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
53 transcript-backed records
01 / 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.”
02 / 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.”
03 / 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.”
04 / 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.”
05 / 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.”
06 / 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.”
07 / uncertainty
“Like, these moments, I don’t know, musically, I don’t understand how you create them ’cause it might be bigger than musical.”
08 / uncertainty
“I live next to a guitar store in Cambridge, and one day… I would always stop by, I don’t know why.”
09 / uncertainty
“I don’t know. But melancholy, and I think you articulate it in Aries, it’s not actually that depressing.”
10 / 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.”
11 / uncertainty
“I don’t know, hundreds of millions, billions. I don’t know. It could just got unlimited amount of money.”
12 / 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.”
13 / 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.”
14 / 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.”
15 / uncertainty
“I mean, I’ve just seen you with snakes and they must sense in you the camaraderie. I don’t know.”
16 / 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.”
17 / 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.”
18 / uncertainty
“I don’t know, I probably have to disagree with you on Vegas. There are at least some competitors.”
19 / 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.”
20 / 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.”
21 / uncertainty
“Protein folding is super fast. I don’t know all the biological mechanisms, but some of them take a long time.”
22 / 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.”
23 / uncertainty
“By the way, speaking of teams, XAI, Tesla are large companies but all those folks … I don’t know what it is about.”
24 / 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.”
25 / 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.”
26 / uncertainty
“Flash didn’t take over the internet, but Moore’s law worked, so we don’t know which one AI is.”
27 / uncertainty
“I don’t know who is the they that we’re talking about, but I believe American citizens care about America first.”
28 / uncertainty
“I don’t know if that contributes to it, but they kind of are grounded in a different time.”
29 / 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.”
30 / 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.”
31 / 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.”
32 / 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.”
33 / uncertainty
“You mentioned that we don’t know the degree to which this change has to do with Xi Jinping, or the party apparatus.”
34 / 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.”
35 / 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.”
36 / 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.”
37 / 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.”
38 / 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.”
39 / 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.”
40 / uncertainty
“I don’t know. It’s different because productivity is part of fun too. There is just a lightness.”
41 / 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.”
42 / 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.”
43 / uncertainty
“I don’t know if this is accurate, but “If you strive for equality over freedom, you often get neither.”
44 / 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.”
45 / 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.”
46 / uncertainty
“By the way, I don’t know if you know this, but Joe has a great comedy club in Austin.”
47 / 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.”
48 / 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.”
49 / 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.”
50 / 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.”
51 / 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.”
52 / 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.”
53 / 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.”