Latest Interviews

Talks at GS with Charles Stewart, CEO of Sotheby’s

Charles Stewart, Kim Posnett

Sotheby's CEO Charlie Stewart has steered the historic auction house through a structural transformation, increasing online bidding from 40% to 92% by integrating a digital ecosystem and leveraging data analytics to optimize client matching. The company has expanded beyond traditional secondary market auctions into direct luxury sales and high-profile categories such as sneaker collectibles and sports memorabilia, which have generated record-breaking valuations. Looking forward, Stewart emphasizes the strategic adoption of blockchain for provenance verification and predicts that long-term investment value will remain concentrated in original works that initiate new artistic movements.

The Immigrant Journey Behind A Silicon Valley Success Story

Garry Tan, Tracy Young

Tracy Young, co-founder of PlanGrid and founder of the new venture TigerEye, reflects on her family's refugee journey from Vietnam to the San Francisco Bay Area, where her parents built a successful distribution business after overcoming immense hardship. Drawing strength from their resilience, Young discusses the intersection of her immigrant heritage, gender bias, and impostor syndrome while arguing that immigration is vital for sustaining economic stability in nations facing declining birth rates. She further advocates for societal support of immigrants and promotes senior women in sales through her monthly newsletter, Predictable Growth.

Investing during times of market stress

Christian Mueller-Glissmann, Alison Nathan

The panel outlines a structural market shift from the stable "buy and hold" era to a volatile late-cycle environment where traditional 60-40 portfolios face reduced efficacy due to positive equity-bond correlations and persistent inflation risks. Experts advocate for dynamic tactical allocation strategies that incorporate gold, international equities, and private markets to diversify away from stressed public assets, while cautioning that low realized equity volatility masks a significant rotation toward mega-cap tech that obscures underlying recessionary tail risks. With the Federal Reserve's rate-cutting expectations largely priced in, portfolio managers are urged to prioritize quality equities and defensive positioning as the US labor market and debt ceiling remain critical catalysts for potential market repricing.

Harvey Silverglate: Freedom of Speech | Lex Fridman Podcast #377

Harvey Silverglate, Lex Fridman

Constitutional attorney Alan Silverglate is running as a write-in candidate for the Harvard Board of Overseers to dismantle administrative bloat, slash tuition costs by 40%, and restore absolute free speech protections on campus. He argues that universities must shield students from censorship and intolerance rather than enforcing speech codes, while also calling for the abolition of the FBI and the end of affirmative action to address root educational inequalities. Silverglate warns that current trends toward suppressing dissent mirror the worst excesses of the McCarthy era and urges alumni to vote for his platform to prevent a slide toward state repression.

Yann LeCun: Meta’s New AI Model LLaMA; Why Elon is Wrong about AI; Open-source AI Models | E1014

Yann LeCun, Elon, David Marcus, Harry Stebbings

Yann LeCun traces the historical resurgence of deep learning from his 1980s postdoctoral work with Jeff Hinton and Yoshua Bengio to his prediction that current autoregressive large language models will soon become obsolete due to their lack of planning capabilities and persistent memory. He advocates for a shift toward open-source ecosystems that enforce hardwired safety constraints and hierarchical objectives, arguing that such architectures will replace text prediction with systems capable of genuine world modeling and common sense. LeCun concludes by dismissing doomer narratives and mass unemployment fears, asserting that the AI revolution will ultimately generate a new renaissance of creative roles while requiring societal adjustments to wealth distribution rather than technological restriction.

The Leading Sex Expert: How To Have Great Sex EVERY Time! (And Fix Bad Sex): Tracey Cox | E247

Tracey Cox, Steven

Sex educator Tracy Cox identifies a global "sex recession" driven by technology and social shifts, warning that sexless relationships rarely self-correct without immediate intervention under her "One-Year Rule." She distinguishes between spontaneous and responsive desire while noting that modern infidelity trends have reversed, with men seeking connection and women seeking erotic variety. Cox argues that restoring intimacy requires maintaining "otherness," replacing negative body image through frequency, and utilizing clear, positive communication to navigate biological and psychological barriers to sex.

Clem Delangue: The Ultimate Guide to Investing in AI; Elon's Threat to Sue OpenAI | E1013

Clem Delangue, Elon, Harry Stebbings

Hugging Face, founded by Clem, Thomas, and Julia, evolved from an initial consumer chatbot experiment into a global AI infrastructure platform by leveraging open-source collaboration and a decentralized talent strategy across Paris, New York, and San Francisco. The company currently serves approximately 15,000 organizations through a freemium model that prioritizes massive adoption and network effects over immediate revenue, while advising startups to build custom models rather than relying on external APIs to ensure long-term differentiation. By maintaining strict investor communication protocols and focusing on community-driven scientific progress, Hugging Face aims to navigate regulatory hurdles and talent shortages as it transitions the industry from niche usage to mainstream scale.

E128: Google enters AI wars, Druck’s warning, Trump crushes CNN & more

Druck, Trump, RFK Jr., Biden, Jason, David Friedberg, Chamath Palihapitiya

Scheduled for September 10–12 at UCLA, the All In Summit 2023 convenes industry leaders and founders to discuss the rapid advancement of generative AI, including Google's Gemini and Duet AI releases, alongside critical debates on US fiscal sustainability and the 2024 presidential landscape. Key figures such as Sam Altman, Stanley Druckenmiller, and David Sacks will address regulatory proposals modeled after the IAEA, potential financial crises driven by entitlement spending, and the political implications of recent scandals. The event aims to provide a comprehensive examination of how these technological, economic, and political shifts intersect to shape the future of markets, society, and governance.

How to Apply And Succeed at Y Combinator | Startup School

Dalton Caldwell

This comprehensive guide details the strategic rationale, application protocols, and evaluation criteria for Y Combinator's startup accelerator program, emphasizing that the high-risk, high-reward process serves as both a funding avenue and a critical tool for refining business models. The content outlines that selection heavily favors teams with strong technical talent and clear narratives, while explicitly discouraging traditional businesses or founders seeking only short-term engagement from applying. Ultimately, the material encourages founders to overcome misconceptions about timing and rejection, urging them to submit honest, concise applications to maximize their potential for partnership with the firm.

Breaking Free: The rise of corporate separations

David Dubner, Sharath Sharma, Allison Nathan

Driven by an elevated cost of capital and a strategic pivot toward simplification, over 30 global corporate separations were announced in 2022 as companies in sectors like pharmaceuticals and industrials seek to unlock portfolio discounts through operational focus. These transactions, typically closing within 9 to 13 months with internal leaders assuming over 80% of NewCo CEO roles, historically generate mid-single-digit outperformance against the S&P 500 within two years. By optimizing capital allocation and enabling targeted M&A, these divestitures serve as a critical mechanism for "shrinking to grow," allowing both RemainCos and NewCos to accelerate executive cycles and achieve value creation previously unattainable within diversified conglomerates.

10 Life-changing Lessons From The Longest Ever Study On Human Happiness! Dr. Robert Waldinger | E246

Dr. Robert Waldinger, Steven

The Harvard Study of Adult Development, tracking over 700 individuals for more than 85 years, identifies high-quality relationships as the primary predictor of long-term health and happiness. This longitudinal research demonstrates that social isolation poses physiological risks comparable to smoking, while strong social connections buffer stress and reduce the likelihood of chronic disease. Consequently, the study advocates for prioritizing authentic social infrastructure and kindness in both personal and professional spheres to counteract modern societal isolation.

Don't make the investor your customer.

Conformist individuals are increasingly entering the early-stage startup ecosystem to pursue status-seeking opportunities rather than traditional entrepreneurial goals. This dynamic elevates the investor to the highest-status position, causing aspiring founders to treat them as their primary customer by crafting ideas and aligning their resumes to secure approval. Consequently, these founders prioritize finding specific validation cues to gain investor acceptance over establishing genuine product-market fit.

20Sales: How to Scale a Career While Scaling a Family; Work-Life Balance; Parental Leave | E1012

Maggie Hott, Stevie Case, Renu Gupta, Lauren Schwartz, Julie Maresca, Jessica Arnold, Harry Stebbings

Six sales leaders, including Jessica Arnold, Stevie Case, and Maggie Hott, convened to discuss the dual challenges and unique advantages of balancing motherhood with high-level sales careers. The panel detailed how integrating family responsibilities fosters leadership superpowers like time efficiency and empathy while highlighting systemic barriers such as career pauses and the lack of equitable parental leave policies. By advocating for structural changes like protected quotas during leave and cultural shifts that normalize vulnerability, the group emphasized that organizational support is essential to transforming perceived work-life conflicts into competitive advantages.

How Dire is the Startup Funding Market Today? | AngelList CEO Avlok Kohli

Avlok Kohli, Harry Stebbings

AngelList analyzed its data from managing over 13,000 startups to reveal a rapid market contraction where Series B and C deal volumes and valuations have plummeted by more than 50%, shifting the industry into its most severe "bad times" historically. While early-stage valuations remain artificially stable due to capital from later-stage investors, the firm warns that adverse selection, extended fundraising timelines, and a lack of credible traction are shutting down capital access for most startups. Simultaneously, secondary market discounts on fund positions range from 20% to 50% as liquidity pressures mount, and the firm anticipates an acceleration of down rounds and M&A slowdowns over the next 18 months unless macro conditions improve.

Stephen Wolfram: ChatGPT and the Nature of Truth, Reality & Computation | Lex Fridman Podcast #376

Stephen Wolfram, Lex Fridman

Stephen Wolfram differentiates between statistically based large language models and his computational systems that perform deep, verifiable derivations, proposing an integration where LLMs act as natural language interfaces for Wolfram Language to ensure factual accuracy. By framing human cognition and physical laws as outcomes of observers navigating a computationally irreducible universe, the discussion outlines a future where "CX" curricula and natural language interfaces democratize access to formal reasoning for generalists rather than specialists. This synthesis aims to mitigate AI risks like hallucination and sandbox breaches by grounding semantic plausibility in deterministic computation while exploring how the interplay of bounded observers and complex rules shapes reality.