Latest Interviews

Trump Brokers Gaza Peace Deal, National Guard in Chicago, OpenAI/AMD, AI Roundtripping, Gold Rally

Trump, Brad Gerstner, Jason, Friedberg, Chamath Palihapitiya, David Sacks

A multilateral framework addressing the Israel-Hamas conflict, U.S. immigration enforcement in Chicago, and the $60 billion OpenAI-AMD semiconductor partnership dominated recent strategic discussions, featuring President Trump's two-phase peace plan and a contentious National Guard deployment. Panelists analyzed how geopolitical stability could unlock Middle Eastern oil monetization while evaluating the economic implications of Trump's ICE operations and the massive shift in AI capital expenditure toward energy capacity. Concurrent macroeconomic shifts, including a surge in gold prices driven by central bank diversification and the professionalization of Polymarket betting markets, further underscored the panel's focus on emerging global power structures and financial innovations.

The Business of Sports: From Old School to Influence | Asia Summit 2025

Adam Heng, John Dykes, Derek Chang, Josh Empson, Deborah Mei, Jeff Wilbur

This panel analyzed the global sports industry's shift toward a $600 billion valuation driven by media rights dominance, strategic capital infusions by firms like Sixth Street, and the rapid "soccerization" of ownership structures. Speakers highlighted transformative demographic trends, including the Asian diaspora's influence on club valuation, the surge in women's sports viewership, and the integration of entertainment formats like Netflix's "Drive to Survive" to capture younger audiences. Ultimately, the discussion underscored a strategic pivot from traditional monopoly models to capitalistic frameworks that prioritize authentic fan experiences while addressing the significant under-monetization of female athletes.

Inside The $2.2B AI Research Accelerator | Turing

Jonathan Siddharth, Molly O'Shea

Turing, a profitable AI infrastructure firm valued at $2.2 billion, serves nine frontier labs by deploying a global network of four million engineers to generate expert data for training superintelligence models. The company distinguishes itself from traditional data labelers by combining smart human sourcing with proactive research to advance coding, reasoning, and multi-modality pillars while challenging the dominance of commodity data services. Facing a market where internet-based pre-training data is exhausted, Turing aims to capture a $30 trillion opportunity by replacing legacy consulting models with agentic systems that automate complex enterprise knowledge work.

Can the Rally Continue?

Ashok Varadhan, Chris Hussey

Ashok Varadhan maintains a constructive outlook on U.S. equities, projecting a policy interest rate normalization near 3% within the year and a market consolidation in the fourth quarter before a 2026 resumption. While advising investors to remain long and hedge downside risks through cheaply priced puts during a low-volatility environment, he identifies a structural shift away from fiat currencies into assets like Bitcoin and AI-driven stocks as a response to fiscal expansion. This strategy navigates potential Q4 risks from a government shutdown that delays critical economic data, ensuring the portfolio capitalizes on the enduring technological investment cycle while accounting for tariff absorption and crowded consensus positions.

Has science finally cracked the secret to invisibility?

Alok Jha, Professor Sir John Pendry, John Pendry

Physics professor John Pendry introduced metamaterials as geometrically engineered structures capable of manipulating light paths to achieve the effects described in his "invisibility cloak" concept. This theoretical framework, initially named by Pendry's wife to aid a 2005 DARPA presentation, faced early skepticism before David Smith's team at Duke University successfully constructed a functional prototype for radar waves. The field has since evolved from resolving debates over negative refraction to experimental recreations of conditions existing near black holes.

Sequoia’s Roelof Botha: Why Venture Capital is Broken & How Great Companies Are Built

Roelof Botha, Jason Calacanis

Sequoia Capital, led by a third generation of partners, sustains its legacy by prioritizing long-term value creation and consensus decision-making over aggressive fee maximization. The firm counters industry capital overhang by deploying proprietary AI tools and maintaining a selective investment strategy that has historically generated trillions in public market value through companies like Apple and Nvidia. While navigating geopolitical shifts by separating its Chinese operations and adapting to a regulatory landscape that has drastically reduced startup formation there, Sequoia continues to back founders with exceptional curiosity despite unconventional profiles.

Actress Shefali Shah: Stories that Move; Strength that Inspires | Asia Summit 2025

Shefali Shah, Teresa Whang, Curtis S. Chin

Acclaimed actress Shefali Shah, known for her Emmy-winning role as DCP Shreya Sharma in Netflix's *Delhi Crime*, discusses the industry's shift from limiting stereotypical roles to complex character portrayals. She details the upcoming third season of the series, which tackles human trafficking and bride sales through a narrative blending multiple true cases, while highlighting her work in *The Three of Us* and *Adolescence* to explore dementia and social media's impact on children. Shah further emphasizes her advocacy for women's and children's safety, urging audiences to view her award-winning projects to understand these critical social issues.

This Startup Is Trying To Delete 29% Of All CO2 Emissions

Paul Gross, Gustaf Alströmer

Remora has launched a solid-pellet based carbon capture system that reduces CO2 emissions by up to 90% in hard-to-electrify diesel trucks and freight trains, converting the captured gas into beverage-grade CO2 for commercial reuse. Backed by $117 million in venture capital, the Detroit-based company is vertically integrating its manufacturing to deploy modular retrofits to major partners like Ryder and Union Pacific while testing the technology on a repurposed locomotive. Co-founders Paul Gross and Christina Reynolds aim to scale this point-source solution to capture one billion tons of carbon annually by overcoming the logistical challenges of retrofitting diverse vehicle fleets.

The Future of Software Engineering: Cognition’s Russell Kaplan

Russell Kaplan, Marco Argenti

Cognition, founded by former Olympiad medalists and now valued at $4 billion, is advancing software engineering by deploying Devin, an autonomous AI agent capable of executing end-to-end development tasks. The company differentiates itself through a dual-product strategy combining Devin for independent execution with the recently acquired Windsurf IDE for human-in-the-loop collaboration, targeting enterprise integration into proprietary codebases. While AI capabilities in coding are projected to double every seven months, Cognition aims to elevate Devin to senior engineer status within a year, though future growth is anticipated to be constrained by energy availability rather than data scarcity.

The Shortcut Rule

The Shortcut Rule demonstrates that optimizing for a single metric achieves the measured target while sacrificing unmeasured objectives, effectively causing programs to hit the target but miss the point. This phenomenon is illustrated by the AI chess case, where Deep Blue defeated Garry Kasparov to satisfy engineering goals without yielding new insights into general human intelligence. Consequently, the event highlights the divergence between technical success and foundational learning when research focuses exclusively on a narrow definition of victory.

The Shutdown’s Economic Impact

Alec Phillips, Alison Nathan

A partisan role reversal has precipitated a broad federal government shutdown as Democrats withhold support for clean spending bills to demand the extension of ACA health insurance subsidies, a move that polling suggests is driving voter blame toward Republicans. The crisis faces a critical resolution pressure point on October 15 when active-duty military personnel miss a pay cycle, a deadline that historically compels congressional action to avoid widespread economic disruption. While the shutdown projects to reduce Q4 GDP by approximately 0.3 percentage points and delay key economic data releases, market analysts and the Federal Reserve anticipate the stalemate will resolve quickly through a targeted fiscal compromise.

YouTube CEO Neal Mohan on AI, Censorship & the Future of Creators

Neal Mohan, Chamath, Jason, Friedberg, Ari

YouTube CEO Neal Mohan outlined the platform's dominance with 2 billion monthly active users and over $70 billion paid to creators, while addressing tensions between its 55/45 revenue model and high-profile creators who opt for direct monetization. Mohan defended YouTube's algorithmic fragmentation as a driver of niche engagement while highlighting new AI initiatives that prioritize creator likeness rights and transparency labels over blanket bans. The discussion further detailed strategies to balance global moderation complexities with evolving regulations and a renewed focus on YouTube Premium and TV to reinvent the viewer experience.

Smart Finance: The Intersection of AI, Technology, Talent, and Transformation | Asia Summit 2025

Krist Boo, Asilah Azil, Marcelo Claure, Andreas Kreuz

Global AI investment is surging toward $500 billion annually, yet a 95% failure rate persists as enterprises struggle to move beyond pilot programs, with only top performers like T-Mobile and K Health demonstrating significant commercial payback. While 47% of organizations report recent AI risk incidents, the primary barrier to value realization remains cultural resistance and workflow inertia rather than technology, necessitating CEO-led change management and governance models that treat agents as corporate citizens. As geopolitical dynamics force Southeast Asian nations like Singapore to adopt a multipolar strategy leveraging both US and Chinese strengths, the race for success now hinges on massive workforce reskilling and the strategic integration of human capital with autonomous systems.

Base Power Raises $1B led by Addition, with Trust Ventures, Lightspeed, a16z, Altimeter, Elad Gil

Elad Gil, Zach Dell, Justin Lopas, Molly O'Shea

Base secured an oversubscribed $1 billion Series C led by Addition, accelerating from its previous $200 million round to fund its "Speed to Power" product designed to bypass traditional grid interconnection delays for data centers. Backed by strategic investors like Lennar and Starwood alongside founders from SpaceX and Tesla, the company is deploying gigawatt-scale battery capacity from its Austin "Factory One" at a target rate of 100 megawatts per month. This capital infusion supports a strategic pivot to replace fossil fuels with cost-efficient solar and storage, aiming to solve critical energy bottlenecks for AI development while expanding operations into high-solar states like California and Florida.

Sam Altman on Sora, Energy, and Building an AI Empire

Sam Altman, Ben Horowitz, Erik Torenberg

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman outlines a strategic shift toward extreme vertical integration, establishing a massive global infrastructure stack to support research, consumer products, and hardware while securing partnerships with Nvidia, AMD, and Oracle. The organization prioritizes scientific advancement and world model development, predicting that within two years AI systems will autonomously conduct complex research in physics and biology, though this rapid scaling necessitates new per-generation monetization models. Concurrently, Altman advocates for a measured regulatory approach focused only on superhuman capabilities to avoid stifling innovation, while emphasizing that the ultimate economic value of this infrastructure lies in the successful and gradual deployment of artificial general intelligence.