Alec Ross

Author, The Industries of the Future · 1 appearance on the record.

computed by AI from the episodes · how this works → · full disclaimer →

Alec Ross is the author of The Industries of the Future and a former innovation advisor to Hillary Clinton. He worked on the first Obama presidential campaign and examines the global impact of technological change.

13statements → 5claims → 2claims resolved → 3.62/5average certainty → 3.08/5average debate potential →

0 supported 0 partly supported 2 contradicted 1 not yet assessed 2 not checkable as stated how the 5 claims stand · each chip opens the sources

3 predictions · 2 assertions · 5 opinions · 3 insights · every statement was checked. The predictions and assertions are the 5 claims: statements the public record can support or contradict. 2 are resolved, 1 is not yet assessed, and 2 name no date, number or outcome precise enough to check. Everything else (opinions, insights, what ifs, disclosures) can never be settled by the record, so it carries no assessment.

The record, in short

What the tape says about how Alec argues and how the claims held up. Everything they said, and everything said about them, is in the tabs below.

Their most notable contradicted claim

Assertion Contradicted
Ross: Declassified US estimate puts Chinese cyber IP theft above $300B annually
“When I was in government, we declassified a national intelligence estimate, which we tend not to do. Well, we declassified a national intelligence estimate that actually put a number on the amount of intellectual property theft taking place because of cyber at…”
Alec Ross Jan 2, 2019 ▶ 23:26 a16z Podcast | Open vs. Closed, Alpha Cities, and the Industries of the Future

Expressed certainty vs assessment result

none yet certainty 1
none yet certainty 2
0% certainty 3
none yet certainty 4
0% certainty 5

weighted support: a fully supported claim counts one, a partly supported claim counts half. Each filled bar is clickable and opens exactly those claims; "none yet" means nothing said at that certainty level has resolved yet

How they sound: speaking style how? →

229 words/min while actually speaking · 9 um and uh per 1k words · 11.9 false starts per 1k · 32.1% of pauses land inside a clause

No argument clarity score for Alec Ross: only 2 usable question→answer exchanges on raw tape (a fair score needs 8+). We do not score a sample that small. Roundtable and news formats yield far fewer direct exchanges than interviews.

Measured by listening to the audio itself: 3,979 words across 1 episode of raw-level tape, transcribed verbatim with every um and uh kept, each one attributed only where the alignment onto our timed stream is unambiguous. These are measurements of speaking style. We do not rank them: across this corpus, fluency and argument quality are nearly uncorrelated (ρ≈0.2), and smooth talking does not signal clear thinking. How it's measured →

Everything Alec Ross said on the a16z Podcast that made the record, most notable first. Filter by type, assessment or year in the ledger →

Assertion Contradicted
Ross: Declassified US estimate puts Chinese cyber IP theft above $300B annually
“When I was in government, we declassified a national intelligence estimate, which we tend not to do. Well, we declassified a national intelligence estimate that actually put a number on the amount of intellectual property theft taking place because of cyber at…”
Alec Ross Jan 2, 2019 ▶ 23:26 a16z Podcast | Open vs. Closed, Alpha Cities, and the Industries of the Future
Assertion Contradicted
Ross: Iranians repurposed US malware to destroy 30,000 Saudi Aramco computers
“I've seen evidence that the malware that the United States is alleged to have used against Iran it looks like, if you look at the code base, it looks like Much of that code was used by the Iranians against the Saudis in attack, in an attack against Saudi Aramc…”
Alec Ross Jan 2, 2019 ▶ 25:08 a16z Podcast | Open vs. Closed, Alpha Cities, and the Industries of the Future
Prediction Not checkable as stated
Ross: Open societies will dominate tech-driven industries over the next 20 years
“Thinking about the industries of the future, not necessarily looking back at the 20 years of digitization and the rise of the consumer internet, but looking forward to the next 20 years, trying to be deterministic about how political systems map to economic ou…”
Alec Ross Jan 2, 2019 ▶ 2:45 a16z Podcast | Open vs. Closed, Alpha Cities, and the Industries of the Future
Opinion
Ross: Governments should not mandate backdoors into encrypted technologies
“And I think that it is perfectly reasonable for there to be close collaboration between the technology community and the intelligence and law enforcement communities in ways that, that fall short of say mandating backdoors into encrypted technologies.”
Alec Ross Jan 2, 2019 ▶ 8:59 a16z Podcast | Open vs. Closed, Alpha Cities, and the Industries of the Future
Prediction Open · timeframe Feb 2021
Ross: The world's next trillion-dollar industry will come from genetic code
“You know, the world's last trillion dollar industry was created out of computer code. I think the world's next trillion dollar industry is going to be created out of genetic code.”
Alec Ross Jan 2, 2019 ▶ 13:51 a16z Podcast | Open vs. Closed, Alpha Cities, and the Industries of the Future
Opinion
Ross: Chicago lacks a lasting internet tech sector due to talent shortfalls
“I even think about a city like Chicago. Chicago has so much going for it, but you, when you really scratch the surface a little bit At least for internet-based businesses, there isn't much there that's lasting, that's created significant employment or other th…”
Alec Ross Jan 2, 2019 ▶ 21:39 a16z Podcast | Open vs. Closed, Alpha Cities, and the Industries of the Future
Opinion
Ross: Code weaponization is the biggest conflict development since nuclear arms
“I believe that the weaponization of code Is the most significant development in conflict since the weaponization of fissile material.”
Alec Ross Jan 2, 2019 ▶ 23:01 a16z Podcast | Open vs. Closed, Alpha Cities, and the Industries of the Future
Insight
Ross: The 21st-century political binary is open versus closed, not left-right
“I think that the principal political binary of the 20th century was left versus right. It was the political left versus the political right. But in the 21st century, in the present day, the principal political binary is open versus closed.”
Alec Ross Jan 2, 2019 ▶ 2:10 a16z Podcast | Open vs. Closed, Alpha Cities, and the Industries of the Future
Opinion
Ross: Western European data sovereignty laws conflict with cloud computing architecture
“Governments in Western Europe are basically building a series of regulations and laws that work across the grain of the way that the cloud works.”
Alec Ross Jan 2, 2019 ▶ 7:11 a16z Podcast | Open vs. Closed, Alpha Cities, and the Industries of the Future
Prediction Not checkable as stated
Ross: 80% of future tier-one global cities will be outside the US
“And I think that we're moving toward a world where there are between, between let's call it 10 to 15 tier one cities, alpha cities, you know, places, you know, you can think of sort of the San Francisco Bay Area as one of these. You can think of New York City …”
Alec Ross Jan 2, 2019 ▶ 16:03 a16z Podcast | Open vs. Closed, Alpha Cities, and the Industries of the Future
Insight
Ross: Top-down tech hubs fail due to human capital, not tax incentives
“Where I see it fail, where you line up all the tax incentives, where you've got the public private partnerships, where you've got Everything just right, but it doesn't end up working tends to be a failure of human capital. You know, you don't actually have the…”
Alec Ross Jan 2, 2019 ▶ 19:59 a16z Podcast | Open vs. Closed, Alpha Cities, and the Industries of the Future
Insight
Ross: Combining STEM and humanities will drive future career success
“I think that the people who are going to be best equipped to compete and succeed in, in the industries of the future are those who most effectively blend That which is technical and scientific with the humanities.”
Alec Ross Jan 2, 2019 ▶ 31:16 a16z Podcast | Open vs. Closed, Alpha Cities, and the Industries of the Future
Opinion
Ross: Facebook succeeded as much from behavioral psychology as computer science
“Facebook is, has been as successful as it is, as much because Mark and the people who he brought into Facebook understood behavioral psychology. As much as they did computer science.”
Alec Ross Jan 2, 2019 ▶ 31:40 a16z Podcast | Open vs. Closed, Alpha Cities, and the Industries of the Future

Appearances (1)

EpisodeDateSpeaking time
a16z Podcast | Open vs. Closed, Alpha Cities, and the Industries of the Future Jan 2, 2019 22m
Made with StarZero

Turn any episode into a week of clips.

This entire site, over 1,000 episodes transcribed, diarized, checked and made playable, runs on the StarZero media pipeline. Drop in your own episode and the podcast clipper finds the moments worth sharing, cuts them, captions them, and reframes them for every feed.