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!

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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 https://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 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 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.

See https://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.

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Peter Thiel has become one of the most mysterious and controversial figures in tech. He’s a visionary investor who recognizes transformative ideas before everyone else. But he’s also seen as a shadowy figure whose network has accumulated extraordinary influence across Silicon Valley, national security and politics– proven by his bets on people like Elon Musk, Alex Karp, Sam Altman, and even Vice-President JD Vance.

Walter invites the “builder of builders” and co-founder of PayPal and Palantir, to explain his warnings about the Antichrist, discuss the current moment of AI co-founders speaking out about safety, and to ask Thiel his philosophy on preferring evil founders to incompetent ones. An illuminating conversation with the man whose bets are reimagining tomorrow’s tech and politics.

Interview taped September 16, 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.

See https://omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Elon Musk has spent his career turning improbable ideas into companies that reshape the world. To some, the entrepreneur behind Tesla and SpaceX is an engineering genius whose ambitions have transformed electric cars and space travel. To others, his politics and extraordinary influence raise serious questions about the future he is building. Either way, the world’s first trillionaire is betting on AI, humanoid robots and life beyond Earth.

In this season’s debut episode, Walter asks Musk about DOGE regrets, why he believes robots will solve America’s national debt, and the dark politics that have consumed his own platform, X. Along the way, Musk shares why living in a simulation demands that we all be less boring. A candid conversation about the imagination, drive and contradictions of a man determined to turn his vision into our future.

Interview taped August 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.

See https://omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

As a teaser to our upcoming series The Builders-- which kicks off with an interview with Elon Musk, we're re-airing our critically acclaimed 2023 podcast On Musk, Walter Isaacson's behind-the-scenes telling of writing the Elon Musk biography. We hope you enjoy it!

Which of Musk’s efforts will mark his legacy? Will it be Starship and his work bringing Americans back into orbit, or will it be X and his amplifications of the worst of humanity? Isaacson wrestles with his time in Silicon Valley, and relays a comparison of Jobs and Musk that’s sure to stay with you.

See https://omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

As a teaser to our upcoming series The Builders-- which kicks off with an interview with Elon Musk, we're re-airing our critically acclaimed 2023 podcast On Musk, Walter Isaacson's behind-the-scenes telling of writing the Elon Musk biography. We hope you enjoy it!

Be a storyteller, not a preacher. That was novelist Walker Percy’s legendary advice to a young Walter Isaacson. One he takes to heart in his work as a journalist at Time and CNN, and as a biographer of creative genius across the centuries—and in trying to capture someone as volatile as Elon Musk. He reflects on the challenges of holding the complexity of a character in his mind—and the minds of readers—in the modern age, when everyone just wants to know if the emerald mines were real.

See https://omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

As a teaser to our upcoming series The Builders-- which kicks off with an interview with Elon Musk, we're re-airing our critically acclaimed 2023 podcast On Musk, Walter Isaacson's behind-the-scenes telling of writing the Elon Musk biography. We hope you enjoy it!

What kind of titan of industry has a "giddy mode"? Or a "demon mode"? The two aspects of Musk’s personality are forces that drive his choices and behavior at work—and vectors Isaacson finds critical to understanding how Musk operates. From ripping out servers on Christmas Eve on a whim to buying Twitter against better wisdom, and reaming out staff members left right and center, we stare into the darker parts of Musk as chronicled by Isaacson.

See https://omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

As a teaser to our upcoming series The Builders-- which kicks off with an interview with Elon Musk, we're re-airing our critically acclaimed 2023 podcast On Musk, Walter Isaacson's behind-the-scenes telling of writing the Elon Musk biography. We hope you enjoy it!

Space travel, electric vehicles, future-powering batteries—the ability to push technology forward and to bring it into the world in a real way is without a doubt the best of Elon Musk. In his 600 page biography, Walter Isaacson chronicles a man with superlative engineering skills, but who “doesn’t have a fingertip feel for social emotional networks.” On this first of four episodes, Isaacson shares the aspects of Musk that gave meaning and muscle to … the rest of Musk.

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Whose imagination do you want to live in? In this new series, bestselling biographer Walter Isaacson sits down with the most consequential names in AI and tech to understand the futures they're racing to build. Elon Musk, Peter Thiel, Alex Karp, Fei-Fei Li, Dario and Daniela Amodei, and more open up about their ambitions, what frightens them, how they think about humanity, and what drives them to build so big and so fast. The conversations are intimate, charming, and sometimes chilling. But mostly, they're impossible to dismiss. Because whether or not you agree with them, it's their imagination we're all starting to live in.

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.

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 https://omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.