From Viral Videos to Brain Chips: The Future of Human-AI Evolution w/ Taryn Southern

SCS (Intro): 

She went viral before Virality was a business strategy, and early YouTube pioneer, Emmy nominated filmmaker, and now investor, Rin has spent her career at the bleeding edge of tech and storytelling. She made history with the first fully AI generated music album.

Today she's working on the frontier of brain computer interfaces at BlackRock Neurotech, exploring how technology can restore mobility, memory, and identity. On this episode of Billion dollar Moves, we go beyond the buzz and into the build of Taryn Southern. You'll learn how to use her gripe framework to prompt ChatGPT, all your favorite AI tool, like a pro.

What Neurotech reveals about the future of healthcare, cognition and deep tech investing. This my friend, isn't just about AI or investing.

It is about reimagining what it means to be human. Let's get into it.

Taryn Southern: 

For the past seven or eight years, I've been experimenting with AI as a creative process, as a creative pursuit, and also working in neurotechnology. And the past four years of that time, been working in implantable brain computer interface technology with a company called BlackRock Neurotech. It's been really interesting seeing how those two sort of intersect in really unique ways, particularly in the last year while I was also sort of going through my own personal health challenges.

Very frequently, I work with patients who have lost some form of function, whether they have ALS or they are paralyzed or they have some sort of neurodegenerative disease that impacts their motor control. It's devastating for these people to lose their autonomy, lose their freedom, and so many times these clinical trials with these bcis are all they have.

And I actually can sort of identify a little bit with that experience of having an incredible amount of uncertainty, a health diagnosis and a treatment plan that that keeps you pretty limited in terms of like how you feel and what you're able to accomplish and all of it changes your. Outlook on life and what it is that you wanna do and spend your time doing.

SCS: 

Yeah, absolutely. But of course, the, the question that comes forward is, you know, many of us remember you from, you've had what, 700 million views on even more now. Perhaps, uh, in your collective videos, you were one of the first few who put yourself forward as. Frankly a female voice. That's smart. That you inserted satire.

I think you did. What was it? The, the play on Obama girl for Hillary. 

Taryn Southern: Yeah. You're good. “Get hot for Hillary.”

SCS: 

All of that. How did we get here to brain chip interface? I mean, this is a very unexpected turn of events. Really? 

Taryn Southern: 

Yeah. The few years. Before I got into entertainment and YouTube, I actually went to school at University of Miami.

I was studying anthropology and broadcast journalism, and my goal was to be a documentary filmmaker, a Margaret Mead anthropologist type who would go in and study unique cultures. I was kind of obsessed with human culture belief systems. I did my senior thesis on Ayahuasca, and that was in 2004. I've just always been fascinated by the technologies both ancient and modern, that sort of impact our world. 

And so I thought I was going to be a broadcast journalist or a documentarian, and I got out of college and I went to Los Angeles and tried to get on shows on Discovery Channel and National Geographic, and they were like, you look like you're 12. Like that's not going to happen. 

So I ended up taking my first job as a red carpet host thinking, you know, this is a great job to pay the bills. Like it's fine on my path to being Margaret Maid, I will, I will do red carpet interviews and it just sort of took off from there. And I started working quite frequently as a host in a lot of the early digital projects.

So I was one of the first hosts for MySpace, one of the first hosts for Facebook, and did a lot of their sort of exclusive live content and. It just got me really excited about this new burgeoning Wild West space. And so in my free time I started making videos. One of the first videos was a satire called Hot for Hillary, which was kind of a spoof on another popular viral video called Obama Girl for the 2007 presidential primaries.

And that video went viral. I ended up getting a couple of job offers to become a political correspondent for MSNBC, Fox News out of that video, and that's when the light bulb went off. It was like. Oh my gosh. Traditionally, we've had gatekeepers, whether it's agents, managers, casting directors, all these people that have to sign off and say, yes, she's talented enough.

But now we have this other path where we just can go straight to an audience and let the audience say what they like, what they don't like, and let that sort of govern this process. And it was so exciting to me, and I'll never forget one of my agents at the time, who was my hosting agent saying, don't put videos on YouTube.

It's gonna make you look bad. It looks desperate. At that time, that's what it was sort of perceived to be. I thought it seemed so much more exciting and that first job offer that was very serious was kind of the proof of the pudding there. So I did that for many years until maybe seven years of YouTube.

And while I was doing YouTube, I also started working in traditional TV and film. I was an actress for a while, did some sitcoms, just like what got my hands into a lot of different pots. I love storytelling. I always knew that this was not a forever career. I thought, this is really fun to be doing all of this in my twenties.

But by the time I hit 30, I better not be driving around to auditions anymore. Like it's just not happening. And I stayed true to that commitment to myself. So I don't know. It was in my late twenties. I was feeling tired from the YouTube hamster wheel of making content, and I was looking around saying, I still like doing this.

I want it to be more intellectually stimulating. I wanna do something that's more challenging and I wanna do something that's putting more good out in the world. Like my funny videos on dating humor. I don't know that they're really contributing that much. And so I ended up in a Google Artist in Residence program in 2016 that was intended to allow influencers and content creators a chance to experiment with early Google technologies, such as their AI technologies, their spatial computing, and VR technologies.

And so I spent a year doing that, just playing, integrating. I went to USC and, and got to participate in seeing a trial on patients who were using virtual reality for pain management. Yeah. So understanding how content affects our physiology, and this kind of opened up the door for me to say, okay, I'm done just being a YouTuber and making content.

I'm ready to start diving into these technologies that will have a profound impact on our lives and on our health and our wellbeing. And that's where it all started. 

SCS: 

Yeah. And 2016 was way ahead of the curve with, you know, experimentation. You were one of the first few, well actually you were the first artist that created a whole album with Ai.

Tell us a little bit about that process and I guess, you know, bringing it to where we are today, where are we with the creative process? I mean, we just came from a bunch of general meetings with a fund where they were talking, frankly, the head of a huge studio was sort of debating with the chief strategy officer of Open AI about AI and the creative process and who should be in the driver's seat and what this means.

So as the pioneer creating your own album with ai, what does this mean for us as creatives moving forward. 

Taryn Southern: 

Actually, the AI album was another seed that was planted in that Artist in residence program that I participated in. I was working with Google Incense and a couple of the other early AI programs that they were working on internally and pretty blown away, to be honest.

Back in 2016, there wasn't much on the image and video generation front. Everything's just sort of looked like a psychedelic mess. If you were plugging it into the AI models, then large language models didn't even exist yet. But the music, the rule-based music Ai. Software was pretty good. And so I reached out to probably 8, 9, 10 different early stage AI music companies, got access to their demo software and was blown away.

I was like, oh my gosh. 'cause I also, I love music. I've always had a passion for music, but I'm not a traditional musician. I don't know how to play an instrument. I had a. A piano teacher who was narcoleptic, God bless her soul. And so she would fall asleep in the middle of teaching me piano. And I, I was like, I didn't wanna wake her up, so I would just sit there while she would sleep.

And that was my two years of bizarre piano lessons. So I, I, I don't know how to play an instrument, but I quickly learned that my. Skillsets around sort of understanding how music can be translated into a different language in this case code or simply language-based, language-based ai. So categorization, tagging, all of that, I could learn music in a different way.

I was so excited. So I, I decided to put together an entire album, each one, sort of working with different tools, and released that in 2017. 

SCS: 

And it hit the charts. 

Taryn Southern: 

It hit the charts. One of the songs hit the top 100. Mm-hmm. Which was a really exciting moment. I mean, look, I'm sure people were just like, what is this song written by robots?

Let's play it on the radio and then immediately go back to our human songs. I think back then it was just like, what? What's happening? This is so weird. But I got to speak a lot about that process, and in doing so. Kind of distilling down why I felt it was a huge add to creativity, not a subtraction. And I think every single person is different.

We can't look at creativity as a one size fits all venture. We all come to the table with different skill sets and different limitations. Sometimes those limitations are resource oriented. Sometimes they're based upon, you know, like who we actually know and can collaborate with. And sometimes they are sort of expertise limitations.

Like in the case of me making music and not knowing how to play the piano. And whenever we bring in this kind of like outside collaborator that has infinite knowledge and expertise, we get to plug in the holes where we see fit. So I never recommend people use AI for the thing that they love most doing or that they're really good at or have their expertise in, but to use it to fill in all of the other areas.

To scale their ideas, to broaden the possibility of what they can actually ship to the world. And as a YouTuber knowing for many years that the most important thing is getting that video out every single week, even if it's not perfect, and learning a little bit of this skill and a little bit of that skill.

And you learn a little bit about lighting and a little bit about camera work, and you kind of become this multidisciplinary artist. I think working with AI is very much similar. 

SCS: 

But we are really advancing at, you know, light speed. Right. In terms of the quality that's being produced. I mean today with just the amount of data that's being ingested and how much it's being proved, there will be job loss for sure.

Yes. And creators are at the heart of it. You've used the word taste making in the past with regard to where our role therefore becomes, but frankly, we're in the world of investment in finance, but very much so this is why the, this podcast exists. We feel that the brand needs to. Be out there, you know, we need to speak to the thesis and frame the direction of where the money goes, frankly.

Right. Because, you know, uh, content affects us in so many ways. What would you say is your advice? I mean, learning from your early days for those that are touching creative in some way. How would we upscale? How do we think about ourselves moving forward to future proof ourselves? 

Taryn Southern: 

You're absolutely right that it's coming so fast. I think everyone is overwhelmed and feels even a bit timid or scared just about the sheer volume of tools being thrown their way, knowing how to actually integrate those tools into a workflow that works for you. Also is not a one size fits all endeavor. And I think the best thing you can do is take advantage of the incredible free education that exists on YouTube.

I teach in AI bootcamp that is very specific to marketing communications and creative professionals, so I've kind of tailored that there's. A million of other people just like me who are out there teaching these classes four to six weeks, an hour a week of experimenting with these tools. Because what you'll find is that the way that you might be taught to use this tool by whatever teacher, you are going to start viewing that tool through the lens of your work and your challenges, and.

It won't take long. I mean, I find this all the time in my bootcamp where people sign up, they think they're gonna learn X, Y, Z, and they end up walking away with three other different insights because the way that they're applying these tools to their work challenges is unique to them. It's just a matter of that exposure and the trial, and once you do that, you're already ahead of 90% of the curve.

SCS: 

What do you see as the key gap here? I mean, when people come to your bootcamp, is it a whole different style of working and thinking that we need a reset? I feel you've been through. The mobile wave. Right. MySpace. You went out to interview your MySpace friends for the first time? Yeah, so we've been through the mobile wave.

AI today is arguably the biggest wave that we're experiencing. Sometimes we overestimate it as well. Let's talk a little bit about that, but I. What is the shift that needs to happen from a talent and frankly investment standpoint? What is the, in the words of, uh, Zach, actually, he was one of the key builders in open AI.

He talks a lot about the blank space. You know, we always talk about like, oh, the dangers of AI, but there's also a lot of blank space. What's the blank space here? What's the skill gap that people are missing? 

Taryn Southern: 

I find most people are just scared to get started. They feel overwhelmed with, like I said, the sheer volume of tools. They've maybe used ChatGPT a handful of times. A lot of times people sort of use it like they use Google to ask certain questions. I think learning how to optimally use it and all of a sudden, seeing the huge leap that your results take when you use it correctly. 

I mean, I always tell them, look at AI as a huge team of people that you have access to, and if you prompt it correctly, you can ensure that each of those team members is a category expert, but you have to prompt it correctly because right now you're just getting the mean average of results.

When you're asking ChatGPT a question, it's taking all the data that it has, and it's sort of like finding the mean average right here in the middle. We don't want middle results. We want exceptional results.

And so how do we get exceptional results by. Prompting with certain keywords that tell the system, I'm only gonna be pulling data from this set of people, individuals, expertise with these kinds of examples. And so I have a whole prompt framework. I call it the gripe framework. So you'll never gripe about your prompts again.

And there's five key components to the gripe framework. So if you are working on a project, there's no room for error here. You really need the best results, you can use this framework and you will find that what you get back from the system is. 9 million times better than what you would've had if you just treated GBT like Google.

SCS: 

Yeah. So changing our framework. Give us a very quick and dirty here. Sure. I do use your gripe framework because I listen to it. It's so practical. 

Taryn Southern: 

Yes. So the gripe framework. First goal, what is your goal that you are having ChatGPT do for you? Is it to write an email pitch? Great. Then R is for role. What is the role you want ChatGPT to play? So in this case, an expert email marketer. Perhaps you even give an example of someone that you think is like the top in their field. 

I stands for identity of the audience. So who is this actually for? Is the audience for 37-year-old busy professionals who don't have enough time and are constantly chugging protein drinks. Um, sorry. Not specific at all. 

P is for parameters. And parameters can be any sort of constraint that you have, such as 100 words needs to be 500 words. It needs to be in the style of the New Yorker, or in the style of Alex Ramoz, or you know, whatever the case may be. It's usually the constraints, the little details.

Does it need to be in bullet points, format tone, and then finally. E for examples. So do you have actual examples of work that you like? And if you don't have examples, another great way to get optimal results is to use frameworks as examples. For instance, if you're writing a book, you know, under E for examples, you might say, make sure to follow this particular three arch structure from, you know, so and so's expert book.

Hero's Journey would be one, right? Follow the Hero's journey structure. So frameworks are great also as examples, and that's your. That's your five part framework. 

SCS: 

Yeah. And it can be overwhelming, but breaking it down like that makes it so practical for so many of us, whether we're investors or, or creators, and thinking about really maximizing AI.

Now the question turns to, you know, I come from the lens of investment. We know that the majority of capital today. It's flooding Ai. Mm-hmm. So much so that it's drowning everything else. There's a lack of resource where frankly it still matters. Right. In areas of impact that you and I care about. How do we think about investing smartly in Ai?

You and I actually talked about this. Had a conversation about this right where we started, actually, our first conversation was about an episode in Black Mirror. Yes. And how a BCI was input into an actual person who would otherwise be brain dead and ended up talking through ads, which is really scary because that is Amazon Prime all the time in a person.

Is that even possible? Are we like overestimating where AI can go and taking over the world? Are we overinvesting? I mean, I know that's a loaded question, but tell us, give us some answers. Taryn. 

Taryn Southern: 

So I believe I soothed some of your anxiety in this conversation by saying, no, it's not possible right now to just read someone's thoughts.

The way that these currently, the way that these brain computer interfaces work is they are decoding and encoding movement information in the brain. It's very specific. Sometimes they're also decoding. Encoding sensory information in the brain. So let me give you an example. You have a patient with ALS.

They are fully locked into their body. They cannot move, nor can they since touch, right? So you have an implant in the motor system and in the sensory system, let's say they're writing an email with their brain, with their thoughts. What's actually happening behind the hood of the car is they are contemplating handwriting a letter or typing.

They were, you know, whatever they were more comfortable doing before the disease took hold. Their brain has a memory, a sense memory of what it was like to use their hand to type or to write. We are decoding the signals of that movement, intention from the brain, sending that to an algorithm. That then translates that into a code that computer can understand.

So when you see someone speaking with just their BCI typing with just their BCI, we are not reading their thoughts, we are translating this movement intention. So it would be very hard, as you can see, for us to just go in and understand and that would be a completely different part of the brain. And we, we don't even understand much about how sort of complex thoughts are formed, but we do have this understanding about the movement part of the brain and we're gaining more of an understanding about the vision part.

And on the sensory part, we can essentially stimulate the brain in certain patterns in the sensory area so that patients get some kind of tactile feedback from their movement. So if they're, let's say, using a robotic arm to feed themself. They're actually feeling something similar to having a spoon in their hand because it's very hard to grip, right? It's very hard to grip and understand movement dynamics without having any kind of sensory feedback. I mean, look, what we're able to do now is unbelievable. It's mind blowing.

I still feel like it's absolute magic, but it's not the Black Mirror episodes that we're all used to.

SCS: 

Okay. 

Taryn Southern: 

And I don't think we're going to be close to some of that for quite some time. What does quite some time look like? Well, it's hard to say because a lot of this is just limited purely by biotech regulation, right?

There's only so many brains we can get implants in. There's only so many people who are willing to sign up for these very experimental studies. When we're talking about like reading thoughts or something more complex, we're looking at whole brain coverage, which quite frankly, we don't even have the technology for yet.

Breakthroughs are happening very quickly with Ai. Breakthroughs will happen even faster. We can't speed up technology in the brain the same way we can speed up a Tesla and a factory. It just doesn't work that way. There's this limiting factor. Will it happen in our lifetimes? Yeah, maybe. Maybe. Maybe when we're old and enjoying a glass of tea on the veranda with our thoughts.

SCS: 

We will be watching this episode that will feel like film, you know, rolling it back. So talk to us a little bit about your work now in BlackRock. You are front and center in storytelling for BlackRock. Where are we in the tech? How is it? It is a competitor to Neuralink that many know. How is it being differentiated in the approach? 

Taryn Southern: 

Yeah, so BlackRock's been a lot around for a very long time, and I have to say it is not the same company as the, the very famous PE firm. BlackRock Neurotech has, has been implanting patients since the early two thousands.

We're coming close to 50 patients implanted. Our technology is safe, it's effective, it works. It's just been a very long road in getting sort of the necessary FDA approval outside of the clinical trials. To commercialize this technology and get it in the homes of people who need it most, in part because it's a very expensive technology, although those costs are coming down, and also just because of the lack of awareness for so many years.

So I have to say I really love the fact that Elon Musk has gotten into the game and sort of created a megaphone or used his megaphone rather, to amplify this technology. You know, as a result, we were able to do several fundraising rounds that I don't know would've been possible without that, and we kind of needed that sort of boost in order to make the next big leaps forward.

These are like going to space endeavors. They're very, very hard. They're very, very expensive. There's not currently a path for making money. You do it because you know that this is critical, a technology, and that it'll also result in so many amazing insights about the human brain, which we can take with us into other areas of human study.

SCS: 

You were talking about the use cases for ALS, you know those that have limited ability. What is the commercialization timeframe for a company like this? Bringing back to that question and pulling that thread a little bit on capital, is there two pools of capital that needs to be spent here. i.e., philanthropy.

Because like you said, if we're being completely honest here, the commercialization timeframe is gonna be super, super long. And you're doing this for the good of humankind. Yeah. And then on the flip side, there are certain product cases or use cases which could be commercialized. How should we be thinking about this?

Are we overspending? 

Taryn Southern: 

I don't think we're overspending. We have to spend the money that we're spending in order to get the results that we need. I think we're actually very close. Really, really close actually to a commercialization point. Is that going to happen in six months this year? Next year? I don't know, but it's right around the corner.

The data is there, the science is there. The safety I believe is there. It just becomes a question of when, not if, and on the commercialization front. It's interesting. Well. There are obviously patient populations of people who, with paralysis and ALS who can get these technologies is limited, right? Like this is not a technology for everyone.

This is a technology for a very small group of people who desperately need it and want it. And so one of the things that we've been looking at is how could these technologies that are being used for this patient population also be used to benefit other people? How could we sort of expand what's possible here so that we can get more investors in the door?

And so we're currently looking at that, right now and have been. And I think that there are some really exciting opportunities and other neurological diseases and disorders that could fall into the category of being helped with these devices in really novel, interesting ways. As of now, as a population, we've all just sort of accepted pharmacological approaches as commonplace, especially as we age and we look at things like Alzheimer's and dementia and Parkinson's, which are really neurological diseases and we often use medicine to treat these diseases and, and not even, not very well, right?

When you're talking about an interface that can encode information, electrical information, the possibilities start to open up in really interesting ways on how to potentially remediate those diseases.

So I think that there is a lot, a lot of opportunity here from like an investment perspective. It really just depends on what your timescales are, but. In many ways, like this could be the exact right time to get in. If you wanna get in on the early ground floor of something that will absolutely be massive and game changing in the world.

These companies have now gotten to the point where we've proven that we've proven this works. We've proven the safety. So it's not as risky as some other early stage biotech investments in that way. It's just knowing it's gonna take a while for the commercialization paths to work themselves out. 

SCS: 

Say, you know, there's a new startup that's coming to us as investors that is looking at neuroscience and you know, building in tech through that to solve those problems.

What kind of capital injection are we looking at? Today, of course, BlackRock Neurotech has been around for 25 years, so there was a lot of initial capital where it was expensive. But now with the tools that we have to build, is it possible to see a 10 year exit horizon in the venture kind of framework?

Or is this purely going to be a private equity play possibly. 

Taryn Southern: 

Possibly, especially with Musk getting in with Neuralink, it just changes the acceleration points for everything. I mean, we raised a $200 million round last summer. Prior to that, I think it had been maybe a total of $30 million, which is not much for an implantable BCI company.

Most of the company's history, it was a profitable, but non venture backed company. 

SCS: 

What was the business model? Who were they selling to? 

Taryn Southern: 

We were primarily receiving grants from the government. Darpa, when Obama came in, he put a huge amount of money into the Brain Initiative, and so there were a number of years where we were getting this money to essentially provide the technology for these clinical trials.

And so we were the gold standard of Neurotech for all the institutions that were running clinical trials around the country, around the globe. We were the ones providing that tech. And so what was cool about that was in many ways, not only are we getting to see how different institutions are using the tech are using different kinds of methods of extracting brain signals and which ones are best, but we weren't actually putting up the money for the trials themselves.

The universities were getting the grants. We were just there as sort of the grant partner. We would sort of be the beneficiary of those grant approvals. And so that could continue. And it's a great model because you can remain profitable. You don't need venture capital to keep running it. But then you can't scale as a technology company if you wanna actually commercialize that technology.

That's where you need venture to come in and say, alright, let's make this more than just a research. 

SCS: 

And so taking a zoom out. On the opportunity of AI, beyond the work that you're doing in the neuro space, what are you tour in Southern still excited by? I was really caught by what you said with how we're really just at the median average of what AI can deliver.

Where should we be investing in and how should women be part of the discussion by the way?

Taryn Southern: 

I really want women to be part of the discussion. It makes me so sad that I still am seeing 90%, 95% men dominating the discussions and the investor space in a lot of these technologies. And I just, gosh, I just want this time to be different, you know?

Because you know that this is gonna be the next big wealth creation moment, and I don't want women to miss out. And the tricky thing about this particular moment, and we talked about this, it's really hard to actually know how to place bets in a space that is moving so fast. I mean, the bets that I would've placed a year ago, for the most part I would not place today because of the advancements that sort of come out of nowhere and you're like, whoa, Deep Seek, okay. Whoa. Exactly. Chat GPT, look at your image model. Didn't expect that. Mm-hmm.

It changes everything and so it does make it very hard, generally, man or woman. It makes it hard to invest. But I think there's a couple of areas that I find particularly interesting because they're huge problems that just need to be solved.

So one of those areas is ai, efficiency. Efficiency, I mean speed, but also energy efficiency. Like we know that we have an energy problem. It's one of the things that a lot of investors don't wanna talk about because it doesn't feel good, but AI's using up water, it's using up electricity. The math doesn't work out.

When we look at sort of usage over time, and there are some interesting ways to tackle this and there's some technologies that are tackling it both on the chip but also in the data centers. I've found that like an interesting place to look. It's not so sexy. But I think it's critically important. So I would say that, and then some just in the chip structure themself figuring out, are we gonna be on transformer only chips that are sort of running LLMs much more efficiently, or do we need to look at a different type of chip?

Because Nvidia has obviously just crushed it. They've crushed it in the market and it's very exciting. But that means there's a lot more space for manufacturers to come in and potentially do something kind of novel and interesting and also save companies a lot of money. And so those are two areas that I've particularly been spending a lot of time looking at.

In terms of the actual application space. I mean, that's the space I love to play in, right? I'm always playing like with the new tools and what's possible, agentic AI and creative AI, and it's just there's so many players, it's really, really hard to figure out how do you place a bet on what's gonna work a year, two, five years from now, especially in the consumer space. So that's a space I've kind of stayed out of, outside of my own experimentation. 

SCS: 

What are the questions? I mean, you know, we like to enrich our audience with frameworks, right? So how should I be thinking about what are the key questions? See, I get pitch. I mean, we get pitches all the time. And frankly, I can't tell A from B nowadays because the story is so good talking about storytelling.

The storyline is getting better and better that my imagination… I have no limit. Now I'm like, yes, this is possible. Yes, I believe in you. What are the questions? I should ask myself and the entrepreneur in diligence to sort of check it out. 

Taryn Southern: 

It's so hard to distill down just a couple of questions. I always like, take a second to look at the whole space. I mean, one of the best things you can do is literally go to ChatGPT, you know, inject a pitch deck or a summary and say what are the biggest issues that you see with this investment? Where are the challenges that you see coming up? What are the competitors that they have to be concerned about?

You know, and then going back to the founder and poking holes with those assessments. So that's obviously an easy one to do, but I think beyond that, I think getting a feel for the founder and how ready they are. For the magnitude of constant change, whether that's regulatory change, corporate governance change, technological change.

Like do they have plans in place for when all of a sudden, you know, a transformer chip becomes the only chip that is used because it's the cheapest chip available and their technology's running on a multipurpose chip. And so it's like how many contingencies do they have in place? And unfortunately because the space is moving so fast, I think founders, I think CEOs have to have many more contingency plans than they would have five years ago. 

SCS: 

Yeah. And so you touched on Deep Seek. That is a big risk with regard to just what's happening outside of America. Are we being too ambitious with our capital i.e., We're not capital efficient enough and just aiming for high valuations and more capital and more money to make things work.

Taryn Southern: 

I feel nervous about that. I mean, venture's always been tough, right? It's always been tough, but I think that there was a kind of a, this big moment, I'd say five, seven years ago, where being a venture capitalist was like very sexy. And so a lot more people got in, more capital came into the space. 

We saw a lot of like fluff occur, the sort of deaths in 2021 and 2022 started happening of these companies that really hadn't, didn't even have a moat. And now technology's doing this. I think it's almost like going back to first principles, uh, with venture to make these bets and, um, trying not to get distracted by the super shiny objects, which are everywhere. It's really challenging though. It's really challenging. 

As I was telling you, I personally am not going to be making individual venture bets for a while. I'm focused, you know, on funds and just other things because I find it too hard for me personally to place those bets. 

SCS: 

Alright, we'll wrap up with this quick game. Billion dollar questions, pick a card and quick one sentence answer. 

Taryn Southern: 

What's your most recent Google search slash question to ChatGPT? Should we look? Uh, last Google search, round trip ticket to Bali. 'cause I'm going there for August, so that's not that interesting. And last GPT question, how many rounds of a supplement I need to take to get rid of a bacterial in my gut? 

This is disgusting. You guys didn't think you were gonna get this on, but I wanted to be honest. So how many rounds of Pylori plex do I need to take to get rid of it?

SCS: 

All right, good to know. 

Taryn Southern: 

Which book changed your perspective and how? I'm really enjoying right now in this moment, the Second Mountain by David Brooks, and it's about this phase in life where the first mountain is like all of the things that you do to satisfy the ego, it's usually the accumulation of status and wealth and whatever the, you know, the achievement, right?

And those are the things that kind of fuel us as we're young. Usually you get the shit kicked out of you a few times, some early in life, some later. Mine all happened in like a very condensed period in my thirties. Yes. And when you come out of that, you often find, at least I found it, is very, very hard to get back on the same horse that you were on before.

Your ambitions have changed, your values have changed. The way that you do life has changed. And so the second mountain is about that moment of reconciliation, the hardship with the previous ambition and what, yeah. What you're doing in that second mountain of life to create purpose and meaning and I love it.

What's one thing you wish you knew earlier about wealth or investing? 

SCS: 

Oh, good choices, Taryn. 

Taryn Southern: 

This is so good. I mean, when I was in my twenties, I really wish I knew what I could ask for myself. I wish that I had taken equity advisor positions with some of the companies that I was. Consulting with, I would've done very well with a few of them.

I just wish I knew how to have the hard conversations. I mean, it almost feels strange these days with chat GPT and with YouTube. There's so much education out there for young women who are investors. We didn't have that. 

SCS: 

Yeah, we didn't. 

Taryn Southern: 

It was you were really having to kind of learn by trial and error, or hopefully you had a guy friend who was willing to pull you aside and say, this is how this works.

There wasn't a big community of women doing it. I wish that I knew where to go to have, to learn where to go to learn how to have these conversations, how to negotiate contracts. 

SCS: 

And to get ownership. That's what you're really pointing to because we discount that, you know, as advisors, I think that's very important because you wanna stake in the game as as they succeed.

Taryn Southern: 

That's right. And it takes time for those advisor equity shares to pay off. And so the earlier you can get to know that process, the better for you in your life. 

SCS: 

Yeah, and which is exactly why I started billion dollar moves and sadly, today we are still one of the only female voices in venture talking about investments, not just work life balance.

By the way, we are serious investors, and I'm so grateful that you are making your version of billion dollar moves, so Taryn Southern, thank you. Thank you for this.