Perplexity’s CEO on Its Plan to Displace Google Search With AI Answers — With Aravind Srinivas

0:00The CEO of the hottest AI startup in the world joins us to talk about talent, tech, and his challenge to Google. All that and more coming up right after this. Welcome to Big Technology Podcast, a show for cool-headed, nuanced conversation of the tech world and beyond. Let's go deep today with the CEO of the one startup that's really changing the way that we think about AI and how it can have a role in challenging incumbents. And not surprisingly, it's coming in the world of search. We're joined today by Aravind Srinivas. He's the CEO of Perplexity, and he's here to talk to us all about his company and also the state of the industry.

0:35Aravind, welcome to the show. Thank you for having me here, Alex. Let me start with this. You have 10 million users, last count. Your company is a search company. So instead of going to Google, you'd go to Perplexity, you type your question in, you get a paragraph or two in conversational AI with some links at the top telling people where to go. And it's really taking off. When I look around thinking about like what other generative AI startups there are that have gained traction, it's not a very long list. I mean, character AI is worth a billion dollars, but I don't hear anybody using that. But your company people use, you're ranked above Google Calendar on the App Store.

1:10I think you were number nine on the top charts last time I checked. What would you attribute this struggle for startups to take off in the generative AI space to? And is my view of this kind of close-minded or am I hitting on something that's right here? It's mostly accurate. There's some nuance. For example, you don't hear people around you using character AI because it's also not a product that people would be very proud of saying they use it. uh it's it's use cases are more uh meant for these lonely uh people who are like you know looking for companionship in their life so it's sort of more like a personal activity and also it's more popular among uh the the younger generation like 50 to 60 percent of their user base is under the age of 20 right uh because they're using it to talk to imaginary anime characters and things like that so it's a very different uh sector product we're more on the entertainment sector and less on the productivity or utility sector.

2:08So we are in the productivity sector. And as for like, you know, in general, for any startup, it's pretty hard to gain widespread adoption. First of all, it's hard to launch a good product. But this technology is supposed to change the world. People are talking about how it's going to be the end of civilization. For something that powerful, you would imagine there would be more. yeah but it takes time for example it takes a lot of time for people to change their habits um adopt a new new i mean how many times do you adopt a new app like you know like it took me personally a very long time to start using instagram twitter even whatsapp even like like i'm only started using whatsapp a lot more recently and i used to stick to like i i just want to stick to fp messenger or like google chat so it takes a while for you to like truly change your habits uh and you know and we are also facing this right like it's all relative okay relative to other products and generally as startups we have more adoption but then relative to chat gpt or google we are like way lower right so uh it takes time and like you know i i'm not very negative about other startups like uh i also think there are products outside the the sector that you're focusing on that are taking off.

3:29Like Levin Labs is a startup that has a lot of adoption. As a podcaster, you might be aware of it. There are a lot of tools there to edit stuff. And then many other interesting companies. But for us, the potential is a lot bigger than any of these others because the quest for knowledge and information is the ultimate thing ever since humanity has started evolving as a society. We've always sought more information, always sought more knowledge, sought a better understanding of the world. So I think that's why this product has no upper bound, honestly. So let's talk a little bit about the product.

4:11Because if you're creating an AI search engine, you've created it. What is the problem with search today that you're trying to solve because it's one thing to say hey we have this cool technology let's just apply it in like a logical way but you have to see a glaring issue with this multi-trillion dollar business of search to be like okay we're actually gonna do something different so the fundamental problem with search today is that you waste a lot of time right like you're looking for something you get a bunch of links uh these links are sort of not exactly order in the way that should save your time, but order in the way that makes Google more money.

4:53You're getting the answer that 10 salespeople are trying to give you at the same time, not the answer that a friend of yours who has used all these different services or products comes and tells you in a nice summarized way of like what is good or bad. Let's say you're like going and asking a friend of yours like which car you should buy. They're not going to tell you what's the best thing about each uh you know car or like each of these cars are trying to bid for against one another to get your attention what they're going to tell you is like hey look i use all these things i use all the other i use two or three cars and this is the best thing about this this is the best thing about that and what do you want like what is it that you're interested in there will be a back and forth interaction with you uh oh like i actually like mileage more like i'm looking for electric car because i care about the environment like there are that sort of an interaction that sort of personalization doesn't happen today in search right um and there is no incentive for google to save your time in searches by the way because uh the whole point for them is that you spend as much time opening like 10 tabs on chrome uh the browser they control and give give the analytics to all of these independent uh website publishers and like brands of like how much traffic they're driving to each of you uh based on how many users are driving to each of you, right?

6:08So they're working for the advertiser, not for the user. So there is an opportunity for a new entrant here that can directly work for the user and like build a business model that's more aligned with the user interest and with the advertiser interest. So that's what we're trying to do. Yeah, but it's interesting because it is almost like a different category of search, right? You've talked about it already, like it's curiosity, right? Like Google is almost like I need to get to the facts right away, like hit me with them. Or like, where's this? What is the answer to this question well i guess you guys could do that too but you actually inspire different queries right like you i saw on your twitter feed you were asking perplexity what's the next trillion dollar company and it said it was the ozempic maker and it's like these type of searches are completely i would say incremental and new and different than the actual searches we would do with google yeah i mean i i generally think that there's like a new segment of searches that these products like perplexity or chat gpt are creating which is like you know making people actually ask well-informed questions uh because we were not asking questions until now we were just entering keywords like in google google kind of spoiled us over two decades to just type in keywords and we wouldn't even type the full keyword they would auto complete it for us and like we would we would just like click on that go and read the links and waste time right so the first time you have this unique power to talk to a computer like a human where you can just go and ask questions now we all need to get used to that power first we suddenly got it we we never knew this was coming it was not incrementally given to us it just happened all of a sudden and then um you're like okay what do i do with it now you're like thinking about what to do with it but the reality is this should have been the way you interacted with search engines all along like you're not coming and talking to me, Arvind, and asking like, you know, Google perplexity, right?

8:05You're like asking, what is perplexity doing that Google cannot do? Like, why is Google not able to do this? Like, these are actual questions. Now you've got the unique ability to ask the same kind of questions in the same conversational way to an AI. But I'm also wondering how big this can actually be, because it's interesting. Like Kevin Roos wrote this story, I'm sure, I mean, you spoke to him for it can this ai-powered search engine replace google it has for me but it's not actually a full replace he even writes later in the article that he's not gotten rid of google and so i do wonder like if this is something that can fully replace google or is it just going to be something that you would use for a subset of questions you might not type into a traditional search engine yeah let me let me give you a more nuanced perspective here so there are two points on a line um the The left point is navigational searches.

9:00The right point is directly giving you an answer. So the left is traditional search engine. The right is answer engine. We are on the right and Google can be considered on the left. Except Google has done a lot of work already to move more towards the right by preserving as much as possible of the left. By the way, I don't want you to think about it like left wing, right wing here. Yeah, yeah. No, no, we're not going there. It's just like mathematical. Now, Google is trying to keep its link UI, link interface, but also try to give you answers whenever possible. That could include weather, time, sports, election results, all sorts of things.

9:44Or like just getting to a website really quickly, the browser navigation. Now, perplexity is giving you answers all the time, but that's not the only way you want to interact with the web. you sometimes just want the, like, you're doing mathematic calculations sometimes, you're doing, you want the time in a particular city, and then you want, like, NBA scores, and, like, you want, if there's an ongoing election, you want to track, like, you know, how many seats each part of Canada has won. So all that stuff doesn't need a large language model that can pull sources from different parts of the web been summarized, these sources.

10:24So we are approaching the problem from a different end of the line and Google is approaching a problem from a different end of the line, except we don't have any business model to defend. But what I'm trying to say is it's not, it might not actually be you versus Google. It might be you and Google. Possible. You know, I don't want to think about it them versus us either. My sense is that if we are the place for de facto information and accurate information on the internet, it will definitely make a dent on them. I'm not, you know, clearly like, look, their whole image is that they are the only place on the internet for facts.

11:05Is that really their image? Well, yeah, like, you go ask anybody, they just say, have you Googled it? Right? Have you Googled it? You know, that means like... I buy that. Yeah. So I think that that will definitely change. There's going to be more ways in which you can learn about anything. I mean, the behavior is also so different. I mean, so let's see, this is a stat that actually perplexity pulled out for me. So fact check it. But in October 2023, it said you had 40.35 million visits. And the average session duration, and this is like the really interesting thing, 21 minutes and 58 seconds which you would imagine on site of google page it's just might be a minute so so that's the thing right like i i just feel like the idea in our product is to make people more curious and engage and ask more questions in fact our the whole idea of a follow-up question was something we we innovated on uh where we would suggest to you what follow-up question to ask.

12:08You know why we did that? There's number one skill is number one skill that actually is the bottleneck for these products to really take off is stability to ask good questions. Oh yeah. Yeah. Human mind is not great at articulating a question. We are all very curious. We're all super curious people, but not all of us have the skill to translate that curiosity into a well-informed question definitely it's like with wikipedia no one goes to like the wikipedia homepage and is like what am i going to explore today you end up on wikipedia through search right so you have that query in mind but then you you read the whole page you read the whole course that's written for everybody but not personalized to you you care about only some parts of it and that's why like we wanted to create an experience of a dynamic personalized nice wikipedia for you like you just you just get an article on the fly have you spoken with jimmy wales over there and are they gonna build their own gpt what's going on with wikipedia they're not gonna build their own gpt i've spoken to him and he uses our product and he likes our product a lot and you know uh he used it when he was in amsterdam and was looking for museums for his kids uh that was like within a few meters from his hotel and he said like google sucked at us and chat gpt hallucinated and like we got the answer right so he really liked that i'm surprised i would think that they would build one he wanted to do some things like oh if i just wanted to create a perplexity like experience but just on wikipedia articles alone how can i do that he he wanted to build something of that nature which we already had by the way like in in our focus searches uh you could just pick one domain and ask questions i told him about it but he's like i wanted to be on wikipedia.com and i told him hey dude like wikipedia people go there only through a search engine.

13:58They don't go there automatically and start exploring. But he's like, okay, what if I had this on the Wikipedia domain, then maybe people will do that. So that was his idea at that point. I don't know what's the status of that idea today. There's so many things that you're going to come up against. I mean, you're already coming up against in this battle. First is data, right? You have far less users. And we all know that Google, Microsoft, Bing even use the data that they have to refine their searches and that feedback to help improve the quality of results. So what's your answer to them on that front?

14:30Yeah, so look, the whole point, the whole amazing part about this generative AI is that it doesn't actually need as much user data as you think. Yeah, share more about that because that's against the common thought about it. That's why OpenAI is a disruption. Why shouldn't a research lab like OpenAI be able to create a better chatbot than Google that has so much more data or like Meta that has so much more chat data? The reason is that we were able to learn this generic knowledge of language itself, common sense understanding, just by predicting the next word on the internet. That is the GPT model.

15:08All it does is take all of the internet, curate it reasonably well, so that you only train on signal instead of noise, and try to predict the next word from the previous words. But by doing that, you get such a good understanding of how the world works, how language works, basic common sense reasoning, mathematical reasoning. And that enables you for the first time in decades to be able to use little data, learn on the fly and do a lot more things. Right? So somebody who has access to such an amazing intelligence API, which has been exposed to all the developers in the world through OpenAI and Azure and things like that, can now program it in ways they want.

15:51Program it for a search engine, program it for a companion bot, program it for a coding assistant. All these things are possible with one generic intelligence layer. And also companies like Meta have open sourced these ways. So you don't even, the flexibility in the programming is even more than what it started off with. So the first time, for the first time, we have had intelligence outside Google, like artificial intelligence outside Google that's of higher quality than what is inside Google which a new startup like us is able to harness take advantage and get it out to the users before Google can that's really what has happened we benefited a lot from open AI and meta all like making so much progress on large language models and getting them to the user base developers, other smaller startups to build amazing products that would never have been done before with way less data because you can just few short prompt it or like fine tune it on a small subset of data that you required.

16:55So the advantages that the incumbents had in terms of having a large volume of data has gone away. I'm not saying you don't need user data at all. All I'm saying is you need a fraction of what was needed earlier for the first time. Arvind Sernivas is here with us. He's the CEO of Perplexity. We're going to keep up this conversation right after the break. Did you know your credit card points and miles can lose value to inflation? Credit card companies often reduce the redemption value of your points and miles. Now imagine a credit card with rewards that can grow in value. With the Gemini credit card, you can earn Bitcoin or one of over 50 other cryptos instantly with no annual fee.

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18:08This content is not investment advice and trading crypto involves risk. The Gemini credit card cannot be used to make gambling related purchases. What the hell is going on right now? And why is it happening like this? At Wired, we're obsessed with getting to the bottom of those questions on a daily basis. And maybe you are too. I'm Katie Drummond, the Global Editorial Director of Wired. And I'm hosting our new podcast series, The Big Interview. Each week, I'll sit down with some of the most interesting, provocative, and influential people who are shaping our right now. Big interview conversations are fun.

18:44I want a shark that... That eats the internet. That turns it all off. Unfiltered and unafraid. So in a lot of ways, I try to be an antidote to the unimaginable faucet of reactionary content that you see online, to the best of my ability. Every week, we're going to offer you the ultimate luxury of our times, meaning and context. True or false, you, Brian Johnson, the man sitting across from me, one day, at some point, as of yet undefined in the future, you will die. False. Tell me more. Listen to The Big Interview right now in the same place you find Wired's Uncanny Valley podcast. Subscribe or follow wherever you get your podcasts.

19:27And we're back here on Big Technology Podcast with Arvind Surnivas. He's the CEO of Perplexity, which is the hottest AI startup in the world right now. It has 10 million users. It's a search tool, a search engine that you could use, but it's more than search. And it's fascinating. We're just talking before the break about how you don't need as much data for Perplexity as you would for other applications. That is one of the innovations that we're seeing in AI. but what you do need is news right and i do you have a very interesting approach to ui where you'll put four links not always news sometimes it's a youtube video like when i searched you on perplexity i found a couple of your youtube interviews and those go at the top if if you're not training on vast amounts of data actually urgency and it being in the moment is crucial i would imagine i mean you even look at some of the suggested searches you have and that's there i'm curious from your perspective how do you think news and information creators are going to factor into this world they're already the times is already suing open ai um i i go back and forth because i run a content business about whether i should let these bots crawl or not talk a little bit about what you think there and who actually benefits?

20:46So our thinking here has been to rely on our background as academics. First of all, like when we launched and ChatGPDA launched one fundamental differences, we give people information on where the answer is coming from, the sources. Right at the top, which I love. Right at the top, the sources, the citations, right? And that I believe is a way to attribute the creator of the content. Okay, you know what? I'm not stealing your content. I'm actually attributing it to you. I'm telling the user exactly where it's coming from. And I'm going to drive traffic to you if they actually want to learn more about other stuff on that website.

21:29So in academia, this is a similar concept as writing a citation. And if someone's interested, they go and read the cited paper actually on their own. We don't have to tell them to go read it. They read it on their own because they think it's important. And I think that's very fair use of other people's content. We're not stealing it. We're actually just being a middleman between them and the end reader. And we're giving them more visibility, right? So it's a different kind of visibility. until now the internet economy has been built around like how much traffic am i getting now you're going to be like how much awareness am i getting how much awareness am i getting like how many times has some content on my site been viewed by people it may not it it can be viewed in a different way too it could be viewed through somebody else it can be viewed directly on me as long as the user knows it's from me it's not right that's that's where that's where we differ from Google or ChatGPT, sorry, not Google, I guess Google Bard and ChatGPT, Google itself is going to be pretty transparent about the links.

22:37And our sense is also that the value of a link click on perplexity will be more than on Google. Because some of it has to be a way higher intent to still leave the site and go, right? Your pitch is very similar to the one that publishers make to advertisers that like it's not only about clicks it is about awareness and you know when you get traffic from a good publisher it's going to be high quality traffic that being said like if you don't have eyeballs on your site it's very difficult to make money from it but we'll see how this plays out i think it's still an open question it's an open question that's that's i i clearly established that here that we don't have complete answers to all this today how are you thinking about making money i mean you have a pro version that's 20 a month you don't have ads yet but you talk very eloquently about the idea that you might eventually have ads and how that could be even better than your experience uh you know we just you talked about google earnings at the top i mean they just added an incremental six billion dollars in advertising in the quarter an incremental in six billion that would be the 11th biggest advertising business on the globe period outside of China, according to Brian Weiser from Madison and Wall.

23:57So people end up spending, what did we say, like 30 something minutes, 21 minutes and 58 seconds on perplexity, and not just, you know, zinging out to websites through Google. How are you going to make money on that? And how does that change the economics of the internet? I think that we just need to rethink what advertising means, right? You go to the first principle of what advertising means. Advertising is a way for the creator of the content or the brand owner to maximize their awareness to the end user or viewership now uh 10 blue links is one way to connect the reader and the creator but not the most efficient way right the more efficient way is actually answering parts of what exists on your website to the end user directly what exactly do you want the user to know about you which you're putting on your site anyway you don't have to tell us you don't have to like pay us for that in fact i i believe it's fair if it's more fair to the advertiser to like not be the middle guy telling and i'll figure out how to sort the order you you pay me money for that but rather you you write about yourself in the most honest transparent way that you want the end user to know about you and let the ai do the job of taking that and reaching the end user more more efficiently than before but advertising interrupts though like so it's very difficult very different to be like a blue link on the side or above versus like you're having a conversation and then like perplexity ads come in and like hey wait a second you should know about this.

25:40Yeah. So what I'm trying to say here is advertising has to be rethought from the perspective of, oh, I just want traffic versus I want more awareness. And what tools can I use to increase that? How can I write the content on my website even better to reach the end user for certain kind of questions? And you are in charge of that yourself as a creator. You don't have to be under the mercy of someone creating an auction system and exploiting you. Right. By the way, the internet can be very fair. We, perplexity is not trying to be creating a trillion dollar economy on top of ads or on top of all the searches that we get and trying to take all of it and not give away much to others.

26:30Like nobody won, only Google won in the past era where you know the telecom providers did not win uh the the publishers did not win they took all the moolah out for themselves we want to change that and create a more fair world and that's why i think like people will be more willing to work with us and i mean it also doesn't just change like the traditional search model it can change commerce too i mean if you think about if you're on amazon you could search amazon and just type uh you know conversationally into a a search bar there and they're actually starting to do this i think it's a product called rufus and yeah that obviously minimizes their amount to make ads but it's also how do you think yeah i'm curious how do you think it's going to change e-commerce well it's good i think it's all like think about it a short term and long term right yeah you may think it minimizes your ads but what if people just purchase more because they're able to make better choices now yeah right uh most of the time people don't end up purchasing they end up shopping a lot but they don't actually make a purchase because they're not sure what to buy but when you have a great shopping assistant that directly gets to what the user wanted the conversion to a transaction could be much higher right and the retention could be higher the number of purchases cumulative number of purchases could just get higher per user and uh you don't have to rely on other people anymore you can just and the merchants are happier.

27:58So they're willing to pay you a little more for like being displayed on your site. So you can create a different kind of economy, right? So by the way, for Amazon to do this hard, obviously, because they do rely on advertising revenue on amazon.com to keep amazon.com profitable. So they have like similar problems to Google there, but look, they are such a massive company and have revenue from AWS and like can definitely make up for like any short-term hits here you have jeff bezos as an investor yeah i do made this argument to him no by the way i want to establish that he doesn't you know he he he's not like actively involved in amazon and his investment in us has no time there he's general he his investment in us has nothing to do with uh us working with amazon it's a it's an independent investment how did you recruit bezos or did he just come in the front door we had i'm sure it's a great story no he he i it's it's not it's not as crazy as you think like we got connected to his um you know besos expeditions fund and um you know obviously in his style they asked us for like like um a memo memo and you know like that was sort of the process and we had a pitch deck and all that and like demo and all these things but yeah they made a decision very fast and it definitely changed our fortune um in terms of being seen as a widely aware like the awareness that we got through this investment is tremendous interesting very quickly as we come into a landing uh you worked at open ai you know i guess like the fashionable thing would be to ask you about their governance troubles so if you want to comment on that fine but what i'm hearing about from them is they keep signaling that's huge stuff is coming down uh the pike this year just like the way that they're talking is that it sounds like some serious advances are going to happen this year do you have any sense as to what those might be and i don't understand like what what could what could inspire such talk is it much i mean if it's a slightly better gpt model okay but it sounds like something more i mean i don't know what has been said publicly maybe you hear something more privately but uh i guess i'll just go by what sam altman told bill gates and i was listening to it like two days ago which is um they'll have a lot more reliable models so uh right now sometimes one in a 10 or one in a hundred completions of a gpt4 model uh is hallucinatory can can say arbitrary things it's not reliable, it's undeterministic programs so I think they'll address that they'll also address the fact of the models being like more multimodal like right now it supports images and input but the most general version will support audio, video as inputs and also as outputs they'll interface with text I think they'll make some advances there I think the third thing they'll make some advancements on is reasoning whatever reasoning GPT-4 is able to exhibit today is already amazing but it's still pretty limited and I think they'll make some more progress there in terms of multi-step reasoning and like doing back and forth thinking you want models to be able to like think for a while and then come back and give you some things right so they'll probably make more progress on those things and I guess the fourth thing that Altman mentioned was like just like reducing the costs Oh, sorry, increasing the personalization of all these models so that people can program all these things in a more reliable way.

31:48Like, for example, why should all the products built on GPT-4 respond in the same way, with the same style of moralizing the user and telling them what not to ask and same kind of diplomatic positioning of things? You want to have more variety and diversity in the product experiences created on top of GPT-4. and I think that is something they'll probably address. Long context reasoning, things like that. So these are all, like when I say these things, it looks boring to you, right? Long context, better models, better reasoning, more reliability, multimodal, such boring answers. But when these actually happen together, when these all really happen at the same time, it'll look like the next generation model dropped.

32:34With Anthropic, what do you think about the Claude model? and does it hold a candle to GPTs? So far, not, to be very honest. But I'll tell you one thing. There are people in the world who actually like Claude a lot more than GPT. In terms of response styles and eloquence, they like Claude a lot more. It's more natural. It feels more like talking to a human than to an AI if you talked Claude. So we offer Claude as an option on the Perplexity product for pro users. And I know a lot of people who still use Claude instead of GPT-4, even though GPT-4 is a more capable reasoner, because they like the way Claude responds.

33:17So Anthropic certainly has something. Now, can they create a model better than GPT-4? I definitely think they can. And if they don't, they're kind of doomed, in fact. This year, in 2024, if they don't create a model better than GPT-4, all the funding and the race is not being put to good use. but I actually think they will end up creating a model better than GPT-4 this year. It's sort of almost guaranteed to happen. So I believe it's going to happen with Cloud 3. Now, does that mean OpenAI is in trouble? I don't think so either. I'm sure there's a GPT-4.5 or 5 that will stay ahead. So it really is going to be a cat and mouse game there where Anthropics playing catch-up and OpenAI is ahead through multimodal capabilities, reasoning capabilities, and things like that.

34:07Now, the question is like, how long can OpenAI keep on staying in the lead? If the delta between them and their competitors is slowly reducing, what is the thing that's going to keep them ahead? That's what I'm not clear. And when Lama 3 comes out, and Lama 3 is as good as Cloud 3 or very close to GPT-4, and the weights are just given out to everybody, it threatens the whole economy that these companies are creating with through apis it doesn't demolish it because just because somebody gave you the weights uh doesn't mean you can take it and serve inference yourself you still need someone to serve inference for you in a more sufficient way and like all the trickery to like make an inference efficient is still not like easy or open source but it certainly reduces the monopoly power of like these um closed source model providers and Google is also going to play in that market through Gemini as an API too, right?

35:07So it's going to be interesting to see. I think OpenAI's value will lie in the ChatGPT product itself, the end-to-end product, and they're going to face competition there too. Like Meta is going to have their own AI assistant, there's Bard, it's all sorts of like, Microsoft has BingChat co-pilot. So it's a market, it's a tough market. It's like there are a few players and they're all going to keep competing and like, you know who's really winning? Consumers. Yeah, and NVIDIA. And NVIDIA, exactly. So everybody's using NVIDIA. I mean, of course, Google doesn't use NVIDIA chips and I guess Sam Altman is trying to create his own chip company and things like that.

35:47So we'll see. Yeah. All right, Arvind, I know you are pressed for time. Keep shipping. And if people want to check out Perplexity, where can they find it? Perplexity.ai. Okay, excellent. Thank you for joining. I hope it's not the last time. Really illuminating conversation. Great point to end on. Thanks again for being here. Thank you, Alex. All right, everybody. Thank you for listening. And we'll see you next time on Big Technology Podcast.

36:13What the hell is going on right now? And why is it happening like this? At Wired, we're obsessed with getting to the bottom of those questions on a daily basis. And maybe you are too. I'm Katie Drummond, the Global Editorial Director of Wired. And I'm hosting our new podcast series, The Big Interview. Each week, I'll sit down with some of the most interesting, provocative, and influential people who are shaping our right now. Big interview conversations are fun. I want a shark that... That eats the internet. That turns it all off. Unfiltered and unafraid. So in a lot of ways, I try to be an antidote to the unimaginable faucet of reactionary content that you see online, to the best of my ability.

36:54Every week we're going to offer you the ultimate luxury of our times, meaning and context. True or false, you, Brian Johnson, the man sitting across from me, one day, at some point, as of yet undefined in the future, you will die. False. Tell me more. Listen to The Big Interview right now in the same place you find Wired's Uncanny Valley podcast. Subscribe or follow wherever you get your podcasts.