Latest Interviews

Sustainable Solutions For a Green Future

Tracy Gray, Tom McGrath, Nancy Pfund, Dakota Semler, Azita Yazdani, Richael Young

Moderator Tracy Marder convened a panel featuring investment leaders Nancy Fund of DBL Partners and Tom McGrath of Vital Clean Tech Ventures to explore how impact capital drives innovation in sectors like transportation, energy storage, and agriculture. The discussion detailed specific breakthroughs from founders including Michelle of Mammoth Trading, Dakota Simler of Thor Trucks, and Azita Yazdani of Exergy Systems, who presented data-driven solutions for groundwater management, electric heavy-duty logistics, and decentralized water recovery. Ultimately, the session emphasized the necessity of long-term policy stability and equitable workforce development to scale these technologies toward the $1.3 trillion annual sustainable energy investment required by 2030.

Facial recognition technology will change the way we live

In 2018, advancements in machine learning and the integration of biometrics into consumer smartphones propelled facial recognition from niche development to mainstream adoption. While commercial applications expanded globally from tracking retail habits in the West to managing a 700 million-person database in China, researchers warned that the technology's ability to covertly identify individuals and infer personal attributes poses significant threats to privacy and civil liberties. Consequently, the year emerged as a critical juncture for establishing regulatory frameworks to balance security benefits against the risks of non-consensual surveillance.

Transforming cities with technology

Fabio Duarte, Caitlin Dolkaert, Nick Mokua

With global urbanization driving 900 million people into slums and cities consuming three-quarters of world energy, the smart city sector is surging toward a $1.5 trillion valuation by leveraging real-time data networks. Innovators in Seoul, Nairobi, and Boston demonstrate this shift by deploying integrated sensor systems to optimize transportation, coordinate emergency services, and detect public health crises through sewage and infrastructure monitoring. These initiatives prioritize using data to "make people smarter," directly addressing affordability, traffic gridlock, and opioid surges without relying solely on hardware deployment.

Highlights | A Conversation with George W. Bush

George W. Bush, Michael Milken

Former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice outlined her multifaceted career initiatives, ranging from a $15 billion HIV/AIDS strategy that prioritized local agency over paternalism to the creation of the Presidential Leadership Scholars program designed to cultivate community-based problem solvers. Her presentation also detailed a personal artistic endeavor to portray veteran trauma and a defense of the No Child Left Behind Act against critics of federal educational accountability. Furthermore, Rice warned that modern populist anti-immigrant sentiments echo the protectionist Smoot-Hawley tariffs of the late 1920s, which historically exacerbated the Great Depression, while asserting that universal freedom remains the most reliable path to lasting peace.

What Happens When Mobile (Really) Hits the Wallet

Alex Rampell

The speaker argues that the banking sector is undergoing a fundamental transformation from physical branch-based models to "Amazon-style" mobile-first ecosystems where services are disaggregated and the physical checkbook is replaced by a layered digital payment stack. This shift enables next-generation personal financial managers to utilize granular Level 3 transaction data for automated refinancing, dynamic insurance switching, and frictionless couponing, while simultaneously threatening legacy payment intermediaries that lack ownership of hardware and operating systems. To fully realize these opportunities, the industry requires open application programming interfaces from major platforms like Apple and Google to facilitate the digitization of all physical wallet items.

AI, Deep Learning, and Machine Learning: A Primer

Frank Chen

Andreessen Horowitz partner Frank Chen frames the current AI boom as a pivotal platform shift comparable to the mobile and cloud revolutions, driven by deep learning's ability to process vast datasets without manual rule programming. This modern "AI spring" contrasts with historical failures caused by scaling limitations, evidenced by recent breakthroughs in autonomous navigation, natural language processing, and superhuman performance in games like Go. While generalized human intelligence remains unproven, deep learning has established itself as the most significant advance in the field since the 1956 Dartmouth conference, becoming an indispensable infrastructure for industries ranging from finance to robotics.

Cracking the Code of Addiction and Mental Health

Lynn Goldman, Thomas Insel, Gary Mendell, Richard Pops, Garen Staglin, Nora Volkow

A panel of experts from NIDA and public health organizations identifies the opioid crisis as a preventable epidemic driven by systemic healthcare failures, including aggressive pharmaceutical marketing and inadequate medical training, which have caused mortality rates among white non-Hispanic Americans to rise for the first time in history. To address this, the group advocates for mandating CDC prescribing limits, expanding access to proven medication-assisted treatments, and shifting workplace cultures to reduce stigma, emphasizing that the primary obstacle remains the implementation of existing evidence-based protocols rather than a lack of scientific knowledge. Despite these proposed solutions facing significant barriers such as insurance coverage gaps and reimbursement policies that delay care, the consensus holds that coordinated policy changes could reduce new addiction rates by half and reverse decades of escalating overdose deaths.

Scaling Culture | Jason Kilar, former Hulu CEO

Jason Kilar

Jason, a corporate culture expert with twenty years of scaling experience at Disney, Amazon, and Hulu, argues that organizational values must be codified into repeatable mechanisms to survive growth beyond fifty employees. He details how Disney relied on explicit behavioral modeling and dedicated training institutions, while Amazon utilized written leadership principles and tangible awards to dismantle bureaucracy and enforce "Disagree and Commit" protocols. Additionally, Jason explains how Hulu leveraged provocative cultural documents to repel misaligned candidates and rigorously terminated high performers who violated core tenets, demonstrating that good intentions alone cannot sustain culture at scale.

How to Be a Great Founder with Reid Hoffman (How to Start a Startup 2014: Lecture 13)

Reid Hoffman, Sam

This analysis challenges the "super-founder" myth by advocating for small, complementary co-founder teams that prioritize high-trust dynamics and constructive conflict over individual panopticons of skill. It outlines a strategic framework where founders select locations based on specific network needs rather than defaulting to Silicon Valley, while balancing rigid long-term visions with the agility to pivot on intelligent risks. The discussion further emphasizes that successful ventures require an informed contrarian thesis and the ability to manage paradoxes such as simultaneous belief and paranoia to navigate the critical intersection of product distribution and financing.

The deep ocean is the final frontier on planet Earth

Bobby Moore, Greg stone, Jim Delgado

Utilizing the US government vessel *Okeanos Explorer* and its advanced *Deep Discover* ROV, an international team is investigating the World War I-era submarine wreck of the S-19 while contending with extreme pressures and critical technical failures. Although scientists hope to uncover clues about the origins of life in deep-sea ecosystems and assess the economic potential of rare earth mineral mining, they simultaneously document pervasive marine debris to underscore the urgency of stewarding these fragile environments. This mission highlights the accelerating race to explore the uncharted depths, balancing historical discovery and resource extraction against the need to protect the ocean's closed-system integrity.

Foundations and Challenges of Deep Learning (Yoshua Bengio)

Yoshua Bengio, Hugo Larochelle, Andrej Karpathy, Richard Socher, Sherry Moore, Ruslan Salakhutdinov, Andrew Ng, John Schulman, Pascal Lamblin, Adam Coates, Alex Wiltschko, Quoc Le, Shubho Sengupta

Yoshua Bengio outlines five essential ingredients for human-level machine learning, emphasizing that deep neural networks overcome the curse of dimensionality through parallel and sequential composition to efficiently represent complex functions. He contrasts current high-dimensional optimization landscapes, which are dominated by saddle points rather than local minima, against historical theories while highlighting unsupervised learning as a critical mechanism for developing generalizable world models. The presentation concludes by addressing future challenges in training long-term dependencies and integrating neuroscience-inspired alternatives to backpropagation, alongside administrative notes regarding an upcoming textbook by Bengio, Ian Goodfellow, and Aaron Courville.

Deep Learning for Computer Vision (Andrej Karpathy, OpenAI)

Andrej Karpathy, Hugo Larochelle, Richard Socher, Sherry Moore, Ruslan Salakhutdinov, Andrew Ng, John Schulman, Pascal Lamblin, Adam Coates, Alex Wiltschko, Quoc Le, Yoshua Bengio, Shubho Sengupta, lexfridman

This presentation traces the evolution of convolutional neural networks from 1960s neuroscience foundations to the 2012 AlexNet breakthrough, highlighting how deep learning displaced traditional feature extraction by achieving near-human accuracy on the ImageNet dataset. Key architectural innovations, such as residual skip connections in ResNets and efficient Inception modules, enabled the training of deeper, wider models that serve as generic feature extractors for diverse tasks ranging from object detection to medical imaging. The discussion concludes with practical deployment strategies emphasizing the use of pre-trained models and GPU-accelerated infrastructure to overcome computational bottlenecks in both cloud and edge environments.

A Fireside Chat with Serge Pun Building Myanmar

Serge Pun, Staci Warden, Mike Milken, Mahendra Lama, Minseok Lee, Dickey Yuhuiko, Brad Gordon

Expanding from a private interview to a public forum, the Milken Institute session featured Serge Poon and Mike Milken discussing Myanmar's shifting economic landscape following the removal of US sanctions. Poon detailed his forty-year journey from displacement to rebuilding a private banking empire through strict anti-corruption practices, while outlining a strategy prioritizing long-term infrastructure investment over short-term gains. The dialogue concluded with an optimistic five-year forecast for nation-building, emphasizing regional connectivity and the need for investors to support foundational "trunk" projects despite lingering political risks.

Discover Colombo: travel in the fastest-growing city in the world

Sonali Dharmavardana, Darshan Munitasa, Gabby White

Following the end of its civil war, Colombo is rapidly transforming into the world's fastest-growing city destination through a fusion of heritage preservation and modern creative industries. Key figures such as celebrity chef Darshan Muniasami, fashion designer Sonali Dharmavardana, and former cricketer Kumar Sangakkara are driving this renaissance by revitalizing culinary identity and showcasing the unique blend of colonial architecture with contemporary lifestyle in venues like the Ministry of Crab. Local experts and residents now urge immediate international engagement, positioning the current moment as a unique window for travelers to experience the city's authentic cultural depth before these rapid developments become fully mainstream.

The future of the car industry

Bhavish Aggarwal, Shantam, David Rust

Global ride-hailing platforms like India's Ola and the United States' Lyft are driving a fundamental shift in consumer behavior where smartphone access has replaced car ownership as the primary mode of urban transport. This disruption forces traditional automotive manufacturers, including Ford and General Motors, to pivot from hardware-centric models to software-driven mobility solutions and strategic partnerships to survive the transition toward shared, autonomous fleets. As a result, the industry's revenue dynamics are reconfiguring, compelling legacy players to innovate with self-driving technology or risk obsolescence in a market increasingly defined by processing power rather than horsepower.