big tech

A 2012 Harvard Institute of Politics conversation between Peter Thiel and historian Niall Ferguson. Thiel discusses technology, politics and his stagnation hypothesis.

A short CNN clip of Peter Thiel telling Google chairman Eric Schmidt that Google has huge cash reserves and does not know how to invest them. Thiel argues this signals a lack of innovation.

Ross Douthat interviews Peter Thiel about technological stagnation, AI, longevity, space travel and politics. Thiel also lays out his framing of the Antichrist as a risk of civilizational stagnation.

Westwood Studios co-founder Louis Castle talks about how pathfinding was solved in Command & Conquer: Tiberian Sun, in an Ars Technica War Stories episode. It also touches on other challenges in Westwood's RTS games.

Tyler Cowen interviews Peter Thiel about technological stagnation, innovation, and lessons from Zero to One. The conversation ranges over business, startups and how Thiel thinks about progress.

A Vanity Fair Summit conversation between Elon Musk and Sam Altman, moderated by Andrew Ross Sorkin. They discuss the future of technology, including AI and the simulation hypothesis.

Dave Rubin interviews Patreon CEO Jack Conte about the removal of Lauren Southern's and IGD's accounts, free speech and Patreon's policies.

A fireside chat at TNW Conference where Reddit CEO Steve Huffman discusses Reddit's growth, user engagement and monetisation plans.

In Ars Technica's War Stories, Naughty Dog co-founder Andy Gavin explains how the team squeezed Crash Bandicoot onto the original PlayStation. They overwrote Sony library code in RAM, built custom animation compression, and streamed assets around slow seek times.

Myst co-creator Rand Miller recounts how the HyperCard-built game struggled to run on 1x CD-ROM drives. He and his brother Robyn compressed image and audio data heavily to get acceptable performance. Part of Ars Technica's War Stories series.

An Ars Technica War Stories episode in which Richard Garriott and Starr Long describe Ultima Online's planned virtual ecology and how players wrecked it. Players slaughtered the animals and also broke the in-game economy.

Lucas Pope, creator of Return of the Obra Dinn, explains in Ars Technica's War Stories how localizing the game's logbook nearly sank the project.

A short compilation of Steve Jobs giving his opinions on Microsoft, including calling it opportunistic and lacking taste. It also touches on the role of big tech companies in showing what is possible.

An interview with Nick Bostrom at Oxford's Future of Humanity Institute presenting his simulation argument: at least one of three propositions about posthuman civilizations and ancestor simulations must be true.

Chamath Palihapitiya talks with Jason Calacanis about how he bought into the mythology of Silicon Valley, which he calls a Ponzi scheme, and about rebuilding Social Capital. He urges founders to grow slowly and build what matters.

A two-hour extended interview in which Crash Bandicoot co-creator Andy Gavin tells how he and Jason Rubin built the game at Naughty Dog. It includes the custom Lisp tools used.

Rap Genius founders appear at TechCrunch Disrupt NY 2013 for a joke-filled interview announcing News Genius, with little detail about what it is.

Marques Brownlee interviews Elon Musk about Tesla, the Model 3, the Roadster and the future of tech. It was recorded in 2018.

FTC Chair Lina Khan sits down with Jon Stewart on The Daily Show to discuss the agency's work protecting consumers from unfair business practices. Topics include the FTC's antitrust lawsuit against Amazon, healthcare industry actions, and whether tech companies are racing to control AI.

A Channel 4 News interview with technologist Jaron Lanier, who argues that social media damages people's lives. He discusses how Facebook, YouTube and Google use algorithms and data collection to shape what users see.

The full-length Numberphile interview with mathematician and hedge fund founder Jim Simons. He discusses his path from mathematics and codebreaking to founding Renaissance Technologies, his use of algorithms in markets, and his philanthropy.

Numberphile talks with mathematician Ron Graham about the magnitude of Graham's number, building up from arrow notation to show how impossibly large it is. It is part of a series of videos on this number.

A 1996 BBC interview in which Noam Chomsky explains his propaganda model of the media to Andrew Marr, including how filters shape what journalists report and the role of self-censorship.

Physicist Roger Penrose and philosopher William Lane Craig discuss the origin of the universe on the Unbelievable? show. Topics include Penrose's three realms of reality, conformal cyclic cosmology and whether fine tuning points to a creator.

John Gruber interviews Craig Federighi and Greg Joswiak after WWDC 2020 about the Mac transition to Apple silicon, macOS Big Sur and iOS 14.

Short archival film footage of an 87-year-old farmer interviewed in 1929, born in 1842, talking about life and change.

A CNBC interview in which Deirdre Bosa talks with Tether's CTO and general counsel about the company's role in crypto and the future of stablecoins.

A short clip of Bill Gates appearing on David Letterman's show in 1995 trying to explain the value of the internet. Letterman is visibly unconvinced.

In a short interview clip, physicist Murray Gell-Mann talks about working alongside Richard Feynman at Caltech. He describes how the two men clashed in personality and image despite similar brilliance.

Charbax interviews the CEO and CMO of CLEARink at SID Display Week 2019 about their eTIR reflective display technology. It demos 9.7-inch low-power color and video ePaper with high refresh capability.

Daniel Schmachtenberger discusses why the information ecology is damaged and what healthy public sensemaking would take. The conversation ties this to the meaning crisis and to improving discourse.

Louis Rossmann interviews Kaylie Milliken and Mellissa Wood, producers of the documentary Billion Dollar Bully, about Yelp's alleged practices toward businesses.

A short Frank Zappa interview clip on the decline of the music business, contrasting old cigar-chomping executives with younger industry people.

Chamath Palihapitiya's Stanford GSB View From The Top talk on money as an instrument of change. HN mostly knows it for his remarks on social media's dopamine-driven feedback loops and regrets about Facebook.

Stripe's John Collison interviews Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei about growth to around $5 billion ARR, model economics, agentic AI and vitalism.

Dwarkesh Patel interviews Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang about whether Nvidia's moat will last. Topics include TPU competition, supply chain bottlenecks, selling AI chips to China and Nvidia's investments.

A short clip of Steve Jobs at the D8 conference discussing the post-PC era, including his analogy of PCs as trucks that will remain for a minority of users.

A short Channel NewsAsia interview clip in which MasterCard's Southeast Asia president voices distrust of cryptocurrencies produced by anonymous computers in anonymous places. It is part of the Perspectives series and runs about four minutes.

Elon Musk joins the All-In Summit 2023 by Starlink for an interview on Ukraine and Starlink, X, the creator economy, China, AI and self-driving.

Fox Business interview in which Oracle co-founder Larry Ellison claims Oracle will beat Amazon at cloud databases. He argues the world's valuable data lives in Oracle and says Amazon struggled to move off it.