The world's largest energy projects take decades to build and cost tens of billions of dollars. When they stall or fail, the consequences extend far beyond budgets. Communities waiting for reliable energy wait even longer. Some never get it at all.

Aleida Rios has seen energy poverty firsthand. She experienced it growing up in Mexico, then again in the jungles of Indonesia, and communities across the United States. That perspective shaped a 35-year career at BP, where she became Senior Vice President and Global Head of Engineering, and later an International Fellow of the Royal Academy of Engineering. For Aleida, building energy infrastructure is one of the fastest ways to improve human prosperity.

In this episode of Earn The Right Podcast, Aleida joins Apoorv Agarwal to examine why energy megaprojects run over budget and behind schedule, what AI can realistically do to fix them, and why faster, more bankable projects are critical to expanding access to energy.

They discuss why the sheer volume of megaproject data exceeds human capacity, how AI can identify design flaws before construction begins, standardise engineering across projects, preserve institutional knowledge, and improve project execution. Aleida also explains why the energy transition is ultimately an engineering and talent challenge, and why, when it comes to delivering the infrastructure the world needs, speed matters most.

WHAT YOU'LL LEARN

- Why 90 percent of energy megaprojects go over budget and what drives it

- How AI can find design defects earlier and reduce the total cost and cycle time of megaprojects

- Why standardisation is the most underrated lever in energy project delivery

ABOUT ALEIDA

Aleida Rios is a former energy executive and chemical engineer whose 35-year career at BP culminated in senior leadership roles including Senior Vice President of Engineering and Global Head of Engineering. She led BP's global engineering centre and the professional development of more than 2,500 engineers worldwide. She previously served as Vice President of Operations for BP's Gulf of Mexico platforms and its US Lower 48 onshore business, overseeing budgets approaching one billion dollars. Born in Mexico and raised in the United States from age eight, she was the first in her family to attend college, earning a B.S. in Chemical Engineering from Texas A&M University. She is an International Fellow of the Royal Academy of Engineering, a Fellow of the Energy Institute, and a Chartered Engineer. She has been recognised in Fortune and ALPFA's 50 Most Powerful Latinas and the Financial Times EMpower ethnic minority executives list.

ABOUT EARN THE RIGHT PODCAST

How do the world's most impactful leaders think, decide and build? Through unfiltered conversations, the Earn The Right Podcast takes listeners inside the rooms where the hardest choices are made: from building billion-dollar companies to navigating doubt, reinvention and change. The show is hosted by Apoorv Agarwal, an AI scientist, entrepreneur (Text IQ, acquired 2021) and Columbia PhD, who has advised Fortune 500 leaders. For founders and decision-makers developing the future, this is your front-row seat to how the best earn the right to lead.

Subscribe to Earn The Right Podcast for conversations with the world's most influential leaders.

Recessions are not caused by booms. They are triggered by shocks. That is the conclusion Tyler Goodspeed reached after studying data across four centuries. Most of what we believe about economic downturns does not survive the evidence.

Tyler is Chief Economist at ExxonMobil, former acting Chairman of the White House Council of Economic Advisers, and holds dual PhDs from Harvard and Cambridge. His new book, ‘Recession: The Real Reasons Economies Shrink and What to Do About It’, draws on figures stretching back to the 18th century. It upends everything we think we know about booms, busts, and what comes next.

This episode of Earn The Right Podcast is for investors, founders, and executives trying to read the economic moment.

Tyler joins Apoorv Agarwal to break down the causes of a recession, challenge the most widely held economic beliefs, and examine what historical technology cycles tell us about the AI investment wave. He also explains the plucking model and what it means for anyone trying to make smarter decisions about their money, their business, or their career during a downturn.

WHAT YOU'LL LEARN

• Why the boom-and-bust story is more myth than reality, and what actually causes economies to contract
• What 18th-century Atlantic piracy reveals about modern supply chain shocks and the Strait of Hormuz
• What the bottlenecks in AI infrastructure mean for the pace of technological change

ABOUT TYLER

Tyler Goodspeed is Chief Economist of ExxonMobil. He previously served as acting Chairman of the White House Council of Economic Advisers, where he also chaired the OECD’s Economic Policy Committee. He holds a PhD in history from Harvard and a PhD in economics from Cambridge, and taught at Oxford and King’s College London. He is also a Griffin Fellow at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution. His latest book, ‘Recession: The Real Reasons Economies Shrink and What to Do About It’, is his first written for a general audience. It challenges conventional wisdom on recessions with data stretching back to the 1700s and practical lessons for investors, executives, and policymakers alike.

ABOUT EARN THE RIGHT PODCAST

How do the world's most impactful leaders think, decide and build? Through unfiltered conversations, Earn The Right Podcast takes listeners inside the rooms where the hardest choices are made: from building billion-dollar companies to navigating doubt, reinvention and change. The show is hosted by Apoorv Agarwal, an AI scientist, entrepreneur (Text IQ, acquired 2021) and Columbia PhD, who has advised Fortune 500 leaders. For founders and decision-makers developing the future, this is your front-row seat to how the best earn the right to lead.

Subscribe to Earn The Right Podcast for conversations with the world's most influential leaders.

JoAnn Stonier has been ahead of every major wave in data, AI governance, and AI safety. Formerly Mastercard's first Chief Data Officer and American Express's first Chief Privacy Officer, she now advises governments and corporations on responsible AI, enterprise AI adoption, and how to scale AI without losing control.

As President of Cantellus Group, she works with Fortune 500 boards on AI strategy and responsible innovation. She sits on the United Nations Expert Group on Governance and Artificial Intelligence and co-chairs the World Economic Forum's Global Future Council on Data Policy.

In this episode of Earn The Right Podcast, she joins Apoorv Agarwal to discuss how to drive enterprise AI adoption inside large organisations, what rogue AI agents and autonomous AI agents reveal about building technology, and why the leaders winning the AI race manage AI risk from day one.

JoAnn explains why embedding AI governance into product design allows companies to move faster, not slower. She breaks down the OpenClaw incident as a real-world example of what happens when agents pursue goals without guardrails. She also shares the exact profile of the Chief AI Officer every enterprise needs right now, why the CAIO role is the most misunderstood, and why most companies are hiring the wrong person for it.

WHAT YOU'LL LEARN

- What happens when autonomous AI agents operate without values, and how to stop it before it hits your organisation

- The first question every CEO and board should ask before deploying an enterprise AI strategy

- Why waiting on AI adoption is not the safe strategy you think it is, and what responsible AI leadership looks like instead

ABOUT JOANN

JoAnn Stonier is President of Cantellus Group, a boutique advisory firm helping boards and executives navigate the strategy, oversight, and governance of AI and frontier technologies. She spent 17 years at Mastercard, serving as Chief Privacy Officer, Chief Information Governance Officer, and the company's first Chief Data Officer, responsible for enterprise-wide data strategy across 210 countries and billions of transactions. She later served as a Mastercard Fellow for Data and AI. Before Mastercard, she was the first Chief Privacy Officer at American Express, appointed by CEO Ken Chenault. She sits on the United Nations Expert Group on Governance and Artificial Intelligence and co-chairs the World Economic Forum's Global Future Council on Data Policy. She teaches at Carnegie Mellon University and Pratt Institute, and advises boards including Omnicom Group and Lytical Ventures. She holds degrees in accounting and finance, computer science, law, and interior design.

ABOUT EARN THE RIGHT

How do the world's most impactful leaders think, decide and build? Through unfiltered conversations, the Earn The Right podcast takes listeners inside the rooms where the hardest choices are made: from building billion-dollar companies to navigating doubt, reinvention and change. The show is hosted by Apoorv Agarwal, an AI scientist, entrepreneur (Text IQ, acquired 2021) and Columbia PhD, who has advised Fortune 500 leaders. For founders and decision-makers developing the future, this is your front-row seat to how the best earn the right to lead.

Subscribe to Earn The Right for conversations with the world's most influential leaders.

Kathy Kay has led technology through some of America's biggest crises. From the Great Recession to California wildfires to a global pandemic, she was the person building systems that kept companies and people afloat.

As EVP and CIO at Principal Financial Group, she brings a battle-tested instinct for building technology through disruption. She has done it at General Motors, PG&E, Comerica, and SunTrust Bank. Every role sharpened her approach to innovating with compliance. That cross-industry depth is exactly what makes her perspective on scaling enterprise AI worth listening to right now.

In this episode of Earn The Right Podcast, she joins Apoorv Agarwal to discuss enterprise AI adoption, the build vs. buy decision for AI agents, and why being a regulated company is no excuse to move slowly.

Kathy shares how she democratised AI across an entire organisation, starting by opening her first ChatGPT study group to attorneys, compliance, risk, and engineers all at the same time. From there, she explains why the one-time cost to build software is always the cheapest part of any program. She also makes the case for why human contact becomes more valuable, not less, as AI automates everything around it.

WHAT YOU'LL LEARN

• Build vs. buy for AI: why the one-time cost is always the cheapest part of any program
• Why outcome-based pricing aligns AI vendor contracts better than seat-based models
• The difference between a mentor and an advocate, and why your career needs both

ABOUT KATHY KAY

Kathy Kay is Executive Vice President and Chief Information Officer at Principal Financial Group. She leads global technology strategy, IT operations, security, and innovation across retirement, insurance, and asset management. Under her leadership, Principal went from 800 to 17,000 active AI users in a single year across a workforce of 20,000. She was inducted into the US CIO Hall of Fame in 2026. She won CIO of the Year at the Technology Association of Iowa's 2023 Prometheus Awards. Before Principal, she served as SVP and CIO at PG&E during the California wildfire crisis, CTO at SunTrust Bank, and SVP and CTO at Comerica through the 2008 financial crisis. She began her career at General Motors Research Labs and OnStar, building connected vehicle systems that saved lives.

ABOUT EARN THE RIGHT PODCAST

How do the world's most impactful leaders think, decide and build? Through unfiltered conversations, the Earn The Right podcast takes listeners inside the rooms where the hardest choices are made: from building billion-dollar companies to navigating doubt, reinvention and change. The show is hosted by Apoorv Agarwal, an AI scientist, entrepreneur (Text IQ, acquired 2021) and Columbia PhD, who has advised Fortune 500 leaders. For founders and decision-makers developing the future, this is your front-row seat to how the best earn the right to lead.

Subscribe to Earn The Right for conversations with the world's most influential leaders.

Thirty years ago, a rejection letter changed internet history.

Randy Milch never planned to be a General Counsel. He wanted to be Secretary of State. When President Reagan fired all 300 diplomats-in-waiting on his first day in office, Randy went to law school instead.

What followed was two decades at the center of American corporate history. As General Counsel of Verizon, Randy navigated the MCI merger, NSA surveillance, and telecom deregulation. When the government's secret surveillance program became front-page news in 2005, he was the lawyer managing it from the inside.

Randy's argument in this episode is uncomfortable: America is protecting the wrong thing. Billions go toward litigating individual data breaches; power grids, water systems, and critical infrastructure remain exposed. He makes the case for a tiered cybersecurity standard that forces a national reckoning with what actually needs protecting.

On AI, he is skeptical but not dismissive. He watched billions pour into dot-com infrastructure in the late 1990s. He was inside one of the companies whose networks ran it all. He knows what a cycle looks like before it turns. The questions he is asking about AI today are the same ones few were asking in 1999.

That experience is exactly what he now brings to NYU, where he co-chairs the Center for Cybersecurity and built one of the first programs training lawyers and engineers to understand each other's risks and blind spots.

In this episode, we cover:

• Why risk aversion is a lawyer's greatest liability

• How Verizon won long distance by losing the right way

• What the NSA surveillance crisis taught Randy about leading under pressure

• Why America is solving the wrong cybersecurity problem

• What the dot-com boom tells us about the AI moment we are in now

• Why engineers and lawyers need to close the gap between legal liability and technical reality

Subscribe to Earn The Right for conversations with the world's most influential leaders.

What does it take to protect the world’s most powerful financial institution for nearly three decades?

In the fifth episode of Earn The Right, Apoorv Agarwal sits down with Greg Palm, the legendary former General Counsel of Goldman Sachs. The story of this small-town bred lawyer is a striking departure from the typical Wall Street pedigree.

Growing up in Chenango Bridge, New York, Greg was the son of parents who never attended college. His path was paved by merit and curiosity, sparked by the national push for science education following the launch of Sputnik.

He attended MIT on a scholarship before completing a joint JD/MBA at Harvard. Before joining Goldman, Greg honed his legal expertise as a clerk for Hon. Judge Henry Friendly and Supreme Court Justice Lewis F. Powell Jr., followed by a prestigious partnership at Sullivan & Cromwell.

Over a 27-year tenure spanning five CEOs, Greg served as Goldman Sachs’ top lawyer, navigating the bank through its 1999 IPO, the 2008 financial crisis, and aggressive regulatory battles. This conversation provides unparalleled insight into high-stakes leadership, the intersection of law and business, and building structural integrity when the global economy is on the brink of collapse.

In this episode, we explore:

• The 2008 Financial Crisis: A behind-the-scenes look at survival strategies, the Abacus settlement, and the emotional weight of leading through a black swan event.

• The Power of Focus over Networking: Why Greg considers himself an outlier who prioritized merit and deep work over intentional networking early in his career.

• From Theory to High Stakes: How a student of theoretical physics and economics at MIT became one of the architects of the modern Goldman Sachs Group.

• Investing in the Unknown: Why a lawyer now bets on the future of space and biology to keep his mind sharp.

• Empowering Autonomy: Greg’s philosophy on building a massive legal department by hiring partners who refuse to be looked over their shoulder.

• The Myth of Gordon Gekko: Why the sleazy Wall Street stereotypes portrayed in movies couldn’t be further from reality.

For more deep dives into the crucial decisions and character-defining moments of world-class leaders, subscribe to Earn The Right.

Teresa Barreira leads marketing at Publicis Sapient, with prior tenures at IBM, Accenture, and Deloitte. She has seen every major technology shift. AI is different.

In this episode of Earn The Right, Apoorv Agarwal sits down with Teresa Barreira, Global Chief Marketing and Communications Officer at Publicis Sapient, to unpack how AI is fundamentally reshaping marketing, leadership, and the future of human work.

Teresa is one of the most influential marketing leaders operating at the intersection of enterprise transformation, AI adoption, and creative strategy. With more than 25 years of global leadership experience, she has built and scaled marketing organizations inside some of the world’s most complex enterprises, often during periods of rapid technological change.

But this conversation goes beyond tools and tactics.

Born and raised in a small village in northern Portugal, Teresa emigrated to the United States as a teenager. She learned English by watching soap operas. She began working in her family’s business at the age of ten. Those early experiences shaped a leadership philosophy grounded in accountability, adaptability, and human judgment. These are qualities she believes matter even more as AI becomes embedded in everyday work.

At Publicis Sapient, Teresa is redefining modern marketing by building AI-first operating models, experimenting with agentic systems, and rethinking roles around tasks rather than titles. Her mandate is clear. AI should not replace humans. It should elevate them.

This is a conversation about what actually changes inside companies once AI moves from theory to operations. It explores how decisions are made, how teams are structured, and where human judgment still defines impact.

In this episode, we’ll explore

• Why every company is becoming a software company: AI is not just automating marketing tasks. It is forcing organizations to learn how to build, test, and iterate systems as a core capability.

• Why creativity beats consistency in the age of AI: When execution becomes automated, originality and judgment become the true competitive advantage.

• Why AI replaces tasks, not jobs: Breaking roles into tasks reveals where humans create value and where automation actually helps rather than threatens.

• Why most AI pilots fail inside enterprises: They optimize existing workflows instead of redesigning how work should happen in the first place.

• Why CMOs must become builders, not just operators: Modern marketing leaders are expected to design systems, not just oversee outputs.

• Why exploration matters more than specialization: AI rewards curiosity, adaptability, and learning speed over narrow expertise.

Subscribe to Earn The Right for unfiltered conversations with leaders redesigning work culture to create impact during technological shifts.

What does it take to lead when systems fail? Timothy Mayopoulos has spent his career answering that question.

In episode three of Earn The Right, Apoorv Agarwal speaks with one of the most trusted crisis leaders in American finance. Tim served as CEO of Fannie Mae and later stepped in as the FDIC-appointed CEO of Silicon Valley Bridge Bank during its 2023 collapse. He is also a lawyer who built his early career inside some of Wall Street’s most demanding legal environments.

This is a conversation about leadership under pressure: decision-making at velocity, empathy in moments of fear and how to find purpose when the world shifts overnight.

Before leading large financial turnarounds, Tim built his foundation as a litigator at Davis Polk. He later became General Counsel across several global financial institutions, including Bank of America, Deutsche Bank and Credit Suisse. His legal career shaped the analytical discipline and empathy he became known for.

Tim went on to serve as President and CEO of Fannie Mae, where the company returned 167 billion dollars in dividends to the U.S. Treasury. After that, he led Blend Labs to a market-leading position in mortgage and consumer banking technology.

Today, Tim sits on the boards of Blend Labs, LendingClub and SAIC. He also advises several VC-backed fintech companies, including Bilt Technologies, Valon and Roam Homes. In addition, he serves on the FDIC Systemic Resolution Advisory Committee.

• Crisis leadership: How to step into uncertainty, take charge and guide teams through fear.

• Turning Risk Into Opportunity: Why running toward a crisis can accelerate your career and expand your leadership capacity.

• Insights from the SVB & Fannie Mae Frontlines: What actually causes institutions to fail and why liquidity, not business model, is often the real culprit.

• Decision-Making Velocity: Why great leaders separate “quality of inputs” from “quality of outcomes.”

• Housing & The American Dream: Why homeownership is still central to wealth-building and what must change for the next generation.

• Leadership at Scale: How leading at Fannie Mae differs from leading at a startup and why small companies demand faster judgment.

• AI, Work & The Future: Why AI is the “electricity of the century” and what it means for the next generation of lawyers, bankers and knowledge workers.

For more conversations with leaders reforming industries, subscribe to Earn The Right.