Uncapped #1 | Shaun Maguire from Sequoia

**Jack Altman** (0:01)
All right, Shaun, thanks for doing this. I'm really excited to talk to you today.

**Shaun Maguire** (0:03)
Thrilled to be here, Jack. What's going on, man?

**Jack Altman** (0:05)
All right. So I want to go right into it. So the first thing I want to talk about is sort of like the current state of the media and social media.

**Shaun Maguire** (0:11)
I'm not sure if I have no opinions on this topic.

**Jack Altman** (0:13)
We can move on.

**Shaun Maguire** (0:14)
I'm just kidding.

**Jack Altman** (0:15)
I don't know if I have the timing exactly right, but the way I experienced sort of you on Twitter was October 7th happened, and you got super vocal, and you started sharing a lot of opinions on X that were kind of controversial, that were strongly rooted. They were ones that I agreed with, but ones that many people were afraid to say in those ways. I wanted to start there of just what happened in that moment, and did I read that right, that there was some change in you, or the way you thought about how you were going to show up around that moment?

**Shaun Maguire** (0:44)
For sure. You nailed it. There's a pretty long backstory on this, so I'll try to keep it brief, but I'm a child of the Internet, born in 1985, first time using the Internet, was fourth grade at my friend Nick Palachukoff's house, AOL. We went in AOL chat rooms, we realized that we could impersonate being a professional baseball player, Mike Piazza. If you're listening, Mike, I've never met you, but I did a great job pretending I was you in fourth grade. You know this too, but there was just really something about the Internet in those points where it was very new, and the social elements of it were brand new, and this is a weird tangent, but like in physics, when you study some system, you start with very simple toy systems that you can actually understand. You study a single ball on a spring or a single ball on a string, you know, or you study with some simple system, and then you try to build up from there. When you understand a simple system deeply, it makes it much easier to understand the complex systems. I feel like I got lucky with when I was born, where I was on the Internet in the very beginning of the social element, and so I think I was able to understand as a participant, like how manipulation works, how misinformation works, how it spreads. And I'll give you an example on Mike Gotts, and I've talked about this maybe twice before, but you know, my friend and I, we would A-beat us. Like, can we convince people as fourth graders that we're a professional baseball player? And we basically learned a tactic accidentally that worked almost every time, call it 80 percent of the time. If you just come out in a form and say, I'm Mike Piazza, no one's going to believe you. But if you join some chat room and you're talking to people and you seem normal, and oftentimes, well, at the time would then go into a sidebar, you'd be talking to someone one-on-one. After talking to someone for a little bit about random stuff, the weather, whatever their hobbies are, they'd ask, what do you do? And if you're not the one that starts with that and they ask, what do you do? And be like, oh, I play baseball. And they'd be like, what do you mean you play baseball?
I get paid to play baseball. And they're like, so you're a professional baseball player? It's like, I guess so. It's like, who do you play for? Play for the Dodgers. They're like, you're lying. What's your name? My name is Mike Piazza. They'd be like, shut up, you're lying. And they'd ask some question about you. And you'd be like, you have to know all the trivia on the person. And so then you answer some basic questions. And then I basically lead with, look, I know it's hard to believe, but it's really hard for me to meet people in the real world. I like to come on AOL and just talk to people, like no one's judging me. And that would click with people at least in 1995 Or sorry, call it 1998, something like that. It was actually shocking where if you kind of did it that way, at least in that time. Today, that wouldn't work, but back then it worked. So anyways, I really grew up in the early days of the Internet. I started building websites. I'd built a lot of prank websites and just gained intuition for how information spreads, what would go viral, all of this. And I basically followed information warfare from an early age. And then I actually worked in the US government doing some of that work. But I was basically quiet online.