The Human Cost of Convenience | Ex-VP @Yahoo! Srinija Srinivasan

You survived the dot-com crash in the 2000s, which was kind of crazy, because Yahoo was clowned as the poster child. I went into it knowing we will try valiantly and I will learn so much, and then I'm gonna go to graduate school like a good Indian girl. What human skill is becoming way more valuable every year? Imagination, creativity, curiosity. All three of those are very kindred. I absolutely believe that that is distinctly human. It comes from an embodied, lived experience. Why is it so hard for art to make money? Capitalism wants to find so-called efficiencies so that what comes out is greater than what was put in. This is kind of a myth to begin with. It's coming at some cost and expense, and the question is, at what cost and at whose expense? Are you exposed to a lot of the youths? Are we just, like, weak? You have a choice, a hard choice to make. You have to choose growth over convenience, and we have handed you a world that has prized convenience over all else. Life isn't here to be easy. It's here to help us grow. What would technology look like if we chose to design it and employ it to make us more human and better humans? It's so basic to me. But, Sharnija, what about the shareholders? Welcome to Office Drama, where we define the modern career for Gen Z and millennials. I'm your host, Kloyshi, and today, we are at the Patreon office in San Francisco. Hold up, chaos. We're back, and we have someone from tech history. She literally shaped the internet itself in its infancy. She was employee number five at Yahoo, who worked as ontological Yahoo and the editor-in-chief and VP. Her job was to categorize the world's first-ever directories of the internet before search was, like, ever a thing. So I don't know what year you were born in, or, like, if you even knew, but once upon a time, if you had to find a website, you literally had to look it up in a book, like a literal book, like a physical, like, who reads books anymore? I don't even, I've never seen one. She worked at Yahoo for 15 years. If you've ever seen the SF Jazz Center in Hayes Valley, she was a board chair to make that happen. She was awarded by President Obama to the White House Commission on Presidential Scholars. I don't even know what that means. And she was and is still on the Stanford Board of Trustees. Not still. Not still. Merita. What's Merita? I'm learning. It means you used to be. Oh, used to be. Merita. Merita. And after Yahoo, she started Louvre, a music venture. Uniting technology and the arts. And she's currently building a new college. Yes. Hey, combining the arts, technology, and humanities. Please welcome the legend, the trailblazer, the academic philosopher, Sharnija Srinivasan. Woo! Welcome to the office. Thank you, Chloe. I'm so happy to have you here. Oh, it's very kind of you to be curious. Yeah. Oh, my God. I had the greatest privilege of meeting Sharnija. Is it two weeks ago? Three weeks ago? Or was it a month ago? No, no, no. It was maybe two weeks. Two weeks ago? Oh, that's crazy. I'm so exhausted. Are you exhausted from that day? Well, life is going dense and fast, you know? Thank you for saying yes and letting me just, like, talk to you guys on camera. But then I realize you don't like doing interviews, too, because media evil. Yeah. So then what made you say yes today? What made you say yes? Yeah, honestly, you're compelling in that I just thought, Sharnija, get over yourself. What are you saying no to and why? Who are you saying no to and why? You know, like, Chloe's out here bursting with intellect curiosity. and creativity and trying to share that with people. And, like, why wouldn't you just say yes and participate and get out of your comfort zone and try to be of use? And if this is of use, that's amazing. Aw, thank you. Thanks for trusting me and believing in me. I really appreciate it. I will take care of you very well. It's awesome to meet one of the founding mothers of the internet. You burst it. You burst what this is. I'm sorry. You're watching the child of Sharnija right now. Sorry, not sorry. I think that you and Jerry have such a cute friendship. And that's only because y'all were on a study abroad program in Japan. I was 20. So this was more than half a lifetime ago. This was, it wasn't even legal to drink, you know? It's like. Wait, in Japan you can drink at 18? In Japan you can, which is really weird. And then you came back and you weren't legal until I had my birthday. But I wasn't, like, really a drinker, but, um. Jerry's responsible for my first hangover. In Japan? In Japan. Ooh. But in seriousness, we had this epic experience on the other side of the planet, you know, thrust together. In an unfamiliar place. And so, like, you cling to each other. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Like, you really kind of, there's your island of sanity. Yeah. And you're sort of going, what's happening, what's happening? And you're trying to make sense of everything around you. And you're trying to just make it through the language and make it through the culture and the workplace and everything. But you had to work there? Yeah. So this was a spring, summer, six-month program. Okay. So it spanned a spring quarter. Stanford has a campus in Kyoto, which is idyllic and amazing. And I live in a host family's house that hosts parents that didn't have children of their own and took me in like their own. And they were unusual and amazing. And I think everyone on our program agreed that I got the longest draw on the host family draw. The best one. You got the best host. I mean, I don't think there was any question. It was sort of, like, obvious. So I very much liked that. But then in the summer, the program helped find good placements for work and, like, some kind of paid internship, something. And it just so turned out that Jerry and I were both in the AI lab of Fujitsu, which was in Kawasaki, which is this concrete industrial. I guess you call it a real city, but it's like 45-minute train ride outside of Tokyo. And it is just this being unto itself. And it's just this industrial concrete place. And so we were both in Fujitsu's AI lab. And that meant that every day that hot, humid summer, we would be emailing each other across the desks, you know, in the big open room while we're supposed to be working. We'd kind of sneak emails to check in on each other. And we would get in the curry rice line at the cafeteria every single day, every single day, every single day. Yum. And I'd get a box of Pocky sticks. Oh, yeah. Yes. Yeah. Can you introduce yourself in Japanese? Konnichiwa. Ano, watashi wa surimi-ja desu. Zenbu wasureimashita. That's it. That's all I can do. What's zenbu? I've forgotten everything. That's everything. Can you say your favorite food? This is a doubly hard question because first I got to go through all the foods. Because that's really important stuff. Like, everything revolves around food for me. So first I got to say, well, what's my favorite food? And then I got to figure out what that is in Japanese. So the first thing that came to mind was paneer tikka masala. But in Japanese. Like, I think that's just going to be paneer tikka masala. Wow. That was beautiful. Yatta. Amazing. Sugoi. Sugoi. Do you watch anime? No. Dude, what? I thought you would be a weeb. I know. I never have. I know. I'm kind of culturally literate in a lot of domains. In a lot of pop culture domains. You still have time. Do I still have time? Yeah, yeah. You still have time. Oh, I still have time. You still have time to watch anime. There's still hope. You still have time to get on the train of anime. Okay. No. Noted. Yeah. There's just so many things. Just so you know. Okay. I also want the people to know your MBTI, your astrology sign, and where you grew up. But you don't know your MBTI. So you're just going to say if you're introverted or extroverted. Introverted. And your astrology sign and where you grew up. To the camera, please. Okay. I'm introverted. I love people. I actually really do. But I really get my charge from solitude and got to have solitude for sanity. And what was the others? Astrology. I'm a Libra. And I'm told by people who know these things that I'm like Libra, Libra, Libra. Libra. Like lots of Libra in there. Lots of Libra. And then born in India, raised in Lawrence, Kansas. Ooh. Very good. In 1989, you were awarded the U.S. Presidential Scholar Award as a student. Then in 2010, you were appointed by President Obama to the White House Commission on Presidential Scholars. Was this how you felt? That is such an obscure fact that you managed to unearth too, by the way. And I think, I don't know if this is still true today, but at that point, I think I may have been the only former scholar. That got ultimately named to be a commissioner. So it was this weird full circle moment. And I don't think, why wouldn't they always draw on former scholars to be on that commission? That would make perfect sense. But that's just not how politics works. What is a commission? It's one of many, many, many, many, many, many, many, many, many bodies, entities, groups of humans that the president has the authority to convene. Maybe there's congressional mandate for something to exist. And that means that humans have to do it. And maybe there's budget attached to it or not. So decades prior, presidents prior. Like, put this presidential scholars program into effect. And every president since needs to perpetuate that. So each president has the opportunity, like many, many, many places in the government to get the next commission appointed. And that's kind of, I guess, an honor to be appointed. But in all of the honors, like, I guess this maybe wasn't like in that top rung or whatever. But to me, that's so dope. I'm being asked to serve. And this is a program I happen to have personal familiarity with. And let me see what that's all about. And it was very interesting. Did you meet President Obama? We did go to the White House. Did we? Did we meet the president on that occasion? This is what's so crazy is I had the great opportunity to meet the president, but I don't think that it was in that context. We met the first lady at the White House. And I'm trying to think if we met the president. I don't think we got to meet the president that day. I mean, that's still dope. But I had different occasion for that. So, well, we know your career trajectory background, but you don't have LinkedIn. I have no LinkedIn. Sorry, Reed. You know, like, it's crazy. Just crazy. I know. I've been aggressively antisocial online. Are you friends with? Yeah, we've known each other since we were both alum of the Symbolic Systems Program at Stanford University. Reed Hoffman, co-founder of LinkedIn. In the 1900s, right? So we've known each other, and I just can't bring myself to sign up for anything. It's just my first 10 years at Yahoo, I did not have a cell phone, and I did not have internet connectivity at home. So you were just living in the office. I was living in the office, which was so much of why I needed to establish a boundary for for sanity and for clarity and just for processing and like go home. process metabolize sleep be present to something else be present to the rest of the world yeah get up and go do it again was having a therapist like common back then or no because we all have therapists now question it would definitely wasn't something that was like you know you talk about like my sneakers my therapist no like not like that not at all plus hella expensive still you what isn't it like covered by health insurance definitely not oh no definitely if that's true now then power to the people that's great but no no no no my gosh yeah so you were just doing it yourself oh yeah but i was very very lucky in that regard boy i mean i i kind of won the womb lottery like i came out i always say i'm the youngest of three kids i was born downstream of all this love i really did i came into this world the youngest child in a family that was freakishly that still is freakishly functional we love that yeah it's very rare and as you get older you see that that is uncommon and you see how uncommon and you see more and more actually yeah be a lover it is rare to know that you are loved yeah i want to talk about when you went to stanford and you chose symbolic systems because your sister told you about it yeah and i just i didn't realize what it was when i looked it up i was like what what does that even sound like but it was this tiny program that you said was a mishmash of computer science linguistics philosophy and cognitive science and thing is it went off to spawn some of the some of the tech's greatest legends like reed hoffman was their uh marissa mayer chris cox mike krieger and you never explicitly mentioned this but i feel like it was a big impact on the rest of your life no doubt no doubt it was foundational but it wasn't like intentionally that way because there were no alums it was so new i think maybe i was there in the third or fourth year of its existence so there were no alums which means you can't say what do you do with this yeah right and i hadn't even heard of it in my freshman year at stanford but my sister who was a couple years ahead of me a few years ahead of me overheard me talking to my dad and i was like what do you do with this and i was like talking to my dad when he said so what are you thinking about me drinking you know and i was riffing and i was like well you know i'm kind of interested in computer science because it's interesting fun i watched my mom do a 180 in midlife and start taking computer science courses before your mom's a baller your mom's cracked at math and sciences and and just shapeshifter because she was an art historian before that dude how she's genius truly yeah and this was like when you had to read books and this is when computers weren't sexy exactly and there was no market and you know you had to learn how to read and you had to learn how to read and you had to learn how to read and you had to learn how to read and you had to learn how to read and you had to learn how to mainframes were as big as a house and you go to the second floor for the printer you know it's like a whole nother 1900 y'all y'all um i was intrigued by that though i like the machines i like this logical analytical framework but i was equally interested in linguistics because i love language i love words i love what you can do with words and how they how they unlock things because now i can connect with you if we can really use them well you know so then i was like well maybe i could combine computer science and linguistics into a self-design major and that would help me understand how would you invent the next computer language it was just i was kind of riffing i had to have an answer from my dad and my sister overheard this and she said you know what you should think about symbolic systems and then she said the most important thing because you would love the people in symbolic systems like the major uh the students are like the professors the students who are already in it the small self-selecting group that chose something that they didn't know what they could do with it there was they weren't transactional instrumental about it they totally defied the dichotomy that stanford said and they didn't know what they could do with it between techie and fuzzy and said i am both hear me roar right yeah and they had a certain kind of sense of humor that i vibed with and a certain just curiosity that combined left brain right brain and all the things so she just turned out to be profoundly right in knowing me and having the sense that i would vibe with the people in it and that the what even though it was a major was less important than the who and that understanding shaped every choice i made since oh hell yeah we love that and then after you graduated you went on to become the ontological engineer yes at the site project at the site project which you were a part of cutting edge ai before it was cool before it was mainstream consumer spicy sexy and this was an effort to build a database of common sense knowledge but first of all like what does the word ontology even mean yeah so i was one of many ontological engineers the main common staff yes so in terms of that specific ai project at that time in that ai project our staff was mostly ontological engineers because the project was building a machine that has all of human common sense and that meant literally like spoon feeding all kinds of information facts rules of thumb heuristics anything that a kindergartner would know about the world common sense what we consider common sense into this machine through a language that was customized for this project but it was really based on first order logic which was straight out of my civilization and i was like symbolic systems training philosophical mathematical logical language for so is it like oh the logic of a person can only be born once it's like that and animals cannot talk it's like fairy tales so those are the kinds of sentences we'd be spoon feeding is like children are always younger than their parents and tables are hard and carpets are soft and everything is in relation to everything else which is interestingly kind of true in the world like you can only understand table insofar as you understand relationship between table and everything that's not table ah do you remember like specific ideas you contributed that were like oh i did land features land features so i learned what mesas and plateaus and you know different yeah exactly exactly so there are things i did know like hills and valleys but i had to learn well exactly what's a plateau and what makes a mesa a mesa you know so i i remember doing land features i might have done a chunk of emotions which would of course be really interesting i'm trying to think what else those are the ones that kind of spring to mind but that was a lifetime ago okay wow that's crazy um so my question to you is is water wet just got so sidetracked by back to psych i was thinking about the room that i worked in and i was thinking about everything is water wet absolutely so that would be a great psych sentence that water is wet yes but back to ontology though because i didn't answer your question oh yeah so ontology is a word that's used in metaphysics that has to do with the nature of of knowledge epistemology but within that like the structure of knowledge so ontology to me really gets to how our worldviews how the structure of how we see the world is defining what we think how we behave like how we walk in the world yeah and that and that these are very influenceable psyche things so that when you're dealing with ontology you're dealing with matters of human malleability and you need to honor that so like ontological engineer was like we're ordering the world here you know we're determining world order and when i got to yahoo i self-titled myself ontological yahoo correct because this seemingly maybe boring neutral process of categorizing websites was nothing neutral to me there was nothing obvious or neutral about what should be listed what's not listed where do we put things what do we call things when do you create a category when is something important enough that there's a salient distinction between the things in it and the things not in it yeah when does something have the right to be in something all those questions are so important and i think that's a really good question about how we describe things is consequential not just in terms of revealing our worldview but in terms of connecting to someone else in their worldview yeah and of course influencing that worldview so the notion that we knew yahoo was a media company from the first page of our first business plan turned out to be profoundly consequential in so many ways did you determine that or no even before i got there as our fifth person oh really jerry and david with their buddy tim brady had penned the first business plan and i was like oh my god i'm this plan and to get that first round of funding yeah and that first paragraph said we're a media company okay which is an extraordinary in hindsight you're like i think intellectually honest acknowledgement of the role we play in the world because the companies that followed us i would say abdicated that responsibility got it yeah that's right to prove that they weren't media companies which they're like it's not my responsibility yeah i'm just the tech profoundly consequential wow so then from psych project to yahoo jerry and david were like they saw all these parallels and give them all the credit because i couldn't even totally see the parallels they saw oh we're building this huge database of websites about anything and everything you're building this huge database of common sense about anything and everything help us figure out what this is going to be when it grows up come yeah browse the internet yeah so that's terrifying and i said oh no i'm not gonna call you boss you're my friends that never ends well and i have a good job that's in you know shouting distance of my home and i make just enough to start paying off my student loans and you had to go not i have the very very very beginnings of like a 401k you know so i was like no i'm not doing that i don't know how to do what you're talking about i don't know what you're talking about i will help you find someone more qualified and i sincerely in earnest thought and thought about who would be qualified and i had no idea because it wasn't here yet you know what would qualifications be and i did then more appreciate the parallels between what we were trying to do at psych and what they were trying to do at yahoo except at this breakneck pace not basic research right like yeah six month milestones no no this is like every second every hour you're on yeah in real time with real humans right with consequence and what i decided was that the reason that friends don't go into business is because invariably someone fails to pull their share of the weight and that breaks the trust in the underlying friendship i don't know how you did it i think there's a lot of people who don't work with friends and i had so much love and admiration for these two young men where they were just i could not imagine that either of you of them wouldn't be smart enough or wouldn't be dedicated enough okay so I figured the failure would be me no if there was going to be a failure and I was like then I better bet on myself and not against myself I better not let fear make this decision I feel like this is a life lesson like a recurring life lesson like you'd rather bet on yourself yeah than against yourself I like that I think I take away so how did you continue to stay friends because like it was 15 years well they made that easy are they just like chill dudes uh that's so funny okay they're not chill sometimes yeah exactly like they have no chill David has like almost pathological chill I mean but on occasion they would get riled up and they were willing and to be candidly riled up with and with and with each other which was actually great because there would be generative tension and conflict to for us to work out hard things you know what I mean so it was actually um they're a great yin yang no pun intended jerry yang yeah yeah they're a great foundership because they really did cover you different kinds of the sphere that one needs to build something and they figured out how to define and operate in relatively distinct and complementary lanes so that there wasn't this like clash of egos and stuff but they're both highly opinionated which is which is a godsend it's a gift yeah right like they were not mushy or yeah vanilla about anything and those opinions are hard won and they come from deep conviction they knew who they were and that that's easy to befriend wow what was your like what was your relationship with them because I envision like they're my elders first of all because I was in my young 20s and they were in their old 20s which is really old they're old people they're old farts because if you're an undergrad when they're grad students that's really old you know true most phd candidates don't hang out with undergrads and when we were in japan together they'd like slum it with us you know um there was this aspect for me where they were my elders even though in high like now that we're in our 50s it's like the gap narrows right yeah they got narrows but so that was one characteristic for me and how I look at the world but we were also really really good friends so I felt a bond of foundational trust that I think afforded a certain kind of fearlessness you know like what's the worst thing that can happen yeah but then they never developed the ego even after yahoo no that was remarkable they were that's so rare so I think that self-knowledge I think they're aware their self-awareness I think knowing themselves well enough to go into that meant the company did not become their proving grounds or training grounds for their egos they could come relatively whole and we could all learn what needs to be learned as opposed to what we need to prove you know yeah well that's so rare like I feel like right now we are in egocentric worlds like everyone has a freaking ego and it's so hard to work with anyone yeah and I think you could say that like our world in 2026 is ruled by boys with daddy issues in some level we have there's a lot of stunted arrested development and hashing out children things that need to be hashed out before one has that much power or influence or why or sway or mouthpiece why I mean I think this is a species level this is I need to know I need to know it's a species level consequence oh right yeah we've we have not attended all of us all of us have you know on some species level failed to attend to the basic essential foundational conditions in which a human being can properly develop a healthy sense yeah self capacity and interrelationship with others and if we fail to develop that we will reap we will be live in the consequences we are living in the we are living I feel like it's a very big issue especially like in the influencer world yeah I feel like it's a very big issue especially like in the influencer world in the creator world I don't know if you're like caught up but pretty much like la la la don't talk to me about it I don't know um I'm not here yeah yeah I see I see but I'd love to learn would you you can tell me I mean you can you be my like spy in that way I'm a spy I am the spy let me tell you a story 10 years ago a senior manager told me that I cannot be taking notes in meetings the way that I do because then I'd look too junior and one must be poised and calm and look like you're listening to have the time to do it and I'm like I don't know I don't know that senior aura but I was new I couldn't keep up with all the lingo and decisions that were happening in a meeting so I had to take notes but now in 2026 we have granola granola is an AI powered notepad that makes your meeting notes useful it captures what happens in your meetings and turns it into clean structured notes with decisions and action items pulled out and made easy to find so instead of typing like my life depended on it only to come out with super chopped notes I now have these clean outlined notes with granola that's all taken care of for me and I now can be that senior person in the room I can dedicate all of my brain cells to be present in my meetings with the person right in front of me and I save so much more time afterwards with organized follow-ups and action items it's just so nice and honestly once you try it on a first meeting it's so hard to go without but you can try it totally for free head to granola.ai office drama that's granola.ai office drama to get your time back go to granola.ai office drama and try it on your next meeting so you uh survived the dot-com crash in the 2000s was kind of crazy because like yahoo was clowned as the poster child and I did ask jerry that question during our interview and taff but how did you emotionally take that time I know this sounds bizarre to say it out loud it sounds disingenuous I don't remember it being emotionally traumatic really because like the retelling is like very traumatic looking but honestly I didn't go into it for the money because I thought we'd fall flat on our face like at like eight out of ten successfully funded startups so I went into it knowing we will try valiantly and I will learn so much from these two people I admire and we're going to learn what we're supposed to learn and then I'm going to go to graduate school like a good Indian girl that was the whole thing you never went back to go no no I lost that intellectual rigor you know like life went on I was like I don't remember reading that that self yeah you gotta have a lot of um self-discipline and rigor to do that so I got off that train probably never to come back to it but you know got my phd on the job true yeah are you exposed to a lot of the youths in this generation of life like this era no yes so the yes is probably a really distorted or specific let's say I don't mean to demean anybody not distorted like that but just specific arbitrary subset because uh serving on the board of trustees at every university for 10 years just means that I would be exposed to many people who are like of college age and that kind of thing of the age of the college I'm an aunt of two amazing nephews and one niece and so I've watched them grow up close yeah that's like my most intimate exposure to youth because I don't have kids of my own and then other than that it's just an observation in life and yeah so that's my youth exposure in your eyes are we just like weak um no no I don't think that actually and I saying that with conviction because I think it's so important to first believe it and then to convey it okay okay okay or are we getting weaker over time well I think you have a choice actually a hard choice to make you have to choose growth over convenience because we there's a lot of convenience or else you will absolutely become weaker over time yeah and we have handed you a world that has prized convenience over all else at any cost yeah and I think that is a awful god I think that is a terrible north star I think that anyone who told you that life was supposed to be easy or that if it's not easy you're doing it wrong I think those are catastrophically bad lessons to learn and I find that we've created the conditions for young people to believe that if things are not convenient if they're uncomfortable that you're doing life wrong which is the opposite I mean it's not just that it's not true but it's actually like life isn't here to be easy it's here to help us grow and growth if there's one is if we're comfortable we're not growing I mean if you're uncomfortable or you might not be growing but if you're comfortable you're not growing it's so true so if growth is of interest is of interest if one would wish to leave this plane more fill in the blank with the word that works for you evolved wise compassionate brave free yeah then growth has to be central right and that means embracing that life is gonna unfold in ways that are unpredictable uncontrollable and that is by design uncomfortable and all of that is an utter gift to help us practice and up our reps at the gym for the values we think we hold dear is that why you decided to leave yahoo after 15 years were you feeling comfortable I don't know if I ever felt comfortable okay okay um because the pace was so great the learning the roller coaster the fire hose name your metaphor yeah after you get a fire never stopped a car well there's always more learn and always more at stake right it felt there was so much at stake I felt so responsible so there was lots of stress about that because I felt that risk I very much internalized that sense of responsibility I left because there had been a few epochs of that internet era yeah to stay in one place for 15 years is actually a rarity and I saw the direction of the industry in total and I came to a clarity that I think I've turned the I think I've given what I'm supposed to give and now the threshold frontier of learning for me is outside okay elsewhere like this is you felt this is for other people that's what it felt like this is now for other people okay so it was like an internal realization very you just woke up one day and you're like I think it's time I I took a year to cement that decision in the sense that my in that like 15th year I the year started with a some events that were difficult uncomfortable. One might even say enraging, you know, like enraging. I mean, isn't this called office drama? Yeah. Oh, you know, the title, you know, oh, you see it right here. Yeah. This is the drama, the inner drama within. I don't even remember the specifics because I've just sort of lobotomized that whole part of me, but I'm sure that there was drama, right? I mean, there was drama. Oh, always. There's humans. Oh, no, I can't even get, I mean, like I would, I'm not even trying to withhold. I just can't even remember so long ago, such a younger person, such a different world. But of course there was always drama. But that's just to say that I remember in that year thinking I'm not going to make a decision after a week or a month from something that I've given and received 15 years, you know, 14 years. Yeah, like your 20s and 30s. So my time horizon was rather generous and patient to say, like, I want to leave well when I leave. I think one thing about being in one place that long in an industry where people just don't stay that long, there's a way where you can say, I just spent 15 years watching people leave. That's true. And so you see a lot of leavers and you see all the ways to leave poorly, you know, like we're so good at orientation and welcoming and like rolling out the red carpet. And we're so bad on both sides at endings. We don't put ceremony and honor and we don't regard those moments with their due consideration on either side. But I think for me at that point, especially from the employee side, I felt, boy, people are just like exit stage left, you know, and I think this was so much more than that. These were people that made sacred commitments to one another. You know, we're trying to do something hard together. And so leaving that should have its due regard to. And I just wanted to leave well. And I spent a lot of time thinking, what would that look like? And it had something to do with the way that relationships would be intact. It had something to do with making sure that the people who were in my specific care, my direct reports, that each had a path that was as good or better as when I was there. And so for me, like one of the things that I've learned is that I've been able to leave well. And I've single greatest points of pride in my life even now is that when I did leave Yahoo, within six months, everyone who had previously reported to me had been promoted, you know, like to vice president or more. And I felt like it's not about the specific title, role, position, whatever. It's just about what that signified in terms of path. Yeah. Yeah. You are surprisingly so humble in every. OK, so you love yourself. I know you have high self-esteem. I think pretty highly of myself. A lot of like being humble and like learning and curiosity and like you've always said it never did it for the money. But like money came into your life early, early or after Yahoo. Well, I was 23 when I joined Yahoo and we went public in a year. Oh, wow. It's dizzying. Isn't that crazy? Like how did people treat you differently or like? Yes. But also that was like so early in life that I'm sure that I don't even know the half of it in terms of how people treat me differently. I think that there's a couple of different ways I'd answer that. Like on the one hand, I want to believe that one can carry oneself with a certain clarity. And again, comes back to like just knowing yourself. Yeah. That you're on the margins more impervious to other people treating you in a way that would be that fickle. On the other hand, money's a big friggin deal in the human psyche. Oh, yeah. I live in L.A. L.A. treats money differently. I've spent a good seven to ten years of my life in my recent life with kindred spirit. I've spent a good seven to ten years of my in a path of deep introspection, interrogation on our own together around money itself, the metaphysics of money. What is money? What's the nature of it? What's the nature of our relationship to it? And we invented this thing. Human beings invented money. It is an ingenious and manmade thing. It is imaginary and it has all this real consequence. We invented it and we have now worldwide allowed in the main our own wills to follow the will of God. And I think that's the money instead of the money following our will. And if we invented it, what did we invent it for? We did not invent it in order to subordinate ourselves to market values. We invented it, I think, you know, to make sure that human will guides the money, that our highest values guide this fungible unit of power. And how would we actually live into that? What would the consciousness shift have to be for us to think about what this agreement is that we've made with this thing we call money? So I spend a lot of my time thinking about this and I would talk to like Jerry and David. Well, this was post-Yahoo, this line of this particular rabbit hole, post-dated Yahoo. But I have a whole beloved group of people with whom we built something we called Jubilee Gift. And out of that comes now Jubilee College. Out of a tributary of that work is a few of us deciding to build a college, which we can get to. But it was steeped in these real deep, again, metaphysical questions about the nature of money. So this is now go back to that time of Yahoo. Yeah, money wasn't the reason to get in. So the minute we had our IPO, it was just enough money that the way I thought about it for myself is, Srinija, you have absolutely no excuse. You didn't have an excuse before. But now by any measure, you have no excuse if you are not letting your will guide your choices. You are not a free person. Like you're not making the most of this life you've been given. So like the responsibility was on me to make sure I was following my deepest will because I have no excuse. That's true. And I guess I want to just understate, I mean, overstate, like underscore that that was true before. Yeah. It's just that like now it's like everybody knows it. You don't have an excuse. I feel you. And so the next 14 years of Yahoo were a very, very considered choice that this is my will because this is where my learning is. This is where I'm meant to be. This is where my, yeah, this is where I'm supposed to be. You're so grounded. I don't know. I mean, I have been really lucky to have some sense of existential okayness that I can give to that freakishly functional family, you know? Very good. Okay. Let's move on from that to SFJazz. How did that happen? What was that like? You know, you love jazz from the beginning of time. I did since I was a kid. So you're like, okay, you left Yahoo. You like did your thing and thought about, oh, what should I do with my life? And I had to follow my will. And then that will brought you to SFJazz and Louv. Well, SFJazz was very contemporaneous with Yahoo. So. Oh, at the age of the same time. So much of my time on that board overlapped with my time at Yahoo. Yeah. And what happened was at Yahoo, one of our earliest corporate sponsors, like one of the earliest marketing kind of dollars and pretty, you know, wasn't huge. We didn't have money that we gave was like for SFJazz. And so I don't know who was responsible for that choice, but that meant that like early on, there were some shows in the city that we got a couple of tickets to like the company. And then the people in the office just knew that I was a fan. So I went to a few shows because of Yahoo. You know what I mean? So then that just introduced me to the fact of SFJazz, that they exist. And I was a lifelong jazz fan. I grew up in Lawrence, Kansas, you know, right near Kansas City. And there's such a jazz tradition. And for so many reasons, jazz had been something I loved. But this was an organization that was new to me. And so then I just was a fan. I really just started going to shows. And then I gave a little money. And it wasn't a lot of money, just like a little money. But I guess their development director at the time was like, who just sends a check without being asked? You know, like, and I didn't know that. I was like, you'd send a check to things that you value. You're a patron of the arts. So he was like, let's have coffee. You know, like, let's have, let's, let's talk before the next show. And I didn't, I didn't understand this world. I'm like, in my 20s. I don't know this stuff. I just like, okay, I guess. That's so baller, walking to SFJazz. Here's a check because I love you guys. And they're like, wait, do we need to do something? And so, so I think they're like, who's this lady? And how come she's not on our radar? And she just gave us money without being asked. So then we had coffee, you know, and then that led to like, would you be interested in joining this board? And all of that seems so crazy to me. Like, I don't have any credentials or experience specific to this. Didn't you play like the saxophone growing up? What do you mean you don't have credentials? But to be on a nonprofit board, it's not. Play piano. You took vocal lessons. You played the saxophone. All that. You did your research, Chloe. All that. Yeah, yeah, yeah. You want to sing a bar? And you still aren't ready to be on a nonprofit board, right? Yeah. So, so I kind of learned on the job, but I thought, well, I am interested actually in the questions of governance and mission for this because I grew up in Lawrence, Kansas and our public schools had vibrant arts programs. Like I was a beneficiary of that. And we had strong music classes and band and chorale and all this stuff, right? And theater. And then I came to Palo Alto, which was the seemingly very affluent community and the arts and the public schools seemed impoverished by comparison. That's very strange. I was like, what happened? And how did people make this choice? Yeah. So I was actually really curious as if jazz has an educational mission and we're in the middle schools in San Francisco, et cetera. And I was like, well, so it was sort of a way to learn, right? But then what it equally was, was this vehicle to learn, not just about governance, about nonprofits, about all this stuff. About public education. But about these questions of values and where we put that value and how that happens. And it started a set of questions in this twin parallel life of like one foot at Yahoo and one foot in SF Jazz of like when the 2008 financial crisis loomed large and Lehman Brothers and all that stuff. Yahoo was like, you couldn't see Yahoo in any print media or any media with without words like suffering, struggling, beleaguered, once lofty internet pioneer around it. Bro. But we were consistently profitable quarter in and quarter out since like, I think our third quarter in existence. Yo, media is evil. That's what I'm saying. Media is evil. So this started getting my head turning about what is a dog and what is suffering and struggling in capitalism if a company that has at that point like $1.2 billion of cash flow a year, meaning $100 million. of cash flow every month. That's just free cash. That's just a good model. And people are bullying you. And they're saying that's a dog. And I was like, so what does that mean? What are our expectations if this is a dog, if we can't reward this, if we don't think that's good enough? And we don't think it's good enough because there is a comparator that's further up and to the right faster. And that got me to this kindergarten understanding of how capitalism necessitates this grow or die scarcity mentality, where if you're not going faster than the next one, you're a dog. And it's like, but the world's better off with all of these things. Why would we make some arbitrary, why would we just cut the heads off of all this valuable stuff, consistently valuable stuff, to go faster, farther, quote unquote, right? And to what end, like at what cost and at whose expense? So those are the sorts of questions that started to germinate in that time, because I I'm not an MBA, but I can look at that balance sheet. And I'm like, that doesn't look like a dog to me. That's enough. But there's this narrative in the world. And there's consequence to that narrative, right? Do you have a PR team at the time? Personally or the company? The company? The only PR team I've ever had is the company. You know, they always had a PR team and I had a PR person. Yeah, I guess it'd be like the internal PR team versus the media. Yeah, no. No, I've never had a PR team. Because that's crazy. That's like someone else writing your narrative to be like, you suck. But I'm like, wait, what? Yeah. We have enough, dude. We have more than enough. Like, why are you trying to compare us? That's where I think I began to develop a very rudimentary foundational understanding of global capitalism and its consequences and the scarcity mentality that it doesn't just cause, but it necessitates, it requires, it requires. What effect does that have on us and life on Earth, you know? How does that affect the music education part for SFJazz? So I was in this like dual consciousness, like with SFJazz and Yahoo. And I was like, well, so over here, we're a dog. But nobody would ever say, and we failed to sell to Microsoft for $50 billion or whatever it is. And it's like, but the world wouldn't be better with Yahoo, Microsoft being one thing. The world's better off with Yahoo and Microsoft. And over here, nobody would ever say that, you know what, Sonny Rollins should buy Ornette Coleman. That's not a thing. Like in the world of the arts. We want both. There is something indivisible, unquantifiable, infinitely valuable about Sonny Rollins and about Ornette Coleman. And you couldn't put them in a funnel and derive some formula that says these should merge. And so I really started to wonder about these questions around art, commerce, you know, music, money. Why do the values that the arts clearly inspire in us, we don't sit there and say Ornette Coleman should be bought by Sonny Rollins. Since we know that, there's something about the arts, which is also human-made technology. That's right. That is your takeaway. The most potent technology. Henry Threadgill is a phenomenal contemporary jazz leader, composer, improviser, fan leader. And he says, art makes us behave better. In the presence of art, we behave better. We're better people because of art. And it's hard to refute that. It's hard to refute that. So if we have a technology that makes us better. Why not invest in it? Why wouldn't that guide our markets instead of the markets guiding our culture, our arts? It's so basic to me. Is that why you decided to start Louvre? It's a lot. It has everything to do with that. I met a boy. A boy. Who was a lifelong composer, improviser, just brave, original thinker, trombone player. And I met him through SF Jazz. He was a part of the SF Jazz Collective as we launched this great new project. And we just hit it off. And from different life paths, we had really shared questions and curiosities about the world and about these questions about money and art, commerce and culture. Why wouldn't this guide that, not the other way around? And so Louvre actually just very organically became our collaboration. It's a collaborative experiment demonstration in the world. Like, what would it look like to us? How could we try to just make something, just try to manifest something that shows what it would be like if the artistic values guided the money instead of the market values guiding the art? And to this day, 20 years later, it's still this big experiment unfolding that we keep on working on. Manifest as a music studio and a kind of a black box arts space, retail cafe. But it's this sort of hybrid bricks and mortar. And I think it's really cool that we have these two spots in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, USA, where we can hopefully. Where artists can come create and showcase. Yes, and audiences can see kind of from soup to nuts what is farm-to-table music. Yeah, farm-to-table music. Does that mean you're a Spotify hater? Short answer, yes. Yeah, what are your thoughts? There's a way where it's like, where do you begin? In terms of, like, Spotify is just sort of one expression of what's been, to me, going wrong, where the thing we value most, we're relegating to the byproduct of the thing we're putting the value, the money into. And so if the cart's going to carry the horse, the consequences will come. If, like, if we're going to create with these powerful and amazing technologies that we've just invented, if we're going to create a data trading platformer. Yeah, what do you want to call that? What is that? The web thing. Yeah. And then music, like, we get some music out of it. It's just, it's backwards, right? There's going to be so many unintended consequences. We actually have to value the thing. The thing, yes. For Lou, like, how did people make money, though, for the artists? We're still figuring out how to make more money than we spend as an enterprise. Oh, rough. That's a real question. Yeah, why is it so hard for art to make money? Because capitalism wants to find so-called efficiencies so that what comes out is greater than what was put in. But I think it's, like, Newton's second law, one of those, says there's, like, conservation of energy and, like. So this is kind of a myth to begin with. That thing that you think you're getting more than you put in is coming at some cost and expense. And the question is, at what cost and at whose expense? We don't like to take account of those two questions. Art is whole. So spicy. So if this thing, like, there's a cost to create the art. Yes. And then you reap the revenue, the profits or whatever. Some people are arguing that why don't you just minimize expenses using AI? What's your take on Suno? I mean, to be honest, like, so I don't even know how to enter that question. Okay, okay. Because if you're asking the question, then you must have absolutely zero related interest as I do in art. Because to me, the value and miracle of art is that a human created this. True. That there is a process. That there is a process of imagination, sometimes disturbance, and always some incredible gift and craft in whatever medium we're dealing with that manifests the thing we call art. So whether it's a painting or a composition musically or a dance or whatever the medium is, if it ends up being something we call art, to me, that means it's the end result of a person expressing the divinity in themselves. Yes. So AI art is. You're anti-AI art. It might have a purpose, meaning there could be reasons to get a manufactured artifact that's a composition or a visual image or whatever. Like, I could be a way better storyteller than I can do on my personal shield if I can employ AI to make some images. Like, if I can say, make it look like this, then it might help my storytelling. But that's not. The art might be the imagination that synthesizes this curation. But the point isn't that that end product visual image is the miracle to me and the value of art is that it has gone through this human crucible. True. Agree. Agree. You're pro-AI, you're pro-art, but art is fundamentally a human process. I'm pro-AI and I'm pro-art in the sense that these are both things humans have made up. Without us, they don't exist. Now we can talk about down the line with agents and they're making their own reality, but the primordial source, like we had to make this stuff up. Yeah. So, these are all things that are man-made. And as a result, they are expressions of our own consciousness. And what we do with them, what we do with the power. Like, the power of art's been used in awful ways too, right? Like, it can be used in sort of like propagandistic or mind control ways. It can be used. It's not only. It really is about the consciousness wielding it. But it has these qualities, as Henry Threadgill says about it, tends to make us behave better. Yeah. So, technology so far does not have that quality. I would not say that it helps us behave better because it is so entangled with money. And convenience and over-optimization. These very seductive, short-term, individualistic, secular things. Interesting. Yeah. So, it is up to us to sacredize it. It is up to us to sacredize money. It is up to us to sacredize technology. And art, to me, comes with more intrinsic built-in sacredization. Oh, yeah. Is that what you mean by when you said the arts is one of the most potent, the most potent technologies that humans have come up with to show us our shared humanity? Exactly. Okay. It's number one. It's our number one tech. Do your research, Chloe. It's the number one tech. Yeah. That's exactly what I mean. It sounds like because art forces you to go through the process and the grit and the story and, like, that is the point of it. It's kind of like you go to the gym to do the hard work. You don't go to the gym to, like, do one time and leave. If an AI can do your reps, but your body is still the same, your health is still the same. Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's like, what? That doesn't really make sense. The whole point was to do this. Yeah. But the whole point of technology is to do this. technology is actually the opposite, which is taking you out, which is a convenience factor. But that is a fallacy of our making. We have made the point of technology convenience. That was a terrible choice in North Star to follow because it goes back to this thing about growth. If convenience is our North Star, we are not growing. We are actually rewarding not growth. We're rewarding stunted, arrested development. I think like now there are technologies and apps that force you to go back to the do more work path. Like, okay, I think, wasn't that, you sent me like an app, like Chris on the side sent me an app where it would force you to write and then you're locked out and you can't go back to revise your thing. I mean, I love this line of thinking because I just think we need imagination. I don't know if that's like the thing, but we absolutely need imagination and lots and lots and lots and lots and lots of experiments for what would technology look like if we chose to design it and employ it to make us more human and better humans. And we'd have to think very deeply about what we want it to mean to be human. But Sharnija, what about the shareholders? Exactly. You just made my point. What about shareholder value? On my deathbed. I just don't think I give a fuck. I'm pretty sure that no one on their deathbed. I mean, I do often say like no one on their deathbed said, honey, remember that day when everything was so convenient? And I don't think I'm going to say, honey, remember that day we made so much for our shareholders. We could be asking that, but I guess we're not. You said I didn't even think about technology as like a way to not dehumanize us, but like we stray farther and farther from God's light because it's making it too convenient and we're over-optimizing for growth and things are being easy. And you're like, at what point have we gone too far? Yeah. Is it what we really want? We're not good at knowing what we really want with a little bit of reflection. Yeah. Like not even five minutes of reflection. Anyone I've said that to agrees that on their deathbed, they're not going to remember the most convenient day. And yet, look how much we prize convenience. Look how far we'll go for that Amazon Prime account or look how much of our local businesses. Do you have Amazon Prime? I don't. I know. Oh, she backs up. She backs up. And it's like the most micro protest of all, right? No, you're protesting out here. I totally acknowledge that it's a miniature micro protest, but it's like one place of sovereignty where I can say, well, I'm going to do it. I can say, well, I cannot do that, you know, because I can actually go to the store and get a thing if I actually need it in an hour. I don't need the potato peeler delivered to my door in an hour. I can get the potato peeler if it's that urgent that I get that or I wait. Well, okay. So are you in all these like ethics conversations about AI and you're like battling the people who are like, I think we can be superhuman with this and become the new gods. And then you're like, wait, but we can't let AI destroy our humanity. I'm definitely not in all the AI ethics conversations. There's a lot of AI ethics conversations. There's a lot going on. There's a lot of that going on. I am in a lot of conversations that have that bent and I relish them. I mean, I'm really glad to be in them. I think there's some really basic, not expensive, but deeply difficult questions that we just don't have a lot of practice and desire to tend to. Like, what do we want it to mean to be human? What do we most value about being human? And I think that's a really good question. I think that's a really good question. And so I think there is a subset of unusual people who are ruling much of industry in AI that in the main, in the main, definitely exceptions, but in the main, I don't think they love being human the way I love being human. I don't know if they want to avoid the messy, irrational, inconvenient, inefficient bits of being human. To me, you miss everything. You miss everything. You miss the invaluable and awesome and beautiful and mysterious and loving and gracious and wondrous about being human because love and wonder and awe and grace aren't convenient. They're not efficient. They're not. And they're awesome. I mean, they're awesome. They're the best reason to be here on a planet, you know, as a human being. So I have to say like, well, have you ever loved? Have you ever been loved? Have you ever been forgiven? Have you ever forgiven? Because if you have, then take five minutes to read it. And if you have, then take five minutes to read it. And if you have, then take five minutes to remember like how alive that makes you feel. And wouldn't you want that for yourself and your fellow people? Or do you really want to kind of like just squeeze out those messy bits to get to some what? Controllable, predictable, freaking unfathomably boring existence so that what? We drive more what? Shareholder value? I think money so they can buy houses and then eventually have an existential crisis. So it's absurd on its face. And then they go on their ayahuasca trips. It seems like the circle, so it's absurd on its face, right? I mean, it doesn't take long and it doesn't even take a deep scholarship to get to this conclusion. It's absurd on its face, but we just need to take a minute and reflect together. And for those of us who really love being human, then let's imagine design and deploy technologies and let's imagine monetary systems that help us be more human, be more who we wish to be. This is the time. I don't think it's an accident that this so-called polycrime is going to happen. I don't think it's an accident that this so-called meta-crisis is occurring at the same time that AI is emerging, that all the crypto, the Bitcoin and cryptocurrency possibilities. Because today, cryptocurrency is just a way bigger version of the same gambling casino that the markets have become. But that's just an impoverishment imagination, or it's a greed, or it's a, you know, chase the thing while we can. But what it really represents is the possibility to imagine entirely new ways of doing things. And I think it's a great way to imagine entirely new ways of doing things. to make, literally make issue money. What are the systems and the rules that govern our monetary reality? And we should experiment with all kinds of things because there are all kinds of ways that we could do that that would enhance our ability to be more wise, loving, compassionate, interdependent. How do we get the people who love being human to win versus the people who love the shareholder values? Yeah. So, I mean, for me, that's so above my pay grade. I have absolutely no idea how we make sure that we win. But I just, I just know that I get to be here. I get to be here now in 2026 on planet Earth, and it might be of consequence. And that's exhilarating. Like, that's exhilarating. I don't know how to make sure we win. You're so stoked on life. I am. I think. Are you an optimist? Is that? I often say I'm not optimistic, but I'm hopeful. But you're so stoked. Because I do see the evidence. I see the overwhelming weight of evidence that's not on our side. Human history is horror. I mean, we do terrible things to one another, and we have been. And it weighs heavily on me. But the future is redeemable. Like, that is always here for us. And we can learn. And we are now in the place of having co-created the largest mirror in the history of time and space to look back on us, which is AI, to see at current course and speed, people. Like, if you keep going in your rational, linear, analytical, linguistically mediated logic circuits, and that's all you got, this is where that goes. How you like that? You know? Like, is anything missing from this picture? And there's so much missing that let's use that for what it's good at. And we don't need to do that stuff so much anymore. We need to develop our critical thinking skills so we know how to wield that. But how do we now see that it's our time to grow into all the capacities and ways of knowing and potentials that that thing isn't and won't be? And we don't need it to be because that comes, we generate that, you know? What human skill do you think is becoming way more valuable every year that we can't lose it to the technology? Yeah, imagination. Okay, imagination. Creativity, curiosity, all three of those are very kindred. And they really go hand in hand for me that I absolutely believe that that is distinctly human. It comes from an embodied, experienced, and it comes from some mysterious co-evolution of stuff and bits and cosmic whatever that made me here living on Earth, co-evolved for billions of years with this planet, you know? There's something there that makes for a capacity of creative, like, creativity. I hear you. I want to talk about the education part of your journey, because you are so Libra. Like, being on the board of trustees is such a Libra thing. Being an ASB student, body president, is, like, so Libra. You were elected onto the board of trustees at Stanford, started your five-year term, and then in 2021, you became vice chair. And then you joined the advisory council. What do you do? Like, what is that? I was on Stanford's board for 10 years. It was two five-year terms. And then I'm not sure the advisory council, but I, for example, I'm- Vice chair of the Stanford HAI Advisory Council. Oh, I see. Yes, I am also nominally a vice chair of the HAI Advisory Council. That is exactly right. HAI is a human-centered AI, which is the The advisory council is a group of volunteers. Beautiful thing. I mean, Stanford is amazing at galvanizing the power of volunteers. And at every corner of the university, there is volunteer power going on. So this is no exception. And HAI has a really amazing advisory council, and I participate in that group. Just like the board of trustees is a voluntary position, but yes, we were elected in. What a great perch and vantage point from which to learn a lot, from which to understand the state of play. If it's on the board of trustees, it's kind of like a perch of higher ed from within one primary place delivering higher ed. And if it's high, It's really seeing kind of the state of play in the industry and in the academy. It's just a great vantage point. And from that, I can really think about. So what's working, what's not working in a way that I believe is beneficial or, you know, true to my values and just a great way to learn. What do you think, like, wasn't working? Like, what was your role in it to be like, OK, the Srinija opinion is this? There's a lot that's working. And I benefited greatly personally from my education and specifically my Stanford education. It was an all-you-can-eat buffet of ideas and information and different kinds of thinking and people and paths. But I was there at a different time. The world was different. The university was different. And it is not immune. Let's put it that way. That place is not immune. And in some ways, it's on the leading edge of certain trends that are getting more individualistic, more secular. More elitist. Yeah, I don't even I've kind of lost track of what that term is anymore because I don't want to shy away. I don't want to shy away from striving for whatever excellence is, how you define it. But if it's exclusionary, if it's if it's scarcity based, if it enforces and reinforces and necessitates scarcity thinking, yeah, that's problematic. But if it's about setting and holding to standards and by doing that inspiring high bar, I'm all for that, you know, so I kind of lose track of what it even means anymore. But I'm interested in how we. Can reimagine education in this now 21st century to start with the premise that there is more to the so-called reality than the five senses can perceive, that there is that this thing about sacred and mystery and unknowable is real, that it's undeniable, that that it's not just about the pursuit of knowledge, but it's about being in relationship to the unknowable. Yeah. And that if we can start there, then we can appreciate the need and the urgency and the opportunity to cultivate capacities like intuition. And like humility and like compassion that aren't in the head. They're not in the analytical, rational, either or mind. They're in the generative, non-zero sum, both and we call it Jubilee College heart cognition. Oh, heart cognition. I love that. And it's time for the heart to meet the mind and to stop being the servant to it, you know, or to stop being the second act. Or to stop being second place. Heart is first. Absolutely. Meaning it's so co-evolved to have so much more wisdom. I mean, wisdom and compassion don't come from the mind. We don't think our way to peace after war. It's not an intellectual abstracted process. It is a embodied, graceful, loving process. And those are hard, hard, hard things. Those aren't soft things. You've already had. You've already had 10 years working with Stanford. Yeah. Why start Jubilee College versus do something with Stanford? Jubilee College is a petri dish experiment and dream by some of us kindred spirits that somehow organically came together from different walks of life and different lived experiences. We found ourselves in the same moment sharing the same questions and wishes. Like, what if we could have an educational environment, a learning environment that started with the premise that there's more to this reality than the material? Than like the empirical material measurable. And the academy writ large and Stanford within it is not, has gotten to be quite like the post-enlightenment thinking that gave rise to the modern university. That was a big cleaving off from the sins and abuses of the church. And reason was lifted up as the highest human sort of capacity. And it's a beautiful human capacity. The mind is beautiful. I love my mind, you know. But it's not our only capacity. And by itself, it's very dangerous. By itself, it's impoverished. Over these hundreds of years, I feel that there have been too many forces in the academy that have gone towards more individualism and more secularism. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And so that it makes it harder in that environment to start with just the shared agreement and premise that there is more than this material reality. And if there is, then how can we create a learning environment that equally emphasizes the importance of learning? And I think that's a really important part of not just study, yes, love it, rigorous critical thinking, but alongside rigorous liberal arts study is work. Work with our hands, get out of the head and into just being accountable and interdependent with one another. What does that feel like in your body and in, you know, in a community? There's more like me plus you is more than one plus one. And then the contemplative practice. How can we take inner life as seriously as outer life? To me, this is a huge one. Um, I grew up. In a Hindu household in Lawrence, Kansas in the seventies, right? Like this was such a stark contrast of the world inside the house and the world outside the house. And it got me so curious about questions of my most basic nature and what is consciousness and is there a God and what is it and is it in me or out of me and, you know, all this stuff. And so I think that we have societally speaking, modern Western culture has continued to put more and more and more weight and emphasis on the outer life. And it's kind of like putting an exoskeleton on a mammoth. It's like, you can't be that big and have an exoskeleton because you'll crush under the weight of your exoskeleton. It's like the outer life is crushing our inner, like our real selves. How do we build the endoskeleton of our inner life to hold up to the outer? Yeah. Right. So how do you describe what Jubilee College will be? We call it a college of water and fire because quite literally we've situated ourselves at the headwaters of the Sacramento rivers, at the base of Mount Chapel. And Mount Shasta is known globally for its like crystalline pure water that comes out of these underground lava tubes where the water has been like being purified for 50 to 100 years. Crazy, crazy location. Like world's greatest Brita filter, right? And it comes out just vital, like right out of these natural springs. So there's this literal like college of water. How can we situate ourselves here and understand, as my colleague Michelle would say, the sacred web of life that makes this ecology vital? Yeah. What is a human being's highest role in serving this web of life? And the Winnemem Wintu are the unrecognized tribe that have been holding down this region in ceremony for thousands of years. And they are a university unto themselves in terms of these questions of this sacred ecology. So that's been a key. The son of their chief is one of our co-founders. We're very serious about learning with and from this university unto themselves so that if we ground ourselves in the consciousness of what is the human being's highest purpose in serving life here, then from that ground of consciousness, we're going to be able to find out what it is that we're going to be able to do. And that's what we're going to be able to do. The college of fire, which is the Promethean fire of our time, the exponential tech, the zeroes and ones, AI, biotech, these superpowers, godlike powers that we have created. How can we, from a place of knowing our deepest purpose in serving life, wield these superpowers so they work for us and not against us? And that means drawing on all of our ways of knowing, not just the intellect, to bring the wisdom, the compassion, the love that's required to keep these things in. That's a concept. That's, that's, that's fire. That's, that's awesome. And it's a two-year program. So we want to have a first cohort of 28 students in 2028. And so we are fast and furious right now, readying everything to make way for that. We've been doing a lot of work in these prior years of laying the ground, building the foundation, the actual building and land on which this work will sit. We imagine that that first cohort will comprise students from 18 to 24 years old. Like that's sort of the age range we're thinking about. What's the tuition? It's free. This has all been philanthropically supported. And the really interesting model for this college is that we have on our own premises and part of our kind of umbrella, 501c3, is a profitable enterprise. This Jubilee Railroad Wilderness Lodge, it's a multi-decades long enterprise that we've bought, inherited, that is like railroad car themed rooms. Like you stay in these cabooses, like motel, hotel. And the dining car is the restaurant and then there's campground and RV park. So that's the sort of hospitality enterprise. The proceeds from that enterprise will fund the college in perpetuity. So right now we've like raised the money to get to this point and we'll be raising a little more to get to the point of that expansion, right, to complete the expansion to where it has its own kind of flywheel of sustainability. Its reality is fueled by its ability to serve its community. That's awesome. I wanted to ask a question not related to this, but some miscellaneous. But like, I remember at the TAF when we were recording for TAF and we were chit-chatting after the interview and we like touched upon a lot of things, like first of all. And I said something impertinent. I think you were like, don't even get me started on lean-in culture. And I was like, whoa, I want to hear about that. What did you mean by that? What do you have to say? Oh, I mean, I think that it's sad to me. So when this became a big deal and when everyone knew what the term lean-in meant and what they sort of, there were circles and groups and all this stuff. I mean, I know it's terrible, like trying to be a less judgmental human being. Yeah, it's okay. We're trying to judge here. It's all trauma. And I think it's emblematic of an impoverished imagination. If our great innovation is that to help women, that half of us should literally lean in and affirm the status quo, like actually that's the best our imagination has to bring is, How about if half of us continue to further bolster and support the very conditions that are creating the malaise that we're all under. Like, is this system that you're leaning into, this values hierarchy of shareholder value over human value, like literally money's on the top of, it's in the numerator and lives are on the denominator, like revenue per user, revenue per employee. These are the metrics that every, that is driving everybody. And it is not, it is not our optimized revenue per user. It's not optimized revenue per employee. It is maximized. That is to a kindergartner with basic math, self-terminating. So let's not lean into a values hierarchy that is making us all busier, all sicker, all less connected, all more individualistic, you know, like all less connected to like the source of life itself. Let us actually have half of us remember that we have innate inborn intuition about what actually creates the conditions for thriving life. You're basically changed the system. Absolutely. But absolutely. I mean, I'm just really bored and uninterested in propping up a system that continues to create these outcomes in bigger scale. I'm profoundly interested in going to root root radical causes of we know, and women in particular know what creates the conditions conducive to life. So let's not lean into a values hierarchy that is making us all so lean in seems awfully impoverished and strange and reimagine and insist and resist and manifest something, make a better party. You know, that's, that's what I'm interested in. Make a better party. Oh, I like that. That's crazy. So now you're busy with building the college, which is there's a lot of physical parts and sounds like a lot of work. And you're busy with being a new fiance. Congratulations. Are you? Are you like really busy these days? Is it where you're planning? Like, where are you in life right now? Yeah. What does 2026 look like for you? So it's true. Like my energy, attention, care, thought, investment of whatever goes into yes, this music work in New York with Louv and this college work in near Mount Shasta. But if I'm being truly candid, uncomfortably honest, I would say that the vast majority of my attention right now is going to trying to figure out what's going on in my life. And I think that's a really good figure out how to be a better partner, how to be a better person, how to be someone worthy of being in a marriage. What do you, why do you say, why do you say it like that? Like be someone worthy of being in a marriage. That's a fair question, Chloe. You're very wise. That assumes a lot about you. Yeah. Because I think that marriage is such a unreasonable and awesome and sacred agreement. And I think that for two people to make that kind of commitment to stick it out alongside with and for each other, despite all of the trials and tribulations, definite trials and tribulations, and also just unknowables. It's like, no one has to do this. Nobody has to do this. You know, I think it's amazing that any of us would. And I think I just take that very seriously. And I feel very blessed that someone would make that choice with me. And I want to honor that. And I that's a whole set of skills, capacities, right, of practice. That for someone who has had a pretty fiercely independent, wonderful life with amazing, loving partners, you know, like each of whom made me more me and each of whom I couldn't be here without, you know, it's sort of astonishing that in one's fifties, the universe can surprise us about that. Yeah. That's beautiful. And it's awe-inspiring and it's really humbling and it's mildly scary. And so I will, if I'm really honest, then I would say that like more attention goes to that than anything else right this very minute. That's awesome. That's what love's about. Like life's about, love's about. I mean, I'm so happy for you. You're so cute. You're giddy. You're giddy. I'm a happy gal. I'm, I'm a lover girl. I am. Are you like scared of commitment in general? No, on the contrary. I'm good at commitment actually. No, I'm good at it. Okay. Because I'm so interested in learning. And I really do believe that we follow our conviction and then it tells us what we need to know or what we need to learn, how we can then follow the next, you know? So no, I'm actually really good at commitment. Okay. You know, when I first joined Yahoo, I to not pull my fair share. I didn't want, you know, so part of it is like, okay, I got to come strong. Yeah, you do. The stakes are high. And yeah, like now it's not just me, you know? I mean, yeah. Yeah. How did your friends react when you're, when you told them the news? I think it was like slight bewilderment, total astonishment, and then certainly joy and jubilation. So there was like an evolving. But it's like, wait, who are you? And what have you done with Srinija? And I think one of my favorites was my friend who works in AI said, see, AI could never have predicted this. And I think that's exactly, that's exactly why it's great to be human. We can surprise ourselves. So I don't know, because both of us are blessedly interested in being married and neither of us are really about the wedding. Like the event is not the thing. We're in our fifties and that's not the thing. It's not not a thing. Yeah. We want to give honor. Yeah. Yeah. But I don't know. One of us is going to have to figure out how to like be a planner or something. Are you not a planner? I mean, when I really am motivated, for something to happen, I suppose I can get it together. But no, I actually am probably unhealthily satisfied staying in imagination. Like in theory, I can live there for a really long time. I can stay in the like abstract esoteric realm of thoughts and values and principles and never necessarily fully grounded in like practical, tactical, material lived experience. So I've always been in collaborative groups. Where there are like operators, you know, like directors of operation, like program managers, like people who just don't want to do shit. Yeah. That's amazing to me. And I think the combination, you know, is it's really generative. So no, I actually I mean, I can plan stuff, but I could get through life, you know, but like possibility that Emily Dickinson poem dwell in possibility is my favorite. It's possibility is always yet unmanifest. And I actually could be there for an unnaturally long time. Maybe it's a super power. Maybe. I mean, it has its gifts. It has its virtues. It definitely does. Like I'm very I'm relatively very comfortable with uncertainty, relatively speaking. It's why I love improvisation and improvisers. It's why I think we have everything to learn at this moment on the planet as a species from those who they don't just tolerate uncertainty. They actually use it as their currency and medium and make beauty. Oh, I love that about improv. I think that's the calling of our time. You're doing a lot of things for the plot right now. How do we all live into becoming improvisers, not leaders? That's so over. That's so past. That's so hierarchical, strategic. Be an improviser. Yeah. But that's serious. That's not cavalier and that's not winging it. Being a real improviser of the highest craft is hard, severe, rigorous initiation preparation of this self. Yeah. This soul like so that I know what my gifts are to give and I can show up ready to say, how do I do this in? Interdependence with you. How in the college we often say, who do I need to be so you can be who you're meant to be? And that's the question at the heart of our existence on a planet interdependently. And it's the question that improvisers just like, they got it. They got it in the bag. Yeah. Yeah. I wish I did more of that growing up. I'll continue. It's never too late. Didn't someone wise just told me it's never too late. It's never too late. That's true. Before I said that about anime, you said it's not too late. It's not too late to watch anime. Yeah. Remember that? I feel like you have a very intellectual academic way of thinking about philosophy. I know. I'm sorry. But I'm also in the practical, like a operator, content creator, max capitalism world, but trying to keep the artistry in it because so many people do it just for the clout and for the follows. And just to say, I want to grow for the sake of growing, like follow me, please follow, follow, follow, follow, follow, follow. And it becomes like this disgusting world of content, like over content, like abusive content. And I'll also just emphasize how much that is. Yeah. And I'll also just the building up of outer life, meaning like think about that exoskeleton as opposed to the endoskeleton, like as opposed to the cultivating of an inner life and what you came in with and what you're going to leave with is that inner life. And I'm getting really just bored of the space. I'm like, no one's doing anything for to be like iconic and legendary and imaginative and creative. They're just doing it to feed the algorithm. And everyone is speaking the same way and no one's original. And like, it's just like, I don't know. I don't know. I don't know. I don't know. It's just so boring here. And the practical part of me is like, I have to know how the game works. Yeah. I'll play the game. It's good to know the dark arts. Know the dark arts. Yes. But then the creative side is like, why am I in this field if I'm not going to be a creative person? Like, that's so silly. Like, why are we playing by the rules? And even in podcasting, people want me to be whoever the big podcasters are. And I'm just like, I don't want to be them. Right. But I want to study them to understand the rules that they worked with to like grow. But I don't have to be them. I don't want to be a second them. Absolutely. Yeah. I want to be different. I don't want to do that. And I just couldn't affirm that more. And on two fronts. So on one front, I would just say as somebody with more gray hair, with gray hair. you've none i would just say one in terms of outer life and how this is going to manifest in the world i have the deep conviction but i can't give you any guarantees life doesn't work that way i have a deep conviction that following that inner knowing which is what you're doing against all empirical evidence against everyone else's wishes and pressures against all the blah blah blah that is its own most potent it's like a knife cutting through butter it's like you're it's like if you do that it's an incisive way to get to attention that no plan could have achieved because everyone else is chasing the same thing in the same way and you're like I'm just piercing through that from this whole other place so one is I think that creativity originality like in the insistence of being you there's a reason you're you you're not me you're not any of those other people you're you and if you figure that out even a little bit it has a penetrative quality in terms of like attention I think that's one or potency let's say right I think that's one and then the second part I'd say is even if that's wrong which I really deeply don't believe it's wrong even if it turns out it doesn't work out this time around or in this life or before you know or in a way that you can fully measure which way would you rather live you like all you've got is you're gonna get up in the morning and you're gonna do stuff and you're gonna go to sleep at night and which would you which which is a better party and there's just no contest the alternative is so not an alternative whose will is guiding it you know so practice being you because worst case you get to die more you I'm like really excited about this time of life but yeah it's a little lonely to be in this headspace just a little bit just a little bit that that's that's pretty much it I'm like no why do you know Japanese anime yeah anime is yeah well I think that loneliness thing is a real and I can just tell you with more gray hair that there really are kindred spirits and whatever age they are find them and nourish those relationships because those are lifelines those are lifelines they're just islands of sanity islands of coherence in you know terribly destabilized and destabilizing you know reality right now and I think it's a crucible to forge some stronger wills for those of us you know your mission if you choose to accept it before we wrap for better for worse we must conduct what we call a performance review those days are over no it's back it's back legally does not affect your compensation your title or follower account but it does affect your aura which is like kind of important as a human in 2026 would you rather be right or promoted oh right I knew it Libra would you rather ship something mid or not ship at all okay I'm gonna say mid it's just rapid fire I gotta say mid because I am guilty of perfectionism guilty and I want to be the person that like go and then see and learn and improve and and don't let fear be your truce is cereal soup no what no and it's awesome I have I have a Seinfeld cupboard of cereal I have I still live on cereal which cereal all the cereal you have all of them you love the cereals I mean they're pretty good not gonna lie they're really good does a straw have one hole or two I guess I'm gonna go with two really yeah that's hard pass okay are you living with main character energy today or are you in your NPC era oh heck a main character all day well meetings before 9am human rights violation or personal problem oh human rights violation yeah that's right what the hell all of us aren't morning people you're not a morning person I thought you would be until very recently in life like really recently in life like single digit years or months like okay I kept thinking maybe the biology would kick in and I would become a morning person because that's what responsible people are and I am a glutton for sleep I get more sleep than most people I know including infants I love sleep I really love it I love sleep and I need sleep and but I love it I think that magical things happen with and from and in sleep and I love where the imagination goes in sleep I love knowing that that's still the imagination that I'm dealing with right now so it has more to give you know I can't say that for any meaningful part of my life I was a morning person I agree and I've been a night owl like a lot of my life it was a night owl heck yeah let's go night owls out of 100% for a promotion what percentage of skill and what percentage of visibility out of 100% of my life I've been a promotion whoa whoa I hope it's like 75 25 skill like hope she says she said hope meaning that's the world I want to live in and that's what I tried to create a like if you can't be visible at all then what's the point like part of life is to share and that means manifesting visibility yeah if the tree's falling in the woods and no one's there to hear it does it you know blah blah blah but I hope I'm yeah I managed I got to be a manager of many many people and I hope that yeah I certainly would hope that intrinsic real hard one skill skill and gift was is Gen Z cooked or trainable in the workplace it's not about Gen Z it's about the workplace okay okay so Gen Z is trainable not cooked is the workplace redeemable to be a training grounds or is it a cooking pot which one is it can it be a training ground I think Gen Z has every opportunity to make the workplace a training ground for what it wants to be when it grows up that's what has to happen so they have to verbalize yeah they have to insist on it absolutely do you think any PR is good PR even if it's bad PR no I didn't ever like that I didn't ever like that I can't stand actually the idea that negative attention is somehow to be celebrated I think values do matter I think virtue matters period it has to if AI completely took your job would you rather be a plumber electrician or a firefighter electrician why plumber just sounds so messy and I'm like a girl that didn't even like to finger paint as a kid you know what I mean like I just think of sewage and I've just had so much plumbing stuff to deal with owning commercial buildings in New York City what about plumbing makes me scared you don't love your toto toilets well if in Japan those are the everything I don't know why I don't have one here that should happen that should that's the question to ask so but I would get a plumber to put that in I don't want to be the one that puts it in so so then and then what was the other one the third one firefighter oh that's just scary I'm not like I don't have that's like you gotta be able to lift all that stuff and trudge up the thing and like inhale the smoke no that's like for heroes um electrician felt like the one that I could fathom because it seems cleaner even if it is sometimes occasionally death defying oh true what have you been humbled by recently relationship intimate relationship to be vulnerable to be honest to be as to go more like to go even more i just when i think i'm as honest as i know how to be like what's the next level what's the next level i don't know because i'm figuring it out yeah fair if you were paid the same if you wanted to go back to being paid srinija would you rather be a people manager or super icy oh is that ice individual contributor yeah i'm not gonna lie i'm selfish now yeah i was a manager for so long there's so many people and i am proud i'm really proud of managing of like how i did i felt i feel like okay that was good yeah i'm just glad i did it when i did it okay no more if you could redo your entire life would you choose yahoo or become a musician and be like super cracked at improv oh boy i have no regrets nothing like that i have to every time it's it was life 101 it was intro everything i learned so much and i wasn't i didn't have the extraordinary internally motivated drive to be an improviser because that is craft of the highest order and i was not getting up every day it's going to sleep every night just practice practice practice and i saw the ones who did and i know the ones who are and i revere it and um i'm good with that okay okay if you were born in the future would you go to stanford or jubilee college i mean i gotta say jubilee college we're hosting a future that hasn't existed before that is the point of us doing this so yeah last question lean in or lie down lie down all day amazing well shenija you have gotten an exceeds expectation congrats thank you for joining us on office drama are you open to people like reaching out to you no no no you're out like i'm so introverted and i'm so offline like anti-social i don't have a presence online does jubilee college have a website yeah okay jubilee.college okay so you're gonna be there in 2028 so you want to see shenija again 2028 jubilee college enroll today enroll in 2027 admissions will begin in 2027 right there you go oh thank you so much for being here i thank you so much thanks for the work you're doing in the world and thank you for your wild curiosity about an old lady yeah she called me unusually curious and i was like i didn't know that about myself yeah thank you so much yay yay that's a wrap hello hello i want to give a shout out to our drama llamas on the patreon our last episode with w if you have not seen it yet you really need to it is five fundamental career lessons from 30 years of deb's career experience she's 50 so like 30 years in the workforce and dude it's like gem after gem i read your comments i am so overjoyed the vast majority of you were saying you've never consumed a higher quality episode in your life you took down a lot of notes one of my friends even texted me that she was listening to this episode at work and literally started crying and she sent me a selfie so yeah i feel like this episode hit a lot of people's hearts because like working in tech and corporate is so freaking competitive and a lot of us come from very little means and we enter the space we don't know what the rules are we go through our challenges we have our nights where we break down and cry we need support we're all trying to make it and trying to prove something and we're all trying to build for our careers without losing our minds and our souls and i think that deep feeling spread throughout the conversation and to see deb so senior in her career on the other side and i know like she's gone through some shit like you know she's gone through her career and she's gone through some shit like you know she's gone through her career and she's gone through some shit like you know she's gone through her career and she's gone through her fair share of insanity she just comes out on top so positive and bright and hopeful it's very refreshing to see someone despite going through all the horrific things that happen in a tech career she's able to see it really lovingly and get so much out of it so i hope you enjoyed that one now let's talk about this episode with shanija because it's so insane holy freaking cow she's a philosopher an academic a humanitarian a patron of the arts and a tech executive and i don't know if i've ever met any of these people in my life i don't know if i've ever met any of these people with that saturated of a combination she's like each of these personalities to the extreme and i will share a little secret she was actually quite hesitant to come on the pod with me because she hates the media like she does not even have a linkedin she's not online at all but her mind is very fascinating i'm so glad she got to say yes to me you know i did that interview for the asian american foundation taft with jerry yang the co-founder of yahoo and shanija and it was coordinated by phil from wongfu productions and so that conversation that we had was the reason why she was able to trust me like i put so much effort into crafting their questions and their stories and writing their narrative and then after that i shot my shot and i was like hey should i like love your mind and would you want to come on my podcast office drama and i wanted to capture her when she was in san francisco because she goes between sf and new york so i shot my shot it worked out i flew up hella pregnant and yeah yay so i'm not the best at philosophy not gonna lie i kind of had a hard time contributing back to the questions she posed and i know i have a lot of to do. My main takeaway from this episode is that in this era of life where AI and technology and like the markets all seem to make you want to min-max everything and it truly isn't the best for your soul, we must find a balance and there's such deep beauty in doing life the hard way. So as I'm embarking on my pregnancy journey and feeling a lot of feelings and challenges, getting through my work, falling behind, comparing myself to others, facing my own physical, mental, emotional limits, I'll be a lot more grateful coming out on the other end. I'm not there yet guys, I'm not there yet, but I am hopeful. I'm very curious, how did this episode impact you? What did you walk away with? And are y'all secretly philosophers? Let me know in the comments and I will see you next time. Bye!