Exploring Prosperity- Challenging Pessimism in the US

Last week, Evan Hubinger, who leads alignment science at Anthropic, said he believes artificial intelligence has a greater than 10 percent chance of killing every human within the next decade. His position makes the warning impossible to ignore: he works on the safety of Anthropic’s AI systems. His chief concern is that a future, more capable AI might escape human control. Concern about that possi...

Bitcoin treasury companies were easy to launch when Bitcoin was rising. Then the market turned and the industry had to learn. Tim Kotzman has had a front-row seat to that process. As host of the Bitcoin Treasuries Podcast and co-founder of Bitcoin Treasuries Media, he has interviewed many of the executives, investors and analysts building this emerging industry. In this conversation, we explore wh...

Artificial intelligence is already changing the practice of law. The question is no longer whether lawyers will use AI, but what happens to the legal profession when they do. Stephen Lofchie, one of the country’s leading financial-services regulatory lawyers, and Ty Greenberg of Caffrey.ai join me to explore how AI is changing legal research, the economics of legal services, and where lawyers will...

Can free will exist in a deterministic universe? What does that imply for artificial intelligence, capitalism, scientific progress, and the future of prosperity? In this conversation, I sit down with Samir Varma to explore the common thread running through his work in economics, physics, mathematics, and computer science. We discuss his theory of free will, why AI may be fundamentally unpredictabl...

Artificial intelligence is advancing faster than almost any technology in history, yet surprisingly few people understand what large language models are actually doing behind the scenes. In this masterclass, Albert Berdellans, Global Head of AI at Inveniam, explains AI in plain English. We explore why ChatGPT doesn't actually "think," how large language models generate answers, why hallucinations...

Education was never designed to fail students. It was designed to solve one of humanity’s greatest challenges: how to provide education at scale to millions of people. The factory model of education succeeded beyond anyone’s expectations. Standardization, age grouping, and shared curricula helped create the most educated societies in history. But scale came with tradeoffs. Some students sit in cla...

Today's guest is Lyn Alden, one of the world's leading macroeconomic analysts and the author of Broken Money and The Stillguard Incident. We explore one of the defining questions of the modern era: humanity has more information, more connectivity, and more problem-solving capability than ever before, yet trust in institutions is falling and agreement on basic facts appears increasingly difficult....

What does it take for one of the world's largest financial institutions to adopt an entirely new technology? Morgan Stanley's Head of Digital Asset Strategy, Amy Oldenburg, joins Exploring Prosperity to discuss the hidden challenge of bringing crypto, tokenization, stablecoins, and blockchain technology into a global financial institution. Most conversations about digital assets focus on prices, r...

Artificial intelligence is rapidly transforming investing, wealth management, and the global economy — but what happens to human judgment when information becomes instantly accessible? Ram Ahluwalia hosted me as a guest this week and in this conversation we discuss:• how AI compresses the time between information and decision-making• why human judgment still matters in investing• the collapse of t...

Artificial intelligence is advancing rapidly, but how realistic are the fears about rogue AI, AGI, and machines turning against humanity? In this conversation, a clip from my previous interview with Albert Berdellans, Global Head of AI at Invenium, he discusses some of the biggest misconceptions surrounding artificial intelligence, autonomous agents, AI safety, and the future of large language mod...

Jeff Park joined usfor a deep discussion on Bitcoin, AI, Federal Reserve policy, financial markets, volatility, and the future of the global monetary system. Jeff explains why “money is always political,” why markets are beginning to behave more like wartime markets than peacetime markets, and why the relationship between the Treasury and Federal Reserve may become one of the defining macro storie...

Artificial intelligence is triggering widespread fear about the future of work, white-collar employment, and the long-term value of highly educated workers. After Citadel founder Ken Griffin described feeling “depressed” after seeing the latest advances in AI, many people interpreted it as another warning about technological disruption and economic displacement. But what if we are asking the wrong...

Why are stocks hitting new highs during war and geopolitical instability? Why are Bitcoin miners suddenly becoming AI infrastructure companies? And could sovereign nations eventually adopt Bitcoin as a reserve asset? In this conversation, Matthew Sigel, Head of Digital Asset Research at VanEck and portfolio manager of the Vaneck Onchain Economy ETF (ticker: NODE), explains how AI, de-globalization...

AI is changing cybersecurity—and it may be increasing the scale of digital threats beyond what banks, platforms, and institutions can manage. In this video, I break down how AI-driven attacks could expose vulnerabilities in financial systems, online accounts, and digital identity infrastructure. Based on real-world fraud experiences and insights from Foundation CEO Zach Herbert, we explore why tra...

Credit stress is beginning to reappear in parts of the economy—especially in private credit markets where institutional capital has surged in recent years. In this episode of Exploring Prosperity, I sit down with veteran distressed real estate investor Bill Landis, co-Founder and Managing Partner of Raith Capital Partners, to break down what actually happens when markets stop clearing. We explore...

Artificial intelligence is changing finance, healthcare, education, and the future of work — but what is it actually doing under the hood? In this conversation, I sit down with Albert Berdellans, Global Head of AI at Invenium, for one of the clearest explanations I’ve heard of how large language models actually work, what AI can and cannot do, where the risks are overstated, and how it may reshape...

Are we actually progressing—or quietly getting weaker? In this conversation, I sit down with Aleks Svetski, author of The Bushido of Bitcoin, to explore a deeper question that sits beneath economics, technology, and politics: what actually drives long-term human progress? Many believe that fixing money—through systems like Bitcoin—can restore discipline, align incentives, and solve structural prob...

In this episode of Exploring Prosperity, I sit down with investor Ram Ahluwalia to examine one of the most important — and least discussed — risks in the AI buildout. OpenAI reportedly has nearly $1 trillion in committed obligations tied to data center capacity and compute infrastructure. With revenue far below that scale, the key question is simple:Can the math foot? This conversation is not anti...

More than 27 million financial reports are filed each year under the Bank Secrecy Act, flagging ordinary banking activity as “suspicious.” Yet, as the data shows, only 370 investigations were tipped off by these reports. In this conversation, Nick Anthony of the Cato Institute explains how U.S. financial surveillance expanded quietly over decades, why routine cash transactions now generate governm...

Families navigate the college decision process rarely—but the consequences can last decades. In this episode of Exploring Prosperity, I speak with Jon Carson, CEO of College Guidance Network, about why the traditional college guidance system no longer works—and why rising costs, declining ROI, and information asymmetry have made the decision riskier than ever. We break down the real math behind hi...

In this episode of Exploring Prosperity, I’m joined by Zach Pandl, Head of Research at Grayscale, to explore why 2026 may mark the true beginning of crypto’s institutional era. We discuss how regulatory clarity — including the impact of Grayscale’s successful challenge of the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission — shifted crypto from the margins into mainstream finance, and why Bitcoin ETFs wer...

I sat down with Jordi Visser to discuss a historically new phenomenon: economic growth without job growth—and what artificial intelligence means for the future of work, capital, and capitalism itself. We discuss I why economic growth is increasingly happening without job creation and what artificial intelligence means for the future of work and capitalism. This conversation explores how AI is brea...

Inflation isn’t 3%. In this episode of Exploring Prosperity, I’m joined by Stefan Rust, CEO of Truflation, to explain what real-time inflation data is actually showing — and why the official CPI number may be missing what’s really happening to prices. See my essay about this interview here: We discuss how Truflation measures inflation daily across thousands of goods and services, how its methodolo...

In this episode, I sit down with investment manager and author Lawrence Lepard ( The Big Print ) to examine how America’s monetary system actually works—and why its failures increasingly feel moral, not just economic. Larry breaks down the Cantillon Effect : how Federal Reserve money creation and artificially low interest rates disproportionately benefit Wall Street, large financial institutions,...

Ethel Walker head of school Meera Viswanathan joins Exploring Prosperity to explain what’s really happening to today’s students — from the rise of social media, smartphones, and anxiety to the decline of confidence, resilience, and curiosity. Drawing on insights aligned with Jonathan Haidt, The Anxious Generation, and current research on teen mental health, Meera breaks down:- How phones and socia...