Joe Rogan Experience #2422 - Jensen Huang (video and brief summary)

youtube.com - Powerful JRE ^ | Joe Rogan and Jensen Huang

[RoosterRedux]

Summary:

Rogan's Jensen Huang interview is one of the clearest windows into how Nvidia was actually built—not as a smooth success story but as a series of near-fatal collapses.

He walks through the entire origin arc: choosing the wrong graphics architecture, nearly going bankrupt, Sega saving the company with a $5M investment that made no economic sense, buying a last-chance hardware emulator to create a digital twin for simulated testing, and convincing a skeptical Morris Chang at TSMC to manufacture design that was only tested in simulation.

Those desperate pivots ended up creating the modern GPU and later CUDA — the foundation of today’s AI boom.

It’s also a raw immigrant story: shipped to America at age nine, raised in poverty, cleaning dorm toilets, parents working menial jobs, and a lifelong feeling of being 30 days from failure. His mindset is constant anxiety, relentless first-principles reasoning, and vulnerability as a leadership tool.

The whole interview shows how close Nvidia came to dying, how improbable its survival was, and how much today’s AI world rests on a handful of insane risks, lucky breaks, and a leader who simply refused to quit.

[SmokingJoe]

Jensen is all over the place in the media lately.

[RoosterRedux]

He’s been at it for quite a while...and he’s excellent at it. He’s basically explaining AI to America and the world.

[Yossarian]

NVIDIA, the story of a company that refuses to hire Americans, so they can abuse people from around the world.

[RoosterRedux]

Source?

[Yossarian]

Source?

Me, living in the Silicon Valley for the past 30 years.

[Vermont Lt]

People don’t care. They just love that their 401(k) is higher this year.

Of course, they have no idea what their 401(k) owns…but yeah, 20% returns!

[RoosterRedux]

Your personal experience isn’t a source. If Nvidia truly ‘refuses to hire Americans’ or ‘abuses people from around the world,’ there should be verifiable evidence. Otherwise it’s just an opinion.

[Yossarian]

Your personal experience isn’t a source. If Nvidia truly ‘refuses to hire Americans’ or ‘abuses people from around the world,’ there should be verifiable evidence. Otherwise it’s just an opinion.

Oh yes it is a source. NVIDIA doesn't open up its personnel records to the world, so you need to see what your "Mark I eyeball" tells you, when you live a mile away from their headquarters and go to chip design conferences.

And so, I can tell you based on experience, that the odds of finding an NVIDIA engineering employee that was born and raised in the United States is NIL!

[RoosterRedux]

I’m not saying your experience is wrong. I’m saying it isn’t evidence—it’s an opinion.

[Zhang Fei]

[Oh yes it is a source. NVIDIA doesn’t open up its personnel records to the world, so you need to see what your “Mark I eyeball” tells you, when you live a mile away from their headquarters and go to chip design conferences.

And so, I can tell you based on experience, that the odds of finding an NVIDIA engineering employee that was born and raised in the United States is NIL!]

---

Hard to argue with success, though. Luck and timing are certainly factors. But they were competing with the best, including entrenched winners like Intel and AMD (which bought ATI) and somehow not only survived, but came out on top. It still astounds me they did. I always thought they were a bit player in the biz relative to the rest. Then came AI.

[pissant]

any relations to John Huang?

[RoosterRedux]

You’ve got the wong Huang.

[pissant]

My mistake, it’s been a rong day

[RoosterRedux]

LOL

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