Latest Interviews

It could happen to you: introducing “Scam Inc”

Jason Palmer, Rosie Bloor, Su Lin Wong, Simon Rabinovich, Tim Cross

Podcast series *Scam Inc.* reveals a multi-billion dollar online fraud industry utilizing violent coercion, AI-driven voice cloning, and psychological exploitation across the globe. Concurrently, the US administration has aggressively implemented sweeping tariff threats on major trading partners, creating significant market volatility while seeking to revitalize domestic manufacturing through protectionist policies. In the sports sector, Magnus Carlsen and Tim Cross are launching a rebranded Freestyle Chess Grand Slam Tour that employs randomized starting positions and F1-style broadcasting to transform chess into a mass-market entertainment product.

The Engineering Unlocks Behind DeepSeek | YC Decoded

Diana Hu

DeepSeek unveiled its open-source R1 reasoning model and V3 base architecture, delivering performance parity with top-tier proprietary systems like OpenAI o1 through novel algorithmic optimizations such as native FP8 training and Group Relative Policy Optimization. The announcement triggered significant market volatility, erasing nearly $600 billion from NVIDIA's capitalization, while demonstrating that software stack efficiency can rival the hardware advantages of major US tech ecosystems despite strict GPU export controls. This breakthrough validates a new trajectory for the industry by proving that high-cost AI development can be drastically reduced, thereby lowering barriers for startups and accelerating the adoption of accessible, locally deployable intelligence.

As a next resort: Trump’s vision for Gaza

Trump, Binyamin Netanyahu, Jason Palmer, Rosie Bloor, Anshul Pfeffer, Avantika Chilkoti

Donald Trump's proposal to economically redevelop the Gaza Strip by relocating its two million Palestinians has drawn immediate rejection from Arab foreign ministers and the governments of Egypt, Jordan, and Syria, while garnering ecstatic support from Israeli far-right figures. Analysts widely characterize the plan as practically unfeasible and morally indefensible, suggesting it may serve as a political distraction for Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu rather than a viable diplomatic strategy. Simultaneously, rising tensions over the 1943–1944 Volhynia massacres threaten to strain Poland-Ukraine relations, while global baby industry spending surges despite demographic shifts and economic constraints.

AI Exchanges: Will falling costs drive new opportunities?

Allison Nathan, George Lee, Kim Posnett

Host George Lee and guests analyze how DeepSeek's low-cost AI model challenges the economic viability of massive U.S. tech capital expenditures while triggering a shift in consensus from data scarcity to power availability as the primary industry constraint. Despite short-term market volatility, the panel highlights record CapEx commitments from hyperscalers and emerging enterprise adoption trends, including Goldman Sachs' internal AI tools and synthetic data markets, which collectively suggest a rapid transition toward autonomous AI agents and multi-gigawatt infrastructure needs. The discussion concludes with a bullish long-term outlook, predicting that declining computing costs will fuel new use cases and accelerate workforce productivity even as the sector navigates immediate supply chain bottlenecks.

Rebel with a new cause: meeting Syria’s president

Ahmed al-Sharaa, Mamoon Alhidayat, Rosie Bloor, Jason Palmer, Zeni Minton-Bettos, Nicholas Pelham, Ethan Wu, James Francham

Ahmed al-Shara has consolidated power as Syria's transitional president following Bashar al-Assad's removal, though his refusal to explicitly reject Sharia law and vague commitments to democratic elections have raised concerns about potential authoritarian consolidation. Meanwhile, the Bank of Japan concluded its era of deflation by raising interest rates to 0.5%, driven by a virtuous wage-price cycle that has boosted bond yields despite lingering pressures on household spending. In the UK, a fifteen-year financial review disclosed that Members of Parliament earned £60 million from second jobs, with media appearances and speeches accounting for the majority of income and sparking public debate over potential regulatory caps.

Putty people: can Trump get his picks?

Trump, Rosie Bloor, Adam O'Neill, Avantika Chirkotty, Luke Lithgow

The Trump administration is advancing controversial cabinet confirmations, including Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and Tulsi Gabbard, while facing judicial and legislative resistance to executive overreach and potential pardons. Simultaneously, the global luxury market is contracting as aspirational brands struggle with economic headwinds, prompting a strategic pivot toward exclusivity and ultra-high-end clientele. In Australia, scientists are deploying genetic modifications and tadpole trapping to control the invasive cane toad population, which currently threatens native predators with lethal toxins.

Remote control: Rwandan proxies occupy Congo

Rosie Bloor, Jason Palmer, Emmett Livingston, Robert Guest, Slaweja Čankova, Vishnu Padmarabhan

Following a collapse of government defenses, the M23 rebel group and alleged Rwandan troops captured Goma, displacing millions while exploiting the region's resources amid accusations of a proxy war strategy. Concurrently, medical research published in the *New England Journal of Medicine* identifies microplastics in half of a patient sample with arterial plaque, linking their presence to a quadrupled risk of heart attacks and stroke. Simultaneously, the global astrology market is surging to $23 billion by 2031 as Gen Z users increasingly turn to AI-driven platforms for guidance amidst declining religious adherence and rising societal stress.

Bot against America: a Chinese AI jolts markets

Rosie Bloor, Jason Palmer, Guy Scriven, Sarah Larniuk, Tim Cross

DeepSeek's cost-efficient AI model triggered a global market sell-off by challenging the expense narrative of American tech giants, while US officials like Donald Trump framed the event as a competitive wake-up call for domestic industry. Simultaneously, Canada's Liberal Party faces scrutiny over unachievable 2030 goals to replace diesel in remote Indigenous communities due to climate-altered logistics and historical trust deficits with local First Nations. In the health sector, major fitness operators are pivoting from cardio to strength training to address metabolic health and counteract muscle loss linked to age and weight-loss pharmaceuticals.

How Scaling Laws Will Determine AI's Future | YC Decoded

Garry Tan

This event analyzes the evolution of AI scaling laws, tracing the transition from the 2020 Chinchilla optimization that prioritized data volume over model size to the current era where OpenAI's O3 model demonstrates that intelligence scales linearly with test-time reasoning compute. The discussion highlights industry concerns regarding pre-training data plateaus while arguing that the scaling revolution is shifting toward reasoning depth and unexplored modalities like robotics and chemical modeling. These insights collectively outline a new trajectory for Artificial General Intelligence that moves beyond simple architectural expansion to leverage extended inference and cross-domain applications.

Right turn at a broken traffic light: Germany’s AfD

Rosie Bloor, Jason Palmer, Tom Nuttall, Gareth Brown, Ann Rowe

With a federal election imminent, the German far-right Alternative for Germany party has surged to second place in polling by broadening its platform to address economic anxiety while facing a cross-party firewall that excludes it from governing coalitions. Concurrently, the collapse of the Assad regime in Syria has triggered a significant return of displaced citizens driven by a desire to rebuild, despite ongoing infrastructure destruction and political tensions between secular and Islamist factions. Additionally, the film world mourns the death of auteur David Lynch, whose career was defined by juxtaposing suburban normality with cosmic dread in masterpieces like *Eraserhead* and *Twin Peaks*.

Why nations that fail women fail

Analysis of global data establishes a direct correlation between patriarchal customs like bride pricing and polygyny and heightened state fragility, as these practices fuel male kinship rivalries and create demographic imbalances that recruit disenfranchised men into armed groups. Despite this evidence, female negotiators currently comprise only 16% of UN-led peace talks, a critical deficit that undermines stability since history shows female-led movements result in lasting peace agreements 35% more often than male-dominated efforts. Policymakers are therefore urged to prioritize women's property rights, enforce minimum marriage ages of 18, and integrate female interests into development aid to transform societal instability into resilient governance.

A tax or attacks: how the Houthis fund themselves

Jason Palmer, Rosie Bloor, Corbyn Duncan, Stephen Askins, Alex Hearn, Ore Ogunbiyi, Amma Mensah, Sylvanus Ashan

In the Bab el-Mandab Strait, Houthi attacks have collapsed 70% of shipping volume and spiked freight rates fivefold, while major powers like the US and China remain constrained by regional diplomatic frictions that limit naval intervention. Simultaneously, China has rapidly narrowed its artificial intelligence gap with the US through cost-efficient frontier models like DeepSeek V3, challenging American infrastructure dominance despite sanctions on top-tier chips. In Ghana, founder Amma Mensah transformed a loss-making rainforest operation into a luxury spirits brand, boosting farmer salaries by 50% and targeting the global market with high-value rums derived from local botanicals.

Turning Graph AI into ROI ft Kumo’s Hema Raghavan

Hema Raghavan, Konstantine Buhler, Sonya Huang, Constantine, Sonia

Kumo AI co-founder Hema Raghavan presents a GPU-accelerated AutoML platform that automatically constructs graph structures from relational data to enable predictive SQL-like queries without manual engineering. The system delivers rapid four-week proofs of concept for sectors ranging from fintech fraud detection to healthcare demand forecasting by integrating directly with Snowflake and Databricks while maintaining strict data residency. By combining optimized cost architectures with explainability features and LLM synergies, Kumo lowers the barrier to graph learning for diverse enterprises requiring immediate, accurate model insights.

View to a killing: bond yields rise and rise

Rosie Bloor, Josh Roberts, Henry Kerr, Edward McBride

Rising global bond yields driven by sticky inflation and anticipated US fiscal expansion under Donald Trump are forcing higher borrowing costs for governments and consumers alike, while threatening to slow economic growth. Parallel strategic tensions involve the US exploring coercive or transactional methods to secure Greenland's critical mineral resources and naval significance, despite local sovereignty concerns. Meanwhile, Singapore faces a severe crisis in its UNESCO-recognized hawker culture as high recruitment costs and low profits deter younger generations, prompting a struggling government to rethink its intervention strategies.

Moving the post goals: Musk’s British-politics meddling

Musk, Jason Palmer, Matthew Holhouse, Shashank Joshi

Elon Musk leverages his platform X to aggressively intervene in British politics by amplifying sexual abuse scandals and criticizing tax policies, creating a sharp generational divide between Prime Minister Keir Starmer's dismissive approach and Opposition Leader Kemi Badenoch's active engagement. Meanwhile, European governments are strategizing for a potential second Trump administration by preparing to increase defense spending to 3.5% of GDP and developing strategic autonomy amid fears of US aid withdrawal from Ukraine and rising instability in the Middle East. In cultural news, the passing of Cheng Yao marks the end of a forty-year Taiwanese literary career defined by her prolific exploration of resilient heroines and controversial portrayals of love.