Latest Interviews

A German economic revival?

Wolfgang Fink, Allison Nathan

The new German coalition government has enacted legislation to unlock €500 billion for infrastructure and committed to raising defense spending to 3.5% of GDP by 2030, while simultaneously implementing reforms to boost economic competitiveness. These structural shifts occur amidst significant external pressure from U.S. tariff proposals that threaten the Eurozone's GDP and force multinational corporations to restructure supply chains, particularly within the automotive and chemical sectors. Despite macroeconomic headwinds and elevated valuations in European markets, robust M&A activity persists as companies accelerate digital transformation and restructuring to navigate a volatile geoeconomic landscape without an imminent recession on the horizon.

OpenAI Codex Team: From Coding Autocomplete to Asynchronous Autonomous Agents

Hanson Wang, Alexander Embiricos, Sonya Huang, Lauren Reeder

OpenAI has rebranded its Codex system into an agentic coding suite specifically RL-tuned to autonomously execute complex enterprise development tasks like debugging, testing, and deployment within isolated cloud environments. Internal adoption data indicates that professional engineers now leverage the tool to generate multiple parallel code iterations daily, effectively shifting their primary responsibility from writing code to validating agent outputs. This strategic pivot aims to redefine 2025 as the "year of agents" by lowering barriers to bespoke software creation while anticipating a market where human developers manage high-level workflows through future interfaces that blend in-IDE pairing with long-running background automation.

Fiverr CEO & Founder, Micha Kaufman: "If You’re Not Adapting to AI, F* You. You’re Done!"

Micha Kaufman, Harry Stebbings

The speaker asserts that individual accountability is the only path to remaining valuable in an era where AI rapidly democratizes skills and collapses the defensibility of incremental innovation. He warns that companies failing to transition their workforce toward strategic, human-centric thinking will face obsolescence, while investors must prioritize founder mission over technical ideas as market forces consolidate around foundational players. Ultimately, the event outlines a future where traditional education becomes obsolete, copyright structures unravel, and the only sustainable advantage lies in authentic human curation and the ability to leverage AI-native velocity.

Scooter Braun: When Everything Broke, It Fixed Me

Scooter Braun, Steven

Music mogul Scooter Braun, who sold his company SB Projects for $1.1 billion and managed acts like Justin Bieber and Taylor Swift, is transitioning from a persona driven by fear and insecurity to a life centered on authentic identity and fatherhood. After publicly selling the Big Machine catalog and navigating the mental health crises of himself and the artists he managed, Braun has embraced personal growth through therapy and a commitment to emerging technologies like AI. At age 40, he is redefining success as present parenting and curiosity, prioritizing emotional vulnerability over the pursuit of external validation.

Credit Markets in Transition | Global Conference 2025

Michael Piwowar, Michael Buchanan, Peter Gleysteen, Deborah Orida, Michael Zawadzki, Mike Pivovar, Mike Buchanan

Panelists analyzed the current macroeconomic landscape characterized by tariff uncertainty and Federal Reserve rate cuts, while highlighting a $30 trillion private credit market reshaped by regulatory changes that drive capital from banks to non-competitive partners. Industry leaders identified investment opportunities in infrastructure, asset-backed finance, and investment-grade credit, noting that resilient fundamentals and low leverage support default rates under 50 basis points despite weakening investor sentiment. The discussion concluded with a strategic pivot toward multi-asset credit approaches and structural diversification to mitigate volatility risks and capitalize on market dislocations for tactical offense.

Crypto's Wild Ride: The Great Debate | Global Conference 2025

Nicole Valentine, Sebastian Bea, Zoe Cruz, Dante Disparte, Mary-Catherine Lader, Caroline D. Pham, Ivan Soto-Wright

Industry leaders and regulators converge to redefine digital assets from speculative experiments into essential global infrastructure, with figures like Zoe Cruz and Dante Disparte highlighting stablecoins as the "digital dollar" for cross-border payments. Regulatory shifts led by CFTC Chair Caroline Pham establish a dual-track framework that separates fraudulent unbacked tokens from tokenized real-world assets to unlock a projected $2 to $5 trillion market by 2030. The consensus among panelists from Coinbase, MoonPay, and Uniswap foresees a 2025 pivot where automated financial protocols and Bitcoin as a strategic reserve become invisible yet ubiquitous utilities replacing legacy banking rails.

The State of Consumer Tech in the Age of AI

Erik Torenberg, Anish Acharya, Olivia Moore, Justine Moore, Bryan Kim

The discussion frames consumer AI as a velocity-driven market where relentless model updates replace traditional network effects, enabling premium pricing models that capture significant value by substituting high-cost labor. While mobile and wearable hardware currently serve as the primary substrate, the sector is navigating a transition from legacy social structures toward novel paradigms like synthetic selves and agentic actions that prioritize direct user utility over static interfaces. Ultimately, success depends on maintaining a technical frontier and evolving new social norms to support an ecosystem where AI companions and enterprise tools facilitate deeper human connection rather than displacing it.

Sundar Pichai: CEO of Google and Alphabet | Lex Fridman Podcast #471

Sundar Pichai, Lex Fridman, Andrew, Chris, Max

Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai characterized AI as the most profound technology in human history, forecasting a 50x surge in token processing by 2030 while projecting that Artificial General Intelligence will emerge shortly thereafter. He detailed significant advancements across Alphabet's portfolio, including Waymo's ten million paid rides and Google's 10% engineering velocity boost, alongside the launch of Google Beam telepresence technology. Pichai concluded that while AI will fundamentally reshape global economics and shift computing toward agentic operating systems, it will ultimately democratize creativity and amplify human consciousness rather than replace it.

Is DPI The Only Thing That Matters? with Sam Lessin, Jason Lemkin & Rory O’Driscoll

Sam Lessin, Jason Lemkin, Rory O’Driscoll, Harry Stebbings

Panelists debated the superiority of DPI over TVPI while noting the collapse of mid-tier venture funds has forced a binary market between mega-funds and smaller entities. The discussion highlighted a surge in hyperscaler capital expenditure for AI infrastructure, warning of potential corrections if revenue growth fails to materialize within two to three years. Strategic predictions further pointed to imminent IPOs for crypto giant Circle and a structural shift in B2B SaaS where AI agents replace traditional user interfaces.

How Goldman Sachs’ John Waldron is navigating “a more uncertain time”

John Waldron, Allison Nathan

Goldman Sachs reports that the U.S. economy remains resilient against recession fears despite April tariff shocks, though persistent fiscal deficits and policy uncertainty continue to constrain corporate capital investment and global capital allocation. The firm has moderated its own risk positioning while anticipating a resurgence in capital markets activity this summer, provided no further exogenous policy disruptions occur. Leadership is simultaneously pivoting toward operational excellence and technology infrastructure to stabilize revenue streams and navigate a volatile environment defined by shifting interest rates and tariff trajectories.

Invest in This – It’ll Be Worth $1.5 Million by 2030 | World Leading Investing Expert - Cathie Wood

Cathie Wood, Steven

ARK Invest CEO Kathy Wood forecasts a decade of transformative economic growth driven by the convergence of robotics, AI, and biotechnology, projecting a tenfold appreciation in assets within these sectors. She highlights Tesla as the world's largest AI project, predicting a $2,600 stock price fueled by autonomous robotaxis and humanoid robots, while also advocating for Bitcoin as a critical global monetary asset expected to reach $1.5 million by 2030. Wood concludes that investors must actively align with these disruptive innovation platforms to counteract demographic collapse and outperform traditional passive strategies.

The Road to the American Dream: Entrepreneurship and Innovation | Global Conference 2025

Rachel Goslins, Bing Chen, David Cohen, Shamina Singh, Anastasia Soare

At the Milken Center panel "The Road to the American Dream," entrepreneurs Bing Gordon, David Sze, Shamina, and Anastasia examined the fractured consensus on economic mobility while contrasting US entrepreneurial strengths with global barriers like credit access and the "missing middle." The speakers outlined strategies for inclusive growth, including Gold House's 50% capital allocation to women-led firms and Techstars' geographic decentralization, while debunking myths about Silicon Valley dominance and technical founding requirements. Despite facing headwinds such as high tariffs and rising costs, the panelists concluded that economic contractions currently offer unique opportunities for new entrants to leverage abundant talent and address unmet market needs.

Jared Isaacman: What went wrong at NASA | The All-In Interview

Jared Isaacman, David Friedberg

President Trump withdrew Jared Isaacman's confirmed nomination for NASA Administrator after a single influential advisor reportedly diverted the administration toward a different direction. Isaacman characterized the reversal as a resistance to his efficiency-focused "DOGE" agenda and a defense of bureaucratic status quo interests rather than political maneuvering. He subsequently detailed a strategic plan to slash the agency's budget, replace the cost-prohibitive Space Launch System with commercial heavy-lift vehicles, and prioritize deep-space capabilities to counter China's rapid progress in the space race.

Many AI apps today are like the horseless carriages of the late 19th century.

The industry currently mirrors the "horseless carriage" phenomenon where AI adoption simply replicates legacy workflows rather than leveraging unique platform capabilities. Historical patterns indicate that software must transition through these superficial early iterations over several years before achieving functional utility. Consequently, experts assert that AI in software development has not yet reached this mature stage of useful implementation.

How Fei-Fei Li Is Rebuilding AI for the Real World

Fei-Fei Li, Erik Torenberg, Martin Casado

Co-founded by Fei-Fei Li alongside computer vision pioneers Ben Mildenhall, Christoph Lassner, and Justin Johnson, World Labs is establishing a foundational infrastructure for 3D spatial intelligence to overcome the limitations of current language-based AI. By leveraging deep expertise in neural radiance fields, Gaussian splatting, and diffusion models, the team aims to build systems capable of converting 2D views into interactive, generative 3D environments for robotics and creative applications. This concentrated effort seeks to solve the "world model" challenge by equipping machines with the embodied spatial reasoning necessary for navigating and manipulating physical realities.