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This conversation was filmed two years ago in San Francisco. I am sharing it today because everything Raffi Krikorian told me then is more relevant now than it was when we recorded it.

Raffi Krikorian was employee number 50 at Twitter. He became the company's Chief Technology Officer. He then left to become CTO of Uber — overseeing self-driving car development at one of the most ambitious technology projects in history. Then he left that to become Chief Technology Officer of the Democratic National Committee — integrating AI into American politics at the highest level for the first time. Today he is Managing Director and CTO of Emerson Collective and has spent over twelve years as a board member of TUMO in Armenia.
He helped build the internet we have today.
And in this conversation — filmed two years ago, republished this week as X is back in every headline and AI deep fakes are reshaping elections around the world — he said it is broken.
He also said Armenia could be the AI powerhouse of the world. He said that before ChatGPT existed. He still believes it.
In this episode of INSIGHT, Emma Sargsyan sits down with Raffi Krikorian for one of the most wide-ranging and honest conversations about technology, power, privacy, children, politics and the future of the internet that this show has ever produced.
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A NOTE ON TIMING
This conversation was recorded two years ago when Raffi was Managing Director at Emerson Collective. Since then the world he described — the broken internet, the AI deep fakes in politics, the data privacy crisis, the question of children and screens — has not improved. If anything it has accelerated. I am sharing this episode now because the questions he raised then are the questions everyone is asking today. And his answers hold up completely.
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ABOUT RAFFI KRIKORIAN
Raffi Krikorian is Managing Director and Chief Technology Officer of Emerson Collective. He previously served as CTO of the Democratic National Committee, CTO of Uber's Advanced Technologies Group, and Vice President of Engineering and CTO at Twitter where he was one of the company's first fifty employees. He has been a board member of TUMO Center for Creative Technologies in Armenia for over twelve years.
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ABOUT INSIGHT
INSIGHT is the first Armenian-English language power and culture podcast in the United States, hosted by Emma Sargsyan. Each episode is a long-form conversation with an extraordinary guest at the intersection of business, identity, technology, leadership and culture. 
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