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Top pick: Tim Ferriss's books for writers
In a newly posted YouTube video, How To Experiment Your Way To Success, Ferriss was asked for his tips for writers and answered with a short reading list:
- Bird by Bird (Anne Lamott). He calls it "a must-read" and says it "will help you manage the psychological and emotional challenges of being a writer." He adds that it has "very good tactical stuff, especially for fiction."
- On Writing Well (William Zinsser). He calls it "a good book."
- On Writing by Stephen King. If Zinsser's book feels too dry, Ferriss says King's is "phenomenal" and "a splendid book," and that he wants to reread it soon.
The transcript doesn't name Lamott or Zinsser; those author credits are added here. In the same answer, Ferriss notes that many prolific writers work between roughly 10 p.m. and 8 a.m., when there are fewer distractions. Watch
Elon Musk: Paul Graham's thread on Amazon banning agents
Musk quoted Graham's post with a single word, "Seriously." Graham argues that "Amazon banning agents is the first opportunity I've seen since Amazon was founded for a startup to create an Amazon competitor." His reasoning is that people will want agents to shop for them and won't want to use "some Amazon-supplied agent." In a follow-up post he makes the general version of the point: any business that bans agents shows that people want to use them, "and that in turn means there's demand for a competitor that allows them." The thread connects to the agent-protocol debate from recent briefs. Post
Elad Gil: OpenAI's new math results
Gil quoted OpenAI's announcement and wrote "What a time we are living in." OpenAI says it is releasing "a broad range of new mathematical results produced by an internal frontier model." It also says it consulted the Institute for Advanced Study's independent Advisory Group on Mathematics and AI on how to release them. The results are at github.com/openai/math. The last brief carried Sam Altman's framing of the same work. Gil, who doesn't work at OpenAI, is a new recommender.
Gil separately shared a YouTube video, captioned only "current state of private markets." He gave no other comment.
Chamath Palihapitiya: two quick signals
- Amjad Masad on AI decompilation. Chamath quoted Masad's post with "This." Masad wrote that AI-powered reverse engineering and decompilation is "absolutely insane" and that "pretty soon all software will be de facto open-source." Post
- Social Capital's DeepSeek chart. Chamath's reaction was "Wow." The post claims that in the last week of September, DeepSeek models processed more tokens on OpenRouter than OpenAI, Google, Anthropic and xAI models combined. Social Capital is Chamath's own firm. Post
Shorter mentions
- Be More Pirate, recommended by Camille François (founding president of Roost) on a Reid Hoffman-channel interview. She found the book while preparing for Roost's first team retreat and calls it "great." What she valued is how it reads the history of piracy for institutional lessons and as "a moment in time that brought a lot of advances in equality and democracy." Asked what makes her optimistic about the future, she named Star Trek, specifically Deep Space Nine. Her reason: it inspires optimism about "our ability to collectively govern it at interplanetary scale." Watch
- Steven Mark Ryan's video "SpaceX Just Pulled Off 5D Chess Move," via Elon Musk, who called it "Interesting analysis." Musk runs the company the video is about. Post
- Roost founding president Camille François called Be More Pirate a “great” book; she found it while preparing for Roost’s first team retreat and valued its use of piracy history to draw lessons about institutions, equality, and democracy.
- François also endorses Star Trek—she identifies as a Deep Space Nine fan—as a source of optimism about the future and humanity’s ability to govern collectively at interplanetary scale.
- For writers, Tim Ferriss calls Bird by Bird a must-read for handling the psychological and emotional challenges of writing, with useful tactics especially for fiction. He also recommends On Writing Well; if it feels too dry, he calls Stephen King’s On Writing phenomenal and says he wants to reread it.
- Ferriss names Anthony Bourdain’s No Reservations as one of his longtime favorite shows, praising its gritty, cinematic style; it was one of the inspirations he combined in making The Tim Ferriss Experiment.
- For people who would rather not start with a book, Ferriss recommends sampling The Tim Ferriss Experiment: choose an episode that seems exciting, and if you like it, he says you’ll like his books and the other episodes. He points viewers to iTunes and 4hourworkweek.com/tv.
- Ferriss recommends guided meditation using apps such as Headspace or Calm, starting with 3–5 minutes each morning; he says it makes an enormous difference and that practicing for 5–7 days in a row has a strong cumulative effect, helping him maintain a level head.
Patrick O’Shaughnessy recommends his conversation with Andrew Huberman, calling it “a fun one.” He says he was fascinated by their discussion of frontier neurotechnology and the prospect of precisely measuring and changing brain states while awake and asleep.
Patrick O’Shaughnessy recommends his conversation with Andrew Huberman, calling it a fun one. He says the discussion unexpectedly focused on frontier neurotechnology—precisely measuring and changing brain states while awake and asleep—which he found fascinating.
Jason Lemkin promoted a new SaaStr article, “We Run Monaco, Agentforce and Artisan. Why We Built Our Own ‘AI ABM’ Tool for Top Accounts”. The article explains that vendors see only a fraction of a company’s data through its CRM, while the team’s tool creates top-account pitches using Salesforce data, event scans, and newsletter opens.
Jason Lemkin (@jasonlk) promotes a free guide to AI Sales Agents at SaaStr.ai and points readers to more information about SaaStr’s AI agents .
Elad Gil shared a YouTube video labeled “current state of private markets” (watch); no reason for sharing is stated.
Elon Musk pointed followers to @paulg’s X post with “Seriously,” an emphatic endorsement of the post . The post argues that Amazon banning agents creates an opening for a startup competitor because people will want shopping agents and may not want an Amazon-supplied agent .
Elon Musk linked to @free_ai_guides’ post presenting Grok as a personal CFO and telling users to link their accounts and use seven prompts . Musk accompanied the link with the claim that “Grok can manage your finances” .
Satya Nadella directed readers to the Windows Experience blog post “Building Windows for hybrid intelligence” for more on Copilot’s Hybrid Intelligence: with permission, Copilot can use PC context, take actions, and use local models when appropriate to provide more capability while helping tokens go further.
Elon Musk shared @mikepat711’s Grok Bot-generated explainer video about residential natural gas, from generation through delivery to a home; Musk’s accompanying endorsement was that Grok “gets better every day.”
Elon Musk amplified @mattyp’s “What’s new in Grok Bot” post, which includes a video update, and said Grok “improves literally every day.” The video’s agenda lists engineering updates, knowledge work and Google connectors, Team Bots in Slack, Team Bot voice calls and status lines, and plugin search.
Elon Musk shared @Michael_Fenech_’s 53-second video offering a mental model for understanding what to use Grok Bot for; Musk says Grok is “like hiring an extremely competent employee.”
Elon Musk endorsed Steven Mark Ryan’s video analysis, “SpaceX Just Pulled Off 5D Chess Move”, calling it “Interesting analysis.”
Aravind Srinivas praised a Perplexity Decider demo as “cool,” linking to Sanchit Monga’s post, whose video shows Decider speedrunning Who Wants to Be a Millionaire?
Clem Delangue shared a video from Microsoft's Windows launch, tagging Satya Nadella, Sriram Krishnan, and Jensen Huang, as evidence that local AI and llama.cpp are exciting.
Elon Musk endorsed @XFreeze’s post/video arguing that Starlink connectivity can boost countries’ prosperity, adding, “Connectivity leads to prosperity.” The post says internet access can open education, information, jobs, customers, and global markets to people with limited connectivity .
Aravind Srinivas praised @AskPerplexity’s video, saying, “We’re living in incredible times!” The video presents an animated scene that @AskPerplexity says Computer made from concept art to final edit, planning shots in Blender, generating reference images with Nano Banana, and animating and scoring it with Seedance 2.5.
