Ahmad Thomas, CEO of the Silicon Valley Leadership Group, joins Scott McGrew to unpack why seven in ten Americans oppose data centers and why he thinks that opposition is really about AI anxiety. Thomas argues data centers have become a physical stand-in for broader fears over jobs, energy costs, and unchecked technological change, and makes the case for "responsible builds" grounded in transparency around water and power use. The conversation moves through AI's actual labor-market impact (Thomas cites SVLG's own research showing no evidence of a job-loss wave), Silicon Valley's housing affordability trap, and the global AI race with China. Thomas also reflects on his path as SVLG's first Black CEO, his father's journey from the segregated South to a business-school legacy at Penn, and what he sees as the deeper values question underneath the AI moment.

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Gradient Ventures' Darian Shirazi says the real winners of the AI era won't be the companies with the best models - it'll be whoever owns the data centers, the chips, and the compute underneath them. Fresh off spinning out of Google, Shirazi explains why Gradient has steered away from funding foundation models, and why China's lead in open source could reshape the whole s

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Leah Solivan — Founders at Work by Jessica Livingston
Alice Bentink — A Work in Progress by Rene Redzepi
David Spreng — All Money Is Not Created Equal by David Spreng
Caitlin Holloway — Creativity, Inc. by Ed Catmull
Grant Lee — Seven Powers by Hamilton Helmer
Vas Natarajan — Thinking in Bets by Annie Duke
Alex Halliday — High Output Management by Andy Grove
Andy Chen — Shoe Dog by Phil Knight
PR Yu — Tao Te Ching by Laozi
Christina Smolke — Anne of Green Gables by L.M. Montgomery
Adeo Ressi — Palo Alto by Malcolm Harris
Jack Leney — Catcher in the Rye by J.D. Salinger
TJ Rylander — By Any Means Available by Mike Vickers
Kanye Makabela — Doing Capitalism in the Innovation Economy by Bill Janeway
Ashu Garg — Sapiens by Yuval Noah Harari
Eugene Malobrodsky — Zero to One by Peter Thiel
Aaron Jacobson — Snow Crash by Neal Stephenson and Daemon by Daniel Suarez
Darian Shirazi — The Hard Thing About Hard Things by Ben Horowitz
Maria Palma — Bending Reality by Victoria Song
Dr. Ed Engelman — Blind Spots by Marty Makary

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