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
55 transcript-backed records
01 / 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.”
02 / 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.”
03 / 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.”
04 / 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.”
05 / 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.”
06 / evaluation
“I love this on so many fronts because, so FFmpeg and VLC are pushing companies and pushing the world to standardize.”
07 / 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.”
08 / 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.”
09 / 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.”
10 / 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.”
11 / 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.”
12 / 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.”
13 / 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.”
14 / evaluation
“Because then if we can create very realistic music that sounds really damn good, where’s the role of the musician there?”
15 / 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.”
16 / 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.”
17 / 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.”
18 / 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.”
19 / 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.”
20 / 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.”
21 / 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.”
22 / evaluation
“Deng Xiaoping famously said that, “It doesn’t matter whether the cat is black or white, as long as it catches mice.”
23 / evaluation
“I think what is happening in Gaza is an atrocity, and I think that the Israeli government is directly responsible for it.”
24 / 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.”
25 / 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.”
26 / evaluation
“I think Chrome positive impact on humanity is immeasurable for reasons that you just described.”
27 / 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.”
28 / 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.”
29 / 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.”
30 / 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.”
31 / 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.”
32 / 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.”
33 / evaluation
““Don’t sell your soul, brother. This is the best music I’ve heard in a long time.”
34 / 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.”
35 / 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.”
36 / 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.”
37 / 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.”
38 / evaluation
“And now, I think the people, the soldiers, at least in my experience when I visited the second time, are more exhausted.”
39 / 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.”
40 / 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.”
41 / 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.”
42 / 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.”
43 / 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.”
44 / 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.”
45 / 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.”
46 / 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.”
47 / 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.”
48 / evaluation
“Boy, am I glad I grew up before the internet because porn is so accessible, so easy to go deep into that addiction.”
49 / 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.”
50 / 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.”
51 / 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.”
52 / 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.”
53 / 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.”
54 / 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.”
55 / 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.”