James Pethokoukis is a Washington D.C.-based economist, journalist, and author who holds the DeWitt Wallace Chair at the American Enterprise Institute. He writes the 'Faster, Please!' Substack newsletter - one of the leading voices in techno-optimism and pro-progress policy - hosts the 'Political Economy with Jim Pethokoukis' podcast, and authored 'The Conservative Futurist: How to Create the Sci-Fi World We Were Promised' (2023). A longtime CNBC contributor, he argues that culture - not capital - is the real barrier to the abundant, innovative future humanity could build.
Matthew Zeitlin is an economics and energy journalist currently reporting for Heatmap News, where he covers the intersection of policy, finance, and the energy transition. With bylines at BuzzFeed News, Grid, Slate, The Nation, n+1, Bloomberg Opinion, and The Atlantic, Zeitlin has built a career dissecting how money, power, and policy shape the energy grid. He writes a personal economics newsletter on Substack and is one of the sharper voices covering how the U.S. economy navigates decarbonization.
Sam Altman is the CEO of OpenAI, the company behind ChatGPT, and one of the most consequential figures in the artificial intelligence era. A Stanford dropout who built his first startup at 19, Altman ran Y Combinator for five years before going all-in on OpenAI's mission to build safe superintelligence. He survived a dramatic 5-day ouster from his own company in 2023, returned to thunderous employee support, and has since steered OpenAI to a $300 billion valuation. He holds no equity in OpenAI, yet built a $3+ billion personal fortune through early bets on Reddit, Stripe, Airbnb, and a cluster of deep-tech moonshots.