People by WTF

I sat down with Nikos Christodoulides, the President of Cyprus — and the rare leader who came to politics as a historian first. Cyprus is a country of a million and a half people sitting on the bridge between Europe, the Middle East, and Africa, which makes it one of the most strategically placed nations on earth right now. We got into why he believes the world is sliding back into raw power polit...

Most politicians know history. My next guest is a historian who became a president. He runs Cyprus — a million-and-a-half people sitting on the bridge between Europe and the Middle East — and he thinks the world is sliding back into the kind of power politics he spent his academic life studying. We got into why starting a war is easy and finishing one is almost impossible, why he believes India ha...

Martin Escobari is the co-president of General Atlantic, one of the largest growth equity funds in the world, and he says entrepreneurs and gangsters have more in common than we admit — so few make it, so many die early, and the ones that survive are almost always wounded in some specific way. He grew up in Bolivia in the 80s through 35,000% inflation, eleven presidents in ten years, and three cou...

Martin Escobari is the co-president of General Atlantic — one of the largest growth equity funds in the world, with over $5 billion deployed into India. He grew up in Bolivia in the 80s with 35,000% inflation, eleven presidents in ten years, three coups, and a family that lost everything in a revolution. I sat him down with a few Columbia Business School students and a 21-year-old AI founder named...

Ajay Banga took Mastercard from a $30 billion company to $360 billion in a decade, was the frontrunner to run Citibank's quarter of a million people, quit to become CEO of a company with 4,000 — and today runs the World Bank Group, a $120 billion-a-year institution that was originally built to rebuild Europe and Japan after the Second World War and now exists to kill poverty by creating jobs. He s...

Ajay Banga took Mastercard from a $30 billion company to $360 billion, left when he was the frontrunner to run Citibank's 250,000 people, and now controls $120 billion a year as the President of the World Bank Group — the institution that was built after the Second World War to stop poverty from turning into war. He says life is 50% luck but most people leave their luck on the station platform, th...

Rishi Sunak says patience is a bigger competitive advantage than speed, that every decision that reaches a leader is 50-50 by definition because if it weren't someone else would have made it, that the long term is just a succession of short terms you either survived or got kicked out of, and that the thing he wishes he'd done more of in his career is read fiction — because non-fiction tells you wh...

Rishi Sunak says he could not function without his marriage, that losing the most public job in the world taught him that the Gita was right about focusing on dharma and not outcomes, and that the blank canvas at 45 is more exciting than the track that got him there. Akshata Murty says she’s not stuck on being her father’s daughter or her husband’s wife, she is clear on who she is than any title e...

One of them says the Gita's line on duty over outcomes is what got him through the most public failure of his life. The other says her identity has never been her father's name or her husband's title. They've been together 20 years and still argue about ice cream flavours. First couple's episode we've ever done. #nikhilkamath Co-founder of Zerodha and Gruhas Host of 'WTF is' & 'People By WTF' Podc...

I sat down with Chamath Palihapitiya. He sold a company to Nvidia for $20 billion, woke up the next morning, saw $13 billion hit the account, and felt nothing. This is a guy who grew up in a home with alcoholism and abuse, immigrated to Canada with nothing, lost billions on SPACs, rebuilt, and now says the whole game is exactly that — a game. We got into the uncomfortable stuff: why pain is the si...

Chamath Palihapitiya has made and lost billions. He backed Tesla, Bitcoin, and the Golden State Warriors when everyone told him he was insane. Now he's building what he calls a software factory — the machine that makes the machine. We talked about why pain is a prerequisite for scale, why socialism might be closer than any capitalist wants to admit, and why none of the metrics society uses to meas...

 I sat down with Dario Amodei in Bangalore. He built Claude, but he started as a biologist looking for a tool to cure disease. Today, he's at the helm of an AI revolution that he compares to a tsunami society is actively ignoring. We got into the heavy stuff: why Anthropic secretly withheld a working model before ChatGPT existed, whether AI is on the verge of consciousness, and if outsourcing our...

Dario Amodei runs a company valued at tens of billions of dollars, building the very AI systems he warns could reshape everything. So I asked him directly: isn't this a bit like rich people saying capitalism is bad? His answer surprised me. We went deep on the economics, the geopolitics, the safety debate, and why the people building AI might actually be the most paranoid about it. A long, honest,...

I sat down with Yuval Noah Harari at the World Economic Forum in Davos and we ended up covering everything from why Christianity's core story is essentially "you are loved by an omnipotent God" to why Greenland might just be the world's most expensive real estate play. He walked me through how algorithms were handed the job of managing public conversation and optimised for hate because hate drives...

Is religion dying, or is it just being replaced by AI? We are living through a dramatic geopolitical shift. The rules we grew up with are being rewritten. I sat down with historian and author Yuval Noah Harari at the World Economic Forum to understand if we are witnessing the end of an era or the beginning of something entirely new. From the "madness" of the US-Europe split to the private conversa...

Elon Musk × Nikhil Kamath — अब हिन्दी में। आपकी रिक्वेस्ट पर, हमने पूरा एपिसोड हिन्दी में डब किया है ताकि यह बातचीत और भी लोगों तक पहुंच सके। Timestamps : 00:00 – Settling in 02:08 – On X, text vs video, how people communicate 06:45 – Collective consciousness 09:54 – Meaning of life, Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy 14:16 – Individuals vs collectives 17:35 – What makes a company worth investing in...

A long conversation with #ElonMusk about work, consciousness, family, money, AI and how the future might unfold. No script, no performance, just two people thinking out loud. A big thank you to Manoj Ladwa - a close friend of many years and a remarkable connector of India to the world and the world to India. Through India Global Forum, he has built one of the most influential platforms showcasing...

Here’s to delaying gratification. The future belongs to the patient.  #NikhilKamath Entrepreneur & Investor Host of 'WTF is' & 'People By WTF' Podcast X: https://x.com/nikhilkamathcio/ Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/nikhilkamathcio/ LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/nikhilkamathcio?utm_source=share&utm_campaign=share_via&utm_content=profile&utm_medium=ios_app Facebook: https://www.facebo...

What struck me most in this conversation with AR Rahman was not his mastery but his humility. He talks openly about fear, self-doubt, imposter syndrome, and why he constantly leaves comfort to evolve. We got into everything, Bombay Dreams, London, Hollywood, Oscars, classical music’s future, AI composition, spiritual surrender, and why consistency matters more than lifestyle. If you’ve ever wonder...

Building the next Uber in India? Dara shares lessons on competition, EVs, quick commerce, and how he helped build Uber through chaos. Timestamps: 00:00 - Intro 01:22 - Dara’s visits to India 01:58 - Uber’s Indian competitors 04:42 - Growing up in Iran 10:47 - Dara on religion & spirituality 16:40 - From Iran to US 19:54 - Key lesson from Barry Diller 28:05 - How AI can reinvent travel 32:12 - Dara...

I finally sat down with Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI, to discuss the launch of GPT-5, its differences, whether we’re inching closer to agent-like AI, what it takes to build a future that’s moving at breakneck speed. 00:00 - Intro 01:13 - What’s New in GPT-5? 02:54 - Sam on First Principles, Careers & Future Industries 05:47 - What’s Possible with GPT-5 07:09 - Building on GPT-5: Skills & Science Appl...

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When I was starting out, this is the kind of conversation I wish I had access to. I sat down with Vinod Khosla, one of the sharpest minds in venture, and asked him the questions every young founder has on their mind. What industries will matter in 2035? Should you build for cities, small towns, or somewhere no one’s looking yet? Also listeners! Just a heads up that we recorded this episode on July...

In this upcoming episode, I sat down with Vinod Khosla, Sun Microsystems Co-founder and Founder of Khosla Ventures to find out where tomorrow’s big bets lie and why contrarian thinking still pays off. #NikhilKamath - Investor & Entrepreneur Twitter:  https://x.com/nikhilkamathcio LinkedIn: / nikhilkamathcio  Instagram: / nikhilkamathcio  Facebook: / nikhilkamathcio  #VinodKhosla - Co-founder, Sun...

Here’s one of my favourite conversations with Palo Alto Networks’ CEO, Nikesh Arora. This episode is a CxO’s playbook where we deep dived into the mindset, strategy, and decision-making frameworks that have shaped Nikesh’s journey across roles at Google, SoftBank, and now leading one of the world’s top cybersecurity firms. This isn’t just business talk. Learn how to think like a CxO when the rules...