Diet TBPN

Apple Sues OpenAI, Experts Sign Another AI Warning Letter, Paramount Threatens CA Exit

The winner could dominate the future just as Apple's iPhone ruled the consumer market for the last 20 years.

Pivot

Mitch McConnell Finally Appeared in a Photo. Kara and Scott Aren’t Buying It | Pivot

This isn't a story about Mitch McConnell. It's a story about American political system that refuses to make room for the next generation.

Book of the Day

Jonathan Jakubowicz says he wanted to write a book Venezuelans couldn't resist

When morals are put aside where ideology doesn't matter, the only thing that matters is that you support the leader, you know, so there is a breakdown in society, and and then suddenly anything goes, and I think it's a very dangerous path to take.

Book of the Day

Mike Pence's 'What Conservatives Believe' critiques the second Trump administration

People that want to drain the swamp in Washington D.C. there's maybe nothing more swampy than the battle over getting tariff waivers for big business.

Hidden Brain

Changing Our Mental Maps

When we think about making changes in our lives, we typically focus on behaviors. But often, the more powerful lever is the mental map we're using to navigate the world. If the map is wrong, no amount of effort will get us to our destination.

Freakonomics Radio

How a Great Architect Thinks, with Bjarke Ingels | Better in Person

Is the oxymoron really "the secret sauce to everything"? That's the case Ingels makes in this debut episode of our new video show Better in Person, filmed in Stephen Dubner's living room.

TED Radio Hour

Tracking what your body needs

When we kind of learn how to check back in with our bodies, right? And we don't have to rely on external cues to do that, right, that behavior is much more likely to stick.

Invest Like the Best with Patrick O'Shaughnessy

John Kim - How to Raise a Few Billion Dollars - [Invest Like the Best, EP.482]

Most LPs will tell you what they want to hear, not necessarily what they think. So the way I tell founders to get signal is to ask them to make an intro to another GP. That is a forcing function — if they liked you, they will make that intro.

Decoder with Nilay Patel

Yes, even Nvidia's head of automotive is fighting for compute

So I asked Xinzhou pretty directly if Tesla full self driving can actually do what Elon claims it will be able to do without using LiDAR. You tell me if you think his answer holds up.

The Prof G Pod

The AI IPO Wave Is Coming — Here's What It Does to Your Portfolio | Office Hours

You're going to see that open AI uh lacks I wouldn't call it business discipline, but it's just a drunk spender and their numbers will reflect that.

China Decode

China Just Dropped Its Jobs Target for the First Time in Decades | China Decode

I would say that if there's one area in which the wheels might come off China's extraordinary economic advances uh over the past few decades, it has to be employment. China is simply moving ahead so quickly on all of these topics that it now becomes an experiment for what happens to employment and social stability when you have hyper rapid AI adoption and automation adoption throughout the economy.

It's Been a Minute

The naked truth of beauty

The internet democratized beauty, but now we all are kind of treating ourselves as these project managers of our faces and our bodies.

TED Radio Hour

Tracking what your body needs

When we compare brain activity after movement versus after sitting, the differences are so striking. The brain after movement looks like one certainly far more ready to learn and to work, and yet somewhere along the way, we decided that sitting and staring in front of a computer screen for eight hours straight is the best way to work.

It's Been a Minute

The naked truth of beauty | It's Been a Minute

When I first started in 2016, I really think beauty was about expression and now increasingly it's about optimization. So people have kind of moved from like how do I want to be? How do I want to express myself to how do I fix myself? How do I optimize?

Invest Like the Best with Patrick O'Shaughnessy

Jeremy Giffon - The Billion Dollar PDF - [Invest Like the Best, EP.481]

The way I think about it is that private markets are just a giant PDF. There's no ticker, there's no price discovery, there's no market. And so the question is: who has the best PDF? Who has the most information? Who has done the most work?

Hidden Brain

Changing Our Mental Maps

We often think of our beliefs and mental models as reflections of reality — accurate maps of the world that help us navigate our lives. But what happens when the map is wrong? What happens when the map itself is the problem?

Invest Like the Best with Patrick O'Shaughnessy

Etched - Building AI Hardware to Make Inference Faster and Cheaper - [Invest Like the Best, EP.480]

The thing that's really interesting about transformers specifically is that it's not obvious that the architecture is going to change. Usually in the history of chip design, you build a chip for a specific algorithm and then the algorithm changes and your chip is worthless. But transformers have been around for seven years and they've just gotten bigger and bigger and more and more capable, and there's no real sign that they're going to go away.

Hidden Brain

Changing Our Mental Maps

We all walk around with mental maps of how the world works — maps that tell us what's safe and what's dangerous, what's possible and what's not. The problem is that these maps were often drawn a long time ago, in circumstances that no longer exist. And we keep using old maps to navigate new terrain.

Radiolab

The Holy Shiver

Why does she get them in so many different situations? What's happening in her body and what does it mean? We take that question and run with it — we face chilly winds, sudden frights, and moments when the world seem to shift under your feet to figure out what the little bumps on our skin might be trying to tell us.

The Prof G Pod

The AI IPO Wave Is Coming — Here's What It Does to Your Portfolio | Office Hours

JP Morgan and Goldman Sachs are now really not bankers, they're engineers. And that is they engineer scarcity and manufacture scarcity such that these things get 20%.

TED

The Unexpected Wonders of My Son’s Short Life | James G. Robinson | TED

Forget that anything ever goes wrong. How incredible is it that anything ever goes right?

Invest Like the Best with Patrick O'Shaughnessy

Jeremy Giffon - The Billion Dollar PDF - [Invest Like the Best, EP.481]

The brilliant insight of the PDF was, nobody cares about the operating history of a company, they care about the story of the company. And the story of the company is best told in a document that you control, that you craft, that has beautiful graphics and beautiful fonts and compelling narrative.

TBPN

Apple Sues OpenAI, Experts Sign Another AI Warning Letter, Paramount Threatens CA Exit

Big tech rivals have long tried to supplant Apple but so far Google, Samsung, Meta Platforms, Microsoft and Amazon.com have all failed. It is crazy. People think, you know, okay, Android was successful but captured like onetenth of the actual value because the margins on Android devices are so much lower, but you forget that Jeff Bezos stood on stage and said, "We're launching the Amazon Fire phone and we're going to win."

It's Been a Minute

The fame and (mis)fortune of family influencing

Those early mom blogs, the mothers were the main characters. And now with family influencing on Instagram and on YouTube, really the kids became the main character and they became the draw and the mothers kind of faded into the background.

Book of the Day

Jonathan Jakubowicz says he wanted to write a book Venezuelans couldn't resist

My country elected a man who believes in nothing but loyalty. He doesn't care what you do as long as you don't cross him. So, why fight him? Who am I to tell people they're wrong for believing in a man who makes them feel seen?

Hidden Brain

Changing Our Mental Maps

These maps act like an autopilot system, allowing us to navigate our lives more efficiently. But sometimes, they can lead us astray, leaving us stuck on a path of negativity and unhappiness.

Fresh Air

'The Invite' screenwriters Rashida Jones & Will McCormack

I think that being an adult is sort of like reconciling who you are with who you want to be. And it's great to have dreams, and sometimes dreams don't come true, but that doesn't mean you can't have another. That doesn't mean—life goes on, right?

EconTalk

From Sawdust to Paw Patrol: The Spin Master Story (with Ronnen Harary)

A nylon stocking filled with sawdust that grows grass for hair launched one of the most successful toy companies in the world.

Invest Like the Best with Patrick O'Shaughnessy

Jeremy Giffon - The Billion Dollar PDF - [Invest Like the Best, EP.481]

The thing that's hard to communicate and I think why private markets are interesting is you can buy things that are actually cheap. In public markets, true mispricings are rare and fleeting. In private markets, you can find things that are just structurally mispriced because the market is less efficient, the information is worse, and the buyer pool is smaller.

The a16z Show

Before Blockchains, There Was State Machine Replication

Every blockchain today relies on replication techniques first developed in the 1980s by researchers who weren't thinking about cryptocurrencies at all.

TED

The Counterintuitive Secret of Leadership | Jessica Kriegel | TED

People don't change because you implemented new processes. People will act in alignment with what they believe. And so if you want to change their behavior, you have to shift what it is that they believe.

Decoder with Nilay Patel

Why did Comcast ever buy NBC?

AT&T tried content plus pipes when it bought Time Warner. Verizon tried content plus pipes when it bought AOL and Yahoo, and, hell, AOL tried content plus pipes when it bought Time Warner in the early 2000s. You might notice a trend here — all of those deals ended in disaster.

It's Been a Minute

The Shelf Life of a Pop Star | It's Been a Minute

The very specific allegations in the lawsuit went so much against what people loved about her in such a big way. On top of that, like she's very been very public about saying like she's passed the body positivity movement and now to body neutrality. And so, you know, I think for a lot of people is like a little bit of a brand betrayal.

Invest Like the Best with Patrick O'Shaughnessy

Etched - Building AI Hardware to Make Inference Faster and Cheaper - [Invest Like the Best, EP.480]

The thing that's really different about a transformer ASIC versus a GPU is that a GPU is a general-purpose chip. It has to be able to run any kind of workload. A transformer ASIC, by contrast, can be completely specialized for one thing, which means you can make very different design decisions.

Invest Like the Best with Patrick O'Shaughnessy

Etched - Building AI Hardware to Make Inference Faster and Cheaper - [Invest Like the Best, EP.480]

The thing that's so special about transformers is they can be trained end to end with gradient descent. You don't have to come up with the algorithm yourself. You just show the network examples of inputs and outputs and it figures out the algorithm. And because the algorithm is learned rather than programmed, it can be much more sophisticated than anything a human could come up with.

Invest Like the Best with Patrick O'Shaughnessy

Etched - Building AI Hardware to Make Inference Faster and Cheaper - [Invest Like the Best, EP.480]

The thing that's so special about a transformer ASIC is that you can literally etch the weights of a model into the chip itself. The weights never need to move — they're just there, on the chip, permanently. That means you eliminate the memory bandwidth bottleneck that makes GPUs so inefficient at inference.

Invest Like the Best with Patrick O'Shaughnessy

Etched - Building AI Hardware to Make Inference Faster and Cheaper - [Invest Like the Best, EP.480]

The thing that's special about transformers specifically is that the weights are so large that you can't fit them all on chip. And so what happens is that you spend most of your time just loading weights from memory rather than doing computation. And so the key insight behind Etched is that if you hardcode the transformer architecture into silicon, you can do a lot of tricks to basically never have to load the weights from memory.

Office Hours

"His Money Is Our Money, My Money Is Mine" — Scott Galloway Responds | Office Hours

The healthiest relationships I find are when men and women have alignment around their approach to money. Who is responsible for bringing it in? What is their approach to spending?

Diet TBPN

GPT-5.6 Reactions, Phoebe Gates’ Phia Drama, Hollywood Chases Internet Horror | Diet TBPN

You can go and recreate Interstellar perfectly, but at the end you just have Interstellar which already exists and is available to stream and so you didn't really get anything in the process. you have to bring something special to the table.

Invest Like the Best with Patrick O'Shaughnessy

Etched - Building AI Hardware to Make Inference Faster and Cheaper - [Invest Like the Best, EP.480]

The thing that's really interesting about transformers is that the weights are basically fixed after training. You load the weights once onto the chip, and then you just do inference over and over again. So if you build a chip that is specifically designed to run one model or one architecture, you can get massive efficiency gains because you're not paying for the flexibility of being able to run arbitrary code.

Invest Like the Best with Patrick O'Shaughnessy

Etched - Building AI Hardware to Make Inference Faster and Cheaper - [Invest Like the Best, EP.480]

The core insight is that transformers have a fixed architecture, and if that architecture is going to be with us for a long time, there's a massive opportunity to build a chip that does nothing but run transformers — and does it faster and cheaper than anything else. A general-purpose chip has to be flexible, and flexibility costs you in efficiency.

China Decode

China Tests Ballistic Missile, Europe's AC Addiction, & China's AI Coding Challenger | China Decode

It's saying don't mess with us. We are a growing and increasingly assertive military power

Hidden Brain

Waking Up Your Spiritual Brain: Part 1

People who have a lot of awe in their lives tend to feel that they are part of something larger than themselves. And that sense of being part of something larger — whether it's a religion, a community, or the natural world — seems to be deeply connected to well-being.

Anatomy of a Scene

Watch Olivia Wilde Explain How Tension Builds in 'The Invite' | Anatomy of a Scene

There's been this kind of minimizing of comedies in terms of their significance and their cinematic value, but we were all raised on comedies that felt incredibly cinematic.

Freakonomics Radio

681. How to Host a Talk Show, with Dick Cavett

Stephen Dubner had an idea for a new project. So he drove to Connecticut and knocked on the door of the master.

TED

Why I’m Obsessed with Health Wearables (and You Should Be Too) | Michael Snyder | TED

We practice sick care rather than health care. And even when we practice health care, if you think about it, it's a pretty archaic process. You will travel to a physician's office that really hasn't changed much in the last 40 years.

TED Radio Hour

Tracking what your body needs

When we exercise, it rewets the sponge. But eventually, that sponge dries out if you get little to no movement the rest of your day.