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

Summary

Shawn Ryan Show - Episode #238: Sriram Krishnan (Senior White House Policy Advisor for AI)

Date: September 22, 2025
Host: Shawn Ryan
Guest: Sriram Krishnan

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Episode Overview

In this dynamic and deeply insightful episode, former Navy SEAL and CIA contractor Shawn Ryan sits down with Sriram Krishnan, Senior White House Policy Advisor for AI and renowned Silicon Valley technologist. Their wide-ranging conversation explores Sriram’s journey from humble beginnings in India to shaping U.S. AI policy at the highest levels. The discussion focuses on the realities and consequences of artificial intelligence, the U.S.-China AI race, the dangers of ideology in AI, the future of open source, and the fundamental importance of American innovation and opportunity. The episode also offers memorable stories of pro wrestling, mentorship, family values, and a behind-the-scenes look at 21st-century tech leadership.

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Main Themes and Purposes

• Demystifying AI: Separating hype, doom, and reality.
• The U.S.-China AI race: What is at stake for the country and the world.
• Sriram’s personal journey: From Chennai to the White House—an “American Dream” story.
• The critical fight against ideology ("woke AI") and for open-source tools in AI models.
• How government, innovators, and entrepreneurs can ensure AI benefits all Americans.
• The intersecting worlds of tech, policy, entrepreneurship, and the unique pressures of leadership.

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Key Discussion Points

1. Sriram’s Backstory and the American Dream (01:10–05:37, 32:07–46:55)

• Raised in Chennai, India, lower-middle class—strong family values, emphasis on education.
• “My whole story exists because my dad took a big bet on me, buying a computer with a year’s salary.” (38:32)
• Taught himself to code; wrote code late at night on dial-up internet; met future wife Aarthi through online coding circles.
• Breakthrough came when a Microsoft exec discovered his blog post, leading to his first job in the US.
• Reflects on parents’ sacrifices and the responsibility to honor them through achievement and service.

2. Career Journey in Tech (22:17–73:59)

• Helped build early Microsoft cloud products; cultural shock adjusting to the U.S. but found mastery through expertise.
• Significant product leadership at Facebook—built ad ecosystem; learned from and about greatness (“When you know what greatness looks like…” 91:01).
• Discussed mentorship, taking bets on talent, and the crucial role of empowering the next generation.

3. Social Media – Power, Politics, and Censorship (110:16–128:35)

• Worked at Twitter and saw firsthand the power of algorithms to shape public discourse and the dangers of centralized censorship and “nudged” political narratives.
• “I became convinced that centralized social media platforms are not good for all of us… It taught me the absolute power of social media and made me very distrustful of top-down centralized control.” (122:51)
• Shared how the rise of "woke" ideology (“DEI virus”) and political activism inside Silicon Valley led many tech leaders to feel intimidated by their own employees and outside media pressure.
• Praised courage of leaders like Brian Armstrong (Coinbase) and Alex Wang (Scale AI) for defending mission-focused, meritocratic values.

4. Open Source, Crypto, and Investing (132:28–194:12)

• At Andreessen Horowitz (a16z): “You pick a person and that's the only person you work with… founders value loyalty.” (185:19)
• Described investing in and championing decentralized tech, especially in social media (e.g. Farcaster), to empower end-users and prevent lock-in and deplatforming.
• Advocated strongly for open-source AI and decentralized tech as core to American competitiveness and innovation.

5. Artificial Intelligence—Promise, Fear, and Policy (194:42–236:58)

The Scope and Power of AI

• AI’s recent leap comes from scientific breakthroughs—e.g., “Attention Is All You Need” (Google, 2017)—that enabled large language models to scale with more data and compute.
• Differentiates closed-source (ChatGPT, Gemini) and open-source AI models.
• “For the first time, we found a mechanism that just continues to scale and work… Transformers and attention are as historic as Einstein’s theory of relativity.” (197:57)
• Strongly opposes AI doom narratives (“doomers”): “I think fear fundamentally underestimates human ingenuity and our ability to harness technology.” (216:53)

Concerns about “Woke AI” and Ideological Capture

• Detailed how even open-source AI can be subtly or deliberately skewed through training data, post-training, or rule sets.
• Led an executive order, “Stopping Woke AI,” mandating federal AI to be truth-seeking, not ideological: “We just want no ideology in AI. We don’t want employees to put their thumb on the scale.” (141:03)
• “Sunlight is the best disinfectant. I am a transparency maximalist when it comes to technology.” (145:32)

Human Relationships with AI

• Acknowledged AI is already used for personal advice, therapy, companionship—and the risks of manipulation, privacy, or bad advice.
• “AI models can manipulate entire populations. That is at the heart of why we made that executive order happen.” (234:40)
• Warned of mental health risks—“AI has encouraged people down very bad paths,” and stressed the need for detection and safety protocols (237:42).

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6. The U.S.-China AI Race and Policy Implications (239:27–284:40)

• Broke down the AI race into: energy/capacity, chip manufacturing, AI model capabilities, and global AI diffusion.
• Energy: China ahead in grid expansion and red-tape-free construction; U.S. catching up fast with new executive orders slashing red tape and investing in data centers and nuclear power (253:32–259:21).
• Chips: U.S. still ahead, but China catching up via innovation and new chip clusters; TSMC Arizona factory crucial but behind schedule (276:08).
  • “One of the most important things we're trying to do is make American AI the default here and around the world.” (239:49)
• Models: China’s “DeepSeek” model shocked the West by demonstrating world-class open-source capabilities; major sputnik moment.
• Diffusion: If China dominates global adoption, American influence and values erode—an existential risk.
• Explains nuanced chip export policy—keeping “the latest and greatest” at home, but flooding global allies (not China) with competitive U.S. GPUs/models to prevent Chinese alternatives from gaining ground (259:52–272:42).
• On the future: “Imagine a world where every robot, every app, every business runs on Chinese models and chips. This is a nightmare scenario. We are not going to let that happen.” (280:30)

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7. Practical Policy—What's Working Now (284:40–292:28)

• Open-source AI is now officially encouraged and prioritized at federal level; stopping state-by-state patchwork regulation; building national security consensus.
• Copyright and model training access framed as a national security issue, not just IP law.
• U.S. tech leaders (Apple, Meta, Scale AI) investing hundreds of billions in U.S. infrastructure following regulatory clarity from current administration.

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

“My whole story exists because my dad took a big bet on me, buying a computer with a year’s salary.”
– Sriram Krishnan [38:32]

“Every single great entrepreneur is insanely fast… They work 24/7, they eat, sleep, and breathe this. There is a real sense of urgency.”
– Sriram Krishnan [187:51]

“I became convinced that centralized social media platforms are not good for all of us. It taught me the absolute power of social media and made me very distrustful of top-down centralized control.”
– Sriram Krishnan [122:51]

“We just want no ideology in AI… Sunlight is the best disinfectant. I am a transparency maximalist when it comes to technology.”
– Sriram Krishnan [141:03, 145:32]

“The whole 'doomer' narrative fundamentally underestimates human ingenuity and our ability to harness technology. We’ve always found a way.”
– Sriram Krishnan [216:53]

“Imagine a world where AI is everywhere, and it’s all powered by Chinese models and hardware. That’s a nightmare scenario. We’re not going to let that happen.”
– Sriram Krishnan [280:30]

“You control your own destiny… When you find what you’re interested in, I don’t believe there are limits. The sky is the limit.”
– Shawn Ryan [68:43]

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Important Timestamps

• 01:10–05:37: Sriram’s backstory & Shawn’s introduction
• 32:07–46:55: Sriram’s family, education, meeting wife Aarthi, first U.S. breaks
• 73:59–83:19: Lessons from Microsoft and Facebook; mentorship and empowerment
• 110:16–128:35: Social media, censorship, and the power of centralized algorithms
• 141:01–153:27: “Woke AI,” ideology in tech, and new executive orders on AI transparency
• 194:42–236:58: AI science, dangers, doomers, realities, and current government actions
• 239:27–284:10: U.S.-China AI race breakdown, chip strategy, energy, open-source challenges
• 289:42–292:24: National action plan, recent White House tech/AI roundtables, policy directions

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Episode Highlights – Lighter Moments

• Wrestling Gifts and Stories: Exchanged pro wrestling memorabilia and stories; Sriram described learning about American psychology and storytelling through wrestling (15:06–31:57).
• Family and Legacy: Both men shared emotional reflections on their parents and motivations—“I just wanted my dad to be proud of me” (49:57–60:26).
• Gummy Bears Taste Test: Sriram sampled American-made gummy bears as a gift from Shawn (“I have no shame, I want the gifts.” 10:19).
• Technical Deep Dives: Sriram gave the clearest, most relatable explanation to date about modern AI model architecture and why “transformers” changed everything (197:57).

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Final Thoughts

Sriram Krishnan's journey embodies the American dream—from Chennai to the corridors of DC. His stewardship aims to fuse technical insight, transparency, and meritocracy with unwavering geopolitical pragmatism. The episode makes clear the AI race is not only about technology, but culture, national security, and the fundamental promise of opportunity. Krishnan insists that with the right values, deeds, and policies, America not only can win the AI race, but ensure AI uplifts every citizen.

Closing quote:

“For me, every day it’s: How do we make sure we’re winning against China, and make sure AI is working for every single American… We want to hear from everybody.”
– Sriram Krishnan [293:30]

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For further reference, listeners are encouraged to read the White House AI Action Plan and revisit key moments in Sriram Krishnan's blog, as well as President Trump’s recent speeches on technology and innovation.

Transcript

[Sean Ryan]

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[Sriram Krishna]

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[Sean Ryan]

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[Sriram Krishna]

Episode is brought to you by espolontequila.

[Sean Ryan]

Slow sticky snoozy they call these the.

[Sriram Krishna]

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[Sean Ryan]

Just add lime agave and a little.

[Sriram Krishna]

Attitude visit espolontequila dot com espolontequila forty percent alcohol volume eighty proof copyright twenty twenty five campari america new york new.

[Sean Ryan]

York drink responsively sriram krishnan am i.

[Sriram Krishna]

Saying that right perfect nailed it sean.

[Sean Ryan]

Perfect i'm sorry but man we become we've become friends over the course of the year and man i've just been super excited to get you in here i didn't think it was going to 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 a mixed bag of emotions here but like i said i am really excited and i love your backstory we were talking at breakfast about the american dream and you came here from india and have been a part of many empires and you've done really well for yourself and your family and that's what i love to showcase here is the american dream and you are very much a big part of that of what that represents and all things are possible in this.

[Sriram Krishna]

Country so thank you man well thank you and thank you sean i mean it's an honor for me to be here i watched you for i think over a year and a half when we first met up and i've just been blown away by just the stories we both talked about at breakfast so many amazing people men and women who have just done some amazing things for this country and i just kind of love the 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 probably one of the badass most patriotic rooms i've ever been in by the way no but thank you i'm.

[Sean Ryan]

Super excited thank you well if it helps i'm also nervous i get nervous for every one of these things you're.

[Sriram Krishna]

Wearing a jacket i feel so bad because i got to wear this i got to wear a suit because it's part of the job it's part of the office right like and i'm like man i'm going to go to chandra and look like a dork out there in a suit right like oh no i appreciate you like you know wearing.

[Sean Ryan]

The jacket thank you thank you but everybody starts off with an introduction here so here we go sriram krishna appointed by president trump you are the senior white house policy advisor for artificial intelligence you're a leader in silicon valley 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 twenty twenty one you joined andreessen horowitz as a general partner opening the firm's first international office in london for focused on investing in ai and crypto 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 arthur aarthi 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 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 twenty two years and you even hosted a podcast together and you're a huge pro wrestling fan so we'll get into all that but like i said 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 and then everything you're doing now with ai so like i said a lot of excitement a lot of fear a lot of mixed emotions about it so it's gonna be an.

[Sriram Krishna]

Amazing interview thank you and thank you for that that was super kind of.

[Sean Ryan]

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 i offer them to do is i offer them the opportunity to ask each and every guest a question so this is from andre what emerging technology or trend do you believe will have the most transformative impact on society in the next five to ten years and how can policymakers and innovators collaborate to maximize its benefits while addressing potential risks well.

[Sriram Krishna]

Thanks andrej i think sort of the obvious answer for me is all things ai and artificial intelligence i think if you look at the last sixty to eighty years there has been a few huge technology trends in the sixties and seventies the first microprocessor was invented in silicon valley and the transistor and the microprocessor which kind of powered intel the moore's law and things which power every single phone every single laptop then in the nineties you had the internet starting with dial up internet using the phone line which is kind of how i started people of our age group probably started and then now of course you don't talk of logging off anymore the internet is just everywhere so i think that was transformational for society in some really good ways some maybe questionable bad ways then you had the mobile phone happen in i'm guessing say two thousand eight 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 and we can get into that but i think really started with the launch of chatgpt about two and a half years ago where it sparked captured people's imagination and now we are 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 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 dad trying to make sure they provide for the family somebody trying to teach their kids whatever it is we want to make sure it makes their lives better at the same time we are 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 and second equally important is making sure ai benefits every single american every single person watching this andre who asked the question my hope is when my time the administration is done they're like okay ai is helping me in my life just a little bit that's the goal anyway yeah i.

[Sean Ryan]

Feel like with ai this is i mean we were talking about it at breakfast but you know you had mentioned it's like when the automobile was invented i feel like this is a moment in humanity like when the wheel was invented everything's going to change and 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 there is a lot of fear of ai is going to take all of our jobs ai is going to crush everything and you are the guy that has to navigate through all of that and make sure it benefits american citizens and humanity as a whole while simultaneously winning the race against china which is no easy task because china plays by damn near zero rules and so it's going to be a fascinating discussion yes it is it's super fun but got a couple gifts for you oh wow okay yeah one this.

[Sriram Krishna]

Is the part i was looking forward to the most i have no shame i want the gifts there we go.

[Sean Ryan]

Those are vigilance league gummy bears made here in the usa legal in all fifty states no thc or anything like that in there can i eat candy.

[Sriram Krishna]

Yeah yeah all right let's do it.

[Sean Ryan]

Dying to know what you think here okay one out of five five being.

[Sriram Krishna]

The best i'm going to say five.

[Sean Ryan]

Nice wow good answer good answer and i got you another gift oh man so i think you're really going to like this one okay wow here you go so i got a friend over at sig sour do you know what sig sour is his name's jason i told him you were coming on he's trying to figure out ai so he's really looking forward to this episode but he wanted me to give you this.

[Sriram Krishna]

Wow hold on how do i get this open here we go oh my goodness okay what am i tell me.

[Sean Ryan]

Explain the screen all right so that is the you want to hold it up it's unloaded i'm gonna teach you how to use that yeah maybe you can teach me some ai stuff and i'll teach you how to shoot yeah but so that is the sig sauer two hundred eleven gto nine millimeter it's got twenty one rounds in the magazine plus one in the pipe so twenty two round capacity it's got that see those slits in the front yeah so that is to help 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 who optics line that's their latest red dot so using a red dot makes shooting a lot easier to hit the target and so in the gun industry there's this rage about these twenty eleven pistols everybody wants a twenty eleven pistol and sig was sig was i don't want to say late to the game but everybody's been really excited about what they're going to release in the twenty eleven series and so that is their first model.

[Sriram Krishna]

This is gorgeous came out but i'm going to ask you a favor and after we are done you want to show me some of the ropes and how to use this properly hey i would love to do it you know one of the things as a federal this is gorgeous so thank him for me this is gorgeous and you know as a federal employee you know you got to declare like every single gift you get and this is going to be i think probably the most interesting declaration for sure you know when i file in the paperwork but no this is gorgeous so thank you and you're going to teach me how to use.

[Sean Ryan]

This i will we'll do it on.

[Sriram Krishna]

A break there we go all right now before we now i have a gift for you i love gifts let's do this and thank you let's keep this right here now outside of i would say technology i would say 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 i got you let me get this out of here 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 who are watching this will know this is known as the the winged eagle wwe championship belt because or back to wwe so in the nineties right like they had like wwe has had wwf 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 it has been held by greats like bret the hitman hart who's my favorite guy growing up the undertaker shawn micha 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 particular thing i'm holding in my hand when my wife and i had this podcast for the last four years until this job if you watch episodes you'll see a title behind me on the shelf and so i grabbed that that's it oh yeah oh man so you know this is like some classic pro wrestling history like right here oh man i love this there you go.

[Sean Ryan]

Wow thank you that is amazing so that'll be displayed at the studio from.

[Sriram Krishna]

Here till it's over yeah well sean's title reign starts right now did you watch pro wrestling much as a kid.

[Sean Ryan]

Now i watched actually i watched it in the nineties okay who was your favorite who was my favorite i don't know it was probably i went back and forth but i really liked hulk hogan and the ultimate warrior.

[Sriram Krishna]

Rip hulk.

[Sean Ryan]

Hogan terry bolia shawn michaels jake the snake all of them what is your.

[Sriram Krishna]

Favorite match that you remember you know.

[Sean Ryan]

What i always liked was the survivor.

[Sriram Krishna]

Series cage matches yes yes which one do you remember like for example well there was a summerslam one between brett and his brother owen but which one.

[Sean Ryan]

I don't remember exactly which one but those were always my favorite when they.

[Sriram Krishna]

Would all show up yeah i think when i was a kid i loved those and i didn't know what i was watching it was like these large than life characters you had hulk hogan eat your vitamins say your prayers train every day the red and yellow coming out my guy was bret hart so bret hart do you know brett oh yeah brett the hitman hart i would say if you ask people for the mount rushmore of professional wrestling brett will always be in there he was one of the most technically savvy wrestlers of all time fantastic at telling stories with his body and in the ring even if you watch his matches now it is just so incredibly crisp and smooth and i know we're talking about breakfast you mentioned stone cold steve austin brett was involved in of the most important matches of stone cold's career right like the i quit wrestlemania match have you seen this no oh okay so this is great right like so i forget which year i'm going to say ninety six but i may be off but so do you know what a heel and a face is in pro wrestling okay so in professional okay in professional wrestling right by the way folks spoiler it's not real it's scripted and it's kayfabe as they would say kayfabe is sort of the reality inside professional wrestling and inside kayfabe a face or a baby face is the good guy and the 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 in a he was the face and then the heel would be the bad guy and the heels would do evil conniving things you know 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 him they're 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 right there were these anti authority figures and you know you know and the good guys what people would call the classic white meat baby face right like you know we're not getting enough cheers and so in ninety six you know brett you know was 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's 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 and they kind of set out this match it's called the you know the i quit match and the idea behind this you know the only way for you to win is the other guy has to say i quit no tap outs no counter you got to say i quit and i think the match was in chicago it's wrestlemania by the 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 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 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 shop shooter when i was a kid right like even though you had this thing where like do not try this at home right like when my cousins like i'm putting them in the shop shooter kids don't try this at home but at the end of the match and steve's in this bloody mess brett puts him in the sharpshooter right 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 and ken shamrock is 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 they end the match there 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 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 he became a good guy and it launched steve's career so that is sort of one of the people ask you for the top five matches in history that's one of the top ones so anyway so brett so that's a great part of wwe history.

[Sean Ryan]

Right there man thank you this is totally unexpected this is awesome i was.

[Sriram Krishna]

Excited i was excited for this wrestling has been a big big part of my life i've learned so much you know i've learned storytelling i've learned what connects to audiences because a lot of people think about it and they go oh it's just like grown men in spandex like throwing each other around right or they say what you did which is like i used to watch it as a kid and i used to watch a kid it's great you watch it it's super fun i try 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 i saw the sophistication and the art form right because number one it requires serious athletic ability these guys and women are incredibly athletic they're taking real risks when they jump off the corner and onto a table well that's a real table that's a real corner and people have hurt themselves and some really bad thing happens so you're taking real risk and then they're trying to tell a story and instead of a story which is through cgi and dialogue it is a story they're telling with their bodies with some promos and dialogue but also with the audience together so wrestling only works because the audience is in there with you 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 on the fly because of the audience and there's a famous example of this you know who the rock is obviously oh yeah okay so by the way i don't know if we're talking about ai we want to get into wrestling first okay and so 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 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 hulk hogan had come back as a bad guy and i think hulk hogan was maybe in his late forties he was kind of in the slightly the tail end of his career right like he was not the red and yellow and this is wrestlemania right and you know 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 one hundred thousand people flashing and you know and they just turn around look at the audience and people are 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 champ you know the rock right and so what happens is rumor the rock went in as the good guy hogan was 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 they want to cheer hulk they want to cheer hogan they want to 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's supposed to work in a certain way right you do legitimate moves you don't cheat et cetera 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 nautical and they without even talking to each other they said we are going to flip this story and for the rest of the match the rock acts physically as the bad guy and if you watch it you can see that happen right and there is this amazing moment which happens where like about near the end of the match the rock hits hogan with his finisher you know the rock bottom and hogan kicks out and he halts up he's like and he's sucking in the hulkamania sucking in the energy and people like connected to their childhood i remember watching i was connected to my childhood right people were like oh my god hulkman is yours now the rock eventually winds up winning but it is one of those amazing moments i was watching it recently because obviously tragically hogan passed away recently so i went back and watched a lot of these old matches but it's one of these amazing things where you're like one hundred thousand people feeling something together to iconic superstars right 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 so anyway so i'm a big fan of pro 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.

[Sean Ryan]

A lot from interesting interesting you know we have a saying here at srs the whole team we compare us politics to professional wrestling so that is true.

[Sriram Krishna]

Do you see any similarities absolutely first of all the person i work for the president of the united states is in the wwe hall of fame okay so let's just start there and i think that you know a lot of people in politics in other parts of the world other domains learn from pro wrestling for example right you're not cutting a promo no okay so cutting a promo is when let us say you and i i'm a good guy or 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 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 or something like that that was a bad promo right like don't judge me but you kind of build up to it and you basically put over the other person kind of 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 got to put over the other person right and then at the same time you're trying to build interest for this match right and i think if you look at a lot of people in polit they have learned from that like and even outside politics for example floyd mayweather manny mayweather he took a lot of how we constructed the tmt the money character from pro wrestling right conor mcgregor exactly right 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 a story and i guess you know watch the fight and i think some of the best people to do it find a way to do it where you're like man i'm going to watch history and i gotta watch it so and maybe i'll stop with this you know people ask me you know what if i'm new to pro wrestling right okay you're going to teach me how to use a six r i'm going to get you back into pro wrestling and the match i'm going to have two matches i'm going to have you watch and these are from two thousand nine and twenty ten and they are shawn michaels and the undertaker 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 we've seen them growing up oh yeah right now the undertaker had what was called the streak and the streak was this 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 wound up getting 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 mister wrestlemania right like he was somebody whose iconic wins went up against 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 you watch it right you know just the storytelling they do one 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 sean just does a lot of these things to get him to say yes and the story goes on and taker says okay fine now i'm going to give you a rematch which is going to be any match you know if you win you're going to break the streak nobody has ever done this before but if i win you're going to end your career okay 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 was 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 i you should watch him at the end of the match you know it is huge and emotional and sean is beaten down and taker tells him you gotta stay down man like i'm just you know it's too much you gotta stay down and sean gives him this throat slash gesture which basically says like 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 of sadness there because you know you're like wow this amazing match ended but sean'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 finished so anyway so when i tell people to watch wrestling like you know you should watch that you should watch rock versus hogan and it'll make you.

[Sean Ryan]

Feel something i will i will incredible let's move into your story yeah you ready all right where did you grow.

[Sriram Krishna]

Up 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 what i would call what indians would call a lower middle class middle class upbringing my mom stayed at home 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 a lot of right values my dad kind of had the same job for forty years he worked in this this nationalized company and we are 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 were 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 were left out 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 passed away he died in two thousand 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 like that just the way things when you're a kid you're five seven eight you're like that's how everyone else but now i realize 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 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 apprec all the sacrifices they were going through to make that happen for me but i'm just very very grateful for the experience i had because i think that grounded me taught me what being a great parent who's dependable who's always there looks like and i've been so much more fortunate in so many ways but yeah that was a i would say i had a.

[Sean Ryan]

Pretty great childhood yeah i 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 you take your family time very seriously but 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 you know what one thing i would like to talk about with you is you know 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 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 uh well.

[Sriram Krishna]

Very obviously i've just been very fortunate here and i think my kids are very young so i think there's very very different childhood from what i had but let's see so india has this term which i don't think is as popular in the united states called middle class and in my family education was a huge priority 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 if you didn't do well academically you know you were really going to struggle or at least that was what i thought now 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 is what i was told like this is the way out and when i was eighteen or nineteen i convinced my dad to buy me a computer one of these old again i'm dating myself here a pentium three box back when a cpu was one of these big beige boxes that showed up and stuck it on a table and it was a big deal for him i recently reconnected with somebody who knew him at the time and it cost him a year's paycheck or something wow this is a big deal and again my kids i'm like you guys have it so easy but big deal for him and i begged and pleaded for a long time now again he was a lot of great things he was a rebel in a lot of ways i get some attitudes from him but he didn't really understand technology he was not of the generation right he just didn't understand computers but he took a bet he spent this serious amount of money on me and then even though he didn't know what i was going to do with it and then i convinced him to get dial up internet which was kind of a big deal and i would say 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 but you know i grew up you know i would spend every single night learning compute the computer and learning to write code 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 used to like run up the phone bill back.

[Sean Ryan]

Home oh yeah yeah and people like.

[Sriram Krishna]

Sean get off the pc you know we have to make a phone call right like or you're like you have a big download and then somebody picks up the phone anyway so kid these days but 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 you know all these kind of you know coding guides i would get all these used books on writing code and at the time i was a bit lost i would say in what i wanted to do with my life how i fit in i wasn't very social and i was kind of lost but then i realized that 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 jar 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 a intellectual exercise 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 i would stay up from like ten pm till four am 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 wound up happening one is my now wife aarti you know she was very similar to me because you know she came from a 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 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 a virtual machine yeah no okay so a little nerdery here if you're going to nerd out for bed so so people usually write manipulate computers using programming languages you might have heard of that right but one of the things people figured out is if you directly have a programming language access the computer it might be unsafe or it might be sort of hard to manipulate in lots of ways so they came up this idea of this 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 on a computer but you can run any sort of code on it you can write a game you can write all these amazing things on it now it's a very sophisticated piece of technology because you've got to be really fast because you got to run it like a computer you got to know all the things a computer does and you 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 i got really into virtual machines and how they work and how to make them fast how to make them performant and all these kinds of things and i kind of had a little bit of a reputation think of it like think of the guy in your high school who can maybe dunk or athletic and the schools around him i was kind of like that guy and so my wife and i 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 so 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 chat chatting and then after six months she's asking me hey who are you i'm chatting with you who are you and i'm like well i live in the city which is kind of nearby and then we wound up meeting a few months after that first time we met and we've been together ever since this was for the last twenty three years now twenty three years yes.

[Sean Ryan]

Twenty three years when did you get.

[Sriram Krishna]

Married we got married in twenty ten but 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 gotta get married and got married in twenty ten have two kids the whole thing so i always have to say the best thing computers have brought me is aarti because without that you know i wouldn't have her i wouldn't you know none of this would be possible the second thing which wound up happening 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 some of the things i was doing and somebody had written seen something i'd written online and i get this cold email saying hey you know do you want to come out and do this this little 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 i couldn't really speak english i was kind of living in my bedroom doing these things on my computer and 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 i think i'm maybe twenty at the time like crazy in this fancy hotel room microsoft paying for went really well and this executive who's now retired but it was amazing was like you kids he met me and my now wife adi he was like you kids should work at microsoft i was like sir we would love to but we are here we don't even know how to find you so long story short he said 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 at the time like cloud computing so he was like hey there's this kid who's doing these things that we are also working on let's just find a way to connect the dots and so a year later they flew me to seattle redmond where microsoft is off and i remember flying in and seattle is a beautiful place 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 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 started my whole journey so i think without sort of my parents the environment i had without my dad taking this bet on me he was not sure what a teenage son teenage sons 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 and so he was like the door is closed but they took a bet on me and one of the things you realize 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 then they had given 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 lived in seattle in san francisco now live in washington dc right 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 yes yes yes you.

[Sean Ryan]

Have and wildly both you and your wife aarthi wildly successful are your parents.

[Sriram Krishna]

Still alive no my you know my father died in two thousand six 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 to 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 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 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 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 right i do think you know i grew up in my twenties with my dad so and obviously look 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 right you knew your dad in that facility but i'm saddens me that he never saw me you know you know have my career and i saw me get married have my kids so i never had sort of that adult relationship with him i never got a chance to provide for him you know i would have loved so he he was a rebel by the way so he 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 but he was a bit of a rebel he was like i want to be a writer i want to write my own books he was kind of he had all these creative ideas 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 being on youtube comments with conspiracy theories he was that person but he missed out right 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 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 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 my mom 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 very close relationship with my wife you know my first kid.

[Sean Ryan]

And yeah what would you i mean what would you say to your dad if he was here today.

[Sriram Krishna]

Man think about this that i somehow made something of myself i don't know he'll say it or show it to him but you know like a lot of parents you know he had he was very proud of me but you know sometimes he 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 want to 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 and i think one of the best things to do you know is to go buy your parents something ridiculous that they will never buy for themselves right and i got jews with my mom by the way so and i never got do it with 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 relationship with your parents and how it has evolved over time i think.

[Sean Ryan]

You know 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 joined the seal teams i mean 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 highest capacity possible and be the best that i could be cause 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 and so you know what really pulled me through all that training and got me in was i had a horrible fear of telling my dad that i failed again 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 just always wanted my parents to know you know they did a good job and that i could make something of myself regardless of you know how my childhood went and my parents are still alive and we have a very very close relationship.

[Sriram Krishna]

How did your parents react when you first signed up there are a lot.

[Sean Ryan]

Of choices out there when it comes to cell phone service and it feels like more are popping up all the time but patriot mobile isn't just another option they're different a company built by people who actually share your values and who are committed to doing things the right way they're also ahead of the curve when it comes to tech patriot mobile is one of the only carriers with access to all three major us networks which means reliable nationwide coverage you can even have multiple numbers on different networks all on one phone a true game changer they offer unlimited data mobile hotspots international roaming internet backup and more everything you'd expect from a top tier carrier and switching couldn't be easier activate in minutes from home keep your number keep your phone or upgrade if you want to go to patriotmobile dot com srs or call nine hundred seventy two patriot and don't forget to use promo code srs for a free month of service that's patriot mobile dot com srs or call nine hundred and seventy two patriot.

[Sriram Krishna]

Well what is that conversation like.

[Sean Ryan]

That conversation went 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 but it didn't apply myself because i wasn't interested and he came out one day he was really frustrated i just got a report card or midterms or something and it was not good and i know that feeling c was probably the best grade and he said it was an argument and he said i'm not going to pay for your college i'm not gonna do it 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 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 he had asked me you know how serious are you about it and and i told him i said yeah i've had multiple meetings with the recruiters already i've already talked about it i want to sign i was only sixteen or seventeen at the time.

[Sriram Krishna]

And why did you want to be a seal i don't know you know.

[Sean Ryan]

I just always grew up playing gi joes watching gi joe i mean your thing was professional wrestling gi joe actually.

[Sriram Krishna]

Gi joe equally i'm trying to get my kids into it right now we have a do you have a sorry what is your favorite gi joe toy.

[Sean Ryan]

Growing up o snake eyes perfect man.

[Sriram Krishna]

Badass ninja snake eyes was a storm shadow right like right and the and the rich kids would have the sky the sky striker jet plane oh man yeah sorry yes but but that's what.

[Sean Ryan]

Got me i think that so i was always you know and and early on in my 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 military war fighters and i was always out in the woods building forts carving spears making bow and arrows and shit like that so that just always got me really interested originally in my military career 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 cause 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 because i was also very into all the vietnam generation movies like apocalypse now platoon 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 luckily wound up making it through and followed through and and that took me into the cia and had an awesome career there and then somehow i.

[Sriram Krishna]

Wound up podcasting 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 especially for something like that because when you're how old were you when you signed up seventeen right so super young you don't really have a sense of the world but maybe you did because you kind of been around the environment a little bit bit like i'm curious about like what is it that makes someone like be like all right i'm going to do this i'm going to serve my country i'm going to put myself in harm's way right what do you think some of the general motivations are when people go like i'm going to go sign.

[Sean Ryan]

Up i mean i think it's always different especially in the seal teams i mean i was one of the maybe no i wasn't the youngest i was maybe the second youngest guy in my bud's 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 they're just they're trying to operate at the highest level as they possibly can you know 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 can't say that i was overly patriotic nine eleven didn't happen until i was already it happened 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 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.

[Sriram Krishna]

I just.

[Sean Ryan]

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 in particularly my dad proud because my brother and sister were good students good at athletics better than everything that i was doing and and and i could see that i could see the interest and 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 up of family and i knew i needed to you know for my own mental health change that to to i just wanted my dad to be.

[Sriram Krishna]

Proud of me was there a moment through your career serving or elsewhere where you're like man this is the moment i know my parents are proud of.

[Sean Ryan]

Me yeah after hell week after hell week do you know what hell week.

[Sriram Krishna]

Is okay yeah thanks a lot by the way to your show and hearing people talk about it on your show.

[Sean Ryan]

Too oh cool cool but 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 over a two year process i was like that's the biggest hurdle and so that was my dad was my first phone call and i said dad i made it through the rest it's going to get easier from here it didn't get easier but that was the big hurt and it felt really good and then graduating buds getting into the seal team first combat deployment finally you know getting into 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 in the podcast world but in general you know i just i just want to 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 just the military community in general is not one that's widely accepted but by civilians i mean there's a lot of drinking debauchery womanizing fighting bar fights i mean and now i can't even remember where i'm going with this but to get somebody yeah to get somebody vulnerable to talk about what that's like and suicide attempts and stuff after and a lot of these guys you know they get out they don't have a voice they aren't able to document what happened over there and to showcase all of that what their career was like what it was like getting out the suicide attempts the drug addictions the womanizing the infidelity and to have somebody come on here and talk about all that and how they got out of it because a lot of veterans feel trapped they don't fit in with regular society you know and regular society is fascinated in the lives of what me and my former colleagues used to do and so to open that up you know 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 to to be able to get a peek behind that curtain on what that life actually is like from somebody that's lived it is awesome and then the audience gets attracted to they're invested i mean we go from childhood all the way to current date and to give somebody a glimpse into what that journey looks like is i mean before this podcast it was unheard of you didn't get that deep and so when the audience gets invested into a story like that these guys that are i think a really good way out of that downward spiral after military service and after war fighting is entrepreneurship is a great segue out because we talked about purpose at breakfast today and help people need a purpose whether they were a factory worker or or auto mechanic or whatever and we were talking about ai taking jobs i mean for military guys i think entrepreneurship gives you for anybody i think it's a enormous amount of purpose and guys coming out of the military and women i mean they have especially in the special ops community are people that are wanting to be the best at what they can and what they do i mean they're gonna implement that in whatever they do but they don't necessarily get the traction the exposure that they need to create a successful business journey as an entrepreneur and we've had time and time again we've had guys in that they didn't have the exposure but i could see the drive and i could just see them in the hamster wheel not getting any traction so i'll 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 real that they don't care what your business 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 we're able to turn a lot of startup businesses into multimillion dollar businesses really overnight and that's what i love to do more than anything or take somebody like you i mean you have a huge name in the tech world you're very connected you're very successful but i think there's still a lot of people that don't they don't know who you are who you are as a person all your accomplishments where you came from in india 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 so to so to be able to bring somebody on like you who 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 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 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 fault right and and but you control i'm a huge believer and 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 i don't believe there are limits you know i think yes there are limits like i'm not going to be a professional wrestler you know i'm a.

[Sriram Krishna]

We we'll get you worth now like don't don't cut yourself short so sorry.

[Sean Ryan]

But but 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 don't think there are limitations i think the sky is the limit and you can probably go higher than that and you are a perfect example of that thank you that 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 stories like yours or palmers or the veterans or blondesdale or a lot of the people that i brought on a lot of these guys they didn't come from generational wealth they built something out of damn near nothing that's how america right there that's it that's it and that's why i do it and so long circle back.

[Sriram Krishna]

I just want to say well thank you but 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 it's just a powerful space because every object here kind of has some meaning and so many of them you know are from people with just these insane amazing stories you know often people who have sacrificed so much for the country and this is so powerful and i think one of the things that you've just done so amazingly well and i'm not saying it's going to blow hot air up here behind is create a space where people can share things i think we were talking at breakfast about your episode with one of your closest friends and one of the things i loved about that was that just seeing him 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 business world right and you know and i think so you just created just this amazing space and platform for people to be part of so well thank you for that i think what you've just done is just.

[Sean Ryan]

Amazing well thank you for saying that but let's get back to your story so you go to seattle and you start working for microsoft what did you think of the united states oh man.

[Sriram Krishna]

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 gi 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 so you watching it on tv you have an idea i think the word american dream gets thrown around and thank you for that i didn't know of any of that i just was like this is a place where i can do something with my skill set and one of which 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 and redmond i was just so lost 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 because we had to figure out our paperwork and we just felt so lost we didn't know a lot of people there but when i walked inside the microsoft building and i would see these computers with coding windows i felt incredibly comfortable because i knew that i was very very good at that 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 that might have been my arrogance maybe i wasn't like that good but 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 so for example when i was there 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 at the time bill gates steve ballmer and this guy ray ozzie and one of the things i did was 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 so and 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 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 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 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 would be people who are much older okay now they're younger than me so but at least when you're in early twenties you know somebody was like forty years old you're like oh my god that guy's ancient.

[Sean Ryan]

A.

[Sriram Krishna]

Little did i know so you know now i'm older but 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 then i 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 and these execs i was comfortable because i had done all the work and i was an expert and so microsoft was very intimidating because it had all these legendary people some of these real icons but when i built this sort of sense of mastery i found my way to comfort so i always talk about when i talk to young people or even people are trying 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 like elon palmer et cetera but if you can make yourself and everybody can make themselves the absolute expectation expert in one area you're going to feel so good and it's going to start opening doors and so that was a big part the second thing was i think a lot of people took a bet on me there and i'm very grateful one of the things i absolutely didn't 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 not need to okay and let me name a couple of people and so this is going to get very nerdy and technical so sorry about that but one of the things microsoft had a lot of were these amazing technical geniuses who were really good at one thing and one of the most iconic people was a guy named dave cutler and dave cutler is probably known as probably the greatest programmer of the twentieth century the greatest one or two in fact palmer will tell you how much he admires dave cutler and the reason he's known as the greatest programmer of the twentieth century is he basically built the version of windows in the nineties that became really popular and he's a personality when i showed up he was in his late sixties he's now in his eighties he was known for being incredibly rude and mean to people there are legendary stories of him punching holes in walls 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 sixties now then now he's in his eighties and then write code okay so i remember you know and i was like man i used to idol worship this guy right and computer science people they still idol 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 is not a lot of people and so i would start showing up on weekends and just see him in the hallways et cetera and then after a while he was like all right 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's basically like royalty when it comes to programming like you know 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 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 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 ugh and he looks at his computer i'm like man this is the end of my career and he was not firing people too by the way by the end of my career right and he was like you know what you're right and i was like okay then i ran out of the office 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 the 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 for lunch every day just to kind of teach us things and so i was taking a bet on right and dave was a royalty right and you know it's like michael jordan now seeing some punk kid and being like i'm gonna take you under my wing a little bit so he took a chance on me and when i had that stamp of endorsement other people like well you know if this guy survived cutler well at least he can survive you know this crazy old person and he's good so it helped me so a lot of people took these crazy bets on 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 these twenty twenty five year old version of me how would they look like where they come from maybe they don't know anything about computers maybe they don't know anything about ai let me find a way to just take a chance 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 realized it's one of the most powerful things you can do and i have been fortunate to have a couple of people do that to me but i'm like wait i didn't know i could even i can do this meeting right or i can start this project or i can start a podcast but that was so powerful because you need that belief right and i think about now how do i find ways to give especially as young people 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 but you are capable and i think that is one of the most powerful gifts that i've been given from my parents others that worked with and whenever possible i try and find a way can i capture some of that and give it to somebody else you empower people well thank you people empowered me they 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 but it's a gift and i try and pay it forward whenever i can i love.

[Sean Ryan]

That i love that i think that i wish more people did that that find success and i think a lot of people do that a lot of people that i talk to and hear do that people have done that for.

[Sriram Krishna]

Me you know but 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 you know you've given so many of these people this platform and you know i don't want to sort of reveal this but you were like hey you are capable of doing this and you know you're capable of so much more so i think you have done just this with this podcast too.

[Sean Ryan]

Thank you thank you i mean it's how we make the country great yes you know you pass it on you pay it forward you empower people you give them confidence and and just shower them with positivity and you know then it's up to them if they go on to do great things or yeah or continue on the same route that.

[Sriram Krishna]

They were but 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 if you and i'm not gonna 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 shift a lot of other places in the world don't give you that by the way you're kind of told you have to stick in this lane or you don't have any opportunity i do think at the core of this place is the sense of opportunity and by the way in some ways looking at the layer but i think about with ai how do we as a country 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.

[Sean Ryan]

Current job yeah yeah where did you go from microsoft did you go to meta or was it was it so.

[Sriram Krishna]

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 up 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 how they competed with each other and we would be like man someday we want to be there and we were like you know by the that was i think it was a bit oriented cd 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 twenty four years later but you know we were like someday we wanted because silicon valley was the 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'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 well i also wanted to maintain wrestlemania but i wanted to make something about in silicon valley so anyway so in twenty eleven twenty twelve we decided okay microsoft has been great for us and we did great my wife and i had fantastic careers there we made a lot of friends 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 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 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 and we can kind of take the pressure off each other and the deal we made with each other was that we will kind of alternate like somebody will go start a company first somebody will go get like a regular job and then then maybe we'll switch it on we didn't know what we were doing we were like we just wanted to be part of silicon valley and i will say silicon valley is a magical place and i think it is one of the 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 idea of it's not perfect a lot of issues with it which we 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 flew down to the san francisco bay area like all right what do we do and so a year later 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 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 have come from there and so my wife had this idea she applied she got into yc and yc 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 how to just get a paycheck get some regular money and so i wound up joining what was then facebook and facebook now called meta and some of the older people here might remember this facebook den 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 dollar forty five the stock price had plummeted second is there was this big question about the whole world is moving from desktop computers to mobile and facebook is only making money money on the desktop so there's this big question of first of all the idea of social networks making money seemed laughable people were just laughing out because people had seen myspace they had seen all these other companies fail they were like i don't even know why this is a thing second was they're like nobody can make money on mobile so they were in a bit of a hole and i had some friends there and i told myself listen i want to do something which is very different from microsoft i want to do something something which involves consumers because i really was interested in consumer psychology you know what makes human beings use products how they interact with products how to build the technical algorithms now maybe ai we didn't have really that word then which kind of interacts with them i was very interested and 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 i i don't know company at the time it was like the stock was down and again i got very lucky i wound up building this ad ecosystem product called the facebook ad network with some amazing smart people and we went from dollar zero to a billion dollar business in three months in three months yes i remember i think two point seven million dollars a day is billion dollar run and it was a rocket ship and i think look again when you look back now i think we were lucky for two things one people were starting to buy things on their phone because the iphone had come out in two thousand eight i think the app store came out maybe a few years later and one of my mentors tells me there is no difference between being wrong and being early they're just the same but in twenty twelve twenty thirteen people 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 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 app the big lesson i learned at facebook is just like the power of working with great people because i had this small team this guy named bj and others who were just fantastic engineers these are the kind of people who'd go off on a weekend and they would rewrite an entire system which had taken a year for a team and they do it all a weekend right like palmer lucky you know and i we share a common sort of hero figure a guy named john carmack did he talk about john carmack when he came on i believe he did he did right so john carmack you know i think by the way one of the idols of the twentieth century john carmack was the guy who built doom the video game doom right oh man.

[Sean Ryan]

I used to love that game yes.

[Sriram Krishna]

Yes so doom and so carmack is is a programming god right what he would do is he invented basically what is called the engine which ran under doom 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 carmack got hired into facebook but the reason i bring up carmack is that there's this great story at facebook where they realized carmack individually was doing the work of entire two hundred person teams holy shit just one person guzzling diet cook 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 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 engineer 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 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 wound up doing ads it became a huge hit hit at facebook 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 what is the win you've had what is the thing which kind of says okay you are somebody who's capable of something and that whole thing gave me that i started to just get known as oh sriram's 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 wow.

[Sean Ryan]

Wow you had mentioned something earlier 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 so.

[Sriram Krishna]

So i stole this from somebody we should talk about marc andreessen marc andreessen is the inventor of the web browser he was the founder of netscape did you use netscape growing up oh yeah 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 ten years later him and ben horowitz started this venture capital firm etricsson horowitz which we can get to i wound up joining 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 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 history is filled with examples of companies that had the right idea but were too early and died let me give you an example do you know what the company company instacart does right it's it's a grossing 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 webvant in the nineties right one of the most famous dot com busts people ask you oh man what was one of the biggest things in dot com era which lost money we web webman they were right they were just too early right or pets dot com right like another famous dot com buzz but people have figured out later myspace right like myspace was or friendster do you remember friendster right like i don't remember friendster but 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 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 if you look at youtube right so people think of youtube as just obviously these days the de facto way to have videos online but when they first came out it was other people had tried it google had this effort called google videos they tried to get videos online 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 to see the increase of original mobile phones which had reasonable quality and in two thousand eight the iphone company so one is you're starting to see more video production right like 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 even the nineties you open up real players like buffering buffering buffering buffering 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 you know 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 history right like and they rode that wave and i think a lot of times times the difference between a five hundred billion dollars iconic company and some company which runs out of money is not the persistence or the heart or the effort of the entrepreneur it is just they were the wrong time and so when you are an investor which obviously we can get that i spent a lot of time as often i was trying to think about is this the right time for 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 were like oh let us embed virtual reality 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 to kind of show you these experiences right so what palmer through his genius through his sort of he told you this amazing story 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 especially with consumer products i think with businesses and enterprises it's a bit different like you can go call up your customers and you can be like hey 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 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 interesting history everybody knows about the facebook history about harvard they've all seen the movie with the social network movie but one of the other untold pieces of facebook history is that how did videos become a thing on facebook 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 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 yes right right okay this is internet history so the ice bucket challenge was basically people raising money and what you would do is you 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 challenge my celebrity friend to go do the ice bucket challenge it would spread so i was at facebook at this time and facebook had just 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 it was video and people had to create it on their own phone so it was personal but second you need to tag your friends because you had to tag some friends facebook just happened to have 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 meeting with sheryl sandberg where there was this vertical straight line and that was usage right because everybody 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 writing in a bottle and you need the right timing and often when i talk to an entrepreneur i often ask them them what makes you so sure that now is the right time not four years ago not four years from now why is today.

[Sean Ryan]

The right time interesting i never thought of it like that and your explanation makes a hell of a lot of sense what you know you went to work at facebook and created the ad network and had a big part in the videos and it sounds like he had a very big part in making it tremendously successful your wife went into entrepreneurship yeah what did she do so.

[Sriram Krishna]

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 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 camera gear but imagine you'd want to buy it 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 or somebody was doing like i just want to do this one scene for a day and they would rent out this gear to them so she raised money from y combinator from a bunch of people and they did very well for a period of time i think they're like i would say probably a couple dozen employees maybe they had a lot of customers they loved them but i think the challenge that they ran into is she would say it's 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 reasonable outcome and i think she had a great experience but she was also a bit early but also at the same time my wife and i this is when we started do some some angel investing together and she's a fantastic investor that's what she does now full time but we had tiny bit of money we had a little bit of money we had made from facebook and one of the things about silicon valley is that 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 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 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 interesting yeah very interesting.

[Sean Ryan]

And so why did you wind up leaving facebook.

[Sriram Krishna]

I was just bored 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 have left et cetera i could have probably stayed you know i was making decent money i would have made more money but i was just like i just want a different adventure i have that problem 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 i did this did this podcast pro wrestling 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 there's a part of it like 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 my myself hard enough because i'm just showing up in this job where facebook at the time has become a big company they don't really need me right because that's how we build these big companies you shouldn't have to need anyone that's how these companies are built so i get very restless when i'm comfortable one of the good things about my current job you're never comfortable but i was just bored i wanted an adventure and i was kind of i was advising a few entrepreneurs i was doing some investing 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 there's a guy named jack dorsey who was running it who was a founder and they had been through a lot of really bad like turns as a business and 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 facebook there was a time in two thousand eight two thousand nine twitter was seen as the potential one hundred billion dollars two hundred billion dollars 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 i think is that facebook had a very methodical way of using metrics and data and numbers and experimentation one of the lessons i really learned from some of the people there was to always 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 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 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 one hundred and forty characters it had worked and then one day it wasn't 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 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 a lot of my personal relationships have come from that professional relationships have come from that i think it's just a fantastic product for the world in terms of you know just what it has done and you know 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 in a bit of trouble it was not glamorous right like you know it was not the sexy company to work it but i really like it and and seems like a challenge so i wound up joining there and that was quite the thing because one of the things i did not realize at twitter was how insanely political in many different ways it was on the inside so that was quite the adventure but that was so i joined twitter i think in.

[Sean Ryan]

Twenty seventeen twenty seventeen yes before we go farther i'm just curious what are your thoughts thoughts about just social networking in general i mean 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 you know but i feel like it's a double edged sword you know it's also a great way for government anybody to kind of map out who you are it's immediate i mean i use it when i get messages on any one of these social platforms and it seems like 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 your life goes onto 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 social media has completely revolutionized the world in a multitude of ways you know there's a lot you can do to cut costs and improve your finances but who has the time to go through all of their expenses and decide what to trim with rocket money crunching the numbers for you leveling up your money game gets way easier rocket money is a personal finance app that helps find and cancel your unwanted subscriptions monitors your spending and helps you lower your bills so you can grow your savings rocket money will even try to negotiate lower bills for you you the app automatically scans your bills to find opportunities to save and then goes to work to get you better deals they'll even talk to customer service so you don't have to rocket money's five million members have saved a total of five hundred million dollars in canceled subscriptions with members saving up to dollar seven hundred forty a year when they use all of the app's premium features cancel your unwanted subscriptions and reach your financial goals faster with rocket go to rocketmoney dot com srs today that's rocketmoney dot com srs rocketmoney dot com srs it's.

[Sriram Krishna]

Such a complicated question first of all as somebody sort of worked in a few of these things i have some biases when you're a part of an institution i've been part of multiple of these institutions you have an affinity you want to defend that's number one but the second part is i've also seen the abuses that happened when social media has real power i've seen the censorship i've seen the centralized control that can happen and i've seen the harm that it can do for kids for example when we grew up up i didn't have to worry about you know was it a popular kid would i get bullied 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 and one of the things i saw on twitter was how censorship or nudging political agendas can can happen sometimes deliberately sometimes even not deliberately and how they can have huge impact so for example people think of the twitter files and all these examples of censorship happening at twitter and i was there when some of this happened and one of the things i always sort of fought back on was 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 he's now running the nih trust twitter deleted his account for basically saying hey maybe the virus came from a lab and maybe i'm not totally sure about the mask thing and they deleted his account but what i also saw was how easily algorithms can be used to shape politics i'll give you a story i was doing it 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 and it says that this hollywood actor 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 the reason it caught my eye was all these stories would embed the same two or three tweets inside and i worked on that i ran a lot of the algorithms and and i was like these tweets look a bit weird there's no followers there's no likes retweets how did these get found why are these kind of getting so fessed 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 on twitter is so at the time 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 now trending right i mean 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 not based out of any deliberate agenda right it said these tweets by total unknown people about this actor is important okay so this happens maybe at like two am three am and then in the morning right like what winds up happening is on twitter there was this product called there was a way where they could highlight these tweets and kind of give big imagery so one of these people wakes up and some of these folks are are just sometimes had a political agenda but i think they were just like hey i just want to do my job and this thing is trending they did not know this came from an error so at five am or six am new york time they take this and they go say this is a thing which is happening on the internet okay a couple of hours later all these editors of all these media publications wake up they're like oh there's a thing people are talking about internet hey hey can you chase this story down and write about it and by the afternoon i think that whole thing that the guy's agent was getting calls and he'd be like oh my god what is happening the internet is talking about this and the reason i bring up this story is first of all it's kind of silly it's like a hollywood movie nobody really cares but it tells you how almost easily inadvertently you could shape the discourse shape the art of something 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 i often call twitter a memetic battleground 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 wound up doing was finding ways to sort of inject their idea into this mimetic 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 like retweets right and these were often things which were provocative like had like made people angry right like and then those people would get followers okay so there was this kind of the system which is 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 oh this is what people on twitter want because it's getting more attention i'm going to send you more followers i'm going to 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 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 you walk into some fancy schmancy michelin restaurant and you're like okay everyone's here in a suit or dressed up and you're like i gotta look the part or let's say you go to a sports bar 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 i i'm not saying it doesn't exist there was a lot of it 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 their you know the titles look like let me copy that so one you're kind of giving people who are exhibiting more wealth certainly literal wealth second you are training everybody new at twitter those are the icon those are the people you should follow right 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 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 is why every platform by the way i'm not picking anybody 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 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 kind of 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 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 wound up investing but part of it is like i need to find ways to battle some of the negative things i saw.

[Sean Ryan]

Over there there 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 you know twenty twenty election time frame 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 way it appeared to i think everybody is that these top guys you know that own these companies are controlling the entire narrative everything that's going out and you know it appeared and i didn't i don't think it appeared it was that way everybody leaned one way and you know that was you know obviously towards the left and i mean they deployed was that one platform they just pulled it aws parlor parlor yeah they just pulled it i'm not sure why i don't know what is going on there but it was like holy shit now there's an entire party oh yes with zero voice to include a sitting president and that really i think opened everybody's eyes immediately of how how powerful and dangerous that.

[Sriram Krishna]

This could be the de platforming was huge i think in a way i had sort of seen the building i had seen 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 depositions and lawsuits and hearings and whatnot they would send all these angry emails to say hey 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 mask mandates or whatever the case may be so they would send this down the second thing i think what is happening was this was the peak of the culture war and these platforms where there was this domino effect where if one person took down a video a piece of content downranked something shadowbanned for example then every other platform immediately felt pressure because what would happen is all of a sudden you would get an email from the former white house members of 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 and so they try to enforce the overton window of conversation and they try to really shrink what can be said and i think in some ways i think the platform i think the turning moment 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 because all of a sudden you had one platform and by the way i was there i was there on the first day we kind of jumping ahead a bit but i had spoken to elon and he told me he was going to do this i had left twitter at the time for a couple of years 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 is a little bit like getting a do over because i could go back and this is not an official capacity i was not an employee but maybe i can go back and i didn't have the power to do some things and i don't have forty five billion dollars to spend on a social media company by the way that was a problem i had but now i have a chance to put some things right okay so do you remember when elon bought twitter the let it sink in dave and 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 and that was such an experience just watching elon work and and trying to sort of clean up the company finding all the ways that sort of these progressive levers had been hidden and for me it 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 ten x which was trying to live by free speech which brought back the president which brought back a lot of people who had been taken down for just asking simple questions like hey what is the origin of the COVID virus are masks effective or how can you say that we can't sit together in a restaurant but a protest is okay how does that work but even just the ask a question your account plan 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 even today that is not appreciated for how important that moment was i mean i.

[Sean Ryan]

Think it revolutionized everything immediately and i.

[Sriram Krishna]

Don'T know were you on twitter were you active then you must have been.

[Sean Ryan]

Yes i probably wasn't very active that's probably the 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 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 platform so i try not to fall into that but i mean i think it was well i don't think i know it was instrumental in what elon did because once again from an outsider looking in what i saw was he would have capitalized on the entire market 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 you're not going to be censored and i think that all these other companies meta google maybe amazon i'm not sure but i think they saw that happening and they thought oh shit if we don't loosen the reins up a little bit here we're going out of fucking business and i think they would have gone out of business and with some of them i'm actually surprised that they didn't just because of the repercussions of what they did to half the country oh yes 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 am i what do you think am i.

[Sriram Krishna]

Wrong on that 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 love it if there was nothing political like ever said on their platform like they really don't want me the business of navigating where the COVID virus came from they just want 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 it and i think you know one of the there's an amazing book you should read from the fifties a bit hard to get on amazon it's called private truths public lies private truths public lies sounds interesting yes and this idea and i think it's out of print or something but it's a very simple idea it's a very simple idea that that sometimes in society everybody starts to pretend to believe in a lie just because it is the convenient expected thing to do 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 these two logically this can't like totally makes sense there's something wrong here right but you can't really speak out against it or if you did there were consequences okay 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 but when you have that one person and do so at usually like sufficient like kind of like risk to themselves everyone else starts to fall in line makes it okay makes it okay you had two guests on your show 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 it episode because he talks about but you know he basically gets bullied bullied into having to put out a statement 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 crypto available safely securely to everybody that's the job that's the job we are in right so he puts out this blog post which was hugely controversial because he was accused of of being racist he was accused of frontiering their 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 which is to make 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 if you care about something more than this 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 the stakes are high the rewards are high it's going to take a lot of energy right and 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 dei right like i remember you know my wife at the time was had a little bit of a stint at meta and you would have these employees who just totally hijack meetings and they would ask people to issue apologies they would say we have to comment on literally every thing happening in the world and a lot of silicon valley executives were just scared maybe they should not have been scared maybe they.

[Sean Ryan]

Should scared of their workforce yes they.

[Sriram Krishna]

Were scared of their own employees they're absolutely scared of their own employees right like they were terrified of man i don't want to seem you know pekinist sexist racist whatever it like i don't want to seem that right and they would get attacked all the time i spoke to to some really famous people who are like i don't want to 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 going to piss a lot of other people off 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 business doesn't get into trouble they had customers and they're like we don't want to be in the political game but i'm scared and this was a thing all over silicon valley it was almost i would say a rising infection 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 dei in silicon valley i think this was in twenty thirteen twenty fourteen and and there's a company called github they are a popular developer company they built source code products for developers and at the time they had actually a funny replica of the oval office that's kind of a thing and they had a carpet like instead of the presidential seal 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 safe meritocracy you know if you 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 where if you say hey you run a four four you know you know you're pretty good at maybe being a wide receiver and they're like well you can't talk about that system like racist but that became a real thing and then i saw over the years quotas you know me a lot of other people we would get into hiring situations where you'd be told hey unless if your entire team is a male white pick your thing you're being racist or sexist and you are like well look i want to hire amazing people people i don't care where they are i don't care what they look like i just want to hire the best people to the job but there was a lot of pressure i know on silicon valley execs to be like okay my board has to look a certain way my exec team has to look a certain way otherwise 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 bad space to be and i 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 we used to get calls from all these founders being like i'm just so terrified of my own employees i don't want to deal with this i just want to build a company i want to build a product serve my customers help my employees hopefully we all make some money i am not interested in weighing in on the latest social issue but they were forced 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 they were a public company he could have been ousted you had all these esg firms you had all these firms all kind of stopped doing it now in some ways thanks to who won the recent election but this idea that hey unless you kind of check off all these boxes on the environment on diversity we want to invest in you and if we are on your board or we're on your cap table we are going to put pressure on you to do these things right and so he took a lot of risk and i think it was not easy for him but when he did that so you know one i have a lot of respect for him because to 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 i'll be in the COVID of time and i'll be happy but he took on the crowd he took on all these folks who are trying to bully him so number one he deserves some respect for that second when he did that it sort of opened the overton window people are like oh wait i can do that i can now start saying oh wait maybe we just need the best hire i don't want to just fill a quote and alex wang who you had he did this thing where he said instead of dei i want mei where meritocracy excellence and i forget what i stands for but it's the idea that we focus on things you kind of want in a workforce right you want people who work hard you want the best of the best and you don't care how they look look like or where they're from or what they do in their private lives so alex took some heat for that alex wang when he did that but that set the tone so i have a lot of respect for some of these people i worked with some of them we spoke about you know folks like balaji srinivasan who i think are similar who took these arrows when they didn't need to and then opened the overturn window for a lot of people to.

[Sean Ryan]

Follow them 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 talk 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 is is is is like silicon valley yes.

[Sriram Krishna]

I think yes for a certain class of companies else guindo that part of that whole community they have a lot of ties to sort of the defense establishment to making hardware and so which is why you're seeing a lot of these american dynamism companies come out of there they can pull talent from elsewhere and i think the other places which i've done start doing really well austin texas has started doing really really well i always have a soft spot for like raleigh north carolina i think they have a great ecosystem there which is awesome sometimes you have these ecosystems outside silicon valley which is great because you get these people who don't have a huge ego they want to work hard and they're not going to switch your company every year and go join somebody else but i would say silicon valley is still really important just because if you think about a lot of these ai companies for example a lot of them are in silicon valley and so one of the things just a few plugs in one of the things we've done in this administration to combat a lot of these things about wokeness about politics in platforms is we leased this executive office order president trump signed this executive order three weeks ago which is called stopping woke ai and i played a big role in this along with david sacks and the whole idea behind the executive order is that it's not that we want you to pick a left versus right ideology we just want no ideology in ai we don't want employees to put their thumb on the scale and sort of embed their beliefs into such a crucial piece of technology and this kind of sometimes accidentally happened 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 was sort of an accident and 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 is and i think given that and given the fact a lot of these ai companies are in silicon valley which often just have a very left leaning ideology 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 how do we make sure that 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 other things we have done says is number one no ideology 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 certain you know even for 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 story about this hollywood movie if somebody could tell how the algorithm was working they'd be like oh wait something's weird let me go investigate so i think sunlight is the best disinfectant right i am a transparency maximalist when it comes to technology so with this woke ai eo with other things we have done we are experiencing 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 how does an.

[Sean Ryan]

Ideology get inserted into an ai platform is that from the engineers or i mean she's processing so much data i mean i'm probably way off but the way i understand it the way i took it from alex wang is that 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 i don't know what all goes into that but i would imagine it would be fairly easy for a rogue engineer to insert head his own ideology in there and it goes unnoticed by the rest of the company is that how that.

[Sriram Krishna]

Happens or 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 for a while there was this phenomenon where left democratic congressmen would sometimes or democratic political figures would rank get ranked higher in the algorithm they got 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 you tell the algorithm hey go find more things like that this and the people who were sometimes giving these lists and i'll just give them the benefit of the doubt 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 view a certain class of publication okay and so those guys start getting more traffic more attention and so it kind of spirals so i bring up that story so very easily and sometimes even without any mal intent sometimes there is like mal intent even without mal intent you can slide these systems okay now with ai right so very simply just kind of like levels it a bit 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 kind of bitches cauldron you know but imagine the cauldron span like multiple data football fields you dump it all in like every book ever written every movie ever made all of wikipedia right if you google all of youtube every bit of human knowledge ever gathered you stick it in there and then you have this algorithm which i really want to talk about try and make sense of it right so for example it says that the word sean what should the word sean be followed by 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 show 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 so it is kind of training and trying to make sense of all of this knowled okay so that's called training then there is a separate step where 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 in these very targeted ways you might have heard of this phrase called fine tuning you're trying to make it better in these very targeted ways at the end of this you get this fully cooked model then you have inference which is you go to chatgpt or you go to grok or you go to gemini on google or you go to claude you type in a question 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 going to have but also every step of this could be infected by ideology number one let's go to the step of this big cauldron what if you only stuck left leaning content in there so there's this data gosh i wish i could remember this at the top of my head that a lot of the written internet is left leaning in nature 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 could wind up learning just a certain ideology second is when you fine tune these things right like for example deep seq which we'll probably wind up talking about this chinese model there's a lot of evidence that it was fine tuned to add chinese ideology say nothing happened in tiananmen square or what china thinks of taiwan that happened in that part of the process 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 a lot of these models have instructions on how they should think rules they should follow you could set up a rule which says pick the answer which optimizes if you're me i would say optimize for truth or you could say pick the answer which optimizes for equity in the dei and it's going to slightly slide the model some way or pick the answer which is least of equity rather than pick the answer which is intellectually honest 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 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 generate photos of human beings to try and generate people of every race but then you're like wait a minute if you get a photo of a nazi right they're probably not asian that's not what the average nazi in germany looked like in nineteen forties or if you have a photo of a viking warrior they probably didn't look like me that's not what vikings looked like in a way 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 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 in this role i think look one of the things we really care about is making sure that there is searching for truth and that there's 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 are reading and my hope is that regardless of whether you agree with me and you on our political beliefs you'll probably agree that truth seeking is a good thing so that's the hope.

[Sean Ryan]

Wow it's a great explanation best i've heard thank you thank you thank you according to new reports central banks around the world may be buying twice as much gold as official numbers suggest you heard that right twice as much and get this some are bypassing the traditional markets and buying gold directly from miners in africa asia and latin america that means no us dollars just straight physical gold the shift isn't just symbolic it could be strategic they could be looking to bypass western financial systems so if central banks are scrambling to reduce their dollar exposure and hold more physical gold gold should you do the same that's where the award winning precious metals company gold co comes in right now you can get a free twenty twenty five gold and silver kit and learn more about how gold and silver can help you protect your savings and all you have to do is visit seanlikesgold dot com plus if you qualify you could get up to ten percent back in bonus silver just for getting started started go to seanlikesgold dot com that's seanlikesgold dot com performance may vary you should always consult with your financial and tax professional whether you're juggling tasks or trying to stay clear headed throughout the day ketone iq delivers clean brain fuel that can help you think sharper longer and smoother no caffeine no crash no overstimulation thanks to the folks at hvmn for sending me their ketone iq product to try i really like taking ketone iq before i work out it's not an energy drink but it gives me a ton of energy i wish i had this when i was on active duty when i take it i have more endurance but without the crash ketone iq uses ketone dial for a fast acting natural slow release effect with no artificial sweetener or fillers it helps support high focus tasks by directly powering neurons and stabilizing cognitive output and it's military tested originally developed to support elite cognitive performance in the field hvmn has an amazing offer just for my listeners visit ketone dot com srs for thirty percent off your subscription order plus receive a free gift with your second shift fun surprises like a free six pack ketone iq merch and more these statements and products have not been evaluated by the fda these products are not intended to diagnose treat cure or prevent any disease or condition all right sriram we're back from the break we were talking about twitter how you got into there when elon took over and and basically eliminated the ideology of wokeness of twitter but something that we didn't talk about yet is a sixteen z andreessen horowitz vc firm and so i'm curious 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 so.

[Sriram Krishna]

A sixteen z stands for andreessen horowitz so so a followed by sixteen letters and z and a sixteen z it's kind of a tech thing 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 these two iconic figures in silicon valley marc andreessen who we spoke about who invented 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 just a little bit of history so when people sometimes think venture capital they think shark tank you know you come in you kind of pitch an idea some rich person in a suit gives you some money or not 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 they'd be like hey we're going to go out and we're going to go into these stormy seas and take a lot of risks and be out for a few weeks maybe catch some whales and and come back and it's an incredibly risky investment right like half the time they don't come back let's just say the hazard rate was pretty high and say they go around and they would go to people with wealth and they'd be like why don't you stake me on this journey and i will give you a percentage of the whale i carry back back which is by the way the word carry in venture capital comes from that it was literally sort of the veil and sort of the thing that you carry back you would get a percentage of that carry so even two hundred years later that word has kind of stayed on in sort of the risk capital discourse and so the history of venture capital is super fascinating and i think it's an essential part of american innovation and silicon valley have existed so in the seventies or eighties what would happen is before venture capital if you're an entrepreneur 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 they give you some money but it was very very hard to go to a bank and say i have a really risky enterprise in technology which you may not understand but i need a few million dollars and by the way you may never see it again and you may not have friends and family who can do that so i'm going to say in the seventies there was a set of folks who wound up forming sequoia capital and kleiner perkins kind of developed the modern venture capital industry these were folks who had made some money from silicon valley sort of the origin of silicon in silicon valley they're kind of been part of these big chip companies and you know that's where the word 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 but the thing which i think is very different from the rest of the world is they were willing to 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 do you remember using like ask jeeps like us yeah yeah yeah right like or yahoo dot com comma like yahoo is another famous one and you know and back then you know you would use these search engines and people are like well look search is really not a business right we don't know how to make money off it it's been solved and then these two guys larry page and sergey brin basically come out with a new algorithm right they were these stanford computer science guys they came with this new algorithm called pagerank by the 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 work but they were like we don't have any money they actually went to a lot of other companies and they said do you wanna buy our algorithm for a million dollars so they went to all these existing search engine companies companies imagine by the way you just bought original google algorithm for less than a million bucks and every just said no so they don't know what to do and so 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 bechtor stein and they said listen i have this idea we need some money and andy i think kind of gave them one hundred thousand dollars they didn't even have a bank account so they didn't know where 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 going to work 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 right there are probably enough people capital going to take a bet on you and probably going to assume that ninety percent of the time this money is not going to 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 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 so this story is very interesting because andreessen horowitz totally revolutionized in my mind and this ecosystem back in the day venture capital firms were sleepy 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 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 had like five to eight partners and that person would be assigned to you and that person if you needed some help like maybe like hey man my company's failing 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 dod that person better have a rolodex right but you're essentially the one person so anyway so mark andreessen and ben they had their own experiences with bad venture capital firms and a lot of bad ones right they do a lot of bad things to founders they throw ceo's out and they also were like listen why is it that when we go we have to rely on this one person and we need all this other help and they met mike ovitz you know who mike ovitz is i don't so mike ovitz is the founder of creative artist agency caa right i would say along with wme the two iconic hollywood talent agencies right he's a guy who's represented like every hollywood i think he's retired now but he's represented every hollywood celebrity best selling author founder ca 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 which are color attention grab 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 right you are with an opposite the way these you should sign up with us is you're not just getting me mike owitz you're going to get the entire firm's rolodex and this firm is going to maintain rolodexes just for you we are going to maintain a list of actors we want to maintain a list of producers directors you know and so if you come in and you have an idea you know you don't need to go find the right editor you don't need to hope that i have a friend you know who can 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 would 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 as a rolodex seeing they 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 so michael was marc andreessen's mentor and friend so mark and ben heard this and they're like why don't we do this for venture capital firms because let us say a typical entrepreneur 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 do you have a rolodex of government officials something goes wrong you need all these other things who these young ceo's didn't know or let us say you run into trouble you're running out of money right how do you restructure a deal how do you close a big customer 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 value every single amazing marketer we're going to maintain a roster of potential board members so when you come in you know twenty five 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 a cfo so often for young founders they don't know how to hire executive talent how do you hire a 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 seen every great sales leader help you do that so that was a different product right from classic venture capital so number one instead of one person solar decks we're going to give you the whole sort of system the second thing they were loud they were brash they had press articles marc andreessen wrote this famous blog post called software is eating the world which basically said that every business 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 a sixteen z used to i would say become one of the most famous powerful firms in silicon valley so how do i come in there right so mark has this great strategy which he calls harp in the venture capital or tech business right like if you sleep if you are 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 there are many others are very good at this like peter thiel lonsdale who i think you know who's been here amazing people there mark was extremely good at it and he would have this tactic he called called harpooning okay 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 a email from mark andreessen is like he's a very notable technology figure so you're just like sitting here 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 criteria it's a little bit like you know you see i don't know a fifteen year old who has amazing skills and you know 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 someday 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 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 marc andreessen saying hey hey i like this blog post and i was like whoa and this was very different time in my life so it was quite shocking.

[Sean Ryan]

Right another blog post huh blog post yes blog post to microsoft no i.

[Sriram Krishna]

Had left microsoft and this was about.

[Sean Ryan]

That'S what they found you with yes.

[Sriram Krishna]

Blog post there's a whole pattern here by the way if you can take a slight tangent which is i think one of the superpowers i think people can have with lot of with very little effort is putting content out online doing what you do right like or i used to write 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 at the right moment saw it and they were 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 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 somebody on instagram and next thing you know you're 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 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 put some into alex wang's company scale ai into a bunch of other companies which started doing really well and silicon valley is a ecosystem run on reputation 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 will not fare very well on the other hand if you take the phone call if you wind up helping that person when they need you if you're just not a jerk and you respond to every single thing timely 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 i made a little bit of money covid happened i was sitting at home you know collecting pasta and toilet paper like everyone else was do you remember that you remember the whole era.

[Sean Ryan]

Oh yeah i still have socks toilet.

[Sriram Krishna]

Paper oh my god like what was your sort of i can't believe we lived through that memory of COVID.

[Sean Ryan]

What'S.

[Sriram Krishna]

That what was your i can't believe we lived through that memory of COVID.

[Sean Ryan]

What is i can't what is it.

[Sriram Krishna]

Yeah you're like 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 now what was that for you.

[Sean Ryan]

A bunch of stuff i remember i fell for it i completely fell for it for about a month and then and then i was like this doesn't seem right but i remember spraying packages off at my front door with lysol.

[Sriram Krishna]

I remember we so the multiple hand washing you had to do that you.

[Sean Ryan]

Made my hands were all cracking here's a funny story for you so when we when we we moved to tennessee and my wife wanted to start a farm so we bought we went and got like six alpacas bunch of goats bunch of chickens and some ducks and.

[Sriram Krishna]

And did you have any experience in farming before no no okay no we.

[Sean Ryan]

Were we had just started this right before it happened happened and so do you know what an alpaca is of.

[Sriram Krishna]

Course my mentor in seattle had an.

[Sean Ryan]

Alpaca farm it's like a llama right very docile animals anyways it gets hot here you know could get to you know one 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 we call this guy or my wife finds this alpaca wrangler woman and she comes down and she shaves the alpacas i remember at the beginning it was all these people in italy were supposedly dying the.

[Sriram Krishna]

February march of that year that time.

[Sean Ryan]

Frame and they come down and i'm like hey make sure you wear a mask we don't know where these people have been i go down there 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 alpaca is getting fancy 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 my wife and i'm like what are you doing you're gonna fucking kill us these people just came from italy.

[Sriram Krishna]

And da da da da da da.

[Sean Ryan]

And she's like holy she got all upset about it and anyways anyways about a couple days later you know because 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 turned some up i don't have cable tv at the house i i really i don't really watch anything smart and i just i don't want to be fed that you know what i mean because i i figured 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 i started talking to some friends that still have news and that's when i figured it out i was like all right this isn't about a virus this is about something much bigger and so but that was kind of those were my moments oh man yeah lasted about a.

[Sriram Krishna]

Month isn't it crazy that we all lived through that we just had our.

[Sean Ryan]

First i gotta be honest it's fucking.

[Sriram Krishna]

Embarrassing but i mean we didn't know better we were all told this and nobody had gone through this before and there's so much fear and you're like is it spreading in the air not spreading in the air like the number of feet everyone and we just had our first child like a little bit before that and we spent so many months just not seeing any human beings i was so bad in so many ways and so bad for sort of elderly people i know who are just stuck and just so it's both funny but also i can't believe we all did that but anyway so i was sitting at home you know doing this not seeing other human beings and everyone was on zoom if you remember this was the era where everybody was doing bdu zoom meetings that was the thing and marc andreessen he reaches out and he said what are you up to and i left twitter because i'd gotten tired and i just wanted to do something else and i was like well i'm just sitting at home waiting for this pandemic to be over i'm sure it'll be over in a few weeks little did i know i'm amazing at predictions sean and he said well just come help us out and what i did not know was they'd been talking about me for a while and they had somebody else who i think was going to step aside and so i became part of the team i became one of the general partners along with katherine boyle and she joined after me but there's about i would say maybe twenty general partners for the firm i became one of them and became a vc started investing while also doing my podcast but that's how my andreessen horowitz journey started wow i learned a lot by the way andreessen horowitz about investing 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.

[Sean 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.

[Sriram Krishna]

Look for good question at the heart of it that is the job 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 if i were to meet meet somebody from your world from your background right without meeting a lot of people i don't think i would know the difference between a amazing top tier operator versus somebody who's not just because i'm just not from that universe and i suspect that if you came into my world you may not know the difference between a top tier engineer somebody who's maybe just good at 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 just got to talk to everybody you got to know okay who the great founders look like who the great engineers look like who the great builders marketers who they may be and you need to meet everybody when you meet people over time you build a spidey sense like i'm sure or when somebody reaches out to you 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 are they full of shit or somewhere in between 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 whole homework that's number one the number two 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 in the bay area there are probably like twenty indian restaurants twenty italian restaurants if you invest in one there is no way that italian restaurant is going to become the only italian restaurant in the united states just not possible at best they maybe have a chain 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 italian restaurant but that's just the nature of the business technology businesses are different 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 five google dominated the world of search engines who is the number two search engine to google i don't know exactly nobody does doesn't matter right because google just dominated same with facebook right and so there are these winner take all patterns which often wind up happening in technology where have you seen the movie glengarry glendros no oh okay this is a classic movie and there is 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 him a pep talk right and he basically insults them insults their manlihood and he says you know the guy who gets the most sales the winner gets this amazing car you know what second prize is after this fancy car set of steak knives nothing right so often in the technology investing world there's a great scene you should check it out on youtube it's very similar dynamic where if you invest in the winner you're going to be in google or microsoft or apple or pick an amazing company or you're in a company where you're like oh i don't even know who the second guy is so how do you then figure out what the next goal 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 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 invested money in er and what the you know what 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 but what is not good good is if you're investing in search engines and you did not invest in google because that is the difference between 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 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 i have.

[Sean Ryan]

A question real quick you know when you're talking about trying to find the winner in a in a category i mean would it not be wise to invest in several companies within the same.

[Sriram Krishna]

Category great question great question let me ask you a simple question yet palmer here okay let's say you invested in palmer let's say you're also invested in palmer's competitor how do you think he's.

[Sean Ryan]

Going to feel that's the caveat to.

[Sriram Krishna]

That right and so we had a word called getting conflicted like i think the great entrepreneurs don't want you in bed with the competition now of course there are a lot of ways to kind of sometimes people get around it some people that i work in other places that 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 right so that is a definite dynamic but to be honest there's ways around it where some people 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 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 not metaphorical not a little one with 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 believe in that loyalty i think that matters a lot and i also think people are not loyal 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 the answer 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 spend time with lots of many amazing entrepreneurs from the sometimes working with them or sometimes from the outside and you sometimes see similar patterns across multiple great entrepreneurs for example i'll just pick one every single great entrepreneur is insanely fast they are urgent i used to remember when i've been in teams which are not create 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 maybe i put a powerpoint deck together 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 twenty four seven 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 build a spidey sense over time interesting.

[Sean Ryan]

Interesting how long were you there four.

[Sriram Krishna]

And a half years until this job.

[Sean Ryan]

What are some of your best investments.

[Sriram Krishna]

Well i'll pick one and because it ties to the theme of what we talked about in social media i just became convinced that centralized social media platforms are not good for all of us 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 can have people have say in these right so while personally i'd invested in companies like spacex with elon or scale ai with alex bank from the firm one of my companies i'm really proud of is a company called farcaster and forcaster 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 romoro who's awesome but the idea was that imagine if with twitter 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 or says i just hate sean ryan i want to see his account disappear maybe youtube does that to you in foraster they built a algorithm a cryptographic protocol sorry protocol on top of the blockchain where you own your social graph and anybody can build a client on top of farcaster so what does it mean right now if twitter decides to ban you youtube decides to ban you you're done you're toast and foraster you're like you know what you can't ban me i'm just going to go over using the same client as other person i'm gonna take my follow up graph i'm going to take my followers i'm going to take my content i'm going to go elsewhere right by the way the interesting thing is this is how the internet used to work 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 et cetera 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 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 even take your email address elsewhere and your social networks we've lost that right if you want to use instagram if you want to use tiktok you have to use the official app right and there's a lot of reasons as to why advertising as a business model but what foraster is trying to do and i think others are trying to do in crypto is let's bring that original internet vibe 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 elsewhere right that's a possibility now it is a possibility now it's early days and the reason so you have to figure out how to make it happen right technically economically so they built this kind of crypto protocol which 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 have never had anything and so i think this hearkens back to an original ethos and spirit of the internet 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 almost five million great how much money do you think youtube makes per year how much money do i.

[Sean Ryan]

Think youtube makes a year in ad revenue for google man i have i've.

[Sriram Krishna]

Never let's make 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 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 contributing to this platform and i think one of the promises of crypto right is that well let's give you know everybody it could be somebody with five million subscribers it 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 dot com comma 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 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 a very deep believer in multiple look i've made i was lucky to work with some amazing amazing founders and entrepreneurs 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 bet on them and i'm grateful for all of them wow very.

[Sean Ryan]

What'S that forecaster forecaster that's interesting that's very interesting i've not heard of that.

[Sriram Krishna]

Yeah well it's early days 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 need to exist.

[Sean Ryan]

Yeah yeah that sounds genius every day i go to bed i'm like oh this could all end by you should.

[Sriram Krishna]

Be like well neil mo is a nice guy right you should be like you know what i put in some work i deserve a little bit part of this i have a say in the algorithm and right now i'm sure they listen to you 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.

[Sean Ryan]

Of crypto yeah wow that's genius i love that so let's move into ai how did you get picked up for the position man senior white house advisor on all things ai it is a.

[Sriram Krishna]

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 services 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 felt like this other universe right like you're like well well a lot of crazy things happening here but i'm here doing my thing but what wound up happening is about a year and a half ago like everybody i had gotten really involved in ai i was investing in ai but there was this narrative that picked up about ai just killing us all my days don't.

[Sean Ryan]

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[Sriram Krishna]

I don't know how much you paid attention to the whole doomer arguments on ai maybe a year and a half two ago but there was this 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 because this is going to become this superhuman intelligence which just takes over all of humanity and i disagree with the 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 including california and what they said 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 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 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 for 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 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 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 valley the second is open source is safer there is a great law called linus's law named after linus starwells 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 says like if you have the world looking at your code you can't hide a security vulnerability in there we're going to find it right because one smart person might miss it but a thousand smart people looking at it somebody's going to 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 with power security software a lot of it is open source right because people like i trusted it a lot of engineers working on it it was very important and in ai there was a growing effort to build open source open weight models okay and again bear with me because some of these i think i think chatgpt 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 going to say in the forties 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 but the second which is even more interesting ai 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's one of behind one door is a human being behind another 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 and 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 going to call it the holy grail right it has inspired people they came into the industry for example in the sixties there was this guy john mccarthy you know he invented these amazing programming languages called lisp all because he wanted to build ai right and in every decade there were people trying to figure out ai and the eighties and nineties 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 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 now the challenge with 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 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 won't scale and so all these ideas what happened they have this little kind of hill and kind of this 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 again even in the two thousands neural networks which were super interesting and hard 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 in ai which one of the questions i think people should ask is why is ai interesting now why not in twenty ten why was chatgpt not built in like two thousand five right like why is it being built now so i think there's a long history of technical accomplishments happened and the two very important moments one was there was something called alexnet which was helped build by this guy ilya sutskevar one of the founders of openai in twenty twelve but the most important thing i would say and this thing should i think someday win a nobel prize or something something is this paper that came out of google in twenty seventeen and the paper is called attention is all you need okay i think this is going to be a 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 we found a mechanism that just continues to scale and work work right with neural networks because remember what i said until then there are all these stop and start stop attempts 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 it just kept growing and it had this magical property called the scaling loss and what that said was that if you give this more data data and more gpu's more computers it just kept getting better across the board okay this is and it won't stop so far it has not stopped 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'd be like can i detect the human face in a particular way well yes but then people have different faces well you can detect the face you can detect the bicep and it just fails 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 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 when you use chatgpt brock anthropic google what does a closed model mean you type in a question or maybe you give it an image you give it a weed 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 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 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 uncertain safe and they tried to get california as a state to basically ban open source so i was sitting here minding my own business and i was like man this is just wrong 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 so i started 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 yes and when 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 that's a bit much but i remember thinking wow these people have infiltrated the highest reaches of government and they have sort of scared the world into thinking that this ai is going to take over the world and just kind of you know take over humanity for reasons by the way 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 sachs the aizar 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 there's an existential issue and david tells me well come to the white house and help fix it and i was like whoa i didn't know that was an option and for me 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 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 going to 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 called deepseek have you heard of it oh yeah oh yeah so deep seek 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 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 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 were very very good with building on top of gpu's and it turns out that a lot of the skills that you need to build build great models is programming gpu's very well so they build 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 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 et cetera 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 and we were off to the races 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 things briefing everybody 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 for.

[Sean Ryan]

The races man well congratulations thank you 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 what do you think the concerns are what.

[Sriram Krishna]

Is so let me sort of try and be intellectually honest and steel man what some of the concerns are on ai are okay 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 a new kind of biological weapon a new kind of nerve toxin right and those are some very legitimate serious threats in there but the real doomer argument was this idea that as ai keeps improving that at some time ai models will start improving themselves so instead of a human being being like all right i'm going to control this ai ai i'm going to try and make it better every single piece of time at some point in time a model will start to improve itself and there's this word in sort of this sort of this ai debate which is called takeoff or foom which is kind of the sound of a rocket taking off where the idea is if you hit that moment of improvement instead of ai just becoming better better better better right it just goes goes and so their belief is if that happens what are the results 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 like we are particularly against ants but we just don't care as much and they worry that ai might think of us as ants maybe there's this famous thing called paperclip maximizing have you heard of this no oh so paperclip maximizing is this idea that the ai's 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 are like no no that's not what is the emotion satisfying job so it is kind of used as a way to say ai might become this all powerful all know intelligence which then is 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've done a reasonable job of conveying this scenario and so if you believe that and they had some other concerns especially the biden people they believe that 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 gpu's 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 another country even an allied country having a nuclear weapon before you 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 it needs to be us first and we need to be kind of scared of it and i think so this was i would say some of the school of thought around the doom 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 are recording this in september twenty twenty five 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 they 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 or companionship into other models which are great for scientific discovery and thinking so instead of having this one model which is becoming the superhuman intelligence and surging ahead you're having this cluster of models all sort of giving people great benefit but not showing any signs of takeoffs 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 would 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 electricity elephant this is why electricity is not safe for you there was a lot of fear mongering right 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 there's a lot of doomer thought against that which we can get to same with the internet right we have a lot of downside we 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're probably going to have a bunch of other ai models which stop it so i think just fundamentally underestimates humans all of us you know our human spirit our creativity our ingenuity as individuals and as a race that's number two the third piece is that instead of having what i think ai has become is and i want to come back to this later in terms of 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 but if i'd given a lot more input and had worked with would have done a lot better the second thing which we absolutely need humans for 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 but anyway so all of this 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 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 gpu's 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 if you think about today day 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 just finding a way to make money 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 so they did not think that some smart set of people around the world could build a deep seq and it totally shocked them and nobody predicted deep seq so as a result of all this i just think like the whole doomer narrative 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 interesting.

[Sean Ryan]

I mean couple of questions going all the way back to different ai specific models you had mentioned one for friendship and companionship what is that well i.

[Sriram Krishna]

Mean i would say it's more of a use case but i think if you look at grok there are a lot of these sort of characters with certain personalities people use sometimes not safe for work but i think when gpt five came out recently a lot of people were upset because they felt like they had built a friend in the previous model with gpt four it had a certain tone it had a certain way of speaking to you and i do think 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 market model or are we going to be just very clinical and cold in how we respond so that is one dimension in which you can differentiate but a lot of other different in which you can differentiate are for example capabilities coding is by far one of the most lucrative most interesting capabilities in models right now have you heard of the phrase vibe coding no 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 then you wrote more piece of code and that's it right these days wipe coding is basically this idea and if you wanted to learn say a new programming language you went and learned how it sounded how it looked like you went to various corners of the internet you figured out how to 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 people are like all right 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 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 get better just by themselves they can basically generate some piece of code and they'll be like is it good let me run it oh it was not good let me make myself better so coding is one of these things where they can just learn much better without having to have human input if they wrote a poem it's much harder to basically hey is this poem better than that poem but with code there is a objective answer now i'm oversimplifying but there's a couple of reasons why coding is gone gotten just dramatically good on these models so vibe coding is this idea where you ask these models to essentially generate code for you you can do this right now have you ever written code at all no oh amazing okay let me get you into this this is one of the most you're going to teach me guns and i'm going to teach you code okay okay let's do this right one of us is going to look way more badass than the other but historically even five years ago ago i was like well i'm going to send you a book or i'm going to send you a youtube video because somebody would say well let's say give me an example of something you want to do maybe does this show have an app or a website you have a website we have a website but you have an app we have no app great let us say you want to build an app for the sean ryan show right it notifies you in this new episode collects email addresses right like you know you can sort of sign up to get early access all these kind of things that apply might do now we should build that please you should right or somebody watching should build it and get your attention but now what you can do is i can teach you to do it right now 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 writing code take this youtube channel and build me a mobile application 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 maybe you say look i want the screen to have this color have this functionality it's going to 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 have to build much more sophisticated experiences and by the way you should try this tonight right now or after this you know what like i'm going to show you maybe a demo and you should try this right now and i think this is such a superpower because computers were often sort of this arcane thing where you're like wow i'm going to 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 want to do building a great app for the shawn ryan show so wipe coding is this idea where instead of spending a lot of time trying to think of what the right code to do you basically tell the model here's the code i'm trying to build and what are the models all right yes yes yes just keep going keep going keep going and it's sort of a little bit of a tongue in cheek idea the idea is like you don't get perfect code you obviously if you're writing this in production if you're writing this for running inside i don't know like a bank or a nuclear reactor you absolutely want to make sure you check it and you know exactly what it is doing you're doing it for fun it's great right you can explore things try out a new idea you know maybe build something as a hobby so why coding's idea you can just sort of go with the model so that has fundamentally changed writing code where i don't know the exact stats but a lot of tech companies i would say like thirty forty fifty percent of their code is now written by ai anyway so my point is kind of going back a little bit ai models instead of having this one model which takes over everybody and becomes this sort of this gigantic terminator brain you now have multiple models which have specialized i'm the great coder model or i'm the great 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.

[Sean Ryan]

Wrong is takeoff a i mean would you say it's a possibility well theoretically.

[Sriram Krishna]

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 scenario which has had no existing proof off we were basically shooting ourselves in the foot we were trying to stop ai we were trying to ban open source ai 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 gpu's and chips because we were worried they would build agi at the same time china was just surging ahead building these models and building this chip capability so if you ask me 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 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 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's very funny about it but i think there's some kind of truth to it 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 are getting to into some sci fi future i think of it as the next great computer platform this is like the internet this is you know on this peter thiel says on the scale of this is a nothing burger or this is 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 but i have not seen the evidence that this is going to be some all knowing all powerful god that takes over all of.

[Sean Ryan]

Us makes sense makes sense i mean so 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 it's.

[Sriram Krishna]

A good question let me ask you though what are the theories you've heard.

[Sean Ryan]

Everything that you've just said okay it's going to take everybody's job it's going to turn into the terminator it's going to kill everybody it's going to wipe out humanity all of everything that you.

[Sriram Krishna]

Had stated above let me ask well let me ask you 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 you know what sriram was wrong he came in the genre and she 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 going to sit still no yeah do you think we're going to 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 is let's pack it up and go on home no they're going to 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 ten 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 whether it be in government technologists just regular human beings without being like hey you know what let's hold up a second here let's just stop and think about it let's put in some safeguards let's have ways to counter these ai models that will definitely happen 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 has taken over a data center i'm like how did it take over the data center what are the twenty five steps which happened before then how did amass all this power right i'm pretty sure somebody stopped it when they took over the second data center so that's my first sort of instinctive reaction to when people post those questions the second thing i would say is the best answer against models is other models and i think this is very true by the way in what i think sometimes the future of cyber warfare might look like where the the best way to defend against maybe a model which is showing this crazy capability is have another model which is looking for these capabilities so 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 the terminator 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 second we have a lot of evidence we are in the opposite direction this is an amazing platform there are some questions in terms of how do we benefit humanity but there are no signs of takeoff and sci fi behavior yet and most importantly china is surging ahead so if we rest if we stop ourselves the other side is not.

[Sean Ryan]

I understand that before we move into china i do want to ask you one question i mean do you have any concern 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 i think that we've seen manipulation with social media to an extraordinary extent and so i think that the manipulation through the potential of manipulation through ai could be even bigger than what social media has done i mean do you have.

[Sriram Krishna]

Any concerns about absolutely i would say this is at the heart of why we made that executive order happen exact heart right 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 one of the things executive order does is to basically say if your model you know it's not truth seeking the government will not work with you and i think that i absolutely have that concern there's another very interesting concern which i think is going to come up more and more which is the idea of privacy or confidentiality if you go to your doctor your lawyer or your priest what are you promised you know that nothing you say can ever kind of get out of that context there are laws there are social convention where you have attorney client privilege you have doctor patient confidentiality various religions have this construct where what you say is sacred except if you do something 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 like what does this mean like you know 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 or maybe just basic career advice i know a lot of people 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 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 kind of protect that but yes i absolutely do have concerns about ideology and that is at the heart of why we did this.

[Sean 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 and they are they're asking an ai a series of questions that ends up with should should i kill my partner because they upset me should i kill myself and i mean the ai is going to respond to that oh yes you know and so that's kind of what i'm getting at is when i'm talking about manipulating population privacy is another concern but i wasn't there yet but you know it has the potential to manipulate entire populations the.

[Sriram Krishna]

Entire population absolutely and there have been been these very tragic incidents i would say in the last few months where ai has encouraged people down a very very bad path where a regular human being would have been like hey man 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 sicklefilm 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 and say like there are kind of precedents 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 and you know people wanting to do things for themselves 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 and 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 which direct they're not perfect obviously and i think ai companies this is going to be an existential question for them they need to find which 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 and i think this is going to be a key topic for all of ai okay okay.

[Sean Ryan]

Let'S talk about china i mean that's the big concern i mean xi jinping has said 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 how far ahead is china than us well i think we.

[Sriram Krishna]

Are ahead right now but maybe it's more useful to break down a little bit of a scoreboard okay i would say let's start with the basics what ai needs is number one is is infrastructure infrastructure in terms of energy energy which powers data centers because again the scaling loss more energy you get better models you can use more ai and there i think one of the fundamental challenges united states has had is for many many years our energy usage as a country has been fairly flat flat i think it's improved by a small percentage every single year then all of a sudden ai shows up and you need a lot more energy you need a lot more data centers and then all of a sudden you have this spaghetti bowl of issues which suddenly come up the first one is where do we get the energy from and that is where i think the current answer is absolutely natural gas that's where i think it's going to power a lot of these ai along with what the president would call 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 they've 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 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 we need more energy 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 call build baby build 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 and we have a spaghetti mess of issues so this administration we did a bunch of things to attack this there's an executive order which is coming 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 nrc the nuclear regulatory commission hasn't approved a single reactor and i think there's a whole future i know you had folks from the nuclear industry here with smrs and so on i know it's like a little bit of time away but i do think we had an executive order which basically says look you know we cannot believe the nuclear definitely has a strong future in america in terms of the present though we need energy now and this is where the president set up something called the national energy dominance council the nedc which brings together the secretary of energy the secretary of the interior and we've been working closely with them which basically tries to attack all of this which says how do we remove the red tape on on building data centers on permitting on regulation 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 and we've obviously done a lot to catch up and i think we're going to search ahead but for the last four or five years they've just been on a great trajectory 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 on your shelf you have chip war by 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 gpu's which are built by people like nvidia 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 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 ascends or other companies called cambricon have now why are we ahead of 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 gpu's 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 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 camricon 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 three hundred eighty four and it's worth googling and looking up and the reason why this is important is if you think about these data centers right if you take say for example openai or groq they have a bunch of nvidia gpu's inside them and they have them in these clusters right like if you have a h one hundred 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 seventy two of them but you kind of cluster these and the idea is is the more of these you bring together the better it is for training a model or inferencing from a model cloud matrix three hundred eighty four is interesting because people believe that china was way behind innovating gpu's and what they did was they built a cluster where you take three hundred eighty four gpu's ascend chinese gpu's 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 really good networking technology they're a networking company so they're able to basically connect if i'm oversimplifying a lot of not as great gpu's but to try and compete with much more powerful gpu's and i think of this as an interesting example just like deep seq of when we try and say we are not going to let the world have our technology or let china have our technology they're often been very good at working around in other very creative ways so that's number two 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 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 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 zero one we have claude three or we have whatever grok two i think at the time and china doesn't have anything deepseek totally in my mind demolished that idea because all of a sudden they were not ahead but they were very clear close okay and 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 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 have i was at a developer event in san francisco recently and i asked the crowd what are you guys how many of you using a chinese model like deepseek quinn klm 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 it is soft power like china having a technology platform which is now running inside american hopefully not american infrastructure but american companies definitely running in global companies where instead of our models second these models also communicate culture think about my story i grew up on the internet i grew up on the english internet i absorbed a lot of american culture just because of the prevalence of english you know america winning the internet but if china dominates the model race right like if you look at deep sea it doesn't really share our ideology 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 i think they've caught up very close behind i think they are ahead on open source we are catching up quickly there's been some great new launches recently we are still very much ahead on closed source models the latest and greatest gpt five gemini grok we are still ahead but it is a much closer race the last and maybe most interesting part of the race is what i would call diffusion which is how are people using ai because the end of the day ai needs usage to be better one of the reasons chatgpt became really good is because when people used it you could use that feedback mechanism and become better this is very important not just by ai today but important for the future like robotics one of the things which is going to be key to getting robots american robots all over the world is can we get that robot's data of usage either from a simulation real world and make it better so i think there's a race right now which is who can get their ai to spread faster to be used faster okay right and historically when you grew up did you use windows laptops or windows computer when you grew up as a kid do you know who windows competitor was in the nineties no nobody remembers there are companies like ibm's os two and others they all got cross 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 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 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 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.

[Sean Ryan]

So if with all the concerns and all the different sectors i mean it sounds like we're ahead on chips software but we're behind on energy and energy seems to be 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've doven into the power grid the vulnerabilities i mean it's atrocious of neglect for our energy system our power grid for years maybe i mean years and years and if china's ahead i mean what are we going to do to unleash nuclear power i mean it seems like that is that's the key yeah and we have all these innovators that are you know we talked to isaiah taylor who's been building the many reactors we talked to scott nolan who's you know enriching uranium 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 getting rid of some of the red tape but i still don't feel like i mean if china has zero red tape how the hell are we going to compete with our power grid i mean we talked to baji bot you know the founder of robin hood and he's he's trying to beam solar energy in from space to receivers that are going to that are that are going to convert it into the grid i mean and we've got all these amazing ideas but it's just not going fast enough in my opinion well.

[Sriram Krishna]

I think i totally agree with you this is one of those things where 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 build colossus it's in memphis and so he builds this old he buys his old i think electrolux factory and then he drives in all these generators on 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 just is one of these amazing suites of engineering but the point being we need energy right now so just on the nuclear front it's absolute future so administration has an executive order out which basically you know tries to clear the red tape on the permit for all things nuclear 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.

[Sean Ryan]

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[Sriram Krishna]

Com srs the game right now is gas and gas turbines and the challenge there well on the energy production side then you have on the energy grid side to your point we have a very old grid from one in infrastructure capacity and second we have all these local state utilities and monopolies which have weird regulation which makes it very very hard to to 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 which is the entire ai strategy for america in my mind i spent a lot of time on it a lot of others have spent a lot of time on it 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 with things like how do we make sure there is data the nepa the national environment protection act how do we find carve outs so that we can get data centered construction just going let's just get the red tap out of the way let's go build build build there are directives in there on figuring out what to do with our grid capacity figuring out incentives on energy i think the president in his first week announced this large project called stargate in terms of getting more investment and getting more of these data center construction going so in my mind 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 every entrepreneur is like look i need to get two hundred thousand more gpu's unlocked what do i do so we need to unlock that and i think unlocking data center construction grid capacity clearing of the red tapes 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 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.

[Sean Ryan]

Moving on to chip 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 not really in 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 fifteen percent of the revenue correct the h twenty chips which are the high end.

[Sriram Krishna]

Chips correct was that a mistake so actually there's a few corrections in there a little bit of history so nvidia makes a whole set of chips and the latest greatest generation is called the blackwalls 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 h one hundred which honestly is what a lot of people have right now or the hedge two hundred they're 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 we'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 so because since they believed that they said number one we're going to put limits on the power of the chips the flops of the chips that china can get and then we are going to slice the world into three categories this was called the biden diffusion rule where some countries like usa uk can get any number of gpu's they want about one hundred countries couldn't really get many gpu's without going through this crazy amount of retrospect and then some would just not get any gpu's at all like iran north korea you know the countries of concern and as a result like you know a couple of things happened 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 they were like we want to bring ai to our citizens and what is a way where we can get your gpu's and the biden diffusion rule said there is no way you can ever get our gpu's that's number one so we essentially kind of turned our back on our allies all over the world because we thought number one there's a supply constraint in gpu's that if a gpu ever goes out of america it means one less gpu for an american company 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 are making a lot of gpu's right like if you want you can go get a h one hundred like right now a 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 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 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 first i want to talk about the middle east then i want to come to china president trump in this first state visit he went to the middle east and we struck these deals called the ai acceleration partnerships and this idea was that we will sell you you these gpu's in return for investment in america and with ironclad security provisions to make sure that those gpu's are going to stay where we ship them they're not going to go to some other country and they don't want 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 wound up happening is huawei has been ramping up chic production so we now have a competitor who has a good product they built cloud matrix they are building asense 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 we have a competitor 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 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 a couple of these middle eastern countries now hopefully that's kind of clear 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 and the idea there is that hey if we deny them anything number one they're not making their own gpu's they're not really making their own model 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 knocking on other people's doors be 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 keep the latest and greatest gpu's for the united states in huge quantities right that is irrevocable like you know we'll be the only country which can build these massive massive super clusters of gpu's but on the other hand you know we want to make sure that we are not giving huawei cambricon 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're 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 auction and i believe the right answer is let's ship them technology 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 kind of follow that where does the hedge twenty come in the first thing about hedge twenty is because some of these biden staffers like to talk about this is biden never banned h twenties ever they were completely allowed all the time through the administration because what happened is when biden's team built out these rules nvidia went out and by the way nvidia has h twenty but amd has something called the mi three hundred eight which is the equivalent of the h twenty they said okay both of these companies we are going to build a nerfed version of our you know what nerfed means in gaming lingo it's a less powerful version of our gpu which is way behind what the latest in greatest america has and we are to going 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 on when we ship gpu's to china right so we said we're going to bring in a licensing regime so every time you see a headline that says president trump banned h twenties in april march not true we brought it under a licensing regime which basically said look if you are going to start to export this you need to ask us for a license first actually the technical term is called an isin formula we send to these companies you need to come ask us for a license 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 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 way less numbers than 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 the hedge twenty is now two and a half years old and 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 this though since the time the h twenty 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 eleven and we are several generations behind this conversation is going to keep coming up again and again and again 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 gp 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 know that gpu's 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 right 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 do you going to probably buy american all over again right now if we refuse to do business with you 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 gpu's with models again america will have ai a overwhelming lead in the quality and the quantity of these gpu's we'll be the only ones who are building you know elon i think is going to build a million plus cluster this year i know 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 running an american model generating american 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 a older nerd nerfed a lower quantity version of our gpu's 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 china we say you can't get anything well they are going to say we need to accelerate all of our indigenous chip making efforts because you guys left us no choice this happened before by the way about ten years ago right like we stopped exporting supercomputing chips 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 be like you know what buy a chinese chip and it's going to come freely loaded with deep seq 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 super clusters but it is enough to make sure the competition there does not get oxygen.

[Sean Ryan]

Now i understand everything you're saying saying you know i mean i know you're very aware of the china taiwan conflict i mean so just the fact that we are sending them 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.

[Sriram Krishna]

Over i don't want to speculate it's hard to say.

[Sean Ryan]

Because then they cut us out.

[Sriram Krishna]

Well my belief i'm not a deep geopolitical expert on taiwan 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.

[Sean Ryan]

I think there are other motivating factors.

[Sriram Krishna]

There are other motivating factors right and i'm not the expert i think some of your you had a lot of great guests on number one is the biden rule definitely amplified that 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 again i keep emphasizing it because somebody when somebody we have the latest and greatest and we'd be the only country who can build these million gpu clusters that any one of these model companies have but at the same time i want to make sure that they get enough to stop them feeling like oh my gosh we're just going to go full on out 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 that we had last year i do think you bring up another interesting question 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 these lithography machines and the second is obviously tsmc and if something happens in taiwan any number of situations could happen but it probably means we don't get iphones 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 onshore 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 chip manufacturing supply chain and not be so reliant on one single point of failure so when i think about tsmc i'm thinking about about all things intel i'm thinking about all things in how do we get these fab construction in arizona going faster how is that factory.

[Sean Ryan]

Going i mean from my interview with bao shi kim it sounds like the vp of taiwan i mean it sounds like that the tariffs may have had some implications on the speed of that.

[Sriram Krishna]

Well i think they went a lot faster than the biden regime for sure but i think there's always space to do more i would think that one of the things that we have really tried to emphasize is that we just need to accelerate our indigenous supply chain and i don't have the latest numbers on how these fab production is going i believe they're kind of increasing increase 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 or full potential 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're going to need intel we might need other answers in there i think this is going to be one of those interesting questions over the next few years and how do we build out these solver in chip making capabilities so that 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 if 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 and they're not picking the other team like that is very much on top of mind for me right now i.

[Sean Ryan]

Have an idea on how to speed it up please yes and you'll have to fact check me on this through my other episode with shelby kim but one of the hurdles i think that frustrates them is they're very concerned obviously about china taking them either by cognitive warfare or actual kinetic warfare warfare and they purchased several planes jets military equipment from us you know but through our red tape and our bureaucracy i mean i can't remember i believe it was about i think it was somebody's just going to 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 you know and they just got their first f sixteen you know and and that's created a lot of frustration over there and so if there was a way to get through the red tape and get the stuff that they had purchased from us in a faster way i think that would help motivate them to help us build the chip factories in arizona okay.

[Sriram Krishna]

Not super familiar with that i need to go back and do some homework.

[Sean Ryan]

On this yeah yeah it's i mean 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 far along are we in that facility.

[Sriram Krishna]

I wish i knew this off the top of my head i believe man i think they had faced a few challenges in the first few years around on permitting and workforce i believe they've just entered production recently but we just need to get a lot more going there so it's up and running i think so okay okay well.

[Sean Ryan]

That'S good to hear yeah i think.

[Sriram Krishna]

So great to hear but i don't want to get fact checked on this 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 that it was in this really slow phase for a little of time because they had 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 and greatest on exactly where they are right now could you.

[Sean Ryan]

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.

[Sriram Krishna]

At oh man oh man yeah well ai look there are multiple timelines ai could take 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 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 being able to innovate faster and that flywheel just picking up momentum imagine a world where our allies are using chinese technology this is actually this has happened before with five g where a lot of the world wound up running on five g technology from china and instead of 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 it knowing 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 which are all powered by chinese 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 yeah.

[Sean Ryan]

I mean i talked a lot about this with alex wang as well and he had talked about the number of ai's against number of ai's so we would need more you know if they have you know one hundred ai's and we have two hundred ai's then they could dedicate their allocate i don't know thirty three ai's to surface warfare vehicle and if we have two hundred we could put sixty six against a thirty three.

[Sriram Krishna]

I sometimes find those a little too theoretical okay when we talk about ai i often want to ground it in terms of how does it make the particular person's life better and i just think about an individual who can just do more they are smarter the ironman suit they're smarter they're better informed they can get more done because they're getting more done they can work more effectively together they have an always on smart colleague in an ai who 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 ai versus ai 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 ai's will need human beings and need to augment human beings and i think about how do you make sure we are augmenting every single american we're helping every single american every day with ai in going to work with their family with their hopes and dreams much better than the other team are and i also don't want that to happen using chinese technology yeah yeah i.

[Sean Ryan]

Never thought about when we were talking about open source and with deep seq 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 that i totally understand that but what i'm getting at is i mean what are we doing about open source to spread is it you've unlocked the fact that everybody can use our stuff but where are we with.

[Sriram Krishna]

The open source 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 path 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 we'd have companies who would tell us hey i want to build this open source model but the previous regime or other state legislators they were scaring us they were like if you guys do this you'll have all these lawsuits and you'd get sued up business what do you guys think and our message has been like we want you to go out there we want you to win we want you to win on open tools across the world and if you look at the last four or five months again i think china's done a great job i think their models are really innovative i just want to make sure we give them props where it is due on the other hand we now have our own open source models that there is openai for the very first time launched their first open source model it's called gpt oss it came out three weeks ago there are multiple startups which are now building open source models again because when you have the government saying 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 have come in and say no we need this for america but look i'm not going to to say it's all hunky dory that is a place where i think we need to do a lot more 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 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 because it's very related so i mentioned when i was talking about open source this thing called sb ten forty six and this was a legislation from the state of california which essentially destroyed open source american open source what it would say it's a little bit like gun liability do you remember when some people said you know what if somebody gets shot of the gun the manufacturer should be liable it tried to do the same with open source models where it said if somebody does something bad with the model mark zuckerberg or elon musk or whoever should be personally that company should be held liable which essence sort of just destro open source because no company can really afford to take that risk and the challenge is we now have every single state now wanting to do their own rules around ai but sometimes around open source so the president three weeks ago came out and i think said two important things the first thing he said was that ai is a national security issue so it is way too important to just leave everything to the states 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 he did veto the laws but i don't want to go there but sorry but if you don't want any individual state to set loss per contain how can that happen because well if you have a really important state state make a law the companies will be like well we don't have to abide by those guys we know how 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 remember what i said about 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 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 also be allowed to train on our data otherwise we are going to fall behind so with open source i think it's not just encouraging open source there is a cluster of issues which are all connected which 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 you know i know you.

[Sean Ryan]

Had a very important dinner last night in fact three former guests have been on there jared isaacman alex wang shyam sangar you were there what came out.

[Sriram Krishna]

Of that dinner 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 may be something we should talk about which you know the first lady and the administration we really cared 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 that dinner which by the way i was not there i was on a flight to get oh shit 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 i'm not just making up an excuse i'm not being a jerk but if you look at the dinner the overwhelming message from everybody was like we 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 i saw that.

[Sean Ryan]

I could be off on this did tim cook say that he was going to put six hundred billion into us.

[Sriram Krishna]

Manufacturing i think that was zuckerberg was that zuckerberg i think so okay 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 zuck who did that but i think you're seeing this across the board look 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 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 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 the reason to this is not just a chip sovereignty but it's the idea of we want to bring back investment and jobs and infrastructure in america but there are so many examples from the tech world not the tech world of people announcing investments in the.

[Sean Ryan]

Us yeah sounds i think there's a.

[Sriram Krishna]

Second comment i think after the event i think the president looked at mark and he said mark this is your start of your career in politics and mark was like i don't know about that.

[Sean Ryan]

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

[Sriram Krishna]

I think he said he was i don't know i think he said he was invited i think he sent somebody else don't know i wonder why but.

[Sean Ryan]

Walsh reran this was a fascinating interview and i think i mean 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 there 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 commend you for rising up and taking the opportunity and we're all.

[Sriram Krishna]

Rooting for you thank you for having me such an honor and look this is such a privilege it's such a dream to just even have this opportunity to be a part of the administration to work for for everyone watching this video and for me i just think every day about 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 i keep going back to we need to make ai work for every individual whether it's to help you i think about my dad how will he use ai and how will he spend more time with his family how will it help him this job and all of the current versions of my father and i think about both those questions a lot and also want to say 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 very very transparent so if folks have thoughts and views hit me up let me know 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.

[Sean Ryan]

Here thank you that means a lot.

[Sriram Krishna]

Cheers thank you sa.