Latest Interviews

Life after Trump: what’s the future of the Republican Party?

Trump, Joe Biden, Idris Kahloun, James Astle

Despite his 2020 election loss, Donald Trump maintains dominant control over the Republican Party, compelling former critics like Lindsey Graham and Marco Rubio to align with his populist platform to avoid electoral backlash. This entrenched loyalty, reinforced by base support for the 2020 election fraud narrative, has created a fragmented media ecosystem and left Trump with minimal internal opposition as he contemplates a 2024 run. Analysts warn that the party's future trajectory remains volatile, with the strength of Trump's personal appeal serving as the decisive factor in either cementing a populist era or allowing for a potential succession.

John Connaughton, Co-Managing Partner of Bain Capital

John Connaughton, Allison

Bain Capital's Connaughton utilized early pandemic insights to secure liquidity for Asian portfolio companies while accelerating technology investments across education, consumer, and healthcare sectors. Drawing on a 2000 dot-com era lesson about defending fact-based theses against conventional wisdom, he defines successful investing as executing calculated risks rather than relying on instinct and predicts S&P 500 stagnation driven by unsustainable valuations. Amidst anticipated US-China tensions and a codependent global supply chain, emerging investors are urged to forge independent brands and unique domain expertise, mirroring Connaughton's own strategic pivot into healthcare to establish a distinct market perspective.

DeepMind solves protein folding | AlphaFold 2

Lex

DeepMind's AlphaFold 2 has solved the fifty-year protein folding challenge by employing attention-based transformer architectures to achieve prediction accuracy rivaling expensive experimental methods. This system outperformed its predecessor and all competitors at the 2018 CASP competition, generating precise three-dimensional structures for millions of proteins despite the astronomical complexity of folding configurations. Experts anticipate this breakthrough will catalyze multiple Nobel Prizes and transform fields ranging from drug discovery to materials science by enabling the computational design of proteins for treating misfolding diseases and engineering agricultural and industrial applications.

Dr. Michael Lomax, President and CEO of the United Negro College Fund

Dr. Michael Lomax, Asai

Founded by Mary McLeod Bethune and Tuskegee Institute leaders, the United Negro College Fund supports 101 HBCUs by channeling over $5 billion into scholarships for 500,000 students to convert undeveloped human capital into market-ready assets. Following the 2020 pandemic and racial reckoning, the organization canceled gala events, secured a $40 million pledge to fund specific institutional scholarships, and retained its workforce through salary cuts to minimize student enrollment losses. Now driving a capital campaign to grow its endowment from $100 million to $6 billion, UNCF targets the tenfold funding disparity between HBCUs and elite private institutions while prioritizing experiential learning pipelines for first-generation students entering finance and technology sectors.

Alan Jope, CEO of Unilever

Alan Jope, Gilberto, Roberto

Unilever CEO Alan Job details the company's decade-long experience with the Sustainable Living Plan, revealing that early targets underestimated the pace of external change and highlighting the difficulty of influencing consumer behavior despite clear financial benefits from purpose-led brands. The organization now generates over half its turnover from purpose-driven portfolios and has secured an €800 million reduction in costs, while successfully positioning itself as the employer of choice in 52 of 54 countries through its corporate values. Looking forward, Unilever advocates for a multi-stakeholder economic model, urging standardized non-financial reporting and carbon pricing between $40 and $100 to bridge the gap between current sustainability goals and necessary systemic transformation.

Mark Carney, UN Special Envoy for Climate Action and Finance

Mark Carney, Richard

Driven by escalating climate risks and strong public pressure, global leaders are mobilizing a triad of fiscal spending, regulatory mandates, and financial infrastructure to accelerate decarbonization efforts. Strategic shifts include the EU's aggressive trajectory toward €75–100 carbon pricing by 2030, the implementation of border carbon adjustments to prevent leakage, and government rebalancing from current expenditure toward capital investment in sectors like hydrogen and renewables. While private capital remains available, successful deployment hinges on establishing predictable, like-minded international frameworks that ensure regulatory certainty and attract long-term deployment.

Frances Frei, Harvard Business School Professor

Frances Frei, Sanyam Bhutani

Frances Fry applies data-driven leadership insights from her tenure at Uber and Harvard Business School to advocate for a shift away from self-centered management toward empowering others through structured team development. Her work documents how rapid cultural transformation at Uber resulted from prioritizing employee education and psychological safety over removing individuals, offering a blueprint for startups to embed inclusive practices from inception. Fry further advises executives to proactively replace themselves and integrate diversity into hiring and promotion systems to secure a competitive advantage rather than relying on performative gestures.

The Surge in Global Biotech Innovation

Jerry Lee, Liz

In 2020, the biotech sector raised $55 billion in equity financing and pursued approximately $50 billion in M&A activity despite an initial pandemic pause, driven by supply-side advancements in genomic medicine and the urgent need for external innovation. Leading pharmaceutical giants like Pfizer, BioNTech, and Moderna deployed significant capital to develop vaccine candidates with high efficacy, while large-cap companies utilized substantial dry powder to acquire novel therapeutic technologies ahead of anticipated patent cliffs. Concurrently, cross-border collaboration shifted toward deep R&D partnerships between U.S., European, and Chinese entities, marking the emergence of Chinese biotechs as potential global competitors supported by government initiatives and a wave of returning scientific talent.

ESG Passes the Stress Test

John Goldstein, Liz

During the 2020 market downturn, ESG funds demonstrated exceptional resilience and attracted $120 billion in net inflows while non-ESG alternatives saw outflows, proving sustainable finance is a fundamental economic driver rather than a market luxury. Goldman Sachs and other industry leaders now prioritize "Inclusive Growth" alongside environmental goals, urging investors and corporations to move beyond ideological labels toward tangible execution in risk mitigation, talent retention, and supply chain mandates. Looking ahead to 2021, the strategic focus shifts to standardizing data, accelerating decarbonization in hard-to-abate sectors like steel and energy, and integrating these real-economy drivers directly into core business purposes.

Care after covid: the future of elderly health-care

Sasha Nauta

Amidst a rapidly aging global population where the 80-and-older demographic is set to double, rising dementia costs and severe care home mortality rates have exposed the fragility of current long-term care systems. While some nations explore controversial international outsourcing to manage labor expenses, the sector remains crippled by chronic understaffing driven by wages significantly lower than those in acute hospital settings. In response, pilot programs utilizing remote monitoring technology are proving that half of institutional care could shift to home settings, offering a potential pathway to mitigate resource strain and improve patient outcomes.

10 things I'm grateful for this Thanksgiving

A speaker identifies ten sources of gratitude ranging from literary figures like *Animal Farm*'s Boxer and Dostoevsky's Prince Myshkin to technical elements like regular expressions and neural networks, using them to illustrate themes of quiet heroism and enduring beauty. These diverse inspirations, which include personal experiences such as wrestling weight cuts and academic research at MIT, collectively foster a perspective that embraces both human flaws and the elegance of theoretical computer science. The presentation concludes with the speaker extending reciprocal holiday well-wishes to an audience that has supported their work over the past two years.

Dennis Lynch, Head of Counterpoint Global at Morgan Stanley Investment Management

Dennis Lynch, Katie

Dennis Lynch, who oversees over $100 billion in assets at Morgan Stanley's CounterPoint Global, discusses how the pandemic accelerated e-commerce and digital infrastructure trends while reinforcing a fundamental investment approach centered on internet advertising, streaming, and healthcare technology. Lynch emphasizes that strict position sizing for capital-intensive businesses and a culturally diverse, long-tenured team are critical for navigating systemic crises and drawdowns. He further advises emerging investors to cultivate broad perspective over narrow specialization to ensure long-term relevance as industry landscapes shift over decades.

Tristan Harris, President of the Center for Humane Technology

Tristan Harris, Jessica

Tristan Harris, a former Google design ethicist and founder of the Center for Humane Technology, argues that Silicon Valley business models exploit human psychological weaknesses through algorithms that prioritize engagement over wellbeing. He contends that these systems fracture shared reality, drive societal polarization, and undermine collective action on existential threats like climate change by treating users as domesticated livestock rather than citizens. Harris proposes regulating these underlying attention economies to restore executive control and build a nonpartisan foundation for democratic resilience.

Misan Harriman, Photographer

Misan Harriman

British Vogue Editor-in-Chief Edward Enninfield selected photographer Anne Harriman to shoot the historic September cover, marking the first time in the publication's 104-year history that a Black photographer has held the role. This decision followed the viral spread of Harriman's civil rights imagery from the 2020 London protests, which highlighted her self-taught background and dual Nigerian-English cultural influences. Looking toward the future, Harriman aims to scale her media business "We See" to drive institutional change while advocating for prison education reform and expanding into documentary filmmaking to emulate the legacies of artists like Gordon Parks.

Comma.ai Drive and Tour with George Hotz and Lex Fridman

George Hotz, Lex Fridman

George Hotz demonstrated the Comma 2 system's end-to-end neural network capabilities during a San Diego drive, where the vehicle successfully navigated complex banked curves and lane changes without disengagement while leveraging Hyundai's existing longitudinal control. Operating from multinational facilities in the U.S. and Europe, the company has grown its active user base to nearly 3,000 monthly devices and now manages 30 million miles of data to validate safety through rigorous injection testing. With plans to deploy OpenPilot 1.1 via over-the-air updates and integrate new machine learning talent, the firm aims to achieve full holistic autonomy on highways before expanding to dense city environments.