ARTY: Hi, everyone. Welcome to episode 202 of Greater Than Code. I am Arty Starr, and I'm here with my fabulous co-host, Rein Henrichs. 

REIN: Thanks, Arty. And I'm here with our guest, Asra Nadeem. Asra is the co-founder of Opus AI, a streaming platform powered by proprietary tech that turns plain text into movies and games in real-time. She is also the first female Pakistani venture capitalist and manages an early-stage startup for Tim Draper. She began her entrepreneurial journey working on product and market development for venture-backed startups in the Middle East, North Africa, and Southeast Asia. Asra is a huge fan of freedom and fried chicken. 

Cool. Hi. Welcome to the show. 

ASRA: Hi, thank you for having me. This is exciting. 

REIN: We're also excited. So, what is your superpower and how did you acquire it? 

ASRA: My superpower is my unrelenting love for myself, and I think I acquired it very early on in life because I grew up in Pakistan, which is as patriarchal as they come. And one of the things that you're always told is -- I love fried chicken. So I'll give you a chicken theory about it. In our culture, the best pieces of chicken or what the women consider the best pieces of chicken, are kept aside for the men of the house. And women are served leftovers at the table for the most part. So in our house, we didn't have anything like that. So my mother would always be like, "Well, go ahead get what you want from the table." And it really annoyed everybody else in our circle of friends and family because they were like, "They're spoiling this girl." And very early on, I learned that I'm going to be the best thing that ever happened to me because that's the only way that my life is going to mean something. And I think just that realization in itself is a pretty big superpower that's helped me throughout. 

REIN: Unrelenting love for myself, I would like to also acquire that superpower.

ASRA: It's actually not that hard because if you think about it, everybody else is going to be, not everybody else, but there's a lot of people, or events, or things that happen in life that are going to be difficult, or that are going to put you down, or that are going to question the core of who you are as a person. And you should be the last person doing that to yourself. 

REIN: Yeah, I think that's right. So can we talk a little bit about storytelling? Because that seems like a passion of yours in general. 

ASRA: Yes. 

REIN: How did you acquire this passion for storytelling and why is storytelling so meaningful to you?

ASRA: So again, I think my passion or love for storytelling is very cultural-based of where I come from because a lot of traditions, a lot of stories, a lot of history is passed on as stories by your elders in the family, or there are love stories or lores that are told by these particular people and you have to go to them to hear them out. So just the romanticism of it is what attracted me as a teenager to storytelling because just this idea of sitting under a tree on a starry night, holding hands, listening to this romantic lore that was written a thousand years ago, is something that completely blew my mind. And then over the course of time, it really helped me also better trace where stories come from and also see this intersection between stories that are told in different cultures. Because a lot of cultures they're not writing first because women are usually not educated in most Southeast Asian cultures, most African cultures. People learned how to write very late, so a lot of stories are just carried on family to family. 

So that's where a huge part of my love for storytelling came from. And also, you and I can be telling the same story but just the way we say things, just the change of language, the words that we add, our pronunciation or enunciation, all of that changes what you're doing with it. And that itself is an art form. 

REIN: I've been thinking a lot recently about how important storytelling is for change because Sidney Decker in his book The Safety Anarchist talks about how numbers can give you data information, but they don't compel you to take action like stories do.

ASRA: Right. You're 100% correct. So I'll give you an example of my great-grandmother. I was very fortunate enough to spend a lot of time with my great-grandmother. And she was a part of -- so India and Pakistan used to be the same country under the British rule or even before that for a very long time. And in 1947, they both got their independence from British and became two different countries. Unfortunately, both of these countries were separated in the name of religion. So a lot of Muslims who lived in India migrated towards Pakistan and vice versa. A lot of Hindus and Sikhs went back to India. 

And my great-grandmother's family were not only involved in the independence movement but for her, one thing she always told in stories is how, and it's kind of stuck with me, is how she was cooking and she left her food on the stove and run with the rest of her family and to her, food never tasted the same. And a lot of her sense of freedom was tied to these stories that you would tell about growing up with so much love. And so I completely agree. I think stories are a huge part of change that is brought upon a society, a nation, or even a family. 

REIN: The other thing that I really liked that he says is that when organizations tell stories, what this demonstrates is that they're about people.

ASRA: Yeah, because the quickest -- numbers are good, numbers, data, all of that is good. And you need it to make a lot of sense out of stories, or to grow, or scale. But to really buy into something you need that connection that is formed through words, or that is formed through mutually assured passion for a future that you want.

ARTY: So in the context of software, say, you've got a team. What would be an example of a way that you might use a story to create this connection that you talked about for the shared passion for the future? 

ASRA: Sure. A lot of people are passionate about a future that they want to see in the world, but there's a very small percentage of people who actually go out and build it. And a lot of those people connect over this -- It's like how you find your soulmate, and life is very similar to that. So to give you an example of it, in terms of building a company, when you start, you don't have a lot of resources. You can't pay people astronomical salaries. A lot of times you're working from a garage or a small room and a lot of odds are stacked against you when you start a company. But you believe in the mission or vision of what you're building and the problem that it is going to solve. 

And once that problem is solved, the efficiency that it's going to bring to the process or the value chain that it's going to create, or the new market opportunities that it's going to open, or the way it's going to change, how something is done -- And there can be multiple motivators there. So money can be a motivator. You want to make a lot of money, nothing wrong with that. You want to change the way something is done and make it more efficient for yourself and other people like yourself. That's a great motivator. You absolutely abhor the way things are done in an industry, and you want to change it. You want to create more jobs at a market or some new technology comes in the market that wasn't possible before. And now there are 100,000 new opportunities that can be created. 

But the only way to see all of this is if you have that shared vision of the future if you have that shared passion for something, mutually shared passion for something. And finding those people is hard, which is why a lot of times we're always building communities. We're always seeking people who think like us and not only think like us but also people who are going to be that 2% or 3% who are going to go out and build it. 

ARTY: Where have you found these builder people that were on fire with that passion to build these dreams? 

ASRA: Sometimes I've just accidentally landed into them because -- Actually, let me rephrase that. I don't think it was an accident. I've always been on this discovery journey of opening doors and finding these people, actually building myself. So a lot of times when you are building something, in order to attract other builders, you have to be the one who's building something as well. Otherwise, what value are you bringing to the table? So I've met a lot of these people through my work with startups, through my own work with building companies,  I'm married to one of them,  so just randomly met them all over the place.

ARTY: So what's this vision that you're passionate about building right now? 

ASRA: So for me, one of the things that I truly believe in is that there is no freedom of any kind without financial freedom. And technology is a great lead enabler to get masses towards financial freedom and to really get people new opportunities. And for me, technology has always been about creating efficiencies because one thing that really differentiates us as humans from everybody else is our ability to be creators and our ability to imagine. Nobody goes to college or like anything ever or gets excited by this idea that I'm going to get up today, and I'm going to go to work, and I'm going to checkboxes for the rest of my day. Or I'm going to drag and drop things for the rest of my day, or I'm going to, you know, whatever other boring jobs there are. So a lot of it is just creating efficiencies that automate those jobs and yes, it takes away those jobs. 

But what it does is it creates a new economy for people to really hone in on their creativity, on their passions, and things that they love doing and use technology to advance at it. And kind of my life's trajectory has always been working on products that do that so be that building on that infrastructure for governments, be that building job websites, be that building any other like a fund or anything else, it's always been about how can we leverage technology to really hone in on human creativity and give people multiple options for that financial freedom?

REIN: The post-Industrial Revolution was really about the automation of work where the original Industrial Revolution was about the mechanization of work. So we want machines to do the sort of physical, mechanical tasks that humans are doing now. The automation of work is about we want machines to do the computer like mental tasks that humans do now like clicking a box or something a computer [inaudible]

ASRA: Redundant tasks.

REIN: Right. The idea for me is that we know in the past few decades, that human brains aren't actually like computers, but we've built up a lot of work where we try to make humans act like computers because ever since the invention of computers or even before, we've had this idea that brains are like computers, but they're not. So right now, creativity is not really a thing that we understand how to make a computer do, except by accident. When computers are creative, it's because a human-made them creative. But the automation of work can't replace human creativity. It can only replace what is computer-like about like information work, what is boring and repetitive and something that you can make a computer do easily.

ASRA: Right. I agree with that 100%. I think a lot of this actually creates new tools that can then really harness human creativity or create markets. So for example, a lot of people are passionate about, let's say music, or they're passionate about dancing or something, or they're passionate about story writing. Like right now in the U.S., only 0.6% of stories or scripts written get made into movies. A whole bunch of them are never made into movies because the commercial viability of making a movie is not there for them. So once you automate the tools that are used to make films, once you automate the tools that are used for a lot things that are expensive -- And that's where technology or computers come in. They make these things cheaper and easily accessible. That's what mobiles have done in a lot of emerging markets. That's where you really harness and then create new markets that we haven't thought about yet. 

REIN: Yeah. The thing that I find so frustrating about this is that it's possible for everyone to have all of the necessities of life completely satisfied under the economic system we currently have. People don't need to be hungry. People don't need to work menial jobs. People can at least be paid a reasonable wage for working those jobs. And the thing that's frustrating to me is that while this does sort of uplift human potential for some people, it also doesn't for other people. The people who are losing jobs to automation are generally trying to get similar jobs. They don't need jobs. The economy requires that they have jobs, but that's human invention. They could be spending all of their time making the next movie, writing the next novel. They're not. They're spending half of their lives working these menial jobs. 

It's really frustrating to me that the original promise of mechanization could have been that everyone in America, for example, doesn't need to work to subsist. And the promise of automization could have been similar, but we still have a very large group of people in America who are making minimum wage and their prospects in the new economy aren't great. And that's what worries me.

ASRA: So how do you define work? 

REIN: That's a good question. It depends on who you ask. I guess the answer I would give is that I would talk about labor, which is selling the capabilities that I have to someone who buys those capabilities to do something with them. So I sell my time to the company I work for, and they use that time and my skills to make money.

ASRA: Right. So for me, the promise of America has never been that you don't have to work. Coming from outside of here, I'm very new here, and coming from a country where who you become or who you marry or what happens to your life is very often decided very early on - so a carpenter's son is going to be a carpenter, a farmer's son is going to be a farmer. So the promise of America, the promise of the free world, is that you can be whoever you want to be. And yes, you were born a farmer. But you can be the next billionaire tech CEO if you want. And for me, I don't think the purpose of anyone's life or any human's desires is to not work because you're essentially selling two things - You're selling your time, and you're selling your mind. And it has to compound. Otherwise, we're going to be very unhappy. 

So I think the repetition doesn't help anybody. But at the same time, technology can really enable us to get to that next frontier where somebody who wants to write or somebody who wants to create a film can do that. And you can see that today. And again, I completely agree with you. These options might seem harder for people whose jobs are getting automated. But if you look at the up-and-coming younger Millennials or Gen Z, they're using technology to really leverage and live to their fullest potential. Upskilling or figuring out how do we create economies for people whose jobs are getting automated that still remains a challenge, but that I 100% agree with. But to me, it was never about the fact that you don't have to work to me it's always about, can you work on what you want to work and still live a good life? 

REIN: Yeah, that makes sense. 

ARTY: I feel like in technology, as we continue to advance technology, we have a responsibility too. I mean, as the world advances in this general direction and we create more automation, and we create more, you know, there's more side effects of the things that we create on society and how our technology shapes society, that we as technologists have a responsibility for those cumulative effects and to think about those effects. And so on one hand, we've got this dynamic of -- you mentioned this promise of a free world. And part of that too I think comes with responsibility that this world that we design with our technology and the effects that it creates at what point do we take responsibility for the shape of the world that emerges from our creation and the suffering that's created as a side effect too? 

ASRA: It's a philosophical question. So if somebody decides to blow up a country and uses an atomic bomb for it, do you blame the person who decided to do the action, or do you blame the person who invented the bomb? Or do you figure out what else can you do with this nuclear technology that you have and harness it to produce electricity? So I completely hear what you're saying. But I also think that a lot of these questions are not as easy as you invented this thing, so you should take responsibility for it. Because I can assure you that the people who were working on the internet did not think that Kardashians are going to be the most viewed medium on the internet. Or you'll have access to any information in the world that you want for free in your pocket, and you're still not going to utilize it. 

So a lot of times I think, yes, technologists need to be responsible for things that they're building. But we as consumers also need to be more conscious of what we're doing with that technology. And again, I think it goes back to taking responsibility as individuals for what happens to our life. So when I came to America for the first time, somebody was like, "Oh we're going to Tony Robbins." And I was like, "Oh, who's Tony Robbins?" And they're like, "Oh he's this guy who helps you with your passions. And he motivates you." And I was like, "Huh? You need somebody to motivate you?" Because to me and to a lot of people outside of the U.S., people who look up to the U.S., people who are growing up in poor countries like Pakistan, or Senegal, or anywhere else in the world, to them, the only person who is going to be responsible for what happens to their life, the only person who takes responsibility, the only person who can motivate them or take any blame for them is themselves. This concept of somebody else motivating you is born out of an abundance of everything. So at least that's how I think about it. 

So yes, technologists should be more considerate or take responsibility for what they're building. But as consumers, we also need to be more considerate or more responsible for our actions.

ARTY: I think this gets into the difficulty of it. As individuals, it's easy to not be at fault for any of the things that are these kind of emerging effects. Then when we end up in a situation where the system as a whole and its emerging effects are heading off the cliff, do we just keep on walking like lemmings off the cliff because none of us are responsible? And I mean, I think that's kind of where we're getting with the evolution of technology and nobody being responsible. And we have to blame the system, but not the people. And at the same time, come up with strategies for actually making things better. And I'm not sure necessarily how to make that transition, but at the same time, somehow I think it's necessary. Somehow I think we need to step up and set up whatever it is we need to set up to create a precedent for how we go about doing things and change the way the system works so that the whole thing doesn't fall off the cliff. Like I said, I think that's very much where we're at right now.

ASRA: Not to take away from the seriousness of what we're talking about, but can I tell a quick story that my great-grandmother told me?

ARTY: Of course, I would love to hear it. 

ASRA: So one of the stories from my childhood goes, and this is when she was instilling this if you want to see any change in the world, you have to start with yourself kind of a thing. And she said, "So there's a village, it's a new village. So some people they don't like the village that they live in. So they say, 'You know what? We're going to move out and build our own village.' And they go. But the first thing that they discover is that there is no well and there's no water for them. So now they have to dig and get water. Once they start digging, they see the earth is really hard and it doesn't really work for them. So the guy who's in charge says, 'You know what? Everybody at night bring a bucket of water and throw water in this hole and tomorrow it's going to be easy.' So everybody goes back and at night, one person thinks you know what? Everybody else is going to bring water. I'll bring stones because well, you know what? Nobody's going to notice. I'll bring some modern stones, and I'll just put them there so at least I can go to bed early. So the next morning they wake up and the hole that they dug is completely filled. Because everybody else thought that somebody else is going to bring water, and they all just brought back the same dirt and filled the hole."

So I feel like a lot of times that's what we do as society. Again, I'm fairly new to the U.S. so I don't know how things happen here. But in Pakistan, it's very common for people to just throw their garbage up on the road. And you always start by not throwing your garbage on the road. You always start by taking that personal responsibility. I think for us to correct things, some of us will have to say, "You know what?" And there are people who lead the way. So who's going to lead the way? And then people who are following, will we take ownership of this? 

ARTY: It's certainly not easy. And I think you're right. It does start with personal responsibility. Just listening to you talk and thinking about the things going on in the world, and we've got all kinds of technology now where we've got dysfunctional system dynamics. We'll put it that way, a nicer way to put it. But it's concerning and not easy to change direction, right? 

ASRA: It is. It's hard. And the longer you go on, it's like a snowball. Once it starts getting bigger and bigger, it's harder to push it back up. 

ARTY: Yeah, definitely. 

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I think we need to find a balance between this idea of personal responsibility and a recognization of these sort of systemic issues, power dynamics, and things like that. So for example, if you look at smoking in the U.S., the Stop Smoking Campaigns were pretty much entirely based around personal responsibility, calls to personal responsibility. You should stop smoking because it's bad for your health and so on. But if you look at why smoking became a thing, it's because the tobacco companies invented the field of marketing to lie to consumers. 

So they wanted women to start smoking. And so what they decided was that they were going to convince women that smoking would make them thinner. But they realized that in order to make that work, they would have to convince women that they wanted to be thinner. So they did that first. And this sort of spawned the entire industry of unhealthy relationships women have with their bodies. And then once they did that, they were able to tell these housewives that if you smoke, you'll be thinner and then you'll look better. So the power that these companies had to design these marketing campaigns that effectively lied to people, the constructive realities that people bought into because of their ability to basically hijack the way brains work. 

So there has to be some balance, I think, between personal responsibility and understanding that that has limits, that people who have power have more responsibility that goes with it. 

REIN: I 100% agree that people that have more power have more responsibility. Also, I think a lot of times -- and that's an ongoing conversation in our house because we have a ton of -- My siblings are all very young, and we're always trying to understand what's the difference or what happens in your life that you buy into somebody else's narrative of who you are as a person? And we can agree to call it marketing. But at the end of the day, that's what it is. You're buying into somebody else's narrative. And that is great storytelling on their part. But what happened to you as an individual to buy into that? Because what are they exploiting by the end of the day? I don't think it's a vulnerability. 

I buy into a lot of stuff all the time, and I'm way more informed than my 18-year-old sister. At one point, I thought that the answer to this is that the sooner you find your purpose in life -- And we talk about this a lot, self-actualization, purpose - What drives you? What motivates you? The harder it is for you to buy into other people's narrative. But then I also realized that that in itself is not enough because the only way to beat a narrative is to have a narrative that's stronger than that. And unfortunately, those kinds of stronger narratives it's hard to build internal traction and external traction for that. And that is where your tools of technology come in. 

So we see bots are a huge problem on Twitter, for example. And any narrative that somebody wants amplified can be amplified if they have a bot farm. And I think that's where the responsibility lies squarely with the Twitter product team or people in power there to shape the narrative. And then we should question what is a narrative that they want to sell? Because when you're not paying for something, you are the sucker. If you're using something for free, you are the product. And when you're commoditized as a human, you're commoditized as a product. Anybody can sell you or sell data to you, that should be questioned. 

And there is a small shift towards more vertical paid communities, which are amazing. I'm a part of a whole bunch of them, but at the same time -- I think about myself. I grew up on the internet. Living in Pakistan, I had no access to anything. I only had Britannica Encyclopedia. And my access to the world, all the opportunities that I got in life came to me because I logged on online and met amazing people, reached out to them, asked for help, and they helped me. But if we start building these silos and these communities that are closed doors, it becomes so much harder for people who are following us or people who don't have that level of access, which is a fairly common problem that happens in venture capital today. It's people who don't have access get left out, or it's hard for them to gain the same level of money or hire the same level of people, et cetera. So it's a hard problem to solve, but there is responsibility that needs to be placed upon those in power and individuals equally.

REIN: I don't want to push back on you too hard.

ASRA: No, go ahead. 

REIN: Because I also struggle with understanding how to balance individual responsibility, each person's obligations in a society with power dynamics with the ability for people to be influenced in ways that they have relatively little control over. Marketing works in part because it's able to tap into the way brains work. I don't want to go all LessWrong because that's super gross, but there's a thought experiment, which is you lock a supercomputer in what's effectively like cyber jail and then it has a conversation with a human. And then the question is, can that computer convince the human to let the computer out? Can it somehow through just talking to the human convince it to do something bad by appealing to your reason, or to your emotions or whatever it needs to do? And I think that thought experiment is interesting. All the other stuff around it is weird and gross, but the idea that humans are like hackable machines, I think is wrong, but not completely wrong.

ASRA: To me, it's not wrong because if I think about it, in my own life, I think I have hacked my brain the most myself, and that has enabled me to get places, to get out of what I wanted to get out of to build a better life for myself, to achieve whatever short-term, long-term goals I had. And that's also the beauty of the human mind - it can be hacked. But at the same time, let's assume that whatever hack happened. And we say, "Oh, that was a mistake that you made or that was an error." In a computer, sometimes errors can crash the system. Humans have the propensity to move on and do better. And without the wrong decisions that we make, our right decisions wouldn't matter as much. 

What you learn from those hackings or that error of judgment, or -- I remember as a kid, everybody would say to me, "Oh, you're really good at talking. You can talk your way out of trouble." And I know I can. As a kid, if you're told that you can talk your way out of trouble, you can talk your way out of anything, it's a very slippery slope because then that's who you become. And then your life choices are -- everybody would be like, "Oh, you should become a lawyer." And I'm like, "Huh?" Because you have this American -- like the Hollywood version of lawyers talking themselves out of everything. But I also think that that ability to talk myself out of things also landed me in trouble a whole bunch of times. I most likely manipulated or bullied people. But at the same time, it also helped me open doors and not be scared about reaching out. I see people even, my own family, who don't have that kind of attitude. 

I think as humans we can manipulate whoever we want, however we want. We have that power of storytelling. We have that power of hacking, as you call it. But harnessing people enough helps the good really excel. 

REIN: One of the things I think is really interesting about that thought experiment is that if it had taken place in the 16th century, it could still have happened almost exactly the same. It just would have been about Satan for the Christian. 

ASRA: Oh, 100%.

REIN: I just think that's interesting that we need some superhuman power or capability and in the 21st century it's AI. But in the 16th century, it's demons, it's the devil, it's God. 

ASRA: And why do you think that is? 

REIN: I don't know. I mean, there's a thought experiment called the Laplace's demon, which is about reversing entropy. And in the 21st century, that would be Laplace's computer. It obviously would be a computer that makes a decision about what to do with each atom. But obviously, in Laplace's time, there weren't computers. So he needed something that had the powers he sought. So he came up with a demon. I think it mostly has to do with changing human conceptions about what is possible. What you need is a stand in that situation to represent the power, the capability, the knowledge that the entity -- You need some entity that has those characteristics. And in the 21st century, we now think that that could be AI, not AI today, but maybe some potential future AI.

ASRA: How much of this do you think is about just control or power? 

REIN: [Laughs] Hopefully most of it.

ASRA: Because in my head, it's people who are scared or people who have something to fear that are the easiest to manipulate and control. And again, I'm saying this because I come from a very religious family in a very religious country. And religion is literally used as a gun on your head to make you do things, and people do them. And this fear of the creative power be that religion, or be that demon, or be that AI, or be this apocalyptic view of oh, this is going to go wrong if you don't do this, it always works in the favor of those in power because that's the way you control humans by the end of the day. 

And I think that's also buying into somebody else's story or somebody else's narrative of what you should be scared of. And a least today I don't think that there is a collective group or a collective conscience or anything that can solve that for you. So getting rid of those shackles of fear is a very individual process and yes, you can enable each other and kind of have a chain reaction where you pull each other out. But it's very, very personal. There is no collective solution to this unknown power of that you have to fear this.

REIN: I would say that it is slightly more general. I think it's people who have really strong goals, desires, needs, strivings can be easily manipulated. So, very greedy people can also be easily manipulated. You just convince them that they will get what they want if they do what you want. And people who are in fear have a striving, which is to be safe. I guess I'm going in an almost Buddhist like, we need to rid ourselves of strivings and desires, sort of way with this. 

ASRA: Our desires and our strivings are what make us who we are. So you can't get rid of that. But one thing I learned at least in my 20s and I wish I'd learned earlier is you have to pick and choose your fights. And this fight of collective fear I thought I'd left it behind, and I didn't think that I would, when I came to the free world, I didn't think I'd have to deal with it again. But unfortunately, what I've seen happening here in the last four years it's very reminiscent of what happens in other parts of the world. So all the politicians are essentially holding an entire country hostage on both sides for this fear of things going on and I'm like, "Oh, no. Did I just wake up in a nightmare or is this a reset?" [Laughs] I worked 20 years to get out of there. 

I just think that there's always going to be about 2% of the people in the world who are going to build things. And we stand on the shoulders of giants who build technologies or who build even technology revolutions, everything, that 2%. And I strive to be amongst that 2% as much as possible. And in my head, at least, it will work out at some point. [Laughs] We'll have somebody else fight this fight for me. So I'm delegating that one over to you.

REIN: I think it could potentially be more than 2% if more people could realize their potential. 

ASRA: Yes, definitely. How do more people realize their potential though?

REIN: Maybe we make automation, not replace jobs, but free people from the need to have those jobs. You can call them jobs if you want, where they can be creative, where they can find ways to express their potential. 

ASRA: Oh, 100%. I think that's one of the things that we're doing with Opus. So what we're building right now is so people who like telling stories can tell stories, monetize those stories. And it doesn't matter who you are or where you are in the world or what language -- Well, right now, you have to speak English. But as long as you can tell a story, we can build it into a series or a movie, and you can monetize that talent. So I think a lot of technology will get there. And there's no reason in my head why we shouldn't be able to get there. 

REIN: So tell us more. How did this start? Can you tell a story about the early stage of this project?

ASRA: Sure. So I think we very early on established that I love stories. And I have a film, TV, theater background. I was studying economics to be a politician and change the world, or at least the world that I grew up in, and very quickly left that notion behind. I was in film, TV, theater, and then I got introduced to somebody building a tech company, and I realized that everything that I wanted to do in life, I couldn't do it if I stuck with my passion of writing or storytelling. So I moved into technology. But it was always something at the back of my head that I wanted to do. And I love playing games, and I love watching movies, and I love people who tell stories. And for me, it's always extremely hard to find exciting stories, and it's become excruciatingly harder in the last couple of years because all our major studios are now just producing reruns or remix of whatever was produced 20 years ago. 

So my co-founder and I started working on a game about six years ago. And when we were working on the game, the idea was that the game would generate environments and have smart tasks, and goals, and everything as you go. And you can integrate multiple stories that you hear around you into the game and play. Extremely difficult to do because the technology to generate anything on the go was not there six years ago. So we kind of shelved that idea kept looking into it, and then went our different routes, did our thing, and then got back on it about a year ago. 

And the idea is very simple. As you're writing something, there is an AI at the back. And when I say AI, it's essentially we're processing a lot of natural languages and we're then using neural networks and procedural design to place objects and animate them. So what happens is as you're writing something, it extracts what you're writing and creates a 3D world around it. And for now, we're making short movies out of it. But the idea is that you can convert any book that you like, anything that you're reading, into a movie in real-time or a game in real-time. 

REIN: That's really cool. I would imagine that even productions that have the resources to do something bigger than that could still find it useful for really fast storyboarding or something like that. 

ASRA: Yes. So that's initially what we tested it with, it was storyboarding. And that's when we were validating the technology when we were validating the scope of it. But what we're building is essentially a media house where we want to be the publisher ourselves. 

REIN: It also sort of democratizes access to the technology. So it went from this is something that production studios with big budgets can use to [Inaudible]

ASRA: Exactly. And there are engines that you can use today to do this, but for those engines, you have to be an expert in let's say, X, Y, and Z. So you need to have X amount of training. And stories are told orally. The way you tell stories is not the way you build or code projects. So we wanted to kind of take the same experience of telling the story so it doesn't tax a creator's mind and give them the ability to at least have a product that they can put out in the world. And even if 10,000, 20,000 people watch it, that's perfectly fine because, for a lot of big-budget studios or big studios, it has to be millions of people, or it's not a viable project. 

REIN: It seems to me like you were sort of uniquely positioned or prepared to realize the potential of this because, and I don't want to generalize, but for portions of American culture, oral storytelling is basically not a thing anymore. There's definitely parts of American culture where it very much is but also where it's not. It's becoming less of a thing over time.

ASRA: I agree. And I think it's also something that's happening, not only in America, but it's happening in other parts of the world. Because we're becoming consumers and we're not creating as much. And a lot of it goes back to -- it's extremely hard to create content. So if you tell somebody that you have to write a story -- If you have to tell somebody okay, you write it then we'll make a film out of it, that's going to take two years to produce. And we will have to go find sponsors for it, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. The person's going to be like, "You know what? I'm just going to go create a TikTok video. At least it's going to get me 10,000 views in a week's time." So a lot of that has to do with access to tools. And I definitely do not want storytelling to die as an art form. 

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I was thinking back to earlier in our conversation when we were talking about individual responsibility and the ways that people's thoughts can be sort of shaped by the context they're in. And I think that the way I've been trying to comprehend the role of individual responsibility is to remember that human cognition is embedded in the context and that human performance is ecological. And so if you want to understand how an individual is performing or thinking or behaving, you have to actually include their environment, their context for that to make sense. 

ASRA: 100%

REIN: So, I think that the way I understand individual responsibility is by being holistic enough to include pretty much everything that goes into how humans make decisions and things like that. 

ASRA: Yeah. In theory, I agree with it. So let's say given the context of my life, every single time that I made an exception for somebody else's reality or somebody else's context into my individual responsibility, it weighed down where I wanted to get in life. It weighed down the decisions that I made because all of a sudden, then I was responsible for my father's honor because his honor was directly tied to all of my actions. I was responsible for my family's status in society because my words could definitely hurt that. I was responsible for the gated community that we lived in because anybody who drove into that gated community was a representative of the community as a whole, onwards, and onwards and onwards. And somehow I have always struggled with that notion which is probably why I never made a very good -- I mean, I was a very efficient and effective employee, but I was never a star employee. It made it difficult for people to work with me because, for me, individual responsibility always is higher than the responsibility of a group. And I understand motivating people or empowering them to perform to their maximum potential. But I also inherently don't understand how somebody's inability to -- Like, I have to drag people with me to my finish line. Does that make sense? 

REIN: Yeah, it does. I don't know if I have an answer, but I may have a useful way to think about it. So I think there's this idea that individual responsibility is basically there's a collection of things that I have control over and then there's everything else. And so individual responsibility is the sum of things I control. There's that sort of sense, which is a sort of classical category of black and white way to look at it. I don't think that works. And I think understanding how it doesn't work is maybe useful. So I think individual responsibility is like any human category, much more nuanced than that.

ASRA: That part I agree with. So that part I 100% agree with. I don't think it's black and white. Yeah, that part I agree with.  

REIN: So one way it could work is that it could be prototypal. So I've been reading a lot of Ackoff. You can probably tell. And so the way that would work is that there are sort of these archetypal things that are in the category of individual responsibility. So when you think of individual responsibility, there are probably a few examples that come to your mind first, and those are sort of central to the category. And then everything else is more or less near to those in some sort of configuration space. And the things that are further away -- so for example, how much money I make is in a gray zone. I personally don't have complete control over how much money I make. When I wake up in the morning is something I have more control over. And so I think if we understand better how the category of individual responsibility works cognitively, I think we'd get a better handle on what to do about it.

ASRA: Yeah, I agree 100%. I don't think that you can build companies or really bring any change in the world if there's this very stringent box of okay, this is what I'm responsible for. In order for any mass change in an organization, or in a society, or in a country, or however you want to think about it, that bubble has to encompass more people. And it's very similar to how you're -- I'm sure you [Inaudible] building teams. So you go from just being okay, this is the code that I'm responsible for to this is the code we're responsible for. And then this is what we are selling as a company. And being at the center of it you kind of keep adding more and more and more to it. So I definitely agree that at some point that has to -- I just haven't figured out how does that morph into or how do you go from that small cluster of individual responsibility to a bigger cluster of social responsibility. 

REIN: Yeah. That's really fascinating too. I think that one of the things I've learned from systems theory is that systems are different in character from the parts that make them up. And so a car is not like an engine or a tire, or a door a car is a different thing. It has different characteristics. A car can take you from one place to another, an engine can't. An engine can't even take itself from one place to another. And so I think that when you combine a bunch of individuals who have a shared purpose, a shared mission, a shared whatever you want to call it, you get something that's different from the sum of all of their individual goals and responsibilities.

ASRA: 100%. Yeah. And I think a lot of times the struggle is just finding those individuals. And I don't know if it's always the case, but it somehow seems easier like a good number for that always ends on 50. And I've seen that happen in a lot of companies as well. The minute you're crossing that 100 employee mark, that culture becomes harder and harder and harder to maintain or that shared vision of the world or that shared goal becomes harder and harder and harder to maintain. And maybe that's the evolution of what a good leader is.

REIN: Yeah, I think that's right. And I would also add and this also comes from Russ Ackoff that one of the characteristics of a big bigger system, a complex system, is that every part has a unique influence on every other part. So for example, what my heart is doing depends on what my lungs are doing. What my brain is doing depends on what my circulatory system is doing. I think that when the system is a bunch of people, each individual connection between people is immeasurably complex. The other lesson from Ackoff is that the system is the product of its interaction and not the sum of its parts. And so systems built from humans are impossibly complex to understand. So the only hope we have of understanding them is to come up with simplifications, and general rules, and guidelines, and heuristics and things like that. But it's good to not mistake those things for the actual system itself.

ASRA: Again, as I have evolved in my life or grown-up as my mum would say, that sense of individual responsibility that I had has grown. So it has grown in its purpose and it has grown in who and what it encompasses. And I think once it's like a building block, so once you start building or you start putting things on top of each other, and these can be humans, these can be shared purposes in life, and you've worked towards something, it's complex, and you can't solve it. But at the same time, the end result can be very, very rewarding because then you're surrounded by people who challenge you but by the end of the day, believe in that same vision for the world that you want to build.

REIN: And I think as leaders, our responsibility is to create a context in which people can be responsible for stuff, to create a context in which people can show up to work feeling engaged, for example. It's really hard to take responsibility for something that you don't give a shit about. If my work environment is so awful that I hate showing up there every day, which is not uncommon, then why would I want to take responsibility for that? I just want to get it done and go home. 

ASRA: That makes sense because to me, finding something to do that's personal responsibility. But then once you've found that, that becomes like a group. For me, in my head, the group then becomes an individual entity.

REIN: Yeah. The way I think of it is sort of I can create a context in which I think you can be successful. And then it's up to you what you do with it. 

ASRA: 100%. I agree.

REIN: And then part of that can be telling me that I was wrong about what do you needed to be successful. 

ASRA: I've always done that with my teams, or I've learned to do that with my teams. And I learned that from my first manager. 

REIN: Well, I think I ended up doing my reflection by accident. 

ASRA: I think it's been a very natural conversation, and I like that because it's not forced into a corner of this is what we have to talk about. 

REIN: That's good. That's what we strive to do. So, Arty, do you want to reflect?

ARTY: I was thinking about this concept of power. What is power in this context? What is influence? And we started this conversation with unrelenting love for yourself as a superpower. So I was thinking about that and what kind of power that is. And one of the things you've been able to do is take your dreams and really go after them and start building them and create your own power by being willing to go out there, and create, and make stuff happen, and find other people that can take technology and wield that power and do phenomenal things with it. 

And as technologists, I think that's one of the things we need to acknowledge is how much power we really have through our skills and our ability to create and build when we really go after that, when we really believe in ourselves, when we're willing to give ourselves all the things that we need to go and be strong and powerful and make stuff happen in the world. And when it comes to creating change, making ways, setting new precedent for whatever vision, whatever shared passion we want to create in the world, it does start with ourselves. And it does start with that power and claiming that power for ourselves. So thank you for that inspiration. 

ASRA: Oh, thank you for taking that away from that. In my head, that was more like, yeah, this is what I did, but I'm glad it was inspirational. [Chuckles] 

REIN: Okay. You're up. 

ARTY: As we were talking, I've been reflecting on a lot of things, but I think for the majority of it I've been -- A lot has happened in the last I think six years of my life. And I haven't really sat down and processed as much of my core beliefs about something as I wanted. But one of the things that I was thinking about is that my idea of what an individual is and what they're responsible for has morphed a lot more than I thought it had. And it's been a journey that I haven't reflected on or thought about or spoken about. But I think it also made me realize A, how far I've come from being just like, I'm going to fight if I have to fight for this too. You know what? I'm going to find people who believe in this thing that I do and build it together. And that itself is a huge change from thinking that as an individual, you're not alone. 

But with that, I think one of the things that I just started thinking about is that, yes, you're not alone but then you're responsible for a lot of these other people that are now tied into your goal. Which bucket of responsibility do you want to put them under? And I don't have the answer for that. That's something I'm going to be definitely thinking about a lot more. 

REIN: As you were saying that, I was just thinking about how a system is the product of its interactions. And I think what that means in this context is that a group of people is actually much more powerful than if you just add up all of the individuals. But I think a group is also somehow more responsible too. I think the obligations placed on a group can be greater than the obligations placed on any individual member if that makes sense. 

ASRA: 100%. But then do you think that your obligations or - Oh, I'm sorry. I know we're trying to wrap this all up. [Laughs] But I just thought of this. And I think, at least as I'm saying this, that I'm leaning more towards a yes. But we agree that the greater the power, the greater the responsibility. So, as a group, as your power or what you can do with tools of technology, or tools of mass destruction or any tools at your disposal, your responsibility increases as well 100%.

REIN: Yeah. I think this is a big mystery for me if it's true that an individual doesn't have the power or the influence or the responsibility that suffices for the whole group. If I could do it by myself, I wouldn't need to bring a bunch of people together to do it. If I can't take on that much power or responsibility, then how do I navigate what my own individual responsibility is? I think that's still a mystery for me.

ASRA: But don't you think that a person who brings a group together and as long as you hold the crown, let's call it the crown, as long as you are the one who's wielding this group together, you also hold some sort of -- I don't think it's as black and white as a kill switch. But what you create, to a certain point you can also, not destroy, but wrangle into a direction that you want. And I think wrangling that in the direction that you want regardless of how much noise, that still remains your responsibility. So in the context of a company, Twitter is Jack Dorsey's responsibility. I'm not shitting on Jack Dorsey. I'm just using it as an example. 

REIN: You can if you want, though. 

ASRA: [Laughs] No. This week I'm trying not to shit on people. But by the end of the day, every decision that comes out of that organization is that person's responsibility because when you build something, you're tying your fate or the fate of that thing to yourself. So what becomes of it is your responsibility. But at the same time, if you pass the reins on to somebody else, does that absolve you of that responsibility? I don't think so. So it's complicated.

REIN: Yeah. So the former Reddit CEO talking about how bad Reddit is now. You're the dude who made that a thing. 

ASRA: [Chuckles] That's like, "Oh, this is toxic." I'm like, "Hello?" And I think that's also a huge part of this celebrity culture or this fake influence culture that we have is like, you built it. You're a part of the problem. Now, just because you're wearing a white hat, doesn't absolve you of the problem. 

REIN: Yeah. I think if we accept the responsibility should be proportional to power, then we have to look at what power is in the social world. And is it just influence over other people? 

ASRA: Like, I don't want influence over other people. So that's also something I always question is, I don't want to influence people. I just want to build what I want to build. And if somebody wants influence over me, my mind, or my time, I always question their motive. But that's easier for me to do versus a larger audience of people to do. So there's always that. 

REIN: Yeah, I definitely agree with that. I guess the way I'm thinking about this is back to the sort of interconnectedness of things and the influence we have over a group is sort of the product of the influence we have over the individuals in the group and that influence isn't always sort of direct and intentional. So the behavior of a leader in a group has an influence over that group, whether they mean it to or not.

ASRA: 100% yeah, that I agree with. 

REIN: So I think that they have a greater sort of commensurate responsibility to act in ways that would be beneficial for the group as a whole. So I think when we think about individual responsibility in a group context, it's different for everyone, and it's sort of graded both in the sense of what's my responsibility, what's your responsibility, is not black and white. And also graded in the sense that everyone in the group has a unique responsibility, not just in terms of the strength of that responsibility but also like what they're responsible to or for.

ASRA: Right. But so now let's say that we're also taking into context other people's narrative of themselves or other people's where they're coming from story. So now we're building something. Is it possible for people to have a shared ideology towards something and have different politics, and I'm not saying politics in the sense of politics but different views of the world, and yet come together? And I know that that is possible. But then if your sense of individual responsibility is tied to your politics, how do you maximize the potential that you get out of them? 

REIN: Yeah. Well, I think once we figure this out, we have an obligation to the world to go tell [Inaudible]

ASRA: [Laughs] Yeah.

REIN: I don't have a pithy answer for you on that one. I will say that it's impossible to not have different perspectives, and different worldviews, and different values, and yet we still do come together. So we're certainly, in practice, doing it more or less effectively all the time.

ASRA: We are. A lot of it is also when we try to filter for that, is when the problem arises because if we accept individuals as individuals and not a part of some sort of a clan or a horde -- So for me, a lot of times building something or working with people it's a personal contract that you're making with each other. So you're making a contract and each one of us is getting some benefit out of it. And as long as we're fulfilling that responsibility, how much or how less we're responsible for each other's life still remains like a culture question. But at the same time, the freedom to be who you want to be is extremely important regardless of where you are in the world or what you're building as an individual. I think groups that figure out how to give that individual freedom but reach that collective goal would outperform 100% of the time. 

REIN: And we're getting to fundamental ethical questions at this point. Like, fundamental, you know, how do you form a just society? Questions that are probably outside the purview of this podcast. I think it's important for me to have an understanding of my own position, and what I value, and what I do to try to achieve to strive towards those values. Praxis for me is taking my sort of theoretical ethical stances, for example, and figuring out what to do in the real world to bring the world more and more close to them. 

I think that this is also the benefit of having an ethical theory because it provides a sort of grounding from which you can operate. So I get a lot of my ethics from Fisk's socialist ethics, for example. So a lot of my answers to the questions of, how do you bring people together have to do with how do you solve for completing goals and so on, have come from that tradition. Other people have different answers. And then we all have to work together in the same group. The thing to do that I can say with some certainty is to understand your position. Not you specifically, but in general, understand your ethical position as fully as you can.

ASRA: Yeah, definitely.

REIN: This was great. I really appreciate.

ASRA: [Laughs] That's a good conversation. Thank you so much. Have a great rest of your day.