Public evidence record
Host · Lex Fridman Podcast
Books, apps, and tools
other / recommends
“Kieran is a longtime codec engineer, FFmpeg contributor, and the man behind the now infamous FFmpeg account on Twitter/X that I recommend everybody follow for the memes and for the unapologetic celebration of open source and great low-level software engineering.”
hardware / uses
“I mean, there’s like so many, just to give people an idea, like I use FFmpeg a lot on everything.”
app / uses
“And then in Spotify, it just seems just effortless. But it helped me discover all kinds of artists I never would have discovered otherwise. And Pandora, I used a lot. Pandora is more prioritizing on the discovery part versus organization part. And that was really wonderful.”
app / uses
“This is gonna be embar… Yeah. I use BIAS FX. I’m sorry.”
app / uses
“I use basically half-and-half Cursor and Claude Code, because I find them to be fundamentally different experiences and both useful.”
app / uses
“I use basically half-and-half Cursor and Claude Code, because I find them to be fundamentally different experiences and both useful.”
book / recommends
“A couple that I wanted to mention—and a book I highly recommend—is Build a Large Language Model From Scratch, and the new one, Build a Reasoning Model From Scratch.”
other / likes
“Yeah, but I should say, I personally love SQL, because I’m an algorithms person, so I love optimization, I love to know how the databases actually work, so I can match the SQL queries and the design of the tables such that there is optimal… Squeeze the optimal performance out of the table.”
other / recommends
“Yeah, anyone interested in unlocking their creativities, they’re not even just filmmaking, I highly recommend that show and I highly recommend kind of the follow-on show, which is where you make Red 11.”
other / recommends
“Also, I recommend you visit the places in question as Douglas has, as I have, or at least talk face-to-face with people who have spent most of their lives living there.”
app / uses
“I think that that’s the reason I use actually Copilot cursor a lot is for developing the skill of editing AI so I can just learn how to do that better and better.”
book / recommends
“and The Glass Bead Game if you want to take on Hesse’s magnum opus, that rigorously explores the ways the human mind and human civilization can engage in the pursuit of knowledge, wisdom, and meaning. But Siddhartha is the only one I’ve returned to more than twice. In my own life, when faced with a difficult situation, I often return to the moment in the book when Siddhartha is asked what skills he possesses, and his answer is simply, “I can think, I can wait, I can fast.” Let me elaborate. Indeed, for the first part, “I can think.” As Marcus Aurelius said, “The quality of your life is determined by the quality of your thoughts.” For the second part, “I can wait.” Patience and waiting often is indeed the optimal decision when facing a problem. Time does bring clarity and depth of understanding. For the third part, “I can fast.” When needed, being able to live and flourish with less is a prerequisite of being free when the mind, the body, and society all are trying to put you in cages. All right, friends, now sadly, our time together in this episode has come to a close. As always, thank you for being here and thank you for your support through the years. Let me leave you with a few words from the Bhagavad Gita. “He who experiences the unity of life, sees his own self in all beings and all beings in his own self and looks unto everything with an impartial eye.” Thank you for listening. I hope to see you next time.”
Claim ledger
500 transcript-backed records
01 / preference
“Linux has been the love of my life for many years, but one of the reasons I’m still attached to Windows and now Mac is because of video editing, Premiere.”
02 / belief
“You have a user-facing interface, and it does something back and forth, and it could be internal to just one person, to multiple people, to a small number of people, or to the world. And I think for that, it’s– I mean, you could really get to the 100% of code written by AI and really almost– if you’re a good programmer and you have a good intuition about what’s happening behind the scenes, you can legitimately not look at the code, at least that’s been my experience.”
03 / recommendation
“I love listening to his podcast, but I’ve never actually heard the two of you have a conversation together.”
04 / belief
“I think he’s one of the most self-confident people in football, in the world in general.”
05 / belief
“I want to say that one of the things that makes Messi great, I think, is that he really had to live in such a shadow of Maradona, and especially with the World Cup.”
06 / uncertainty
“I don’t know if it’s okay to ask something like this, but I would dream of coming out there to Dagestan, and not just to Makhachkala, but to Sildi.”
07 / uncertainty
“I don’t know why, but cameras get in the way for me because this sport, this preparation, it happens here, and that whole world where celebrities matter, it gets in the way.”
08 / belief
“Your fight with Conor, I think, was the biggest fight in UFC history. That’s for sure.”
09 / belief
“I think in your lecture you mentioned this thing which I just love, the slime line.”
10 / belief
“Yeah, sometimes I think about, I’m sorry to romanticize it, but because I do think that Barack Obama was one of the great speech makers of my lifetime.”
11 / belief
“I think that’s one of the lessons you learn from human history across the different places where slavery was abolished, is abolishing slavery is not the end of a journey.”
12 / belief
“I think if we ignore history, we’re gonna be doomed to repeat it. I think that’s… We should never censor books.”
13 / belief
“I think you said something about Buchanan is… There’s like a basement, there’s like a basement below basement.”
14 / belief
“We humans are capable of that. And this doesn’t somehow go away because we agree for it to go away.”
15 / belief
“I think people are, despite the discourse and the bickering, there’s a real love of nation that maybe is not often expressed- … explicitly.”
16 / belief
“Maybe ’cause you say it’s a political kind of community, that means a set of ideals. And we’ll talk about, because those ideals become even more concretized and explicit, I think, through the East Roman Empire, because one of the things you talk about is that the citizens of the empire are kind of all connected, that they are- … engaged in this whole sort of machinery.”
17 / belief
“I think there’s also a synonymous use of the word empire that refers to the power that the state has- … in the global context geopolitically.”
18 / belief
“I should say that as far as historians go, I think you don’t give too many points on the conquest front.”
19 / uncertainty
“Some badass names for emperors, by the way. I don’t know if it’s the chicken or the egg, but just- … some epic names.”
20 / belief
“I think there’s a lot, a lot of wake-up calls about the war in Afghanistan and Iraq, where people realized that there is that gap between the rhetoric and the action.”
21 / belief
“I think you’ve said that US foreign policy sometimes has a, quite a large gap between the rhetoric and, in modern times, the rhetoric and the action.”
22 / belief
“Actually, as another side to a side, I think you mentioned whether it’s on your podcast or elsewhere, that if you had to have a beer with any of the emperors, you probably wouldn’t.”
23 / belief
“I think unquestionably, this period in history, the 20th, the, the late 20th century and the 21st century will be seen as the flourishing of humans.”
24 / belief
“I think you’ve articulated that rhetoric is really powerful, like stating over and over and over- … that you represent the people, that you’re acting on behalf of the people and doing the action.”
25 / belief
“Yeah, I think the, one of the ways to explain that is because, so, you know, in the modern day, democracy in quotes, there’s a kinda temporary nature to the leader at the top.”
26 / evaluation
“‘Cause this seems like a revolutionary idea, and when we think about the American Revolution and the founding documents, it seems like a few individuals- … were really critical about the wording of things, and then words matter because those words create the reality, and then it propagates through time.”
27 / belief
“I mean, I think special relativity is separate from general relativity in terms as far as Nobel Prizes go.”
28 / belief
“The space-time unification- … is a good warm-up as we march through the twentieth century ’cause it gets, in my view at least, weirder and weirder, even with Einstein himself.”
29 / uncertainty
“Anyway, I did wanna mention, I don’t know if this is true, but I, I kind of heard you talk about this, that when you first showed up to Fermilab, you were, like, working crazy hours, working extremely hard- … eight AM to midnight.”
30 / belief
“I think twenty grams of antimatter is equivalent to a one-megaton nuclear warhead in terms of explosive energy.”
31 / belief
“Kieran, you said that there’s an active archiving preservation community? I think that’s super fascinating.”
32 / evaluation
“Is that– That’s the, that’s the initial instinct for a lot of people when they show up to a code base, probably before LLMs, is like… probably because they don’t understand the, the, the wisdom of the way things have been done in the past.”
33 / preference
“Like, what… You know, there’s a bunch of people listening to this, they’re basically like, sorry, for myself included, you know, I programmed for many, many years in C/C++, going up the standards of C++, fell in love with C++, even meta programming and so on, and then transitioned more and more because of machine learning about 15 years ago to Python.”
34 / preference
“What he did on his laptop, and I was young, I was 21, was just like mind-blowing because he was basically debugging Windows inside a type of VM with ex- Like, wow.”
35 / preference
“I mean, there’s like so many, just to give people an idea, like I use FFmpeg a lot on everything.”
36 / evaluation
“Well, my main concern, I understand, and I think looking at the long history, it’s all for the good. But I do… I am concerned because there’s so few humans that are critical to the success of open source projects that I have seen it be a psychological toll on folks and, you know, sometimes leads to burnout.”
37 / evaluation
“It sucks that that’s part of reality, ’cause all the people that love VLC, all the people that love FFmpeg, like me, you know, I, I legitimately hundred- probably thousands of times in my life had a smile on my face because FFmpeg made me happy, period.”
38 / evaluation
“It’s inspiring for others I think that are pushing the open source movement forward, that it’s okay to do these kinds of huge sacrifices if you believe it’s right. And I think in that case it was right and it was the reason that VLC became as successful as it was, ’cause it’s an embodiment, it’s a symbol of like, you know, freedom and what the open source community can create.”
39 / preference
“I think thankfully at the time I found a sample by pure chance that had a lot of flat blocks. It was animation, so that really helped a lot because it wasn’t using particularly complex coding tools, et cetera, and you could kind of get somewhere and then, and then build up and build up until you figure, “Hey, here’s a few bits here.”
40 / evaluation
“I love this on so many fronts because, so FFmpeg and VLC are pushing companies and pushing the world to standardize.”
41 / recommendation
“Kieran is a longtime codec engineer, FFmpeg contributor, and the man behind the now infamous FFmpeg account on Twitter/X that I recommend everybody follow for the memes and for the unapologetic celebration of open source and great low-level software engineering.”
42 / belief
“What are you doing? Anyway, so yeah, so one of the lessons I think we need to draw is shower daily.”
43 / preference
“I like the leaders, and there’s a few of them in history that rise to the very top, and they’re still able to maintain humility.”
44 / commitment
“” And so you gotta teach as many of us to look up at the stars and dream. Because once you allow yourself to dream of a better world, you try, you try.”
45 / evaluation
“They held onto the law. And that’s many of the legal ideas we take for granted is grounded in everything developed in the Roman Empire and stabilizing the Roman Empire, so they carried that flag forward.”
46 / evaluation
“They go through this process of trading and then establishing a state, now they’re doing treaties of different kinds, and they’re also waging or trying to wage war. And going all the way to Constantinople, and having a deep admiration for Constantinople enough to then begin to dream of sacking Constantinople.”
47 / commitment
“I think the diagnosis that you’re kinda hinting at is, is seemingly the most accurate one, which is we’re flawed.”
48 / prediction
“You can transform your understanding of land from the geography of the land to the geography of the river networks, because the way they raid and then invade and then conquer England is through the rivers.”
49 / evaluation
“A colorless twilight, not necessarily a place of punishment but simply the inevitable end for most, unless you end up in Valhalla, which means you’re a great warrior dying in battle.”
50 / evaluation
“If you’re good at what you do, you demonstrate that skill in battle. That means you get to have maybe a leadership position.”
51 / preference
“Oh God, I love the Vikings. So as you’ve covered, and maybe you could speak to that a bit more, for a long time to come, Normans have influence on Europe and beyond.”
52 / evaluation
“The creative destruction engine that created Europe was the Normans and the Vikings. And then you also, you have another book that talks about the Byzantine Empire, so you have the creative destruction that resulted in Europe, that Europe led to this Western, quote-unquote, civilization that we think of now.”
53 / belief
“Ah, what you said, I think accurately, that the AGI timeline question rests on your definition of AGI.”
54 / uncertainty
“I think whenever you have transformative technology like that’s coming with artificial intelligence, there’s going to be a lot of pain, and I don’t know what to do about that pain.”
55 / belief
“I think people are very sensitive to human faces. And we’re now living in this moment, which I think is a, is a beautiful one, which is people are sensitive to AI slop.”
56 / belief
“You’re originally from Taiwan and have a close relationship with TSMC. So I have to ask TSMC I think also is a legendary company in terms of the engineering teams, in terms of the incredible engineering work that they do.”
57 / belief
“I think NVIDIA, both NVIDIA and TSMC are two of the greatest companies in the history of human civilization.”
58 / uncertainty
“I don’t know if this is something that you can talk about, but I got a chance to see the game for a few hours, and I have to say it’s incredible, Jeff.”
59 / belief
“Jeff, formerly from the Overwatch team, I have to say from the bottom of my heart, and I think I speak for millions of people, thank you for everything you’ve created in this world.”
60 / commitment
“I will try my hardest to give you slack or something to read while you should be working.”
61 / belief
“You were first a legendary video game player, in particular in EverQuest, before you ever became a legendary video game designer on World of Warcraft and on Overwatch, which I think is a wild journey to go through from gamer to designer.”
62 / belief
“I think, you know, it used to be, and still is somewhat the case, that books do that same kind of thing.”
63 / evaluation
“I have to, if you may allow me, read the prophetic “one of us” quote, “one of us” post you made on April 18th, 2002. Because in some deep sense, you, I think, remained one of us.”
64 / recommendation
“This is gonna be embar… Yeah. I use BIAS FX. I’m sorry.”
65 / belief
“In your conversation with Sting, he said something about how modern music is simpler more minimalistic, and, ” The bridge is gone,” I think- … he said.”
66 / uncertainty
“Like, these moments, I don’t know, musically, I don’t understand how you create them ’cause it might be bigger than musical.”
67 / belief
“I mean, and that… But there’s the other side of it which is the guitar. I told you offline, I think having multiple guitars is cheating, but whatever.”
68 / belief
“By the way, before I forget, I think I speak for the entirety of the internet thanking you for how you introduce your videos and how you close them.”
69 / belief
“Maybe smoking distracts them from the hard… I mean, heroin and coke, I mean, those, those things really, and alcohol, unfortunately- … can be easily abused, I think.”
70 / belief
“The other thing that came through is that he’s an improviser at heart. And that, I think, clashes with this kind of rigid structure that metal is.”
71 / belief
“You had, I think, an incredibly fun and diverse beginning to your music journey.”
72 / belief
“I think I saw some of these incredible scientists that work on the neuroscience, the neurobiology, psychology of language in early life.”
73 / belief
“I think there’s one thing that should be said, that in modern culture for young people, a lot of them will see YouTube and TikTok and Instagram, and they kinda wanna be famous.”
74 / belief
“I think from all the music teachers I’ve ever had, I understood the importance of studying Bach.”
75 / belief
“Like, being a, getting extremely good at it. I just, I think in modern culture there’s a sense you want to skip that part.”
76 / uncertainty
“I live next to a guitar store in Cambridge, and one day… I would always stop by, I don’t know why.”
77 / uncertainty
“I don’t know. But melancholy, and I think you articulate it in Aries, it’s not actually that depressing.”
78 / evaluation
“Just a really… it’s a masterful celebration of Beethoven in an interesting kind of way through the perspective of a love letter that he’s written. But then I realized like… and this is early, this is many, many… this is a couple decades ago now, that, you know, he went deaf before he even started writing the Ninth Symphony, which is why they consider it to be one of the greatest compositions of all time, the greatest symphonies of all time.”
79 / preference
“Maybe that’s what raw talent looks like. It makes me a little bit sad because I’m a huge fan of long-form.”
80 / evaluation
“Because then if we can create very realistic music that sounds really damn good, where’s the role of the musician there?”
81 / recommendation
“And then in Spotify, it just seems just effortless. But it helped me discover all kinds of artists I never would have discovered otherwise. And Pandora, I used a lot. Pandora is more prioritizing on the discovery part versus organization part. And that was really wonderful.”
82 / belief
“I think you’ve spoken about Codex reading more and Opus being more willing to take action faster and maybe being more creative in the actions it takes.”
83 / belief
““Wow, this is the smartest thing of all time,” and then they start saying, “You could just watch the Reddit posts over time,” start saying that, “We believe the intelligence of this model has been gradually degrading.”
84 / belief
“There’s to steel man the, the criticism in general, I do wanna say in my experience with Silicon Valley there’s a bit of a bubble in the sense that there’s a kind of excitement and an over-focus about the positive that the technology can bring.”
85 / belief
“I think no matter what the stuff you’re building and the kind of human you are doing stuff at scale is kinda awesome.”
86 / belief
“I think I also speak for a lot of people in saying, I think you’re one of the, the great people in AI in terms of having a good heart, good vibes, humor, the right spirit. And so it would, in a sense, this model that you’re describing, having open source part, and you being part of uh, also building a thing inside, additionally, of a large company would be great, because it’s great to have good people in those companies.”
87 / belief
“Some of the other aspects of the dev workflow is pretty interesting too. I think we w- went off on a tangent.”
88 / belief
“I was really excited by the diagrams. And then I realized, in order to remove from them hallucinations, you actually have to do a huge amount of work.”
89 / belief
“For most of my life I’ve been a Linux, Windows and WSL1, WSL2 person, which I think are all wonderful, but I… expanding to also trying Mac. Because it’s another way of building and it’s also a way of building that a large part of the community currently that’s utilizing LMS and agents is using, so.”
90 / uncertainty
“Being able to use a chat client to talk to an agent, versus, like, sitting behind a computer and like, I don’t know, using cursor or even using Cloud Code CLI in the terminal.”
91 / uncertainty
“I don’t know, hundreds of millions, billions. I don’t know. It could just got unlimited amount of money.”
92 / observation
“The point is, that whole saga made a dent in your whole f- the funness of the journey, which sucks.”
93 / commitment
“We’ll talk to our AI agent to, to accomplish different tasks, to learn about different things, but we won’t value online interaction because there’ll be so much AI slob that smells and so many bots that it’s difficult.”
94 / uncertainty
“Like, there’s certain companies and approaches th- that can just suffocate the spirit of the thing. I don’t know what that is.”
95 / preference
“I’ve, I’ve spent so many, I don’t know, maybe thousands of hours poring over code and putting my heart and soul and, like, and just, like, some of my most painful and happiest moments were alone behind… I, I was an Emacs person for a long time.”
96 / belief
“Can you describe 9/9/6 as a culture? I believe you could say it was invented in China and adopted in Silicon Valley.”
97 / belief
“I think actually in a Terminator type of setup, I think humans win. I think we’re too clever.”
98 / belief
“My prediction is probably even beyond 2031, but at least you can think concretely about how difficult it is to fully automate programming.”
99 / belief
“I think SF is an incredible place, but there is a bit of a bubble. And if you go into that bubble, which is extremely valuable, just get out also.”
100 / belief
“One other thing I think people are generally curious about, I’d love to get your thoughts: as LLMs are used more and more, if you look at even arXiv or GitHub, more and more of the data is generated by LLMs.”
101 / belief
“You can just keep loading it with extra information every time you prompt the system, which I think both can legitimately be seen as learning.”
102 / belief
“I think there’s a lot of programmers on the outskirts who don’t… I mean, there’s not a really good guide on how to use them.”
103 / belief
“As opposed to micromanaging the details of the generation and looking at the diff—which you can in Cursor if that’s the IDE you use—you are understanding the code deeply as you progress, versus just thinking in this design space and guiding it at a macro level. I think that is another way of thinking about the programming process.”
104 / uncertainty
“By the way, I don’t know if there’s a representative case: wife waiting in the car, you have to run, unplug the GPU, you have to generate a Bash script.”
105 / belief
“Like, I think we just have to develop a good taste— —talk about research taste, like school taste about stuff that you should be struggling on— —and stuff you shouldn’t be struggling on.”
106 / belief
“For me, for that same reason—but this could be just momentum— Gemini is the better interface for me. I think because I fell in love with their needle-in-the-haystack capabilities.”
107 / belief
“I think we’re not saying one actually obvious thing that we’re not realizing, that’s a gigantic thing that’s hard to measure, which is making all of human knowledge accessible… …To the entire world.”
108 / recommendation
“A couple that I wanted to mention—and a book I highly recommend—is Build a Large Language Model From Scratch, and the new one, Build a Reasoning Model From Scratch.”
109 / recommendation
“I use basically half-and-half Cursor and Claude Code, because I find them to be fundamentally different experiences and both useful.”
110 / belief
“I think we’ll talk at least 10 more times, and I think I speak for everybody in saying thank you, and please don’t die trying to save the rainforest.”
111 / belief
“As more and more compelling and effective bots appear on the internet— … we’re going to value that less and less, I think.”
112 / uncertainty
“I don’t know. But I think there is something to you. See, you’re just taking for granted the things that you’re putting out into the world.”
113 / belief
“I think there’s a sense when you’re able to sense the animal, whether it’s crocodiles, caiman, or anacondas, and maybe radiate a sense of calm.”
114 / uncertainty
“I mean, I’ve just seen you with snakes and they must sense in you the camaraderie. I don’t know.”
115 / evaluation
“In a deep sense, the uncontacted tribes represent the deep jungle. And so if they’re threatened, that means the deep jungle is threatened.”
116 / evaluation
“Because we should say, kind of the obvious thing is, as far as anyone remembers any encounters, any minimal, small encounters with these tribes— …have been violent.”
117 / preference
“Let me look this up on Perplexity: what are the technologies we modern humans have that the Mashco Piro do not? It’s just interesting to think about the kind of technologies we take for granted.”
118 / recommendation
“That there’s going to be pain, there’s going to be suffering along the way. You have a really nice post… …That I recommend people watch about just this.”
119 / evaluation
“There’s a deep optimism to that. And you actually write in the book, which I really like, I think somewhere in the beginning, quote: “Given all the death and destruction I’ve witnessed, it would be easy to slip into the popular anti-human narrative that we are a plague on the planet and there’s nothing that can be done, but my career in conservation has given me a glimpse into an alternate narrative.”
120 / commitment
“I have been hiding from the world a bit, reading, thinking, writing, soul-searching, as we all do every once in a while. But mostly, just deeply focused on work and preparing mentally for some challenging travel I plan to take on in the new year.”
121 / belief
“Oh, man. Well, that’s the only way to judge a person, I think. That’s, I think, objectively correct.”
122 / belief
“I think cellular automata is one of the most incredible, complicated, fascinating… It feels like an open door into a world we have not quite yet explored. And it’s such a beautiful illustration of that world, the Game of Life, but calling it a game… Maybe life balances it, because that’s your powerful word, but it’s not quite a game.”
123 / belief
“I think his case is a reminder that some of the greatest mathematicians, some of the greatest scientists and human beings do the thing they do, take on these problems for the love of it, not for the prizes or the money or any of that.”
124 / belief
“I think the right way to think about it is the way the British Museum thinks about it.”
125 / belief
“Many times what makes moments really precious is that they’re going to be gone. I think that’s not a trivial thing for us humans to really contend with.”
126 / uncertainty
“If you go to the physics department and the biology department, those people are different in some categorical way. So somehow, I don’t know what the chicken or the egg is, but the categories… Maybe the categories create themselves because of the way we think about them and use them in language, but it does seem useful.”
127 / belief
“I mean, this speaks to embryogenesis, which I think is one of the coolest things in the universe.”
128 / belief
“I think a lot of radical thinkers think that they’re sacrificing something by learning the skill of fitting in, but I think if you want to have impact, if you want ideas to resonate and actually lead to, um … First of all, be able to build great teams- … that help bring your ideas to life.”
129 / belief
“I think one useful one comes from the paper, Technological Approach to Mind Everywhere.”
130 / belief
“I think you’ve mentioned in a few places that like you wrote that the “Ingressing Minds” paper is not the weirdest thing you plan to write.”
131 / belief
“I think at the very basic level, intuitively, we think of organisms as hardware… …And software as not possibly being able to be organisms, but… …what you’re saying is that it’s all just patterns in an excitable medium, and it doesn’t really matter what the pattern is.”
132 / belief
“I think from a basic caveman science perspective, the repeatable experiment… …Is the one that most of intelligence comes from here.”
133 / belief
“I think you could also point to Donald Hoffman and who speaks of an interface to a world.”
134 / belief
“I think the tension is, and absolutely, and this idea that you’re talking about, almost… I think you’ve termed it cognitive prosthetics… …Which is different ways of perceiving and interacting with the world.”
135 / belief
“What lessons do we learn from the Chernobyl nuclear disaster and maybe also Three Mile Island and Fukushima accidents? I think you’re suggesting that it has to do with the humans a bit.”
136 / belief
“I think there’s a perception that nuclear fission reactors are unsafe, they’re dangerous, and if you just look empirically at the statistics, that fear is not justified by the actual safety data.”
137 / belief
“In fact, you should maybe explain that you’re, I believe, on the seventh prototype.”
138 / belief
“I think the heroic action to take with time is to become more optimistic, to see more good.”
139 / belief
“I think The Elder Scrolls series has almost always leaned a little more towards the open world.”
140 / belief
“There’s often been a tension through your work between an open world, that freedom, and the narrative- …driven storytelling. And I think you’ve often, maybe always, gotten the balance right.”
141 / belief
“Kurt in the book… …of A Bitter Paradise has this nice line that I think is thoughtful.”
142 / uncertainty
“I mean, the snowstorm that starts the game RDR2, I don’t remember the last time I’ve experienced anything like it, but you felt it. I don’t know how the hell you do that.”
143 / belief
“I think I speak for most of human civilization that fortunately you have that as part of who you are, because it comes through your stories.”
144 / belief
“I think he’s probably the greatest character for me created in the Grand Theft Auto series.”
145 / belief
“I think GTA5 had the biggest launch in video game history, and GTA6 has the potential to top that.”
146 / belief
“To me, I think definitively Arthur from Red Dead Redemption 2 is the best character ever created in video games.”
147 / belief
“I think, to me, one of the most surprising things about Red Dead Redemption, about video games, that Red Dead Redemption showed is how much value for storytelling is insanely specific, intricate details.”
148 / belief
“I would say one of the most memorable moments in film for me is the meeting in the desert.”
149 / commitment
“I think sometimes, depending on the day, depending on the bar and how much alcohol I had, I will say True Romance is the best movie ever made.”
150 / belief
“There’s a devout suburban Mormon who commits, I think, serial murder with a shovel as a form of religious atonement.”
151 / uncertainty
“I don’t know, I probably have to disagree with you on Vegas. There are at least some competitors.”
152 / belief
“I think editing, editing film, and I imagine editing video games, editing down is an art form, but it’s also just… It feels like torture because you’re letting go of things you put so much love into.”
153 / belief
“I think there’s a strong case to be made that it’s the greatest game of all time.”
154 / belief
“I think the point of describing that was that we often label that as evil or bad.”
155 / belief
“I think I’m… I actually reduced those people down to a few concepts about the characteristics of their face, and I might be visualizing the concepts.”
156 / belief
“I think you mentioned somewhere, maybe in an interview, that there was some concern of being sexualized when you covered the topic of sexuality.”
157 / belief
“You used the analogy of a Wikipedia page for memory. I think that’s a pretty useful way to think about it.”
158 / belief
“I think I should say that it’s one of the worst overreaches of power I’ve seen as applied to a tech leader in recent history, in all history.”
159 / belief
“After having spent many days with you, I learned of something that you’ve never talked about at the time, have not talked about to this day, that there was an assassination attempt on you using what appears to be poisoning in 2018.”
160 / belief
“Another thing we’ve talked about, which I think is a fascinating topic, is the power of the mind, power of thought.”
161 / belief
“First I really have to say for myself from I think millions, maybe hundreds of millions, maybe the entirety of Earth, thank you for putting your life on the line in those cases, I think freedom of speech is fundamental to the flourishing of humanity.”
162 / belief
“There’s a lot of attack vectors on user privacy and I think the most important, the last wall of protection is the actual people that are running the company, so it’s important to some degree for you to be out there to showing your true self.”
163 / belief
“I think the number one thing that people are concerned about, about which there’s also misinformation, is about private messages.”
164 / belief
“I think you mentioned to me one of the things he said was not to just speak of your principles, but to live them, to lead by example.”
165 / belief
“I think you still consider yourself a libertarian. There is something about government that always over time naturally builds a larger and larger bureaucracy.”
166 / belief
“I think Steve Jobs, Jony Ive talked about this, they would put so much love and effort in the design of everything, including things that weren’t visible in the initial pc, personal computers because they believe that you somehow through osmosis, the users will be able to feel the love that the designers put into the thing and you’re absolutely right.”
167 / evaluation
“You can overemphasize how important it was as an explainer of the effectiveness of Blitzkrieg, for example. Because there is some… I mean, I should say there is something really compelling about a singular theory that explains everything, and you can fall in love with it too much as an explainer.”
168 / belief
“I think the thing you mentioned is he could be on sugar, so it could be a lot of elements.”
169 / belief
“Again, insane it is to say, I think the documentary, “Ordinary People,” was looking at the Germans that were a part of the shooting squads.”
170 / uncertainty
“I mean, what does it do? Like, writing, I don’t know. Again, me as a fan of writing, it feels like writing is suffering.”
171 / belief
“I think I’ve been fidgety, especially staying up all night. You can just be caught in a certain moment when you’re being very fidgety.”
172 / belief
“I think your book did a masterful job of never making itself amenable to that kind of narrative.”
173 / belief
“I think if you’re really honest about where you have the asymmetry of power, which is in the speed of the Blitzkrieg, so that’s similar to Genghis Khan, who had a very small military, but their advantage was, I mean, I think at the peak it would be probably 100,000, and but every soldier of Genghis Khan’s had five horses.”
174 / belief
“I- I think as society becomes, develops more and more, it d- seems to resist, certainly psychedelics, s- seems to resist drugs.”
175 / commitment
“Context phase. And for the next 10 hours, and maybe for the rest of our lives, we will be continuing just setting the context.”
176 / belief
“I mean about, for example, there’s a bunch of mysteries that we think we understand, maybe about the concentration camps, maybe about the Eastern Front, the interplay between Stalin and Hitler.”
177 / belief
“You know, I should also say I think that’s the experience for a lot of people. Before reading your book, I had the same kind of feeling that the Nazi ideology was all about law and order and purity, and surely they would not be doing drugs.”
178 / evaluation
“I think that’s grounded in the idea that if you say that, “Well, all the Nazi forces and Hitler were on drugs, so therefore their evil can be… They’re not really evil.”
179 / evaluation
“I think Dostoevsky tried to create a Jesus-like character in Prince Myshkin. And I think kind of failed, because he was too giving in a way that was actually counterproductive and destructive to the world, which he tried to fix in The Brothers Karamazov with Alyosha Karamazov.”
180 / recommendation
“In general, when people ask me, because I’ve done psilocybin a few times and I did Ayahuasca and I’ve talked about it, when people ask me if I recommend those things, I, as a general statement, I say no.”
181 / prediction
“I think what humans don’t quite realize is we may end up being just a chapter in a book. It might be our extinction event, self-created, perhaps a nuclear war, perhaps robots take over, perhaps we don’t know.”
182 / evaluation
“If you don’t care about the details, the story gets corrupted. So, I just wanted to say that some of the things you describe, like how many fingers, um- … it’s like that’s important to get that right, because if you do, some magical stuff can really emerge.”
183 / belief
“You did mention immigration a little bit. I think that’s a component of it also.”
184 / commitment
“” Modi a little bit has a similar way of being like, “Let’s just…” And the implied thing is, forgive the French, but if you fuck with us, we won’t be nice, but let’s just all be nice together.”
185 / belief
“The wine and dine and the evil competitors is an interesting challenge. That, in some maybe distant ways, akin to the problems of the Soviet Union, I think, I guess in the United States there’s less of that, and I don’t even know if that’s based on laws, because there’s a lot of lawyers in the US that could do the same kind of evil competitor stuff, technically.”
186 / belief
“I also, in my mind, am contrasting it with the way the Soviet Union and Russia, since operated.”
187 / evaluation
“Deng Xiaoping famously said that, “It doesn’t matter whether the cat is black or white, as long as it catches mice.”
188 / preference
“I think that permeates throughout the culture to where, first of all, you understand that hard work is the only way to improve, to succeed in life.”
189 / belief
“I find it really convincing. But I think your skepticism has to do not necessarily with the paper’s contents but more the implication that it speaks to the thing that maybe the people who think of Genghis Khan as a brutal barbarian assume that the reason is 0.”
190 / uncertainty
“You can’t help it. I don’t know what that is. That’s maybe the animalistic, but take that with the ability at high speeds for the Mongols to encircle and attack the flanks.”
191 / belief
“I believe that that on the whole will keep humanity flourishing and keep evolving and changing towards something better with every generation.”
192 / evaluation
“I think what is happening in Gaza is an atrocity, and I think that the Israeli government is directly responsible for it.”
193 / belief
“I think that underappreciated art form is the interface design because I think you can not unlock the power of the intelligence of a system if you don’t have the right interface.”
194 / uncertainty
“Protein folding is super fast. I don’t know all the biological mechanisms, but some of them take a long time.”
195 / belief
“I think a lot of people highlight different aspects including the comedic and the mean and all that kind of stuff.”
196 / belief
“In your Nobel Prize lecture, you propose what I think is a super interesting conjecture that “any pattern that can be generated or found in nature can be efficiently discovered and modeled by a classical learning algorithm.”
197 / observation
“I also just for that purpose on the AI scientist front just broadly, so there’s a essay from Daniel Cocotaglio, Scott Alexander and others that online steps along the way to get to ASI and it has a lot of interesting ideas in it, one of which is including a superhuman coder and a superhuman AI researcher.”
198 / belief
“Sorry to anthropomorphize, but it’s an interesting moment because I think in so many domains it will keep happening.”
199 / belief
“Don’t let the leaders that are warmongers divide us. I think science is the ultimately really beautiful connector.”
200 / uncertainty
“I don’t know if it’s our intelligence, it could be something else, that other thing that’s outside the mad dreams of reason.”
201 / belief
“Yeah, I hope there’s some collaboration on stuff that’s less high stakes and in so doing, serves as a mechanism for maintaining friendships and relationships. So for example, I think the internet would love it if you and Elon somehow collaborate on creating a video game, that kind of thing.”
202 / belief
“AlphaGenome predicts how small genetic changes if we think about single mutations, how they link to actual function.”
203 / belief
“I think you’re having more and more fun on Twitter, on X, which is great to see.”
204 / belief
“I think that’s one of the great mysteries. I think ultimately what we’ll figure out is their continuum.”
205 / belief
“I agree with you. I think that’s beautifully put. You’ve said that you talk to and are on good terms with the leads of some of these labs.”
206 / prediction
“I wonder if it will take something like a Move 37, so on the positive side versus a barrage of 10,000 cognitive tasks where it’ll be one or two where it’s like, holy shit, this is special.”
207 / belief
“Then he says, “I as an artist can see how beautiful this is, but you as a scientist take this all apart and it becomes a dull thing,” and I think that’s kind of nutty.”
208 / preference
“There’s this notion that you can only understand the physical world by having an embodied AI system, a robot that interacts with that world. That’s the only way to construct an understanding of that world.”
209 / evaluation
“I should say that I think a lot of people see DeepMind as a really great place to do cutting-edge work for the reasons that you’ve outlined.”
210 / evaluation
“” All this, I think, teaches us that everything is a matter of perspective and that wisdom may arrive if we have the humility to keep shifting and expanding our perspective on the world.”
211 / belief
“Oh, we should probably say that in Europe, maybe you can comment on this, especially in Eastern Europe, but Europe in general, piracy I think was more acceptable than it was in the United States.”
212 / uncertainty
“By the way, speaking of teams, XAI, Tesla are large companies but all those folks … I don’t know what it is about.”
213 / belief
“I think kids do make you more productive in that way for people who need it, especially people like me, they create their urgency.”
214 / belief
“DHH left the cloud. I think that’s literally a meme, but it’s also a fascinating decision.”
215 / belief
“Just to pick one, it’s funny that sometimes the advice givers, the wisdom givers have gone through all the bullshit, and so there is a degree to which you want to make the mistake. So I think I would still give the advice of you want to have a stretch of your life, where you work too hard, including anything that fails.”
216 / belief
“Yeah, Tim … I mean, like you said, founders, but also specific kind of founders because I think … Maybe you can educate me on this, but Tim is somebody who maintains to this day the unreasonableness of principles.”
217 / uncertainty
“How long did it take you? And by the way, I don’t know. I haven’t yet… Well, I know intellectually, but just like with kids, I haven’t gone in all the way in.”
218 / belief
“Really beautifully put. And gaining money might assign to your responsibility of running a larger thing that takes away the flow that you gain from being… Fundamentally for you what flow means is programming and then tranquility is like… I think you also have a beautiful post of like, “Nirvana is an empty schedule.”
219 / belief
“I think Amazon, there could be a case made that Amazon is one of the greatest companies in the last 100 years.”
220 / belief
“I think sometimes maybe even with founders, you can get worn down. It’s a large company.”
221 / belief
“Some people really are planners and it maybe energizes them, but I think most creative pursuits, most really interesting, most novel pursuits are like, you kind of have to just take the leap and then just figure out as you go.”
222 / uncertainty
“There is a beautiful aspect, and you found a good balance there. But I don’t know, you’re bringing so much joy to people with this thing you created.”
223 / belief
“I think one of the big open questions to me is how far you can get with vibe coding, whether an approach for a young developer to invest most of the time into vibe coding or into writing code from scratch.”
224 / uncertainty
“Flash didn’t take over the internet, but Moore’s law worked, so we don’t know which one AI is.”
225 / belief
“I think our whole conversation today is also an indication, it’s just two humans talking.”
226 / evaluation
“I think Chrome positive impact on humanity is immeasurable for reasons that you just described.”
227 / evaluation
“Yeah, I read, I don’t know if this is still the case, that Basecamp is an LLC and doesn’t have a CFO, like a full-time accountant.”
228 / evaluation
“All right, let’s walk back up the stack of this recursive tangents we’ve been taking. So Chrome, we should say, at least in my opinion, is not winning unfairly.”
229 / evaluation
“Can we just linger on that advice that you’ve given, that small teams are better? I think that’s really less… Less is more.”
230 / evaluation
“It’s come under a bunch of criticism over the years. This is something about humans that I don’t appreciate so much, that we take for granted the positive that a thing brings real quick, and then we just start criticizing the thing.”
231 / preference
“I’m like, holy shit, I’m having, it’s like a buddy that’s really being positive and is very smart and is challenging me to think. And even if I never use the code it generates, I’m already a better programmer.”
232 / recommendation
“Here is a good moment to bring up what I think is maybe one of the greatest open source projects ever, WordPress.”
233 / recommendation
“For example, there could be vibe coding could actually be a skill that if you train it and by vibe coding, let’s include the step of correction, the iterative correction, it’s possible if you get really good at that, that you’re outperforming the people that write from scratch that you can come up with truly innovative things, especially at this moment in history while the LLMs are a little bit too dumb to create super novel things and a complete product, but they’re starting to creep close to that, so if you are investing time now into becoming a really good vibe coder, maybe this is the right thing to do.”
234 / prediction
“Yeah. And I think if AI becomes more and more successful, I think we’ll need the software writer skill more and more because it feels like that’s the realm of which… Because it’s not writer.”
235 / preference
“Yeah, but I should say, I personally love SQL, because I’m an algorithms person, so I love optimization, I love to know how the databases actually work, so I can match the SQL queries and the design of the tables such that there is optimal… Squeeze the optimal performance out of the table.”
236 / uncertainty
“I don’t know who is the they that we’re talking about, but I believe American citizens care about America first.”
237 / uncertainty
“I don’t know if that contributes to it, but they kind of are grounded in a different time.”
238 / belief
“I think an American citizen cares primarily about America. That is a fundamental belief for me.”
239 / belief
“You’re speaking to this other people that you’ve heard that somehow. They do say we, and they talk about, I would say ridiculously as if, I’ve even heard some people basically put Israel above US, and they’re American citizens.”
240 / belief
“In fact, many of the horrible policies of the United States, in my opinion, have to do with projecting World War II onto every single conflict in the world.”
241 / belief
“Let’s step back and maybe look at a bit of a romanticized version of mathematics. So I think you’ve said that early on in your life, math was more like a puzzle-solving activity when you were young.”
242 / commitment
“One of the things I find really sad about the finiteness of life is that I won’t get to see all the cool things we create as a civilization because in the next 100 years, 200 years, just imagine showing up in 200 years.”
243 / belief
“I think on the whole, it is a hugely positive thing. To talk about Steve Jobs as a representative of Apple, when I personally know and of course everybody knows the incredible design, the incredible engineering teams, just the individual humans on those teams.”
244 / belief
“I think you also suggested somewhere this fascinating approach, which really stuck with me as they’re using it, and it really works, I think you said it’s called structured procrastination.”
245 / uncertainty
“There’s a kind of emergence that happens with these cellular automata local rules… maybe it’s similar to fluids, I don’t know, but local rules operating at scale can create these incredibly complex dynamic structures.”
246 / belief
“New concepts, new ways of thinking, also sucking at a thing that others… I think in that talk, you could be a Fields Medal-winning mathematician and an undergrad knows something better than you.”
247 / belief
“I mean, it seems like it’s one of those cases similar to Riemann hypothesis. I think the evidence is leaning pretty heavily on the no.”
248 / preference
“” Like you mentioned, coding as an analogy is interesting, because there’s also this activity called the code golf, which I also find beautiful and fun, where people use different programming languages to try to write the shortest possible program that accomplishes a particular task, and I believe there’s even competitions on this, and it’s also a nice way to stress test not just the programs, or in this case, the proofs, but also the different languages.”
249 / belief
“I forget the full list that’s on there. But I think that’s so far from the human experience that my intuition about, let’s say productivity multipliers of those particular inventions completely breaks down, and a different framework is needed to understand the impact of these inventions of evolution.”
250 / belief
“I think the big thing is that it makes it accessible. It unlocks the cognitive capabilities of the entire 8 billion.”
251 / belief
“I think even for a large code base that’s touching a lot of users like Google’s does, I’m imagining, very soon, that productivity should be going up even more.”
252 / belief
“I think on the personal level, asking questions about yourself, a sequence of questions like that about what makes me happy, I think we would be very surprised to learn through a sequence of questions and answers, we might explore some profound truths in a way that sometimes art reveals to us, great books reveal to us, great conversations with loved ones reveal.”
253 / uncertainty
“Of course, the argument is the journalists are still valuable, but then, I don’t know, the crowdsourced journalism that we get on the open internet is also very, very powerful.”
254 / belief
“I agree with you totally. I’m truly grateful to be alive in this moment. And I’m also really excited for the future, and the work you and the incredible teams here are doing is one of the big reasons I’m excited for the future.”
255 / preference
“I think, for me, I’ve been asking just a much larger number of questions of this black box machine, let’s say, whatever it is, and with the AI overview, it’s interesting because I still value the human… I still ultimately want to end up on the human created web, but like you said, the context really helps.”
256 / evaluation
“A little bit scary that it might change the internet because Google has been dominating with a very specific look and idea of what it means to have the internet.”
257 / evaluation
“AdSense revolutionized advertisement. It’s one of the greatest inventions in recent history because it allows us, for free, to have access to all these kinds of services.”
258 / preference
“On the podcasting front, I’m a fan of podcasts much more than I am a fan of being a host or whatever.”
259 / belief
“I think in the details, there’s two ways, I think, to look at the Holocaust. One is Man’s Search For Meaning, but Viktor Frankl, this philosophical thing about how a human being can confront that and find meaning.”
260 / belief
“Here’s my question. I think you’re being too nice on France, here. So when Germany invaded Poland, correct me if I’m wrong, but it feels like France could have just went straight to Berlin.”
261 / belief
“I think there’s a lesson there. There’s many lessons there, but one of them is don’t let an extremist into government and assume you can control them.”
262 / belief
“The technology of the day today, which is a terrifying one for me, is I would say AI on social media.”
263 / belief
“To give a good faith interpretation of that, I believe he meant that Churchill forced Hitler to escalate the expansion of Nazi Germany beyond Poland into a global war.”
264 / belief
“Just get into the details, and in those details, I think there’s some deep profound human truth that can emerge.”
265 / belief
“I think there’s a lot of values to understand from a first person perspective, the words of a dictator, of a person like Hitler.”
266 / belief
“The Munich Conference is a pretty interesting moment, I would say in all of human history, because you got the leaders of these bigger-than-life nations and the most dramatic brewing conflict in human history, Chamberlain, Hitler, Mussolini, Daladier.”
267 / belief
“I think there is a human element there, of course, especially when there’s this force that is Hitler.”
268 / evaluation
““Don’t sell your soul, brother. This is the best music I’ve heard in a long time.”
269 / belief
“I think you did a lot. I think you’re an inspiration. You have helped a huge number of people and you’re also an inspiration to the other side of it, which is the artists and just to humans to have integrity.”
270 / uncertainty
“I mean, he’s got an eye for how to bring out … I don’t know what it is, both the audio side and the video side, how to bring out the best in a person.”
271 / belief
“Ultimately, I think, maybe dark to say, but there is a base layer at which we’re alone in this world.”
272 / belief
“I got to ask you about something before I forget. I think I saw on Instagram you talked about a three-legged cat.”
273 / belief
“You said something I think to Jaco that I really liked. “Everything that has purpose behind it comes with risk.”
274 / evaluation
“Yeah, it’s the transitionary state, and one of the responsibilities I take very serious, because I agree with you, is I tried to pierce the bubble that is the San Francisco, that is the Silicon Valley, that is the people that build these technologies, they often live a bit in a bubble.”
275 / evaluation
“” You need some poison, some swearing, some meanness, some bullshit, some intensity to shake up a system, because when it converges towards this polite bureaucracy, the atrocities can happen and hidden away.”
276 / commitment
“I’ve talked to great engineers about this, Jim Keller is a legendary engineer, Elon, Elon Musk is another example, that you need that … I don’t know what’s the nice term for it, but you need the asshole, because you want to get to the ground truth of things, to the first principle of things.”
277 / commitment
“I wrote the music I wrote because I was suffering with mental health and depression.”
278 / belief
“We think there’s a lot of drama today on social media. Imagine that. Here’s a guy who predicts how actually in nature would be the formation of this most radical of object that broke even Einstein’s brain, while one of the most evil, if not the most evil humans in history, starting the first steps of a global war.”
279 / uncertainty
“Certain books just kind of inject themselves into our culture in a way that just reverberates, and I don’t know, creates culture, not just influences.”
280 / belief
“I think all the best thoughts, honestly, maybe the worst thoughts too, all come at night.”
281 / belief
“I mean the predator and prey dynamic is really effective at accelerating evolution and development. It seems like us being able to destroy ourselves is a really powerful way to give us a chance to really get our shit together and to flourish, to develop, to innovate, to go out amongst the stars, or 50/50 destroy ourselves, which I think me as a human is a horrible thing.”
282 / belief
“I think we’re still at such early stages where we’re not really even at a good explanation.”
283 / belief
“I think one of the most incredible things… I have to talk to you about this. One of the most incredible things that humans have ever accomplished is LIGO.”
284 / belief
“I think when in a corporate context and maybe the world forces you to behave, you’re supposed to be a certain kind of way, there’s some aspects, and it’s a really beautiful aspect to preserve and to celebrate in academia is you’re just allowed to be childlike in your curiosity and your exploration.”
285 / preference
“That’s a beautiful way to phrase it. But also we shouldn’t forget, I love seeing that even in academia, because it’s humanity, the silliness.”
286 / belief
“Also, I think what’s useful is over and over learning a hard thing and then showing to yourself that you can do it, that you can learn a hard thing.”
287 / belief
“What makes you Epic so unique in this regard? And I should say, I think everything you said I agree with fully.”
288 / belief
“Blockchain and crypto is a really powerful technology that I think can enable a lot of the things that we’re talking about, but so many people use it to try to make money to create these bubbles and the hype and the meme coins and the so on and so forth that becomes much less about, that drifts far away and rapidly from things that are actually of value, which is the experience of playing Fortnite and how you look when you play Battle Royale.”
289 / belief
“I think we talked about the soul on several fronts, right? I wish it would be studied more.”
290 / belief
“I mean for me, just sorry to pause on that, I think Wolfenstein was one of the most amazing moments of my own life.”
291 / belief
“Yeah, I would love to sort of talk about different aspects of that a little bit more because Epic has created a lot of amazing games, Unreal Tournament, Gears of War, but the game that I think is fair to say that transformed the gaming industry was Fortnite, Fortnite Battle Royale especially.”
292 / belief
“I think if you just keep being open to using the tools, constantly trying the cutting edge tools, how they can make you more productive, how can they empower you as a creator, as an artist, or as an engineer, I think you’re going to just keep winning.”
293 / belief
“Basically, I think, most people when they derive value from things like video games, want to pay for those video games, they just want it to be easy.”
294 / belief
“Now that there’s enough number of people using Epic Games Store to drift away, to move away from exclusivity, it’s understandable that it’s needed for the competition for the underdog to enter the scene, but it goes against the freedom, the free spirit of choice that I think you represent in a lot of the decisions you’ve made, which is making the games cross-platform and just, yes, giving freedom to the developers, giving freedom to the gamers to choose.”
295 / belief
“I think for me personally, it makes it more fun and faster to generate boiler play code so I can focus on the harder decisions, harder big picture decisions and harder innovative decisions and all that kind of stuff, and just makes programming more fun for me because I feel less lonely.”
296 / belief
“I think Red Dead is a great example, but to do Red Dead Redemption in a way where you can walk around with friends at a large scale.”
297 / evaluation
“Yeah, I think there’s going to be some hard questions, and I think maybe I’m just being human centric here, but there should probably be some legal bounds on two things, sort of not creating a reality in which humans would want to stay too long, sort of yeah, focusing more on the game side, and more importantly, not creating simulations of humans that could suffer.”
298 / evaluation
“There’s the natural thing in companies to want to close and control and crush competition, but Apple is full of brilliant engineers, open it up and win. It’s going to create the right kind of competitive incentive to make the Apple Store better to make… because they’re great at creating great interfaces, but competition will sharpen the sword.”
299 / belief
“If he doesn’t give in and even escalates the tariffs, although I think he said no more escalation on the China front, then he comes off strong, but also the equally unreasonable person who doesn’t care about the world, who only cares about his own ego, and maybe some aspect of the Communist Party maintaining power, because just like with Tiananmen Square and the tank man, you don’t know once you make the decision how the world will read that decision, what kind of things will become viral memes about the telling of that story.”
300 / uncertainty
“You mentioned that we don’t know the degree to which this change has to do with Xi Jinping, or the party apparatus.”
301 / observation
“Boy, so many contradictions always with Stalin, he was a communist but also a nationalist, right? That contradiction, it also permeates through Mao and all the way to Xi Jinping.”
302 / commitment
“At the same time, I saw that China’s escalating internal propaganda, including interestingly, it would be nice to talk to you about it, the use of the Mao Zedong 1953 speech during the Korean War where he says, “We will never yield.”
303 / belief
“You’ve actually spoken about and described China’s more akin to the dystopian world of Brave New World than 1984, which is really interesting to think about. I think about that a lot.”
304 / belief
“There’s two parts of the world that I think are fascinating … and unpredictable.”
305 / belief
“There’s something I learned about called Gray’s Law, which states any sufficiently advanced incompetence is indistinguishable from malice.”
306 / preference
“We know a lot about Donald Trump, we know a lot about the White House. And actually, let me just say as a tangent for whatever you think about this particular White House, one of the things I really like is that every single member of the cabinet is willing to talk for many hours every single week, talk about what they think, how they see the world, explain Donald Trump’s approach.”
307 / observation
“One of the things I learned about all of this, which is interesting, I want to learn more, is about the human psychology, the ability of the individual mind, to compartmentalize things.”
308 / recommendation
“Yeah, anyone interested in unlocking their creativities, they’re not even just filmmaking, I highly recommend that show and I highly recommend kind of the follow-on show, which is where you make Red 11.”
309 / belief
“I think when you say creativity, some of that is being a rebel, not listening to the experts.”
310 / belief
“Can we actually pause on that because I think Bedhead has a really great, really unique story shot in a really unique way.”
311 / uncertainty
“I don’t know shit about cameras and you roll in and then there’s all the experts almost talking down to you and telling you how things are supposed to be.”
312 / belief
“I think of all the art forms of all the art mediums that it just has so many different components.”
313 / belief
“I think you’ve spoken about that filmmakers, especially early on in their journey, critics and the audience can destroy them, meaning it creates too much of a burden, too much, just wear them down to where they’re almost scared to be creative.”
314 / belief
“I think what’s also really powerful because I’ve done that, is to do a high effort description of where your life is just for yourself.”
315 / belief
“You are just a fan enjoying the scene when it’s done well. But I think there’s an aspect, if I were to put myself in the headspace of the actor, they want you as the audience to earn that happiness.”
316 / belief
“I think the thing you’re implying is, whenever they state it’s not quite genuine to some degree.”
317 / uncertainty
“At least there’s another guy who thought there’s a chance that it might be a good idea. Because I don’t know, that’s the cool thing about the things we do, you’ve been through a lot of battles, you’ve walked into a lot of tough debates and it’s like you don’t know, this could be the conversation that ends you.”
318 / belief
“I think also there are shows, there are people, that just are constantly conspiracy theorists, which is fine also, but I sometimes feel that those lack genuineness, because they put themselves in a bin.”
319 / belief
“I think also the Democratic Party has learned a lesson of you have to have candidates that do … I don’t give a shit about podcasts, but do podcasts-like things, meaning reveal themselves as human beings.”
320 / belief
“In a way that’s completely not productive. But to me, I think of the Jew-hating nerds and trolls on Twitter as just the other side of the woke.”
321 / commitment
“The question is there, where do we go from here? If we… We will talk about Netanyahu some more.”
322 / uncertainty
“Oh, yeah, I’ve been gradually growing in popularity over the past 10 years, I’ve been doing interviews, lectures, podcasts, and it’s actually very gradual. And I don’t know what else to say.”
323 / belief
“First of all, thank you for the encouragement. But to push back on the complexity of it a little bit, I think everything you said about your life is also true about my life except family, I want to have a family, you son of a bitch, you’re bragging.”
324 / belief
“I think there’s a certain drug to the dogmatic certainty that you were mentioning. It really annoys me, there’s something about human psychology, because when I say stuff, I usually show doubt and show the humiliated that I might not have the right answer and I sometimes look at multiple perspectives.”
325 / belief
“I think the broader point you’re making, I mean, there’s just a lot of trivialization of the World War II that happens in the West, in the United States especially.”
326 / belief
“I think we got to this discussion from the military industrial complex and military intervention, and Ron Paul, before that, if you could rewind a little bit.”
327 / belief
“I mean, I would generally think that AOC can develop into that candidate. She might not be there yet, but I think she can develop into that.”
328 / belief
“I think legitimately that statement, removing the trolling from it, is the revisionist history statement that I think is wrong, and the invasion of the Soviet Union would’ve happened no matter what.”
329 / belief
“I think the Chinese government officially says, they have an actual percentage that he was 70% correct.”
330 / belief
“I think the thing that we left unsaid that’s important to say is that Putin invaded Ukraine in February 24th, 2022.”
331 / belief
“I think flirting with that idea too much is dangerous, this kind of transhumanism kind of idea.”
332 / belief
“Just like, fuck it. And he has that whole vibe, which kind of looks effortless, but I think when you look at it seriously, especially in contrast with journalists, there’s a fearlessness there.”
333 / preference
“I think I agree with you fundamentally because war is hell, and that’s why I’m against war.”
334 / preference
“In fact, one of the reasons I stay away from that discussion of Israel, which I think is nuanced and really complicated in the way that we’ve been discussing, in order to have an intellectual exploration of ideas, you have to be able to misstep and try ideas for size.”
335 / evaluation
“And now, I think the people, the soldiers, at least in my experience when I visited the second time, are more exhausted.”
336 / belief
“I think my experience of the soldiers, the people of Ukraine early on in the war, there’s a intense optimism about the outcomes of the war.”
337 / belief
“I think the way you have a guarantee, implicit guarantee is by having military and economic partnerships with as many partners as possible.”
338 / belief
“I think there’s a sense that victory is so close, there’s times in a war when you feel like victory is close.”
339 / belief
“I think as I’ve learned, and we’ll talk about Israel and Palestine, I’m learning that everybody’s an expert on geopolitics and the history of war on the internet.”
340 / belief
“I think we’ll talk about that in your new book, Death Cults, that one is an easier one for me to understand to the story that you’re describing.”
341 / belief
“There’s crazy stuff or a totally new military alliance with France and Britain and Germany and European nations and Ukraine or some weird network of military power that threatens Russia in some way or maybe some big breakthrough partnership between India, China and Ukraine, something like this, just some really out there ideas. And I think that’s how the world finds a balance and realigns itself in interesting ways.”
342 / belief
“I think a world that’s flourishing would have Russia trading and being friends with the West and the East.”
343 / belief
“I’ve walked around and hung around with a lot of powerful and rich people, and the thing I learned is they’re just human beings.”
344 / evaluation
“There is a lived experience of what it means to grow up in Gaza. And if you fully load that into your brain in a real way, not using the words of good and evil, but in a very deep human sense, from that place, from that place of desperation, from your home and your family is destroyed, doesn’t matter why, doesn’t matter if there’s evil all around you that caused it.”
345 / evaluation
“One in the spring because Ukraine was in a real big, I would say, position of strength having fended off the Russian forces around Kiev.”
346 / evaluation
“I think the sad thing about successful wars, at least in the modern day, is it takes a great military leader which I would argue that Zelenskyy really unified Ukraine in this fight in the beginning of the war.”
347 / recommendation
“Also, I recommend you visit the places in question as Douglas has, as I have, or at least talk face-to-face with people who have spent most of their lives living there.”
348 / belief
“You’re often referred to, at least I think of you as one of the most intellectually rigorous voices on the left.”
349 / prediction
“If AOC comes off brilliant, they’re not going to be thinking, “Oh, this is a place to be brilliant.” They’re going to be like, “Well, because AOC is brilliant, but my candidate is not.”
350 / preference
“I’m definitely becoming a worse programmer by using AI offloading because it actually works really well there.”
351 / prediction
“There’s all this popular criticism of scientific projects that sound like a waste of money when in reality, at least in the scientific realm, projects that seem like they don’t have any positive effect might actually end up being the ones that transform human civilization as we know it because of the unintended discoveries that happen and all the eureka moments.”
352 / evaluation
“You’re right, there’s some degree to which what the right, when the right speaks about the size of government, it’s a little bit rhetoric and not actual policy because they seem to always grow the size of government anyway.”
353 / evaluation
“They are meant to be escalators into the middle class, not penthouses for the upper class.” So the housing problem we’re talking about specifically, or most importantly is in urban areas.”
354 / preference
“I think the left is more comfortable with larger government as long as it’s effective and efficient, at least in its idea.”
355 / evaluation
“Well, I don’t like it because it cuts my ear in a certain way that one of the criticisms I have for Donald Trump and the Trump administration is, there’s a natural circles of sycophancy that forms, and every president has their personality and psychological quirks, and I think he is one of the people where favoritism is more likely to develop.”
356 / evaluation
“Let me just describe, just because I know the engineers inside Twitter well, which we could argue that the government is very different than a company.”
357 / evaluation
“I have a question about DOGE, but before that, I’ll just say that I don’t think Donald Trump should have that much power because I think to this day, my biggest criticism and concern is that he is a person that denied the results of the election.”
358 / preference
“You said a lot of really interesting insights there. So, one, if I understood correctly that regulation of outcomes is more a good idea than regulation of process, because regulation of process is where you can breed a lot of, basically the lawyers show up.”
359 / recommendation
“I think that that’s the reason I use actually Copilot cursor a lot is for developing the skill of editing AI so I can just learn how to do that better and better.”
360 / belief
“I’m a big proponent, I think you’ve mentioned this in the past, I put asserts everywhere.”
361 / belief
“I think that’s even more so on YouTube for live-streaming. All the same folks show up and they talk shit, they celebrate, the meme train arrives.”
362 / belief
“A lot of people have written to me, I think a lot of developers, programmers are really concerned about the future of their profession in the context of quickly improving AI systems.”
363 / belief
“I think there’s a lot of people, yeah, it’s a job, but it’s also a source of meaning, a source of joy.”
364 / belief
“Yeah, that’s a weird one. That’s a really weird one because most of these models I think are training on data they don’t technically have rights to be training on.”
365 / belief
“I think there is like a skill to working together with AI, which is why I’m kind of excited to watch you keep trying to do it.”
366 / uncertainty
“Maybe people write it maybe in school, but even in school now for a operating systems course or something like that, or system engineering. I don’t know if they write Assembly anymore.”
367 / belief
“I think somebody said that on this topic that you think work smarter not harder is a phrase that you dislike.”
368 / belief
“I think a lot of people are really inspired by the fact that you’re able to be productive and flourish while having ADHD.”
369 / belief
“On a scale of one to 10, how much do you hate every product Microsoft has ever created and why is it a 10? I think we covered that.”
370 / belief
“I think a lot of people listening to this will resonate with your experience in high school.”
371 / belief
“I’m sure you can get super efficient with that, but it just takes time to learn that kind of thing. So yeah, I think there’s some value to it, but I think there’s a learning curve.”
372 / belief
“We’re now there. And I think ultimately that is what humans are amazing at, which is like knowing when something is right like, “This is it.”
373 / belief
“Polluting the code with global variables that are holding values, SPHP I think allows you to do, that’s a tricky one to discover, because you rely on it, then there could be somebody else assigns a value to it.”
374 / belief
“I really don’t want to talk down on any choice like work-life balance or not, I think both are beautiful paths.”
375 / belief
“I think just there’s a certain number of sexual partners from which you can collect a lot of data and it can free you about, like not to be so nervous about the opposite sex, not to be so nervous about human interaction.”
376 / belief
“I think that’s the attack vector that will do in the longterm the most damage in the world.”
377 / belief
“Yeah, I think that’s… I think I feel fundamentally constrained when I can’t see more because your eyes are just good at jumping.”
378 / belief
“What I would love to see… This is how it came up I think on the cursor conversation, is that I would love it if an AI agent did this, like Anthropos computer use or something like that, actually took the action of ordering the coffee while it was programming.”
379 / belief
“I think what’s really nice to do is to imagine, just like we said with high school, that there are a bunch of trajectories in life where you’ll be truly happy and you need to construct your life in a way where you have the chance to travel down those paths.”
380 / belief
“See, code is an iffy one code because code, 25 lines at a time, I think you can do a lot.”
381 / uncertainty
“I don’t know where that’s in the priority list, but for important things like that, you should be able to do that quickly.”
382 / belief
“For people who don’t know, Kinesis keyboard, I think the thing that you experience the most is exactly the thing you just said now, which is the backspace is really easy to press versus what it is on normal keyboards.”
383 / belief
“I think if anything, high school is really bad at picking out the cool people. Whatever the system, the hierarchy that forms, it’s such a basic bitch hierarchy.”
384 / uncertainty
“I don’t know if this is a general rule, this is my anecdote data. The better you’re programming, the less you want to use the AI, the more gets in the way.”
385 / commitment
“I will. Beat the shit out of him, and take some jiu-jitsu and learn how to take him down.”
386 / belief
“I think there’s a deep loneliness in all of us and a longing to be a part of this bigger thing.”
387 / belief
“I think that’s an incredible skill set to have to be able to drop in into any code base, drop into any situation, and do print off debugging.”
388 / belief
“I should say in all seriousness, I think I’ve had a bunch of conversations in the Python world where I would have to mention the name of this data structure and it makes me uncomfortable every time.”
389 / belief
“Operating system? I think you’ve been miseducated my friend. So, at least 30 minutes on Emacs versus Neovim is what Reddit requested.”
390 / uncertainty
“I don’t know. It’s different because productivity is part of fun too. There is just a lightness.”
391 / evaluation
“The annoying thing about those great engineers is then looking back, they forget the hard work because they remember all the joy they now are experiencing from all the efficient, smart work they figured out how to do.”
392 / recommendation
“Make sure you treat every single problem, even fuzzy problems seriously, because that’s actually long-term is going to create code that’s much easier to work with, much more fun to work with, much more robust, resilient to all kinds of weirdnesses, all that kind of stuff.”
393 / preference
“And for some others, one trip could be amazing and the next one could just completely destroy you and wreck your life. So I don’t know what the recommendation from that is, maybe avoid it, but then all of us die and life… I tend to lean into adventure but drugs is… If you fuck with the biochemistry of your brain, you can really destroy yourself in a way that it’s going to torment you.”
394 / evaluation
“Boy, am I glad I grew up before the internet because porn is so accessible, so easy to go deep into that addiction.”
395 / prediction
“The reason I chose to go with VS Code is it felt like there’s going to be an acceleration of features to which Neovim or Emacs will not be able to catch up, in the… and I don’t mean in the next five years, I mean in the next 30 years. And it felt like I almost wanted to take the pain of learning new editors constantly and just switching and learning that, because I was getting so comfortable in Emacs, with this Kinesis keyboard, everything, all the shortcuts, I know how to program, and it felt like this is not… Neovim will not be here in 50 years.”
396 / preference
“As opposed to actually doing print off debugging on the space of languages, on the space of problems, because there’s a lot of wisdom and solved problems already in this code base.”
397 / evaluation
“I mean it does require, to be fair, a leap of faith, because people will tell you, those conformist, dogmatic, Java instructors will tell you, that this is important, to understand recursion.”
398 / preference
“It’s just mentally, at least for me, it works as a hack to assume they’re the smartest person in the world, way smarter than me. And so I take every single word they say as potential wisdom, and that helps me sort of mine for potential wisdom there.”
399 / preference
“Because I listen to audiobooks often when I run and it’s so easy to just tune out.”
400 / evaluation
“There’s just the people behind them must be just brilliant masterminds because they have to work with all these codecs, with all these containers, with all the mysteries of the media codec universe they’re masters of.”
401 / recommendation
“and The Glass Bead Game if you want to take on Hesse’s magnum opus, that rigorously explores the ways the human mind and human civilization can engage in the pursuit of knowledge, wisdom, and meaning. But Siddhartha is the only one I’ve returned to more than twice. In my own life, when faced with a difficult situation, I often return to the moment in the book when Siddhartha is asked what skills he possesses, and his answer is simply, “I can think, I can wait, I can fast.” Let me elaborate. Indeed, for the first part, “I can think.” As Marcus Aurelius said, “The quality of your life is determined by the quality of your thoughts.” For the second part, “I can wait.” Patience and waiting often is indeed the optimal decision when facing a problem. Time does bring clarity and depth of understanding. For the third part, “I can fast.” When needed, being able to live and flourish with less is a prerequisite of being free when the mind, the body, and society all are trying to put you in cages. All right, friends, now sadly, our time together in this episode has come to a close. As always, thank you for being here and thank you for your support through the years. Let me leave you with a few words from the Bhagavad Gita. “He who experiences the unity of life, sees his own self in all beings and all beings in his own self and looks unto everything with an impartial eye.” Thank you for listening. I hope to see you next time.”
402 / belief
“In this moment, I was wondering if you could guide me perhaps through a Hindu prayer or meditation for a few moments. I learned, I’m trying to learn the Gayatri Mantra.”
403 / belief
“I agree with you. It does make me and a lot of people wonder what makes humans special because it seems that there’s a lot that makes humans special.”
404 / belief
“I think the cool thing about people anywhere on earth is they quickly do see the real you past the facades that strangers put up for each other, if you’re vulnerable and honest enough to let them.”
405 / commitment
“I will, most certainly, travel around India with my friend Paul Rosalie in the near future, maybe with some other friends all around from the north of India to the south.”
406 / belief
“You rose from humble beginnings to lead the world’s largest democracy. So, I think there’s a lot of people for whom this is truly inspiring.”
407 / commitment
“I promise that we will continue to work very hard to break down the barriers that language creates, and try to make these conversations as accessible as possible to everyone in the world.”
408 / recommendation
“I would recommend to read Demian, when you are younger, Steppenwolf, when you are older, Siddhartha throughout your life, especially in moments of crisis, and The Glass Bead Game if you want to take on Hesse’s magnum opus, that rigorously explores the ways the human mind and human civilization can engage in the pursuit of knowledge, wisdom, and meaning.”
409 / belief
“I think also the nature of what it means to be a programmer and what kind of jobs programmers do changes, because I think there needs to be a human in the loop of everything you’ve talked about.”
410 / belief
“I think the pricing model mostly they use for input tokens is about one fourth of price of the output tokens.”
411 / belief
“I think one of the other aspects of that Financial Times article implied, and so that leads to a more general question.”
412 / belief
“I think we already have something like that’s exceptionally impressive that Alan Turing would for sure say is AGI, but he’s referring more to something once in possession of, then you would have a significant military and geopolitical advantage over other nations.”
413 / evaluation
“It’s insane. It’s exciting because they’re trying to figure out what the bottlenecks are, how to remove the bottlenecks, how to make sure that… There’s just so many really cool things about putting together a data center because everything has to work.”
414 / commitment
“We want to build the AI system that people around the world are using. And I think that, if anything, some of the recent news has only strengthened our conviction that this is the right thing to be focused on.”
415 / uncertainty
“You’ve mentioned in the past the book The Ancient City by, if I could only pronounce the name, French historian Numa Denis Fustel de Coulanges. I don’t know.”
416 / belief
“Wow, that meme came and went. I think you were central to them. You’re central to a lot of memes.”
417 / belief
“As you said about the 800, so I took the SAT and the ACT many times, and I’ve always gotten perfect on math, 800. And I’m not special, it doesn’t identify genius, I think you want to search for genius.”
418 / belief
“I think your profile on X states, it’s time to build. It feels like 2025 is a good year to build.”
419 / belief
“I think I speak for a lot of people that it has been a real joy and, for me, an honor to get to watch you seek to understand the human psyche as you described.”
420 / uncertainty
“I don’t know if there’s parallels there, but I could also say just on a human level, he has a good heart and I interact with a lot of powerful people, and that’s not always the case.”
421 / belief
“I think you guys disagree on a lot of things, but I personally like vigorous disagreement, I, as a person in the stands, like to watch the gladiators go at it.”
422 / belief
“Maybe it’s grounded in hope that I believe you can revolutionize a system from within, because I do believe Stanford and MIT are important.”
423 / belief
“You know how I think runs it? Whoever the fuck says they run it, that’s what great leadership is.”
424 / belief
“I agree with you that the situation is dire, but I just think that institutions are important.”
425 / evaluation
“To play devil’s advocate in all this, in terms of national immigration issues, none of this is a top end issue, just because the numbers are small, and so I don’t think, the administration has said this is not a priority of theirs for right now.”
426 / recommendation
“I think, again, I think the way to do it is to look at these issues combined, look at DEI combined with high-skilled immigration.”
427 / belief
“I think simple words can have power, and the cliche thing sometimes needs to be said. And sometimes it effectively needs to be said in an over the top way in the Mythic Register, because that’s the thing that resonates with us.”
428 / belief
“I just re-listened to Ayn Rand’s, I think, last lecture, or at least it’s called that, and just the confrontational nature of how she answers questions or how she addresses critics and so on.”
429 / belief
“I think there’s a thread throughout this conversation where we should actually also say that you’re a historian of ideas.”
430 / belief
“After the invasion of February 24th, 2022, I believe there were three chances where peace was most achievable.”
431 / belief
“I think about ideas like Marxism and how that evolves into the Bolshevik Revolution and how that takes hold in its implementations.”
432 / belief
“You mentioned there’s a strong collaborative component, but there’s another story I saw about that I think his son recalled about the argument number system that you mentioned, which, by the way, if you can explain that as a tangent of a tangent, that’s really awesome.”
433 / belief
“Money is fascinating in that way, and I think for Milton Friedman trusting the flow of money is really important and the signals that pricing and money in general provides is really important.”
434 / belief
“I think on communism, going back to that lecture that Ayn Rand gave, I think what rings true to me a little bit is that what fuels it is a kind of… Maybe not resentment, but envy towards the have-nots versus the haves.”
435 / belief
“On the topic of corruption, I think the reality of corruption versus the perception of corruption is really important in a lot of these nations.”
436 / belief
“I think you spoke about Knight’s Case for capitalism was grounded in the idea that the ability to act in the face of uncertainty creates profit.”
437 / belief
“I think so much of the friction of human interaction could be boiled down to just not being able to admit they are wrong efficiently and quickly and regularly and just often.”
438 / uncertainty
“I don’t know if this is accurate, but “If you strive for equality over freedom, you often get neither.”
439 / preference
“More than that, I just simply refuse to be caught in any one single echo chamber. It’s an ongoing battle of course, because social media algorithms and the various dogmatic groups and tribes out there want to pull you in to their warm embrace of belonging.”
440 / evaluation
“You have written two biographies, one on Milton Friedman and one on Ayn Rand. So if we can, we will focus on each one separately, but first, let’s talk about the ideas that two of them held in common, the value of individual freedom, skepticism of collectivism, and the ethics of capitalism.”
441 / prediction
“He lived 1912 to 2006. So, that means he lived and worked through some major world events where his ideas were really important, the Great Depression with the New Deal, World War Two with post-war reconstruction, the Rise and Fall of the Bretton Woods Monetary System as we may talk about, the Cold War and all the conflicts involved in that, the tensions around communism and so on, so the fall of the Soviet Union.”
442 / evaluation
“It’s interesting even just how you conduct studies like this, how you do these kinds of experiments, especially if you’re empirically minded because a lot of the studies I saw is they’re pretty small, so how do you make big conclusions about how to run the world, how to run the economies from such small studies? It’s all a fascinating experiment of ideas, and it’s also inspiring to see individuals and maybe small groups of individuals like the Chicago School of Economics to shake out what we believe and how we run the world.”
443 / recommendation
“I’ve read countless books about this war and the long arc of history that led up to it. It forced to recommend two at this moment, I would say The Russo-Ukrainian War by Serhii Plokhy and The Showman by Simon Shuster, which is a good personal behind-the-scenes biography of the President focused on 2022, but there are many, many more.”
444 / recommendation
“For example, for a good overview, I recommend John McWhorter’s books and especially his lecture series for the Great Courses on language.”
445 / belief
“For example, if America simply leaves NATO, I believe there is a high likelihood that Donald Trump would do such a thing.”
446 / uncertainty
“I don’t know. Normally by the sea, the same as with you. He invites you to the sea with me, just the three of us.”
447 / disagreement
“I disagree with you here. I think and hope that many people in Russia will hear us today.”
448 / commitment
“I will just say that your team that I spoke with is an excellent team. Excellent people.”
449 / commitment
“We will continue to explore how to break down the barriers that language creates with AI and otherwise.”
450 / uncertainty
“I have traveled to many cities in Ukraine, but I have never been to Odessa and everyone tells me that, and I don’t know why.”
451 / uncertainty
“By the way, I don’t know if you know this, but Joe has a great comedy club in Austin.”
452 / belief
“Joe Rogan, yes. And I think that as a person who respects comedy and stand-up comedy, it would be interesting for you to have a look at it.”
453 / uncertainty
“I don’t know. Normally, by the sea, the same as with you. He invites you to the sea with me, just the three of us.”
454 / commitment
“I will also work on improving my whole pipeline both equipment-wise and interpreter-wise in doing these conversations in other languages because there are many that I would like to do in languages I don’t speak at all like Chinese, Mandarin or Spanish, Arabic, Hindi, Portuguese, French, German.”
455 / prediction
“I believe that Presidents Zelenskyy, Putin and Trump should meet soon after January 20th this year and give everything they got to negotiate a ceasefire and security guarantees that pave the way for long-lasting peace.”
456 / commitment
“Now, it is true that I plan to travel to Moscow and to speak with President Vladimir Putin and I hope to be back in Kyiv as well as President Zelenskyy said, this was our first of many more meetings.”
457 / preference
“If I’m regularly getting insights from a person, I will continue listening to them whether I agree or disagree.”
458 / belief
“I think the postmodernist on the left and the anti-establishment people on the right, and then just pseudoscience that kind of does this in-between thing.”
459 / observation
“Abiogenesis, glucose fermentation to propionic acid, all kinds of steps, all the way to homo sapiens, animal intelligence, land ecosystems, endoskeletons.”
460 / belief
“If you just, hey, the aforementioned cockroach with some bacteria, place it in Europa, I think you’d be surprised what happens.”
461 / belief
“Type two is 10 orders of magnitude larger than that, 10 to the 26th watts, and I think estimate for the galaxy is another 10 orders of magnitude.”
462 / belief
“I mean, I think there is a hunger to acknowledge that there’s an elephant in the room, that we’re just removing the agent.”
463 / belief
“If we, normal humans saw 100 experiments, and we knew that at least one time there was a successful human civilization built we would say for sure, in 100 you’ll get another one.”
464 / belief
“I think you give a bunch of examples of that. Looking at temperature as a number is a very objective, scientific way of looking at that.”
465 / belief
“I think, again, if I were to bet everything, even in advanced civilizations are common.”
466 / belief
“I wonder who the dominant forces are in the world, because I think there’s a lot of people, the military they’ll probably move first so they can steal whatever advantage they can from this new discovery so they can hurt China or China hurt America.”
467 / belief
“Just as a human society as we are now, we would engage and we would be detectable, I think.”
468 / evaluation
“You have to have the huge variety of resources that are always available on a planet somehow, even when it’s a super harsh condition. So that’s actually not a trivial experiment and if somebody did that experiment in the lab, I’d be a little bit skeptical because I could see bacteria doesn’t survive in this kind of temperature.”
469 / uncertainty
“I mean, there is a case to be made that he was joking, I don’t know. But there is a kind of weaving that he does with humor, where sometimes it’s sarcasm, sometimes not, much easier to showcase in a three-hour interview, I’ll say.”
470 / belief
“I think also for me, personally, maybe I’m deluded, the great man view of history, I think some of it is in programming circles, the term skills issue.”
471 / uncertainty
“I think one thing, maybe to partially steel man his case but also just to steel man the way the world works, is that there is some probability that Kamala Harris will institute a communist state and there is some probability that Donald Trump will indeed… Will fly a swastika with… And deport, I don’t know, everybody who’s not Scott Irish.”
472 / belief
“I think that his biggest problem is he never went full Trump. He kept saying sorry.”
473 / belief
“I think you have a psychopath view of history where all great leaders are for sure psychopaths.”
474 / belief
“Of arrogance. And I think you’ve also articulated that a lot of presidents throughout American history have suffered from a bad case of arrogance and narcissism.”
475 / belief
“To give the counterpoint that I think you’re probably also rooting for is that one is a statement like Peter Thiel said, “Don’t bet against Elon.”
476 / belief
“I would love to live in a country and in the world where it’s you who gets the talk to the press secretary, to the president, because I think you’re one of the good ones, as far as journalists go, as far as human beings.”
477 / belief
“I think you read the truth. I really worry about this general, especially now, the anti-establishment sense that every politician must be a sociopath.”
478 / belief
“When Claude, future versions of AI systems, exhibit consciousness, signs of consciousness, I think we have to take that really seriously.”
479 / belief
“Can you talk through some of the building blocks that we’ve been referencing of features and circuits? So, I think you first described them in a 2020 paper, Zoom In: An Introduction to Circuits.”
480 / belief
“By the way I should mention, I believe the brilliant John Schulman was a part of that.”
481 / belief
“If we think of interpretability as a kind of anatomy of neural networks, most of the circus threads involve studying tiny little veins looking at the small scale and individual neurons and how they connect.”
482 / belief
“I think probably where they’re coming from is the general skepticism of institutions which is grounded in a, there’s a deep philosophy there which you could understand, you can even agree with in parts.”
483 / uncertainty
“I don’t know what that is about human nature, but it is demotivating to see people who are not obsessively driving towards a singular mission.”
484 / uncertainty
“I have a sense that there would be things that a model can say that convinces you this is very… I’ve talked to people who are truly wise, because you could just tell there’s a lot of horsepower there, and if you 10X that… I don’t know.”
485 / belief
“Let’s see, you’re talking to somebody who as a hobby does a podcast. I agree with you 100%.”
486 / belief
“I think, just like you said, when you’re living on a paycheck, month to month, when the resource is really constrained, then that’s where failure is very expensive.”
487 / uncertainty
“I’m denying the intelligence of this entity by calling it it, I remember always don’t gender the robots, but I don’t know, I anthropomorphize pretty quickly and construct a backstory in my head.”
488 / belief
“Another way that I think the world might be changing with AI even today, but moving towards this future of the powerful super useful AI is programming.”
489 / belief
“I think if you just assume we have to colonize Mars in order to have a backup for human civilization, even if that’s not true, that’s going to produce some interesting engineering and even scientific breakthroughs, I think.”
490 / belief
“All the times that Claude says something really smart, your sense of its intelligent grows in your mind, I think.”
491 / belief
“I think there’s a bunch of humans that just won’t respect the model at all if it’s super polite, and there’s some humans that’ll get very hurt if the model’s mean.”
492 / belief
“I think there is a psychological effect. You just start getting used to it, the baseline raises.”
493 / belief
“I think in the essay you said … Again, it’s a bet that it’s not going to be embodied, but it can control embodied tools.”
494 / belief
“There potentially could be laws that prevent AI systems from claiming to be conscious, something like this, and maybe some AIs get to be conscious and some don’t. But I think just on a human level, as in empathizing with Claude, consciousness is closely tied to suffering, to me.”
495 / belief
“I think we just motivated a lot of people to do a lot of crazy shit, but it’s great.”
496 / uncertainty
“I don’t know about romantic, but friendships at least. And then you have to, I mean, there’s so many fascinating things there, just like you said, you have to have some kind of stability guarantees that it’s not going to change, because that’s the traumatic thing for us, if a close friend of ours completely changed all of a sudden with a fresh update.”
497 / belief
“I think people quickly fell in love with it, I think. So people already miss it, because it was taken down, I think after a day.”
498 / belief
“See, I think as these models become better and better conversation and become smarter, social engineer becomes a threat too because they could start being very convincing to the engineers inside companies.”
499 / belief
“I think that’s probably one of the things that made human civilization what it is.”
500 / belief
“You gave what I think is a truly brave speech on the Iraq War in 2002, I believe.”