Latest Interviews
Showing 301–315 of 809 transcripts.
Clear all filters- Milken Institute40 min
Global Companies and a New Era of Growth | Global Investors' Symposium Hong Kong 2025
Avril Hong, Hans Dekkers, Tony Fernandes, Éric Martel
Representatives from IBM, AirAsia, and Bombardier convened to outline a strategic framework prioritizing robust data infrastructure as a prerequisite for effective AI adoption in the aviation and aerospace sectors. The panel detailed specific outcomes such as AirAsia's projected 3–4% fuel savings and Bombardier's 93% on-time global parts delivery rate, achieved through predictive analytics and automated supply chain management. Additionally, the discussion emphasized navigating complex regulatory certification hurdles and managing workforce cultural shifts to balance human oversight with AI-driven efficiency.
- Goldman Sachs28 min
Dame Sarah Storey on winning her 19th Paralympic gold medal
Britain's most decorated Paralympian Dame Sarah Storey secured her 19th Paris 2024 gold medal, extending her career total to 30 golds while reflecting on her unique transition from swimming to cycling and the erosion of government funding since 2008. She advocates for increased sponsorship and infrastructure investment to support the "speculate to accumulate" reality of Paralympic cycling and emphasizes innovation in physiological management as she considers a potential 10th Paralympic appearance in 2028. Storey attributes her longevity to a multidisciplinary team approach and the aggregation of marginal gains, rejecting traditional sports hierarchies in favor of holistic strategies that accommodate perimenopausal needs and family motivations.
- Milken Institute31 min
Global Debt Levels: Opportunity to Innovate | Finance Forum 2025
Matthew Aleshire, Avinash Persaud, Stacy Swann, Heiko Thoms
A panel of international economists and policymakers convened to address the critical intersection of record-high global public debt and the urgent need for climate resilience financing, highlighting how current debt frameworks stifle essential green investments. The discussion examined structural reforms in Germany, such as new debt rules exempting defense spending, alongside the growing dominance of private creditors in developing nations which complicates traditional resolution mechanisms like the Paris Club. Experts concluded that effective solutions require MDBs to expand capital bases, greater Chinese creditor participation, and the design of shock-absorbing debt instruments that capture long-term fiscal savings from climate adaptation.
- a16z26 min
The Future of Digital Workers
Level Next distinguishes itself in the AI sector by prioritizing customer outcomes over technology, recently re-architecting its Alice and Mike agents from basic prompting to fully agentic frameworks capable of planning and reasoning. The company supports this technical shift with a unique go-to-market strategy that offers free product access for validation and employs a vendor-agnostic architecture to rapidly swap model providers based on performance metrics. Underpinned by a "zero-to-one" pod structure and a hiring focus on chaos tolerance, Level Next aims to deliver anti-fragile revenue motions while educating clients on data-driven optimization over subjective perception.
- Goldman Sachs29 min
Carl Nassib: NFL star to philanthropy entrepreneur
Former NFL player and first openly gay active player Carl Nassib leverages his platform to drive a strategic modernization of philanthropy through the Raise app, aiming to bridge the technological gap between traditional nonprofit infrastructure and a mobile-native donor base. Drawing on his experience as a Penn State Board member, Nassib advocates for comprehensive financial literacy education to prepare both college athletes in the NIL era and retiring athletes for wealth management, while predicting a massive transfer of generational wealth that will redefine future charitable giving.
- Milken Institute30 min
New Directions and Opportunities for Resilient Disaster Recovery | Finance Forum 2025
Kristen Fanarakis, Lynette Bell, Tom Hoban, Nuin-Tara Key
The Truist Foundation is leading a strategic shift from reactive disaster relief to proactive resilience by committing $725 million over three years to Western North Carolina following Hurricane Helene. This initiative prioritizes small business recovery by reducing capital access timelines from 60 days to 10 days and advocates for standardized building codes alongside new tax incentives to incentivize structural upgrades. Experts further propose adopting a "risk curve" framework and leveraging regional public-private partnerships to sustain long-term funding for climate adaptation and infrastructure hardening.
- Milken Institute36 min
Incentivizing Investment in Innovative Technologies | Finance Forum 2025
Karen Kornbluh, Doug Arent, Jennifer Hankins, Jigar Shah, Maggie Switek
A panel of experts from the NREL Foundation, Tulsa Innovation Labs, and the Milken Institute discussed strategies to compress multi-decade innovation timelines into three-to-five-year cycles for clean energy and AI deployment. Speakers highlighted the critical need to shift from linear financial incentives to unconventional cross-sector partnerships, warning that failing to rapidly scale domestic manufacturing risks transferring intellectual property to competitors like China. The consensus emphasized that accelerating grid capacity through virtual power plants and regulatory agility is essential to unlocking private capital and ensuring U.S. economic growth.
- Milken Institute37 min
Sovereign Wealth Funds: Lessons for the US | Finance Forum 2025
Caitlin MacLean, Victoria Barbary, Angela Rodell, Tarek Shoukri, Kaitlyn McLean
The U.S. Treasury Department is currently soliciting private sector input to design a national Sovereign Wealth Fund using a blank-slate approach for capitalization and investment mandates. Drawing on global best practices and case studies like the Alaska Permanent Fund, the proposed framework emphasizes independent governance to insulate decisions from political cycles while targeting strategic sectors such as critical minerals and AI. With further concept papers expected in the spring, the initiative aims to establish a bipartisan structure that catalyzes high-cost infrastructure deployment without crowding out private commercial activity.
- Milken Institute40 min
New Pathways to Help Forgotten America | Finance Forum 2025
Rich Ditizio, Marla Blow, Van Jones
A panel at the Milken Institute, featuring Skoll Foundation's Marla Carter and Amazon Web Services' Dan Price, analyzes the structural retreat of the U.S. public sector and the subsequent necessity for private capital and technology to solve social challenges. The discussion details strategic pivots in philanthropy toward complex capital stacks, highlights specific tech interventions in criminal justice and infrastructure, and reframes diversity initiatives as economic imperatives rather than moral obligations. Looking forward, the speakers outline a new "Center for Advancing the American Dream" to document mentorship narratives while urging the integration of AI and community access to navigate a rapidly changing technological landscape.
- Milken Institute29 min
Community Infrastructure Building Blocks: 10,000 Communities Initiative | Finance Forum 2025
Rachel Halfaker, Andreas Karelas, Jane Brady Knight, Amanda Li, Tony Pipa
High demand for rural economic revitalization faces significant deployment barriers, including insufficient project scale, limited local capacity, and traditional financing models that exclude non-profits lacking credit scores. To overcome these hurdles, successful strategies now employ blended capital stacks, direct pay provisions from the Inflation Reduction Act, and digital platforms that automate underwriting to reduce overhead on small-ticket clean energy investments. By shifting narratives toward rural agency and utilizing community financial institutions, stakeholders aim to establish a permanent, self-sustaining asset class that drives long-term wealth creation and strengthens national competitiveness.
- a16z27 min
DeepSeek, Reasoning Models, and the Future of LLMs
Guido Appenzeller, Marco Mascorro
DeepSeek R1 is an open-weight reasoning model from China that achieves top-tier performance by combining Multi-Head Latent Attention, Group Relative Policy Optimization, and a 256-expert MoE architecture to generate complex thought chains. The development team overcame early behavioral failures through a low-cost, self-supervised pipeline utilizing 800,000 verifiable traces and rule-based verification to produce responses up to 10,000 tokens long for roughly $5.5 million in base training costs. This breakthrough has shifted industry focus toward test-time compute and local deployment, enabling state-of-the-art reasoning on consumer hardware while bypassing traditional bottlenecks associated with human-labeled data.
- a16z23 min
How to spot an AI Deepfake
Over 90% of security attacks now target human behavior, with AI-driven social engineering tactics like deepfakes and voice cloning surging to affect millions globally and enable sophisticated impersonations of corporate leaders and government officials. Experts warn that while current losses are financial, these threats pose imminent risks to critical infrastructure and human safety, driven by open-source models that allow adversaries to automate attacks without significant cost barriers. To counter this evolving landscape, organizations must shift from static compliance training to continuous, adaptive simulations and deploy defensive AI agents capable of countering automated offensive operations.
- Goldman Sachs26 min
Macro questions and market strength
Jan Hatzius, Dominic Wilson, Alison Nathan
Goldman Sachs economists Jan Hatzias and Dominic Wilson project that 2025 U.S. real GDP will grow by approximately 2.5% despite an effective tariff increase of 4–7 percentage points, a scenario where tailwinds continue to outweigh policy headwinds. While the Federal Reserve is anticipated to cut rates later in the year due to sticky but manageable inflation, markets remain resilient near record highs driven by strong consumer income growth and a pricing dynamic that favors offshore equities. The analysts warn that aggressive tariff implementation poses a significant tail risk for growth and bond yields, yet they maintain that the current low recession probability supports a gradual upward drift in risk assets.
- Goldman Sachs35 min
How the Florida Panthers won the Stanley Cup with CEO Matt Caldwell
CEO Matt Caldwell spearheaded the Florida Panthers' transformation from a financially struggling franchise into a Stanley Cup champion by implementing Wall Street-level financial rigor and a data-driven "grit" culture. The organization achieved this turnaround by pivoting revenue streams from traditional cable models to direct-to-consumer and Over-the-Air broadcasting while aggressively cultivating community engagement through veteran-focused initiatives and grassroots youth programs. This strategic shift not only secured the team's first championship in thirty years but also established a sustainable business model capable of thriving despite the NHL's unique salary cap constraints and the rapid evolution of sports media distribution.
- Goldman Sachs29 min
The pace of innovation in biotech: Mirador’s Mark McKenna
Former Prometheus Biosciences CEO Mark McKenna discusses the transformation of the biotech landscape from a pharma-dominated field to one driven by agile, high-risk companies like his current venture, Mirador Therapeutics, which recently secured $400 million in rapid fundraising. Drawing on his experience leading the $11 billion Merck acquisition of Prometheus, McKenna emphasizes that success now relies on leveraging generative AI for precision medicine, operating with a "speed as currency" philosophy to parallelize trials, and maintaining strategic secrecy to protect intellectual property against global competitors. The dialogue further outlines critical industry challenges, including the need to reform drug pricing models dominated by PBMs and to de-risk supply chains from over-reliance on Chinese manufacturing.