June 2026
John Coogan and Jordi Hays use TBPN’s Cannes, AI, hardware and markets recap to argue that scarce infrastructure and rising production costs are changing where value accrues in tech and media. Their through-line is that the visible product — a creator show, Meta glasses, a frontier model, an Apple device or a SoftBank holding — matters less than the expensive machine behind it: production capacity, chips, memory, data centers, distribution and the ability to keep generating the next asset.
Ben Horowitz, a16z cofounder and general partner, argues in “This is New Media” that founders should stop treating legacy media as the source of prestige and legitimacy. The source presents old media as a system of scarce channels, fixed formats, and institutional brands, then contrasts it with a16z’s direct audience metrics, startup-heavy visual world, and willingness to try unproven production formats. Its case is that credibility and storytelling for founders can now be built outside the old media system.
Perplexity Academy presents Personal Computer as a Mac-based extension of Perplexity Computer, designed to let the system act on the files, apps, folders, browser tabs, and desktop context where users’ work already sits. The tutorial argues that the product’s significance is local access: users can start tasks from the Mac app, a floating desktop bar, voice mode, remote control, or Comet, while heavier processing remains on Perplexity’s servers. Its examples frame the Mac not as an endpoint for AI output, but as an operating surface for organizing folders, updating files, reviewing presentations, generating briefs, and running recurring background work.
Dwarkesh Patel argues that frontier AI labs are betting too much on reinforcement learning from verifiable rewards: training models across vast numbers of checkable, replayable tasks in the hope that this produces general agents. In his account, verifiability is not enough; the domains that matter most are often too slow, messy, and non-repeatable to be “grindable” training environments. The next paradigm, Patel suggests, will depend on whether models can turn scarce deployment experience into durable updates to their weights, through continual learning methods such as on-policy self-distillation, “dreaming,” or something not yet invented.
Bloomberg’s Natasha Mascarenhas argues that AI has not eased the work burden for many Silicon Valley employees so much as changed its form. In her reporting, engineers and founders describe a culture in which AI agents run around the clock, workers feel obliged to monitor them, and competitive revenue targets turn productivity gains into longer hours, higher anxiety and less room to step away.
Patients in the discussion described arriving in medicine through identities already waiting for them: anxious woman, easygoing patient, bad patient, racialized risk, redemptive survivor. Meghan O’Rourke, Jonathan Gleason and Walela Nehanda argue that patient stories matter because they contest those imposed narratives and reveal what clinical categories can miss. The piece makes the case that patient testimony can expose diagnostic uncertainty, racism and structural neglect, but that listening requires time, resources and systems capable of receiving what patients know.
Psychologist Beth Cabrera argues that the usual language of discipline and willpower misunderstands why people struggle to live healthier lives. Drawing on her forthcoming book, Being Well, she makes the case that the gap between intention and behavior is better closed by designing environments, routines, and social conditions that make good habits rewarding in the present. Positive emotion, self-compassion, social support, and small sources of agency are not ancillary to well-being, she argues, but part of what makes healthier behavior sustainable.
Death doula and cultural anthropologist Darnell Walker and comedian Tig Notaro argue that death should make ordinary life more deliberate, not more abstract. In a conversation at Aspen Ideas: Health, Walker describes end-of-life care as presence, planning, honesty and witness, while Notaro draws on the final year and death of poet Andrea Gibson, the subject of Come See Me in the Good Light, to show how humor, community and small daily attachments can shape a good goodbye.
Alex Hormozi argues that procrastination often comes from overestimating the distance between ignorance and competence: many useful skills become workable after roughly 20 focused hours, while people spend years avoiding the start. In a conversation with Chris Williamson, he extends that idea into a broader case for building transferable skills, choosing a defining “quest,” and treating outside criticism as a conflict of preferences rather than evidence that the goal is wrong.
In a TED talk, 14-year-old New York student Miles Wu argues that origami is more than decorative paper craft: it is a way to test how geometry can change what a material can do. Wu traces that claim from childhood folding projects to a Miura-ori science experiment in which compact paper structures held extraordinary loads, including one version that supported more than 10,000 times its own weight.
Rowan Jacobsen argues that modern indoor life has stripped away much of the broad, intense light spectrum humans historically received outdoors, leaving people not just with less brightness but with a different “light diet.” His case is that sunlight should be understood as a dose-dependent biological input—ultraviolet, visible and infrared wavelengths acting through different mechanisms—rather than only as a skin-cancer risk or a source of vitamin D. He does not dismiss that risk, especially burns and susceptible skin types, but argues the larger public-health question is how to restore moderate, regular outdoor light without treating sun exposure as harmless.
In a Tim Ferriss Show conversation, integrative medicine physician Andrew Weil and anthropologist Wade Davis argue that coca leaf has been wrongly collapsed into cocaine in medicine, law and public understanding. Weil presents coca as a case study in the difference between whole plants and isolated compounds, with suggestive but under-researched therapeutic uses; Davis argues its prohibition reflects a racially charged campaign against Indigenous culture as much as concern over cocaine trafficking. Both make the case for renewed research, legal reconsideration and a licit market for the leaf.
Figma co-founder and CEO Dylan Field told Bloomberg Technology that the company’s Config overhaul is meant to turn Figma’s canvas from a place for design artifacts into a broader production environment for software, motion, AI workflows and brand systems. Field’s argument is that AI will make code easier to generate, shifting value toward design judgment and human point of view rather than making designers less important.
Bloomberg’s Julia Love reports that senior Google AI researchers Jonas Adler and Alexander Pritzel are planning to leave for Anthropic, adding to a short but notable list of departures from Google’s frontier AI ranks. Love argues the risk is not a broad staffing exodus but the loss of scarce researchers who can materially affect model progress, including contributors to Gemini. The segment also points to contested compute allocation inside Google as part of the pressure around its AI organization.
Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman says Apple’s latest price increases are an unusually broad response to higher memory and storage costs tied to AI data-center demand. The increases hit Macs, iPads, home devices and Vision Pro, with the sharpest demand risk in categories where buyers have cheaper alternatives, especially iPads, Apple TV and HomePod. Gurman also reads Apple’s wording as leaving room for another round, potentially including the iPhone and Apple Watch when new models arrive in September.
At Aspen Ideas: Health, Blythe Adamson, Ashish Jha, John Nkengasong and Jessica Malaty Rivera argued that the world is still not ready for the next fast-moving infectious threat, even as WHO members negotiate the first legally binding pandemic agreement. Their case was that preparedness now depends as much on early detection, engineered-biology safeguards, regional response capacity, trusted communication and global financing as on vaccines and stockpiles — and that several of those systems are being weakened at the same time they are supposed to be built.
Psychologist Sonja Lyubomirsky argues that many people’s problem is not that they are unloved, but that love does not register. Drawing on her research into happiness interventions, she says the practices that reliably improve wellbeing often work by making people feel more connected, known, and cared for — and that feeling loved depends on habits such as sharing, curiosity, listening, validation, and noticing others in ordinary ways.
Rachel Yehuda of Mount Sinai and Matthew Zorn of HHS argue that the arrival of prescription psychedelic therapies will turn less on the drugs alone than on the clinical systems built around them. In a discussion at Aspen Ideas: Health moderated by William Brangham, they describe a field nearing FDA review while still facing unresolved questions about evidence, training, reimbursement, patient selection and the risk that approval is mistaken for a general green light.
Gastroenterologist Trisha Pasricha and brain-gut researcher Emeran Mayer argue that the gut should be understood as an active nervous, hormonal, microbial, and immune system in continuous communication with the brain, not as digestive plumbing. In a live Science Friday discussion at Aspen Ideas: Health, they make the case that this bidirectional system may reshape how clinicians think about Parkinson’s disease, GLP-1 drugs, diet, mental health, and early-life development, while warning that much of the consumer “gut health” market has moved faster than the evidence.
At TED2026 in Vancouver, Jacob Collier conducted the VSO School of Music Orchestra through an unrehearsed arrangement of the Beatles’ “All You Need Is Love,” built in front of the audience without sheet music or prior plan. The performance argues, by demonstration, that improvisation at orchestral scale depends less on vagueness than on precise, rapidly revised instructions: pitches, loops, dynamics, entrances and roles assigned in real time.
Death doula and cultural anthropologist Darnell Walker and comedian Tig Notaro argue that dying clarifies life less through grand revelation than through specific acts of presence: saying what needs to be said, making plans, laughing when grief allows, and staying with people at the end. In an Aspen Ideas: Health conversation rooted in Notaro’s documentary about poet Andrea Gibson’s final year, they describe death care as practical, relational work that families often already do, whether or not they have a name for it.
At Aspen Ideas: Health, NPR’s Allison Aubrey moderated a nutrition panel with Jessica Knurick, Ty Beal, and Dariush Mozaffarian that argued the clearest dietary advice is also the hardest to implement: eat mostly whole or minimally processed foods, and change the food environment so that choice is easier. The speakers treated fights over seed oils, protein, saturated fat, alcohol, glucose spikes, and plant-based labels as real but often secondary to the larger questions of ultra-processed foods, school-meal infrastructure, food access, and policy incentives.
Psychologist Beth Cabrera argues in her forthcoming book, “Being Well: A Positive Path to a Healthier, Happier You,” that the main obstacle to better health is not ignorance but the gap between intention and action. In a conversation with Elizabeth Cohen, Cabrera makes the case that lasting behavior change depends less on discipline and guilt than on designing daily environments, relationships, and routines so that healthy choices feel rewarding and become easier to repeat.
Gastroenterologist Trish Pasricha argues that bowel habits are a meaningful health signal, not a taboo subject or a once-a-day performance target. In a conversation with John Torres based on her book, You’ve Been Pooping All Wrong, she makes the case that people should know their own baseline, pay attention to changes, and treat stool form, effort, timing, diet, posture, and pelvic-floor mechanics as clinically relevant rather than embarrassing.