off grid

A short clip in which Carl Icahn tells the story of his first activist investment and of firing 12 floors of people, arguing activism need not be short term.

Former CIA officer Frank Snepp describes how, working in Vietnam from 1969 to 1975, he planted stories in major newspapers to support Agency goals. He notes that some younger reporters refused to take the bait.

Computerphile with Professor Brailsford on how a 1979 Bell Labs team reverse engineered a Linotron 202 phototypesetter over a summer to get high-quality print output. It covers typesetting history and the later 2013 rebuild of the famous vacation memo.

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.

A short clip of former KGB defector Yuri Bezmenov in 1984 describing Soviet ideological subversion of Western societies. It is a political commentary excerpt from his longer lecture.

A 2006 television appearance in which Peter Schiff warns on Kudlow & Co about the housing bubble and an approaching US economic collapse.

A 20-minute Y Combinator interview in which Sam Altman asks Elon Musk how to build the future. Topics include which problems a 22-year-old should work on, such as AI, genetics, and brain interfaces, and general advice for founders.

Giant Bomb interviews John Carmack at E3 2012 about his virtual reality head-mounted display prototype. He demos it and talks about latency, depth and focus problems in VR.

Numberphile interviews Cliff Stoll about Klein bottles, the one-sided surfaces with no inside or outside. Stoll explains them with characteristic enthusiasm and shows off his collection.

A five-minute clip in which Erich Fromm asks whether the purpose of work is just making money. He argues that white-collar workers end up selling their personality, relating to others the way goods relate to each other on a market, and he points to creative pleasure, participation and usefulness to society as what work could offer instead.