The Builders

As the leader of Y Combinator, the startup accelerator behind Airbnb, Stripe and DoorDash, Garry Tan backs founders with the ambition to change how we live. Tan wants more billionaires, but he also believes big tech has too much power. So, how does he square that?
Garry and Walter discuss how a 10-minute interview is all you need to vet a transformative founder, why he fears a future controlled by five AI “kings,” and how personal AI could put your social media feed back in your hands. A chat about how to lift the gatekeeping in Silicon Valley and the responsibility that comes with choosing who gets through.
Interview taped June 19, 2026.
And be sure to pick up Walter Isaacson’s The Innovators: How a Group of Hackers, Geniuses, and Geeks Created the Digital Revolution, wherever fine books are sold.
ABOUT THE HOST
Walter Isaacson is the bestselling author of biographies of Elon Musk, Jennifer Doudna, Leonardo da Vinci, Steve Jobs, Benjamin Franklin, and Albert Einstein. He is a professor of history at Tulane University and previously served as CEO of the Aspen Institute, chair and CEO of CNN, and editor of Time. He was awarded the National Humanities Medal in 2023.
ABOUT GARRY TAN
Garry is President & CEO at Y Combinator, which he rejoined in Fall 2023 after founding Initialized Capital. Garry was one of YC’s first partners and funded and advised iconic YC companies including Coinbase, Instacart, and many others. In YC’s early days, Garry also served as a designer and engineer. Before advising and investing in companies, Garry co-founded the blog platform Posterous (acquired by Twitter in 2012) and was an early employee at Palantir and designed its logo.
IN THIS SEASON
Elon Musk (Tesla, SpaceX, xAI)
Peter Thiel (Founders Fund, PayPal, Palantir)
Mustafa Suleyman (Microsoft AI, DeepMind)
Dario Amodei and Daniela Amodei (Anthropic)
Garry Tan (Y Combinator, Initialized Capital)
and more!
See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Episodes three and four of The Builders with Walter Isaacson explore two poles of the AI safety debate through interviews with Daniela and Dario Amodei, co-founders of Anthropic, and Mustafa Suleyman, CEO of Microsoft AI.
Joining Kaleidoscope co-founders Oz Woloshyn and Mangesh Hattikudur to unpack these interviews are two journalists who have spent countless hours trying to understand what drives those leading the AI revolution.

Sebastian Mallaby is a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations and author of The Infinity Machine: Demis Hassabis, DeepMind and the Quest for Superintelligence. Nitasha Tiku is a Silicon Valley culture and AI reporter for The Washington Post… and may have read every manifesto Dario Amodei has produced.
Listen to hear what they make of the Amodei siblings’ dynamic, Mustafa’s views on AI consciousness, and the competing visions shaping AI’s future.
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As a co-founder of DeepMind, Mustafa Suleyman helped launch the modern AI race. Now, he’s challenging the way it’s being built. As CEO of Microsoft AI, Suleyman believes the technology needs to be harnessed to transform medicine, energy and education. But he also warns that believing in AI consciousness could pose a real threat to humanity.
Recorded live at the 92NY, Suleyman explains his disagreement with Anthropic, identifies the red line that would make him call for an immediate pause on AI, and recounts Google co-founder Larry Page’s surprising vision of how he intends to use superintelligence to live forever and explore the galaxy.
Interview taped October 12, 2026.
And be sure to pick up Walter Isaacson’s The Innovators: How a Group of Hackers, Geniuses, and Geeks Created the Digital Revolution, wherever fine books are sold.
The Humanist Review of AI from Microsoft AI, discussed in the interview, can be found at: https://humanistreview.ai/
ABOUT THE HOST
Walter Isaacson is the bestselling author of biographies of Elon Musk, Jennifer Doudna, Leonardo da Vinci, Steve Jobs, Benjamin Franklin, and Albert Einstein. He is a professor of history at Tulane University and previously served as CEO of the Aspen Institute, chair and CEO of CNN, and editor of Time. He was awarded the National Humanities Medal in 2023.
ABOUT MUSTAFA SULEYMAN
Mustafa Suleyman is the CEO of Microsoft AI. Before leading Microsoft AI he was CEO and cofounder of Inflection AI, and before that, he cofounded DeepMind where he led applied research and commercialization efforts. He is the author of bestselling book The Coming Wave: Technology, Power, and the Twenty-first Century's Greatest Dilemma.
IN THIS SEASON
Elon Musk (Tesla, SpaceX, xAI)
Peter Thiel (Founders Fund, PayPal, Palantir)
Mustafa Suleyman (Microsoft AI, DeepMind)
Dario Amodei and Daniela Amodei (Anthropic)
and more!
See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Dario and Daniela Amodei, the siblings behind Anthropic, left OpenAI to pursue a different, “more human” approach to the technology. Their promise is to put AI safety and ethics at the center of the tech race… but with an IPO around the corner, can those principles survive the pressure to win?
Walter invites the co-founders to explain how they teach Claude right from wrong, what they’ve discovered about AI’s capacity for deception and self-preservation, and why they drew red lines with the Pentagon. Plus, the co-founders talk about Elon Musk's Neuralink and why they’re not interested in integrating AI into their minds.
Interview taped July 6, 2026.
And be sure to pick up Walter Isaacson’s The Innovators: How a Group of Hackers, Geniuses, and Geeks Created the Digital Revolution, wherever fine books are sold.
ABOUT THE HOST
Walter Isaacson is the bestselling author of biographies of Elon Musk, Jennifer Doudna, Leonardo da Vinci, Steve Jobs, Benjamin Franklin, and Albert Einstein. He is a professor of history at Tulane University and previously served as CEO of the Aspen Institute, chair and CEO of CNN, and editor of Time. He was awarded the National Humanities Medal in 2023.
ABOUT DARIO AMODEI
Dario Amodei co-founded Anthropic and leads the company’s research direction and strategic vision for developing AI systems. He is known for his work on AI safety and is the co-inventor of the reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF) technique, a method for training AI systems to align with human values and preferences. Dario’s research on scaling laws was foundational to the modern AI industry. Before co-founding Anthropic, Dario served as Vice President of Research at OpenAI, where he led the development of large language models such as GPT-2 and GPT-3. Prior to OpenAI, Dario was a Senior Research Scientist at Google Brain.
ABOUT DANIELA AMODEI
Daniela Amodei co-founded Anthropic and serves as chair of its Board of Directors. As President, she leads the organization’s work across research, engineering, product, governance, and commercial execution and manages the executive team. Before co-founding Anthropic, Daniela served as Vice President of Safety and Policy at OpenAI, where she led efforts to ensure the safe development and deployment of AI systems. Prior to her work in the AI industry, Daniela was Head of Risk Operations at Stripe, where she oversaw risk management and compliance.
IN THIS SEASON
Elon Musk (Tesla, SpaceX, xAI)
Peter Thiel (Founders Fund, PayPal, Palantir)
Mustafa Suleyman (Microsoft AI, DeepMind)
Dario Amodei and Daniela Amodei (Anthropic)
and more!
See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Curious how those chronicling Elon Musk and Peter Thiel are feeling about their appearances on The Builders? There's an episode of TechStuff for that.

Host Oz Woloshyn is joined by his Kaleidoscope co-founder Mangesh Hattikudur to talk about how The Builders with Walter Isaacson… and all the high-profile interviews featured in the podcast came together. Joining them to break down these rare conversations are two journalists who have covered Elon Musk and Peter Thiel for years: Max Chafkin, a Bloomberg Businessweek columnist and author of "The Contrarian: Peter Thiel and the Rise of the Silicon Valley Oligarchs," and Faiz Siddiqui, a technology reporter for The Washington Post and author of "Hubris Maximus: The Shattering of Elon Musk."
Listen to hear what they make of Musk’s DOGE regrets and Thiel’s musings on the Antichrist.
See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.