Ralph Goff is a 35-year veteran of the CIA, having served as a six-time Chief of Station across Europe, the Middle East, and Central and South Asia. During his career, he also held the roles of Chief of Operations for Europe and Eurasia and Chief of the CIA's National Resources Division. Since leaving government, he advises on national security issues and speaks publicly on intelligence, geopolitics, and great power competition.

In this episode of Summation, Ralph and Auren discuss:

• Why blackmail almost never works in espionage and ideology still does
• Who is actually dying for Putin
• Why China is the biggest winner of the Ukraine war
• How technological surveillance transformed CIA tradecraft 

You can find Auren Hoffman on X at @auren and Ralph Goff on Linkedin

Glenn Youngkin was the 74th Governor of Virginia. Before politics, he spent nearly 25 years at The Carlyle Group, one of the largest private equity firms in the world, where he rose to co-CEO. During his four-year term, Virginia generated $10B in surplus revenue, delivered $9B in tax relief, attracted $156B in capital investment, and became one of the first states in the country to mandate cell-phone-free classrooms.

In this episode of Summation, Glenn and Auren discuss:

• Why every Virginia state agency got OKRs and how it transformed a 110,000-person government
• Why decommissioning baseload power was one of the dumbest decisions ever made 
• How Loudoun County gets more than 25% of its tax base from data centers
• How a startup used AI to cut more Virginia regulations in 7 months than 3 years of manual work

You can find Auren Hoffman on X at @auren and Glenn Youngkin on X at @GlennYoungkin

Marco Zappacosta is the co-founder and CEO of Thumbtack, the home services marketplace he started in 2008. Thumbtack connects homeowners to 300,000+ local service professionals, with nearly 100M projects started on the platform. 

In this episode of Summation, Marco and Auren discuss:

• Why home services is bigger than groceries but barely any is booked online
• How AI collapsed Thumbtack's product pod sizes
• Why Silicon Valley underrates leadership and overrates management 
• The single trait to screen every executive hire for

You can find Auren Hoffman on X at @auren and Marco Zappacosta on X at @mlz

Eric Ries created the Lean Startup methodology and authored the bestselling book of the same name, which has sold over a million copies. He's also the founder and executive chairman of the Long-Term Stock Exchange, the co-founder of Answer AI (an AI R&D lab), and the author of the upcoming book Incorruptible, releasing May 26th.

In this episode of Summation, Eric and Auren discuss:

• why "bad governance" companies have outperformed "good governance" since 2008
• financial gravity - the invisible force that bends companies away from their mission
• the foundation-controlled blueprint behind Novo Nordisk, IKEA, and Zeiss
• why vibe coding is headed for its Chernobyl moment

You can find Auren Hoffman on X at @auren and Eric Ries on X at @ericries

Karl-Theodor zu Guttenberg became Germany's youngest Minister of Defense in history, and previously served as Minister of Economics and Technology. He is the chairman and founder of Spitzberg Partners, an investment and advisory firm, a bestselling author, and co-founder of Open Minds Media, where he produces films and podcasts. He co-hosts one of Germany's most popular podcasts.

In this episode of Summation, KT and Auren discuss:

• Why Germany's defense spending hovered at 1% of GDP for decades and what finally forced a change
• The nuclear exit decision that was driven by a single state election and backfired spectacularly
• How Rheinmetall surpassed Volkswagen in market cap and what it signals about Europe's industrial reorientation
• Why Germany's total stock market cap is less than a single US company like Nvidia

You can find Auren Hoffman on X at @auren and Karl-Theodor zu Guttenberg on Linkedin. 

Pat Gelsinger is the former CEO of Intel and longtime Silicon Valley leader.  He joins Auren to unpack the forces reshaping technology, geopolitics and leadership.

After more than 30 years at Intel (including serving as its first CTO) and nearly a decade as CEO of VMware, Pat now sits at the intersection of deep tech and purpose-driven innovation as executive chair and head of technology at Gloo and general partner at Playground Global.

In this episode of Summation, Pat and Auren discuss:

• Why the US now imports more from Taiwan than from China -- and what that means for national security
• The case for a U.S. sovereign wealth fund to counter China’s tech investments in semiconductors, energy, and rare earth minerals
• What happened when Intel gave $70B back to shareholders instead of building fabs, and why tech companies need technologist CEOs
• Andy Grove's 35-year mentoring relationship with Pat, starting with a cold call that changed his career

You can find Auren Hoffman on X at @auren and Pat Gelsinger on X at @PGelsinger

Vlad Tenev (Robinhood co-founder/CEO) and Tudor Achim (former helm.ai CTO) are the founders of Harmonic, an AI lab pioneering the path toward mathematical superintelligence. Together, they developed Aristotle, a model that eliminates hallucinations by reasoning in Lean code rather than natural language. By shifting from probabilistic guesses to formal logic, Aristotle produces 100% verified mathematical outputs. The model recently demonstrated its breakthrough capabilities by achieving gold-medal performance at the International Math Olympiad. 

In this episode of Summation, Vlad, Tudor, and Auren discuss:

• Why AI models struggled at math for so long 
• How Aristotle helped 10x the total corpus of formally verified Erdos problems in just a few months 
• Why formal verification will make all software dramatically safer
• How the first Millennium Prize problem will be solved by 2027-2028

You can find Auren Hoffman on X at @auren, Vlad Tenev on X at @vladtenev, and Tudor Achim on X at @tachim

John Allen is a retired four-star Marine Corps general who commanded 150,000 US and NATO troops in Afghanistan and built a 65-nation coalition as Special Presidential Envoy to the Global Coalition Against ISIS. After retiring from the military, he led the Brookings Institution as its president. He co-invented the term "hyperwar," holds five AI patents, and co-authored Turning Point: Policymaking in the Era of Artificial Intelligence. He currently serves as a strategic advisor to Microsoft.

In this episode of Summation, John and Auren discuss:

• Why Ukraine's battlefield is accelerating the autonomous weapons timeline faster than any defense department predicted
• The single assumption that doomed Afghanistan and why 2,500 troops could have changed everything
• What nobody is asking about the US operation in Iran 
• How China's one-child military could be the most underappreciated deterrent against a Taiwan invasion

You can find Auren Hoffman on X at @auren and John R. Allen on LinkedIn

Adrian Aoun helped found Torch, a health data platform that was acquired by OpenAI earlier this year. He's also the co-founder of Seneca, which raised $60 million to build autonomous drones for wildfire suppression. Adrian previously founded Forward Health. He previously led special projects for Larry Page at Google, where he founded Sidewalk Labs and helped build Google's AI division.

In this episode of Summation, Adrian and Auren discuss:

• Why curing all cancer adds only ~3 years of life but internet access for a billion people is massively more impactful
• How AI is turning healthcare from a service into a product -- and why the AMA is the new taxi medallion lobby
• The expert investor paradox: why deep expertise makes you a worse angel investor
• Why GLP-1s are the closest thing to a miracle drug in our lifetime

You can find Auren Hoffman on X at @auren and Adrian Aoun on X at @adrianaoun

Tod Sacerdoti is the CEO and co-founder of Pipedream, which recently sold to Workday. Tod is also a general partner at Flex Capital, where he's invested in over 400 companies including Chime, Vercel, Replit, CodeRabbit, Mercury, and many others. He previously founded BrightRoll, a programmatic video advertising platform that sold to Yahoo for $640 million in 2014. 

In this episode of Summation, Tod and Auren discuss:

• Why seed investing has the highest annualized returns of any venture asset class
• First-gen AI companies being the most vulnerable to AI disruption
• QSBS and why it's the most important tax benefit nobody talks about
• The founder code and what happens when people break it

You can find Auren Hoffman on X at @auren and Tod Sacerdoti on X at @tod