Yahoo Finance Invest liveblog: Exclusive conversations on AI, crypto, and the economy

Reddit co-founder and Seven Seven Six founder Alexis Ohanian envisions that artificial intelligence will be a net contributor of jobs to the economy.

“I do think more new jobs will be created than removed from the system,” Ohanian said at Yahoo Finance’s Invest.

Echoing the sentiment of Affirm CEO Max Levchin, who said that AI will allow workers to “do more,” Ohanian said that every technological revolution brings with it new careers and industries that previously didn’t exist.

He noted that social media offers a precedent, as 20 years ago, few could have imagined creators becoming multimillionaires or billionaires, in YouTuber MrBeast’s case, through careers in social media.

But educators will need to rethink how they prepare young people for the labor market of the future, Ohanian added. He argued that schools should embrace AI in their curriculum.

“I do think the future of education for, let’s say, K-12 looks a lot more like having guides instead of teachers,” Ohanian said. “There’s no reason why a kid, regardless of their background, regardless of their home life, shouldn’t be able to get personalized education.”

Robert F. Smith, founder and CEO of the private equity firm Vista Equity Partners, sees AI as a wave of digitization that will bring both disruption and productivity booms across industries.

“We’re going to continue to grow,” Smith, who built an empire by purchasing and improving enterprise software businesses, told Julie Hyman at Yahoo Finance Invest. “What’s interesting is as you grow, you can actually grow without adding as many people, which is the way you actually have to think about this. Now, in certain instances, there are going to be certain categories of jobs that become very much affected by artificial intelligence and AI. Other categories become very much more enabled by that. And so it’s a balance of expression and expansion as you get these systems to actually operate at scale with capacity.”

Smith later added that “it’s early… but it has massive implications and massive productivity.”

Ask about the skills that younger workers will need in the age of AI, Smith pointed to the need for “what we call the whole brain type of skill.”

Previously, “there was a premium on being able to process data and come up with insights and analytics around that data.” Now, with new technology, “you have this new tool and a set of agents that can actually do that in a much more efficiently, much more quickly, and serve you, in essence, the synthesis of the data based on what it is you’re looking for. And now what do you do with that?”

The people who will succeed, according to Smith, are those who leverage “a little bit more whole brain,” such as being “creative, thoughtful, [and] understanding the ecosystem” to help achieve business gains.

Watch the full interview on YouTube.

Guggenheim Partners chief investment officer Anne Walsh expects the Federal Reserve will cut interest rates in December as the central bank faces a “delicate” balance between a sluggish labor market and elevated inflation.

And looking ahead, Walsh sees further rate cuts in 2026.

“No matter what happens, I think we are looking at a more dovish Fed composition,” Walsh said, “and that means we’re back to my concept of and belief in a much lower neutral rate going forward, which should be helpful for the interest-sensitive parts of the economy, the lower-end consumer.”

Walsh noted that the appointment of a new Fed chair could tilt the Fed toward a more neutral policy.

With Fed Chair Powell’s term up in May, President Trump has reportedly narrowed his list of candidates down to five: former Fed governor Kevin Warsh, National Economic Council Director Kevin Hassett, current Fed governor Chris Waller, Fed governor Michelle Bowman, and BlackRock fixed-income chief investment officer Rick Rieder.

“The panel of nominees that are being considered are all pretty well qualified to be Fed chair,” Walsh said. “I actually happen to be a big fan of Kevin Warsh, … but [Michelle] Bowman is amazing, and maybe more of a dark horse is Kevin Hassett. And then I’m a big fan of Chris Waller as well.”

Read more here.

“I like to think of the Trump administration as having four policy pillars,” Anne Walsh, Guggenheim Partners Investment Management managing partner and CIO, told Julie Hyman at Yahoo Finance Invest (emphasis ours).

“In no particular order: trade and tariffs, which continues; deregulation, … with the great pomp and circumstance to begin with DOGE, but really kind of now playing around in the background; tax policy, which is one of the elements that’s actually got some certainty to it now because of the ‘One, Big Beautiful Bill’ passage — and I think that’s going to create some tailwinds into 2026; and then ultimately the immigration policy, or if I tend to prefer to call it reverse immigration. So we’re seeing all of this play out. And I think that’s going to continue.”

Eric Trump, who backs bitcoin miner American Bitcoin (ABTC) with his brother, Donald Trump Jr., said that the crypto industry could draw investment to the United States.

“I think it’s going to onboard trillions of dollars into the US,” Trump told Yahoo Finance’s Brian Sozzi. He said that countries that want the US dollar are investing “trillions and trillions of dollars every year” in stablecoins, 99% of which are pegged to the US dollar.

First launched as a subsidiary of publicly traded bitcoin mining firm Hut 8 (HUT), American Bitcoin began trading on the Nasdaq in September, marking another foray by the Trump family into the cryptocurrency sector.

Reuters reported that the Trump family brought in at least $800 million from sales of crypto assets in the first half of 2025, which has heightened concerns about potential conflicts of interest.

Eric Trump noted that friendlier crypto regulation under his father’s administration is drawing more companies to the US.

“Crypto companies were leaving the United States” under the previous administration, Trump said. “They weren’t fleeing to the United States.”

Yahoo Finance’s Francisco Velasquez reports:

Read more here.

While he lets most pitches slide, “Shark Tank” investor Daymond John admitted to the one investment that got away: the Scrub Daddy.

In 2012, Scrub Daddy CEO Aaron Krause pitched a line of sponges to the “Shark Tank” investors. A bidding war ensued, which John lost to Lori Greiner, who invested $200,000 in exchange for a 20% stake in the company.

“Every time I walk in the store, there’s a Scrub Daddy, there’s a Scrub Mommy, … they’re all smiling at me,” John told Yahoo Finance’s Allie Canal at Invest. “And I think she’s done about $1.4 billion in sales to date.”

After 17 years on the show, the FUBU founder explained that the best pitches successfully tell a story.

“They tell you how the train is leaving the station with or without you,” he said. “They want you on the train, but it’s leaving the station. You get a little bit of FOMO.”

Other non-negotiables are knowing your numbers and understanding your market.

“If you don’t know your numbers and you don’t know your customers, all you’re doing is using my money as tuition,” he said. “But if you know all those things and you can show proof of concept, then I’m in.”

Yahoo Finance’s Allie Canal reports:

Read more here.

Coinbase (COIN) institutional head of strategy John D’Agostino said the biggest risk for crypto investors right now is timing the market.

“The idea of trying to time the market, I think, would be the biggest risk,” D’Agostino said. “The macro thesis, quite frankly, looks good. I know the price action recently hasn’t been great, but we’re looking at massive regulatory unlocks.”

D’Agostino recommended “a sober dollar-cost averaging approach,” given regulatory improvements and increased institutional adoption.

The Benchmark Company equity research analyst Mark Palmer also weighed in, saying that investors should remember that the asset class is still nascent in its development.

“As it pertains to AI, and I’d say this for crypto as well, you really have to be open-minded and flexible at this point, because we’re so early,” Palmer said. “Bitcoin is not even an adult yet. It’s still a teenager.”

Crypto and traditional finance are on a collision course to become virtually indistinguishable in the future, Robinhood CEO Vlad Tenev said at Yahoo Finance’s Invest.

“Crypto and financial services are going to fully merge over time, and that’s kind of the bet that we’re making,” Tenev said. “You’re going to start to see banking-like products that are stablecoin-powered. And there’s going to be some ambiguity about whether that’s a crypto business or a tradfi business. But as the two fully merge, I think it’s going to be a little bit more difficult to cleanly separate.”

Robinhood has been quietly building an all-encompassing finance ecosystem that offers services from trading and crypto to prediction markets and traditional checking and savings accounts. It’s even, as Myles Udland notes below, providing at-home cash delivery. Investors have rewarded these forays into various financial sectors, as the stock is up 277% year over year.

When asked what the bigger opportunity was, crypto or prediction markets, Tenev demurred.

“I think those businesses, too, are not going to be distinguishable,” he said. “I mean, you look at prediction markets ex US, it’s generally on crypto rails.”

Tenev continued, “I think what’s going to happen is outside of the US, the dominant way to invest or get exposure to US assets, and later on, global assets, is going to be through tokenization and crypto technology, like you see with our EU offering. And then the US eventually will upgrade on the back end…”

Watch the full interview here.

Robinhood (HOOD) CEO Vlad Tenev said public companies will have to begin catering more to retail investors, as better access for retail investing is a “wave that’s going to continue.”

“I think you have to remember, most companies, when they think about their business, dealing with retail investors is pretty secondary or ancillary, and they treat investor relations, particularly retail, as kind of a chore or something they’re forced to do,” Tenev told Yahoo Finance’s Brian Sozzi at Invest.

Tenev pointed to changes in how companies like Robinhood are communicating with investors, such as launching video earnings calls and taking questions from retail investors.

“Just last week, Opendoor, for example, became the first company outside of Robinhood to use our infrastructure to livestream their earnings to their customers,” Tenev said. “So you should expect that to be a growing trend in investor relations in the future.”

Watch the full interview here.

Robinhood (HOOD) this week rolled out a new banking service meant to offer some of the features so-called “private banking” programs from larger rivals may include.

Among them? Cash delivery.

Speaking at Yahoo Finance’s Invest event on Thursday, Robinhood CEO Vlad Tenev discussed the new offering, noting that even as the financial world grows more digital, many people still have a use for cold hard cash.

“And as we started thinking about the types of features and services that the high net worth individuals would get, one of them is [that] they’re not going to an inner city ATM,” Tenev said.

“They’re getting cash delivered to their house. And surprisingly, even though we’re getting increasingly digitized, cash is still a very important part of the US economy, and people need it from time to time.

“And when they need it, we want to deliver it to them with the convenience they expect from other digital services. So, [a] high net worth individual gets cash delivered to their house in a truck. We figured out how to do that in partnership with Gopuff to the mass market.”

As for how the cash will show up at your door, Tenev said the delivery will be “discreet.”

Activist investor and Starboard Value CEO Jeff Smith walked through some of the companies he’s engaged with, including Salesforce (CRM) and Kenvue (KVUE). But there’s one company that has a special place in his heart: Papa John’s (PZZA).

Smith served as chairman of Papa John’s board from 2019 to 2023, helping to initiate a turnaround at the pizza chain.

“I love Papa John’s,” Smith told Yahoo Finance Executive Editor Brian Sozzi. “We did some great things at Papa John’s,” Smith recalled. “We improved the business tremendously. We changed the perception around the brand. We introduced Stuffed Crust Pizza for Papa John’s.”

Papa John’s has had a volatile year, as Apollo Global Management (APO) bid $2.1 billion to take the company private but then withdrew its offer earlier this month. Now, the company is reportedly looking for another buyer. (Disclosure: Yahoo Finance is owned by Apollo Global Management.)

When asked if he would consider investing in Papa John’s again, Smith didn’t rule out the possibility.

“I would never rule out getting back involved,” Smith said. “I think there’s a lot of opportunity at the company, but it has to be right for both people and has to make sense.”

Watch the full interview here.

Yahoo Finance’s Jake Conley reports:

Read more here.

Are we in an AI-driven stock market bubble? Truist chief investment officer Keith Lerner laid out the case that while valuations are a bit stretched, markets are not yet in “bubble” territory.

“There’s a couple of factors, but one is valuations by themselves,” Lerner said in a panel alongside Investopedia’s Caleb Silver and ADP’s Nela Richardson. “Valuations are rich, but if you look at the S&P Technology sector, we’re trading around 30 times. That’s expensive, but during the [dot-com] bubble, it was 50 times.”

Another point Lerner made is that corporate profits have been keeping up with rising stock prices.

“The north star of this bull market is corporate profits,” Lerner stated. “As the stock market has made a new high, corporate profits have followed. Now we have to see is that sustainable? A lot of that is driven by tech and AI, but we have seen that bearing out as well.”

Still, Lerner said it’s possible investors will see a correction. Stocks sold off on Thursday as the government shutdown ended and investors rotated out of technology stocks like Nvidia (NVDA) for more value-oriented plays.

“We had a big run,” he said. “We’re seeing a little bit of nervousness. But ultimately, I think that underlying trend for tech is still intact.”

Former Federal Reserve vice chair Lael Brainard thinks Fed Chair Jay Powell will loom large in history for one key reason — his fight for the central bank’s independence.

“I do believe that the single most important legacy will be [Powell’s] very determined efforts to guard the independence of the Federal Reserve, to make sure that the Federal Reserve maintains its institutional strength and resilience,” Brainard said during Yahoo Finance’s Invest event on Thursday.

“And, of course, that is the most important legacy he can hand to future Federal Reserve chairs,” Brainard added.

“It’s also the most important legacy to serve the American public, because it means that they can have confidence in low inflation and that it won’t require high unemployment to bring inflation down.”

Brainard, who joined the Fed board during President Obama’s second term and was named Fed vice chair under President Biden, served with Powell on the Fed’s Board of Governors for nearly a decade.

Powell was nominated to serve as Fed chair by President Trump in 2017 and was renominated to the role in 2021 by Biden.

During both his first and second terms in office, Trump has at various points criticized Powell for not cutting rates quickly enough. Earlier this year, Trump suggested that he could look to remove Powell from his post, but later said he wouldn’t fire the Fed chair.

The White House’s search for a successor to Powell is reportedly down to five candidates. Powell’s term is up in May.

The US economy would be suffering a lot more if it weren’t for artificial intelligence investments. That was the message on the bifurcated economy that former Federal Reserve Board vice chair Lael Brainard gave to Yahoo Finance’s Brian Sozzi at Invest.

“I think we have a very clear two-track economy,” said Brainard, who is also the former director of the National Economic Council.

“We have the AI sector, and … the leading sector is doing extremely well, but it’s not hiring,” Brainard explained. “And the rest of the economy is suffering. It’s suffering because it is less favored in the capital markets. It’s suffering because it is still trying to digest those tariffs.”

Consumers, especially the high-income consumers that drive spending, largely remain resilient, though affordability pressures continue to trouble households, driving sentiment to a three-year low.

Brainard predicts that overall third quarter GDP will hold up, but that there’s nuance to how different parts of the economy are performing.

“The economy at the top level is strong,” Brainard said, “but again, it’s being driven by this really important set of investments in AI. The rest of the economy under the hood is really stuck.”

Watch the full interview here.

Affirm CEO and techno-optimist Max Levchin weighed in on the debate about how advancements in artificial intelligence will reshape the labor market. While we can’t ignore the safety risks, Levchin argued that using AI at work is likely to make humans better off.

“I’m not at all worried about the loss of jobs,” Levchin told Yahoo Finance’s Brian Sozzi at Invest. “I do think the robots are coming.”

Instead of coming for everyone’s jobs, Levchin argued that AI “will open up our world to do more interesting, more intellectually stimulating jobs.”

He acknowledged that some “will lament the loss of their manual labor” but that this is comparable to similar periods in the past when automation changed work.

Still, he warned that precautions should be taken to avoid bad actors who may try to weaponize AI.

“I would definitely invest a few serious cycles into making sure we don’t end up in the sort of a Skynet universe, not so much because the robots will evolve consciousness and want to kill us all, but because there are plenty of people out there who would love to wreak havoc by breaking into these robust operating systems and doing bad things,” Levchin said. “So security is important. Safety is important. I think we’re going to solve those problems.”

Watch the full interview here.