Latest Interviews

Thelma Golden on Preserving Black Culture and the New Era of the Studio Museum in Harlem

Thelma Golden, Asahi Pompey

Thelma Golden, serving as Ford Foundation Director and Chief Curator of the Studio Museum in Harlem, continues her career-long mission to center artists of African descent while overseeing the museum's relocation into a new state-of-the-art facility in November. Her leadership leverages strategic partnerships with entities like Goldman Sachs to transform the institution from a temporary loft into a permanent cultural anchor that preserves the legacy of the 1968 founding while supporting contemporary creation. This expansion aims to solidify the museum's role as a vital space where art functions as both a historical mirror and a visionary window for processing current societal realities.

BofA's Hari Gopalkrishnan on AI Strategy with Julie Hyman

Hari Gopalkrishnan, Julie Hyman

Bank of America is allocating over $4 billion annually to scale AI from pilot programs to enterprise-wide deployment across its relationship management and credit underwriting operations. This strategy prioritizes solving specific business problems with rigorous governance focused on customer experience, return on investment, and safety, resulting in tools currently serving 25,000 advisors with plans to expand to 50,000. Despite significant efficiency gains, the bank maintains a growth trajectory by hiring 20,000 new employees this year to leverage AI for increased client capacity rather than workforce reduction.

Can Donald Trump secure a deal with Cuba? | The Economist

Donald Trump, Dr Christopher Sabatini, David Rennie, Sarah Birke, Christopher

A proposed transactional framework seeks to secure Cuban economic relief, including lifting the oil embargo, in exchange for a credible multi-party election plan. Key figures like Marco Rubio and Donald Trump aim to satisfy the Cuban-American voting bloc by offering a political roadmap that prioritizes economic liberalization over immediate regime change. Despite skepticism regarding the administration's long-term commitment, proponents argue that even a flawed agreement could dismantle the current stagnant leadership structure.

Is global culture dead? | The Economist

Tom Wainwright, Adam Roberts

Contrary to the expectation of cultural convergence, streaming data from 2019 to 2025 reveals a sharp global rise in local artist representation as audiences prioritize national identity over global homogeneity. This shift has compelled major platforms like Netflix to abandon failed "global first" productions in favor of domestic-focused strategies, while democratized technology and user-driven algorithms have further suppressed elite curation in favor of hyper-local viral trends. Consequently, charts in nations from Brazil to Mexico now show dominant local shares, with only specific language-sharing or Anglophone outliers remaining significantly influenced by foreign content.

Why are Gen-Z socialists obsessed with taxing billionaires? | The Economist

Generational shifts are driving a move from traditional progressive taxation toward novel levies on immovable wealth, exemplified by New York's new pied-à-terre tax on non-resident luxury properties. While economists debate whether targeting static assets like real estate avoids the innovation-killing pitfalls of direct billionaire wealth taxes, the discourse is increasingly expanding to include inheritance reform and one-off proposals in states like California. As AI-driven IPOs generate new ultra-high-net-worth individuals, this debate is poised to redefine fiscal policy beyond the narrow "billionaire" label in both the US and UK.

Why Rates Could Keep Rising

Phillip Lee, Chris Hussey, Phil Lee

Rising real yields are driven by a convergence of inflation uncertainty, resilient growth, and elevated fiscal deficits, causing market expectations to shift from anticipated rate cuts to a prolonged pause or potential hikes. The Federal Reserve's upcoming June guidance from its new Chairman underscores this uncertainty, while higher mortgage rates are stifling the housing market and eroding consumer spending power. Institutional investors are consequently adopting a bear-steepener strategy, maintaining dynamic patience in fixed income portfolios to navigate the divergence between robust equity performance and weakening underlying consumption.

Ceasefire, rates and the US consumer

Ralf Preusser, Bruno Braizinha, Sophia Salim, David Tinsley, Sfia Salim, Bruno Brasenia

Driven by persistent energy supply shocks and uncertain inflation baselines, market analysts project a limited number of European Central Bank rate hikes, with 10-year yields forecast to decline toward 2.9% before falling further to 2.7% by 2027 as growth risks persist. Concurrently, the volatility landscape reflects a regional divergence where European markets lag US levels due to rich pricing, while Asian markets like China demonstrate unique immunity to geopolitical tensions. In the US, consumer spending remains robust at a 3.2% annualized rate fueled by tax refunds and wage growth, creating a K-shaped recovery where higher-income groups drive discretionary gains despite rising gasoline costs.

Conflict keeps midstream compelling, integrateds see a pipeline of cash

Jean Ann, TJ Thornton

U.S. energy producers are prioritizing capital discipline and shareholder returns over expansion, while a B of A outlook projects long-term oil prices stabilizing between $70 and $71 supported by strategic reserve restocking and potential Iranian production increases. Disruptions to Qatar's LNG capacity and delays in new projects are shifting global supply toward equilibrium, driving a 50% EBITDA surge for U.S. LNG exporters by next year. Simultaneously, rising electricity demand from data centers and AI is accelerating natural gas pipeline construction, creating a divergence where midstream firms anticipate low double-digit earnings growth despite a neutral third-person tone ensuring objective delivery of these market shifts.

Is Defense the Next Trillion-Dollar Category? | a16z American Dynamism Summit

Erin Price-Wright, Michael Duffey, Dino Mavrookas

Saronix is reshaping maritime defense by pivoting to software-driven autonomy that slashes labor requirements from millions to mere fractions while deploying an "IKEA" manufacturing model at its new Louisiana Port Alpha facility. This industrial strategy integrates commercial vessel production to ensure economic sustainability and rapid scaling, directly addressing Pentagon constraints on manufacturing capacity through private capital investment and streamlined acquisition policies. By fostering a robust public-private partnership, the initiative aims to establish a century-long national industrial base capable of supporting both defense needs and global energy dominance.

How Founders Can Build for Law Enforcement and First Responders | The a16z Show

David Ulevitch, Col. Jeffrey Glover, Rahul Sidhu, Colonel Glover

Law enforcement agencies are rapidly transitioning from traditional physical confrontation to AI-driven investigative frameworks that utilize autonomous drones, sensor fusion, and behavioral analytics to prevent crime and optimize resource allocation. This shift is evident in successful interventions where technology de-escalated potential threats and in the adoption of data-driven well-being programs that have reversed historical union resistance to body-worn cameras. Looking ahead, international intelligence sharing and advanced fraud detection are becoming central to a new policing model that prioritizes technical analysis over brute force, requiring developers to deeply understand operational contexts to effectively deploy these inevitable advancements.

How to Trade Oil Now

Jerome Dortmans, Chris Hussey

Oil markets are currently navigating a binary valuation dependent on a potential memorandum signing, which determines whether prices stabilize near $95–$105 or re-price higher following a 30-day sell-off window. While the April ceasefire has removed the immediate risk premium on infrastructure, refined product shortages and yield shifts are expected to constrain European jet fuel supplies and sustain elevated summer prices for at least three to six months. Investor sentiment has subsequently pivoted from directional trading to downside hedging, anticipating that full supply normalization and a bearish market scenario will not materialize until nine months post-conflict.

Will AI Make Markets Less Efficient?

Osman Ali, Alison Nathan, George Lee

Goldman Sachs' Global Co-Head of Quantitative Investment Strategies, Osman Ali, discusses how his team leverages AI and machine learning to analyze market sentiment across 15,000 stocks daily, capturing the fact that over half of recent equity returns are now driven by themes rather than fundamentals. Ali explains that while advanced language models enhance market efficiency, their widespread adoption creates new alpha opportunities through crowding effects and predictable herd behavior, which the firm actively models to exploit. This strategy relies on a hybrid approach combining proprietary data, custom technology, and human experience to navigate a zero-sum game where increasing market complexity continuously generates fresh sources of value.

Do plants feel pain? | The Economist

Michael Pollan, Alok Jha

Biologists Michael Levin and other experts presented evidence that non-neural mechanisms like bioelectric fields enable information processing in organisms without centralized brains, as demonstrated by planaria worm regeneration and conditioned *Mimosa pudica* responses. The event detailed documented plant capabilities including visual mimicry, auditory toxin release, and the distinction between environmental sentience and human-style consciousness. While debate persists regarding whether immobile flora can perceive pain, the consensus among interviewed scientists suggests that plant intelligence is fundamentally an adaptive problem-solving tool rather than a basis for moral objection to consumption.

Starcloud's Philip Johnston: Why the Cheapest Compute Will Be in Space

Philip Johnston

StarCloud CEO Philip Johnston validated the technical feasibility of space-based high-performance computing through the successful "StarCloud 1" mission, which demonstrated thermal management and radiation tolerance while executing AI inference tasks. The company has filed an FCC application for an 88,000-satellite constellation capable of delivering 20 gigawatts of compute power with sub-50-millisecond latency, targeting a $100 billion capital expenditure that becomes economically viable once launch costs drop below $500 per kilogram. While current operations focus on inference workloads, the roadmap envisions future large-scale training structures that could catalyze a transition toward a Kardashev Type 2 civilization within decades.

Are AI models running out of power? | The Economist

Shailesh Chitnis, Rosie Blau

Facing severe hardware shortages and monopoly choke points where Nvidia and TSMC dominate supply, major AI developers like OpenAI and Anthropic are throttling services and redirecting resources to manage capacity. In response to these constraints, five cloud providers plan a $700 billion infrastructure build-out while companies grapple with three-to-five-year lead times for essential components and aging chip inventories. This fundamental mismatch between rapid software cycles and slow physical production is projected to reverse declining inference costs, potentially raising prices and slowing overall industry adoption.