TBPN
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![For two years, Walter Isaacson lived in an Airstream next to Elon Musk while writing his biography. Isaacson didn't want a book built on a series of interviews. Instead, he got near-constant access to observe Musk firsthand. That's how he saw Musk's "demon mode" up close. Here's how he describes the mood swings: "He gets really dark and really difficult. He just goes silent." "There are people like Gwynne Shotwell and [Tesla design chief] Franz von Holzhausen who know how to push him out of demon mode. He also knows how to get himself together when he goes on stage." "It depends on what's crossing his mind at the moment. It's almost like a storm cloud coming in off the Gulf." "There'd be times I'd watch him go into demon mode. I'd be sitting at dinner at a restaurant in Austin and Grimes would be next to me, and she'd say, 'Oh, demon mode's about to come.'" "I'd watch people text Gwynne to come run into the conference room when he's about to kill Falcon Heavy or something." And he doesn't think Musk has gotten any less mercurial, either.](https://image.24vids.com/tw-2111217110483685526/amplify_video_thumb/2111216869776748544/img/CJ5eH-JjcI1-kZU-.jpg)
For two years, Walter Isaacson lived in an Airstream next to Elon Musk while writing his biography. Isaacson didn't want a book built on a series of interviews. Instead, he got near-constant access to observe Musk firsthand. That's how he saw Musk's "demon mode" up close. Here's how he describes the mood swings: "He gets really dark and really difficult. He just goes silent." "There are people like Gwynne Shotwell and [Tesla design chief] Franz von Holzhausen who know how to push him out of demon mode. He also knows how to get himself together when he goes on stage." "It depends on what's crossing his mind at the moment. It's almost like a storm cloud coming in off the Gulf." "There'd be times I'd watch him go into demon mode. I'd be sitting at dinner at a restaurant in Austin and Grimes would be next to me, and she'd say, 'Oh, demon mode's about to come.'" "I'd watch people text Gwynne to come run into the conference room when he's about to kill Falcon Heavy or something." And he doesn't think Musk has gotten any less mercurial, either.
TBPN380,853 views • 2 days ago
![.Walter Isaacson says Steve Jobs would be appalled by agentic AI. "[Steve Jobs] says the goal is to connect human creativity to the processing power of our machines." "What we're doing now with agentic AI is where I worry." "When I start using agents that try to do things without me and to be out of my control, Steve Jobs would be appalled by that." "It doesn't connect human creativity to the product. It doesn't have the music that makes our hearts sing, as Steve said, with the iPod." "These people aren't stepping back and saying, 'Why are we making this?' The answer should be to help humanity." "That was Steve's lodestar."](https://image.24vids.com/tw-2111204325188112703/amplify_video_thumb/2111204290799026177/img/D-N9-laqiXBr-wWJ.jpg)
.Walter Isaacson says Steve Jobs would be appalled by agentic AI. "[Steve Jobs] says the goal is to connect human creativity to the processing power of our machines." "What we're doing now with agentic AI is where I worry." "When I start using agents that try to do things without me and to be out of my control, Steve Jobs would be appalled by that." "It doesn't connect human creativity to the product. It doesn't have the music that makes our hearts sing, as Steve said, with the iPod." "These people aren't stepping back and saying, 'Why are we making this?' The answer should be to help humanity." "That was Steve's lodestar."
TBPN75,596 views • 2 days ago
MongoDB interim CEO Dev Ittycheria on Meta poaching CJ Desai: "CJ made a decision, and I'll let you pass judgment." "What I will say is I got a note from a good friend who says, 'At the end of the day, no one's going to remember how much money you make. They're going to remember what kind of leader you were and what kind of person you were.'" "I'll just leave it at that."
TBPN407,711 views • 18 days ago
.Ben Thompson says consumer AI has a marketing problem because the average consumer doesn't actually want to be more productive. "Tech companies are like, 'Let us book your flight for you!' I’ve had a personal assistant for 10 years. He does not come within an inch of booking my flights for me. That is crazy talk." "I understand which ones are gonna be delayed. I know which seat I want to be on. So the fact that this is continually a demo is hilarious to me." “Number two: people love shopping. They don’t want to be productive. They want to be entertained. One of the biggest forms of entertainment is shopping.” "Also, there’s so much information on a product page. Companies have spent so much energy focusing on that. You look at apparel as a category. They’re going to tell you what size the model is wearing, and you want to know that, and you want to look at the different styles." "The idea of having a personal agent that’s going and getting some of the information and bringing it back to you, and then you’re like, 'Well, what about this other thing? Tell me about this thing.'" "And you have your eager tech company executive say, “Oh, I have an assistant that can do it for you!" "And it’s like, no. Not only do I want to do it, I want to complain about it. I’m enjoying myself complaining right now, okay? Would you just let me be and live my life?"
TBPN540,939 views • 26 days ago
![LORE: Walter Isaacson says Elizabeth Holmes failed his smell test long before the Theranos scandal, and that he repeatedly turned down opportunities to interview her, write about her, and moderate panels with her as a result. "I met Elizabeth Holmes before she was quite famous or infamous." "[Her team] wanted me to interview her on stage and she wanted me to write something about her. I said, 'This doesn't meet my smell test'... There's something really wrong here." "I actually declined moderating some panels with her in public just because it made me feel a bit off." "She was a huge Steve Jobs fanatic. She even tried to dress like Steve Jobs." "She had read my Steve Jobs biography probably more times than I had... I think it's dangerous if you read the book once too often. It kind of makes you think that you might become reality distortion field Steve." "I know she's a con artist, but has she conned herself?"](https://image.24vids.com/tw-2111198075469594714/amplify_video_thumb/2111197994750275584/img/u9nn7us-mJn5g7sW.jpg)
LORE: Walter Isaacson says Elizabeth Holmes failed his smell test long before the Theranos scandal, and that he repeatedly turned down opportunities to interview her, write about her, and moderate panels with her as a result. "I met Elizabeth Holmes before she was quite famous or infamous." "[Her team] wanted me to interview her on stage and she wanted me to write something about her. I said, 'This doesn't meet my smell test'... There's something really wrong here." "I actually declined moderating some panels with her in public just because it made me feel a bit off." "She was a huge Steve Jobs fanatic. She even tried to dress like Steve Jobs." "She had read my Steve Jobs biography probably more times than I had... I think it's dangerous if you read the book once too often. It kind of makes you think that you might become reality distortion field Steve." "I know she's a con artist, but has she conned herself?"
TBPN37,877 views • 2 days ago
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.Sam Altman says the advice to pick one thing to build and pour all your focus into it no longer applies. "The canonical advice that was correct two years ago was, 'Pick one, and put all your effort into it, because you can't build all 30 things.'" "You can now build all 30 things. And you can get people to use them all. And you can work more on the ones that work." "So I think this mindset of lots of ideas, quick feedback, and being open to a lot of things not working is great for this new era for how people build."
TBPN294,517 views • 19 days ago
"Every male 40 and older should probably be taking somewhere between 2.5 and 5 milligrams of tadalafil." - Andrew D. Huberman, Ph.D. Jordi: What do you think the best athletes in the world are doing this Olympics? Huberman: "People are taking vasodilators. You know, Viagra and tadalafil, which commonly goes by Cialis." "Tadalafil is a vasodilator. It lowers blood pressure, and people know of it as Cialis for erectile dysfunction. It was originally developed as a drug to improve prostate health." "The basic takeaway is that most every male 40 and older should probably be taking somewhere between 2.5 and 5 milligrams of tadalafil—not necessarily for erectile function, although it will augment that as well—but to lower blood pressure and to improve vasodilation for the brain and the prostate." "And I'm not saying this as a biohacker or a podcaster. Our head of male sexual health from Stanford, Mike Eisenberg, MD, PhD. He is best in class in terms of male sexual health endocrinology. That's his recommendation."
TBPN4,596,319 views • 8 months ago
Erewhon could have your product on its shelves in two weeks. Kabir Jain, chief growth officer at the Los Angeles luxury grocery chain, explains how they operate faster than traditional supermarkets: “We’re reviewing products every Thursday in the office, and we’re reviewing categories on the go.” He compares their speed with stores like Whole Foods or Sprouts, which typically operate on six-month review cycles. And once Erewhon decides to stock a product, they can handle distribution themselves or use a distributor they already work with. "It allows the brands to get on shelf really quickly."
TBPN55,384 views • 4 days ago
There might not be a better person on Earth to explain how AI could change football analytics than John Urschel, former NFL player and MIT math professor. He explains football currently has player-tracking data, but it's a mess. He believes AI will help make sense of it. "You’ve got 22 guys on a field, and it’s just complete chaos from a data, statistical point of view." “Even a couple years ago, it was not easy to take player-tracking data and actually recognize what play just happened.” “Was the defense in Cover 2? Were they in Cover 3? What run play did the offense do? What was the passing scheme?” “And so I think there’s a huge potential for AI to help.”
TBPN47,699 views • 4 days ago
When we sat down with Alexandr Wang at Meta Connect 2025, he shared his advice for young people: “If you’re 13 right now, you should spend all your time vibe coding. This is the Bill Gates, Mark Zuckerberg moment. The people who grow up with these tools will have an immense advantage in the future economy.” From his appearance on the show in September.
TBPN4,400,728 views • 11 months ago
![Apple's Eddy Cue reveals the logic behind charging $0.99 a song when the company launched iTunes Store in 2003, despite the fact that Apple would lose money at that price: "There were two keys to $0.99 that we really believed in, and people didn't see." "Number one is when the price is $0.99, and it's consistent, you never have to think about price." "The second thing was that people could never do that, because at $0.99, if you're charging a credit card, you would lose money. Because credit cards have a fixed fee and a percentage that you pay." "Well, the fixed fee and the percentage you pay on a $0.99 song was like a quarter, and the vast majority of the [rest of] the money went to the labels. So every time we'd sell a song, we'd lose money. Nobody wanted to do that." "What we decided to do is, as we were building this — and it was a huge discussion, because we would lose a ton of money — we said, 'Look, this thing is amazing. You're not going to buy just one song, you're going to buy a lot of songs.'" "'And when you do that, instead of closing the transaction on every single one, why don't we just combine them over a period of time? Let's keep the transaction open for a period of time — let's call it 24 hours, or 8 hours. And everything you buy, we're just going to give you, then we're going to charge you at the end.'" "And that's exactly what happened. Very few transactions were just $0.99. Most of the transactions were multiple dollars. And the fixed fee didn't matter."](https://image.24vids.com/tw-2039434372953293245/amplify_video_thumb/2039434193009258496/img/PEMcV_Lkw-E9ijrW.jpg)
Apple's Eddy Cue reveals the logic behind charging $0.99 a song when the company launched iTunes Store in 2003, despite the fact that Apple would lose money at that price: "There were two keys to $0.99 that we really believed in, and people didn't see." "Number one is when the price is $0.99, and it's consistent, you never have to think about price." "The second thing was that people could never do that, because at $0.99, if you're charging a credit card, you would lose money. Because credit cards have a fixed fee and a percentage that you pay." "Well, the fixed fee and the percentage you pay on a $0.99 song was like a quarter, and the vast majority of the [rest of] the money went to the labels. So every time we'd sell a song, we'd lose money. Nobody wanted to do that." "What we decided to do is, as we were building this — and it was a huge discussion, because we would lose a ton of money — we said, 'Look, this thing is amazing. You're not going to buy just one song, you're going to buy a lot of songs.'" "'And when you do that, instead of closing the transaction on every single one, why don't we just combine them over a period of time? Let's keep the transaction open for a period of time — let's call it 24 hours, or 8 hours. And everything you buy, we're just going to give you, then we're going to charge you at the end.'" "And that's exactly what happened. Very few transactions were just $0.99. Most of the transactions were multiple dollars. And the fixed fee didn't matter."
TBPN2,404,178 views • 6 months ago
Jack Goldburg, co-founder of food-media company Yes Chef Group, gives a pretty accurate diagnosis on the sad state of the American knowledge worker: "Technology has killed lunch. Lunch is dead." "You walk around in London and everyone is pounding Guinness." Jacks Dining Room
TBPN50,523 views • 5 days ago
![Netflix rejected a $12M offer from Bezos in 1999. Blockbuster "laughed [Netflix] out of the room" when Netflix offered to sell to them for $50M. Today they announced their acquisition of Warner Bros, and have a market cap of $426B.](https://image.24vids.com/tw-1997084575651319981/amplify_video_thumb/1997083228730253312/img/ms5dufWsUBXGRhhV.jpg)
.Ben Thompson gives his recommendation on how Meta should market Muse: "The way to frame this is to say: 'We're not helping you be more productive, we're helping you get rid of annoying crap in your life.'" "It needs to be framed more as a pain relief as opposed to this aspirational, 'I'm gonna be so productive and get things done.'" "People don't care about being productive. Employers care about their employees being productive. But once you're off the job, you just want to go home and watch TikTok." "The way I think this is going to land is through Instagram Reels or TikTok with people actually showing stuff they do and people say, 'That's amazing. That would make my life so much easier.'" "It really is a show-not-tell sort of technology."
TBPN208,899 views • 26 days ago
.Garry Tan says the Jacob Coxon stuff is a smokescreen distracting us from the much more immediate, practical concerns around AI that we're facing right now: "We should be talking less about this Jacob Coxon guy, and talking a lot more about — what is actually happening with Hugging Face? Are agent swarms going to take over infrastructure en masse? And then, what are we actually doing about that?" "I don't want to hear about some guy who worked for Anthropic for 2 months. There's a coordinated effort to try to influence politicians to get a knee-jerk response out of them." "That's a smokescreen. You shouldn't be paying attention to that. We need to be paying attention to the actual things we can do to, for example, prevent agents swarms from taking over entire data centers. What's our shutdown strategy? How do we ensure provenance? Where is this agent actually located? What software can we build? What cybersecurity defenses can we build today?" "That's the level of discourse I think we need, and we just don't have that." "I don't really care about science fiction. I saw Terminator 2, too. We're not here to talk about that. We need to actually talk about what's really happening with the servers, what's actually happening with the agent swarms, and how do we actually prevent that?" "When it comes to regulation, it's like, let's pass regulation of these things we actually care about, instead of what a socialist says in the New York Times. I don't care about that."
TBPN305,573 views • 1 month ago