Lex Fridman Podcast / episode intelligence
Speakers in the public record
Claim mix
Evidence policy
Every row below preserves an exact excerpt. Identified speakers are linked; unresolved voices are labeled and excluded from people counts.
Claim ledger
83 published records
01 / recommendation
“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.”
02 / recommendation
“I keep doing it and then one day I decide I’m going to do some programming. Because I really love Vim and I think I’m fast at Vim, and maybe people think programming is cool.”
03 / belief
“I’m a big proponent, I think you’ve mentioned this in the past, I put asserts everywhere.”
04 / belief
“I think that’s even more so on YouTube for live-streaming. All the same folks show up and they talk shit, they celebrate, the meme train arrives.”
05 / uncertainty
“There’s a lot of similar emotes and everything, so it’s very tight-knit. So when I stream, I get all the same jokes that you would pretty much see if you saw, I don’t know, Sodapoppin or some big streamer, Asmongold, whoever, [inaudible 02:55:56] software streaming.”
06 / belief
“Every way it’s described, all the different things. I think Zig’s is, it’s a decent size, but it’s not just simply read the words.”
07 / belief
“A lot of people have written to me, I think a lot of developers, programmers are really concerned about the future of their profession in the context of quickly improving AI systems.”
08 / belief
“I think there’s a lot of people, yeah, it’s a job, but it’s also a source of meaning, a source of joy.”
09 / belief
“Yeah, that’s a weird one. That’s a really weird one because most of these models I think are training on data they don’t technically have rights to be training on.”
10 / belief
“I think there is like a skill to working together with AI, which is why I’m kind of excited to watch you keep trying to do it.”
11 / belief
“I think the first language people should learn if they have no idea about anything is JavaScript.”
12 / uncertainty
“I don’t know the maze, but if I just go up, right, down, and left, and hop back every time I’ve been to that square, don’t visit it, it will just go forever.”
13 / uncertainty
“I’ve never really enjoyed doing merch. I just find that, I don’t know, it’s just not as much fun for me.”
14 / 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.”
15 / belief
“I think somebody said that on this topic that you think work smarter not harder is a phrase that you dislike.”
16 / belief
“I think a lot of people are really inspired by the fact that you’re able to be productive and flourish while having ADHD.”
17 / belief
“I would say the biggest one that I can really hold on to had to be one of two experiences.”
18 / belief
“On a scale of one to 10, how much do you hate every product Microsoft has ever created and why is it a 10? I think we covered that.”
19 / belief
“If you say, “Write me quicksort,” some people will think quicksort’s super complex. But I would argue that that’s actually probably the simplest thing you could ask an AI to do.”
20 / belief
“I think that the bigger the project you can manage, the bigger the thing you can build, the more understanding both down and up the stack you can go, the more valuable you become. Because if you understand how to build something in the front end, okay, well, now you kick off some LLM task of some sort, that’s going to go off and make a change to the front end.”
21 / belief
“I would argue that people don’t have a good grasp of what complex is in programming.”
22 / observation
“Not all tools are great at solving all problems. And so what you think is really the problem is you run into this trade off, which is you have some tool belt that you’re very adept with, you know all the ins and outs.”
23 / belief
“I think a lot of people listening to this will resonate with your experience in high school.”
24 / belief
“I’m sure you can get super efficient with that, but it just takes time to learn that kind of thing. So yeah, I think there’s some value to it, but I think there’s a learning curve.”
25 / belief
“I think I should make an addendum to the phrase, I think the phrase should be work hard, get smart.”
26 / observation
“Everything is actually really hard and most of the time I don’t even know what I’m doing, so therefore I don’t even know what smart looks like. And so for me, the only way I can learn how to work smart is by working very, very hard and knowing that there’s no shortcuts.”
27 / belief
“We’re now there. And I think ultimately that is what humans are amazing at, which is like knowing when something is right like, “This is it.”
28 / belief
“I have a very great story about that, that this is what I think has shaped me the most about my perspective of other devs.”
29 / belief
“I’ll say something. That’s the reason why I think Zig is so interesting comparatively to say C or Rust.”
30 / belief
“Polluting the code with global variables that are holding values, SPHP I think allows you to do, that’s a tricky one to discover, because you rely on it, then there could be somebody else assigns a value to it.”
31 / uncertainty
“I did SQL because I didn’t know the audience. I don’t know if they can handle the truth, which is its squeal.”
32 / belief
“I do think that the women that I dated during high school or the women after high school and college, I looked at them as a means to an end. And I think porn greatly kind of shifted that perspective in my head that I did not give the value that was desired to another person.”
33 / belief
“Obviously I’m not a game developer, probably a different world probably should use… I think John Carmack was on here and talked to how great the debugger is, different world.”
34 / commitment
“Meaning that when you ask for a path, we will make sure we fill it out so we don’t accidentally erase anything.”
35 / belief
“I really don’t want to talk down on any choice like work-life balance or not, I think both are beautiful paths.”
36 / belief
“I think their idea of audio first is a great first step where people can listen to it and have the phone away maybe.”
37 / belief
“I think that’s a really interesting question, because if you go on Twitter or you’re new, your thoughts are probably that there is just web programming, and maybe there’s some other stuff, yeah, like game programming, but you’d be like, game programming in JavaScript and on the web.”
38 / belief
“I think just there’s a certain number of sexual partners from which you can collect a lot of data and it can free you about, like not to be so nervous about the opposite sex, not to be so nervous about human interaction.”
39 / belief
“SQL is interesting. I believe you can classify it as a programming language. It does have, if.”
40 / belief
“I think FFMPEG is probably one of the most consequential libraries of our day, and the Twitter account is so unhinged. It is the most amazing thing to see because I think FFMPEG does not get the love it deserves.”
41 / belief
“I think that’s the attack vector that will do in the longterm the most damage in the world.”
42 / belief
“Yeah, I think that’s… I think I feel fundamentally constrained when I can’t see more because your eyes are just good at jumping.”
43 / belief
“What I would love to see… This is how it came up I think on the cursor conversation, is that I would love it if an AI agent did this, like Anthropos computer use or something like that, actually took the action of ordering the coffee while it was programming.”
44 / belief
“I think what’s really nice to do is to imagine, just like we said with high school, that there are a bunch of trajectories in life where you’ll be truly happy and you need to construct your life in a way where you have the chance to travel down those paths.”
45 / belief
“See, code is an iffy one code because code, 25 lines at a time, I think you can do a lot.”
46 / belief
“I think at some point if all things continue at the current rate of improvement, there does come a point where programming as a hard skill does become unnecessary.”
47 / belief
“I would say that you have to be very green to think that you should highly trust an AI output.”
48 / belief
“At some point you have to take off the training wheels, because I think what you’re really spotting is the difference between reading and writing code.”
49 / belief
“I think a lot of people desire that approval or that loving figure, and I just didn’t have that.”
50 / 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.”
51 / belief
“For people who don’t know, Kinesis keyboard, I think the thing that you experience the most is exactly the thing you just said now, which is the backspace is really easy to press versus what it is on normal keyboards.”
52 / commitment
“I am going to try to answer that question, I guess the best I can, which I think that if you’re entering into the tech world, one of the hardest pieces of advice that I took a long time to learn was I became enamored and addicted.”
53 / commitment
“I will say something like, “I really dislike the color purple because the color purple makes me upset.”
54 / belief
“Lisp could be in that category too, just, or Closure I think at this point is what everyone tells you to use.”
55 / belief
“I think if anything, high school is really bad at picking out the cool people. Whatever the system, the hierarchy that forms, it’s such a basic bitch hierarchy.”
56 / uncertainty
“Really, if you think about it, if you’re just writing a mom-and-pa website, people that do PHP that are doing WordPress and all that, they’re going to build something, they’re going to hand it off to, I don’t know, Linode, DigitalOcean, some company.”
57 / 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.”
58 / belief
“I think there’s some technical definition that it is. If you use this certain amalgamation of CSS plus HTML, it actually has, it can be a Turing complete language.”
59 / commitment
“I will. Beat the shit out of him, and take some jiu-jitsu and learn how to take him down.”
60 / belief
“I think there’s a deep loneliness in all of us and a longing to be a part of this bigger thing.”
61 / commitment
“I will say I’m going to read 50 pages, I will sit down and read 50 pages, and when I get distracted I’ll go back to the last place I remember and I’ll start again.”
62 / uncertainty
“You don’t meet the standards, we kick you out.” So it’s like I’m leaving a place where it’s more secure to go to a place I don’t know anybody, to a job that’s bold in its claims about firing everybody with a wife that’s just about to have a baby.”
63 / belief
“I think that’s an incredible skill set to have to be able to drop in into any code base, drop into any situation, and do print off debugging.”
64 / belief
“I think there’s a lot to that because not every job you’re going to get is going to be great.”
65 / belief
“I mean, there is something very true about that, that I think especially… I mean, I have no idea what the girls experience of high school would be like, but as a guy, there’s definitely a lot of like physical requirements in high school.”
66 / belief
“I should say in all seriousness, I think I’ve had a bunch of conversations in the Python world where I would have to mention the name of this data structure and it makes me uncomfortable every time.”
67 / uncertainty
“I can just feel it. It’s like something inside of me that’s kind of… I don’t know how to say it other than it like wants to get out but I don’t really know what that is.”
68 / belief
“My wife has complete confidence in me that there is not going to be a situation in which she has to question me in any kind of sense. And that builds a much more deeply, I would argue, a very deep relationship because the trust is that much bigger.”
69 / belief
“Operating system? I think you’ve been miseducated my friend. So, at least 30 minutes on Emacs versus Neovim is what Reddit requested.”
70 / uncertainty
“I don’t know. It’s different because productivity is part of fun too. There is just a lightness.”
71 / prediction
“I definitely can’t say how long it will take, a better life. But for me, there’s no way in the universe I could have had the relationship that I have without first making those steps because I couldn’t value my wife in the way that was proper for who she was.”
72 / belief
“I think you should explore a loosey language, so Python slash JavaScript, where there is truly only one type, which is a boxed value, which is a multivariate, different types underneath the hood.”
73 / observation
“The problem is whenever I get a back, I just slouch and I find myself just getting uncomfortable.”
74 / 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.”
75 / recommendation
“Make sure you treat every single problem, even fuzzy problems seriously, because that’s actually long-term is going to create code that’s much easier to work with, much more fun to work with, much more robust, resilient to all kinds of weirdnesses, all that kind of stuff.”
76 / 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.”
77 / evaluation
“Boy, am I glad I grew up before the internet because porn is so accessible, so easy to go deep into that addiction.”
78 / 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.”
79 / 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.”
80 / 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.”
81 / 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.”
82 / preference
“Because I listen to audiobooks often when I run and it’s so easy to just tune out.”
83 / 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.”