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
30 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 / 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.”
03 / 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.”
04 / preference
“I mean, there’s like so many, just to give people an idea, like I use FFmpeg a lot on everything.”
05 / 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.”
06 / 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.”
07 / 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.”
08 / 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.”
09 / 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.”
10 / 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.”
11 / 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.”
12 / 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.”
13 / 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.”
14 / 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.”
15 / 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.”
16 / 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.”
17 / preference
“On the podcasting front, I’m a fan of podcasts much more than I am a fan of being a host or whatever.”
18 / 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.”
19 / 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.”
20 / preference
“I think I agree with you fundamentally because war is hell, and that’s why I’m against war.”
21 / 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.”
22 / preference
“I’m definitely becoming a worse programmer by using AI offloading because it actually works really well there.”
23 / preference
“I think the left is more comfortable with larger government as long as it’s effective and efficient, at least in its idea.”
24 / 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.”
25 / 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.”
26 / 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.”
27 / 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.”
28 / preference
“Because I listen to audiobooks often when I run and it’s so easy to just tune out.”
29 / 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.”
30 / preference
“If I’m regularly getting insights from a person, I will continue listening to them whether I agree or disagree.”