Latest Interviews
Showing 16–30 of 250 transcripts.
Clear all filters- Goldman Sachs36 min
Are Investors Complacent?
Jan Hatzius, Dom Wilson, Alison Nathan, Dominic Wilson
The U.S. has raised effective tariff rates by nine percentage points, introducing new levies on China, Canada, and Mexico while delaying agricultural tariffs until late next year. This shift, combined with a fiscally expansionary "Big Beautiful Act," is projected to push core PCE inflation to the low threes and suppress 2025 GDP growth to between 1% and 1.5%. In response, financial markets anticipate Federal Reserve rate cuts beginning in September to mitigate these temporary price shocks, while the U.S. dollar continues a structural depreciation against a backdrop of resilient global trade.
- a16z30 min
What You Missed in AI This Week (Google, Apple, ChatGPT)
Google's VO3 model and recent updates to ChatGPT voice and Apple Intelligence are driving a rapid shift toward autonomous video and narrative creation, allowing users to generate consistent multi-character scenes and human-like dialogue from single text prompts. These technological leaps, alongside Eleven Labs' emotion-tagging capabilities and data showing a doubling of consumer AI startup revenue, are establishing a "faceless" creator economy where entrepreneurs can build full-stack brands using AI-generated assets. While current limitations in character consistency and high inference costs persist, the industry is rapidly moving from experimental novelty to a dominant force in social media and professional workflows.
- a16z43 min
The State of Consumer Tech in the Age of AI
Erik Torenberg, Anish Acharya, Olivia Moore, Justine Moore, Bryan Kim
The discussion frames consumer AI as a velocity-driven market where relentless model updates replace traditional network effects, enabling premium pricing models that capture significant value by substituting high-cost labor. While mobile and wearable hardware currently serve as the primary substrate, the sector is navigating a transition from legacy social structures toward novel paradigms like synthetic selves and agentic actions that prioritize direct user utility over static interfaces. Ultimately, success depends on maintaining a technical frontier and evolving new social norms to support an ecosystem where AI companions and enterprise tools facilitate deeper human connection rather than displacing it.
- a16z41 min
Autonomy is no longer a moonshot—it’s a market
Erin Price-Wright, Qasar Younis, Jason Brown
Applied Intuition leverages a dual-use strategy that forces defense autonomy products to meet rigorous commercial benchmarks before government adoption, ensuring validity through real-world market competition. The company is capitalizing on the convergence of Waymo and Tesla methodologies to modernize legacy defense platforms while introducing transformative transformer-based architectures for swarm and collaborative autonomy. By bridging the gap between rapid commercial software development and the Department of Defense's traditional hardware-centric procurement culture, the firm is actively reshaping defense acquisition models to accelerate the deployment of scalable, cost-effective autonomous systems.
- The Economist25 min
Economies of sail: migrant-smuggling entrepreneurs
Rosie Bloor, Joel Budd, Noah Snyder, Oliver Morton, Rachel Dobbs, Ainsley Johnston
An analysis of global security and environmental trends reveals that UK migrant smuggling networks have fragmented into professionalized, decentralized supply chains that evade traditional law enforcement decapitation tactics, while simultaneous extreme wildfires in South Korea and Japan signal accelerating climate impacts in high-latitude regions. Parallel to these physical shifts, international public opinion is undergoing a rapid polarization driven by US political changes, characterized by a sharp decline in favorable views of America across traditional allies like Canada and European nations. These converging dynamics suggest a global landscape where adaptive criminal markets, climate-fueled disasters, and fractured diplomatic trust are reshaping security challenges and cross-border perceptions.
- Y Combinator32 min
DoorDash CEO: Customer Obsession, Surviving Startup Death & Creating A New Market
DoorDash was founded on the principle of empowering physical businesses after observing a macaroon store owner's inability to fulfill delivery requests, leading to a validated strategy that prioritized suburban markets and a diverse driver workforce over traditional high-density city centers. The company weathered critical operational crises, such as the 2013 Stanford delivery delays and persistent investor skepticism, by establishing a customer-obsessed culture that later enabled it to surpass competitors during the 2020 pandemic through strategic commission cuts and industry-wide support. Today, DoorDash employs over seven million drivers and commands approximately 60% of the U.S. food delivery market share while maintaining its long-term mission to grow the GDP of every city.
- The Economist25 min
Kurds in the right place: a truce nears
Rosie Bloor, Jason Palmer, Pyotr Zalewski, Simon Rabinovich, Danielle Zaslavsky, Henrietta McFarlane
Following secret negotiations, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan and former hardline leader Devlet Bahçeli have advanced a peace initiative with imprisoned Kurdish leader Abdullah Öcalan, aiming to end a 40-year conflict through a PKK ceasefire while securing regional stability against Israel and Western alliances. Simultaneously, President Trump's aggressive tariff escalation on China, Mexico, and Canada triggered immediate global market sell-offs and record-low consumer sentiment as nations retaliated, compounding existing economic vulnerabilities in housing and business investment. In a contrasting cultural shift, the $3.1 billion caviar industry is surging toward a projected $4.6 billion valuation by 2029, driven by viral social media trends among young consumers who are adopting unconventional pairings and spurring innovations in cultivated, fish-free alternatives.
- Y Combinator32 min
Vibe Coding Is The Future
Andrej Karpathy, Gary, Jared Harge, Diana, Abhi von Copycat, Mark Mandelmann, Yoav, Leslie Kendricks, Francesc Campoy Flores, Mark Mirchandani, Melanie Warrick, Trevor, Mark Blyth, Anders Ericsson, Malcolm Gladwell, Picasso, Max Levchin, Toby Lutke, Mark Zuckerberg
Founders characterize "vibe coding" as the emerging dominant standard, where exponential velocity gains from AI tools like Cursor shift the primary engineering role from syntax generation to product judgment and taste. While this paradigm democratizes initial prototyping by generating over 95% of code automatically, participants note a critical divergence where scaling to massive user bases still demands classically trained architects to handle complex systems engineering. Consequently, the industry is pivoting toward hiring assessments that prioritize reviewing capabilities and architectural decision-making to distinguish between the "good enough" code produced by AI and the exceptional quality required for world-class systems.
- The Economist28 min
Pompcast: Trump rallies Congress
Trump, Jason Palmer, Rosie Bloor, John Priddow, Ana Lankes, Alex Hearn
President Donald Trump suspended military aid to Ukraine following a dispute with Volodymyr Zelensky, triggering retaliatory 25% tariffs from Mexico and Canada and prompting Zelensky to signal readiness for a new minerals deal. In his first congressional address, Trump claimed record-breaking approval swings and erroneously contrasted European and American aid contributions while asserting he ranks alongside George Washington. Simultaneously, Ecuadorian Attorney General Diana Salazar continues high-stakes investigations into corruption linking drug cartels to former President Rafael Correa, with the outcome threatening to determine whether the nation remains a democracy or becomes a narco state before upcoming elections.
- The Economist26 min
Phase transition? Gaza’s shaky peace
Greg Carlstrom, Jason, Rachel Dobbs, Ana Lankes
Negotiations for a second phase of the Gaza ceasefire are stalled as the initial truce approaches expiration, with a short-term extension considered the most likely scenario while future reconstruction plans clash between Arab proposals and Israeli suggestions. Simultaneously, the US faces significant disruption in its federal science sector due to proposed budget cuts of up to 50% and the removal of indirect costs, prompting fears of a mass exodus of scientific talent and a decline in global research output. Meanwhile, Brazil is undergoing a national reckoning with its military dictatorship legacy, driven by the Oscar-nominated film *I'm Still Here*, which has intensified judicial scrutiny over past disappearances like that of Rubens Paiva and underscored political tensions surrounding former President Jair Bolsonaro's pending trial.
- Goldman Sachs26 min
Tariffs: What’s ahead and why it matters
Alec Phillips, Joseph Briggs, Kamakshya Trivedi, Alison Nathan
Starting February 1, 2025, the administration implemented a 10% tariff on Chinese imports and delayed measures against Canada and Mexico while accelerating steel and aluminum duties to 25% with no exemptions. This unprecedented two-week escalation compresses trade war dynamics into a single window, projecting a mid-single-digit rise in effective U.S. tariff rates that could slow American growth by 25 basis points and push core inflation to 2.6% by year-end. As global central banks diverge with the Federal Reserve adopting a slightly hawkish stance, investors are increasingly hedging against dollar strength while anticipating a pivotal April 1 report on structural tariff mechanisms.
- The Economist25 min
Love match: Modi-Trump’s tariffs tussle
Modi, Trump, Jason Palmer, Rosie Bloor, Kira Khuyu, Leo Morani, John Fassman
At the White House, President Trump and Prime Minister Modi advanced a "mega-prosperity" partnership marked by the "MIGA" slogan, even as trade tensions over reciprocal tariffs and immigration enforcement disputes threaten the $200 billion bilateral relationship. Concurrently, global aviation faces a decade-long crisis of eroding safety and shrinking airspace due to geopolitical conflicts, granting non-Western carriers a competitive edge while forcing Western airlines to cancel routes. In the entertainment sector, *Saturday Night Live* celebrates its 50th anniversary by maintaining structural consistency under Lorne Michaels' leadership, successfully adapting its political satire for the digital age to sustain high ratings during election cycles.
- The Economist41 min
Scam Inc 1: Pigs in a barrel
Jim Tucker, Shane Haynes, Bill Tucker, David, Su Lin Wong, Zannie Minton-Beddoes, Karina, Evan, Edgar, Sam Colbert, Alizé Jean-Baptiste, Weidong Lin, Darren Ng, Claire Reid, Rosie Blore, Heidi Pett, John Shields
In July 2023, Elkhart, Kansas, Heartland Tri-State Bank collapsed after CEO Shane Haynes transferred $47.1 million to the cryptocurrency exchange Kraken following a sophisticated "pig butchering" scam. Despite the board's secret meeting and unanimous rejection of a recovery plan, federal regulators seized the bank, dissolving its charter and costing local shareholders millions while depositors remained insured. This incident exemplifies the rise of global criminal networks that exploit professional relationships to generate tens of billions in annual losses for victims worldwide.
- The Economist23 min
War hoarse: is Zelensky being heard?
Zelensky, Jason Palmer, Rosie Bloor, Ore Ogunbiyi, Vicente Maldonado, Caitlin Talbot, Halen Michael Seaman, Gabe Poirot
President Zelensky warns of grim front-line realities and insists Ukraine will only negotiate with binding U.S. security guarantees, while simultaneously facing funding hurdles for a contingency plan to double the national army. In West Africa, aquaculture startups like Troppo Farms struggle to meet surging local fish demand due to high capital intensity and bureaucratic barriers, despite 60% of global consumption shifting to farming. Meanwhile, TikTok has become a primary driver of religious engagement for Gen Z, where viral influencers bypass traditional institutions to build communities, albeit with risks of spreading misinformation and fragmenting belief systems.
- Y Combinator44 min
How To Get AI Startup Ideas
YC is hosting its inaugural AI Startup School in San Francisco on June 16th and 17th, featuring high-profile speakers like Elon Musk and Sam Altman to guide eligible CS students and recent graduates through cutting-edge venture creation. The program emphasizes deriving viable startup ideas by leveraging unique domain expertise or conducting undercover research in underserved industries, illustrated by case studies of founders who transformed personal observations at companies like Tesla and Cohere into seven-figure ventures. Participants receive full travel support and strategic advice to persist with ambitious AI projects, moving beyond transient trends to build companies with sustainable competitive advantages in rapidly evolving sectors.