Latest Interviews

In conversation with Robert F. Kennedy Jr.

Robert F. Kennedy Jr., David Sacks

Robert F. Kennedy Jr. officially launched his 2024 presidential campaign on the All-In podcast, outlining a platform defined by anti-interventionist foreign policy, strict regulation of the military-industrial complex, and significant skepticism toward federal pandemic responses. During the two-hour interview, he proposed ending U.S. involvement in Ukraine through immediate negotiations based on the Minsk Accords while simultaneously pledging to dismantle the CIA's clandestine operations and pardon whistleblowers like Edward Snowden. Although hosts David Sacks and Chamath Palihapitiya praised his willingness to challenge establishment orthodoxy, co-host Jason Calacanis noted specific skepticism regarding Kennedy's causal claims on vaccines, highlighting the intense debate over his proposed economic and social reforms.

What causes hurricanes?

Katie, Oliver Morton

Hurricanes are classified tropical storm systems defined by sustained winds of at least 74 mph that form over warm oceans when specific atmospheric and thermal conditions converge. These massive energy engines generate winds exceeding 200 mph and release rainfall at rates capable of causing billions in damages, with water-driven phenomena like storm surges accounting for the vast majority of fatalities. While climate change may not increase the total number of storms, warming oceans and rising sea levels are intensifying rainfall and slowing storm movement, necessitating a strategic shift toward infrastructure adaptation rather than intensity reduction.

Macklemore: How You Can Overcome Your Darkest Days & Hardest Battles!

Macklemore, Steven

Musician and activist Macklemore chronicles his decades-long battle with substance abuse, detailing critical turning points that ranged from a severe relapse during the pandemic to a catalyst moment involving his wife's pregnancy. His journey includes entering rehab at age 26 and helping his business partner achieve sobriety, strategies he now applies to advocate for the disease model of addiction and the importance of support systems like Al-Anon. Now maintaining long-term recovery, he channels these experiences into his latest album *Ben* and his Seattle-based youth program, "The Residency," while explicitly rejecting victimhood to focus on service and creative authenticity.

Digital Branding: Lessons from Vogue, Monetizing Social, Creator Tips | Field Notes with Connie Chan

Connie Chan, Susan Plagemann

Former Cosmopolitan and Vogue editor Susan Plageman, now President of WME Fashion, outlines a career spanning the transition from print dominance to digital disruption while advising creators to prioritize strategic alignment over simple metrics. She details how her teams at major publications pioneered digital video and social engagement by adapting content to new platforms rather than replicating print, emphasizing the need for brands to anticipate client needs rather than react to them. Plageman concludes that sustainable success in the modern economy requires self-disruption and a clear emotional brand identity, arguing that high-quality content creators deserve direct compensation from platforms for the value they provide.

Learning is so much easier when you care about your customers.

Organizations that prioritize customer needs achieve the fastest path to solving complex problems by dedicating significant time to direct engagement. This focused interaction allows leaders to identify specific pain points and develop tailored solutions at an accelerated pace. Consequently, the correlation between sustained customer dedication and operational speed establishes a direct link between engagement strategies and organizational outcomes.

The Scary New Research On Sugar & How They Made You Addicted To It! Jessie Inchauspé | E243

Jessie Inchauspé, Steven

Jesse Inchauspé, the self-styled "Glucose Goddess," leverages her personal experience with severe spinal trauma and resulting mental health crises to advocate for the management of blood sugar spikes as a foundational health strategy. She outlines ten practical behavioral interventions, including eating fiber before starches and moving after meals, to mitigate the cellular stress, chronic inflammation, and metabolic dysfunction caused by rapid glucose fluctuations. Ultimately, Inchauspé aims to democratize biochemistry knowledge by encouraging the public to view glucose control as a daily habit comparable to hygiene, thereby empowering individuals to prevent long-term conditions like diabetes and Alzheimer's without restrictive dieting.

Secrets You Can Learn From Your Customers

Michael Seibel, Dalton Caldwell

Founders accelerate learning by discarding initial overconfidence to personally engage with early customers, a strategy exemplified by Airbnb's photo visits, Brex's direct work with non-US startups, and Twitch's manual payments to streamers. This deep, one-on-one involvement unlocks specific insights and trust that surveys or data teams cannot provide, as demonstrated by the handwritten notes received from a single host and the creation of niche financial products. Consequently, success relies on maintaining direct founder-customer contact to solve edge cases quickly, avoiding the counterproductive layers of staff that dilute essential feedback.

E126: Big Tech blow-out, Powell’s recession warning, lab-grown meat, RFK Jr shakes up race & more

Powell, RFK Jr, Chamath, Calacanis, Friedberg, David Sacks, Timoth

Google reported a record-breaking Q1 2024 quarter with a 5% stock surge and historic Cloud profitability, yet investors remain concerned over the company's lack of a clear AI commercialization strategy and insufficient cost-cutting compared to peers like Meta. Broader market analysis suggests that major tech firms have transitioned into cash-flow-focused entities relying on buybacks rather than organic innovation, while a deflationary wave from AI adoption threatens to disrupt white-collar labor markets. Concurrently, the macroeconomic environment faces a potential 50/50 recession risk driven by aggressive Federal Reserve policies, alongside sector-specific distress in commercial real estate and persistent economic hurdles in the alternative protein industry.

Reasons to do YC.

Founders join Y Combinator to access a high-caliber peer group and secure a strategic defense against investor exploitation through the program's honest feedback and accountability structures. Critics who fail to propose superior alternatives for funding or processes while focusing solely on fear are dismissed as unreliable investors lacking viable options. Consequently, the speaker asserts that YC's track record of enabling founders to extract value remains valid precisely because it forces full responsibility for company outcomes.

The Surprising & Unbelievable Dark Side Of Open Relationships: Aubrey Marcus | E242

Aubrey Marcus, Joe Rogan

Onnit co-founder Aubrey Marcus details the company's trajectory from a $110,000 seed investment to its $60 million valuation and eventual acquisition by Unilever, highlighting critical survival strategies during a near-fatal cash crisis. Drawing on personal history marked by family dynamics and psychedelic exploration, Marcus explains how he transformed ancestral trauma and past relational failures into a philosophy of radical ownership and authentic partnership with his current partner, Violana. Looking forward, he is transitioning to a visionary role to fund new wellness initiatives and the donation-based "Fit for Service" community, aiming to facilitate collective healing through non-plant-based psychonautics while avoiding the delusions that plague traditional entrepreneurship.

Being accessible is one of the major advantages startups have over big companies.

Founders from established corporations often mistakenly replicate complex bureaucratic structures when launching startups, a strategy that directly conflicts with user demands for personal engagement. Software customers explicitly prioritize direct access to the creators of their tools, valuing the responsiveness and sense of being heard over impersonal support channels. Consequently, maintaining direct founder-to-user communication serves as a critical competitive advantage that large, rigid organizations are structurally unable to replicate.

Future of Resale: AI Styling, Live Video, Social Marketplaces | Field Notes by Connie Chan

Connie Chan, Tracy Sun

Tracy Sun, co-founder and SVP of Seller Experience at Poshmark, outlines the platform's evolution from a casual closet-cleanout app to a professional resale ecosystem where sellers earn incomes rivaling traditional employment. The company drives this growth by integrating AI-powered authentication and live video commerce to foster authentic connections, while specific tools and subsidized shipping strategies target the critical "first sale" inflection point for new seller retention. By embedding engineers in customer events and prioritizing a culture of handwritten notes and community curation, Poshmark continues to solve dual market challenges despite scaling hurdles in discovery and sustainability.

The "Most Money Raised" game

One of the stupid games sometimes people play is just how much money can I raise? What's the stupid prize if you play the raise as much as you can game? Often you lose control of your company. So like when you confront the challenges, suddenly, you know, your board can fire you. Often you find yourself burning tons of money because all the people who gave you money expect you to spend it. Oftentimes you have the wrong people on your team. You have a bunch of people who think you've made it, who think that this is, you know, the next Google, when in reality it's not. And then last, you might have to change what you're working on or change the problem or pivot in some significant way. But now there are all of these people and all this money and all of this momentum going down a direction that's driving a company off the cliff. And that pivot becomes 10 times harder or damn near impossible oftentimes. But you did win the fundraising game. Yeah, it's a congratulations. So congratulations. Here's your prize. You have a messed up company that shouldn't have raised all the money. and you've got to dig yourself out of a disaster.

Excessive capital raises frequently compromise founder control and force unsustainable burn rates as investors pressure rapid deployment. This influx of funding attracts teams with inflated expectations and locks companies into failing trajectories, making necessary pivots nearly impossible. Ultimately, prioritizing fundraising volume over strategic alignment often creates complex operational crises rather than genuine success.

Beyond Avatars: How AI is Reshaping Online Identity (Danny Postma and Sinead Bovell)

Danny Postma, Sinead Bovell

The digital creator economy has rapidly shifted from labor-intensive CGI to accessible generative AI, enabling non-experts to produce vast quantities of synthetic imagery for pennies per unit while major retailers adopt these tools for supply chain forecasting and trend analysis. This technological leap has sparked wage deflationary pressure across creative sectors and intensified legal debates over intellectual property, even as early-stage ventures struggle to build sustainable business models in a collapsing commodity market. Despite these disruptions, industry experts emphasize that high-fashion creativity remains resistant to full automation, driving a new demand for specialized, high-friction tools that solve specific brand consistency problems rather than competing in saturated general-purpose categories.

Deepak Chopra: The 5 Simple Steps That Will Make Your Mind Limitless! | E241

Deepak Chopra, Steve

Dr. Deepak Chopra addresses humanity's precarious state of extinction and pervasive suffering by attributing these crises to the collective illusion of a separate self and a society obsessed with activity over being. Drawing on his medical background and epigenetic research, he argues that trauma is biologically encoded across generations and that true healing requires shifting from reactive emotional states to a foundation of silence, sleep, and limbic resonance. Ultimately, his mission to transform one billion individuals through the Chopra Foundation seeks to replace material conditioning with self-realization, viewing the recognition of infinite awareness as the sole path to joy and sustainable global peace.