Matsuoka-San is the Chief Economist of SBI Securities in Japan. Before that, he was the Chief Economist for Japan at Deutsche Bank. Overall, he has been involved in macroeconomic analysis at research institutions and financial institutions for the past 30 years. He is known to be one of the leading Japan economists with unique insights on structural issues. Over the years, he has been highly ranked in numerous surveys, including the Institutional Investor survey. In this podcast, we discuss:

1. The "Inconvenient Mix" of Inflation
2. Japan's Real Neutral Interest Rate
3. The Case for Nominal GDP Targeting
4. Consumption Tax: Regressive Relief?
5. Wage Growth Divergence
6. The Working Hours Trap
7. Fiscal Dominance and Vulnerability
8. The Enigma of Yen Weakness
9. Work-from-Home and Birth Rates
10. Erosion of the US Dollar's Premium
11. The AI/Semiconductor "Vertical Jump"
12. US vs. Japan: Labour Participation Trends

Stefan Jansen is the founder and CEO of Applied AI. He advises Fortune 500 companies, investment firms, and startups across industries on data & AI strategy, building data science teams, and developing end-to-end machine learning solutions.

Before his current venture, he was a partner and managing director at an international investment firm, where he built the predictive analytics and investment research practice. He was also a senior executive at a global fintech company with operations in 15 markets, advised Central Banks in emerging markets, and consulted for the World Bank. In this podcast, we discuss:

1. Defining AI as a Moving Target
2. The Trading vs. Business Data Science Divide
3. Synthetic Data and the "Fat Tail" Challenge
4. Shapley Values: Turning Black Boxes Grey
5. Agentic AI and Unstructured Data
6. RAG, Provenance, and the Context Window Debate
7. The "Alpha Factory" Workflow
8. Reinforcement Learning (RL) for Execution, Not Prediction
9. The Critical Role of Human Context
10. Advice for the AI-Native Job Market

William W. Beach is the Senior Fellow in Economics at the Economic Policy Innovation Center (EPIC) and the Coffin Fellow at the Calvin Coolidge Presidential Foundation. Beach also serves on the UKG Workforce Institute Advisory Board.

Prior to these appointments, Beach was the fifteenth Commissioner of Labor Statistics at the Bureau of Labor Statistics in Washington, DC. He took up his duties there on March 28, 2019. Prior to joining BLS, Dr. Beach was vice president for policy research at the Mercatus Center at George Mason University from February of 2016 to March of 2019; and, prior to that served as the Chief Economist for the Senate Budget Committee, Republican Staff, from 2013 through early 2016. In this podcast, we will discuss:

1. The "Fiscal Precipice"
2. The "Crowd Out" Effect
3. Social Drivers of Debt
4. The "Undemocratic" Tax System
5. The Social Security Countdown
6. The Future of "Enhanced Labour"
7. The Data Response Crisis
8. Modernising Federal Statistics

Martin Wolf is the chief economics commentator at the Financial Times in London. He was awarded the CBE (Commander of the British Empire) in 2000 'for services to financial journalism'. In this podcast, we discuss:

1. AI: The Ultimate General-Purpose Technology
2. Market Complacency in the Middle East
3. Jay Powell's "Superb" but Flawed Legacy
4. The "Perverse" Risks of Kevin Warsh
5. The UK's Productivity Puzzle and Brexit
6. From "Democratic Recession" to Depression
7. The "Graduate Trap" and Disaffected Youth
8. Advice for the Next Generation

Daniel Rasmussen is the founder and managing partner of Verdad Advisers, an investment firm with over $1 billion in assets under management across multiple asset classes. He is the author of The Humble Investor (2025) and American Uprising (2011). Prior to founding Verdad, he worked at Bain Capital Private Equity and Bridgewater Associates. In this podcast, we discuss:

1. Investing as Meta-analysis
2. The Evolution of Private Equity
3. Stranded Software Assets
4. The Private Credit Mirage
5. The "Adjusted EBITDA" Trap
6. Small-Cap Growth Dangers
7. The AI Capex Cycle
8. AI Productivity Mindset

Neil Dutta is Head of Economic Research at Renaissance Macro Research (renMac). He leads their macroeconomic research efforts, with an emphasis on analysing the US economy, the Federal Reserve, global trends, and cross-market investment themes. He is considered a market economist, looking at the economic data and trying to highlight the risks to the consensus as he sees them.

Prior to RenMac, Neil spent seven years at Bank of America-Merrill Lynch. There, he was a Senior Economist covering both the United States and Canada. In this podcast, we discuss:

1. Neil's Wall Street "Origin Story"
2. The Four Pillars of Economic Analysis
3. The Real Income Squeeze
4. AI, RSUs, and State Tax Revenues
5. Pervasive Optimism and Reflexivity Risk
6. The Fed's "Path of Least Resistance"
7. The Warsh Nomination and Forward Guidance
8. Productivity Boom or Demand Story?
9. AI's Wealth Effect Beyond Accounting
10. The 2027 Fiscal Headwind
11. Substack vs. Institutional Research

Dr. Dirk Willer is a Managing Director and Global Head of Macro and Asset Allocation at Citi Research in New York. Prior to this role, Dirk headed global Emerging Market Strategy, where he and his teams were consistently ranked in the top three in the institutional investor surveys. Previously, Dirk worked at Omega Advisors and RHG Capital as a global macro strategist and portfolio manager, and at Swiss Bank as a fixed income strategist for Russia and Eastern Europe. Dirk holds a PhD and MSc in Economics from the London School of Economics. Dirk is also the author of an influential book on how to trade emerging market fixed income, published by Wiley in 2020, and of a book on global macro trading, released in 2026. In this podcast, we discuss:

1. Unlearning the QE Reflex
2. Trading "Close to the Fire"
3. The Nearest Neighbour Regime Framework
4. PMIs vs. "Noisy" Indicators
5. Yield Curve Inversions and Fed Lags
6. The "GMO" Bubble Methodology
7. Credit as the Equity Canary
8. The Four-Indicator Dollar Model
9. Fading Geopolitical Shocks
10. The Role of Human Judgment in AI

Dylan is the founder of arcMacro, where he analyses macro and private markets. His previous roles include serving as an economist at Goldman Sachs and Rosenberg Research, and later as a private market consultant at McKinsey. In this podcast, we discuss:

1. The Hormuz Supply Shock
2. Stagflation as the New Base Case
3. AI Capex vs. Energy Headwinds
4. A Hawkish Fed Outlook
5. Canada's Productivity Pivot
6. The USMCA Trade Cloud
7. Private Market Maturation
8. Normalising Credit Defaults
9. AI's Private Market Future

Shawn Edwards is Bloomberg's Chief Technology Officer. Based in New York, he oversees the development of Bloomberg's global technology strategy. In 2017, Shawn was named in the top ten of the Institutional Investor Tech 40 – an annual ranking of financial industry technology leaders. Prior to joining Bloomberg in 2003, Shawn worked for Bear Stearns & Co., where he was a managing director in the company's fixed income trading group. He has also held positions at Mentor Graphics and IBM. In this podcast, we discuss:

1. Engineering Trust through "Entailment"
2. Automating "The Bloomberg Way"
3. ASKB: Reimagining the Terminal
4. Workflow-Specific AI Expansion
5. Actionable Alternative Data
6. Empowering Non-Programmers
7. Accelerating Data Onboarding
8. Competition vs. Domain Knowledge
9. A Cautious View on AGI

Andrew Perry is the creator of Macro Pillars, a macro research product servicing a bespoke selection of global banks, hedge funds, and sophisticated investors. He has over 35+ years of experience in markets, including as a Portfolio Manager at Tudor Investment Corporation under Paul Tudor Jones, and later as a Managing Director and Portfolio Manager at Nomura. In this podcast, we discuss:

1. The Five Pillars of Global Macro
2. The Move Index: The Ultimate Indicator
3. Non-Traditional Liquidity and Market Plumbing
4. Australia's "Lucky Country" Crisis
5. From Supply Shock to Demand Shock
6. The Significance of "Critical Dates"
7. Risk Management and Emotional Resilience
8. US Equity Outperformance and Policy Makers