Latest Interviews

What will the US presidential election mean for the economy?

Kevin Hassett, Jared Bernstein, Allison Nathan

Former and current Council of Economic Advisers chairs Jared Bernstein and Kevin Hassett debated the U.S. economic outlook, contrasting Bernstein's assessment of a solid expansion with Hassett's characterization of conflicting recessionary and growth signals. Their discussion highlighted sharp divergences on policy, with Bernstein defending targeted tariffs and tax hikes on high-net-worth individuals while Hassett advocated for reciprocal trade measures and warned that raising the corporate tax rate to 28% would stifle growth. Despite these disagreements, both economists acknowledged the potential of expanding tax credits for families and expressed concern over long-term fiscal sustainability regarding deficit levels and the upcoming debt limit crisis.

AI, Robotics & the New Global Arms Race

Marc Andreessen, Ben Horowitz, David Halberstam, Elon Musk

While the US and its Western allies maintain a leadership advantage in the software and AI models powering general-purpose robotics, China currently dominates the critical hardware supply chain required to mass-produce these systems. This asymmetry creates a strategic dependency risk for the United States, as the dominance of Chinese entities like DJI and Unitree in drones and humanoid robots exposes the US to potential supply chain disruptions during conflict while facing prohibitive domestic manufacturing barriers. Without an urgent policy shift to address this hardware gap, the convergence of advanced AI with China's mature physical production capabilities could redefine global military and economic power.

Ukraine reaction: Russia deploys North Koreans

Rosie Bloor, Jason Palmer, Shashank Joshi, Tom Easton, Catherine Nixie

Recent analysis indicates Russia is bolstering its war effort in Ukraine with North Korean troops and massive ammunition supplies while the Ukrainian military faces a severe mobilization crisis and critical shortages of air defense interceptors. Concurrently, logistical failures in overseas voting during the US election have undermined American democratic credibility, while the UK's "Life in the UK" citizenship test is increasingly scrutinized as an arbitrary barrier rather than a genuine integration tool. These developments collectively highlight a shifting global landscape where military attrition, domestic political friction, and exclusionary civic policies are reshaping international stability and democratic norms.

How Glean CEO Arvind Jain Solved the Enterprise Search Problem – and What It Means for AI at Work

Arvind Jain, Sonya Huang, Pat Grady

Glean CEO Arvind Jain's company has evolved from an enterprise search provider into an AI application platform, leveraging a five-year vision to automate 80% of knowledge worker tasks through a unique RAG architecture that grounds responses in private data. The platform differentiates itself by prioritizing data governance, semantic knowledge graphs, and fine-grained access controls before layering on Large Language Models, which has enabled year-over-year revenue quadrupling. By abstracting complex infrastructure for developers and focusing on agentic workflows, Glean aims to shift the market from reactive querying to proactive, autonomous assistance that doubles productivity for engineering, sales, and support teams.

Blackstone’s Jon Gray on real estate, rates, and building a winning company culture

Jon Gray, Jonathan Gray, John Waldron

John Gray, President and COO of Blackstone, leverages the firm's $1 trillion asset base to guide a strategic pivot toward thematic sectors like data centers and life sciences while navigating a post-2008 landscape defined by shifting capital flows. Through disciplined contrarian investing exemplified by the Hilton turnaround and a "concussion bombing" deployment strategy, Blackstone is capitalizing on falling interest rates to restart IPO and transaction markets despite current macroeconomic headwinds. Gray's leadership couples this aggressive capital allocation with a strong entrepreneurial culture and philanthropic rigor, positioning the firm to exploit growth opportunities in India and resilient real estate sub-sectors like logistics.

Timed bombs: Israel’s pre-election attack on Iran

Jason Palmer, Rosie Bloor, Greg Karlstrom, Henry Trix, Mike Jakeman

Israel executed its first officially acknowledged strike on Iranian soil, targeting air defense and missile manufacturing sites while deliberately avoiding nuclear and economic infrastructure to comply with US pressure ahead of the November election. The operation aimed to deliver a strategic blow without inflaming global oil markets, prompting domestic criticism in Israel for its limited scope and leaving Iran in a period of defensive calculation as it weighs future retaliation. Meanwhile, broader geopolitical and economic shifts include a significant surge in generative AI investment within customer service and ongoing, complex negotiations to merge the LIV Golf and PGA tours despite regulatory and cultural hurdles.

The Weekend Intelligence: The Apology

Charlie McCann, Gladstone family, Charlie Gladstone, Tara, John, Terry, Laura Trevelyan, Eric Phillips, Vereen Shepherd, Oswald Kwamena, Roxanne Kwamene, Rory Galloway, Nico Rofast, Jemma Newby

At the upcoming Commonwealth Heads of Government meeting in Samoa, Caribbean nations are pressuring the UK to address billions in reparations claims stemming from the transatlantic slave trade, a demand contrasted by British officials who warn of unmanageable historical complexities. Amidst this diplomatic tension, the Gladstone family made a rare public apology in Guyana for Sir John Gladstone's role in enslaving 2,500 people, pledging £100,000 for scholarship programs and engaging in direct reconciliation with the descendants of rebel leader Kwamena. While individual descendants offer moral redress through education funding, international experts and CARICOM nations maintain that the primary financial obligation for compensating the estimated $24 trillion in damages rests with state actors rather than private families.

Markets turn Trump, Long rates spike, Election home stretch, Influencer mania, Saving Starbucks

Trump, Chamath, Jason, Friedberg

Prominent investors and analysts warn of escalating global leverage and inflation-driven asset repricing, citing a pivot toward gold and Bitcoin as superior hedges against a US debt crisis reaching $68 trillion. The discussion highlights a decisive electoral shift toward Donald Trump alongside a Democratic campaign struggle characterized by ambiguous messaging and a credibility collapse among mainstream media outlets. While corporate maturity cases like Starbucks illustrate the limits of efficiency-driven growth, hosts advise constructing portfolios around commodity-linked businesses and maintaining anti-fragile side hustles to navigate a coming correction in overvalued equities.

Banking on an Inclusive Future | Global Investors' Symposium Mexico City 2024

Rodrigo Bettini, Gabriela Zapata, Ruben Coppel, Tonatiuh Rodríguez Gómez

The Milken Institute convened a panel to analyze financial inclusion strategies in Mexico, highlighting how institutions like Banco Azteca and Banco BanCoppel leverage physical retail networks to serve the 81% of the population earning under $600 monthly. Experts emphasized that true inclusion requires moving beyond basic account access to generate wealth, noting that rigid regulatory frameworks currently hinder the unbanked by failing to accommodate volatile income streams and informal credit histories. Looking ahead, the discussion underscored the necessity for hybrid service models combining digital tools with face-to-face interactions and called for regulatory sandboxes to test differentiated rules that better support low-income demographics ahead of global climate and economic summits.

Why OpenAI's o1 Is A Huge Deal | YC Decoded

OpenAI has released the O1 Preview and O1 Mini models, a new class of systems designed for advanced reasoning that match PhD-level performance on complex scientific and coding benchmarks through self-generated chain-of-thought processes. Unlike previous architectures requiring manual prompt engineering, these models utilize large-scale reinforcement learning to decompose problems into verifiable steps, with accuracy improving dynamically as they allocate more "thinking time" to correct errors. While early testing shows mixed preference over GPT-4o for creative tasks, Sam Altman characterizes the technology as a foundational leap comparable to the GPT-2 stage, promising rapid evolution toward GPT-4 capabilities and future multi-modal integration within months.

Follow the leader: who will run Hamas?

Rosie Bloor, Gareth Brown, Rebecca Jackson, Anne Rowe

Following the killing of Yahya Sinwar in Gaza, Hamas faces a critical leadership vacuum while weighing a transitional council against potential successors like the Iran-aligned Khalil al-Hayya or the Turkey-aligned Khalid Mashal. Concurrently, Kamala Harris navigates a fragile Georgia election strategy amidst significant erosion of Black male support, countering economic anxieties with policy proposals on housing and the child tax credit. Meanwhile, the death of Turkish cleric Fethullah Gulen closes the chapter on a decades-long power struggle that destabilized Turkey's institutions through a vast network of schools and the fallout from the failed 2016 coup attempt.

Former Chief Scientist at Salesforce, Richard Socher | You.com, LLMs, AI Agents, Complex Work

Richard Socher, Molly O'Shea

u.com recently secured a $50 million Series B financing round led by Georgian to accelerate its pivot from a search engine to an AI-driven productivity engine serving high-stakes industries like hedge funds and biotech. The company differentiates its model-agnostic platform through proprietary search stacks and enterprise features that support massive data rooms, resulting in API traffic that now surpasses end-user consumption. Backed by investors including NVIDIA and Salesforce Ventures, u.com is scaling its operations and hiring to automate complex workflows that traditional large language models cannot reliably execute.

Global Overview: Pathways to Inclusive Growth | Global Investors' Symposium Mexico City 2024

Richard Ditizio, Robert Citrone, Agustin Coppel, Altagracia Gomez

President Sheinbaum's new administration is accelerating Mexico's nearshoring strategy by establishing ten strategic industrial corridors, slashing permit processing times by half, and setting renewable energy targets of 45% by 2030. This policy shift, supported by a massive domestic STEM workforce and regulatory reforms in sectors like Grupo Coppel's expansion, aims to capitalize on a global macroeconomic realignment toward pro-market Latin American governments. Despite these structural advantages, the investment community emphasizes that long-term success hinges on the government strengthening the rule of law to ensure private sector growth without excessive interference.

Coming up Trump: our election model puts Harris behind

Trump, Harris, Rosie Bloor, Jason Palmer, Dan Rosenheck, Simon Wright, Shailesh Chitnas

The Economist's latest forecasting model has shifted to give Donald Trump a 56% probability of winning the U.S. presidency, narrowing the Electoral College gap in key swing states after consolidating undecided and third-party voters. Meanwhile, Tesla introduced its autonomous Cyber Cab and RoboVan with plans to undercut competitors on price, though the event triggered a 9% stock decline due to investor skepticism over regulatory hurdles and a lack of concrete deployment timelines. Finally, Microsoft marked Excel's 40th anniversary by integrating AI assistants to maintain its dominance among 400 million paid users despite the software's historical role in significant data processing errors.

DoorDash ft. Tony Xu – The “Wrong” Moves That Built a Giant

Tony Xu, Roelof Botha, Keith Yandell, Miki Kuusi, Alfred Lin, Rolof Guedan

Founded in 2013 by Tony Xu and three Stanford classmates, DoorDash disrupted the food delivery industry by targeting suburban markets with a merchant-first strategy before navigating severe capital shortages that nearly caused the company to collapse. Facing a critical 2018 cash crisis, the leadership accepted simultaneous term sheets from SoftBank and Sequoia Capital to secure a $535 million war chest, a move that enabled rapid expansion and allowed the firm to surpass competitors like Grubhub and Uber Eats by 2019. The company subsequently leveraged its operational efficiency and underdog mentality to pivot from a single restaurant category to a global logistics platform, a trajectory solidified by its pandemic-era support of merchants and the 2022 acquisition of Finland's Volt.