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
21 transcript-backed records
01 / 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.”
02 / commitment
“I think the diagnosis that you’re kinda hinting at is, is seemingly the most accurate one, which is we’re flawed.”
03 / commitment
“I will try my hardest to give you slack or something to read while you should be working.”
04 / 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.”
05 / 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.”
06 / 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.”
07 / 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.”
08 / 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.”
09 / 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.”
10 / 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.”
11 / commitment
“I wrote the music I wrote because I was suffering with mental health and depression.”
12 / 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.”
13 / commitment
“The question is there, where do we go from here? If we… We will talk about Netanyahu some more.”
14 / commitment
“I will. Beat the shit out of him, and take some jiu-jitsu and learn how to take him down.”
15 / 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.”
16 / 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.”
17 / 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.”
18 / commitment
“I will just say that your team that I spoke with is an excellent team. Excellent people.”
19 / commitment
“We will continue to explore how to break down the barriers that language creates with AI and otherwise.”
20 / 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.”
21 / 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.”