Latest Interviews
Showing 3541–3555 of 4,875 transcripts.
Clear all filters- Milken Institute56 min
A Conversation with Leon Black
Founded by Leon Black three decades ago, Apollo Global Management now directs $350 billion in assets across 18 global offices using a diversified "fund for all seasons" strategy that spans private equity, private credit, insurance, and real assets. The firm distinguishes itself by targeting an average acquisition multiple of 6x EBITDA and prioritizing complexity arbitrage in corporate carve-outs and distressed scenarios, while shifting 80% of capital into long-duration structures to mitigate fundraising pressure. Facing a market where public valuations discourage long-term planning, Apollo is actively deploying capital into public-to-private transactions and emerging sectors like aviation finance with the goal of generating 8–10% returns in credit platforms over the coming years.
- Milken Institute1h 2m
Is Crypto Finally Growing Up?
Staci Warden, Michael Gronager, Navin Gupta, George Kikvadze, Simon Seojoon Kim, Mike Novogratz
Moderated by Stacey Worden, a panel of industry leaders including Mike Novogratz and George Kikvadze confirmed the cryptocurrency sector's evolution from a speculative frontier to a regulated, institutional-grade asset class. The discussion highlighted Bitcoin's role as a macro hedge against fiat debasement while outlining how enterprise solutions like Ripple are driving mass adoption in Asia and how blockchain traceability effectively combats illicit finance. Looking ahead, the group projected that infrastructure maturation over the next five years will trigger a global economic transformation comparable to the post-1999 internet boom, with billions of users entering the ecosystem through decentralized finance and device-to-device interactions.
- Milken Institute23 min
A Conversation with Paul Ryan
Former House Speaker Paul Ryan outlines a legislative agenda for a potential second Trump term focused on extending tax cuts, reforming healthcare, and modernizing infrastructure while navigating a consensus on technological decoupling with China. He attributes the 2017–2018 surge in bipartisan output to the administration's deregulatory approach and projects continued economic growth despite ongoing trade uncertainties. Ryan, now a university professor and policy founder, argues that economic stagnation drives current political polarization and warns against the erosion of meritocracy in favor of identity-based politics.
- Milken Institute59 min
Private Equity: A Continuing Evolution of Capital Access
Glen August, Nazim Azimbaev, Maggie Finari, Ray Thorne, Andrew Weinberg, Mark O'Lean
Leading institutional investors including Glen August of Oak Hill Advisors and Maggie Finari of Ontario Teachers' Pension Plan convened to debate strategies for securing 20% net returns in a private market increasingly constrained by 11–12% historical averages. The panelists outlined divergent approaches ranging from Ray Thorne's asset-intensive company building to Andrew Weinberg's focus on the middle-market family business wealth transfer, all while integrating ESG principles and data science to hedge against technological disruption. Despite optimistic targets, the group emphasized that geopolitical tensions, potential policy shifts, and the inevitable credit cycle downturn necessitate strict covenant protections and selective operational value-add to sustain performance.
- Milken Institute37 min
Opening Plenary - Part 2: Global Overview
Waleed Al Muhairi, Adam Boehler, Raymond Dalio, Dina Powell McCormick, John, Haldun al-Mubarak
The event analyzes escalating global economic headwinds driven by geopolitical tensions and the coronavirus outbreak while detailing how major institutional investors like Mubadala adjust their portfolios toward cash-flow robust assets amidst shifting monetary policies. Simultaneously, the discussion highlights the strategic maneuvering of entities such as the DFC to counter Chinese influence in emerging markets and addresses the urgent need for economic diversification in the Middle East to mitigate youth unemployment risks. Experts emphasize that long-term success now depends on integrating ESG principles and accelerating the transition away from hydrocarbon dependency before fiscal stability is compromised by resource depletion.
- Lex Fridman8 min
Jim Keller: Most People Don't Think Simple Enough | AI Podcast Clips
The speaker contrasts the limitations of following rigid recipes against the necessity of deep understanding for adapting human systems and computer architectures to novel challenges. They advocate for a radical three-to-five-year refresh cycle in computer design to avoid the diminishing returns of incremental optimization, arguing that legacy code inevitably becomes unnecessarily complex and slow. Despite business pressures prioritizing short-term stability and marketing demands for universal performance gains, successful organizations must parallelize legacy maintenance with new architectural development to prevent long-term stagnation.
- Lex Fridman26 min
Moore's Law is Not Dead (Jim Keller) | AI Podcast Clips
The speaker challenges predictions of Moore's Law's demise by highlighting a cascade of innovations across materials science and optics that have sustained exponential performance growth for fifty years despite shrinking transistor dimensions to near-atomic scales. While current physics limits approach 2 to 10 atoms, the projected roadmap envisions a 100x shrink factor over the next two decades supported by new architectures like nanowires and abstraction layers that manage the complexity of billions of transistors. Ultimately, this relentless hardware scaling is expected to trigger unpredictable computational eras where AI systems discover patterns through endless projections rather than explicit mathematical functions, fundamentally altering how computation is performed.
- Lex Fridman24 min
Jim Keller: Elon Musk and Tesla Autopilot | AI Podcast Clips
Jim Keller, Elon Musk, Lex Fridman
Tesla's approach to autonomous driving prioritizes affordable, scalable hardware designed through first principles to address the 80% of accidents caused by human attention lapses rather than incremental engineering tweaks. The methodology distinguishes between solving simple detection problems and the complex challenge of modeling human intent and behavioral unpredictability, a divergence that delays perfect generalization while promising a tenfold safety improvement in the near term. By combining rapid data collection with a manufacturing philosophy that strips away assumptions, the initiative navigates intense regulatory scrutiny to achieve robust system safety despite the long timeline required for full human-like understanding.
- Goldman Sachs17 min
David Katz, Founder and CEO of The Plastic Bank
The Plastic Bank operates a global currency system that enables impoverished communities to exchange collected plastic for essential goods like education, healthcare, and utilities. This model functions as a for-profit enterprise that supplies major corporations with verified recycled materials while providing collectors with an entrepreneurial income stream exceeding traditional wages. The organization is currently expanding its footprint upstream along the Nile River to prevent marine debris at its source by formalizing waste collection in Egypt and neighboring nations.
- Goldman Sachs28 min
Leon Black, Chairman and CEO of Apollo Global Management
Founded by Leon Black in 1990, Apollo Global Management has evolved from a distressed debt specialist into a $200 billion alternative credit giant that uniquely profits across all market cycles through an integrated debt-and-equity platform. The firm currently derives 75% of its business from this credit division and its insurance subsidiary Athene, which leverages a yield-enhancing strategy to significantly boost returns on equity. Black remains committed to the firm's value-oriented philosophy and the private equity model, citing its critical role in supporting underfunded public pensions while simultaneously driving major ESG initiatives and medical research breakthroughs.
- Y Combinator1h 58m
YC SUS: Aaron Epstein and Eric Migicovsky give website feedback
Aaron Epstein, Eric Migicovsky
Aaron Epstein, a YC alum and Creative Market co-founder, evaluates the websites of Startup School founders to identify critical failures in clarity, trust signals, and conversion optimization. The review process prioritizes precise value propositions and user benefit statements over visual aesthetics, exposing common issues like vague positioning, confusing navigation, and a lack of social proof across diverse ventures ranging from crypto tax tools to pet insurance. Epstein concludes with a strategic directive for founders to validate their messaging through external user testing and to align their site content immediately with a single, clearly defined use case.
- Goldman Sachs30 min
Sustainability - Goldman Sachs 2020 Investor Day
Asahi Pompei, Margaret Anadu, John Goldstein, David Solomon, Mike May
Goldman Sachs has declared a $750 billion ten-year commitment to integrate sustainable economic growth into its core operations, focusing on climate transition and inclusive development through initiatives like the Urban Investment Group. This strategy mobilizes capital across all divisions to finance green infrastructure, social sovereign bonds, and private impact investments while expanding philanthropic programs such as 10,000 Women to support 50,000 entrepreneurs globally. By leveraging rigorous risk management and standardized data disclosure, the firm positions private capital as a primary solution for global inequality and climate challenges amidst shifting regulatory and market demands.
- a16z34 min
The Risk, Fear, and Preparation Behind Free Solo
Alex Honnold's two-year preparation for his free solo of El Capitan combined high-volume physical training and iterative mental risk assessment to achieve a historic, unroped ascent of the granite wall. This journey, captured in Jimmy Chin's Academy Award-nominated IMAX documentary, detailed not only the specific climbing strategies and speed records involved but also Honnold's evolution from a van-dwelling "dirtbag" to a philanthropist funding the Honold Foundation. The project highlights how Honnold balances extreme athletic performance with a deliberate shift toward solar energy initiatives, emphasizing that his radical lifestyle decisions were driven by a pursuit of mastery rather than conventional happiness.
- Lex Fridman20 min
David Chalmers: What is Consciousness? | AI Podcast Clips
The speaker defines phenomenal consciousness as subjective experience distinct from information processing, highlighting the unresolved "hard problem" of explaining how physical brain processes generate feeling. While the event traces the shifting medical consensus on infant pain and the logical expansion of consciousness to diverse entities, it critically examines competing theories like panpsychism, cosmopsychism, and Integrated Information Theory as potential solutions. Ultimately, the presentation contrasts these minority views against the orthodox scientific stance, arguing that consciousness may require treatment as a fundamental property of reality rather than a mere emergent byproduct of complex machinery.
- Y Combinator1h 1m
YC SUS: Kat Mañalac and Eric Migicovsky discuss Week 2 SUS Lectures
Founders are advised to prioritize rapid MVP validation and recurring launches over perfectionism to maximize market discovery and gather authentic user feedback. Strategic distribution requires targeting accessible micro-communities and non-scalable manual hacks before scaling, while pricing and feature decisions must rely on real customer interactions rather than hypothetical surveys. Ultimately, sustainable growth depends on securing early revenue from niche customers to fund development, treating failed hypotheses as necessary pivots, and aligning product iteration with specific geographic or sector constraints.