somehow made something of myself? I don't know if I'll say it or show it to him, but you know, uh, like a lot of parents, you know, he had, he was very proud of me, but you know, we, we sometimes we would have friction and he'd be like, and I just want to show him that in the very imperfect way I am now, you know, I've sort of made something of myself, right? And a lot of it, thanks to him and. A lot of the bets he took and you know, my hope is that you know, somehow, some way he knows that. But you know, that's the one thing I always feel like I never got a chance, you know? You wanna, you know, you wanna buy your parents cool stuff and you make some money, right? Like, you know, I think people ask me, you know, what is it when you ever make some money, right?

• 50:42Speaker 07

  And I think one of the best things to, you know, is to go buy your parents something ridiculous that they will never buy for themselves. Right? And I got used to my mom, by the way, so and I would never do that to my dad. So I always feel like, you know, but I think the deeper notion would be to be like, hey, it kind of worked out. You know, I made something of myself and thank you. What about you? Like, you know, how do you feel about your relations with your parents and how it is at all over time?

• 51:11Shawn Ryan?

  I think, you know, I think, I think me and you share a very similar sentiment and I just always wanted to prove to my parents that I could be something and do good for the world. And it's something that I took on at the age of eighteen when I, when I joined the SEAL teams. I mean, that's, that's really what pulled me through, you know? Yes, I wanted to go to war. I wanted to fight for the country in the, in the highest capacity possible and be the best that I could be. Cause I, I was, I was a failure up to then. And I didn't make good grades. I wasn't very athletic. I didn't really have much going for me.

• 51:50Shawn Ryan?

  And so, you know, what really pulled me through all that training and got me in was I, I had a horrible fear of telling my dad that I failed again. And, and so that stuck with me at eighteen and buds, that's what got me through. That's what got me into the agency, you know, was I wanted to, I, I just, I just always wanted my parents to know, you know? They did a good job.

• 52:17Speaker 07

  Yes.

• 52:17Shawn Ryan?

  That, that I could make something of myself regardless of, you know, how my childhood went. And my parents are still alive and, and we're, we have a very, very close relationship.

• 52:27Speaker 07

  How did your parents react when you first signed up?

• 52:31Speaker 00

  Mr. President, my company told me of the explosion on our rig.

• 52:34Speaker 01

  On October 2nd.

• 52:35Speaker 00

  Causing massive water displacement and triggering a tsunami. They all heap the blame on me.

• 52:40Speaker 01

  Tom Cruise is.

• 52:41Speaker 02

  Digger got us into this mess, and Digger's gonna dig us up.

• 52:45Speaker 01

  From the director of Birdman and the Revenant.

• 52:47Speaker 03

  What would happen if I stopped drilling? You're stalled, you're freezing there, that's what.

• 52:51Speaker 01

  With great power comes great deniability.

• 52:55Speaker 03

  I'm not the first daddy.

• 52:56Speaker 01

  Digger. See the trailer online, only in theaters October 2nd. Rated R, under 17, not admitted without parent.

• 53:02Shawn Ryan?

  Well.

• 53:04Speaker 07

  What was that conversation like?

• 53:05Shawn Ryan?

  That conversation went, uh, when it came out, like I said, I didn't make good grades, and I had a lot of potential. I was a smart kid. I was really good at math. And, um, but I didn't apply myself because I wasn't interested. And it came out, uh, one day. He was really frustrated. I'd just gotten a report card or midterms or something, and it was not good. And, uh.

• 53:33Speaker 07

  I know that feeling.

• 53:34Shawn Ryan?

  C was probably the best grade. And, uh, he said, um, it was an argument, and he'd said, "I'm not, I'm not gonna pay for your college. I'm not gonna do it."

• 53:45Speaker 07

  Yeah.

• 53:46Shawn Ryan?

  He's like, "You're not gonna apply for yourself." And I said, "I don't give a shit if you pay for my college or not, because I'm not going to college. I'm gonna become a Navy SEAL." And at that moment, the whole, everything changed. And, uh, he, you know, he, I mean, I think he thought I was full of shit because I didn't follow through on anything that I'd said that I was gonna do. And, uh, he had asked me, you know, "How serious are you about it?" And I told him, I said, "Yeah, I've had multiple meetings with the recruiters already. I've already talked about it. I wanna sign." Uh, I was only 16 or 17 at the time.

• 54:22Speaker 07

  And why did you want to be a SEAL?

• 54:26Shawn Ryan?

  I don't know, you know, I just always grew up playing G I Joes, watching G I Joe.

• 54:30Speaker 07

  Yes.

• 54:31Shawn Ryan?

  I mean, your thing was professional wrestling.

• 54:33Speaker 07

  G I Joe, actually, G I Joe equally. I'm trying to get my kids into it right now. We have a do you, do you have a, sorry, do you, do you have, what is your favorite G I Joe toy growing up?

• 54:41Shawn Ryan?

  Oof, Snake Eyes.

• 54:43Speaker 07

  Perfect, man, badass ninja.

• 54:44Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 54:44Speaker 07

  Snake Eyes versus Storm Shadow, right? Like, and the, and the rich kids would have the Skys, the Sky Striker jet plane. Oh man, yeah, sorry, yes.

• 54:53Shawn Ryan?

  But, um, but that's what got me. I think that, so I was always, you know, and, and, uh, early on in my, uh, in my younger years, fourth grade, my dad took a job as a pharmacist in the, in the army. And we went to Germany and that's when Desert Storm was kicking off. So I was always, anytime we were at the bookstore, I was always grabbing all the magazines and books about what was going on over there. And I would just look at the pictures of tanks and helicopters and planes and, and, and, and, and military warfighters. And, uh, I was always out in the woods, building forts, carving spears, doing all, making bow and arrows and shit like that. And, and, um, so

• 55:35Shawn Ryan?

  that just, that just always got me really interested in, in, originally in my military career, I just, I didn't really care. I just wanted to go fight in a war somewhere. So I wanted to be a Marine. Wanted to be, then I, I started looking into that, found Force Reconnaissance, talked to the Marine Corps at the recruiting station. They laughed me out of the office because I was about a hundred pounds soaking wet. Went to the army, wanted to be a Ranger or a Green Beret. Same deal, laughed me out of the office. And the Navy recruiter sticked his head out and said, hey, you want to be a SEAL? And I didn't even know what a SEAL was. And, uh, because I was also very into all the Vietnam Generation movies, like Apocalypse Now, Platoon.

• 56:18Speaker 07

  Yeah.

• 56:18Shawn Ryan?

  All that kind of stuff. And so they gave me a pamphlet on being a SEAL and I read it and went to the library, checked out a bunch of books, started watching movies and I was like, that's it. That's what I want to do. And, um, and, and.

• 56:35Shawn Ryan?

  Luckily wound up making it through and followed through and that took me into the CIA and had an awesome career there and and um and then somehow I wound up podcasting.

• 56:47Speaker 07

  Man, uh, well, well, thank you for everything you've done, but I'm so fascinated with just how you signed up because I'm very curious about why people pick the carriers they do. Uh, especially for something like that because when you're, how old were you when you signed up?

• 57:01Shawn Ryan?

  Seventeen.

• 57:02Speaker 07

  Right, so super young, you don't really have a sense of the world, maybe, but maybe you did because you were in, uh, you kind of been around the environment a little bit. Like, I'm curious about, like, what is it that makes someone, like, be like, all right, I'm gonna do this, I'm gonna serve my country, I'm gonna put myself in harm's way, right? What do you think is some of the general motivations are when people go like, I'm gonna go sign?

• 57:24Shawn Ryan?

  I mean, I think it's always different, especially in the SEAL teams. I mean, I, I was one of the, maybe, no, I wasn't the youngest, I was maybe the second youngest guy in my BUDs class. And, you know, when you go to BUDs, you have all these, you have guys that are coming in from other special operations units that had already been to war and, uh, they're just, they're trying to, to operate at the highest level as they possibly can, you know, and, and what they think they want to do. And so you've got eighteen-year-olds up to thirty-year-olds, you know, that are trying out to become a SEAL. And, you know, for me, I ca- I can't say that I was overly patriotic. Um, nine eleven didn't happen until

• 58:09Shawn Ryan?

  I was already, uh, it happened to like, right after boot camp, so I was already in. But even when nine eleven happened, I mean, I knew we were going to war, but I didn't, I didn't understand what that meant. So, like I kind of said at the beginning, for me, it was, I mean, that's just what I wanted to do. It wasn't necessarily just for the country, it was what I wanted to do. I wanted to experience.

• 58:39Shawn Ryan?

  I just wanted to experience that, you know, at the, at the highest level. And then on top of that, even more than my own desires, I just wanted to make my parents and, and, uh, and particularly my dad proud because my, my brother and sister were good students, good at athletics, better than everything that I was doing. And, uh, and, and I could see that. I could see the interest in, especially in my brother. My brother was a really good ball player, baseball. And I could see my dad gravitating towards, you know, what my brother and sister were doing. And kind of like, well, Sean's just the fuck up of the family.

• 59:19Shawn Ryan?

  And, uh, in, in, I knew I needed to, you know, for my own mental health, change that to, to, I just wanted my dad to be proud of me.

• 59:28Speaker 07

  Was there a moment through your career serving or elsewhere, you're like, man, this is the moment I know my parents are proud of me?

• 59:37Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah. After hell week, after hell week. Do you know what hell week is? Okay. Yeah.

• 59:43Speaker 07

  But thanks a lot, by the way, to your show and hearing people talk about it on your show too.

• 59:47Shawn Ryan?

  Oh, cool. Cool. But, um, but yeah, that was, that was the moment, you know? That was the first moment that I was, that I felt like, man, even though I'm only four weeks in to a, over a, you know, two-year process, I was like, that's the biggest hurdle. You know, and so, um, that was, uh, my dad was my first phone call and I said, Dad, I'm, you know, I made it through the rest. It's gonna get easier from here. It didn't get easier, but, um, but that was the big hurdle and, uh, it felt really good. And then graduating BUDS, getting into the SEAL team, first combat deployment.

• 1:00:27Shawn Ryan?

  Finally, you know, getting into, uh, contracting at CIA. I mean, it just, it just, that would, it's, it's always in the back of my head, even still today, you know, with the interviews that I do. I take, I take this very seriously and I've made a lot of mistakes, uh, in the podcast world. But in general, you know, I just, I just wanna.

• 1:00:52Shawn Ryan?

  I have an ability to get stories out, you know, and make people comfortable during these interviews. And, you know, it's, it's, it's, it feels really good to be able to take somebody, you know, like I was telling you at breakfast, to take somebody that nobody's ever heard of, who's starting a business, who's been through struggles, and get them in here and get them vulnerable, especially with some of the special operations guys that have, that have, you know, there's a cost that comes to doing that job, both mentally and physically. And, and there's a culture within that. And, you know, the culture within the SEAL teams and the special operations, and even

• 1:01:34Shawn Ryan?

  just the military community in general, is not one that's widely accepted by civilians. I mean, there's a lot of, there's a lot of drinking, debauchery, womanizing, fighting, bar fights, I mean, and, and, now I can't even remember where I'm going with this, but, but to get somebody, yeah, to get somebody vulnerable to talk about what that's like and, and suicide attempts and stuff after, and, and a lot of these guys, you know, they, they get out, they don't have a voice, they aren't able to document what happened over there, and, and to showcase all of that, you know, what their career was like, what

• 1:02:16Shawn Ryan?

  it was like getting out, the suicide attempts, the drug addictions, the, the womanizing, the, the, the infidelity, and to have somebody come on here and talk about all that, and how they got out of it, you know, because a lot of veterans feel trapped, it's, it's, they don't fit in with regular society, you know, and, and, and regular society is fascinated in the lives of, of what me and my, you know, former colleagues used to do, and so to open that up, you know, it's, it's like, it's like giving the American, not even just the American, the world, I mean, it's a huge podcast now, people all over the world listen

• 1:02:58Shawn Ryan?

  to, to be able to get a peek behind that curtain on what that life actually is like from, from somebody that's lived it, is awesome. And then the audience gets attracted to, they, they, they're invested, I mean, they, they, we go from childhood all the way to current day. And to give somebody a glimpse into what that journey looks like is, I mean, before this podcast was, it was unheard of. You know, you didn't get that deep. And so when the audience gets invested into a story like that, these guys that are, you know, I think a really good way out of that downward spiral after military service and

• 1:03:42Shawn Ryan?

  after warfighting is entrepreneurship is a great segue out because we talked about purpose, right? It breakfasted today and how people need a purpose, whether they were a factory worker or, you know, auto mechanic or whatever. And we were talking about AI taking jobs. I mean, for military guys, I think entrepreneurship is, gives you, for anybody, I think it's a, it's a enormous amount of purpose. And that, and, and guys coming out of the military and women, I mean, they have, especially in the special ops community, or people that are wanting to be the best at what they can be, what they

• 1:04:23Shawn Ryan?

  do. I mean, they're gonna, they're gonna implement that in whatever they do, but they don't necessarily get the, get the, get the traction, the exposure that they need to, to create a successful business journey as an entrepreneur. And we've had time and time again, we've had guys in that, that, that they didn't have the exposure, but I could see the drive, you know, and, and I could just see him in the hamster wheel, like not getting any traction. So be able to bring them in, tell a life story, get the audience invested in their story and who they are as a person. It just, you know, some of these stories are so wild and, and, and real that they don't care what your business

• 1:05:07Shawn Ryan?

  is. They just want to see you as a human succeed for all the sacrifices that you've made in the country. And it brings other veterans hope and It really brings anybody hope. It's like, man, if this guy's dealing with this shit, then maybe I can. Maybe I can push through what I'm going through. And uh, and we're able to turn a lot of startup businesses into multimillion dollar businesses really overnight. And uh, and that's, that's what I love to do more than anything and or take somebody like you. I mean, you have a huge name in the tech world, very connected, you're very successful, but I don't, I think there's still a lot of people that don't

• 1:05:48Shawn Ryan?

  know who you are, who you are as a person, all your accomplishments, where you came from in India, in a middle class, in a middle class family in India. I think a middle class family in India looks a lot different than a middle class family here in the United States. You know, and, and so to, so to be able to bring somebody on like you, who

• 1:06:14Shawn Ryan?

  I wouldn't say you came from nothing, but very little. And to be able to come to the United States and build what you've built, you know, the life for you and your wife and your kids, I mean, that is going to bring some, at least one person that's watching this hope, you know, and, and because we live in this, you know, we live in this society where it's become very popular to victimize yourself and make excuses on why you're not finding success and it's always somebody else's fucking fault. Right? And, and, but you control, I'm a huge believer in you control your own destiny and when you find what you, what your gifts are, what you're good at, what you're interested in.

• 1:06:58Shawn Ryan?

  I don't believe there are limits, you know, and I think, yes, there are limits, like, I'm not going to be a professional wrestler, you know, I'm a We'll, we'll get you working. Don't, don't cut yourself short. Sorry. But, but you know, I'm a buck eighty, it's just not going to work, but I find the things that I'm interested at, that I'm good at. And I, I don't think there are limitations. I think the sky is the limit and you can probably go higher than that and, and you are a perfect example of that. Thank you. That if, if you have the drive and the work ethic and you don't spend your time looking for excuses on why you're not successful, you will rise to the top. And, and, and, and stories like yours are

• 1:07:44Shawn Ryan?

  Or Palmer's, or the Veterans, or Blondesdale, or a lot of the people that I've brought on, a lot of these guys, you know, they didn't, they didn't come from generational wealth. They built something out of damn near nothing and, and

• 1:07:57Speaker 07

  That's how I'm gonna go right there.

• 1:07:59Shawn Ryan?

  That's it. That's it. And that's why I do it. And, and, um, so, long circle back.

• 1:08:07Speaker 07

  I, I just wanna say, um, well, thank you, but, um, you know, one of the, I don't know how much people can see just the room we are in, but before we started, you kind of gave me a tour. And this is a powerful space because every object here kind of has some meaning. And so many of them, uh, you know, are from people with just these insane, amazing stories, you know, often people who have sacrificed so much, uh, for the country. And this is so powerful. Uh, and I think one of the things that you've just done so amazingly well, and I'm not saying this kind of blow hard out of your behind, is create a space where people can share things. I think we were talking at breakfast about your episode

• 1:08:49Speaker 07

  with one of your closest friends. And one of the things I loved about that was that just seeing him, seeing somebody, you know, who's just, you know, such a great sort of masculine figure, but at the same time, you know, opening up about some of his struggles, you know, dealing with the family, dealing with sort of all the things that he had to overcome. And also in the business world, I was very interested when he talked about how he was navigating the, the business world, right? And, uh, um, you know, and I think, so you just created just this amazing space and platform, uh, for people to part of. So, well, thank you for that. I think what you've just done is just amazing.

• 1:09:32Shawn Ryan?

  Well, thank you for saying that. But let's get back to your story.

• 1:09:36Speaker 07

  Hmm.

• 1:09:36Shawn Ryan?

  So you go to Seattle and you start working for Microsoft. What did you think of the United States?

• 1:09:42Speaker 07

  Oh man, dream come true. Right, like you grew up a lot of places around the world and you know, you watch this on movies. You know, I grew up on G I Joe, by the way, like, you know, I have a whole big collection. I grew up on Top Gun, Independence Day, you know, Rambo, Rocky, all the classics. So, you know, and uh, so you watching it on TV, you have an idea. Uh, I think the word American dream gets thrown around. Thank you for that. I had, I didn't know of any of that. I just was like, this is a place where I can do something with my skillset.

• 1:10:21Speaker 07

  And one of the ways I can maybe make this useful is a lot of times people ask me, what is my advice for young people? People in their early twenties and I remember when I first got to Seattle uh, and Redmond, I was just so lost. Uh, I didn't have a driver's license. I had never seen snow before and it was snowing. And my now wife and I, we were like, oh my God, like we had to walk a mile to the grocery store in the snow. And you didn't have an SSN for a while, which was, you know, because you had to figure out your paperwork. Uh, uh, and uh, and uh, and we were just felt so lost. We didn't, we didn't know a lot of people there. But uh, I, when I walked inside a Microsoft building, right?

• 1:11:02Speaker 07

  And I would see these computers with coding windows, I felt incredibly comfortable. Because I knew, you know, that I was very, very good at. Um, and I knew on that, there was anybody in the building, I could go toe to toe with them. So, and I think that sense of mastery is very important, right? Maybe whether that might have been my arrogance, maybe I wasn't like that good. But um, if you are, you know, if you're kind of lost and you know, one of the things I tell people is find a way to become a master of one tiny niche thing.

• 1:11:40Speaker 07

  So for example, when I was there, uh, we had this sort of this big presentation we had to do for Bill Gates, another senior exec who were kind of running the show uh at the time, Bill Gates, Steve Ballmer and this guy Ray Ozzy. And uh, you know, and one of the things I did was like, I became the guy who for the thing I was working on, the voice of the customer. What I would do is I would go look at every single internet complaint. Every single, I would call up customers. I'd be like, hey, this is someone from Microsoft. They'd be like, why are you calling me? And I'd be like, hey, I just want to know what you guys think. And I was not supposed to do that. I was on the engineering side.

• 1:12:25Speaker 07

  And the reason I tell the story is because over a few months, because I had the technical background and I was building some of these products, but I was also talking to customers on this very niche thing. I became like the worldwide foremost expert on that thing, right? How people were using it. What were they doing? What are the issues they were running into? And by the way, it's a tiny thing. Nobody else. Because I was a master because nobody else cared enough to make themselves a master. But the reason it was great for me was when I would walk into a meeting and I'd be with people who are much older. Okay, now they're younger than me. So at least when you're in your early twenties, you know, somebody was like forty years old. You're like, oh my God, that guy's ancient.

• 1:13:07Speaker 07

  Uh, and like, I know, so you know, now I'm older, but but and and I had an accent. Right? I look different. I'm weirdly tall, as you know. But when it came to this topic, which is about this kind of this kind of programming we could do. That was like, I'm the expert, right? And even if the others didn't know it, I knew it. Because I'd spent every day, every night for months and months, and nobody could take that away from me. So when you have these huge meetings, I once had to make this presentation to Steve Ballmer uh and these execs, you know. I was comfortable because I had done all the work and I was.

• 1:13:50Speaker 07

  An expert, right? And so Microsoft is very intimidating because it had all these legendary people, some of these real icons. But I, when I built a sort of sense of mastery, I found my way to comfort. So I always talk about it and talk to young people. But even people are trying to to break into the technology industry, which is, you know, the technology industry can seem bizarre. It has all these crazy, larger-than-life personalities, right? Like Elon, Palmer, et cetera. But if you can make yourself and everybody can make themselves the absolute expert in one area, right? You're going to feel so good, right? And it's going to start opening doors. And so that was a big part.

• 1:14:33Speaker 07

  The second thing was, I think a lot of people took a bet on me there, and I'm very grateful. Like, so. One of the things I absolutely underline is I am the result of so many things going my way. And so many people taking a chance on me when they did not need to, okay? I would, and let me name a couple of people. And so this is going to get very nerdy and technical, so sorry about that. But, you know, one of the things Microsoft had a lot of were these amazing technical geniuses who were really good at one thing.

• 1:15:12Speaker 07

  And one of, you know, the most iconic people was a guy named Dave Cutler. And Dave Cutler, you know, is probably known as probably the greatest programmer of the 20th century, the greatest one or two, okay? In fact, Lee Palmer, you know, will tell you, you know, how much he admires Dave Cutler. And the reason he's known as the greatest programmer of the 20th century is he basically built the version of Windows in the 90s that became really popular. And he's a personality, okay? Ben I showed up, he was in his late 60s, he's now in his 80s. He was known for being incredibly rude and mean to people. There are legendary stories of him punching holes in walls,

• 1:15:54Speaker 07

  of throwing people out of his office. He was not a person who suffered fools gladly, okay? But this guy had an insane work ethic. He had more money than God, but he would show up to work every single day. You know, at age, must have been late 60s now, then, now he's in his 80s. And then write code, okay? So I remember, you know, and I was like, man, I used to idle worship this guy, right? And computer science people, they still idle worship. I need to find a way to impress this guy. And I don't know how, I was terrified, right? And so what I would do is, you know, he would show up on weekends. I remember him once showing up on December twenty sixth and working, right? Which not a lot of people do.

• 1:16:37Speaker 07

  And so I would start showing up on weekends and just see him the holidays, et cetera. And then after a while, this young punk is here. And then after like six months, I found an error in his code. This scared the shit out of me because like he was, he's basically like royalty when it comes to programming. Like, you know, I think, you know, I don't know, you're going up against Michael Jordan and you're saying, hey, by the way, you know, your jumper shooting form, I found an, I found an error, right? Or Steph Curry, you know, that three pointer, like I saw something last night, like I think you can fix. So this is on that level.

• 1:17:16Speaker 07

  So I was terrified, but I sort of went into his office and I was like, and he was like, sir, I have this thing and I have this thing. And he goes, uh, and he looks at his computer. I'm like, man, this is the end of my career. And he was known for firing people too, by the way, the end of my career right there. And he was like, you know what? You're right. And I was like, okay. Then I ran out of the office.

• 1:17:40Speaker 07

  And but, you know, the thing about him was he was so intellectually honest. So he took my fix. He made this buck fix in his code. And then he kind of slightly, you know, him and others took me under their wing a little bit. There are others, a guy named Barry Bond, who was a deep mentor for me and my wife. He would have us over for lunch every day, just to kind of teach us things. And so, so I was taken a bet on, right? And Dave was a royalty, right? And, you know, it's like Michael Jordan now seeing some punk kid and be like, I'm going to take you under my wing a little bit. So he took a chance on me and then I had a stamp of endorsement. Other people like, well, you know, if this guy survived cutler, well, at least he can survive, you know, uh, you know, this crazy old person, you know, and he's good.

• 1:18:25Speaker 07

  So it helped me. So a lot of people took these crazy bets on me at Microsoft. So when I think about Microsoft. You know, I mean, look, Microsoft is crazy, complicated company, and a lot of people have mixed emotions about it. But at that time, then, I think about all the people who took a bet on me, even though they had no reason to. And so now for my wife and me, you know, now we are like in the position to take bets on people. And I always think about, okay, how am I trying to spot the twenty, twenty-five-year-old version of me? How would they look like? Where would they come from? Maybe they don't know anything about computers. Maybe they don't know anything about AI. You know, let me find a way to, you know, just take a chance.

• 1:19:07Speaker 07

  Because I do think one of the most powerful things you can give a young person is this idea that they are capable of much more than what they realize. It's one of the most powerful things you can do.

• 1:19:20Shawn Ryan?

  Mm-hmm.

• 1:19:21Speaker 07

  And and I have been fortunate to have a couple of people do that to me. But I'm like, wait, I didn't like know, you know, I could, even increasingly, I can do this meeting, right? Or, you know, or I can start this project, or I can start a podcast. Um, and, um, you know, or I, uh, and, and, but that was so powerful because you need that belief, right? And I think about now, how do I find ways to give, especially to young people, you know, okay, you are capable of so much more than what you realize right now. It may not be easy. It may take a lot of hard work. You may not accomplish it. It's, you know, whatever.

• 1:20:02Speaker 07

  But you are capable. And I think that is one of the most powerful gifts that I have been given from my parents, uh, others that I've worked with and in, I don't know. Whenever possible, I try and find a way, can I capture some of that and give it to somebody else?

• 1:20:17Shawn Ryan?

  You empower people.

• 1:20:19Speaker 07

  Well, well, thank you. People empowered me. They made me, gave me belief in myself when I didn't have belief in myself. Maybe they gave me too much belief in myself. Some people would say that too, uh, but it's a gift. And, you know, I try and pay it forward whenever I can.

• 1:20:32Shawn Ryan?

  I love that. I love that. I think that, you know, I wish more people did that, you know, did, did, did. That find success, they they and I think a lot of people do that, a lot of people that I talk to in here do that. People have done that for me, you know, but.

• 1:20:47Speaker 07

  Maybe you had such great stories. I just want to say I don't want to put you on the spot, but when you're talking about breakfast. Uh, you know, you've given so many of these people this platform and, you know, you know, I don't want to sort of reel this video like, hey, you are capable of doing this and, you know, you're capable of so much more. So I think you've done justice with this podcast too.

• 1:21:07Shawn Ryan?

  Thank you. Thank you. I mean, it's how we make the country great.

• 1:21:12Speaker 07

  Yes.

• 1:21:12Shawn Ryan?

  You know, you pass it on, you pay it forward, you empower people, you give them confidence and uh and just shower them with positivity and you know, then it's up to them if they go on to do great things or.

• 1:21:25Speaker 07

  Yeah.

• 1:21:26Shawn Ryan?

  Or continue on the same route that they were, but.

• 1:21:29Speaker 07

  I I think that's in some ways, I think that is one of the most beautiful things about America, which is this idea that you have a shot. Right? Like, you know, um, if you, and I'm not going to pretend it is easy for everybody, right? You know, a lot of people, you know, just come from different walks of life, have bad shit happen to them. But I think at the core of it, one of the promises of this country is that, you know, if you work hard and if you apply yourself and you do all the right things, right, like good things will happen, like you have a shot. A lot of other places in the world don't give you that, by the way, you know, you're you're kind of told you have to stick in this lane

• 1:22:09Speaker 07

  or you don't have any opportunity. I do think, you know, at the core of this place is the sense of opportunity.

• 1:22:15Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 1:22:16Speaker 07

  Right? And I, by the way, in some ways, we can get the layer, but, you know, I think about with AI, you know, how do uh how do we as a country give, you know, expand the opportunity set, give people way more opportunity than they had before. So that's one of the things I think about when I think about my current job.

• 1:22:31Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah, yeah. Where did you go from Microsoft? Did you go to Meta or was it was it?

• 1:22:36Speaker 07

  So so my wife and I, we idolized Silicon Valley, the culture of Silicon Valley, you know, we when we grew up, you know, our first date was I couldn't afford anything. I had this tiny, you know, slightly smelly one bedroom. And we had to see each other and the parents didn't know we were seeing each other. So she would kind of sneak in and we would watch movies about Silicon Valley, right? One of the greatest movies about Silicon Valley, by the way, is this movie called Pirates of Silicon Valley. It's a movie about Steve Jobs versus Bill Gates in their young heyday and they how they competed with each other. And we would be like, man, someday we want to be there.

• 1:23:20Speaker 07

  And we were like, you know, but that was, I think it was a bit oriented city. Like, we didn't exactly pay for that. Like, we were like, we couldn't afford the actual real thing. Hopefully, I don't get in trouble for like 24 years later. And but, you know, you know, we were like, someday we want to, because Silicon Valley was a land of opportunity. You went there, you know, you were good at computers. You could make something of yourself, right? So for me, like, you know, like, for example, if you if you're playing football, what do you dream? You want to play in the Super Bowl, right? You're a pro wrestler, you want a main event WrestleMania, hopefully at Madison Square Garden. But for me, right, like, well, I also want to main event WrestleMania. But, right, I wanted to make something about Silicon Valley. So anyway, so in 2011, 2012,

• 1:24:05Speaker 07

  we decided, okay, Microsoft's been great for us and we did great. My wife and I had fantastic careers there. We made a lot of friends, you know, we did very well for ourselves. We were like, we want to take a risk and go down to Silicon Valley. We just got married too, by the way. And the way we did it is we said, okay, there are two of us. So, you know, we're going to sort of hedge risk between us. And one of us is going to take a chance and build a startup. And one of us is going to get like, you know, go make some regular paycheck and job. And so one of us is paying the bills and the other person can kind of. Follow this entrepreneurial path, then we can kind of take the pressure of each other. And the deal we made with each other was that we will kind of alternate.

• 1:24:47Speaker 07

  Like, somebody will go start a company first, somebody will go get like a regular job. And then maybe we'll switch it on. Like, we didn't know what we were doing. Like, we were like, we just wanted to be part of Silicon Valley. I will say Silicon Valley is a magical place. And I think it is one of the, you know, unique advantages America has over a lot of other parts of the world. Because the combination of capital which flows in, the combination of talent there, the density of the companies there, the, you know, the idea of anything. But it's not perfect. A lot of issues with it, which you can talk about, but it is magical and it is unique. So we wanted to be there. So we quit our jobs at Microsoft. And we, you know, flew down to the San Francisco Bay area.

• 1:25:31Speaker 07

  I'm like, all right, what do we do? Right? And so a year later, you know, my wife, do you know what Y Combinator is? Yes. Okay. So Y Combinator is this very popular startup incubator. It's maybe one of the most popular startup incubators. And at the time, they were maybe not as popular as they are now, but they were still a bit popular. And what they would do is if you had an idea, you go to them, you apply. And, you know, they pick maybe twenty, thirty companies a batch. And some amazing companies have come out of that. Airbnb, Coinbase, Brian Armstrong, I think, talked about Y Combinator here. Dropbox, lots of great companies that come from there. And so, you know, so my wife, you know, had this idea, she applied.

• 1:26:16Speaker 07

  She got into Y C. And Y C, by the way, doesn't give you a ton of money. I think at the time, they gave you, for the entire company, maybe like eighty thousand dollars or something. So it's not a lot, like, you know. And I was like, okay, I need to figure out, you know, how to, you know, just get a paycheck, you know, get some regular money. And so I wound up joining what was then Facebook. And Facebook, and I'll call it Meta. And some of the older people here might remember this, Facebook then had just gone public. And they were in a dark hole because number one, the IPO had Gone terribly poorly. They had gone public, I think, at like forty five dollars. The stock price had plummeted.

• 1:26:59Speaker 07

  Second is there was this big question about the whole world is moving from desktop computers to mobile. And Facebook has only making money on on the desktop. So there's this big question of, first of all, the idea of social networks making money was some seem laughable. Like, like, people just laugh at you because people had seen MySpace, they'd seen all these other companies fail. They were like, I don't even know why this is thing. Second was like, nobody can make money on mobile. So they were a bit of a hope. And I had some friends there and and, you know, I told myself, look, I want to do something which is very different from Microsoft. I want to do something which involves consumers, because I really was interested in consumer psychology.

• 1:27:39Speaker 07

  You know, what makes human beings use products, how they interact with products, how to build the technical algorithms. Now, maybe A I, you know, we didn't have that really that bird then, which kind of interacts them. I was very interested. I just want to do something different. So I got a job at Facebook and I wound up working on Facebook advertising. Now, now it's a monster, you know, I don't know, or a company. At the time, it was like the stock was down. And again, I got very lucky, you know, I wound up building this this ad ecosystem product called the Facebook Ad Network. And with some amazing smart people. And we went from zero dollars to a billion dollar business in three months.

• 1:28:24Speaker 07

  In three months? Yes, I remember like, you know, I think two point seven million dollars a day is billion dollar run rate. And it was a rocket ship. And and I think, look, again, when you look back now, I I think we were lucky for two things. One, people were starting to buy things on their phone, right? Because Iphone had come out in two thousand eight, I think the App Store came out maybe a few years later, right? And one of my mentors told me, like, you know, there is no difference between being wrong and being early, they're just the same. But in twenty twelve, twenty thirteen, people

• 1:29:01Speaker 07

  are starting to buy things. So there was commerce happening. So when there was commerce happening, people wanted to advertise and push their products, Target, Amazon, mobile games. Second, Facebook at the time, you know, had actual authentic people, not like bots, which was a huge problem in the internet. And third was we were able to marry that with these algorithms and products. And uh, the big lesson I learned at Facebook is uh, just like the power of working with great people. So um, because I had this small team, um, uh, this guy, uh, you know, named Vijay and others and uh, you know, who were just fantastic engineers, right?

• 1:29:42Speaker 07

  These are kind of people who would go off on a weekend and they would rewrite an entire system which had taken a year for a team and they do it over a weekend. Right? Like Palmer Lucky, you know, and I, we shared a common sort of hero figure, a guy named John Carmack. Did you talk about John Carmack when he came on? I believe he did. He did, right? So John Carmack, you know, uh, I think by the one of the idols of the 20th century, John Carmack was the guy who built Doom, the video game Doom, right? Oh man, I used to love that game. Yes, yes. So Doom, you know, so Doom and so Carmack is a programming god, right? What he would do is he invented um, the basically what is called the engine, um, uh, which ran under Doom

• 1:30:24Speaker 07

  and then under Quake and all these engines. And then eventually he met Palmer because he was very interested in VR and they wound up doing Oculus together. And then, you know, Carmack got hired into uh, Facebook, right? But the reason I bring up Carmack is that uh, you know, uh, there's this great story at Facebook where they realized like Carmack individually was doing the work of entire 200 person teams. Holy shit. Just one person? Guzzling Diet Coke, right? Like, I think he now lives in Dallas, right? Like, sitting by himself, just like, doing the work of two hundred people. At one time, you know, Facebook HR realized, like, you know,

• 1:31:08Speaker 07

  they had nowhere else to promote him to, because they just run out of levels to give him, and he was just a machine. And so the reason I bring this up is it is very hard to make sort of, get yourself to the top of an industry unless you know what greatness looks like. So I was lucky, because when I joined Facebook, I was surrounded just by sheer serendipity by some great engineers, just like I was at Microsoft, right? So now, even though these guys are, by the way, just to be clear, they were thousand times better than me. They would run circles around me with anything technical, like, without even batting an eyelid. It's like me playing like a pickup game against LeBron or something, right?

• 1:31:53Speaker 07

  But I saw what greatness looks like. So which meant that many, many years later, when I was starting doing investing, or when I meet entrepreneurs now, I now have a rubric in my mind of, okay, I know what elite talent looks like. I see the work they put in, I see how they talk, how they think, how they spend their free time. So now I can sort of like, you know, if you know how like Steph Curry shoots threes, and then you know how, you know, the kid you play with at the gym shoots threes, you know, I kind of see what greatness looks like. So I was exposed to Facebook, I was exposed to some real greatness at Facebook. So I wanted to do ads, it became a huge hit at Facebook.

• 1:32:36Speaker 07

  And I think Silicon Valley is one of those places where it has a lot of good things, but everyone's kind of looking for, you know, what is the win you've had, right? What is the thing which kind of like, kind of says, okay, you are somebody who's capable of something? And that whole thing gave me that. Like, I started to just get known as, oh, you know, she runs this guy who kind of built all this stuff at Facebook. And if you go Google me from back then, I would start showing up in all of these press pieces. It very important, I think it put me and my wife on the map in Silicon Valley. And so I'm very, very grateful for that.

• 1:33:13Shawn Ryan?

  Wow, wow. You had mentioned something earlier.

• 1:33:18Shawn Ryan?

  About five minutes ago, I think you said there's, I think you said there's no difference between being early and being wrong. What do you mean by that?

• 1:33:25Speaker 07

  So, uh, I stole this from somebody we should talk about, Marc Andreessen. You know, Marc Andreessen is the inventor of the web browser. He was the founder of Netscape. Did you use Netscape?

• 1:33:39Shawn Ryan?

  Oh, yeah.

• 1:33:39Speaker 07

  Great, great, right? So the spinning logo with the stars and all of that. So Marc Andreessen was kind of one of the original boy wonders of sort of technology world. He built this browser called Mosaic, which then, and he started this company called Netscape, which was kind of this darling child of Silicon Valley in the nineties and then got crushed by Microsoft. But then 10 years later, him and Ben Horowitz started this venture capital firm, Heterix and Horowitz, which, you know, we can get to, I want to join later. But for many years, he was a mentor, is still a mentor for me. And he has great many sayings. So this is, and so when you, when you have an idea as an entrepreneur, right?

• 1:34:22Speaker 07

  Like, I think, you know, there are a lot of things which can go wrong. And one of the things that you have to think about is that, is this the right time for this idea? Right? And like history is filled with examples of companies that had the right idea, but were too early and died. Let me give an example. Do you know what the company Instacart does? Right? It's a grocery shipping service, right? Or DoorDash. What does DoorDash do, right? Like you buy a product, they bring it in from the nearby restaurant or, you know, deliver you groceries, right? Exact same company as Webband in the nineties, right? One of the most famous dot com busts.

• 1:35:06Speaker 07

  People ask you, oh, man, what was one of the biggest things in the dot com era which lost money? It'd be Webband. They were right. They were just too early, right? Or Pets.com, right? Like another famous dot com bust, but people have figured out later. Myspace, right? Like Myspace or Friendster. Do you remember Friendster, right?

• 1:35:24Shawn Ryan?

  I don't remember Friendster.

• 1:35:26Speaker 07

  All these social networks, but Myspace. I'm sure you were on, right? Oh, yeah. You know, it was okay for a while, you know, and you know, they sold to, I think Murdoch. But you know, Facebook did so much better. And I think as an entrepreneur, you know, you have to think about, is this the right inflection time for my idea? Because when you connect the right idea, the right entrepreneur and the right time in history, magic happens. I'll give you an example. I know if you look at YouTube, right? So people think of YouTube as, you know, um, just obviously these days the de facto way to have videos online, right? But when they first came out, it was, uh, other people had tried it, right? Like, um, you know, uh, Google had this effort called Google Videos that tried to get videos online.

• 1:36:12Speaker 07

  Uh, others had tried it, but none of them had really worked. But YouTube captured this moment in time because digital cameras were starting to explode. And I think you started had, you started to see the increase of original mobile phones which had reasonable quality, right? And in two thousand eight, the iPhone comes out. So one is you starting to see more video production, right? Like, uh, by regular people, right? Without needing a camcorder or doing those home videos or needing a bulky camera, you're seeing video production go up. Second is broadband around the United States was getting better. Super important to basically get these videos to show up. Like, I don't know, maybe you remember the nineties, you open up RealPlayer and like buffering, buffering, buffering, buffering. Yeah.

• 1:36:57Speaker 07

  You watch a minute buffering, buffering, right? Like, you know, in two thousand eight, most of the issues are pretty solved and you could watch a video without it, um, you know, um, buffering. And then, so these guys, like the YouTube founders, like Steve and Jawad and all these guys, built this product, you know, which more than anything just captured this right moment in, uh, history, right? Like, uh, and, and, and they rode that wave. And I think a lot of times, the difference between a Five hundred billion dollar iconic company and some company which runs out of money, you know, is not the persistence or the heart or the effort of the entrepreneur, right? It is just they were wrong, they were the wrong time, right?

• 1:37:41Speaker 07

  And so when you're an investor, which obviously, you know, I can, I've spent a lot of time as, I often, I was trying to think about, is this the right time, you know, for this idea to happen? Palmer is another good example, right? Like, so a lot of people had tried virtual reality. In the nineties, there was this thing called VRML, where you're like, oh, let us embed virtual reality in your, you know, in your computer. And there are all these movies and TV shows which had virtual reality in it. The Matrix is the most famous one, but there was a Pierce Brosnan movie, there were all these things had virtual reality. But the challenge was that the hardware was too complicated. Nobody could figure out the hardware and there was no internet bandwidth

• 1:38:24Speaker 07

  to kind of show you these experiences, right? So what Palmer, you know, and through his genius, through his sort of, you know, he told you his amazing story, you know, him sort of like figuring this out by himself. He sort of captured the right moment in time with the camera gear, trying to figure out all the low latency interfaces, so that the image that the camera sees is now, or the image that is being projected is kind of reacting with you in near latency. So that was the right moment in time. So I often think about, like, you need the right time. The other thing you need is you need some luck and some magical lightning in a bottle. And especially with consumer products. I think with businesses and enterprises, it's a bit different.

• 1:39:09Speaker 07

  Like, you can go call up your customers and you can be like, hey, you know, you know, what do you guys want? I can build that for you. But with consumers, I do think you need lightning in a bottle. So YouTube, you know, they started taking all these videos, they put it up. I think an SNL video once went viral, they went off to the races. Facebook has a, you know, interesting history. Everybody knows about the Facebook history, about Harvard. They've all seen the movie with, you know, the Social Network movie. But one of the other untold pieces of Facebook history. Is that how did videos become a thing on Facebook? Because for the many, many years, Facebook only did photos, right? This all seems like ancient history and anybody under the age of thirty is like, hey, folks, what are you talking about? I'm on TikTok, Instagram.

• 1:39:53Speaker 07

  But for a long time, you posted a photo on Facebook of your friends and you tagged them, no videos. Until, do you remember this thing called the Ice Bucket Challenge?

• 1:40:04Shawn Ryan?

  Yes.

• 1:40:05Speaker 07

  Right? Okay, this is internet history. So the Ice Bucket Challenge was basically people raising money. And what you would do is you would take this bucket of cold water, dunk it on yourself, right? Like with a video camera in front of you. And then most importantly, you would then shout out four or five people. You'd be like, hey, I'm going to, you know, challenge my celebrity friend to go do the Ice Bucket Challenge, right? Edward Sperr. So I was at Facebook at this time. And, and, you know, and Facebook had just launched video, but they could not really get people to upload video or what is going on. But the Ice Bucket Challenge had this remarkable couple of properties. One was that, you know, it was video and people had to create it on their own phones. So it was personal.

• 1:40:51Speaker 07

  But second, you need to tag your friends because you're a tag some friends. Facebook just happened to have, you know, a platform where you could post a video and you could tag a friend. You could not do it on YouTube. So I remember being in this meeting where with Sheryl Sandberg, where there was this vertical straight line and that was usage, right? Like because everybody, you know, was uploading videos onto Facebook. And so every platform has one of these stories. With AI, I would say it's ChatGPT, for example, which has a story. But I think my point is that with consumer products, you need lighting in a bottle and you need the right timing. And often, you know, when I talk to an entrepreneur, I often ask them, what makes you so sure that now is the right time?

• 1:41:36Speaker 07

  Not four years ago, not four years from now, why is today the right time?

• 1:41:40Shawn Ryan?

  Interesting. I never thought of it like that. And your explanation makes me get a hell of a lot of sense.

• 1:41:48Shawn Ryan?

  What um, you know, you went to work at Facebook and created the ad network and had a big part in the videos and was it, it sounds like you had a very big part in making it tremendously successful. Your wife went into entrepreneurship.

• 1:42:05Speaker 07

  Yeah.

• 1:42:05Shawn Ryan?

  What did she do?

• 1:42:06Speaker 07

  So she started this, I always tell people, my wife is the more impressive person of the pair because it is true. She's a multi-time entrepreneur. You know, she's actually been through the journey so many times. And so she started this company, which was about renting electronic gear. The idea, which by the way, I think she would say was maybe a bit ahead of its time going backwards, our sort of theme. The idea was that instead of renting, like for example, you're surrounded by several high-end, you know, camera gear, but imagine you don't want to buy it, you know, could you just rent it and then try it out because you're going on a trip or you're going on a photo shoot, or maybe you're renting a drone. That was a big deal because drones are very expensive. Somebody was doing an ad shoot

• 1:42:50Speaker 07

  or somebody was doing like, I just want to do this one, you know, scene for a day and they would rent out this gear, you know, to them. So she raised money, you know, from Y Combinator, from a bunch of people, and they did very well for a period of time. You know, they, you know, I think they're like, you know, I would say probably a couple dozen employees, maybe. They had a lot of customers, they loved them. But I think, you know, the challenge that they ran into is, she would say is a little bit early because now you're actually seeing other companies do that at scale because so many other consumer product categories have exploded which need that dynamic. And at the time, I think she was doing cameras and drones. So yeah, she had a, you know, a reasonable outcome, you know,

• 1:43:33Speaker 07

  you know, and you know, I think, and she had a great experience, but she was also like a bit early. And, but also at the same time, my wife and I, you know, this is when we started to do some angel investing together. And she's a fantastic investor, that's what she does now, you know, full-time. But, you know, we had tiny bit of money, we had a little bit of money we had made. Facebook and and one of the things about Silicon Valley is that, you know, you just start meeting people who are starting companies all the time. And we started to learn how to do angel investing. And we would write like incredibly, I would say, small amounts of money compared to what a lot of like other angel investors.

• 1:44:18Speaker 07

  And I like sometimes we wrote like a couple of thousand dollars, right? Like, and and just because we wanted to support someone who was a friend. But I think that over the next four, five, six years, taught me a lot about investing. It brought me in touch with fantastic entrepreneurs, actually, some of some of whom actually been on your podcast before. And then in a way, it kind of led me and her to our investing careers much later.

• 1:44:45Shawn Ryan?

  Interesting.

• 1:44:46Speaker 07

  Yeah.

• 1:44:46Shawn Ryan?

  Very interesting. And so why did you wind up leaving Facebook?

• 1:44:52Speaker 07

  I was bored. I was I was a bit like, Facebook is, I think there's a pattern through my career. Where once I've sort of felt comfortable and settled in, I want to be like, okay, I want to find my next thing which really challenges me and push me. So I think they were great, a lot of friends there at the time, some of left, etc. I could probably stayed, you know, I was making decent money, I made more money. But I was just like, I just want a different adventure.

• 1:45:24Shawn Ryan?

  I had that problem.

• 1:45:26Speaker 07

  Yeah, yeah. Right, like, I mean, if you look at my, you know, when you're reading my bio, I was like, man, there's a lot of stuff in there, right? Like, you know, there's like, did this podcast, and part of it, I think, is just, I just, you know, I've seeked out different adventures over time. And so I was very comfortable there. And also, as a part of it, I'm very suspicious if I'm very comfortable. Because I'm like, man, am I stagnating? You know, do I need to push myself, right? Like, I'm also very competitive. So I would be like, am I not pushing myself hard enough? Because I'm just showing up in this job where Facebook at the time had become a big company. You know, they don't really.

• 1:46:07Speaker 07

  Need me, right, like, you know, uh, because by that's how you build these big companies like you don't. You shouldn't have to need anyone like that's how these companies are built. So, uh, I just, I, I get very restless when I'm comfortable. Right. One of the good things about my current job, you're never comfortable. Uh, but I was just like, I was just bored. I wanted an adventure. And I was kind of, I was advising a few entrepreneurs. I was doing some investing, um, and, uh. But I would say what eventually that path led me down to is the first of two times at Twitter. Right. And so Twitter at the time, you know, um, you know, there's a guy named Jack Dorsey who was running it, who was a founder.

• 1:46:50Speaker 07

  And they had been through a lot of really bad like turns as a business. Uh, and I, I, one of the things I like to compare is like Facebook and Twitter as companies. Because at the time in two thousand eight or two thousand nine, Twitter, by the way, of course now X run by Elon, which we can come to had some little one there. But, uh, Facebook, there was a time in two thousand eight, two thousand nine, like Twitter was seen as the potential hundred billion dollar, two hundred billion dollar. You know, company and Facebook was like, oh, just this toy social network that just will never spread outside colleges. That obviously flipped. And part of the reason, you know, you know, I think is that, um. Facebook had a very methodical way of using metrics and data and numbers and experimentation.

• 1:47:32Speaker 07

  Like one of the lessons I really learned from some of the people there was to always, you know, be distrustful. Unless you have the numbers and the experiments to prove it, and the numbers back it up or the experiments back it up. You should be prepared to change your line of thinking. One of the things I think Facebook has been very good at is changing how they believe. What they believe about things, uh, when they have new data, at least the time I was there, very different company now. You know, I don't really spend any time with them now, obviously. So I kind of learned that mentality about like, okay, if. If I run this experiment, if I try something, if I learn something different, I'm going to change my worldview, right? They were very good at that. Twitter was very different, right? They had this product, hundred and forty characters. It had worked. And then one day it wasn't.

• 1:48:17Speaker 07

  Really working and they were a public company. They weren't making enough money. They had a CEO change. So it was a little bit of a spiral, right? Like you're a public company, you know, people are comparing you to the other companies. You're you're getting like a new CEO every year or two. So it was a bad place to be and they were spiraling and spiraling. And at the time, you know, I love Twitter and now X as a product. I use it all the time, right? Like, you know, it has given me so much. I a lot of my personal relationships have come from that. Professional relationships have come from that. Uh, uh, uh, I think it's just a fantastic product for the world in terms of, you know, just what it has done. And, you know, um, somebody reached out to me and said, hey, would you want to help? And I was like, yeah, sure. Like, you know, it seems like a challenge. The company is like a bit of trouble.

• 1:49:02Speaker 07

  It was not glamorous, right? Like, you know, it was not the sexy company to work it, but I really like it and seems like a challenge. So I want to joining there. Uh, and that was a quite the thing because one of the things I did not realize at uh, Twitter was how insanely political, you know, in many different ways, you know, it was on the inside, right? So that was quite the adventure, but that was the guy. So I joined Twitter, I think in twenty seventeen.

• 1:49:28Shawn Ryan?

  Twenty seventeen.

• 1:49:29Speaker 07

  Yes.

• 1:49:30Shawn Ryan?

  You know, it before we go farther, I'm just curious. I mean, what are your thoughts about just social networking?

• 1:49:40Shawn Ryan?

  In general, I mean,

• 1:49:44Shawn Ryan?

  it's caused a lot of problems in the world. I think it's also connected a lot of people in the world. I mean, I've I've made a lot of contacts off X, Facebook, Instagram, not so much TikTok, but um, you know, but I feel like it's a double edged sword, you know, it's it's also a great way for government, anybody to kind of map out who you are. It's it's immediate. I mean, I use it when I get messages on any one of these social platforms and then and it seems like an interesting message. The first thing I do is I go to the friends list, see who they're see who mutual connections are. And so it's, you know, I mean, you're basically what a lot of people, myself included, I mean,

• 1:50:30Shawn Ryan?

  you your life goes on to these social networks. It's easy to map you. It's easy to map your connections. Everybody you're connected to, who they're connected to. I mean, I'm just curious, you know, what what are your thoughts on on all of it from?

• 1:50:47Shawn Ryan?

  It is social media has completely revolutionized the world in a multitude of ways. Mr. President, my company tore me of the explosion on our rig.

• 1:50:57Speaker 01

  On October 2nd.

• 1:50:58Speaker 00

  Causing massive water displacement and triggering a tsunami. They all heap the blame on me.

• 1:51:03Speaker 01

  Tom Cruise is.

• 1:51:04Speaker 02

  Digger got us into this mess. And Digger's gonna dig us up.

• 1:51:08Speaker 01

  From the director of Birdman and The Revenant.

• 1:51:10Speaker 03

  What would happen if I stopped going? You're stalled, you're freezing there, that's what.

• 1:51:15Speaker 01

  With great power comes great deniability.

• 1:51:18Speaker 03

  I'm not the first nanny.

• 1:51:19Speaker 01

  Digger. See the trailer online. Only in theaters October 2nd. Rated R. Under 17. Not a minute without parent.

• 1:51:24Speaker 07

  It's such a complicated question, right? You know, first of all, like, as somebody sort of worked in a few of these things, right? Like, I have some biases. Like, when you're a part of an institution, right? I've been part of multiple of these institutions, right? Like, you, you, you sort of have an affinity, you want to defend it. That's number one. But the second part is, I've also seen the abuses that happened when social media, you know, has the real power, right? Uh, I've seen the censorship. I've seen, like, the centralized control that can happen. Uh, and, uh, and I've seen the harm that it can do for kids, for example.

• 1:52:05Speaker 07

  Um, you know, uh, when we grew up, I didn't have to worry about, you know, was I a popular kid? Uh, would I get bullied, uh, if I said something? I have a lot of friends with adolescent daughters, sons, and they have to worry about that. It is a very complicated topic. I think the thing which I often think about is, uh, and, you know, one of the things I saw on Twitter was how censorship or nudging political agendas can happen, sometimes deliberately, sometimes even not deliberately, right? And how they can have huge impact, right? So, again, people. You know, think of like the Twitter files and, you know, all these examples of censorship

• 1:52:49Speaker 07

  happening at Twitter, right? And I was there when some of this happened. And one of the things I always sort of fought back on was like, you know, the influence of politics inside these social media algorithms. Okay. So often people kind of often know, I think, the easy ones. They are like, oh, my account got shadow banned, right? Like, or I said something like, for example, in COVID, you know, I said the virus came from a lab and, you know, my account got blocked, which is, by the way, you know, the NIH director Jay Bhattacharya, he said that his account got blocked. And think about his story now, you know, he's now like running the NIH because Twitter deleted his account, right? Like for basically saying, hey, maybe the virus came from a lab and, you know, maybe

• 1:53:34Speaker 07

  I'm not totally sure about the mask thing. And they deleted his account. And but what I also saw was like how easily algorithms can be used to shape politics. I'll give you a story. I was Twitter one day and I wake up and I'm scrolling the internet and I see this story. And I won't say who, but it is this famous Hollywood actor, right? And it says that this Hollywood actor is has this movie project that was just announced, but the internet is mad at him for getting this movie project and he might lose it. And and the reason it caught my eye was, you know, all these stories would embed the same two or three tweets inside.

• 1:54:16Speaker 07

  And I worked on that, you know, I ran a lot of the algorithms and I was like, these tweets look a bit weird, like there's no followers, like there's no likes, retweets. How did these get found, right? Like, why are these kind of getting surfaced up? So I had some free time and I sent some emails and I poked around. And it turned out what had happened is, do you know what trending out trending on Twitter? Yeah.

• 1:54:40Speaker 07

  At the time, you know, the trending algorithm on Twitter had all sorts of issues, all sorts of bugs, right? And what it would do is sometimes it would try and tell you, hey, this is what people are talking about right now on Twitter, right? It's trending. Sometimes we just kind of pick a random arbitrary thing and say it's not trending, right? When it couldn't find anything. And what happened one night, that previous night, was it had found a random set of tweets. And because it could not find a legitimate trending topic, this algorithm, by no one's fault, or someone's fault, but it not placed out any deliberate agenda, right? It said, these tweets by total unknown people about this actor is important, okay? So this happens to be at like 2 AM, 3 AM.

• 1:55:24Speaker 07

  And then in the morning, right? Like what winds up happening is on Twitter, there was this product called, there was a way they could highlight these tweets and kind of give it big imagery. So one of these people wakes up and some of these folks are, you know, just sometimes had a political agenda, but I think they were just like, hey, I just want to do my job, you know, and this thing is trending. They did not know this came from an error. So at 5 AM or 6 AM New York time, they take this and they go say, this is a thing which is happening on the internet, okay? Couple of hours later, all these editors of all these, you know, media publications wake up. They're like, oh, there's a thing people are talking about internet. Hey, can you chase this story down and write about it?

• 1:56:07Speaker 07

  And by the afternoon, you know, I think that whole thing, you know, the guy's agent was getting calls and be like, oh my God, like what is happening, right? The internet is talking about this. And the reason I bring up this story is, you know, first of all, it's kind of silly, right? It's like a Hollywood movie, nobody really cares. But it tells you, right, like how almost easily inadvertently, you could ship, shape the discourse, right? Shape the arc of something, you know, so easily, right? And the combination of the algorithms, the metrics, and some of the people inside Twitter meant you could really influence the world. Like I often call Twitter, you know, the memetic battleground.

• 1:56:50Speaker 07

  You know what memes and memetics are, right? So Twitter is a place where all these ideas fight. And if you win, you get to spread all over the world a little bit. And so one of these things that people want to be doing was finding ways to sort of inject their idea into this memetic battleground and try and fight everyone else. Now, this was rewarded by the algorithm, because what the algorithm was doing was it was looking at, okay, what is getting the most attention, likes, retweets, right? And these were often things which were provocative, like have like made people angry, right?

• 1:57:31Speaker 07

  Like, and then those people would get followers, okay? So there was this kind of the system which was being created, where if you said something provocative and you made people angry, right? Like, one, you could kind of shape the discourse. Second, the algorithm would be like, oh, this is what people on Twitter want, because it's getting more attention. I'm gonna send you more followers. I'm gonna bump you up in the algorithm, right? And this had two, I think, catastrophic impacts, right? One was that the people who were sort of exhibiting some of the worst behavior, right? Like, were getting rewarded, right?

• 1:58:11Speaker 07

  Like, the more you get people angry, the more, you know, you get people outraged, the more attention you are getting. But the second more subtle thing which was happening was when somebody new signed up on Twitter, right? Imagine you walk into a restaurant for the very first time, okay? You walk into some fancy-smancy Michelin restaurant, and you're like, okay, everyone's here in a suit or dressed up, right? Like, and you're like, I gotta look the part. Or let's say you go to, you know, a sports bar, right? Like, late night, you're watching a game, it's a bit rowdy, you know the vibe. The thing which Twitter was doing was it was shaping the vibe to be one where anger and provocation was rewarded, as opposed to kindness, as opposed to education.

• 1:59:00Speaker 07

  There was a lot of it, and obviously you and I and others have had great experiences. We're sort of pushing the ball over in one direction, right? And when new people signed up, they were like, oh, I don't know what this place is. Oh, who's doing really well here? Oh, it's that guy who's getting people angry. By the way, this happens on YouTube. This happens on platforms all the time. What do people do? They're like, what are the videos that are doing really well? What are they doing on the thumbnail? What are the, you know, the titles look like? Let me copy that. So, one, you're kind of giving people who are exhibiting sort of more wealth, some literal wealth. Second, you are training everybody new at Twitter. Those are the icons. Those are the people you should follow, right?

• 1:59:40Speaker 07

  So there was kind of this whole system which evolved. And so anyway, my point of this sort of roundabout explanation is, one, it taught me the absolute power of social media. Second, that how these systems when centralized can have real power, right? And and real censorship and how it is important that you have absolute transparency, number one. We need to know what algorithms exist in these platforms. We need to know that there is no ideology in these platforms. So it kind of really was an awakening moment for me. It kind of really shaped me. Think of me as somebody on the inside, like, oh, my gosh, like, you know, we need to sort of fix these things. And this was every platform, by the way. I'm not picking anybody. Yeah.

• 2:00:24Speaker 07

  Everybody, every platform. The second thing, it kind of really sent me down the path of was decentralization. This idea, which I think is kind of a lot of the crypto people, you know, really resonate with is like, we as people need to have ownership over how these things work. We need to have a say. We need to know what is happening behind the curtain. And maybe we just don't have like one big thing. We need to have a lot of other small things competing. So it may be very distrustful of top-down centralized control. And it made me feel like, okay, I need to find a way to bring more decentralized systems into the world, which is why I wound up in crypto for a while. But yeah, so social media, I think, shaped my career. It's given me a lot.

• 2:01:10Speaker 07

  But I also saw a lot of sides of it. My Twitter time was deeply formative for me. And when I left, you know, I want to be investing, but part of it is like, I need to find ways to battle some of the negative things I saw over there.

• 2:01:25Shawn Ryan?

  That makes a lot of sense. You know, that makes a lot of sense. I mean, it's such, it's just such a powerful tool. I mean, back to, um, you know, 2020, uh, election timeframe. I mean, we saw, we saw what's, what appeared to me, you know, from the out, from an outsider is, you know, we saw a sitting president get banned on X, get banned on Facebook, get banned on Instagram, get banned on YouTube, banned, you know, banned on all of these networks. And so, you know, the, the way it appeared to, I think, everybody is that these top guys, you know, that own these companies are controlling

• 2:02:01Shawn Ryan?

  the entire narrative, everything that's going out. And, you know, it appeared, and I don't, I don't think it appeared, it was that way. Everybody leaned one way. And, you know, that was, um, you know, obviously towards the left. And, and, and it, it, I mean, they deep, what was that one platform? They, they just pulled it, A W S pulled it. Parlor. Yeah, they just pulled it. I'm not, I'm not sure why. I don't know what is going on in there. But, you know, it was like, holy shit, like now there's an entire party.

• 2:02:34Speaker 07

  Oh, yes.

• 2:02:34Shawn Ryan?

  You know, with zero voice to include a sitting president. And that really, I think, opened everybody's eyes immediately of, of how powerful and, and dangerous that this could be.

• 2:02:49Speaker 07

  The deep platforming was huge. I think in a way, like, I sort of seen the building, I'd seen how it was, what was building up. So I was not terribly surprised when all of that happened. But if you think about that era, right? Number one was you had the previous administration putting pressure on the social media platforms to take down content. Right? Like, they would send these angry emails. This is now all documented and it's come out in, you know, depositions and lawsuits and hearings and whatnot. They would send all these angry emails to say, hey, you, you need to take this tweet down, right? Like, we don't love this tweet about Hunter Biden. Like, we don't like this tweet about, uh, you know, mask mandates or whatever the case may be. So they would send the

• 2:03:35Speaker 07

  The second thing I think what is happening was this was the peak of the culture wars. And these platforms were like, there was this domino effect. But if one person, you know, took down a video, a piece of content, uh, you know, downranked something, shadow banned, for example, then every other platform immediately felt pressure. Because what had happened is all of a sudden you would get an email from the former White House, a member of, you know, Congress, or a New York Times hit piece, which would be like, hey, those guys have taken down this thing, you guys are leaving this up, and you are responsible for all these crimes. So you, and so they tried to enforce the overturned

• 2:04:19Speaker 07

  window of conversation, and they tried to really shrink, you know, uh, what can be said. And I think, you know, uh, uh, in some ways, I think the platforms, I think the turning moment, uh, in my view, and some people may disagree, is when, well, obviously, before this election, would be when Elon bought Twitter. Okay, because I think that totally changed how free speech on the internet works. Uh, because all of a sudden, you had one platform, and by the way, I was there. Uh, you know, I was there on the first day, we kind of jumping out a bit, but, uh, you know, I had spoken to Elon, and he told me he was going to do this.

• 2:05:03Speaker 07

  I had left Twitter at the time for a couple of years, uh, and I joined this venture capital firm. But Elon said, look, I'm going to do this thing, can you come help me out? And for me, it was a little bit like getting a do-over, because I could go back, and this is not an official capacity, um, I was not an employee, but like, maybe I can go back and, you know, I didn't have the power to do some things in, I didn't have forty-five billion dollars to spend on a social media company, by the way, that was a problem I had, uh, but now I have a chance to put some things right, okay? So, uh, do you remember when Elon bought Twitter, the let it sink in day, when he bought the sink in? So I showed up that same day. Kind of snuck in, making sure the TV crews didn't see me.

• 2:05:48Speaker 07

  And that was such an experience, just watching Elon work and trying to sort of clean up the company, finding all the ways that, you know, sort of these progressive levers had been hidden. And for me, there was a chance to kind of like put right some of those things. And I would say that moment changed how free speech on the internet works. Right? Because all of a sudden you had a major platform, Twitter, then X, which was trying to live by free speech, which brought back the president, right? Uh, you know, which brought back a lot of people who had been taken down for just asking simple questions like,

• 2:06:29Speaker 07

  hey, what is the origin of the COVID virus? Okay, are masks effective? Right? Or how can, you know, how can you say that we can't sit together in a restaurant, but a protest is okay, right? Like, how does that work, right? Like, but even just the ask a question would just get you a cornblende. And now here's a platform that was bringing it back. And look, people have a lot of complicated views on Elon or the company. But I do think that moment was huge in changing how free speech on the internet works. And I think, and I think even today, that is not appreciated for how important that moment was.

• 2:07:07Shawn Ryan?

  I mean, I think it revolutionized everything, you know, immediately. I don't know.

• 2:07:12Speaker 07

  Were you on Twitter? Were you active then? You must have been.

• 2:07:15Shawn Ryan?

  Yes, I probably wasn't very active. Uh, that's, that's probably the,

• 2:07:20Shawn Ryan?

  I don't know, that's maybe the platform I used to be least active. I'm a lot more active on it now, but, but I, I really pull away from, I go on there mostly to see how our content's doing. Because I do think that there is a lot of toxicity. I know there's a lot of toxicity that comes out of all these platforms. So I try not, I try not to fall into that, but, but, I mean, I think it was, well, I don't think, I know it was instrumental in what Elon did because.

• 2:07:53Shawn Ryan?

  From an like, once again, from an outsider looking in, what I saw was he would have capitalized the on the entire market and and taken the entire market share by providing an actual free speech platform where you don't have to worry about asking questions. You don't have to worry about calling out corruption and and and you're not going to be censored. And I think that all these other companies, Meta, Google, you know, maybe Amazon, I'm not sure, but you know, I think that they saw that happening and they thought, oh shit, if we don't, if we don't loosen the reins up a little bit here, we're going out of fucking business.

• 2:08:32Speaker 07

  Yeah.

• 2:08:33Shawn Ryan?

  And and I think they would have gone out of business. And with some of them, I'm I'm actually surprised that they didn't, just because of the repercussions of what they did to half the country.

• 2:08:44Speaker 07

  Oh, yes.

• 2:08:45Shawn Ryan?

  You know, and and but I think that they saw that that gaping hole in their business when Elon secured Twitter and turned it into X and everybody else had to follow suit. What do you think? Am I wrong on that?

• 2:08:58Speaker 07

  I I think you're very right. I think there's another dynamic, which is courage, which is he just took a lot of the arrows back then. And so when he did that, some of these companies, you know, they just want to stay out of trouble. Like, they would allow it if there was nothing political like ever said on their platform. Like, they really don't want to be the business of navigating where the COVID virus came from. They just want to look, come here, have a great time, have great content. We want to sell some ads against it. Let's go home. Okay. But that's not the choice, obviously, when you're running a major platform. It's almost like running a country. So they got sucked into

• 2:09:38Speaker 07

  it. And I think, you know, one of the, there's an amazing book you should read from the 50s, a bit hard to get on Amazon. It's called Private Truths, Public Lies. Private Truths, Public Lies.

• 2:09:53Shawn Ryan?

  Sounds interesting.

• 2:09:54Speaker 07

  Yes. And it is idea, and I think it's out of print or something, but it is, it's a very simple idea. It is very simple idea that sometimes in society, everybody starts to pretend to believe in a lie, just because it is the convenient, expected thing to do.

• 2:10:14Speaker 07

  During COVID, right? You would somehow have to wear a mask into a restaurant and be asked to do so. But you could take off the mask once you sat at the table. You're like, okay, hold on a second. How does like these two logically this kind of like totally makes sense? There's something wrong here, right? But you can't really speak out against. So if you did, there were consequences. Okay, so, so what this book says, the second part of this book, and it's a great book. Please, I'm oversimplifying, is what it takes is it takes one person, an entity, to point out the emperor has no clothes. Okay, all it takes is one, right? But when you have that one person do so, that usually like sufficient like kind of like risk to themselves,

• 2:10:59Speaker 07

  everyone else starts to fall in line. Makes it okay. Makes it okay. You had two guests on your ship who've done this, right? Like, you know, Brian Armstrong with his mission oriented company statement. Like, did you talk about that when you had him? We did. Right, right. So that's such a great story. So Brian, please go watch that episode because he talks about, but you know, he basically gets bullied into having to put out a statement, right? Like, which he doesn't want to, and he doesn't like the fact that he's being bullied, right? And he says, listen, we are not a political, social company. We are in the business of making, you know, crypto available safely, securely to everybody. That's the job. That's the job we are in, right?

• 2:11:44Speaker 07

  So he puts out this blog post, which was hugely controversial because he was accused of being racist. He was accused of fronting your times. And he says like, okay, we are a mission oriented company. Which sounds crazy that it was controversial, but he says, if you work here, you are signing up as a part of this mission, okay? Which is to make, you know, crypto available safely, securely at scale. If you don't like this mission, don't work here. No harm, no foul, okay? Go find a job somewhere else, right? If you care about something more than this, that's also fine. We just ask that you do not bring that into the workplace. Because in the workplace, we care about this mission. It's a big mission. We have competition.

• 2:12:28Speaker 07

  The stakes are high. The rewards are high. It's gonna take a lot of energy, right? And, um, and as long as you focus on this, we don't care about anything else. But that was so controversial. Because at the time, you know, I was watching inside these tech companies, the rise of D E I. Right? Like, um, I remember, you know, my, uh, my wife at the time was, had a little bit of a stint at, uh, Meta. And you would have these employees who just totally hijacked meetings. And they would ask people to issue apologies. They would say, we have to comment on literally everything happening in the world.

• 2:13:10Speaker 07

  And a lot of Silicon Valley executives were just scared. Maybe they should not have been scared. Scared of, scared of their workforce? Yes, they were scared of their own employees. They were absolutely scared of their own employees, right? Like, they were terrified of, man, I don't wanna seem, you know, pickanist, sexist, racist, whatever it is. Like, I don't wanna seem that, right? And they would get attacked all the time. I spoke to some really famous people who are like, I don't wanna hire this exec, but I'm being forced to. Because if I don't, I'm going to be accused of discrimination in some shape or form. And then it's gonna piss a lot of other people off.

• 2:13:54Speaker 07

  Then it might piss some of my investors off, or the media off. I don't know what to do. And there were so many people. And I think, look, if you're harsh, we can see they didn't have enough courage. But also, look, they had a lot of employees. They were trying to make sure, like, the business, you know, doesn't get into trouble. They had customers. And they're like, we don't wanna be in the political game, but I'm scared. And this was a thing all over, uh, Silicon Valley. It was almost, I would say, a rising infection. Mm-hmm. Which just spread by twenty twenty. A virus. Yes. Like, I remember, kind of going, jumping back a bit, the original moment when I felt the rise of D E I in Silicon Valley. I think this was in twenty thirteen, twenty fourteen. And there's a company called GitHub. They are a popular developer company.

• 2:14:38Speaker 07

  They build like source code products for developers. And at the time, they had actually a funny replica of the Oval Office. Okay, that's kind of a thing. And they had a carpet, like instead of, you know, the presidential like seal, you know, with the bald eagle. There was a carpet which said with their logo and it said, in meritocracy, we trust. Okay. And you would think that's safe. Meritocracy, you know, if work hard, you know, you're the best at what you do, you win. That was hugely controversial at the time. And I remember a lot of us going, that's weird, right? Like, you know, can you imagine like an NFL draft combine?

• 2:15:21Speaker 07

  Where if you say, hey, you run a four-four, you know, you know, you're pretty good at maybe being a wide receiver. Yeah, and they're like, well, you can't talk about that. It's just like racist, but that became a real thing. And then I saw over the years, quotas. Uh, you know, me, a lot of other people, we would get into hiring situations. But you'd be told, hey, unless if your entire team, you know, uh, you know, is a male, white, pick your thing. You're being racist, right? Uh, or sexist. And you are like, well, I want to hire amazing people, right? I don't care where they are, you know, I don't care what they look like. I just want to hire the best people to the job.

• 2:16:04Speaker 07

  But there were a lot of pressure, I know, on Silicon Valley execs to be like, okay, my board has to look a certain way. You know, my exec team has to look a certain way. Otherwise, you know, the New York Times is going to come after you. And you might lose your job. And some people did lose their jobs, by the way. So this was a, a bad space to be. And I think a lot of people outside Silicon Valley don't recognize how bad it got. Like I was at this venture capital firm. And you know, we used to get calls from all these founders, like I'm just so terrified of my own employees. I don't want to deal with this. Like, I'm just building, I just want to build a company. I want to build a product, serve my customers, help my employees, you know, hopefully we all make some money. Right? Like, I am not interested in weighing in on the latest social issue, but they were forced.

• 2:16:49Speaker 07

  And so the reason I bring this up, so when Brian Armstrong did that, right, like, he was taking a huge risk. And I'm not sure he kind of took enough credit for it when he did your podcast. But he was taking a huge risk, right? He could have been fired. That they were a public company, he could have been ousted. They could, uh, you know, he could have, you had all these E S G firms, um, you know, you had all these firms. Well, kind of stopped doing it now, uh, in some ways, thanks to who won the recent election. Uh, but you know, his idea that, hey, unless you kind of check off all these boxes on the environment, on diversity, we won't invest in you. And if we are on your board or we're in a cap table, we are going to put pressure on you to do these things, right?

• 2:17:30Speaker 07

  Uh, and, uh, so he took a lot of risk and I think it was not easy for him. But when he did that, um, so, you know, want to have a lot of respect for him because he could do that. He could have just played it safe. He could have been like, yeah, I'm just going to say the things which everybody wants me to say. And, and I'll be in the tower of time and I'll be happy, right? But he took on the crowd, right? He took on all these folks who were trying to bully him. So number one, he deserves some respect for that. Second, but when he did that, it sort of opened the Overtown window. People are like, oh, wait, I can do that, right? Like, I can now start like saying, oh, wait. Maybe we just need the best hire. I don't want to just fill a quota.

• 2:18:10Speaker 07

  Uh, and Alex Wang, who you had, uh, you know, he did this thing where he said, instead of D E I, you know, I want M E I, where, uh, meritocracy, excellence, and I forget what I stands for. But it's the idea that, you know, we focus on things you kind of want in a workforce, right? You know, you want people to work hard, you know, you want the best of the best, right? Like you want, um, uh, and, and you don't care how they look like, uh, or where they are from, uh, or what they do in their private lives. So Alex took some heat for that, uh, Alex Wang, when he did that, but that set the tone. So I have a lot of respect for some of these people. Now, I work with some of them. We spoke about, you know, folks like Balaji Srinivasan, who I think are similar.

• 2:18:55Speaker 07

  Who took these arrows when they didn't need to? And then opened the overt window for a lot of people to follow them.

• 2:19:01Shawn Ryan?

  I mean, I think Silicon Valley listened. Well, maybe they didn't listen, but I mean, it seems like, you know, talking to, you know, talked to a lot of innovators in the tech space recently this year and a lot of these guys moved down to El Segundo, it seemed like, for a different culture. And so now, now we see, you know, and I'm not terribly familiar with it. I've never been to Silicon Valley or El Segundo. But it seems like El Segundo is rising up as, is, is, is like Silicon Valley two.

• 2:19:32Speaker 07

  Uh, I, yes, uh, I, I think, yes, for a certain class of companies. Uh, El Segundo, that part of, uh, uh, that whole community, they have a lot of ties to sort of the defense establishment, to making hardware. Um, and so which is why you're seeing, um, a lot of these American dynamism companies come out of there, uh, they can pull talent from elsewhere. Uh, but, and I think the other places which I've done started doing really well. Austin, Texas has started doing really, really well.

• 2:20:04Shawn Ryan?

  True, fair.

• 2:20:05Speaker 07

  Um, I always have a soft spot for like Raleigh, North Carolina. I think they have a great ecosystem there, uh, which is awesome. Sometimes you have the ecosystem outside Silicon Valley, which is great because you get these people who are, who don't have a huge ego. They want to work hard, you know, and, you know, they're not going to switch your company every year and go join somebody else. Um, and, uh, but I would say Silicon Valley is still really important. Um, just because if you think about a lot of these AI companies, for example, a lot of them are in Silicon Valley.

• 2:20:37Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 2:20:37Speaker 07

  And, um, so one of the things, you know, just, you know, a few plugs in one of the things we've done in this administration, uh, to combat a lot of these things about wokeness, about politics in platforms is we released this executive order. President Trump signed this executive order three weeks ago, which is called like stopping woke AI. And I was, you know, I played like a, a big role in this along with David Sacks. And the whole idea behind the executive order is that, um, you know, it's not that we want you to pick a left versus right ideology, we just want no ideology in AI, right? Like, we don't want employees to put their thumb on the scale and sort of.

• 2:21:22Speaker 07

  Embed their beliefs into such a crucial piece of technology. And this kind of sometimes accidentally happen like, for example, last year, there was this sort of infamous incident. Where if you asked a leading large language model, show me a photo of George Washington. It showed you a black George Washington, right? And it's sort of an accident, it's kind of, you know, and I think it's not like super deliberate. But there are other cases which are way more insidious. And and I think, given that, and given the fact, a lot of these AI companies are in Silicon Valley, right? Which often just have a very left leaning ideology. You know, I think it is super important to figure out, okay. How do we make sure we don't have a repeat of what I was talking to you about what I saw at Twitter? Right? How do we make sure that?

• 2:22:06Speaker 07

  And by the way, with AI, it's going to be so much more important than social platforms. It's going to be so much more important. It's going to be so much harder to find things. So what the executive order says, and a lot of our things we have done says is. Number one, no ideology. We don't, we want no thumbs on the scale. Number two, we want transparency, right? Like, we want to know, you know, if you say a certain answer, a certain, you know, even if example, a political comment, that's fine. Just tell us where you got it from. Tell us what your sources are, right? Like, you know, let the audience, let the viewer, let the person interacting with you, let them make up their own minds. Like, don't hide it, right? Because I think if you go back to my Twitter story, right? That's really about this Hollywood movie.

• 2:22:48Speaker 07

  If somebody could tell how the algorithm was working, right? They would be like, oh, wait, something's weird. Let me go investigate. So I think sunlight is the best disinfectant, right? I am a transparency, like maximalist when it comes to technology. So with this work AI EU, with other things we have done, we are like, all right. These things are so important for our economy, for the world. And we want to make sure there is one, no politics, and also we know what's happening behind the scenes.

• 2:23:18Shawn Ryan?

  How did the, how did the, how does an ideology get inserted into an AI platform? Is that from the engineers or, I mean, it's just processing so much data, I mean.

• 2:23:30Shawn Ryan?

  I'm probably way off, but the way I understand it, the way I took it from Alex Wang is that, you know, you have these enormous data centers and that's what the AI model pulls from and processes and gathers the data, processes it and presents it to you. And so, I mean, I would imagine, you know, I don't know what all goes into that, but I would imagine it would be fairly easy for a rogue engineer to insert his own ideology and then it goes unnoticed by the rest of the company. Is that how that happens?

• 2:24:06Speaker 07

  There are many, many ways how ideology can be inserted. Like the word ideology is so broad and vague. So I'm an engineer, let's make it very specific, okay? Let me give you actually maybe a non-AI story and then we come to AI. So when I was at Twitter, right, for a while, there was this phenomenon where left Democratic congressmen, where sometimes our Democratic political figures would get ranked higher in the algorithm, they would shown more, like YouTube algorithm, you know, like the algorithm bumps you up, just like on Twitter, than figures on the right. And the reason that it happened was when you train the Twitter algorithm, you give it examples of good and you give it examples of bad and

• 2:24:51Speaker 07

  you tell the algorithm, hey, go find more things like this. And the people who were sometimes giving these lists, and I'll just give them a benefit of the doubt, right? I don't think they were trying to put a thumb on the scale, but they had certain beliefs. They stuck the news organizations they followed, they stuck the political figures they liked. They maybe didn't know or didn't approve of people on the other side. So the algorithm kind of learned good to mean a certain class of views, a certain class of publication. Okay, and so those guys started getting more traffic, you know, more attention. And so it kind of spiraled. So I bring up that story so very easily, and sometimes even

• 2:25:34Speaker 07

  without any malintent, sometimes there is like malintent, even though malintent, you can slide the systems, okay? Now with AI, right?

• 2:25:46Speaker 07

  Very simply, you know, just kind of like levels it a bit, right? The way a modern AI model works is there are kind of like two steps. One is a process called training. And the way I would think about it is you take all of human knowledge, all of the internet. Imagine this sort of massive, like kind of vicious cauldron, you know, but imagine the cauldron spanned like multiple data, you know, football fields. You dump it all, like every book ever written, every movie ever made, all of Wikipedia, right? If you Google, all of YouTube, uh, you know, every bit of human knowledge ever gathered, you stick it in there, right?

• 2:26:25Speaker 07

  And then you have this algorithm, which I really want to talk about, try and make sense of it, right? Um, you know, so for example, right, you know, it it says that the word Sean. What should the word Sean be followed by? Okay, let's say, I say, okay, what Sean followed by Ryan? Then you're like, okay, Ryan, and then what comes after that? Well, the Sean Ryan, sure. Operator, military, intelligence, CIA, makes sense, okay? Let's say after Sean, I say Michaels, okay? Then you get title, wrestling, heel, face, stone cold.

• 2:27:07Speaker 07

  So it is kind of training and trying to make sense of all of this knowledge, okay? So that's called training. Then there is a separate step where you, you know, you kind of take this kind of this large blob. And then there is a step called post-training, where you are basically trying to make the model better in specific ways. For example, you're trying to make sure it gets better at, say, coding. Or you're trying to make sure it gets better at science and you're trying to make sure it gets better at these, you know, uh, uh, in these kind of, this very targeted ways, right? Like you might have heard of this phrase called fine-tuning. You're trying to make it better in these very targeted ways. And so that, at the end of this, you kind of get this fully cooked model.

• 2:27:52Speaker 07

  And then you have inference, which is you go to chat G P T or you go to. To Grok or you go to Gemini on Google or you go to Claude. You type in a question, right? And then it starts giving you letter by letter, word by word. Like that is inference, like you're basically giving, getting back answers. So the point, I want to kind of explain this whole thing, just kind of ground a lot of the other conversations we're gonna have. But also every step of this, right, like could be infected by ideology, right? Number one, let's go to, uh, you know, the step of this big cauldron. What if you only stuck, uh, you know, left-leaning content in there? Right, a lot of, there's this data, and gosh, I wish I could remember this off the top of my head,

• 2:28:34Speaker 07

  that a lot of the written internet is left-leaning in nature, right? Like, and so if you just dump the internet in there, you could just get a leftward bias, just right there, right? So just by sort of the sources of data, your model, you know, could wind up learning, you know, just a certain ideology. Second is when you fine-tune these things, right? Like, you know, uh, for example, DeepSeek, which, you know, we probably wound up talking about, this Chinese model, right? There's a lot of evidence that it was fine-tuned to add Chinese ideology. Okay, you know, um, say, nothing happened in Tiananmen Square, right?

• 2:29:16Speaker 07

  Like, or, you know, yeah, or, you know, what China thinks of Taiwan. Or was that happened in that part of the process? You know, or another part of the process you could add things are, is when the model is trying to react and give you a token and it is thinking, right? A lot of these models have instructions on how they should think, rules they should follow, right? You could set up a rule which says, pick the answer which optimizes, if you're, if you're me, I would say optimize for truth. Or could say, pick the answer which optimizes for equity. Right in the D E I, right? And it's going to slightly slide the model some way, right? Or pick the answer which is least offensive. Rather than pick the answer which is intellectually honest.

• 2:30:00Speaker 07

  These are incredibly oversimplified examples, but you could see that, right? And so any one of these steps could have either deliberate or accidental ideology inserted. Now, in the Google case, and I could be wrong, you know, because I only sort of read some press reports later. I don't know what actually happened. I think what had happened is somebody by accident had added this idea that whenever the model is trying to generate photos of human beings, to try and generate people of every race. But then you're like, wait a minute. Like if you get a photo of a Nazi, right? Like they're probably not like Asian, right? Like that's not what like the average Nazi in Germany looked like in nineteen forty's, right?

• 2:30:45Speaker 07

  Or if you have a photo of a Viking warrior, right? Like, you know, they probably didn't look like me. Like, that's not what Vikings looked like, you know, when they flew, you know, shipped out from Norway. But this little thing was like, oh, whenever we ask for a human being, I'm just going to spread the human race out there. So what happens? You get the Black Pope, the Black George Washington, right? So, so, and I hope I'm not making this too complicated, but this idea is that these things can be very subtle. They can be hard to find. They can be deliberate or inadvertent. And for me, you know, in this role, I think, look, one of the things we really care about is making sure that, that there is searching for truth

• 2:31:28Speaker 07

  and that there is no ideology of any kind. And if you look at the executive order, it doesn't say you need to optimize for the right. It says you need to be truth-seeking, optimize for the truth. And if you don't know the truth, express skepticism and tell us what you're reading, right? Like so, and my hope is that, you know, regardless of whether you agree with, you know, me and you on our political beliefs, you'll probably agree that truth-seeking is a good thing. So that's the hope.

• 2:32:00Shawn Ryan?

  Wow.

• 2:32:01Speaker 07

  Yeah.

• 2:32:01Shawn Ryan?

  It's a great explanation, best I've heard. Thank you.

• 2:32:04Speaker 07

  Thank you.

• 2:32:04Shawn Ryan?

  Thank you.

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• 2:33:19Shawn Ryan?

  All right, so remember, we're back from the break. We were talking about Twitter, how you got into there when Elon took over and basically eliminated the ideology of wokeness of Twitter. But, you know, something that we didn't talk about yet is A16Z, Andreessen Horowitz VC firm. And so I'm curious, you know, we've had some offline discussions about investments and things like that. But I'm curious, how did you get picked up for that? How did you find your way into there?

• 2:33:48Speaker 07

  So, so A16Z stands for Andreessen Horowitz. So A followed by 16 letters and Z, and A16Z. It's kind of a tech thing. And so they're one of the leading venture capital firms in the world. I would say the leading venture capital firm. I think they're the largest in terms of money they have. And the founders are, you know, these two iconic figures in Silicon Valley, Mark Andreessen, who we spoke about. Into the web browser and Ben Horowitz, who was with him at Netscape and is a bestselling author among many, many other amazing things. And in a lot of ways, they revolutionized, in my view, the way venture capital worked in Silicon Valley.

• 2:34:34Speaker 07

  This is a little bit of history. So when people sometimes think venture capital, they think Shark Tank. You know, you come in, you kind of, kind of, you know, you pitch an idea, you know, some like rich person in a suit gives you some money or not. There's some element of that, but it's actually a lot more complicated. The history of venture capital actually goes back to whaling and fishing. So back a couple of hundred years ago, when you would get these sort of sailors or whalers, I don't know what the, hey, we're gonna go out. And we're gonna go into these stormy seas and take a lot of risks and be out for a few weeks. Maybe catch some, you know, whales and come back.

• 2:35:16Speaker 07

  And it's an incredibly risky investment, right? Like, half the time they don't come back. It's, let's just say, you know, like, the hazard rate was pretty high. And so they would go around and they would go to people will wealth and they'd be like, you know, why don't you stake me, you know, on this journey? And I will give you a percentage of the whale I carry back, right? Which is, by the way, the word carry in venture capital comes from that. It was literally sort of, you know, the whale and sort of the thing that you carry back, you would get a percentage of that carry. So even 200 years later, that word has kind of stayed on in sort of the risk capital discourse.

• 2:36:02Speaker 07

  And so the history of venture capital is super fascinating. And I think it's an essential part of how American innovation and Silicon Valley have existed. So in the seventies or eighties, what would happen is, you know, before venture capital. If you're an entrepreneur, right, how do you, you have an idea, how do you go get money? You go to a bank, you get a loan, maybe you have some friends and family. Family, you know, they give you some money. And but it was very, very hard to go to a bank and say, I have a really risky enterprise and technology, which you may not understand, but I need, you know, a few million dollars. And by the way, you may never see it again. And and we may not have friends and family who can do that.

• 2:36:47Speaker 07

  So I'm going to say in the seventies, there, you know, there was a set of folks who wound up farming Sequoia Capital and Kleiner Perkins. Kind of developed the modern venture capital industry. These were folks that made some money from Silicon Valley. So of the origin of silicon in Silicon Valley, they are kind of been part of these big chip companies. And, you know, that's where the word silicon Silicon Valley comes from. They made some money and they basically said, okay, we are going to stake these entrepreneurs. You know, fund them on their journey, not out of sort of the goodness of their heart. Because we know that when these companies do really well, we stand to make a huge return on our investment.

• 2:37:28Speaker 07

  But the thing which I think is very different from the rest of the world is they were willing to lose their money. They didn't love it, but they're willing to kind of take bets on these risky enterprises. So I think if you look at a lot of these amazing companies in Silicon Valley, Apple, right? For example, or Google or Netscape, they all had one of these venture capital firms who are essentially taking bets on a totally unknown person and saying, I'm going to give you some money. Famous example is Google. So Google comes by, I think in nineteen ninety eight, right? And again, I'm dating myself here, but Google was not the first, the second, the third, maybe the fifth or sixth search engine. You remember using like Ask Jeeves, like us? Yeah. Yeah, right, like you or Yahoo dot com, like Yahoo is another famous one.

• 2:38:13Speaker 07

  And, you know, and and and back then, you know, you would use these search engines. People like, well, look, search is really not a business, right? We don't know how to make money off it. It's been sucked. And then these two guys, Larry Page and Sergey Brin, basically come out with a new algorithm, right? They were the Stanford Computer Science Guys. They came with this new algorithm called PageRank. By the way, PageRank is super. Interesting. It basically says that I'm gonna think you are important if a lot of other people who are trustworthy also think you're important. And that in one oversimplified sentence is kind of how the origin of Google worked. But they were like, we don't have any money. They actually went to a lot of other companies and they said, do you want to buy our algorithm for a million dollars?

• 2:38:55Speaker 07

  So they went to all these existing search engine companies. Imagine, by the way, you just bought like original Google algorithm for like less than a million bucks. And everyone just said, no. So you know what to do. And so they, I think they came to two essential part of the Silicon Valley ecosystem. First is angel investors and the second is venture capital. So they went to basically kind of these wealthy Silicon Valley guys, this guy named Andy Bechstein. And they said, listen, I have this idea. We need some money. And Andy, I think, kind of given them hundred thousand dollars. They didn't have a bank account, so they didn't know what to put the money, so they kind of kept it and started building Google. But so think of this construct, two guys, crazy idea, nobody thinks it's gonna work.

• 2:39:37Speaker 07

  But the ecosystem and the culture of the valley was like, okay. If we think that you have a shot at this and you've done some work, there are probably enough people, capital are gonna take a bet on you and probably gonna assume that ninety percent of the time this money is gonna come back. Every once in a while, you're going to create an iconic company. So Google then, of course, gets funded by another iconic firm called Kleiner Perkins. And then, you know, they go IPO, they obviously kind of become the huge giant they are. So all of Silicon Valley has these stories of these amazing companies, but these venture capitalist firms who are at the heart of it. So this story is very interesting because Andreessen Horowitz totally revolutionized, in my mind, and, you know, this ecosystem.

• 2:40:22Speaker 07

  Back in the day, venture capital firms were sleepy, you know, they were, they were kind of behind the scenes. They would never say anything in public. They didn't want any attention or controversy. The idea was you come in, you pitch us, you know, go on your way. The other thing was strategically, what would happen is you would go pitch a person at a venture capital firm, a partner, usually they had like five to eight partners. And that person would be assigned to you. So and that person, if you needed some help, like maybe like, hey, man, my company's failing, like I need some advice, you had to go to that one person for advice. If you're like, hey, I need a contact in the Pentagon, like, do you know somebody at the D O D? That person better have a rolodex, right? But you're essentially the one person.

• 2:41:05Speaker 07

  So anyway, so Mark Andreessen and Ben, they had their own experiences with bad venture capital firms, a lot of bad ones, right? They, you know, they do a lot of bad things to founders. They, you know, throw CEOs out. And they also were like, listen, why is it that, you know, um, when we go, we have to rely on this one person and we need all this other help? Um, and they met Mike Ovitz. Do you know who Mike Ovitz is? I don't. So Mike Ovitz is the founder of Creative Artists Agency, CAA, right? The, I would say along with WME, the two iconic Hollywood talent agencies, right? He's the guy who's represented like every Hollywood, I think he's retired now, but he's that, uh, represents every Hollywood celebrity, bestselling author, founder of CAA.

• 2:41:48Speaker 07

  And CAA had this amazing strategy to win the market, right? What they did was like, number one, they said, we're going to be very loud, right? Like, we're going to make sure everybody knows our name. We're going to be brash. We're going to use these red binders, we're going to color, attention grabbing. We're going to get people to pay attention to us. The second, and this is very interesting, they said, if you sign up with us, you are a A-list actor, that you are with an opposite, the way, reason you should sign up with us is you're not just getting me, Mike Ovitz, you're going to get the entire firm's rolodex. And this firm is going to maintain rolodexes just for you. We're going to maintain a list of actors. We're going to maintain a list of producers,

• 2:42:30Speaker 07

  directors, you know, and so if you come in and you have an idea, you know, we don't need to go find the right editor. You don't need to hope that I have a friend, you know, who can, you know, direct your movie. We have entire teams whose whole job is to maintain a roster for you at all times. And they would go and win all these clients because you'd go, what is your image of a Hollywood agent? A guy in a sharp suit, right? Like, you know, on a phone, quick talking, maybe has a rolodex. CAA industrialized it. They had some of that for sure, but they industrialized it because they're like, you come in, we can plug you into this machine, which is going to make great movies for you, make you famous, right? So Michael was Mark Andreessen's mentor and friend. So Mark and Ben heard this and they were like,

• 2:43:14Speaker 07

  Why don't we do this for venture capital firms? Because let us say a typical entrepreneur, you know, we spoke about some in your twenties, thirties, you often don't know what it means to build a business or you're good at one thing. Let us say you're good at building technology. You're great at computers like I used to be, right? Or maybe you just know your product area very well. You're great at making ice cream. You're great at building rockets. But are you the best CFO? Are you the best marketer? Like, do you have a rolodex of, you know, government officials? You know, something goes wrong. You need all these other things who these young CEOs didn't know. Or let us say you're under trouble. You're running out of money, right? How do you restructure a deal? How do you close a big customer?

• 2:43:58Speaker 07

  How are you supposed to know these things, right? So what Andreessen Horowitz said, Mark was like, we are going to copy and replicate the CAA model, but for technology venture capital. Okay, so we were going to have a roster. We're going to have a roster of every single amazing CFO in Silicon Valley. Every single amazing marketer. We're going to maintain a roster of potential board members. So when you come in, you know, twenty four year old with this idea who has something working, we are going to plug you into the system. You want a CFO? We have everybody on speed dial. We have done them favors, so they will pick up our call. We can get you in. By the way, they can also help you hire CFOs. Often for young founders, they don't know how to hire executive talent.

• 2:44:40Speaker 07

  How do you hire a fifty year old head of sales if you've never met a great sales leader before? How do you even know how to do that? We have the team who've seen every great sales leader will help you do that. So that was a different product, right? From classic venture capital. So number one, instead of one person's rolodex, we're going to give you the whole sort of system. The second thing, they were loud. They were brash, right? They had press articles, you know? Mark Andreessen wrote this famous blog post called "Software is Eating the World", which basically said that, you know, every business, you know, on planet Earth is going to have software underpinning it. And I think in some ways, I think he's been proven right. So there's a lot of backstory and this is kind of some of the tactics A16Z.

• 2:45:24Speaker 07

  Use to, I would say, become one of the most famous, powerful firms in Silicon Valley. So how do I come in there, right? Like, so Mark has this great strategy, which he calls harpooning. In the venture capital or tech business, right? Like, if you sleep, i- if you're not paying attention to what the next generation is building, time will pass you by. You know, you have to stay current. You have to stay always on the edge of what people are doing. And Mark, and maybe there are many others are very good at this, like Peter Thiel, Lansdale, who I think, you know, who's been here, amazing people there. Mark was extremely good at it. He would have this tactic he called harpooning. Okay?

• 2:46:07Speaker 07

  And what he would do is if he saw anybody online who had written or done something interesting, he would send them an email, right? And getting an email from Mark Andreessen is like, he's a very notable technology figure. So you're just like, sitting there like, wow, what is that? And the reason you do that is like, I want to get to know this person before they become famous, before they build this next career. It's a little bit like, you know, you see, I don't know, fifteen year old who has amazing skills and, you know, but I don't know what the legality of this as a coach is. You're like, I'm gonna make sure I'm like building a relationship with this person, because in some day, if they wanna pick a school or a team, I have a relationship with this person. So Mark was very, very good. I'm pretty sure even to this day, he starts sending out these emails in the blue.

• 2:46:52Speaker 07

  And he harpooned me. You know, I had written a blog post in, I would say, twenty twelve, twenty thirteen, and I get this cold email one day from Mark Andreessen saying, hey, I like this blog post. And I was like, whoa, you know? And, uh, and this was very different time in my life, so it was quite shocking, right?

• 2:47:09Shawn Ryan?

  Another blog post.

• 2:47:10Speaker 07

  Huh?

• 2:47:10Shawn Ryan?

  Blog post.

• 2:47:11Speaker 07

  Yes.

• 2:47:12Shawn Ryan?

  Blog post to Microsoft?

• 2:47:14Speaker 07

  No, I had left Microsoft and this was about, uh...

• 2:47:16Shawn Ryan?

  That's what they, that's what they found you with.

• 2:47:18Speaker 07

  Yes.

• 2:47:18Shawn Ryan?

  Blog post.

• 2:47:19Speaker 07

  Yes, yeah, there's a whole pattern here, by the way. Uh, if you can, like, take a slight tangent, which is, I think, one of the superpowers I think people can have with a lot of, with very little effort, is putting content out online, doing what you do, right? Like, uh, I use, right? I used to do video because when you put out content online and if you're passionate and you know, hopefully you know something about it that somebody learns from. Some of the best people in the world are paying attention, right? And I've noticed every sort of world leader in technology is always scouring for new ideas, new people. And so there's been a repeating pattern in my career where I've written something and somebody has,

• 2:48:00Speaker 07

  was at the right moment saw it and they're like, hey, this guy is doing something which I'm interested in. Let's reach out and make something happen. So one of the things I always tell people do, especially young people, is write things, put things online. These days I would say get a YouTube channel, right? Like, talk about what you're passionate about and somebody will find you. Like, I know Elon, for example, has found amazing hires because he went on a YouTube rabbit hole. He was like, let's get this guy. He looks like really smart. You and I talk about like you follow someone on Instagram and next thing you know, like, hey, come on my show. And so I think creating, writing what you do is such a great differentiator. Anyway, so I wrote something and Mark liked it. He sent me an email. We met up, we built a relationship for many, many years. That's one.

• 2:48:41Speaker 07

  The second thing was I started doing my, putting my own money, a little bit of my own money into various companies. I put some into SpaceX, I put some into Alex Banks Company, Scale AI, into a bunch of other companies which started doing really well. And Silicon Valley is a ecosystem run on reputation. You know, i- if you are an investor who puts money into a founder and you are a jerk, you never show up, you never take the next phone call, you're not going to do really well because your reputation will spread. That founder is going to tell his or her roommate, they're going to tell the next person and, you know, you will not fare very well. On the other hand, you know, if you take the phone call,

• 2:49:24Speaker 07

  if you wind up helping that person when they need you, if you're just not a jerk, right? And you respond to every single thing timely, you know, karma starts accumulating in your favor. And I just built up this portfolio of a bunch of these investments which started to do pretty well. So I made a little bit of a name for myself is what I would say. And so.

• 2:49:46Speaker 07

  And I made a bit of money. Covid happened. I was sitting at home, you know, collecting pasta and toilet paper like everyone else was. You remember that? You remember the whole era?

• 2:49:56Shawn Ryan?

  Oh yeah, I still have socks.

• 2:49:57Speaker 07

  Oh my god, like, what was your sort of, I can't believe we lived through that memory of Covid.

• 2:50:05Shawn Ryan?

  What, what's that?

• 2:50:06Speaker 07

  What was your, I can't believe we lived through that memory of Covid?

• 2:50:12Shawn Ryan?

  What is I can't?

• 2:50:13Speaker 07

  Yeah, I can't believe you did that. I can't believe we as a human race, or you here, we did that. Like for me, for example, the fact that we spent months stuck indoors, not seeing other human beings, just bizarre. I can't believe we did that, right? And what was that for you?

• 2:50:30Shawn Ryan?

  A bunch of stuff. I remember, I fell for it. I, I completely fell for it for about a month. And then, and then I was like, uh, this doesn't seem right. But I remember spraying packages off of my front door with Lysol. I remember, we, so.

• 2:50:51Speaker 07

  Multiple hand washing you had to do, that you mean, you wash your hands?

• 2:50:54Shawn Ryan?

  My hands were all cracking. Here's a funny story for you. So when, when we, we moved to Tennessee, and my wife wanted to start a farm.

• 2:51:05Speaker 07

  Hmm.

• 2:51:05Shawn Ryan?

  So we bought, we, we went and got like six alpacas, a bunch of goats, a bunch of chickens, and some ducks.

• 2:51:15Speaker 07

  And, and did you have any experience in farming?

• 2:51:17Shawn Ryan?

  No, no.

• 2:51:18Speaker 07

  Okay.

• 2:51:18Shawn Ryan?

  No, we were, we had just started this right before it happened. And so, do you know what an alpaca is?

• 2:51:24Speaker 07

  Of course. My mentor in Seattle had an alpaca farm.

• 2:51:27Shawn Ryan?

  It's like, it's like, it's like a llama, right? Very docile animals. Anyways, it gets hot here, you know, could get to, you know, a hundred degrees here. And so every spring, you're supposed to, you're supposed to shave the alpacas. And, and I mean, that's what people raise them for anyways, the fur, right? So.

• 2:51:49Shawn Ryan?

  We call this guy, or my wife finds this alpaca wrangler woman. And she comes down and she's, she shaves the alpacas. Remember at the beginning, it was all these people in Italy were supposedly dying.

• 2:52:02Speaker 07

  Yes.

• 2:52:03Shawn Ryan?

  And in.

• 2:52:04Speaker 07

  The February, March of that year, that timeframe.

• 2:52:07Shawn Ryan?

  And they come down and I'm like, hey, make sure you wear a mask. I don't, we don't know where these people have been.

• 2:52:13Speaker 07

  Mm hmm.

• 2:52:14Shawn Ryan?

  I go down there. After this is all going on and there's like four people on this alpaca. My wife doesn't have a mask on. They're shaving this damn thing. And these, these two people that came with the, with the, whatever you want to call it, the groomer, whatever. They go.

• 2:52:32Speaker 07

  Alpaca is getting fancy.

• 2:52:33Shawn Ryan?

  These are like free spirited people. They don't, you know what I mean? They just travel wherever and do this. And two of them were like, yeah, we just got back from this big trip to Italy. And I grabbed, grabbed my wife and I'm like, what are you doing? You're gonna fucking kill us. These people just came from Italy and da, da, da, da, da, da. And she's like, holy, she got all upset about it. And anyways, anyways, about a couple of days later, you know, cause I didn't, I don't even, I don't watch the news. I got tired of the news long before people got tired of the news. And I was just like, we're just being fed the same bullshit over and over. Well, then COVID turns up. I don't have cable TV at the house. I really, I don't really watch anything.

• 2:53:18Speaker 07

  Smart.

• 2:53:18Shawn Ryan?

  And I just, I don't want to be fed that shit. You know what I mean? Because I've, I've figured it out, you know, I mean, I think everybody's figured it out that they, they're telling you how to think, what to think. They're injecting thoughts into your head by that. And it can manipulate the way you think. So we got rid of cable a long time ago. COVID pops up and I was like, hey, let's just see what's on air TV. Only station we got was ABC, you know, and so I was like, well, let's, let's just see what's going on in the world. So we were fed, you know, that garbage for a while and then, and then I started talking to some friends that still have news and, and um,

• 2:53:58Shawn Ryan?

  and that's, that's when I, you know, figured it out. I was like, all right, this is, this is, uh, this isn't about a virus. This is about something much bigger. And so, but, but that was kind of, those were my moments.

• 2:54:11Speaker 07

  Oh, man, yeah.

• 2:54:12Shawn Ryan?

  Lasted about a month.

• 2:54:13Speaker 07

  Isn't it crazy that we all lived through that? Uh, we just had our first.

• 2:54:18Shawn Ryan?

  I gotta be honest, it's fucking embarrassing, but.

• 2:54:21Speaker 07

  I mean, we, we didn't know better.

• 2:54:23Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 2:54:24Speaker 07

  We were all told this and we had, nobody had gone through this before and it was so much fear and you're like, is it spreading in the air? Not spreading in the air, like the number of feet, uh, everyone, and we just had our first child like a little bit before that. And I, we spent so many months just not seeing any human beings.

• 2:54:42Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 2:54:42Speaker 07

  Uh, I was so bad, uh, in so many ways and, uh, so bad for sort of elderly people I know who are just stuck. And, um, just so, it's both funny, but also I can't believe we all did that. But anyway, so, so I was sitting at home, you know, doing this, you know, not seeing other human beings and everyone was on Zoom. If you remember, this was the era where everybody was doing video Zoom meetings. That was the thing. And Mark Andreessen, you know, he reaches out and he said, what are you up to? And I'd left Twitter because I'd gotten tired and, and I just wanted to do something else. But I was like, well, I'm sitting at home, um, waiting for this pandemic to be over. I'm sure it'll be over in a few weeks, uh, a little bit. I'm amazing at predictions, Sean. And, uh, and he said, well, just come help us out.

• 2:55:26Speaker 07

  Uh, and what I did not know was, you know, they'd been talking about me for a while and they had, you know, somebody else who I think was going to step aside. And so I became a part of the team, uh, became one of the general partners, um, you know, along with Catherine Boyle and she joined after me, but there's about, I would say maybe 20, uh, general partners for the firm. Um, I became one of them and started, became a VC, started investing, uh, while also doing my podcast. But that's how my Andreessen Horowitz journey started.

• 2:55:57Shawn Ryan?

  Wow.

• 2:55:58Speaker 07

  I learned a lot, by the way, at Andreessen Horowitz about, uh, investing. They. Mark, I think I learned a lot about how to be a good investor there, which in a lot of ways, I think, can carry over in other things in life.

• 2:56:13Shawn Ryan?

  What is it that you see in a startup company that makes you want to invest? I mean, what are some of the points that you look for?

• 2:56:24Speaker 07

  Good question. At the heart of it, that is the job. Like, you are here to figure out who the winners are and put as much money as you can inside them. So the first thing is, you probably do not know what to look for until you have met hundreds of companies and founders. So for example, right, like, if I were to meet somebody from your world, from your background, I don't, without meeting a lot of people, I don't think I would know the difference between an amazing top-tier operator versus somebody who's not, just because I'm just not from that universe. And I suspect that, you know, if you came into my world,

• 2:57:08Speaker 07

  that you may not know the difference between a top-tier engineer, somebody who's maybe just good and not great. And the only thing that kind of sets that apart is, have you put in the time and the effort to meet everybody? So the first thing, if you want to be an investor, is you've just got to talk to everybody. You've got to know, okay, who the great founders look like, who the great engineers look like, who the great builders, marketers, who are they maybe? I need to meet everybody. When you meet people over time, you know, you build a spidey sense. Like, I'm sure when somebody reaches out to you, you know, just because of this podcast, you now have a little bit more of a spidey sense in terms of how to judge them. Are they legit? You know, are they full of shit?

• 2:57:54Speaker 07

  Or somewhere in between, okay? And the first thing is, unless, as an investor, you've done your homework and met a lot of people, you will not know the difference between the next Google founder or these guys are just, they have nothing. You should have done the homework. That's number one.

• 2:58:11Speaker 07

  The belief I learned is that technology is a sector where often the winners are outsized. Peter Thiel talks about this. Peter Thiel has this book called Zero to One, where he basically says that if you go to Palo Alto, right, there are in the Bay Area, there are probably like twenty Indian restaurants, twenty Italian restaurants. If you invest in one, right, there is no way that Italian restaurant is going to become the only Italian restaurant in the United States. It's just not possible. At best, they maybe have a chain, you know, you go to a few cities, but that's it. There is a cap on how big those Italian restaurants can be. No harm, no offense to Italian restaurants, but that's just the nature of the business.

• 2:58:55Speaker 07

  Technology businesses are different, right? If you invest in the right company, they may be the only search engine people use. They may be the only social media network people use, or pick your company, right? So there is a huge difference in picking the winner in a category versus not picking the winner in a category. For example, in two thousand and five, Google dominated the world of search engines. Who was the number two search engine to Google? I don't know. Exactly. Nobody does. Doesn't matter, right? Like, because Google just dominated. Same with Facebook, right? Like, or, and so there are these winner-take-all patterns, which often wind up happening in technology, where, you know, have you seen the movie Glengarry Gendros?

• 2:59:40Speaker 07

  No. Oh, okay, this is a classic movie. And there's this classic scene where there's a bunch of sales guys, and they're kind of running low on meeting their quotas. And Alec Baldwin comes in, and he's just sort of this amazingly famous salesperson. He gives them a pep talk, right? And he basically insults them, insults their manliness. And he says, you know, the guy who gets, you know, the most sales, the winner, gets this amazing car. You know what second prize is after this fancy car? A set of steak knives. Nothing, right? So often in the technology investing world, you know, there's a great scene, you should check it out on YouTube. It's very similar dynamic, where if you invest in the winner, right, like...

• 3:00:22Speaker 07

  You're going to be in Google or, you know, Microsoft or Apple or pick amazing company. Or you're in a company where you're like, oh, I don't even know who the second guy is, right? So how do you then figure out what the next Google is going to be? Well, number one, you have to really, really, really do your homework. And I think what the firm taught me is that you can get the category wrong of company wrong, but you can't get the company, you can't get the actual winner wrong. What does it mean, right? So, for example, about like, uh, like VR is a good example. Like Oculus was a big, it was a reasonable winner in VR. But a lot of other VR companies didn't really do super well. They might come back now, but people invest money in VR.

• 3:01:05Speaker 07

  And what the, you know, what, you know, some of the partners would say like, that's fine. You took a bit on the entire category. You had the best company in the category. That's good, right? Uh, but what is not good is if you're investing in search engines and you did not invest in Google. Because that is the difference between, you know, being part of one iconic company and not being part of anything at all. So we often thought a lot about how do we make sure that you're investing in the winner in a category versus somebody else? And you have to wait sometimes until you know who the winner is, right? You have to be prepared. You have to, you know, you have to know all the founders. You need to be, they need to know you. So that was, I think, another big dynamic that they taught me. The final, and I think the most important part.

• 3:01:50Shawn Ryan?

  I have a question.

• 3:01:50Speaker 07

  Yes.

• 3:01:51Shawn Ryan?

  You know, when you're talking about trying to find the winner in a, in a category. I mean,

• 3:01:58Shawn Ryan?

  would it not be wise to invest in several companies within the same category?

• 3:02:04Speaker 07

  Great question. Great question. Let me ask you a simple question. You had Palmer here, right? Let's say you invested in Palmer. Let's say you're also invested in Palmer's competitor. What do you think? How do you think he's going to feel?

• 3:02:16Shawn Ryan?

  That's the caveat to that.

• 3:02:18Speaker 07

  Right, and so we had a word called leading conflicted. Like, I think the great entrepreneurs, you know, don't want you in bed with the competition. Now, of course, a lot of ways to kind of, sometimes people get around it. There's, you know, some, some people that I work, you know, in other places, they say, you know what, like, we work with everyone equally. But, you know, one of the prizes is, you know, if you just back the winners and they don't want you often to work with everyone else. So that is a definite dynamic, but to be honest, there's ways around it where some people will say, guess what? That's just the nature of me. I just work with everybody. That's a price you have to pay to work with me. That's all fine.

• 3:03:01Speaker 07

  But that was just the culture I grew up in when I was at Andreessen Horowitz, which is you pick a person and that's the only person you work with. Right? And I believe a lot in that because I do think a lot of founders value loyalty. Like, they want you to work with them because they are in a knife fight every single day. I'm not metaphorical, not a little one with the, they're trying to win deals. They are trying to make sure that company's not like crushed or running out of money due to the other person. They don't want you also helping the other person. They want to know that you are the, you know, you are loyal to them. And I think I really believe in that loyalty. I think that matters a lot. And I also think, you know, people are not loyal, you know, the great founders don't wind up working with them. So that's a big dynamic. But it's a good question, but that's, that's the answer.

• 3:03:45Speaker 07

  I think the most important part, I would say, is you need to have a spidey sense for what a great entrepreneur looks like. And not look like literally look, but how they operate, what they do. And I was lucky here because I got to spend time with lots of many amazing entrepreneurs from the, sometimes working with them. Like, you know, or sometimes from the outside. And you sometimes see similar patterns across multiple great entrepreneurs. Like, for example, I'll just pick one. Every single great entrepreneur is insanely fast. You know, they are urgent, right? If you, if you, I used to remember, you know, when I've been in teams which are not great. If you wanted to have the next meeting or a conversation about something, they'd be like, yeah, let's go meet in a week or two.

• 3:04:30Speaker 07

  Maybe I put a PowerPoint deck together, you know, you know, who has been in corporate America probably recognizes this. If you work for a great entrepreneur, they'd be like, well, let's talk in five minutes. Let's find the answer. Let's go, go, go. We don't have time to waste. They work 24/7. They eat, sleep and breathe this. There is a real sense of urgency of mission. And I think that's one of the things that I've learned to pick up on over time. And it's not the only thing. I think it's table stakes. It's necessary, but not sufficient, as they would say. But you, you, you build a spidey sense over time.

• 3:05:07Shawn Ryan?

  Interesting, interesting. How long were you there?

• 3:05:11Speaker 07

  Four and a half years until this job.

• 3:05:13Shawn Ryan?

  What are some of your best investments?

• 3:05:15Speaker 07

  Well, I'll pick one, and because it ties to the theme of what we talked about is social media. I just became convinced that centralized social media platforms are not good for all of us. You know, because if you have the team which doesn't agree with your politics running them, they can just issue orders top on down. And that's how I really got into crypto. I became a fan of this idea that crypto is a way to decentralize these platforms. And instead of having one central company or algorithm which does everything. You know, you can have people have say in this, right? So while personally I had invested in companies like SpaceX with Elon or Scale Air with Alex Bank.

• 3:05:59Speaker 07

  From the firm, one of my companies I'm really proud of is a company called Farcaster. And Farcaster is a decentralized social network. And I did this like a few years ago. And it is done by this ex Coinbase product builder named Dan Romero, who's awesome. But the idea was that imagine if, you know, with Twitter. If if if Twitter was someday, let's say you like Elon, you agree with this politic. Let's say someday in the future Twitter is run by somebody who doesn't agree with you, right? Or says like, I just hate Sean Ryan, I wanna see his account disappear, maybe YouTube does that deal.

• 3:06:36Speaker 07

  In Farcaster, they built a cryptographic protocol, uh uh sorry, protocol on, you know, on on top of uh the blockchain. Where you own your social graph and anybody can build a client on top of Farcaster. So what does it mean? Like, right now, if Twitter decides to ban you, YouTube decides to ban you, you're toast, you're done, you're toast. In Farcaster, you're like, you know what? You can't ban me. I'm just going to go over using the same client to this other person, I'm gonna take my follow graph, I'm gonna take my followers, I'm gonna take my content, I'm gonna go elsewhere, right? By the way, the interesting thing is, this is how the internet used to work.

• 3:07:15Speaker 07

  Let me ask you something. What was your first email? Don't tell me your first email. What provider did you sign up for your first ever email address? Hotmail. Great. Okay, and then you probably switched, right? You probably went to Gmail, etc. But when you switched, there are a lot of ways to take your email to other places, you could forward your email to other places. If you wanted to access your email, you could do it on your phone, right? You could do it using the official hotmail dot com website. Or later on, you could use it on the iPhone or on your own desktop client. So the you signing up for the service was not tied to the actual application you were using with it. And you're not tied to it, you could, sometimes you'll take your email address elsewhere. And your social networks, you lost that, right?

• 3:07:58Speaker 07

  If you wanna use Instagram, if you wanna use TikTok, you have to use the official app, right? Uh, and there's a lot of reasons to why advertising is a business model. But what Farcaster is trying to do, and I think others are are trying to do in crypto, is let's bring that original internet way back, where you own your handle. Like, so for example, I want a world where even if Neil Mohan, who runs YouTube, gets really pissed off at Sean Ryan. You can take your audience and your subscribers and just go elsewhere, and they can just follow you elsewhere, right? That's a possibility now. It is a possibility. Now, it's early days and and the reason, you know, I I I so you have to figure out how to make it happen, right?

• 3:08:39Speaker 07

  Technically, economically. So they built this kind of cryptographic crypto protocol um um which to make it happen. And they built all these alternate clients. It's very early days, right? But I love the idea because for me, that is the spirit of the internet I grew up in, like late night. Because imagine in a world where I was late night in my computer back in Chennai like twenty one years ago. And I was told, oh, wait, before you can write any bit of code, you need to call up a salesperson in Microsoft before you can write code. Like I would never had anything. Um. And so I think this harkens back to an original ethos and spirit of the internet. Uh. And I think of crypto, which is that you own these things. You have a say, you have a stake. Let me ask you another example, right? How many subscribers do you have on YouTube right now?

• 3:09:24Shawn Ryan?

  Almost five million.

• 3:09:25Speaker 07

  Great. Uh. How much money do you think YouTube makes per year?

• 3:09:29Shawn Ryan?

  How much money do I think YouTube makes a year?

• 3:09:31Speaker 07

  In ad revenue for Google.

• 3:09:33Shawn Ryan?

  Man, I have, I have, I've not.

• 3:09:35Speaker 07

  Let's make a number. Let's say it's five billion dollars, right? Again, I don't mean to pick on YouTube. I think they're amazing, right? How much of that money do you think you are owed?

• 3:09:45Speaker 07

  Or how do you have you even thought of that, right? And, you know, because you are a stakeholder, you're contributing to this platform. If you use another social media platform, you are contributing to this platform. And I think one of the promises of crypto, right, uh, is that, well, let's give, you know, everybody. It could be somebody with five million subscribers, could be even five subscribers, a stake in the platform, a stake in two ways. One, financially, if you know, if YouTube, Instagram, TikTok make money, you get money. Second is stake in terms of how you want to experience it. If you want to use instead of youtube.com, you want to use another app, you should be able to go for it. If you want to use a different algorithm on the right side, or if you want to have use a TikTok with a different algorithm, you should be able to go for it, right?

• 3:10:28Speaker 07

  Like, I want a world, for example, where one day you open up Twitter or TikTok and you're like, well, you know what? I want to pick this algorithm. I don't want to pick just the algorithm they give me. Imagine you have like a shopping market of algorithms you could pick from. Crypto makes all of this possible. So anyway, so that is one of the things, you know, I was, I was, I was a very deep believer in the multiple. Look, I I I've made, I I was lucky to work with some amazing founders and entrepreneurs, uh, some of the best, deepest relationships. These are friendships I'll have forever because they took a bet on me as much as I took a a bet on them. And I'm grateful for all of them.

• 3:11:02Shawn Ryan?

  Wow, very, what's that, forecaster?

• 3:11:06Speaker 07

  Forecaster.

• 3:11:07Shawn Ryan?

  That's interesting. That's very interesting. I've not heard of that.

• 3:11:10Speaker 07

  Yeah, well, it's already there, but you know, it's one of those things where I think, you know, them or somebody like them, I think it's one of the things that just needs to exist.

• 3:11:17Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah, yeah, that sounds genius. Every day I go to bed, I'm like, oh, this could all end by morning.

• 3:11:25Speaker 07

  You should be like, Neil Mohn is a nice guy, you should be like, you know what, I put in some work, I deserve a little bit part of it, I have a say in the algorithm. And right now, I'm sure they listen to you, can get a call and they'll probably listen to you, but you don't have an actual say, and I think that's the promise of crypto.

• 3:11:40Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah, wow, that's genius. I love that. So let's move into AI. How did you get picked up for the position?

• 3:11:49Speaker 07

  Man.

• 3:11:51Shawn Ryan?

  Senior White House Advisor on all things AI.

• 3:11:55Speaker 07

  It is a pure, I would say, accident in a lot of ways. So going back a bit, I had, a lot of people in DC, you know, have long careers in public service, they have a lot of aspirations to be here. I was not one of them, you know, I was happy, as can be, back in Silicon Valley, back in the technology world, investing, I was thinking of starting a company, I was thinking of starting my own firm, I was just off doing, you know, my thing. Just because, I'm sure a lot of people will agree, DC just feels like this other universe. Like, you're like, well, a lot of crazy things happening here, but I'm here doing my thing.

• 3:12:40Speaker 07

  And, but what wound up happening is about a year and a half ago, you know, like everybody, I had gotten dearly involved in AI, I was investing in AI, but there was this narrative that picked up about AI just killing us all.

• 3:12:57Speaker 04

  It arrives in a cloud of feathers with a cry to wake the dead.

• 3:13:02Speaker 04

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• 3:13:20Speaker 05

  Espolon Tequila, forty percent alcohol by volume, eighty proof, copyright twenty twenty six, Compaia America, New York, New York. Drink responsibly.

• 3:13:26Speaker 07

  Um, I don't know how much you paid attention to the whole, like, doomer arguments on AI, maybe a year and a half, two ago, but there was a whole school of thought which picked up, I'm going to say in late twenty twenty three, sometime on that frame, which basically said that, oh, we should just stop working on AI, and because this is going to become this superhuman intelligence, which just takes over all of humanity. And I disagree with that, which we can really get into. The other thing that they started doing was a lot of these folks started influencing government, influencing the Biden administration, influencing various legislators, you know, including California. And what they said

• 3:14:07Speaker 07

  was, let's find a way to stop or slow down AI in any number of ways. And I was paying attention to this, but the one thing which really kind of struck me as very wrong was they tried to ban this thing called open source. Okay, so open source, by the way, just for history, is the software world through the last thirty, forty years has had two camps. One is closed source, which is somebody like Microsoft Windows, they build it in Redmond, they ship you a product, or Apple's, you know, OSX operating system, you use it. The other is open source. The classic examples would be Linux, which I'm sure you've heard of, or the Android operating system, where there is source code which any of us can go look at, modify, and then contribute back to. And open source is very important for

• 3:14:52Speaker 07

  a couple of reasons. One is it is kind of part of the spirit of the internet. It is how people kind of innovate, build on, you get kids, you get academics, you can download, you know, the latest and greatest, and you can build on it. It's kind of this spirit of how all these. Engineering ecosystems at the heart of Silicon Valley. The second is open source is safer. There is a great law called Linus's law, named after Linus Torvalds, the founder of Linux. It says, with given enough eyes, all bugs are shallow. It's a different way of saying sunlight is the best disinfectant. It is like if you have the world looking at your code, you can't hide a security vulnerability in there. We're gonna find it, right?

• 3:15:32Speaker 07

  Because if one smart person might miss it, but a thousand smart people looking at it, somebody's gonna find it. So what has happened over the last twenty years is if you look at the heart of the things which power your phone, things which power security software, a lot of it is open source, right? Because people like I trusted it, a lot of the engineers working on it, it was very important. And in AI, there was a growing effort to build open source, open weight models, okay? So, and again, bear with me because some of these, you know, I think chat G P T is probably the first time people heard of these model, AI models, okay? AI as a, and you know, there's been a long history of AI development. AI started in the, I'm gonna say in the forties.

• 3:16:18Speaker 07

  Forties? Yes, AI is one of the reasons computation was invented. There's this guy Alan Turing, you know, you might have seen in the imitation game with Benedict Cumberbatch. He invented the Enigma machine or is a big part of it, which helped the British with the Nazis in terms of ciphers. He was a mathematical genius in the forties and fifties, and he invented a lot of modern computation. He invented two really important ideas which underpin all of computing. One is called the Turing machine, which basically says that anything can be a computer if it can decide to between option A, option B, or it can follow an instruction. It is the heart of every computer.

• 3:17:00Speaker 07

  But the second, which is even more interesting, there's something called the Turing test. Have you heard of this? No. The Turing test is, okay, I'm sitting in front of you. Imagine there's a door in front of us, I couldn't see you, there's another door. There is one of, behind one door is a human being, behind other door is an AI, right? The Turing test is, can I as a human being tell the difference? And know who's the human and who's the AI, right? Uh, and it's kind of, it was always seen as sort of this theoretical hypothetical test, right? But the thing about AI development, it started in the forties and fifties and it has always been, I'm gonna call it the Holy Grail, right? It has inspired people, they came into the industry.

• 3:17:41Speaker 07

  For example, in the sixties, there was this guy, uh, you know, John McCarthy, you know, he invented these amazing programming languages called Lisp, all because he wanted to build AI, right? Uh, and in every decade, there were people trying to figure out AI. And the eighties and nineties, uh, people started really interested in the idea of neural networks. Okay, this idea was like, let's figure out how the brain works. Okay, and then let's try and mimic it in a computer and maybe we get AI, right? Like for some different definition of AI, right? Maybe you think Terminator and Skynet, maybe you think, uh, two thousand one a space odyssey. Sorry, sorry Dave, you know, I can't do that. You know, you think data from Star Trek, whatever it is, that's some form of AI. Now, so basically, people have been trying for years.

• 3:18:25Speaker 07

  Now, the challenge the AI has been, over the last fifty years, you would see these ups and downs. Somebody would get really excited about a particular idea, right? It would show promise for a while, people would build PhDs, they would build companies, and then one day it'll run out of steam. Because what would happen is this piece of AI that worked for one idea would not work for another idea. Maybe you can detect cats, but not dogs. Maybe you can translate English, but not French, right? It doesn't, it wouldn't scale. And so, so all these ideas, what happened, they have this little kind of hill and, you know, uh, uh, a kind of this, uh, uh, momentum and energy and then disillusionment. And people leave the industry, companies would go out of business, and this was happening time and time and time again.

• 3:19:09Speaker 07

  Even in the two thousand, neural networks, which were super interesting and hot, every academic was interested in the eighties. In the two thousands, people like, I don't know about neural networks, we've been stuck for twenty years, we haven't made a breakthrough. Instead of that, let's figure out alternative mechanisms, like there are support vectors, the other things that people are doing. Now, there are two really key moments that happen, uh, in AI, which one of the questions I think people should ask is like, why is AI interesting now? Why not in twenty ten? Why not? Why was ChatGPT not built in like two thousand and five, right? Like, why is it being built now? So I think there's a long history of technical accomplishments happened at two very important moments. One was, uh, there was something called AlexNet,

• 3:19:53Speaker 07

  which was helped build by this guy, Ilya Sutskevich, one of the founders of OpenAI in twenty twelve. But the most important thing, I would say, and, uh, and this thing should, I think, someday win a Nobel Prize or something, is this paper that came out of Google in twenty seventeen. And the paper is called Attention Is All You Need, okay? Uh, I think this is going to be historic paper. I think this is going to be as important as Einstein's theory of general relativity. It is iconic. And the reason why it is important is that for the first time, you know, we found a mechanism that just continues to scale and work, right? With neural networks. Because remember what I said? Until then, there are all these stop and start stop attempts.

• 3:20:36Speaker 07

  You start somewhere, you throw some promise, you would stop. With transformers and attention, these bunch of Google engineers figured out this thing, and they didn't know what they had at first. But it turns out like it just kept going. And it had this magical property called, uh, the scaling loss. And what it said was that if you give this more data and more GPUs, more computers, it just kept getting better across the board. Okay, this is, and it won't stop. So far, it has not stopped. Um, and the reason why this way, why is this important? Okay? Every AI algorithm in the past had stopped. It worked for a while, and then it did not scale. People tried to be smart. They were like, can I detect the human face in a particular way? Well, yes, but then people have different faces. Well, you can do the face, can detect the bicep, right?

• 3:21:21Speaker 07

  And it just fail, kept failing. But this algorithm, right? As long as you gave it more data, more to learn from, and then more computers, more data centers, more energy, it just kept getting better. Okay? And so it was built by Google, but OpenAI, which had been built, you know, started by Sam Altman and Elon Musk and a bunch of others, you know, they've kind of ran with it, okay? And a few years later, came out with ChatGPT, okay? Which I think is probably the real moment where people are like, oh, wow, like this is really powerful and so on. So just a lot of history in terms of how we got here. Why are we even here at this moment? Okay. Now with ChatGPT, it's a closed model.

• 3:22:05Speaker 07

  When you use ChatGPT, Brock, Anthropic, Google. What does a closed model mean? You type in a question or maybe you you give it an image, you give it a video, and it then generates an answer for you. But you can't really see what it is doing behind the scenes. You can't run it on your laptop or you can't like run it on your own data center. It is closed, not open. But that's perfectly fine because they have a business model. They spend hundreds of millions and billions of dollars on this. They want you to pay a subscription fee and use ChatGPT, right? But a set of companies started building open source models. And these are models where like you could take ChatGPT, a smaller version of it, but run it on your laptop, right? You could run it on your phone.

• 3:22:50Speaker 07

  Meta was one, they had this model called Llama, okay? Why was this interesting to how I got in here? Why this whole roundabout thing? A set of people got really convinced that open source was dangerous. They were convinced themselves that it is going to help the Chinese, that somehow it is going to make the world unsafe. And they tried to get California as a state to basically ban open source. So I was sitting here, right? You know, minding my own business. And I was like, man, this is just wrong, right? Like, because this is the way the internet should work. This has been the heart of innovation. This is how you get multiple small entrepreneurs and not just a few big guys. Not that I have anything against big guys, they're awesome, but I need multiple entrepreneurs. This is just wrong. So me as somebody who had no interest in policy, I started getting involved in these battles.

• 3:23:35Speaker 07

  Okay, so I started joining the right groups. I started putting my hand up. And I was in the United Kingdom at the time. I was helping Andreessen Horowitz grow internationally. I had a meeting with the then UK government. They had a bunch of people. And they asked me, hey, they asked the whole group, can we make this open source model public? This was two and a half years ago, it was super safe, obviously. I said, I was the only person in the room who said yes. I mean, I said yes, this person next to me looked at me and said, you have just killed all of our children. I was like, whoa, like, that's, that's a bit much. But I remember thinking, wow, these people have infiltrated the highest reaches of government, right? And they have, and they have sort of scared the world

• 3:24:20Speaker 07

  into thinking that this AI is going to take over the world. And, you know, and, and just kind of, you know, take over humanity for reasons by which I can sort of dispute and, you know, why I think is untrue. But that kind of got me personally motivated. So fast forward, the election happens. And I was very, you know, I was close to David Sacks, the AI czar. And I said, listen, I have all these ideas for you because I think this is one of the most existential questions. The Biden administration has taken so many wrong turns. They have hurt the American AI ecosystem. They have caused us to almost lose the race to China in a bunch of different ways. And I think this is an existential issue.

• 3:25:02Speaker 07

  And David tells me, well, come to the White House and help fix it. And I was like, whoa, like, and I didn't know that was an option. And for me,

• 3:25:16Speaker 07

  this country has just given me so much. And I was like, here's a moment in time where I have the chance to give something back. And I've been incredibly fortunate where, like, imagine you have some skill set in some area, right? And all of a sudden, you get a chance to help your country with that particular skill set. Right? I was like, I don't know when this chance will ever come again. I was convinced the country was going down the wrong direction on AI. I thought the stakes were incredibly high. Like, if we get this wrong, which I thought the Biden folks were, we would lose this race to China with catastrophic consequences. And here I was with this opportunity to, well, step up and try and do something about it.

• 3:25:59Speaker 07

  So I flew to Mar-a-Lago and I got a call saying, hey, you know what? You're on the team. This was, I'm gonna say mid, early December, a little bit after the election. Fast forward a bit more, the president gets sworn in. And a couple of days later, and I suspect this was time, China comes out with this model called DeepSeek. Have you heard of it? Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. So DeepSeek is super important because it is a open source model. Okay, so first of all, a lot of the people who wanted to stop open source said, well, one of the reasons we want to don't have open source is because we don't want to help China. It turns out that the Chinese are actually way ahead and they actually had a genuinely a fantastic model that surprised the world.

• 3:26:44Speaker 07

  Okay, at the time, it was the only reasoning model, a model which can think and reflect on itself, which was not OpenAI, it was ahead of so many other models that America had. It captured everyone's attention and I don't want to take any credit away from the team that built DeepSeek. There was this team of basically hedge fund guys who had, you know, who were very, very good with building on top of GPUs. And it turns out that a lot of the skills that you need to build great models is programming GPUs very well. So they built some innovative cool stuff. So I always tell people like DeepSeek has some great ideas that we hadn't seen before, but it is, I think, a Sputnik moment. Wow.

• 3:27:29Speaker 07

  Because it showed us that not only are we not like Scared everybody. Yes, and because not only are we like, not like far ahead, we are super close. And we are on this wrong trajectory where we could just wind up losing. So we talked about all these companies, Google, Apple, etc. Imagine if in nineteen ninety-eight, China built Google and that's all we use every single day. China built the iPhone, that's all we use every single day. And AI could be a much, much more important technology platform than those things. So, and we were off to the races, right? I remember the very first day coming in, I hadn't even been sworn in yet, so they had to give me a badge and do all these things, briefing everybody.

• 3:28:13Speaker 07

  And then the president comes out that evening and he says like, we need to compete. We need to unleash American entrepreneurship. So that was my, I think, the day before my first day, the next day I started and we were off to the races, man.

• 3:28:26Shawn Ryan?

  Well, congratulations.

• 3:28:27Speaker 07

  Thank you.

• 3:28:28Shawn Ryan?

  Late congratulations, but you know, you had mentioned, I want to talk about, you know, you were talking about the doomers in AI. What is, what is, I mean, I know a lot of the concerns, but I want to hear them. You know, what, what do you think the concerns are? What is it?

• 3:28:42Speaker 07

  So let me sort of try and be intellectually honest and steel man what some of the concerns are on AI are, okay? There are, I think, there are several classes of concerns. The first, maybe the most important one, and this is not from the doomers, is AI is going to take my job. That's important, but that's not what the doomers are talking about. There is another set of concerns, which is AI could build maybe, you know, a new kind of biological weapon, a new kind of, you know, nerve toxin, right? And those are some very legitimate, serious threats and that. But the real doomer argument was this idea that as AI keeps improving, that at some

• 3:29:25Speaker 07

  time, AI models will start improving themselves. So instead of a human being, being, being like, all right, I'm going to control this AI, I'm going to try and make it better every single period, piece of time, at some point in time, a model will start to improve itself. And, and there's this word in sort of this AI debate, which is called takeoff or boom, which is kind of the sound like of a rocket taking off. Whereas if you hit that moment of improvement, instead of AI just becoming better, better, better, better, right? It just goes boom. And, and so their belief is if that happens, what are the results?

• 3:30:05Speaker 07

  Well, you might get AI, they would say, that is not aligned with our hopes and beliefs. Not because AI is evil, like if you see an ant, you're not aligned with this interest. We just, not that we are particularly against ants, but we just don't care as much. And they worry that AIs might think of us as ants. Maybe there's this famous thing called paperclip maximizing. Have you heard of this?

• 3:30:28Shawn Ryan?

  No.

• 3:30:29Speaker 07

  Oh, so paperclip maximizing is the idea that the AIs may not want to kill us, but they may not really know what we like. So they may put us in a job where they say, you know what? Make just amazing paperclips because they think humans are happy. And we're like, no, no, that's not what is the emotion satisfying job. So it is kind of used as a way to say AIs might become this all powerful, all knowing intelligence, which then. He's going to be smarter than any one human or any one country. And then just given its knowledge and power could just control us and may not have our best interests at heart. I think I think I've done a reasonable job of, you know, conveying the scenario.

• 3:31:12Speaker 07

  And so because if you believe that, and they had some other concerns, especially the Biden people. They believe that, well, if you believe this, you need to make sure that we slow down. We don't get anywhere close and we need to make sure that only America can build these AI models. No other country, because why would you risk some other country having this superhuman intelligence? They would often compare it to a nuclear weapon and they would often compare a GPU, a graphics card, one of these thousands of GPUs which are in a data center or hundreds of thousands to plutonium. They would say it's like collecting plutonium and you don't want to have, you don't want to have another country, even allied country, having a nuclear weapon before you.

• 3:31:54Speaker 07

  So, so they had this thought, I would say fear of we need to make sure that if we hit AGI, I'm sure you've heard of the word AGI, artificial, like it needs to be us first and we need to kind of scared of it. They also, and I think so this was, I would say some of the school of thought around the doomers. And I just didn't buy any of it. And the reason I didn't buy any of it is that we are so many years into these AI models. And there are absolutely few things. There are absolutely no signs of takeoff. In fact, we're recording this in September twenty twenty five.

• 3:32:36Speaker 07

  I would say for the last several months, every model has slightly leapfrog over another. And there is no sign that any one model is taking off. There is no one model to call it. And in fact, what is happening is these models are increasingly specializing. You have one company which is building amazing models for code. You have another company which is building amazing models for maybe friendship, right? Uh, or a companionship, another company, in so other model, models which are great for scientific discovery and thinking. So instead of having this one model which is becoming this superhuman intelligence and surging ahead, you're having these cluster of models, you know, all sort of giving people great benefit,

• 3:33:19Speaker 07

  but not showing any signs of takeoff. That's number one. The second reason why I disagree with a lot of the doomers is that it fundamentally underestimates human ingenuity. Okay, human beings through history have been able to harness technology, right? The wheel, fire, right, like electricity. Have you seen these videos of, you know, when people who try and scare people over electricity by, you know, by killing elephants? Like, you know, there's this whole thing where there was a lot of fear mongering about certain, like, one form of electricity versus another. So they would do these incredibly barbaric things. They were like, I'm going to electrocute this elephant. This is why electricity is not safe for you.

• 3:34:03Speaker 07

  There was a lot of fear mongering, right? And well, and time and time again, human beings found a way to harness technology, even with nuclear weapons, right? Human beings found a way to harness nuclear energy. And of course, and there's a lot of doom or thought against that, which we can get to. Same with the internet, right? We've a lot of downside, we've found a way to harness it. So I think if you think about AI, it fundamentally underestimates human ingenuity. Humans are not going to allow a one all powerful model to become superhuman intelligent. You know what? Without being like, you know what? We're going to have a say in this. We're going to try and stop it way, way before that happens. They probably going to have a bunch of other AI models which stop it.

• 3:34:45Speaker 07

  So I think just fundamentally underestimates humans, all of us. You know, our human spirit, our creativity, our ingenuity as individuals and as a city. That's number two. The third piece is that, you know, instead of having, you know, what I think AI has become is we, and I want to come back to this later into the jobs question, we absolutely need humans at both ends of the AI model. We need a human being to give it context and input. Like I was telling you before I showed up today, I went and asked a model, hey, I'm going on Sean Ryan's show, I am the White House AI advisor, what should I talk about? It's pretty okay, but they didn't know me really well, it didn't know you pretty well, right? But if I'd given a lot more input and had worked with it, it would have done a lot better.

• 3:35:31Speaker 07

  The second thing which we absolutely need humans for, you know, is on verifying the output, which is when an AI model gives you an answer. Be it a diagnosis to a doctor, be it a suggestion to an accountant, or maybe a suggestion to somebody manning a drone, you will absolutely need a human being to check it, to verify it, to specialize in it. So when I think of AI, I think of like the Iron Man suit. It amplifies you. It is a fantastic assistant. It does not replace you. So but anyway, so all of this, I think, I think disproves the doomers and their version of this takeoff risk. But along with this, I think the Biden folks made a bunch of key errors.

• 3:36:15Speaker 07

  They felt that, one, we have to stop this AGI from happening anywhere else in the world. Second, they were convinced that there was going to be a shortage of AI chips and GPUs forever, and that China just can't innovate, that they just can't build amazing models or amazing chips. They were just wrong on all of it. And you know, if you think about today, you know, people can just get AI GPUs from Nvidia, from AMD. There's a bunch of other companies you can just get them. There's no more shortages, no more supply constraints, because the semiconductor industry is very, very good at reacting to shortages and honestly is finding a way to make money.

• 3:36:59Speaker 07

  But the second thing is they really underestimated China. Because since they really believe these AI models can be constructed only by a certain number of people in San Francisco, they did not think that some smart set of people around the world could build a deep sea. And it totally shocked them, right? And nobody predicted deep sea. So, so, so, so as a result of all this, I just think like the whole doomer narrative, you know, set the country on a wrong path. I think almost really hurt us in the race against China. And a lot of what we have done in this administration is try and undo that.

• 3:37:34Shawn Ryan?

  Interesting. I mean, a couple of questions going all the way back to different AI specific models. You had mentioned one for friendship and companionship. What is that?

• 3:37:46Speaker 07

  Well, I mean, I'm saying more for use case, but I think if you look at Grok, there are all these sort of characters with certain personalities people use, sometimes not safe for work. And but I think when GPT-5 came out recently, a lot of people were upset because they felt like they had built a friend in the previous model with GPT-4. It had a certain tone, it had a certain way of speaking to you. And I do think, you know, and they kind of projected this idea of a relationship. And sometimes some of these AI companies, what they're doing is they're specializing in tone. Are we the friendly model? Right? Like, are we going to be just very clinical and cold

• 3:38:29Speaker 07

  in how we respond? You know, so that is one dimension in which you can differentiate. But a lot of other differences you can differentiate are, for example, capabilities. Coding is by far the one of the most lucrative, most interesting capabilities in models right now. Have you heard of the phrase vibe coding?

• 3:38:49Shawn Ryan?

  No.

• 3:38:49Speaker 07

  Oh, okay. So when I wrote code and everyone wrote code, the way you did it is you typed in a piece of code, a program, you gave it to the computer, whether it worked or not, and then you took it back and they wrote more piece of code and that's it, right? These days, vibe coding is basically this idea. If you want to learn, say, a new programming language, right? You went and learned how it sounded, how it looked like, you went to various corners of the internet, you figured out how to use it idiomatically, just like you learn a new language, right? It's one thing to look at the French dictionary. It's another thing to be able to speak in French idioms where, you know, people are like, I think this person knows French. And you have the same with programming languages. But AI models are incredibly good at coding. There are a couple of reasons

• 3:39:34Speaker 07

  for this. One is that there's a lot of code on the internet. So AI models are just trained on a lot of code. The second more interesting reason in my mind is that coding is a way where the Models can actually uh uh get better by just by themselves. They can basically generate some piece of code and they will, is it good? Let me run it. Oh, it didn't. It was not good. Let me make myself better. So coding is one of these things where they can just like learn much better without having to have human input. If they wrote a poem, it's much harder uh to basically, hey, is this poem better than that poem? But with code, there is an objective answer. Now, I'm oversimplifying, but there's a couple of reasons why coding has gotten just, you know, dramatically good on these models.

• 3:40:16Speaker 07

  So vibe coding um is this idea where, you know, you ask these models into essentially generate code for you. You can do this right now. Have you ever written code at all? No. Oh, amazing. Okay, let me, let me get you into this. This is one of the most, you're gonna teach me guns and I'm gonna teach you code, okay? Okay. Let's do this, right? Uh, one of us is gonna look way more badass than the other, but uh, well, eh, but historically, even five years ago, I was like, well, I'm gonna send you a book or I'm gonna send you a YouTube video. Because somebody would say, well, let's say, give me an example of something you wanna do. Maybe, uh, do you have, does this show have an app or a website? You have a website? We have a website. Do you have an app? We have no app. Great. Let us say you wanna build an app for the Sean Ryan Show, right?

• 3:40:59Speaker 07

  It notifies you when this new episode collects email addresses, right? Like, you know, uh, you know, you can, you know, you can sort of sign up to get early access, all these kind of things that app might do. Now. We should build that. Please, you should, right? Like, you know, or somebody watching should build it and get your attention. But, you know, now what you can do is I can teach you to do it right now. Uh, like, what you would do is you would open up one of these models. You would say, I know nothing about computer science. I have no background in, you know, writing code. Uh, take this YouTube channel and build me a mobile application on, run it on my iPhone, run it on my Android, which does all the things I just said. That's it. And what it is going to do is it's going to start generating code for you. It might ask you some questions, like, how do you want the screen to look like?

• 3:41:44Speaker 07

  Maybe you say, look, I want the screen to have this color, have this functionality. It's gonna generate that for you. And then it's going to maybe even run that for you, right? And without. Maybe even you individually writing a single line of code yourself, you could have today a fully functional mobile app. People actually build much more sophisticated experiences. And well, you should try this tonight, right now or after this. You know what, like, I'm gonna show you maybe a demo and you should try this right now. And I think this is such a superpower because computers are often sort of this arcane thing where you're like, wow, I'm gonna go to school. I have to teach myself this. But with models, anybody and everybody can just get into it and they can amplify themselves. And you can focus on the thing you wanna do, building a great app for the Sean Ryan Show.

• 3:42:28Speaker 07

  So, vibe coding is this idea where, you know, instead of spending a lot of time trying to think of what the right code to do, uh, you basically tell the model, here's the code I'm trying to build. And one of the models says, all right, I'm, yes, yes, yes, just keep going, keep going, good going. And it's sort of a little bit of a tongue in cheek idea. The idea is that you don't get perfect code. You obviously, if you're writing this in production, if you're writing this for running inside of, I don't know, like a, a bank or a, you know, nuclear reactor, you absolutely want to make sure you check it and you know exactly what it is doing. If you're doing it for fun, it's great, right? You can explore things, try out a new idea, you know, uh, uh, maybe, uh, build something as a hobby. So vibe coding is ideas that you can just sort of go with the model.

• 3:43:11Speaker 07

  So that has fundamentally changed writing code where, I don't know the exact stats, but a lot of tech companies, they, I would say like, like thirty, forty, fifty percent of their code is now written by AI. Uh, anyways, so, so my point is to kind of going back a little bit. Uh, AI models, instead of having this one model which takes over everybody and becomes this sort of this gigantic, uh, you know, Terminator brain, you now have multiple models which have specialized, like I'm the great quarter model or I'm the great, you know, one of the great personality. And so we see no signs of takeoff happening. So I think the doomers in my mind have been completely proven wrong.

• 3:43:48Shawn Ryan?

  Is takeoff a, I mean, would you say it's a possibility?

• 3:43:54Speaker 07

  Theoretically, absolutely, right? But for me, you have to come back to science, right? You have to come back to the scientific method. So I would say you have to show me proof that it can happen. And every data point we have now is pointing the opposite direction. And what we were doing is in fear of, in my mind, this theoretical like scenario, which has had like no existence proof of, we were basically shooting ourselves in the foot. We were trying to stop AI, we were trying to ban open source AI. Uh, we were trying to stop our AI from being used by other countries, our allies. We were trying to stop our allies from using our GPUs and chips because we were worried they would build AGI.

• 3:44:37Speaker 07

  At the same time, China was just surging ahead, building these models and building this chip capability. So if you ask me, like, is it a possibility? Anything is a theoretical possibility. But we live in the world of reality where you have to be like, you know what? You know, show me the empirical evidence that we have any proof of this happening. When I have so much evidence of things in the opposite direction. Uh, one of the things I heard the president say is, I'm not sure you've heard this. He says he hates the word artificial intelligence. He hates the word AI. And he, you know, he's very funny about it. Uh, but I think there's some kind of truth to it.

• 3:45:18Speaker 07

  Because the word AI, I would say, almost oversells the space a little bit. Because in my mind, I just don't think of this as this thing where we're getting to into some sci-fi future. I think of it as the next great computer platform. This is like the internet. Right, this is, you know, uh, on this, Peter Thiel has says, on the scale of this is a nothing burger? Or this is, you know, some sentient AI sci-fi race? I'm somewhere in the middle, and I think I agree with him. This is like the internet. This is like the mobile phone, maybe bigger. Is this going to fundamentally shape humanity? Yes, the internet did. Mobile phones did. AI is going to.

• 3:45:58Speaker 07

  But I have not seen the evidence, uh, that this is going to be some all-knowing, all-powerful god that takes over all of us.

• 3:46:06Shawn Ryan?

  Makes sense, makes sense. I mean, so.

• 3:46:12Shawn Ryan?

  You know, for the doomers, I mean, I've listened to all these things and all these different theories on what it could do, what it could turn into. I mean, what would it take to kill it? I mean, wouldn't it just take removing the power source?

• 3:46:24Speaker 07

  It's a good question. Let me ask you though, what are the theories you have heard?

• 3:46:28Shawn Ryan?

  Everything that you've just said.

• 3:46:29Speaker 07

  Okay.

• 3:46:30Shawn Ryan?

  It's gonna take everybody's job, it's gonna turn into the Terminator, it's gonna kill everybody, it's gonna wipe out humanity.

• 3:46:36Speaker 07

  Yeah.

• 3:46:36Shawn Ryan?

  All of, everything that you had stated above.

• 3:46:39Speaker 07

  Let me ask, well, let me ask, I would say, one of the challenges of some of these questions is, they are almost a theoretical thought exercise, where it is so hard to disprove something which is so theoretical, okay? But let me give you an answer. Imagine, you know, tomorrow, there was this idea that, into what? Shridham was wrong. You know, he came on the Shandaran Show, he was wrong, we are actually seeing signs of these models taking off and maybe wanting to do bad things to human beings. If that happens tomorrow, what do you think you, me, all of humanity is going to do? Do you think we're gonna sit still?

• 3:47:18Shawn Ryan?

  No.

• 3:47:19Speaker 07

  Yeah. Do you think you're gonna allow that to happen? Like, do you think, you know, all these other people, companies, engineers, do you think that, well, that's it then for the human race, let's pack it up and go on home? No, they're gonna stop it, way, way before it ever becomes a thing. Like, we talked about social media, right? Like, you know, social media, you know, today versus 10 years ago is so different. There's so many checks and balances and laws and regulations. So this idea that, you know, you go from this sort of, this what we have today into this all-knowing God without reasonable people, you know, whether it be in government, technologists, just regular human, without being like, hey, you know what, let's hold up a second here, let's just stop and think

• 3:48:02Speaker 07

  about it, let's put in some safeguards, let's, you know, have, you know, ways to counter these AI models. Like, that will definitely happen. Like, there is no way we just get from here to there without a bunch of things in the middle. So when, sometimes, when people say, how do you stop this all-powerful AI which is taking over a data center? I'm like, how did it take over the data? Center, right? Like what are like the twenty five steps which happened uh before then? How would it amass all this power, right? I'm pretty sure somebody stopped it when, you know, they took over the, you know, the second data center. So, so that's my the first sort of like instinctive reaction to when people post those questions. The second thing I would say is the best answer against models is other models.

• 3:48:43Speaker 07

  So, and I think it's very true, by the way, in uh what I think sometimes the future of cyber warfare uh might look like. Where the, you know, the best way to defend against maybe a model which is showing this crazy capability is have another model, you know, which is looking for uh these capabilities. So uh, look, I hear the sci fi. I grew up on sci fi. I grew up on Star Trek. I grew up on two thousand one A Space Odyssey. I've seen, you know, the Terminator uh movies. I know all the risks. I know all the theories. The thing is, we have no proof, no evidence. We are anywhere on the track. Second, we have a lot of evidence. We are in the opposite direction. This is an amazing platform.

• 3:49:23Speaker 07

  There are some questions in terms of how do we benefit humanity, but there are no signs of takeoff in sci fi behavior yet. And this, but most importantly, China is searching ahead. So if we rest, if we stop ourselves, the other side is not, and.

• 3:49:43Shawn Ryan?

  I understand that. Before we move into China, I do want to ask you one question. I mean, do you have any concern about people, people in their relationships with AI? So we're starting to see people ask very personal questions, use AI as a therapist. Use AI, should I get divorced? How should I discipline my kids? You know, and they're, they're asking AI very, very personal questions. And the, I don't do this, but, but the AI will spit out an answer. And then you, I think that, that you, I mean, we've seen, we've seen manipulation with social media uh to an extraordinary extent.

• 3:50:26Shawn Ryan?

  And so, you know, I think that the, the manipulation through the potential of manipulation through AI could be even bigger than, you know, what social media has done. I mean, do you have any concerns about?

• 3:50:41Speaker 07

  Absolutely. I would say this is at the heart of why we made that executive order happen. Exact heart. Like, you know, imagine, you know, some young kid, you know, influence, ask AI a very personal question. We don't want ideology to influence an answer. We want the honest truth. So the one of the things executive order does is to basically say, if your model, you know, is not truth seeking, the government will not work with you. And I think that I absolutely have, you know, that concern. There's also, there's another very interesting concern, which I think is going to come up more and more, which is the idea of privacy. So, or confidentiality. If you go to your doctor, your lawyer, or your priest, what are you promised?

• 3:51:27Speaker 07

  Right? You know that nothing you say can ever kind of get out of that context. There are laws, there are social convention where, you know, you have attorney-client privilege, right? Like you have doctor-patient confidentiality, right? Various religions have this construct where what you say is sacred, except, you know, you know, if you, you know, if you do something like really, really crazy. Now with AI, we are starting to see people ask very deep, personal questions. They say, look, here's my medical report, like, what does this mean? Like, you know, I don't, give me a sense of what my blood test means. Or, you know, maybe I'm not feeling great about myself, you know, what should I do?

• 3:52:10Speaker 07

  Or maybe just basic career advice. I know a lot of people who, you know, ask AI for career advice. I would think it would be weird for all of those to be public. Imagine if somebody could say, you know, if you gave a piece of AI your medical history and somebody could just say, you know what? Just like I can get access to your emails, I want to get access to every single thing you're asked a piece of AI. So I don't know what the right answer is, but I do think the way we work with these AI models is a little different than other pieces of technology. And I do think we're going to have this public conversation about what are the right legal constructs?

• 3:52:50Speaker 07

  Kind of protect that. But yes, I absolutely do have concerns about ideology and that is at the heart of why we did this.

• 3:52:57Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah, I'm not just talking about privacy. I'm talking about, I mean, what if somebody were to, I'm just pulling something out of thin air. What if somebody were severely depressed? You know, and they are, you know, they're asking an AI a series of questions that it ends up with. You know, should I, should I kill my partner because they upset me? Should I kill myself? And I mean, the AI is going to respond to that.

• 3:53:23Speaker 07

  Oh, yes.

• 3:53:24Shawn Ryan?

  You know, and so that's kind of what I'm getting at is when I'm talking about manipulating population. I'm, I'm, I'm, privacy is this could is another concern.

• 3:53:33Speaker 07

  Yeah.

• 3:53:34Shawn Ryan?

  But I wasn't there yet, but, but you know, it has the potential to manipulate entire populations. The entire population.

• 3:53:42Speaker 07

  Absolutely, and there have been these very tragic incidents, I would say, in the last few months. Where like AI has encouraged people down a very, very bad path. Where a regular human being would have been like, hey, man, like, maybe you need to get some help. Maybe you should have a conversation. And so I think one of the things which a lot of the leading model companies are working on is addressing sycophancy. This idea that you just don't want an AI which just agrees with you. But you want an AI which spots patterns of, you know what, this person may need some help. Or maybe we need to alert law enforcement.

• 3:54:24Speaker 07

  And see like, is there a kind of precedence for this, by the way, in other places? When, look, one of the things I'll say about social media platforms is they just see a lot of very dark things in humanity.

• 3:54:36Speaker 07

  And, you know, people wanting to do things to themselves. People trying to do really terrible, bad things to others. And they build a lot of systems over time to try and kind of deal with that. And most social media platforms, if you, I'm not going to say every single time. But they try, like, if you try and do something where you might be harming yourself. Or maybe you express a desire to harm someone else. They try and find ways to do it. They're not perfect, obviously, we know. And I think AI companies, this is going to be an existential question for them. They need to find ways to figure out how to spot it when people are going down dark paths. And make sure either they're alerting someone or they're kind of coming out of it. Or you're just not saying, hey, man, yes, you're absolutely right in everything you believe.

• 3:55:19Speaker 07

  And I think this is going to be a key, key topic for all of AI.

• 3:55:24Shawn Ryan?

  Okay, okay. Let's talk about China. I mean, that's the big concern. I mean, Xi Jinping has said, you know, the winner of the AI race will dominate the entire world. I mean, I have a general idea of how that would happen, but how does, I mean, how far ahead is China than us?

• 3:55:47Speaker 07

  Well, I think we are ahead right now, but maybe it's more useful to break down a little bit of a scoreboard.

• 3:55:54Shawn Ryan?

  Okay.

• 3:55:55Speaker 07

  I would say, let's start with the basics. What AI needs is, number one, is infrastructure. Infrastructure in terms of that energy, energy from the AI which powers data centers. Because again, the scaling laws, more energy, you get better models, you can use more AI. And there, I think, you know, one of the fundamental challenges the United States has had is for many, many years, our energy usage as a country has been fairly flat. Yeah, I think it's improved like by a small percentage every single year. And then all of a sudden, AI shows up and, you know, you need a lot more energy. Yeah, I need a lot more data centers.

• 3:56:39Speaker 07

  And then all of a sudden, you have this spaghetti bowl of issues which suddenly come up. Like, the first one is, you know, where do we get the energy from? Right? You know, and, you know, and that is where I think the current answer is absolutely natural gas. Like, that's where I think it's going to power a lot of these AI along with what the president would call like clean, beautiful coal. But also, the future is definitely going to be nuclear. That's going to be a big part. On this, I would say China is ahead because they have done, or, you know, they have just invested in building out their energy grid, building out generation. They've done a lot of work on nuclear and building out the grid that transmits power.

• 3:57:22Speaker 07

  We, on the other hand, one is we have work to do across all these fronts. I'll talk about what we are doing as this administration, but one, if we need more energy, right? Second is, We have all these outdated, broken rules and laws which stop data centers from being constructed. Just from a lot of, I would say, completely nonsensical climate concerns. And we need to get rid of the red tape. We need to get rid of the red tape and we need to, what the president called, build, baby, build. Right? We need to build these data centers. We need to build energy. And we need to also figure out a way to upgrade our energy infrastructure. So we, and we have a specky mess of issues.

• 3:58:06Speaker 07

  So this administration, you know, we did a bunch of things to attack this. There's an executive order which has, you know, come out, which is, which is tackling nuclear. Which is said, I think, I forget the exact number of years, but I think for thirty, forty years, the N R C, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, hasn't approved a single reactor. And I think there's a whole future, but I know you had folks from the nuclear industry here with S M R and so on. I know it's like a little bit of time away, but I don't think we had an executive order which basically says, look, you know, we cannot believe, you know, the nuclear definitely has a strong future in America. In terms of the present, though, we need energy now.

• 3:58:46Speaker 07

  And this is where the president set up something called the National Energy Dominance Council, the N E D C, which brings together the Secretary of Energy, Secretary of the Interior, and, you know, and we've been working closely with them, which basically tries to attack all of this. We usually say it's like, how do we remove the red tape on building data centers, on permitting, on regulation? Like, what are all the things that we can do to just get more data centers built, more energy going? So just on the scoreboard front, though, this is one where China's ahead. Or, and we had obviously done a lot to catch up, and I think we're going to surge ahead. But, you know, for the last four or five years, they've just been on a great trajectory.

• 3:59:27Speaker 07

  And I think we have a lot of great work here to catch up and obviously exceed them. The second part is chips. So chips are super interesting, and we should spend a lot of time. I see, you know, on your shelf, you have Chippewa by Kelly, Chris Kelly out there. On chips, we are ahead, but maybe not as much as people think. So when I talk about chips, there are multiple layers. But essentially, for AI right now, the most important ones are the GPUs, which are built by people like Nvidia and AMD. And then, of course, you have Google, which has built their own hardware in terms of TPUs. And then Amazon has their own hardware. But Nvidia, AMD, all these companies are obviously ridiculously important.

• 4:00:12Speaker 07

  And they are, right now, really far ahead of what the latest and greatest from China, which have companies like Huawei, which builds a product called the Asens, or the other companies called Cambridge on Hap. Now, why are we ahead? There's multiple answers, but part of it is because we have access to better technology from TSMC in Taiwan, which I know you're very, very familiar with. We have access to much better software, which runs these GPUs. And we just have like a lead on them. Now, it turns out, though, on this case, China's done a lot of work on catching up.

• 4:00:53Speaker 07

  And instead of having a multi-year lead, I think our lead is much, much smaller. And right now, what China has been doing with companies like Huawei and Cambridge on is really worth paying attention to. A few months ago, and this is, I think, a very interesting one to look at, Huawei came out with this product called Cloud Matrix 384. And it's worth Googling and looking up. And the reason why this is important is if you think about these data centers, right?

• 4:01:22Speaker 07

  If you take, say, for example, OpenAI or Grok, they have a bunch of Nvidia GPUs inside them. And they have them in these clusters, right? Like, if you have a H100, which is what a lot of people use, you have eight of them clustered together, and you have maybe several hundred thousand of them. Or more recently, Nvidia has come up with this product called the Blackwells, where you connect 72 of them. But you kind of cluster these. And the idea is, the more of these you bring together, the better it is for training a model or, you know, inferencing from a model. Cloud Matrix 384 is interesting because people believe That China was way behind in innovating GPUs. And what they did was they built a cluster where you take three hundred and eighty four GPUs,

• 4:02:06Speaker 07

  ascend Chinese GPUs. Now, each of those use way more power than Nvidia. They are not as fast, but it doesn't matter because guess what? China has more power. They don't care as much as we do. Second, Huawei has, you know, really good networking technology. They are a networking company. So they are able to basically connect. Uh, if I'm oversimplifying, a lot of not as great GPUs, but to try and compete with much more powerful GPUs. And I think of this as an interesting example, just like DeepSeek of when we try and say, we are not going to let the world have our technology or let China have our technology. They have often been very good at working around in other very creative ways. So that's number two.

• 4:02:50Speaker 07

  So, but I think on the chip side, we still have an advantage in the performance of each GPU and also how many we can make, right? For a lot of reasons, you know, uh, we can just make several million of these. And China is definitely a lot more hamstrung in how much they can make, but we are ahead. Models is very interesting, right? On models, if you talk to somebody on January fifteenth or January eighteenth, they would say, oh, man, American models are way ahead. We have OpenAI at the time, oh, one. We have Claude uh three or we have, you know, whatever Grok, Grok two, I think at the time. Uh, China doesn't have anything.

• 4:03:31Speaker 07

  DeepSeek totally, in my mind, demolished that idea because all of a sudden they were not ahead, but they are very close. Okay, and uh, and one of the uh, one of the phenomenons that happened in AI is this idea of distillation, which is you can take a really powerful model and you can distill it to make a smaller, not as powerful model, but just slightly uh close behind. TLDR, what happened is China proved to us that they can build really, really good models in some ways surpassing what we have. Uh, I was at a Developer event in San Francisco recently. And I asked the crowd, what are you guys, uh, how many of you using a Chinese model?

• 4:04:13Speaker 07

  Like DeepSeek, Quen, uh, K L M, there's a bunch of others. And almost everybody in the room put up their hands. And I was like, whoa, like this is not good. Why is this not good, right? Number one, right? It is soft power, right? Like China having a technology platform, which is now running, you know, inside American, hopefully not American infrastructure, but like American companies, definitely running in global companies where instead of our models. Second, these models also communicate culture. Like, think about my story. I grew up on the internet. I grew up on the English internet. I absorbed a lot of American culture, uh, just because of the prevalence of, uh, you

• 4:04:56Speaker 07

  know, you know, America winning the internet. But if China dominates the model race, right? Like, if you look at DeepSeek, it doesn't really share our ideology. Uh, and we don't want that to be the dominant ideology and values around the world. You asked about people asking models very personal questions. Think about a world where people ask a Chinese model very, very personal questions. I'm not sure I would want that. So one, on the model side, you know, um, I, I think they've caught up very close behind. I think they're ahead on open source. Uh, we are catching up quickly. There's been some great new launches recently. We are still very much ahead on closed source models.

• 4:05:35Speaker 07

  The latest and greatest G P T five, uh, Gemini, um, Grok, uh, uh, you know, we are still ahead, but it is a much closer race. The last and maybe most interesting, um, part of the race is what I would call diffusion, which is how are people using A I? Uh, because at the end of the day, A I needs usage to be better. One of the reasons Chat G P T became really good is because when people used it, you could use that feedback management become better. This is very important, not just by A I today, but important for the future, like robotics. One of the things which is key, going to be key to getting robots, American robots all over the world is can we get that robots like data? Of usage either from a simulation, real world and make it better.

• 4:06:19Speaker 07

  So I think there's a race right now, which is who can get their AI to spread faster, to be used faster.

• 4:06:28Shawn Ryan?

  Okay.

• 4:06:29Speaker 07

  Right? And historically, uh, when you grew up, you, did you use Windows laptops or Windows computer when you grew up as a kid? Do you know who Windows's competitor was in the nineties?

• 4:06:39Shawn Ryan?

  No.

• 4:06:40Speaker 07

  Nobody remembers. There are companies like IBM's OS two and others, they all got crushed because Microsoft, Windows, along with Intel dominated. Why? They got everybody to use it first and they got all the developers to build applications on it first. They probably built Office, used Office, uh, games that you use, Netscape. Now everyone used Windows. So when you get everybody to use your stuff, you get this ecosystem flywheel, right? More smart people start building on your stuff. Your stuff gets better. More applications make your platform better and on and on and on, right? And right now, we have a window of time where we can make American AI the default here around the world.

• 4:07:24Speaker 07

  And if we don't, China will try and make their AI, their chips, their models, you know, future, their robots, the default around the world. And that for me is the heart of the race.

• 4:07:36Shawn Ryan?

  So if, with all the, the concerns and all the different sectors, I mean, it sounds like we're ahead on, on chips, software, but we're behind on energy and, and, and energy seems to be, I mean, with the little I know, you know what I mean? Energy seems to maybe be the most important factor in AI and data centers and all this other stuff. And so what are we doing specifically to unleash? I mean, I, I've dove into the, the power grid, the vulnerabilities. I mean, it's, it is a, it's atrocious.

• 4:08:12Speaker 07

  Yeah.

• 4:08:12Shawn Ryan?

  Of, of.

• 4:08:15Shawn Ryan?

  Neglect for our energy system, our power grid and for, for, for years, maybe, I mean, years and years. And, you know, if China's ahead, I mean, what are we gonna do to unleash nuclear power? I mean, it seems like that is, that's the key.

• 4:08:32Speaker 07

  Yeah.

• 4:08:33Shawn Ryan?

  And we have all these innovators that are, you know, we talked to Isaiah Taylor, who's been building the mini reactors. We talked to Scott Nolan, who's, you know, enriching uranium and, and, but we need to go faster. We need to go faster. And all these guys are very impressed with the, with the current administration and, and getting rid of some of the red tape. But we're, I, I still don't feel like, I mean, if China has zero red tape, how the hell are we gonna compete with our power grid? I mean, I've, we talked to Bhajibad, you know, the founder of Robinhood, and he's, he's trying to beam

• 4:09:15Shawn Ryan?

  solar energy in from space to, to receivers that are gonna, that are, that are gonna get diverted into the grid. I mean, we've got all these amazing ideas, but it's just not going fast enough, in my opinion.

• 4:09:29Speaker 07

  Well, I, I think I totally agree with you. Like, this is one of those things where, you know, we just need to move as fast as we can. So I would think of it in a few layers. I absolutely think nuclear is the future, but I think we're still a few years away from getting there. And we have data center needs right now, like today. Like, what is stopping the training of the next large model? Well, we need to have a larger data center. And we are seeing entrepreneurs all the time, like Elon, for example, if you see how we built Colossus, it's in Memphis, right? And so he builds this old, he buys his old, I think, Electrolux factory, and then he drives in all these generators on

• 4:10:14Speaker 07

  all sides, and then uses Tesla solar packs to basically even it, you know, kind of augment it, write some code to even it all out, and it's, Just is one of these amazing streets of engineering. But the point being, we need energy right now. So just on the nuclear front, it's absolutely future. So administration has an executive order out, which basically, you know, tries to clear the red tape on the permitting for all things nuclear. Uh, but my sense, and I'm not like a deep nuclear person. It's my sense from talking to the best people in this is like, we're still looking out like a few years. The game right now is gas and gas turbines. Uh, and the challenge there, well, on the energy production side.

• 4:10:58Speaker 07

  Then you have on the energy grid side, to your point, we have a very old grid from one in infrastructure capacity. And second, uh, we have all these local state utilities and monopolies which have weird regulation, which makes it very, very hard to, you know, take power from one state to another. There's a whole cluster there. So we came out with this document a few weeks ago called the AI Action Plan, uh, which kind of, which is the entire AI strategy, uh, for America in my mind. I, I spent a lot of time on it. A lot of others spent a lot of time on it. You know, the president announced it. And in that, one of the top priorities we talk about is one, removing the red tape for data center construction, right?

• 4:11:42Speaker 07

  With things like, how do we make sure there is the NEPA, the National Environment Protection Act? How do we find carve outs so that we can get data center construction just going, right? Let's just get the red tape out of the way. Let's go build, build, build. Uh, there are such, the, uh, you know, directives in there on, you know, figuring out what to do with our grid capacity, figuring out incentives on energy. Uh, I think the president in his first week like announced this like large project, uh, yeah, yeah, called Stargate. Uh, uh, in terms of getting more investment and getting more of these data center construction going. So in my mind, we, nuclear is the future. I think we've done a lot to clear out the red tape, but I have a race to win right now.

• 4:12:27Speaker 07

  Right? Like every entrepreneur, uh, it's like, look, I need to get a hundred thousand more, two hundred thousand more GPUs unlocked. What do I do? So we need to unlock that. And I think unlocking data center construction, grid capacity, clearing of the red tape, so the power can come to the data center. How do we find smart ways to go do that, really innovative ways to go do that? That's the game right now, which I think, you know, and I don't want to take credit for this because I do think the Department of Energy and Interior have done a lot of great work on this. They are very, very focused on, all centered around gas and coal.

• 4:13:06Shawn Ryan?

  Moving on to chips. I mean, you say we're ahead on chips. I think it was, was it April of this year, we said, no, no chip sales to China, correct, from Nvidia? Was that correct?

• 4:13:21Speaker 07

  Not really.

• 4:13:22Shawn Ryan?

  August, we said, I believe it was August, right? It was last month. August, we said Nvidia can sell chips to China, but we get 15% of the revenue, correct? The H20 chips, which are the high-end chips, correct? Was that a mistake?

• 4:13:40Speaker 07

  So actually, there's a few corrections in there, like a little bit of history.

• 4:13:45Speaker 07

  So Nvidia makes a whole set of chips. They, and the latest, greatest generation is called the Black Falls. They usually start with the letters G and B. The previous generation was called the Hopper. They started the letter H. The top of the line was the H100, which honestly is what a lot of people have right now, or the H200, they kind of the top of the line in America. Now, about two and a half years ago, the Biden administration came out and said, hey, they're going to, remember what I said, the Biden administration had all these mistaken beliefs. And one of the beliefs I think they had was that China, one, our allies can't have our AI chips, and that China can't ramp up chip technology.

• 4:14:26Speaker 07

  So because, since they believed that, they said, number one, you know, we're going to put limits on the power of the chips, the flops of the chips that China can get. And then we're going to slice the world into three categories. This is called the Biden. Diffusion rule where some countries like USA, UK can get any number of GPUs they want. About a hundred countries, you know, couldn't really get many GPUs without like going through this crazy amount of red tape. And then some would just not get any GPUs at all, like Iran, North Korea, you know, the countries of concern. And and as a result, like, you know, a couple of things happened.

• 4:15:07Speaker 07

  One was that a lot of our allies were like, well, we want to use American stuff, but you guys won't work with us. And they were just left out in the cold. A good example is like the Middle East, where the Middle East and countries like other countries are like, we want to bring AI to our citizens. And and what is a way where we can get your GPUs? And the Biden diffusion rule said, there is no way you can ever get our GPUs. Uh, that's number one. So we essentially kind of turned our back on our allies all over the world. Because we thought, number one, you know, there's a supply constraint in GPUs that if a GPU ever goes out of America, it means one less GPU for an American company.

• 4:15:52Speaker 07

  We thought China will not compete on chips. Third, we thought AGI can only happen in America. It's a scary, scary thing. So we came in and we were like, this is just wrong, you know, because number one, we're making a lot of GPUs. All right, like if you want, you can go get a H one hundred like right now, uh, an H two hundred like right now. Because it turns out that all these semiconductor companies, when they find a supply constraint, they're very, very good at innovating and working on it. They are very capitalistic. They want to make money. So number one, if if we ship a GPU to somebody else, that doesn't mean one less GPU to America. Number two, as I said earlier, I don't think we worry about AGI exploding anymore. We talked about that.

• 4:16:35Speaker 07

  I don't think we worry about takeoff anymore. I'm not so much worried about a allied country building a super intelligent AI ahead of us. I just don't think that is a realistic possibility. So we said, first of all, to our allies, we're going to tear apart this two hundred page crazy document called the diffusion rule. And the first thing You know, first, I want to talk about the Middle East, then I want to come to China. We, President Trump, in his first state visit, he went to the Middle East. And we struck these deals called the AI Acceleration Partnerships. And his idea was that we will sell you these GPUs in return for investment in America and with ironclad security provisions.

• 4:17:18Speaker 07

  To make sure that those GPUs are going to stay where we ship them. They're not going to go to some other country and they're going to have somebody we don't like accessing them. And the idea behind all of this is like, we want our chips, our models, to be used the world over. We want to be like Windows, we want to be Intel, and we don't want to risk competition. Because in the meantime, what would have happened is Huawei has been ramping up chip production. So we now have a competitor who has a good product. They built Cloud Matrix, they are building Ascent. There is a story in Bloomberg last week about Huawei exporting chips or trying to export chips to multiple countries around the world. So if you think of American AI as a product,

• 4:18:02Speaker 07

  we have a competitor, you know, who's out there selling a competing product out there. So our stance is that when it comes to our allies, we want them to have American AI, our chips, our models, in return for, you know, investment in America and with the right security safeguards in place. And always, always underscore that it is in the terms that we sign, for example, some of the, a couple of these Middle Eastern countries. Now, hopefully that's kind of clear on why we want our allies to have our technology. China is an interesting, different case. There are two schools of thought on China. One school of thought is what you said, which is we should just deny them any chip, any GPU, right?

• 4:18:46Speaker 07

  And the idea there is that, hey, if we deny them anything, you know, number one, they're not making their own GPUs, they're not really making their own models, that was the original thinking. So we will just make sure we get this race to AGI, we will be far ahead. It turns out that was fatally flawed. Okay, because number one, China's making chips. They're innovating and they're building great models. And they're going, you know, knocking on other people's doors. They're like, hey, America is not selling you, the Biden administration is not giving you any of their technology at all. Maybe you want to work with us. Okay, and so we think the answer is we will always keep the latest and greatest GPUs for the United States in huge quantities.

• 4:19:30Speaker 07

  Right, that is irrevocable. Like, you know, we will be the only country which can build these massive, massive superclusters of GPUs. But on the other hand, you know, we want to make sure that we are not giving Huawei, Cambridge, all these Chinese competitors oxygen, oxygen of growth, oxygen of revenue and usage. Right, because when somebody uses a GPU, they're writing code on it, they're finding issues, they're finding bugs, they are making it better. So what is the answer? How do we thread this needle between let's keep our big stuff, but let's not give the competition any oxygen? And I believe the right answer is let's ship them technology

• 4:20:13Speaker 07

  that is ahead of what the competition has, but way behind both in individual performance and also in quantity what we have. So that's the principle and the framework. So if you're going to follow that, where does the H20 come in? The first thing about H20 is because, you know, some of these Biden staffers like to spend, you know, talk about this is Biden never blocked H20s, ever. Right, they were completely allowed all the time through the administration. Because what happened is when Biden, Biden's team built out these rules, Nvidia went out, and by the way, Nvidia has H20, but AMD has something called the MI308, which is the equivalent of the H20.

• 4:20:57Speaker 07

  They said, okay, we, both of these companies, we are going to build a nerfed version of our, you know what nerf means in gaming, gaming language? It's a less powerful version of our GPU, which is way behind what the latest and greatest America has. And we are going to ship this only to China because it will keep us ahead of what. Huawei has, so we can get these Chinese customers using it, but we are way behind what America has. Nvidia built this, AMD built this. The Biden folks were completely okay with this. So we came in and the first thing we said is, one, we tore apart the diffusion rule for the rest of the world. When it came to China, we said, okay, we need to know exactly what is going on when we ship GPUs to China.

• 4:21:41Speaker 07

  Right, so we said, we're going to bring in a licensing regime. So every time you see a headline that says, you know, President Trump banned H20s in April, March. Not true. We brought it under a licensing regime, which basically said, look, if you're going to start to export this, you need to ask us for a license first. Actually, the technical term is called an instant form, we send to these companies. We need to come ask us for a license first, right? So we know how much are we shipping and who's getting it on the other end, right? And now, you know, as you mentioned a couple of weeks ago, these are my partners in the Commerce Department who are actually in charge of the licenses. Like, they kind of, they take all the credit for thinking through all this. You know, them, along with the president, said, okay, you know what?

• 4:22:25Speaker 07

  We're going to get a great deal for the American people. We're going to start approving some of these licenses of these much older, less performing chips, way behind what America has in wayless numbers and what America has. And we're going to get a great deal for the American people. So that's the history. But that's all the past. I like to think about the future because, you know, every, the H20 is now two and a half years old. And then every company has a new generation roughly every single year. And one of the amusing things for me is we are still talking about this, even though since the time the H20 has built, we have been through two iPhone generations. It's like we're talking about, I don't know what the latest iPhone is, we're talking about like the iPhone 11 and we're, you know, several generations behind. This conversation is going to keep coming up again and again and again.

• 4:23:10Speaker 07

  So what is the right long-term strategy, right? In my mind, it is, one, we need to flood the zone around the world with our allies with American technology. We're starting with American GPUs. Why? You know, the whole old business model of Gillette, which is you sell them a razor, but you make money on the blades. You remember that? GPUs and models are a bit similar. If you are a country and you spend a few billion dollars buying American chips, guess which models you're going to use? Probably American models. You're going to make both those models and the chips better on using it. When you build a next data center, you already have all these innocent American models. What are you going to do? Probably buy American all over again. Now, if we refuse to do business with you,

• 4:23:55Speaker 07

  you're probably going to go to a competitor at some point in time. Because AI is just too important. We just can't keep telling people to pound sand every single time they knock on the door and say, I want to bring my citizens AI. So, one, we should flood the world, our allies, with American technology, with GPUs, with models. Again, America will have a overwhelming lead in the quality and the quantity of these GPUs. We'll be the only ones who are building, you know, Elon, I think is going to build a million-plus cluster this year. And I think Google has way more TPUs. We'll be the only country which can build these massive ones. But if another country is like, hey, I want to bring my citizens education, I'd much rather them doing it on an American GPU,

• 4:24:40Speaker 07

  turning an American model, generating American tokens. So that's for our allies, right? And we can talk about who the allies are. For China, our belief is the right strategy is find a way where we keep the latest and greatest. But, you know, ship technology. So if they want to build a chatbot, if they want to build education, I would much rather have them use an older, nerfed, a lower quantity version of our GPUs rather than buy a Chinese company and then keep improving it. And because the reason is, if we do that, what happens? Let's say we ban all American technology in China. We say you can't get anything. Well.

• 4:25:23Speaker 07

  They are going to say we need to accelerate all of our indigenous chip making efforts. Because you guys left us no choice. This has happened before, by the way, about ten years ago, right? Like, we stopped exporting supercomputing chips to China. And within a couple of years, Chinese indigenous supercomputing ecosystem just exploded. And they have, I think, within a few years, like, much better supercomputers and the chips we were exporting them to. So if we force their hand, they're going to now build out an alternative technology stack. And then they're going to start exporting it. They are going to go to other countries, because we are being difficult to do business with in this Biden scenario. We're like, you know what?

• 4:26:04Speaker 07

  Buy a Chinese chip, buy, and it's going to come freely loaded with DeepSeek on top of it. So that's the scary scenario. So I think the right answer is we ship China older, smaller quantity chips in enough quantity so that we retain the latest and greatest, we retain these superclusters. But it's enough to make sure the competition there does not get oxygen.

• 4:26:27Shawn Ryan?

  No, I understand everything you're saying. You know, I mean, I know you're very aware of the China-Taiwan conflict. I mean,

• 4:26:39Shawn Ryan?

  so just the fact that we are sending them

• 4:26:44Shawn Ryan?

  older technology, older chips that aren't up to snuff with what we have. I mean, do you think that's more motivation for them to make a move on Taiwan?

• 4:26:55Shawn Ryan?

  To take over?

• 4:26:56Speaker 07

  I don't want to speculate, it's hard to say.

• 4:27:00Speaker 07

  Because

• 4:27:01Shawn Ryan?

  Because then they cut us out.

• 4:27:03Speaker 07

  Well, my belief, I'm not a deep geopolitical expert on Taiwan. I'm much more, I'm much more familiar with the semiconductors, is I think the motivation there is more about sort of how they believe history. But I think it's a good question, which is

• 4:27:21Shawn Ryan?

  There are other motivating factors.

• 4:27:22Speaker 07

  There are motivating factors, right? I'm not the expert. I think some of your, you know, you had a lot of great guests on. Number one is the Biden rule definitely amplified that. Like, because if we go tell people, pound sand, you're not getting anything. You sort of have to find ways to find alternatives. We are relieving the pressure, right? Like, you know, again, I keep emphasizing it because somebody, when somebody, they're like, they, like, we are, have the latest in data and we are, we'd be the only country who can build these million GPU clusters that, you know, any one of these model companies have. But at the same time, you know, I want to make sure that they get enough to, you know, to stop them feeling like, oh, my gosh, we're just going to go full on out

• 4:28:04Speaker 07

  to build out our entire ecosystem and go talk to somebody else. So, does it take away the motivation? I don't think so, but it's definitely better than the previous alternative, you know, what we had last year. I do think you bring up another interesting question, which is the Taiwan TSMC question, which is that we as a country, I guess the world, essentially has a reliance on a couple of companies around the world who are essential. One is ASML in the Netherlands, who build, you know, these lithography machines. And the second is obviously TSMC.

• 4:28:46Speaker 07

  And if something happens in Taiwan, any number of situations could happen, but it probably means, you know, we don't get iPhones. You know, we don't get AI chips. It's not going to be good. And I think this is where the TSMC project in Arizona, all of President Trump's efforts to ensure these capabilities, the recent deal that President Trump and the Commerce Secretary did with Intel on this, all kind of play a part, which is, this is such an important capability that we as America need to have on our soil. And we need to find ways to bolster our entire.

• 4:29:30Speaker 07

  Manufacturing supply chain and not be so reliant on one single point of failure. So when I think about TSMC, I'm thinking about all things Intel. I'm thinking about all things in, you know, how do we get these fab construction in Arizona? You know, going faster.

• 4:29:52Shawn Ryan?

  How is that factory going? I mean, from, from, from my interview with Val Shikim, it sounds like, you know, the VP of Taiwan. I mean, it sounds like that, that the tariffs may have had some implications on, on the speed of that.

• 4:30:07Speaker 07

  Well, I think they want a lot faster than the Biden regime for sure. But I think we, there's always like space to do more. I'm very, I, I would think that, you know, one of the things that we have really tried to emphasize is that we just need to accelerate, you know, our indigenous supply chain. And I don't have the latest numbers on how these fab production is going. I believe they've kind of increased like their capacity in some way than what it was two, three years ago. But we need to do more. I believe even if the fabs are at the current rate are full potential, it's, it's not going to be sufficient to make up for all the things that TSMC winds up making. So we need other answers. We'll probably, we're going to need Intel.

• 4:30:52Speaker 07

  We might need like other answers in there. I think this is going to be one of those interesting questions over the next, you know, few years. And how do we build out these sovereign chip making capabilities? So that's for me is one. But I want to kind of come back to the Chinese Huawei question because I do think it's important. Like one of the things top of mind for me right now is how do I stop? How do I make sure that somebody around the world is building an application? They're building a critical piece of infrastructure. They are picking our chips, our models, writing applications on top. It's creating a smoke and they're not picking the other team. Like that is very much on top of mind for me right now.

• 4:31:32Shawn Ryan?

  I have an idea on how to speed it up.

• 4:31:34Speaker 07

  Please, yes.

• 4:31:35Shawn Ryan?

  You know, and you'll have to fact check me on this, on this through my other episode with Shelby Kim. But, you know, one of the, one of the hurdles, I think, that, that frustrates them is, you know, they've bought, they're very concerned, obviously, about China taking them either by cognitive warfare or, or actual kinetic warfare. And they've purchased several planes, jets, military equipment from us. You know, but through our red tape and our bureaucracy, I mean, I, I can't remember. I believe it was about, I think it was, somebody's just gonna have to fact check me. I can't, I can't look it up right now. But they bought these weapons like five years ago.

• 4:32:16Speaker 07

  Mm-hmm.

• 4:32:16Shawn Ryan?

  You know, and they just got their first F-16, you know, and, and that's created a lot of frustration over there. And so if there was a way to, you know, get through the red tape and get the, the, the, the stuff that they had purchased, you know, from us in a, in a, in a, in a faster way.

• 4:32:36Speaker 07

  Mm-hmm.

• 4:32:37Shawn Ryan?

  I think that would help motivate them to help us build the chip factories in Arizona.

• 4:32:44Speaker 07

  Hmm, okay. Not super familiar with that. I need to go back and do some homework on this.

• 4:32:48Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah, yeah, it's, I mean, I know, I know that they're frustrated about that, and rightly so. I mean, shouldn't have to buy something five years in advance before you get it. But, I mean, so how, how far along are we in that facility?

• 4:33:06Speaker 07

  Um, I wish I knew this off the, the top of my head. Um, I believe, uh, man, I, I, I think they had faced a few challenges in the first few years around permitting and workforce. I believe they've just entered production recently. Um, um, but we just need to have, get a lot more going there.

• 4:33:28Shawn Ryan?

  So it's up and running?

• 4:33:29Speaker 07

  I think so.

• 4:33:30Shawn Ryan?

  Okay, okay. Well, that's good to hear.

• 4:33:32Speaker 07

  Yeah, I think so.

• 4:33:33Shawn Ryan?

  That's great to hear.

• 4:33:34Speaker 07

  But I don't want to get fact checked on this. Like, you know, the way I understand it is that, and I'm going to be spending a lot more time on this because I've been spending time on some of these model questions, is that... It was in this really slow phase for a little of time because there are a lot of issues with finding the right skill set. I think at some time they had trouble finding enough electricians and other skilled technical people. But I think it's ramped up now, but I don't have the latest in data on exactly where they are right now.

• 4:34:08Shawn Ryan?

  Could you paint a picture of what it looks like, not only for the US but for the world if China does win the AI race? What are we looking at?

• 4:34:16Speaker 07

  Oh, man.

• 4:34:18Shawn Ryan?

  Oh, man.

• 4:34:19Speaker 07

  Yeah.

• 4:34:21Speaker 07

  Well, AI, look, there are multiple timelines AI could take.

• 4:34:28Speaker 07

  I think it's pretty obvious that AI is going to have profound impacts on the economy, on productivity, just making people's jobs better on drug discovery. Imagine a world where China just dominates drug discovery. Imagine a world where, you know, every Chinese individual is able to be smarter, more productive, get more done than what we can do. Imagine Chinese companies being able to build faster, right? Being able to innovate faster and that flywheel just picking up momentum. Imagine a world where our allies are using Chinese technology.

• 4:35:13Speaker 07

  This is actually, this has happened before with 5G, where a lot of the world wound up running on 5G technology from China and instead of, you know, something from a Western country. And that caused a whole set of issues. So imagine a world where AI being so much deeper. You mentioned, you know, it knowing, you know, people's personal issues. It knows how your business works. It knows your numbers. It is helping you make critical decisions. All of this being run on Chinese models and the influence and the power it would have. So imagine a world of robots building inside factories, inside people's homes,

• 4:35:58Speaker 07

  you know, which are all powered by Chinese software and hardware all over the world. And again, this is for me a nightmare scenario. We are not going to let this happen. But that was, I think, in some ways, the path we were on.

• 4:36:11Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah, I mean, I talked a lot about this with Alex Wang as well, and he had talked about the number of AIs against the number of AIs. So we would need more, you know, if they have, you know, a hundred AIs and we have two hundred AIs, then they could dedicate their, you know, allocate, you know, I don't know, thirty-three AIs to service warfare vehicle. And if we have two hundred, we could put sixty-six against that thirty-three.

• 4:36:36Speaker 07

  Uh, I sometimes find those a little too theoretical.

• 4:36:41Shawn Ryan?

  Okay.

• 4:36:41Speaker 07

  I often, when we talk about AI, I often want to ground it in terms of how does it make the regular person's life better?

• 4:36:51Shawn Ryan?

  Hmm.

• 4:36:51Speaker 07

  Uh, and I just think about an individual, you know, who can just do more. They are smarter, the Iron Man suit. They are smarter, they are better informed, they can get more done, you know, because they're getting more done, they can work more effectively together. They have an always-on smart colleague in an AI who can, you know, they can ask things to, their companies can innovate faster, build more. So sometimes I worry that we get lost in a little bit of the theoretical elements of AIs versus AIs. Maybe that's true. It's hard for me to tell with high levels of confidence how that plays out. But I do have a high degree of confidence that AIs will need human beings and need to augment human

• 4:37:33Speaker 07

  beings. And I think about how do we make sure, like, we are augmenting every single American, we're helping every single American every day with AI in going to work, you know, with their family, with, you know, with their hopes and dreams, much better than the other team are. And I also don't want that to happen using, you know, Chinese technology.

• 4:37:53Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah, yeah. You know, you, I never thought about, you know, when we were talking about open source and with DeepSeek, I mean, if that's the open source model, then the entire world uses that, maybe except us. And so they're using a Chinese model. And so I understand that because that I totally understand that, but what I'm getting at is, I mean, what are, what are we doing about open source to spread? Is it?

• 4:38:20Speaker 07

  Ah, yes.

• 4:38:22Shawn Ryan?

  You've unlocked the fact that everybody can use our stuff, but where are we with the open source?

• 4:38:26Speaker 07

  The first thing we did is we basically said, stop scaring people about this is a good thing. And this is very important. Like, if you go read the AI action plan that I mentioned, which is the official document, it is literally the first paragraph, which is, we want American open source to win. And the reason this is important is when the government takes a symbolic tone, it sets a tone for everybody in terms of do we like this or not? So that's number one. So companies would talk to us, big. We have companies who tell us, hey, you know, I want to build this open source model, but I was, the previous regime, you know, or the, you know, other state legislators,

• 4:39:06Speaker 07

  they were scaring us. They would like, if you guys do this, you'll have all these lawsuits and you'd get sort of business. Like, what do you guys think? And our message has been like, we want you to go out there, we want you to win. Right? We want you to win on open to across the world. And if you look at the last four, five months, again, I think China's done a great job. I think their models are really innovative. Um, I just want to make sure like, you know, we give them props where it is due. On the other hand, we know how, you know, some, our own open source models, there is open so, OpenAI for the very first time, launched their first open source model. It's called GPT OSS. It came out three weeks ago. Uh, there are multiple startups which are now building open source models. Again, because when you have the government saying,

• 4:39:49Speaker 07

  nobody should do this, it's very hard for a startup to go out and raise money. It's very hard for an academic to work on this. We are coming and saying, no, we need this for America. Um, but look, it, I'm not going to, you know, say it's all, you know, hunky dory, right? Uh, that is a place where I think we need to do a lot more. Um, so the action plan, it has a bunch of initiatives in there on how we are going to work with academia, on making open source more real, uh, and how we are going to work with industry. So that's one. I want to talk about something else here, which is about laws around AI. It is very related. So I mentioned, I was talking about open source, this thing called SB ten forty seven. And this was a legislation from the state of California to, which are essentially destroyed open source.

• 4:40:32Speaker 07

  All of American open source. But what it say, it's a little bit like. Gun liability, do you remember when some people said, you know what, if somebody gets shot at the gun, the manufacturer should be liable. It tried to do the same with open source models, where it said, if I, if somebody does something bad with a model, Mark Zuckerberg or Elon Musk or whoever should be personally, you know, their company should be held liable, which essentially sort of just destroyed open source because no company can really afford to take that risk. And, and the challenge is, we now have every single state now wanting to do their own rules around AI, but you know, sometimes around open source. So the president, three weeks ago, came out and I think said two important things.

• 4:41:16Speaker 07

  The first thing he said was that AI is, is a national security issue. So it is way too important to just like leave everything to the states. So I don't know about you, I don't want California setting the tone for how we use AI all over the country. And there's a Gavin Newsom joke in there, but I won't go there. All right, sorry.

• 4:41:38Speaker 07

  He did veto the last, but I don't, I don't want to go there. But, sorry. The, but, but if you don't want like a, any individual state to set laws for the country, and how can that happen? Because well, if you have a really important state make a law, the companies will be like, well, we don't have to abide by those guys, you don't have to abide by those guys, let's just pick the lowest common denominator. The other hand, what is China doing? No red tape. Go, go, go, go, go. So President Trump came out and said, listen, you should listen to the speech. He's like, this is a national security issue and we need to make sure that we are doing this at a federal level. So I think this is connected. Very related is this idea of copyright, where, you know, remember what I said about

• 4:42:23Speaker 07

  models? Models become better when you have more data and you have more infrastructure. And the Chinese models are training on our data. But if our American models are stopped from training on these, on this data, the other models are going to get further ahead. So I know this is a complicated discussion, but in my mind, I think of The national security dynamic of how do we make sure our guys are allowed to do the exact same things as the competition? Because if they are training on our data, our guys should be also be allowed to train on our data, otherwise we're going to fall behind. So with open source, I think it's not just encouraging open source, there is a cluster

• 4:43:06Speaker 07

  of issues which are all connected, which, you know, I think for folks watching this, you should read the action plan and you should listen to President Trump's speech when he announced the action plan.

• 4:43:16Shawn Ryan?

  You know, I know you had a very important dinner last night. In fact, three former guests have been on there, Jared Isaacman, Alex Wang, Shom Sangar, you were there. What came out of that dinner?

• 4:43:29Speaker 07

  Well, I would say, so we had this big event yesterday, which is we had this whole AI education task force meeting with the first lady, which I think maybe something we should talk about, which, you know, the first lady and the administration really care about how Americans get the skills to work with AI. So there was a big event and as a part of that, there was a dinner with several really, really interesting people. And I think, you know, the overwhelming tone, if you look at the dinner, which, by the way, I was not there, I was on a flight to get here.

• 4:44:03Shawn Ryan?

  Oh, shit.

• 4:44:04Speaker 07

  Yeah. By the way, folks, you know, I had to cancel on you yesterday because I was like, hey, Sean's team, I'm getting pulled into something, I'm going to have it move to the next day. And then I was like, see Sean, like this was why I had to move to the next day, you know, you can, I'm not just making up a next year's, I'm not being a jerk. But if you look at the dinner, the overwhelming message from everybody was like, we just love what the administration has done in cutting red tape, in being pro innovation under the leadership of President Trump. So you kind of see that overwhelming message, but it is fun and entertaining in a way only President Trump can be.

• 4:44:46Shawn Ryan?

  I saw that I could be off on this. Did Tim Cook say that he was gonna put 600 billion into US manufacturing?

• 4:44:54Speaker 07

  Well, I think that was Zuckerberg.

• 4:44:56Shawn Ryan?

  Was that Zuckerberg?

• 4:44:57Speaker 07

  I think so.

• 4:44:58Shawn Ryan?

  Okay.

• 4:44:58Speaker 07

  I think I think there was definitely a big number from Apple, but I'm not sure whether it was yesterday. I think that was Mark Zuckerberg. I could be wrong, right? Like, I was on a very late plane here, so I wasn't watching the videos, but I think it was Suck uh who did that. But I think you're seeing this across the board. Uh, but with President Trump and his administration, there's one very key message, which is you need to invest and build in America. Like, you see this message through and through and through. So if you, you know, there are so many examples. You had TSMC come in and talk about their investments here. You had Tim Cook go to the Oval and talk about investing here. Zuckerberg yesterday, multiple, multiple companies basically talking about how they are investing

• 4:45:43Speaker 07

  tens of billions of dollars in infrastructure all over America. And I think this is a key theme, which ties into some of the pieces we talk about. Like, the reason to this is not just a chip sovereignty, but it's the idea of like, we want to bring back investment in jobs and infrastructure in America. But like, there are so many examples from the tech world, not the tech world, of people announcing investments in the US.

• 4:46:10Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah, yeah, sounds uh.

• 4:46:12Speaker 07

  I think there's a second comment, I think, after the, I think the president looked at uh Mark and he said, Mark, this is your start of your career in politics. And Mark was like, I don't know about that.

• 4:46:23Shawn Ryan?

  It was interesting to see Elon didn't have a seat at that table.

• 4:46:26Speaker 07

  Uh, I, I think he said he was, I don't know. I think he said he was invited. I think he sent somebody else. Uh, I don't know.

• 4:46:33Shawn Ryan?

  I wonder why. But um well, this was a fascinating interview and I think, I mean.

• 4:46:43Shawn Ryan?

  I'm excited for you and excited for the country and I love your plan. Everything that you just talked about here and man, I gotta hand it to you. This is, you're probably, not probably, you are in one of the, if not the most important role in that right now. I think that this is, this is, this is a lot more serious of a race than most people even realize. With the race with China and so I just, I just commend you for rising up and taking the opportunity and we're all rooting for you.

• 4:47:16Speaker 07

  Thank you. Thank you for having me. Such an honor and look, this is such a privilege. Like it's such a dream to just even have this opportunity to be a part of the administration, to work for everyone watching this video. And for me, I just think every day about like the time I have here. How do I make sure one, we're winning against China and two, how do I make sure that AI is working for every single American? Like I keep going back to, we need to make AI work for every individual. Like whether it's to help you, like I think about my dad, how will he use AI and you know, how will he spend more time with his family? How would it help him with his job and you know, on all of the current versions of my father?

• 4:48:00Speaker 07

  And I think about both those questions a lot and also want to say, you know, I just want to hear from everybody. Part of the reason I wanted to do this is because I think it's super important just be like very, very transparent. So if folks have thoughts and views, hit me up and like, you know, let me know. I want to, we are open for business. We want to hear from everybody, but most of all, thank you. I've been a fan for a long time. I've been such an admirer of what you've done. I can't tell people enough how much being in this room, seeing this story on these walls is a testament to the space you have created. You deserve all the success and you're just getting started and thank you. This means a lot for me to be here.

• 4:48:39Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah, thank you. That means a lot. Cheers.

• 4:48:43Speaker 07

  Thank you.