Latest Interviews

A Conversation with Demi Lovato | Global Conference 2023

Demi Lovato, Savannah Sellers

Demi Lovato discusses the damaging impact of algorithmic social media on youth body image and details her personal evolution from seeking perfection to prioritizing authentic self-expression. She outlines her refusal to be a singular recovery icon, emphasizing that recovery is non-linear while sharing statistics on rising eating disorders and her own mental health management strategies. Looking forward, Lovato declares her advocacy more vital than her music career as she prepares to release an upbeat rock album and continues her work supporting Mental Health Action Day.

A Conversation with John Legend on the Path to Reentry after Incarceration | Global Conference 2023

John Legend, Conrad Kiechel, Karen Bass, Jonathan Capehart, Sheena Meade, Deepti Rohatgi

At the 26th Milken Institute Global Conference in Los Angeles, speakers including Mayor Karen Bass and documentary filmmaker John Legend addressed the city's upcoming infrastructure projects for global events while highlighting a severe homelessness crisis. A subsequent panel on the *Home Free* documentary examined systemic barriers facing the 114 million Americans with criminal records, featuring success stories from the Clean Slate Initiative and Slack for Good's Next Chapter Program. These initiatives have demonstrated that removing occupational licensing hurdles and implementing "Ban the Box" policies can yield high hiring success rates, prompting calls for business leaders to adopt policies that unlock second chances for employment and housing.

Factory’s Matan Grinberg and Eno Reyes Unleash the Droids on Software Development | Training Data

Matan Grinberg, Eno Reyes, Sonya Huang, Pat Grady

Factory deploys autonomous software engineering "droids" that leverage existing foundation models to automate unenjoyable enterprise tasks like code review and testing, delivering a 22% increase in engineering cycle speed. The company recently achieved a 19% pass rate on the SWE-Bench benchmark by prioritizing task-specific cognitive architectures over training new models, effectively surpassing previous state-of-the-art performance. Founders Matan Grimberg and Eno Reis position the platform to shift engineering roles toward orchestration, focusing on measurable organizational metrics rather than individual developer replacement.

Wim Hof: They’re Lying To You About Disease & Inflammation!

Wim Hof, Steven

Wim Hof, known as the "Iceman," utilizes a methodology combining conscious breathing, cold exposure, and mindset to help individuals regulate their autonomic nervous system and overcome psychological trauma. Supported by scientific studies demonstrating voluntary immune control and enhanced stress resilience, his approach enables practitioners to bypass panic responses and access deep emotional states. By challenging modern societal structures that drain energy, Hof encourages a shift toward personal responsibility, aiming to restore happiness and physical strength through rigorous bio-hacking techniques.

A Conversation with John Podesta and Exxon Mobil CEO Darren Woods | Global Conference 2024

John Podesta, Darren Woods, David Westin

Amidst a record $1.7 trillion surge in clean tech investment and the Inflation Reduction Act's push toward 2030 emissions targets, industry leaders like ExxonMobil's Darren Woods and the Biden administration's John Podesta engaged in a strategic debate over balancing rigorous carbon accounting with urgent climate action. While both sides advocate for an "all of the above" approach involving carbon capture and renewables, they identified critical bottlenecks in permitting, regulatory certainty, and supply chain dependencies on China that threaten project execution. The discussion ultimately emphasized that long-term decarbonization requires scaling diverse energy molecules and establishing fair global trade mechanisms to prevent high-emission manufacturing from undercutting domestic net zero goals.

How Discord Became a Developer Platform

Jason Citron, Anjney Midha, Mark Mandelmann, David Malani

Discord has grown to serve over 200 million monthly active users, leveraging a recent shift in developer activity that generated more than 20,000 new activities via its Embeddable Apps SDK. This platform evolution, driven by CEO Jason Citron's strategy to prioritize community feedback and open architecture, now allows startups to deploy rich HTML5 applications directly within the ecosystem while utilizing new one-click payment features for monetization. As a result, development friction has decreased significantly, enabling a projected surge from 20,000 to 200,000 apps within a single year as the platform transitions from a gaming chat tool into a comprehensive hub for the generative AI and interactive metaverse.

A Conversation with IMF Managing Director Kristalina Georgieva | Global Conference 2024

Kristalina Georgieva, Richard Ditizio, Zanny Minton Beddoes

Over 1,000 speakers convened at the 2024 Milken Institute Global Conference under the theme "Shaping a Shared Future" to address critical challenges ranging from supply chain disruptions and cybercrime threats to a historic displacement crisis of 110 million people. IMF Managing Director Kristalina Georgieva and other key figures analyzed divergent economic trajectories, warning that fiscal deficits and trade fragmentation could trigger a "turbulent" decade unless nations pivot toward productivity-enhancing innovations like green technology and artificial intelligence. The event highlighted both severe US social crises, including gun violence and fentanyl overdoses, and significant global opportunities, such as $500 billion in deployed philanthropic capital and fintech solutions banking millions of unbanked individuals.

Argentina turning? Milei’s surprising political success

Milei, Birubala Rabha, Rosie Bloor, Kinley Salmon, Anne Rowe

President Javier Milei recently secured passage of two controversial economic bills requiring the Vice President's casting vote, granting emergency powers to privatize state firms and attract foreign investment while facing severe social backlash from protesters. Although the administration has achieved monthly surpluses and lowered default risk through drastic austerity measures, the country remains in recession with uncertain inflation trends and unresolved currency strategies that have drawn criticism from the International Monetary Fund. Simultaneously, the UK Conservative Party faces a potential electoral "punishment beating" driven by election betting scandals and voter anger over institutional dishonesty, creating a multi-front assault on their parliamentary majorities from Labour, Reform UK, and the Liberal Democrats.

In conversation with President Trump

Trump, Chamath, Jason, Friedberg, David Sacks

Donald Trump outlines a second-term economic strategy centered on aggressive deregulation, reciprocal tariffs, and a shift toward traditional energy sources like oil and nuclear power to lower costs and fuel AI infrastructure growth. On foreign policy, he guarantees no American ground troops in Ukraine while advocating for the immediate release of withheld JFK files and the preservation of dollar hegemony against de-dollarization efforts. Domestically, his platform devolves education funding to states, promises green cards for all U.S. graduates to retain global talent, and commits to stopping the release of unspent federal funds to control the national deficit.

What Is ZIRP And How Did It Poison Startups?

Dalton, Michael

During the Zero Interest Rate Phenomenon, a flood of cheap capital distorted venture capital markets, prompting fund managers to chase assets under management while founders prioritized aggressive hiring and inflated valuations over product-market fit. This environment spawned a wave of unsustainable businesses that collapsed immediately when rates normalized, separating companies with viable profit models from those reliant on infinite liquidity. In response, experienced investors and accelerators like Y Combinator are now urging a return to realistic growth strategies that prioritize operational efficiency and enduring business models over market timing.

The Sex Expert: "Casual Sex Is Almost Always Dangerous For Women!" - Louise Perry

Louise Perry

In a new interview, author Louise Perry contends that modern sexual culture, driven by biological mismatches and the 1960s contraceptive revolution, generates widespread misery by normalizing casual sex and eroding monogamous commitment. Perry supports her arguments with data on declining global fertility rates, the "Cinderella effect" regarding step-parenting risks, and psychological distress women experience after unprotected intimacy, while advocating for a return to engagement-before-sex norms to ensure partner investment. She further asserts that addressing these issues requires rejecting the denial of biological differences and implementing policies like the Nordic Model for sex work to protect vulnerable populations.

Marc Andreessen & Andrew Chen Talk Creative Computers

Marc Andreessen, Andrew Chen

Marc Andreessen frames the current technological landscape as a critical transition from legacy paradigms to probabilistic AI and immersive gaming, arguing that moral panics and outdated regulatory models threaten to stifle the private sector's role as the primary engine of innovation. He predicts that mass adoption of these new platforms will be driven by "massively multiplayer dreams" and permanent game economies, fundamentally reshaping industries ranging from education to healthcare by replacing static content with dynamic, user-generated experiences. Consequently, Andreessen advises founders to abandon traditional product roadmaps and instead build capital-intensive, policy-savvy institutions capable of executing decades-long visions in an environment where incumbent firms risk irrelevance without native AI-first architectures.

LangChain’s Harrison Chase on Building the Orchestration Layer for AI Agents | Training Data

Harrison Chase, Sonya Huang, Pat Grady

Harrison Chase positions Langchain as a critical orchestration layer for the "middle ground" of agent autonomy, prioritizing production-grade reliability over the volatile hype of fully autonomous systems. The company addresses this shift by deploying LangGraph for complex, stateful workflows and LangSmith for observability, enabling organizations to build custom cognitive architectures that balance flexibility with necessary human-in-the-loop controls. As the industry transitions from static chains to dynamic agents, these tools facilitate the move from customer support automation to software development integration while redefining testing and user experience paradigms.

Leaders in Sports: A Conversation with Earvin “Magic” Johnson and Mark Walter | Conference 2024

Earvin "Magic" Johnson, Mark Walter, Sarah Sandler, Jim Gray

Mark Walter and Magic Johnson established a transformative ownership partnership for the Los Angeles Dodgers, prioritizing shared values of winning and community uplift to secure a franchise valuation rise from $2.1 billion to approximately $6 billion. Their strategy combines aggressive business maneuvers, such as the $3.5 billion sale of minor league assets and the high-profile acquisition of Shohei Ohtani, with significant philanthropic commitments including $50 million in 2024 support for the Dodger Foundation and extensive minority business investment. Simultaneously, Johnson leverages this platform to advocate for a resilient competitive mindset within the Lakers organization while expanding his global legacy through HIV advocacy, animal conservation, and the planned Las Vegas "Hall of Excellence" museum.

It only really matters if you can find a handful of users that use your product habitually.

Early-stage founders are advised to prioritize identifying users who habitually integrate their product into daily workflows over pursuing vanity metrics like total signups. Success is defined by the retention of a core user base that returns repeatedly, rendering other performance data insignificant without this foundational evidence of habitual usage. Consequently, high acquisition numbers remain secondary unless they demonstrate tangible integration into the users' regular routines.