Merlin

Most celebrities make fans nervous, but Michael Jackson operated on a level of fame that made other A list superstars forget how to act like normal human beings. Archival footage and celebrity anecdotes reveal the chaotic, surreal reality of entering Jackson's orbit: Chris Tucker recalled trying to take Michael to a public movie theater disguised in an all-black ninja outfit, only for Jackson to sneak into the auditorium and end up laughing louder than anyone in the room. Tucker tested Jackson's legendary generosity after being casually gifted a brand-new flat-screen TV just for complimenting it, but when Tucker boldly pointed at Jackson's luxury Rolls-Royce outside, Michael shut him down immediately, deadpanning that he was on his own for that one. Comedians and athletes regularly found themselves disarmed by his presence. Steve Harvey recalled picking Jackson up for a quiet church service, only for Michael to spontaneously roll down the car window into an uncontrollable mob of fans tearing at his clothes, while Mike Tyson admitted he secretly held a bitter grudge after Jackson casually pretended not to recognize the undisputed heavyweight champion of the world backstage. At major industry galas, Jackson's quiet dominance threw everyone off script: he once casually ordered Eddie Murphy to adjust his microphone mid-speech as if he were an assistant, while in private life his isolation was so severe that friends rented out an entire supermarket with paid actors just to let him experience pushing a grocery cart

Willem Dafoe, the four time Oscar nominated character actor, tackled the internet's most pressing questions in a candid interview, debunking Marvel visual effects rumors and breaking down the real story behind his iconic name. Born William James Dafoe, he ditched his legal name in high school when a classmate dubbed him Willem to avoid being called Billy, choosing to keep the moniker on stage programs rather than reverting to his birth certificate. Addressing speculation surrounding his return as the Green Goblin in Spider-Man: No Way Home, Dafoe scoffed at rumors that digital de-aging or CGI carried his performance, pointing out that digital de-aging technology still looks unfinished and insisting he simply has not aged that much thanks to good skincare. Beyond iconic villains, Dafoe discussed his unconventional artistic range from learning classical brushwork to portray Vincent van Gogh, to speaking fluent Italian, practicing daily yoga to stay fit, and being one of eight siblings in a family of surgeons, lawyers, and nurses. He also pushed back against comic book fan-casting for the Joker, doubting he would ever take on the role while brushing off assumptions that he shares the chaotic madness of the fictional antagonists he plays

Leonardo DiCaprio, long before winning an Oscar or dominating Hollywood box offices, fumbled his very first on-camera interview at age sixteen while joining the cast of Growing Pains. Flustered on the television set in 1991, a young DiCaprio struggled to articulate his new character's dramatic backstory, describing Luke Brower's rough upbringing before awkwardly claiming the character was searching for a better home than the Seaver family. Realizing his blunder on camera, he quickly walked back the statement to avoid insulting the show's beloved TV family, stammering that he meant a better home compared to having no home at all because the Seavers were perfect. DiCaprio admitted to feeling deeply intimidated as a teenager stepping into an established cast that had already spent years working together, uncertain whether the veteran actors would welcome a newcomer onto their set. The retrospective also highlighted a candid 1996 junket for Romeo + Juliet, where DiCaprio openly laughed at his private romantic side, confessing he turns into a total softie who uses baby voices and rubs noses behind closed doors.

Mark Zuckerberg, the 20 year old founder of The Facebook, held a plastic cup of beer in an off beat 2004 interview and genuinely insisted he had no desire to take over the world. Recorded in a Palo Alto summer rental shortly after the site's initial boom, Zuckerberg explained how he coded the project alone in his Harvard dorm room simply because the university lacked an interactive student directory. Within two weeks of launch, two-thirds of Harvard had signed up, prompting rapid rollouts to Columbia, Yale, and Stanford before the team relocated to Silicon Valley to prep another 150 campuses. Addressing the platform's future, Zuckerberg explicitly dismissed the idea of chasing global scale, arguing that obsessing over massive user counts dilutes product quality and declaring that his sole ambition was to build a clean college directory. Two decades later, the footage stands as one of tech history's greatest ironies: an unpretentious founder swearing off global expansion right before building the dominant social network on Earth

Leonardo DiCaprio, Brad Pitt, and Margot Robbie, stars of Quentin Tarantino's Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, delivered an endlessly entertaining breakdown of Hollywood controversies, childhood cinema obsession, and mortifying on-set brain freezes. The conversation kicked off with the ultimate modern movie debate: whether Jack could have shared that floating wooden door with Rose at the end of Titanic. While Robbie and Pitt eagerly grilled DiCaprio about the scene's logistics, DiCaprio stone-faced the controversy with a firm refusal to comment. The trio traced their early obsession with film back to childhood emotional shocks: DiCaprio fell in love with cinema watching James Dean's raw vulnerability in East of Eden, Robbie obsessively rewatched Robin Hood: Men in Tights dozens of times as a child, and Pitt recalled crying his eyes out at drive-in screenings of Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid. Candid confessions quickly turned to cinematic blind spots. Robbie admitted she has never watched Gone with the Wind or any Star Wars films, recalling how DiCaprio used to get legitimately furious with her on the set of The Wolf of Wall Street every time she revealed a major classic film like Citizen Kane she had skipped. The discussion wrapped on an actor's worst nightmare: completely blanking on dialogue in front of an entire crew. DiCaprio shared how Martin Scorsese had to wait through 40 agonizing takes on The Aviator just for him to deliver two simple lines, while Robbie described the panic of trying to pronounce complex foreign dialogue mid-stunt

Leonardo DiCaprio, a 20 yearold rising Hollywood star on the brink of global mania, wandered the foggy streets of Paris with MTV News in 1995, completely unbothered by fame, public perception, or the rush to grow up. In town promoting The Basketball Diaries, DiCaprio gave a chaotic, sarcastic tour of French landmarks joking that the actual Mona Lisa had likely been stolen and replaced by a replica, making up nonsensical histories for Egyptian obelisks, and summarizing his gritty film as a story about running away with a dog. When asked if he felt pressure to transition into mature leading-man roles or feared becoming the next disposable teen heartthrob, DiCaprio pushed back with surprising maturity. He refused to skip his youth just to play a packaged Hollywood sex symbol, insisting that because he planned on being in the industry for the long haul, adult parts could wait until he actually grew into them. He opened up about ignoring media narratives and learning not to take tabloid reputation seriously, naming Gary Oldman, Al Pacino, and Dustin Hoffman as his ultimate acting lodestars while casually admitting he lost out on Interview with the Vampire alongside Brad Pitt

Adam Matos, a jealous ex-boyfriend, massacred four members of his own son’s family and then spent days living inside the crime scene selling off their belongings online. The nightmare began in Hudson, Florida, shortly after Megan Brown called 911 reporting that Matos the unemployed father of her four year old autistic son, Tristan had held a knife to her throat in a fit of rage after she began seeing someone new. Less than 24 hours later, Matos ambushed the home with a hammer and a firearm. He brutally bludgeoned Megan's mother in the garage, fatally struck Megan's new boyfriend Nick Leonard 21 times in the head, and shot Megan and her father Greg before anyone could escape. Instead of fleeing, Matos stayed inside the house for nearly a week with his traumatized four-year-old son among the corpses. He ordered pizzas to the crime scene, told curious neighbors the family was away on a hunting trip, and took out ads on Craigslist to sell off the victims' furniture, electronics, and breeding dogs. After hitting bedrock while trying to bury the victims in the yard, Matos loaded the four bodies into the family van, dumped them in nearby woods, and fled by canoe to a Tampa hotel, where SWAT teams finally tracked him down. In court, Matos claimed all four killings were committed in self-defense, but testimony from his young son and store footage showing him buying a burial shovel after the murders helped prosecutors secure four consecutive life sentences without parole

Jeff Pearson, an armed robbery suspect, proved to be far smarter than the detectives interrogating him and walked out a free man in under 24 hours Facing decades behind bars with zero direct evidence tying him to a 7-Eleven robbery, Pearson was swept up by police simply for being in the wrong house at the wrong time. The moment detectives sat him down, Pearson took full control: he demanded to know if he was formally under arrest, forced the detective to state the exact charges, and invoked absolute silence against every attempt to bait him into small talk. When detectives brought him back for a second round, Pearson systematically dismantled the Reid interrogation playbook, calling out manufactured empathy and fake evidence bluffs on the spot. He refused to sign waivers, demanded an attorney, and laughed off claims that police had "mountains of physical evidence" bluntly reminding the detective that cops don't beg for confessions when they actually have proof. Despite sweating through brutal withdrawals and being denied methadone, Pearson casually asked for cans of Coke and Butterfinger bars while watching the clock run out on the department's legal detention limit. With zero confession, no physical evidence, and a suspect who refused to utter a single self incriminating word, detectives had no choice but to drop the charges and let him walk out the front door

Tom Holland, demonstrate how his personal hobbies and early dance background keep him sane outside the film industry. He began by explaining his obsession with golf: despite his overactive mind, the sport remains completely humbling because no matter how much you practice, you can still have days where you feel like you’ve never picked up a club. Holland admitted golf isn't necessarily relaxing for his mental health because he is a self-described hothead on the course, though he proudly claimed two career holes in one including one against a scratch golfer where he deliberately ignored club advice. Switching gears to tap dancing and ballet, Holland connected his early stage training directly to acting. In roles like Spider-Man where a mask hides facial expressions, body language has to convey the entire internal state. Simple movements like tilting the head to signal confusion or raising shoulders for surprise feel exaggerated in normal clothing, but translate as natural physical storytelling on screen. He also opened up about what keeps him grounded amidst global fame: leaning on close friends who refuse to be "yes men," stealing skincare products from Zendaya, and regretting not taking a gap year to backpack through Asia as a teenager

Mark Zuckerberg, returned to Harvard in December 2005 to give a guest lecture for the CS50 class, outlining the raw engineering decisions and scaling bottlenecks behind the platform's early explosive growth. He revealed that the critical choice preventing Facebook from crashing like Friendster was database partitioning. Instead of running exponential shortest-path graph calculations across millions of users globally, they gave every single university its own isolated MySQL database instance, capping search paths to manageable local student bodies. Zuckerberg admitted that co-founder Dustin Moskovitz joined the project knowing zero web development, buying Perl for Dummies by mistake before learning PHP over a weekend to handle the site's rapid campus rollouts. By late 2005, Facebook was generating 400 million page views a day surpassing Google's daily traffic at the time - with just 50 employees and hundreds of rented machines, proving how cheap distributed infrastructure had fundamentally replaced high upfront capital. When photos launched, overwhelming demand pushed uploads to 100 per second, forcing the team to build custom client-side compression tools and deploy edge caching layers to prevent servers and expensive network routers from collapsing. He firmly rejected adding MySpace-style custom profile CSS, arguing that Facebook was fundamentally an information directory where uniform layouts and real identities acted as natural moderation against spam and explicit content

Kanye West, addressed students at the Oxford Guild in March 2015, turning a simple audience prompt into a free-form masterclass on creativity, ego, and global elitism. Demanding complete silence so not even a whisper would derail his stream of consciousness, he traced his roots back to studying fine art from age five, arguing that modern creatives are conditioned to tuck their heads down and silence their boldest ambitions out of fear of ridicule. He likened cultural noise and media criticism to Agent Smith copies swarming in The Matrix, claiming focused conviction and a dedicated team allow an artist to slow down time just like Michael Jordan on the court. Addressing his transition from Yeezus to public service, West confessed that ego had long been his greatest Achilles' heel. He credited Nicki Minaj’s standout verse on Monster as a defining lesson in humility realizing true greatness meant letting someone else shine on his own masterpiece without letting personal vanity cut them short. He pointed to time as humanity’s only real luxury, contrasting genuine joy with the false happiness manufactured by luxury fashion brands and consumer culture. His core outrage focused on class separation: arguing that beauty had been stolen from the public and resold back as luxury, West called for the world’s top industrial designers to work on everyday essentials instead of $5,000 sweaters

Christian Bale, broke down his most extreme roles for GQ, revealing the obsessive routines, risks, and behind the scenes chaos that shaped his career. He began with American Psycho, recalling how financiers fired him and director Mary Harron after they secured the film's budget. Convinced the role was his, Bale ignored friends calling him crazy, turned down other work, and continued prepping until the production eventually came back to him. When warned that playing Batman would destroy his ability to ever be seen as another character, his reaction was simply "bring it on." If he couldn't break out of the batsuit later, he reasoned, he didn't deserve a career anyway. Looking back at The Dark Knight, Bale admitted he worried Batman was being outshined by Heath Ledger's Joker. Seeing Ledger's performance on set, Bale joked that he felt dull by comparison because Ledger was entirely consuming every frame. For The Machinist, his dangerous weight loss wasn't a calculated industry move he took the low-budget film while newly married and facing eviction. Losing that much physical weight altered his mind, cutting his sleep to two hours a night and leaving him reading for ten hours straight without moving. The common thread across his iconic transformations, from The Fighter to Vice, isn't calculated method acting, but an appetite for physical and artistic discomfort that makes pretending unnecessary

Mark Zuckerberg appeared on CNBC in 2004 as a college sophomore to explain why students were flocking to his new campus network. Introduced alongside another student dating site creator, Zuckerberg admitted he never anticipated rapid growth, noting he initially only hoped for 400 or 500 users to fill the lack of an official directory at Harvard. By the time of the interview, the platform had already exploded to 100,000 users across several campuses. When asked about the future magnitude of the product, Zuckerberg stayed modest, saying it was impossible to tell where it was heading beyond targeting 100 to 200 more universities by the fall. He described The Facebook simply as an online directory built around college social networks where users post profiles, majors, contact details, and their list of friends. Instead of grand predictions of global media dominance, his near-term ambition was straightforward: launch side applications, keep college students returning, and "maybe make something cool." Looking back at the broadcast, the striking contrast is watching financial anchors treat what would become a trillion-dollar tech giant as just a quirky college matchmaking trend.

Bill Gates, Microsoft co-founder, tried to explain the internet to David Letterman in 1995. Letterman’s response: why would anyone listen to a baseball game on a computer when they already have a radio? Gates explained that the internet could let you listen whenever you wanted. Letterman had another question: wasn’t that what tape recorders were for? The audience laughed, but Gates kept going. He described people publishing information online, sending electronic mail, and finding others who shared their interests. Letterman said he already had magazines and a phone line for motorsports updates. Gates suggested the computer could connect him with other people who cared about the same things. Then, near the end, the conversation took a turn toward something else. Gates said computers were mainly tools for learning and connecting people. Eventually, he suggested, we might figure out how to make them think, although he described it as a very difficult problem with almost no progress at the time. Watching it now, the funny part isn’t that Letterman asked the wrong questions. He was trying to understand a new technology through the things he already knew. 00:50 - Gates’ vision of a computer in every home 02:45 - Letterman asks what the internet is 03:13 - The baseball game and radio exchange 04:05 - Gates explains finding people with shared interests 06:23 - Gates on whether computers might eventually think

Kyle MacLachlan landed the lead in a $40 million movie before he had a film career. Then his contract left him unable to work in film or television for a year and a half. When the movie finally came out, it flopped. The movie was David Lynch’s Dune. MacLachlan had been planning a life in theater when the opportunity came to him in Seattle. He got a call saying a film was looking for an actor to play Paul Atreides. MacLachlan was such a fan of Frank Herbert’s novel that he thought someone was playing a joke on him. The audition was real. It led him to Los Angeles, where he met Lynch and was asked to come back for a screen test. He got the part. It was his first feature film. On set in Mexico, he brought his guitar to work and ended up learning songs from Sting, who was also in the movie. Arnold Schwarzenegger was using the hotel gym while filming another production nearby. After filming ended, MacLachlan says his contract kept him from appearing in other film and television projects until Dune was released. He went back to the stage and did a play while he waited. Then Dune opened in 1984. It made less than it cost, and its failure followed him into auditions. But Lynch worked with him again. Two years later, MacLachlan starred in Blue Velvet. In 1990, he became FBI agent Dale Cooper in Twin Peaks. MacLachlan thought the call about Dune was a prank. It gave him a difficult start in Hollywood - and introduced him to the director he would work with for decades.

Tom Cruise rode a motorcycle off a cliff for a movie. When an interviewer asked whether he feared death, Cruise started talking about adventure. The interviewer stopped him: “I asked if you feared death.” That exchange is in the video below. Zach Baron reminds Cruise of the motorcycle jump and the airplanes he has hung from. He points out that audiences now watch his stunts wondering whether the actor himself will be okay. Cruise brings the conversation back to filmmaking: what does the danger make the audience feel? Then he answers the original question. He says he doesn’t fear death, but makes a distinction: that doesn’t mean he never feels afraid. “I’m not afraid to feel afraid.” Baron asks where the need to find the edge comes from. Cruise says it’s simply who he is. Asked for a theory, he gives the same answer. Eventually, Cruise turns the questions around. Does Baron fear death? Would riding a motorcycle off a cliff frighten him? Yes, Baron says. He likes the uncertainty of interviewing someone. The possibility of dying is another matter. The interviewer is looking for an explanation of why anyone would take that risk. Cruise seems puzzled by the idea that fear itself should settle the decision.

Michael Jackson paid $47.5 million for a music catalog containing hundreds of Beatles songs. Paul McCartney had encouraged him to invest in publishing. When Paul later asked for a better deal, Jackson’s answer, he says, was: “That’s just business, Paul.” Their friendship had started with a phone call. McCartney remembers answering his private number at Christmas and hearing a quiet voice. It was Michael Jackson, asking whether he wanted to make some hits. They did. Jackson visited his home, got to know his family, and they recorded together. Then came a conversation about business. McCartney suggested buying publishing rights—the ownership behind the songs, rather than just earning money from performing them. Jackson told him he was going to buy his. McCartney thought he was joking. In 1985, Jackson bought ATV Music for $47.5 million. The catalog included 251 Beatles songs alongside thousands of other compositions. McCartney hadn’t owned those rights when Jackson bought them. But now the owner was his friend. He thought that might finally mean an opportunity to improve the songwriting deal he and John Lennon had signed when they were young. So he called. According to McCartney, Jackson kept treating the request as a business matter. The better deal never materialized. There was no dramatic confrontation. McCartney says they gradually drifted apart. He still called Jackson a lovely man and an extraordinary talent. The advice had made Jackson a valuable investment. McCartney had hoped the friendship would count for something when it was his turn to negotiate.

Leonardo DiCaprio played Jordan Belfort bragging about making $49 million in a year and being disappointed it wasn’t a million a week. DiCaprio describes the world Scorsese wanted to capture: men living like Roman emperors, with no rules. In the video below, he explains how they built that world for The Wolf of Wall Street. Before filming, Scorsese held screenings for the cast and crew. Sometimes they watched two entire movies to find the feeling he wanted for a single scene. Then came Belfort’s “I’m not leaving” speech. DiCaprio had developed tonsillitis the day before. Production shut down, and they had to wait two weeks before filming it. He used the delay to work through the speech, thinking about each shift in Belfort’s delivery. The result is a room celebrating a man who refuses to surrender his position. He has money, followers and an audience ready to applaud him. Other scenes were much less controlled. With Jonah Hill, DiCaprio says, he never knew where a conversation would go. They could rehearse the speeches, then let the exchanges between their characters turn unpredictable. He remembers it as one of the funniest, freest productions of his career. He had never seen Scorsese so happy on a set. That freedom helped make Belfort entertaining. The real story still ended with guilty pleas, prison and an order to repay more than $100 million. The movie gives him a room that cheers. His victims had to take their claims elsewhere.

Moonshot shipped Kimi K3.1 Pro. 2.8T total, 104B active, 1 million token context. On Terminal-Bench 4.0 they report 65.7%, just behind Opus 5.5 at 66.4% and ahead of GPT-6 Astra at 58.2%. They also pitch full-project games plus Blender and CAD, and a Highspeed variant that is 2 to 3 times faster. Weights go public on Nov 4. That is the part that matters. The first thing I would test is a real repo, not the Unreal palace demo.

Google CEO Sundar Pichai says Gemini 4 Argon processed almost 25 trillion tokens in its first 72 hours. Even Google is struggling to supply enough compute. 00:37 - Almost 25 trillion tokens in 72 hours 09:07 - How Google uses Argon on large codebases 12:51 - What happened to Gemini 3.5 Pro 42:55 - Agents connecting Google’s products 43:52 - Why Google is exploring data centers in space That’s roughly three times Gemini 3.0’s launch usage, according to Pichai. In his interview with Alex Heath, he describes what Google is seeing internally: agents working through changes across Chromium’s millions of lines of code, plus models helping researchers develop and evaluate the next models. He also explains what happened to Gemini 3.5 Pro. Google prioritized faster experiments with smaller Flash models. By the time those improvements were ready to transfer, Argon had finished pre-training. Rather than release a Pro model with a short shelf life, they applied the lessons to Argon. The bigger product ambition is an agent that carries your context across Search, Gmail, and Gemini, picking up work wherever you left it. Then there’s Project Suncatcher: Google’s effort to explore AI computing in space. Pichai frames that as a long-term response to growing compute demand, with solar energy as a major attraction. He’s talking about a 10–20-year journey, rather than an immediate replacement for terrestrial data centers. The launch number puts the rest of the conversation in perspective. Better models create more uses, and more uses keep pushing the infrastructure requirements higher