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.”
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9 transcript-backed records
01 / 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.”
02 / 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.”
03 / 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.”
04 / 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.”
05 / 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.”
06 / 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.”
07 / 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.”
08 / 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.”
09 / 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.”