Latest Interviews
Showing 616–630 of 6,397 interview transcripts.
Clear all filters- The Economist9 min
Do plants feel pain? | The Economist
Biologists Michael Levin and other experts presented evidence that non-neural mechanisms like bioelectric fields enable information processing in organisms without centralized brains, as demonstrated by planaria worm regeneration and conditioned *Mimosa pudica* responses. The event detailed documented plant capabilities including visual mimicry, auditory toxin release, and the distinction between environmental sentience and human-style consciousness. While debate persists regarding whether immobile flora can perceive pain, the consensus among interviewed scientists suggests that plant intelligence is fundamentally an adaptive problem-solving tool rather than a basis for moral objection to consumption.
- Sequoia Capital26 min
ElevenLabs' Mati Staniszewski: How Voice Becomes the Interface for AI
Mati Staniszewski, Andrew Reed, Alfred Fuller, Gabriel Sanchez, Konstantin
Established in 2022 by high-school friends Gabriel Sanchez and Piotr to address monotone localization in Poland, Eleven Labs has rapidly scaled to generate over $400 million in revenue with a flat, title-less organization of 400 remote employees. The company distinguishes itself by prioritizing immediate monetization and emotional nuance in audio synthesis, evolving its technology from text-to-speech to complex voice agents deployed by governments, enterprises, and educational platforms. With a roadmap focused on emotional intelligence and the integration of audio as the primary interface for robotics, the firm maintains defensibility through proprietary data and a vast ecosystem of user-contributed voices.
- Y Combinator32 min
Harshil Mathur: AI Is Compressing Every Moat
Founded by Harshil Mathur in 2015, Razorpay became the first Indian Y Combinator company to pivot from a failed educational focus to a payment infrastructure provider for startups after navigating a twelve-month regulatory gestation period. The firm secured a competitive moat by rejecting early global acquisition offers and becoming the first gateway to support UPI, subsequently processing over $180 billion in gross merchandise value while maintaining capital efficiency that inadvertently generated profits. Today, Mathur continues to lead the company through a strategic reinvention using AI, emphasizing that founder-led conviction in long-term problem-solving remains essential despite advancements in software development speed.
- Milken Institute30 min
A Conversation with Citadel’s Ken Griffin | Global Conference 2026
Ken Griffin characterizes the Middle East conflict as a severe humanitarian crisis that threatens to trigger a global recession within six to twelve months, though he maintains that U.S. energy independence from fracking insulates the American economy from immediate oil shocks. He details a shifting political landscape where rising extremism and progressive policies in Chicago and New York drive a corporate exodus toward business-friendly states like Florida, where Citadel is doubling down on its operations. Looking ahead, Griffin emphasizes education as a national emergency to combat inflation and workforce displacement, advocating for meritocratic reforms and the integration of AI to create new jobs while preserving the skills of older workers.
- a16z1h 23m
Building Blackstone, Backing Costco, and Working with Munger | Tony James on The a16z Show
Tony James, Munger, David Haber, Jim Sinegal, Steve Schwarzman
James transformed DLJ from a niche player into a market leader with $14 billion in sales, subsequently steering Blackstone to nearly $1 trillion in assets by cultivating a team-based culture and scalable platform. His strategic investments in entities like Costco and his tenure alongside Charlie Munger underscore a philosophy rooted in flawless execution and long-term value creation. Looking forward, James advocates for structural shifts in private credit and fund models while championing an HBCU initiative designed to leverage private equity capabilities for broader societal impact.
- Stanford Online1h 1m
Stanford CS153 Frontier Systems | Andreas Blattmann from Black Forest Labs on Visual Intelligence
Andreas Blattmann, Anjney Midha
Black Forest Labs, a Freiburg-based team of former Stability AI researchers, has scaled a 25-person operation to a $3 billion valuation by bootstrapping the Flux family of multimodal generative models. The company distinguishes itself through an open-weight commercial strategy and a strict adherence to EU AI Act compliance, maintaining identical safety guardrails for all partners including Meta and XAI. Looking forward, the organization is shifting its research focus from image synthesis to physical AI and robotics, aiming to validate model intelligence through real-world causal interactions rather than subjective aesthetic metrics.
- a16z23 min
Digital Freedom, AI Regulation, and the Fight for the Western Internet | The a16z Show
The U.S. administration is prioritizing the development of a "Western AI stack" to counter adversarial nations and dismantle prior State Department censorship apparatuses by redefining public diplomacy around user empowerment and free speech. Key figures like Under Secretary Rogers are leading an office restructuring that rejects opaque foreign information integrity initiatives while countering EU regulatory threats that use digital safety laws to penalize protected political expression. This strategy aims to align AI policy with First Amendment principles, ensuring that transparency, individualistic reasoning, and user-driven moderation tools serve as the primary defense against authoritarian models and foreign viewpoint-skewed legislation.
Shopify CEO on How AI is a Scapegoat for Mass Layoffs & Trump Derangement Syndrome in Canada
Shopify founder Tobias Lutger outlines a leadership philosophy centered on long-term vision and "heat source" management, citing his strategic decision to launch the company's 2015 IPO at a premium valuation to align with investors rather than short-term bankers. He details the firm's current pivot toward a 100x productivity increase by deploying the "River" AI system to handle over half of code generation, effectively shifting senior engineers from coding to steering autonomous agents. Lutger further advocates for a deregulated economic model where private sector innovation, rather than government intervention or "climate cult" rhetoric, drives wealth creation and infrastructure development.
- The Diary Of A CEO1h 58m
Scott Galloway: The Rich Are Quietly Preparing For The AI Collapse
Professor Scott Galloway argues that the United States and the artificial intelligence sector face a simultaneous crisis of reputation driven by perceived government corruption and a narrative shift where AI benefits only the wealthy. He contends that tech leaders employ exaggerated job destruction fears as fundraising tactics while ignoring societal costs, a strategy that risks severe economic disruption if employment falls too sharply too quickly. Ultimately, Galloway predicts an inevitable market correction and advises investors and workers to prioritize resilience, storytelling skills, and disciplined long-term saving rather than chasing speculative valuations.
Inside Clay's Sales Playbook | Becca Lindquist
Clay, Becca Lindquist, Harry Stebbings
Clay Head of Sales Becca Lindquist outlines a high-growth strategy that prioritizes hiring adaptable, data-driven "high-slope" candidates while enforcing a strict compensation model targeting a 7.5x quota-to-OTE ratio. Her approach combines a zero-tolerance policy for stagnation and ego with aggressive AI integration to scale SDR productivity and build a collaborative, winning culture. These methods have enabled the company to achieve $100 million in annual recurring revenue by focusing on deep domain expertise, rigorous forecasting, and performance-based incentives over rigid playbooks.
- The Economist8 min
Are AI models running out of power? | The Economist
Facing severe hardware shortages and monopoly choke points where Nvidia and TSMC dominate supply, major AI developers like OpenAI and Anthropic are throttling services and redirecting resources to manage capacity. In response to these constraints, five cloud providers plan a $700 billion infrastructure build-out while companies grapple with three-to-five-year lead times for essential components and aging chip inventories. This fundamental mismatch between rapid software cycles and slow physical production is projected to reverse declining inference costs, potentially raising prices and slowing overall industry adoption.
- All-In Podcast1h 21m
OpenAI Misses Targets, Codex vs Claude, Elon vs Sam Trial, Big Hyperscaler Beats, Peptide Craze
Elon, Sam, Friedberg, Jason Calacanis, David Sacks, Chamath Palihapitiya
OpenAI faces mounting structural tensions as it misses 2025 revenue and user targets while CEO Sam Altman pushes for an IPO against CFO Sarah Fryer's caution amidst $600 billion in future compute commitments. The company currently maintains a compute advantage over rivals like Anthropic through excess data center capacity, even as the broader AI sector grapples with power grid bottlenecks and a record $725 billion in hyperscaler capital expenditures for 2026. Concurrently, Elon Musk pursues a $150 billion lawsuit alleging a breach of charitable trust following internal documents revealing plans to remove him before the entity's conversion to for-profit status.
- The Economist6 min
How high could the oil price go? | The Economist
Zanny Minton Beddoes, Edward Carr, Mathieu, Henry
Global oil markets face a structural crisis where a 14 million barrel-per-day supply deficit has eroded the "sanguine" expectation of a quick peace deal, creating a price disconnect that literature estimates would require $167 to $460 per barrel to correct. With production gains from non-conflicted regions proving negligible, the market is currently absorbing this shortfall through record-fast inventory drawdowns of 8 to 10 million barrels daily, driven by pre-war shipments and sanctions-induced cargo displacement. As critical buffers for jet fuel and diesel approach minimum levels and logistical constraints lengthen trade routes, the only remaining adjustment mechanisms involve further depletion of commercial stocks or active demand destruction in major consuming regions like Asia.
- Sequoia Capital27 min
Waymo's Dmitri Dolgov: 20 Million Rides and the Road to Full Autonomy
Dmitri Dolgov, Konstantine Buhler
Dmitry Dolgov, Waymo's co-founder, outlines a 21-year evolution from DARPA challenges to a sixth-generation autonomous fleet that has achieved 200 million fully autonomous miles and delivered over 20 million rides with a safety profile 13 times superior to human drivers. The company's architecture utilizes a multimodal "Foundation Model" integrating physics reasoning and spatial understanding to power a structured, end-to-end system across 11 cities, now accelerating toward global expansion in London and Tokyo through the newly launched Waymo Origin vehicle. This mission-driven approach bypasses incremental improvements to rapidly scale commercial deployment, treating full autonomy as an existential imperative to eliminate the 13 million annual road fatalities while transitioning the core technology into a primary family transportation tool.
- Goldman Sachs15 min
Riding the AI Wave
The April 30 FOMC meeting revealed a divided Federal Reserve committee that shifted from expectations of a near-term rate cut to a non-committal stance, a position reinforced by the incoming appointment of hawkish member Kevin Warsh. While private sector leverage has decreased since the Great Financial Crisis, concerns regarding public sector debt sustainability and elevated term premiums persist alongside a robust equity rally driven by hyperscalers and artificial intelligence. Investment strategists consequently maintain a bullish but cautious 7/10 allocation to technology, avoiding fixed income while rotating into energy and defense to hedge against potential consumer drawdowns expected in the mid-year "air pocket."