Latest Interviews

A Conversation with the President of Paraguay H.E. Santiago Peña | Global Conference 2025

Santiago Peña, Daniel Yergin

Under President Santiago Pena's leadership, Paraguay has secured a positive credit outlook from S&P Global and a diversified economy driven by industrial growth and renewable energy exports. The government's strict "no shortcuts" fiscal policy and simplified tax regime have stabilized currency and attracted major foreign investment, particularly from Brazil's manufacturing sector and global tech firms seeking data center connectivity. As the nation pursues OECD membership and expands trade agreements with the EU and UAE, it positions itself as a top-performing Latin American economy with significant potential for green hydrogen and digital infrastructure development.

Things That Will Blow Your Mind | Global Conference 2025

Richard Sandler, JC Btaiche, Rowland Illing, Christyl Johnson, Jeb Terry, Crystal Johnson

Led by moderator Richard Sandler, a panel of industry leaders from NASA, FUSE, AWS, and Cosm explored the technological interdependencies required to achieve sustainable lunar habitation by 2040, commercial fusion energy within a decade, and AI-driven healthcare advancements. Speakers detailed critical innovations ranging from NASA's use of digital twins and inflatable habitats for Mars missions to FUSE's "Radiation as a Service" model and AWS's multimodal generative AI applications that accelerate biological discovery. The consensus emphasized that while government funding is necessary, scalable progress in space, energy, and health relies heavily on structured public-private partnerships to incentivize private capital and navigate the growing energy demands of these transformative sectors.

America's Energy Problem: We Need A New Grid

David Ulevitch, Erin Price-Wright, Ryan McEntush, Aaron

This event addresses the critical ossification of the U.S. electrical grid, where aging infrastructure, severe transformer backlogs, and a dispersed skilled workforce have stalled megaproject development. Panelists argue that the solution lies in a decentralized "leapfrog" strategy combining on-site generation, Small Modular Reactors, and AI-driven management to bypass interconnection bottlenecks. The discussion highlights urgent investment opportunities in grid visibility software, industrial robotics, and supply chain diversification to meet the explosive power demands of data centers and EVs.

Nobel Laureate John Jumper: AI is Revolutionizing Scientific Discovery

John Jumper

Google DeepMind leader John Jumper presents AlphaFold 2, an AI system that revolutionizes structural biology by accurately predicting protein 3D structures to bridge the massive gap between sequenced genes and experimentally solved forms. The technology's superior accuracy, validated by a thirty-fold reduction in error rates at CASP14 and the release of over 200 million predictions, has accelerated drug discovery and enabled novel applications like re-engineered molecular syringes for targeted therapy. This shift allows experimentalists to advance the pace of biological research by 5 to 10 percent, transforming AI from a narrow computational tool into a fundamental amplifier for scientific discovery.

Strategies for Expanding Affordable Housing | Global Conference 2025

Jennifer Sondag, Stephen J. Cloobeck, Scott Epstein, Martin Muoto, Shane Phillips, Stephanie Rawlings-Blake

A high-stakes panel on California's housing crisis converges on the conclusion that a five-million-unit supply shortage, exacerbated by regulatory burdens like CEQA and restrictive zoning, necessitates urgent legislative and structural reform. Key figures including developer Martin and gubernatorial candidate Stephen Zake advocate for dismantling bureaucratic barriers, citing cost disparities between inefficient nonprofit construction and private sector models, while highlighting successful precedents in Cambridge and New Zealand. The discussion culminates in a strategic pivot toward public-private partnerships and single-family upzoning, arguing that aligning private capital with social impact is essential to resolve the workforce housing mismatch and lower costs for essential workers.

US Economic Competitiveness in a Changing World | Global Conference 2025

Stephanie Flanders, Gary Cohn, Kevin McCarthy, Peter Orszag, Ruth Porat, Glenn Youngkin

Panelists project the U.S. economy will maintain long-term resilience driven by global reserve currency status and corporate investment, despite short-term fiscal strain and a macro-resilience decline caused by supply chain diversification away from China. To address structural deficits, the discussion emphasizes accelerating GDP growth through aggressive AI adoption, a nuclear energy revolution to power digital infrastructure, and tax policy extensions that prioritize domestic manufacturing over antitrust enforcement. Simultaneously, the administration faces a critical tension between strict immigration enforcement and the urgent need to attract global talent, a challenge highlighted by Virginia's $100 billion in recent corporate commitments and its pivot toward non-traditional workforce development pathways.

Grok 4 Wows, The Bitter Lesson, Third Party, AI Browsers, SCOTUS backs POTUS on RIFs

Travis Kalanick, Keith Rabois, Chamath, Jason, Friedberg

Travis Kalanick unveiled his "Bowl Builder" robotic food assembly machine designed to slash labor costs to 10% of revenue, while Elon Musk confirmed ongoing discussions with Pony AI to license autonomous driving technology for both passenger and food delivery applications. These logistical advances align with Musk's announcement that Grok 4 has outperformed competitor models by scaling general computation and transitioning exclusively to synthetic training data. Amidst these technological shifts, Musk also proposed a new political party focused on fiscal responsibility to influence congressional races, a move supported by the Supreme Court's recent ruling granting the President broad authority to execute federal workforce reductions.

Balance Sheet: The US Government Budget and National Debt | Global Conference 2025

Josh Barro, Maya MacGuineas, Steven T. Mnuchin, Paul Ryan, Alan Schwartz, Phillip Swagel, David Malani

A panel of economic experts and former officials projected that U.S. deficits will reach 8% of GDP within four years, driven by expiring tax provisions, rising interest costs, and an inflexible entitlement system facing insolvency by 2033. While policy proposals ranging from Value Added Taxes to sovereign wealth funds were debated, participants warned that political gridlock and current IRS reductions will likely delay necessary structural reform until a market crisis forces action. The discussion highlighted a potential erosion of dollar hegemony due to rising borrowing costs and foreign diversification, urging the creation of a bipartisan fiscal commission with enforcement powers to prevent a long-term debt spiral.

A Conversation with US Secretary of Education Linda McMahon | Global Conference 2025

Linda McMahon, Nina Rees

Appointee Linda McMahon, drawing on her business leadership background, has launched federal investigations into universities over civil rights compliance while initiating a strategic plan to dismantle the Department of Education by shifting authority to states and families. This agenda includes increasing charter school funding, integrating artificial intelligence into curricula, and prioritizing workforce development to reduce reliance on four-year degrees. Although the full elimination of the department requires congressional approval, the current administration has already cut major data collection budgets and redirected resources toward parental choice and local control.

How to Spend Your 20s in the AI Era

Garry, Harj, Diana, Jared

The event critically examines how AI is collapsing traditional computer science career safety nets and redefining startup economics by shifting capital formation toward direct revenue generation rather than external validation. It argues that competitive advantage now relies on "forward-deployed engineering" and niche domain expertise, urging founders to build value through tangible utility rather than brand narratives or simulated success. Furthermore, the discussion outlines a preparation framework for entrepreneurs emphasizing frugality, co-founder synchronization, and the strategic use of proprietary data to secure moats in specialized markets before the potential obsolescence of human labor renders current wealth accumulation obsolete.

Macroeconomic Outlook | Global Conference 2025

Gregory Zuckerman, Khalid Al-Falih, André Esteves, Karen Karniol Tambour, Kathryn Koch, Ron O'Hanley

Leading financial experts analyze the convergence of political volatility, trade uncertainty, and shifting geopolitical alignments that are driving a global reevaluation of U.S. exceptionalism and prompting investors to diversify into Asian markets, the UK, and the Middle East. The panel highlights critical macroeconomic headwinds, including a "baked-in" recession risk and a Federal Reserve constrained by tariff-induced inflation, which are forcing a repricing of Treasury yields and exposing vulnerabilities in risk assets. Amidst these challenges, private credit emerges as a vital, though stress-tested, innovation for risk dispersion, while advocates for conservative lending strategies and active management position themselves to capitalize on the expected rise in defaults and liquidity dislocations.

"What The F Are We Doing?" David Friedberg On BBB’s Deficit Increase & Trump vs. Elon

David Friedberg, Trump, Elon

The White House and Treasury officials, including Scott Besson and Ray Dalio, are advocating for a "333" economic strategy to reduce the federal deficit-to-GDP ratio to 3% while stimulating 3% growth and controlling inflation. This approach relies on unproven variables such as tariff revenue and tax cuts, facing skepticism from economists who warn that current structural incentives in Congress and massive hidden liabilities make the target unachievable without monetary expansion. Concurrently, analysts project a strategic pivot for Elon Musk to leverage his $250 million in political expenditures to define a specific "America Pack" focused on balanced budgets and sustainable energy, aiming to influence policy without engaging in direct conflict with the Trump administration.

The Real Moat

The startup sector faces a critical juncture where founders must balance personal branding with substantive venture building to avoid relevance loss. Success is increasingly defined by a specific archetypal profile combining elite engineering proficiency with exclusive, deep domain knowledge to secure localized competitive moats. This narrow niche of multibillion-dollar founders leverages specialized software tailored to specific audience segments to maintain long-term market dominance.

Author Talk: Jonathan Haidt, "The Anxious Generation" | Global Conference 2025

Jonathan Haidt, Jennifer Siebel Newsom, Conrad Kieschel

At the Milken Institute Global Conference, social psychologists Jonathan Haidt and California First Lady Jennifer Siebel Newsom addressed the youth mental health crisis by identifying the 2012 shift to smartphones as the primary driver of surging depression, anxiety, and social skill atrophy among teenagers. They advocated for four specific policy norms—delaying smartphone access until high school, mandating phone-free schools, raising the age of internet adulthood to 16, and promoting unsupervised free play—to counter the addictive designs of tech giants and facilitate proper neurodevelopment. The session concluded with a call for collective community action and a "mother's rebellion" to enforce these boundaries, aiming to restore physical interaction and resilience for future generations.

François Chollet: How We Get To AGI

François Chollet

Recent analysis of the Abstraction Reasoning Corpus series reveals that while standard pre-training scaling fails at fluid intelligence, Test-Time Adaptation enables models to dynamically solve novel problems, though current systems still lag significantly behind human performance on the 2025 ARC-2 benchmark. To bridge this gap, the field is adopting the Kaleidoscope Hypothesis, which posits that future architectures must integrate continuous intuition with discrete programmatic reasoning to achieve true compositional generalization. This shift drives the development of endia-like meta-learners capable of synthesizing custom code and maintaining a dynamic library of abstractions, with the explicit goal of accelerating independent scientific discovery by early 2026.