Latest Interviews

Ballot from the blue: will Ukraine hold a poll?

Rosie Bloor, Oliver Carroll, Andrew Knox, Natasha

Vladimir Putin and Donald Trump have recently challenged Volodymyr Zelensky's legitimacy, sparking a domestic political shift where Zelensky's approval rating of 45% now surpasses his military rival's 30% despite constitutional barriers preventing elections during martial law. Simultaneously, President Trump plans to announce "Liberation Day" tariffs that could mirror the destructive economic fallout of the 1930 Smoot-Hawley Act by triggering a global trade war and reducing American growth. While international and domestic political maneuvering continues, public health experts warn that the recent Daylight Savings Time shift disrupts circadian rhythms, linking the change to increased risks of heart attacks, depression, and sleep deprivation among vulnerable populations.

The idea for DoorDash didn’t come from surveys—it came from living a day in the customer’s shoes.

DoorDash's founders identified a critical delivery gap after observing a macaroon store owner reject a thick booklet of lost orders, revealing a scalable opportunity for the broader restaurant and retail ecosystem. This insight drove their strategy to validate three distinct components: the merchant need, consumer demand, and driver supply, which proved essential during their Y Combinator period. The resulting platform successfully addressed the unmet revenue potential for small merchants while establishing the necessary infrastructure for a functional gig economy workforce.

Bain Capital’s David Gross on global opportunities and private equity’s evolution

David Gross, Alison Mass

Bain Capital Co-Managing Partner David Gross outlined a bullish macro strategy targeting Japan's fragmented buyout market, Germany's divestiture wave, and India's stabilizing governance structure while leveraging a dedicated macro team to identify investable themes. To sustain competitive advantage, the firm is scaling its operational capabilities with 130 value creation professionals and deploying a venture arm to integrate disruptive technologies like AI across its portfolio. This approach, underpinned by Bain's private partnership model and disciplined valuation entry, has enabled distribution yields exceeding 30% in North America and positions the firm to navigate current cyclical lows toward a recovery in deployment and liquidity.

Right down: Le Pen barred

Le Pen, Rosie Bloor, Sophie Pedder, Callum Williams, Anne Rowe

A Paris criminal court banned Marine Le Pen from future elections for five years due to embezzlement, effectively removing her from the 2027 presidential race and plunging the National Rally into strategic uncertainty. Concurrently, a separate report highlights sustained rental inflation across wealthy nations driven by migration and supply shortages, while acknowledging that these costs have likely peaked despite remaining high. Finally, the obituary section honors Oleg Gordievsky, the high-ranking KGB officer who successfully defected to MI6 in 1985 after covertly gathering intelligence for decades.

Why CRM Needs an AI Revolution, with Day.ai Founder Christopher O’Donnell

Christopher O'Donnell, Pat Grady

Christopher O'Donnell, the former architect behind HubSpot's billion-dollar CRM growth, is launching Day.ai to replace manual data entry with an AI-native system that decompresses customer interactions into high-fidelity natural language records. By balancing autonomous automation with user oversight, the company targets the enterprise CRM market's $10 billion ARR potential while avoiding the risks of fully self-driving data models. The product's development strategy relies on direct customer engagement and a "slow is smooth" philosophy to ensure the system of record remains robust before scaling.

How Robin Hood CEO Rich Buery is addressing NYC’s rising poverty rates

Rich Buery, Richard Buery, Tony Pasquariello

The Robin Hood Foundation addresses New York City's rising poverty rate, which has surged to 25% due to expiring pandemic benefits and rising living costs, by deploying a $129 million investment strategy in 2024. This approach combines direct funding for high-impact interventions like the CUNY ASAP program with advocacy for systemic changes and the exploration of AI solutions to expand economic opportunity. Led by CEO Rich Beery, the organization utilizes evidence-based research and public-private partnerships to prioritize early childhood education and policy reforms that yield measurable long-term societal benefits.

Kevin Scott, CTO @ Microsoft: An Evaluation of Deepseek and How We Underestimate the Chinese

Kevin Scott, Harry Stebbings

Satya Nadella asserts that the current AI era offers unprecedented entrepreneurial opportunities, urging active iteration to transform raw models into user-centric products before scaling laws reach their eventual asymptote. He outlines a future where specialized agents and AI-generated code elevate software engineering productivity, while large enterprises and startups coexist within a hybrid ecosystem that leverages existing distribution alongside disruptive innovation. With frontier models already outperforming average medical practitioners in diagnostics, Nadella advocates for rapid global deployment to address scarcity in healthcare and education, emphasizing that leadership success depends on amplifying individual strengths rather than fixing weaknesses.

Shock and war: Myanmar junta exploits quake

Donald Trump, Rosie Bloor, Su Lin Wong, Anton LaGuardia, Lizzie Pete

Amidst a devastating earthquake in Myanmar, the ruling junta has intensified airstrikes and blocked humanitarian aid to populations outside its control, resulting in a confirmed death toll of 1,700 that officials fear will rise significantly due to restricted information access. Simultaneously, the US administration has ended over eighty years of global broadcasting by shutting down Voice of America and related networks, a move praised by authoritarian regimes like China and Russia as it eliminates platforms exposing human rights abuses in regions such as Xinjiang. In a separate development, the 2025 Economist Glass Ceiling Index revealed that while Sweden has reclaimed the top spot for gender equality, the United States continues to lag due to a lack of federally mandated parental leave and high childcare costs, despite record highs in women's parliamentary representation in nations like Britain and Japan.

Young Men Are (Quietly) Giving Up...Here’s Why!

Steven, Scott Galloway, Logan Ury

A March 2025 Centre of Social Justice report identifies a critical demographic crisis where young men are falling behind in education and employment, driven by biological maturity gaps, educational structures favoring girls, and a transformed dating market. This "Lost Boys" phenomenon has triggered a surge in NEET status, mental health issues, and political realignment among males under 30, exacerbated by the collapse of traditional vocational pathways and the rise of digital isolation. The event synthesizes these findings with proposed interventions, including revitalized vocational training, delayed school entry, and the creation of male peer support groups, while framing the crisis as an existential economic threat that requires systemic solutions to ensure societal stability.

Douglas Murray: Putin, Zelenskyy, Trump, Israel, Netanyahu, Hamas & Gaza | Lex Fridman Podcast #463

Douglas Murray, Putin, Zelenskyy, Trump, Netanyahu, Lex Fridman

Douglas Murray analyzes the grinding attrition of the Ukraine-Russia war and the catastrophic intelligence failure of Israel's October 7th Hamas attack, emphasizing how fanaticism and political disillusionment have shifted strategic outcomes. He critiques the Zelensky-Trump summit as a premature diplomatic misstep driven by incoherent US strategy while simultaneously exposing Hamas's systematic indoctrination and Israel's operational struggles against an enemy utilizing civilian populations as shields. Ultimately, the discussion challenges Western "realist" foreign policy assumptions and antisemitic projections, arguing that true clarity emerges only through confronting the brutal realities of ideological extremism and the moral necessity of supporting democratic resilience.

Hacking, defending, surviving: 15 expert takes on information security in the age of AI

Rob, Holden Karnofsky, Tantum Collins, Nick Joseph, Nova DasSarma, Sella Nevo, Kevin Esvelt, Lennart Heim, Zvi Mowshowitz, Bruce Schneier, Nita Farahany, Vitalik Buterin, Nathan Labenz, Allan Dafoe, Tom Davidson, Carl Shulman

Experts highlight that physical infiltration vectors like USB drives and the immense strategic value of stolen AI model weights expose frontier systems to significant theft by both nation-states and casual actors. While formal verification and liability shifts are proposed to mitigate these risks, severe workforce shortages and the inability of current defenses to stop well-funded adversaries leave the confidentiality of critical AI assets highly vulnerable. Consequently, the consensus suggests that without mandatory security standards and a fundamental shift in security culture, the development of advanced AI remains compromised by the threat of unauthorized deployment and "weaponized" model variants.

Julia Hoggett, CEO @ LSEG plc: The Myths and the Reality of The London Stock Exchange

Julia Hoggett, Dame Julia Hoggett, Harry Stebbings

Addressing a three-decade market disconnect driven by outdated regulations and pension reform, the London Stock Exchange has implemented a five-pillar "Fast-Fire" agenda to revive capital raising by aligning listing rules with global standards and restoring bank-funded research. Central to this strategy is a shift toward outcome-based regulation and the Mansion House Compact, which commits the UK's largest pension schemes to allocating 5% of assets to private companies while proposing a tapered stamp duty to incentivize domestic investment. These structural changes aim to transition the UK from a cost-focused regulatory model to a vibrant ecosystem where domestic capital fuels entrepreneurship, positioning London as the second-largest equity market globally for 2024-25.

What Founders Can Do To Improve Their Design Game

Aaron, Raphael Schaad

Raphael Schad argues that successful startups require the intersection of design, business, and technology, urging designers to learn coding to bridge the gap between concept and execution. His startup Cron exemplifies this approach, having evolved into Notion Calendar following an acquisition that validated the power of founders who can build their own product visions. As artificial intelligence reshapes product categories, Schad emphasizes that the ability to create interactive prototypes and understand technical constraints remains a critical competitive advantage for modern founders.

Whack of all trades: America’s economy

Jason Palmer, Simon Rabinovich, Sarah Larniuk, Oleg Tsenkoltadze, Lyudmila Mironenko, Kate Mikluka, Andrew Miller

Amidst record economic uncertainty driven by President Trump's imminent tariff announcements, small businesses face paralysis while the auto industry risks severe disruption from new protectionist measures. In parallel, Japan continues its extensive non-military support for Ukraine through reconstruction grants, workforce retraining, and cultural preservation initiatives that have helped sustain 4% economic growth despite the war. Meanwhile, the viral success of the Netflix series "Adolescence" has intensified global debates on the impact of toxic online cultures and generational disconnects in addressing male violence against women.

Inside Varda’s Space Factory | Delian Asparouhov, Founders Fund & Varda

Delian Asparouhov, Molly

Varda Aerospace has transitioned from an MVP demo to a high-cadence manufacturing operation, securing its first major revenue recognition with a commercial-pharmaceutical mission and launching a dedicated Department of Defense contract. Founders Fund co-founder Delian Liu projects an aggressive schedule of monthly launches and landings while leveraging Rocket Lab's platform to focus engineering resources on re-entry vehicles and drug reactors. The company currently operates a 60,000-square-foot facility in El Segundo with 115 employees and is navigating complex regulatory hurdles by targeting landing zones in Australia to bypass US military range scarcity.