Latest Interviews
Showing 421–435 of 1,935 transcripts.
Clear all filters- Milken Institute1h 0m
Strategies for Expanding Affordable Housing | Global Conference 2025
Jennifer Sondag, Stephen J. Cloobeck, Scott Epstein, Martin Muoto, Shane Phillips, Stephanie Rawlings-Blake
A high-stakes panel on California's housing crisis converges on the conclusion that a five-million-unit supply shortage, exacerbated by regulatory burdens like CEQA and restrictive zoning, necessitates urgent legislative and structural reform. Key figures including developer Martin and gubernatorial candidate Stephen Zake advocate for dismantling bureaucratic barriers, citing cost disparities between inefficient nonprofit construction and private sector models, while highlighting successful precedents in Cambridge and New Zealand. The discussion culminates in a strategic pivot toward public-private partnerships and single-family upzoning, arguing that aligning private capital with social impact is essential to resolve the workforce housing mismatch and lower costs for essential workers.
- Milken Institute59 min
US Economic Competitiveness in a Changing World | Global Conference 2025
Stephanie Flanders, Gary Cohn, Kevin McCarthy, Peter Orszag, Ruth Porat, Glenn Youngkin
Panelists project the U.S. economy will maintain long-term resilience driven by global reserve currency status and corporate investment, despite short-term fiscal strain and a macro-resilience decline caused by supply chain diversification away from China. To address structural deficits, the discussion emphasizes accelerating GDP growth through aggressive AI adoption, a nuclear energy revolution to power digital infrastructure, and tax policy extensions that prioritize domestic manufacturing over antitrust enforcement. Simultaneously, the administration faces a critical tension between strict immigration enforcement and the urgent need to attract global talent, a challenge highlighted by Virginia's $100 billion in recent corporate commitments and its pivot toward non-traditional workforce development pathways.
- All-In Podcast1h 31m
Grok 4 Wows, The Bitter Lesson, Third Party, AI Browsers, SCOTUS backs POTUS on RIFs
Travis Kalanick, Keith Rabois, Chamath, Jason, Friedberg
Travis Kalanick unveiled his "Bowl Builder" robotic food assembly machine designed to slash labor costs to 10% of revenue, while Elon Musk confirmed ongoing discussions with Pony AI to license autonomous driving technology for both passenger and food delivery applications. These logistical advances align with Musk's announcement that Grok 4 has outperformed competitor models by scaling general computation and transitioning exclusively to synthetic training data. Amidst these technological shifts, Musk also proposed a new political party focused on fiscal responsibility to influence congressional races, a move supported by the Supreme Court's recent ruling granting the President broad authority to execute federal workforce reductions.
- Milken Institute58 min
Balance Sheet: The US Government Budget and National Debt | Global Conference 2025
Josh Barro, Maya MacGuineas, Steven T. Mnuchin, Paul Ryan, Alan Schwartz, Phillip Swagel, David Malani
A panel of economic experts and former officials projected that U.S. deficits will reach 8% of GDP within four years, driven by expiring tax provisions, rising interest costs, and an inflexible entitlement system facing insolvency by 2033. While policy proposals ranging from Value Added Taxes to sovereign wealth funds were debated, participants warned that political gridlock and current IRS reductions will likely delay necessary structural reform until a market crisis forces action. The discussion highlighted a potential erosion of dollar hegemony due to rising borrowing costs and foreign diversification, urging the creation of a bipartisan fiscal commission with enforcement powers to prevent a long-term debt spiral.
- Milken Institute14 min
A Conversation with US Secretary of Education Linda McMahon | Global Conference 2025
Appointee Linda McMahon, drawing on her business leadership background, has launched federal investigations into universities over civil rights compliance while initiating a strategic plan to dismantle the Department of Education by shifting authority to states and families. This agenda includes increasing charter school funding, integrating artificial intelligence into curricula, and prioritizing workforce development to reduce reliance on four-year degrees. Although the full elimination of the department requires congressional approval, the current administration has already cut major data collection budgets and redirected resources toward parental choice and local control.
- Y Combinator39 min
How to Spend Your 20s in the AI Era
The event critically examines how AI is collapsing traditional computer science career safety nets and redefining startup economics by shifting capital formation toward direct revenue generation rather than external validation. It argues that competitive advantage now relies on "forward-deployed engineering" and niche domain expertise, urging founders to build value through tangible utility rather than brand narratives or simulated success. Furthermore, the discussion outlines a preparation framework for entrepreneurs emphasizing frugality, co-founder synchronization, and the strategic use of proprietary data to secure moats in specialized markets before the potential obsolescence of human labor renders current wealth accumulation obsolete.
- Milken Institute57 min
Macroeconomic Outlook | Global Conference 2025
Gregory Zuckerman, Khalid Al-Falih, André Esteves, Karen Karniol Tambour, Kathryn Koch, Ron O'Hanley
Leading financial experts analyze the convergence of political volatility, trade uncertainty, and shifting geopolitical alignments that are driving a global reevaluation of U.S. exceptionalism and prompting investors to diversify into Asian markets, the UK, and the Middle East. The panel highlights critical macroeconomic headwinds, including a "baked-in" recession risk and a Federal Reserve constrained by tariff-induced inflation, which are forcing a repricing of Treasury yields and exposing vulnerabilities in risk assets. Amidst these challenges, private credit emerges as a vital, though stress-tested, innovation for risk dispersion, while advocates for conservative lending strategies and active management position themselves to capitalize on the expected rise in defaults and liquidity dislocations.
- All-In Podcast13 min
"What The F Are We Doing?" David Friedberg On BBB’s Deficit Increase & Trump vs. Elon
The White House and Treasury officials, including Scott Besson and Ray Dalio, are advocating for a "333" economic strategy to reduce the federal deficit-to-GDP ratio to 3% while stimulating 3% growth and controlling inflation. This approach relies on unproven variables such as tariff revenue and tax cuts, facing skepticism from economists who warn that current structural incentives in Congress and massive hidden liabilities make the target unachievable without monetary expansion. Concurrently, analysts project a strategic pivot for Elon Musk to leverage his $250 million in political expenditures to define a specific "America Pack" focused on balanced budgets and sustainable energy, aiming to influence policy without engaging in direct conflict with the Trump administration.
- Milken Institute51 min
Author Talk: Jonathan Haidt, "The Anxious Generation" | Global Conference 2025
Jonathan Haidt, Jennifer Siebel Newsom, Conrad Kieschel
At the Milken Institute Global Conference, social psychologists Jonathan Haidt and California First Lady Jennifer Siebel Newsom addressed the youth mental health crisis by identifying the 2012 shift to smartphones as the primary driver of surging depression, anxiety, and social skill atrophy among teenagers. They advocated for four specific policy norms—delaying smartphone access until high school, mandating phone-free schools, raising the age of internet adulthood to 16, and promoting unsupervised free play—to counter the addictive designs of tech giants and facilitate proper neurodevelopment. The session concluded with a call for collective community action and a "mother's rebellion" to enforce these boundaries, aiming to restore physical interaction and resilience for future generations.
- Y Combinator35 min
François Chollet: How We Get To AGI
Recent analysis of the Abstraction Reasoning Corpus series reveals that while standard pre-training scaling fails at fluid intelligence, Test-Time Adaptation enables models to dynamically solve novel problems, though current systems still lag significantly behind human performance on the 2025 ARC-2 benchmark. To bridge this gap, the field is adopting the Kaleidoscope Hypothesis, which posits that future architectures must integrate continuous intuition with discrete programmatic reasoning to achieve true compositional generalization. This shift drives the development of endia-like meta-learners capable of synthesizing custom code and maintaining a dynamic library of abstractions, with the explicit goal of accelerating independent scientific discovery by early 2026.
Why a16z Bet $15 Million on THIS Controversial Startup
Bryan Kim, Roy Lee, Molly O'Shea
Brian Kim secured a $15 million investment in Cluely by leveraging a "momentum as a moat" strategy that prioritizes velocity and personal rapport over traditional fundraising pitches. His investment thesis for the AI era emphasizes rapid scaling and efficiency, as evidenced by his high-velocity deals with 11 Labs and Function Health while navigating regulatory headwinds regarding deepfakes. Kim argues that the current technology landscape requires building "in the plane as it falls," with companies achieving profitability through smaller teams and massive growth trajectories.
- Milken Institute1h 0m
Green or Gray: What's Next for Transportation? | Global Conference 2025
Susan Li, Adam Goldstein, Nina Hachigian, Alex Israel, Mark Morelli, Will Thompson
Industry leaders including Mark Morelli of Circle K and Will Thompson of Barclays convened to analyze the severe financial and operational headwinds facing the U.S. mobility sector, such as projected tariff losses for Ford and GM and a critical $400 billion grid infrastructure gap. The panel debated divergent paths forward, ranging from China's state-subsidized pricing advantages to the necessity of multi-fuel strategies and a "technological war" for AI dominance in defense and electric vehicle manufacturing. While consensus emerged that autonomous fleet deployment and EV charging profitability will likely materialize within two to three years, stakeholders uniformly dismissed the 2035 total electrification mandate as unrealistic given current fleet turnover rates and transmission constraints.
- Milken Institute1h 0m
The Global Landscape and Opportunities for Medical Breakthroughs | Global Conference 2025
Usha Lee McFarling, Jay Bradner, Doug Drysdale, Neil Kumar, Alice Pomponio, Grant Verstandig
Biomedicine leaders from BridgeBio, Amgen, and Zephyr AI outlined a strategy to accelerate the industry from discovery to commercialization by leveraging precision diagnostics, population-scale genetics, and AI-driven protein folding to overcome the "valley of death." While startups like Saiban pioneer high-efficacy mental health treatments and the American Cancer Society launches "BrightEdge" to blend venture capital with donor funds, panelists warned that eroding NIH funding threatens this innovation ecosystem. The discussion emphasized that sustaining global competitiveness requires public-private partnerships to fund basic research and expand diverse genomic databases beyond Western populations.
- Y Combinator44 min
Fei-Fei Li: Spatial Intelligence is the Next Frontier in AI
Fei-Fei Li, Diana, Alex, Karl, Yashna, Annie
Dr. Fei-Fei Li, founder and CEO of World Labs, leads a team of renowned technologists to develop spatial intelligence and 3D "world models" as the essential pathway to achieving Artificial General Intelligence. The venture addresses the unique mathematical and physical complexities of reconstructing and generating the three-dimensional world, distinguishing its approach from current language-centric large language models. By combining rigorous data quality standards with a focus on fundamental, interdisciplinary research, the company aims to power next-generation applications ranging from the metaverse to advanced scientific discovery.
- Milken Institute56 min
Aging Societies: Opportunities amid Challenges | Global Conference 2025
Maneet Ahuja, Cynthia Hardy Maasry, Ted Koenig, Timothy Lyne, Andrew Milgram, Cynthia Masry, Tim Line
Panelists Andrew Milgram, Ted Koenig, and Tim Line characterize the current economic landscape as a technical recession driven by tariff uncertainty and wage compression, resulting in middle-market EBITDA margins near 5-6% and bankruptcy filings at 14-year highs. The institutional focus is shifting as non-bank lenders now execute 90% of leveraged finance while private equity capital flows toward private credit to navigate declining deal valuations and extended hold periods. Experts forecast a tepid 2025 followed by a recovery in 2026 and 2027, with lenders increasingly prepared to act as permanent owners of distressed assets through robust restructuring capabilities.