Lex Fridman Podcast

Introduction

Now, meanwhile, as far as the outside world is concerned, you've disappeared off the face of the earth, but you were actually working on a game. The following is a conversation with Jeff Kaplan, a legendary game designer of World of Warcraft and Overwatch, which are two of the biggest, most influential games ever made. He is genuinely one of the most amazing human beings I've ever met. In the many conversations I was fortunate enough to have with him, including while playing video games, he was always kind, thoughtful, hilarious, and still and forever a legit gamer, through and through. Of course, he's always quick to celebrate the incredible teams of creative minds he has gotten a chance to work with over the years, and they are truly incredible. Blizzard has created some of the greatest games ever made, games that to me personally have brought me thousands of hours of fun, meaning, and happiness, from Warcraft, to StarCraft, to Diablo, WoW, Overwatch and more. So for that, a big thank you to Jeff, to the entire Blizzard team, and to every creative mind in the video game industry, giving their heart and soul to build video game worlds that we fans get a chance to enjoy. This was a super fun, inspiring, whirlwind conversation, pun intended, with one of the most beloved gamers and game designers ever. Full of memes, lulz, wisdom, emotional rollercoaster moments, and of course, Blizzard video game lore.

Introduction

The following is a conversation with Rick Beato, legendary music educator, interviewer, producer, songwriter, and a true multi-instrument musician, playing guitar, bass, cello, and piano. Rick, with his incredible YouTube channel, celebrates great musicians and musical ideas, and helps millions of people, including me, fall in love with great music all over again. This is Lex Fridman Podcast. To support it, please check out our sponsors in the description, where you can also find links to contact me, ask questions, give feedback, and so on. And now, dear friends, here's Rick Beato. You had, I think, an incredibly fun and diverse beginning to your music journey.

Episode highlight

I watched my agent happily click the "I'm not a robot" button. I made the agent very aware. Like, it knows what his source code is. It understands th- how it sits and runs in its own harness. It knows where documentation is. It knows which model it runs. It understands its own system that made it very easy for an agent to... Oh, you don't like anything? You just prompted it to existence, and then the agent would just modify its own software. People talk about self-modifying software, I just built it. I actually think wipe coding is a slur. You prefer agentic engineering?

Introduction

The following is a conversation all about the state of the art in artificial intelligence, including some of the exciting technical breakthroughs and developments in AI that happened over the past year, and some of the interesting things we think might happen this upcoming year. At times, it does get super technical, but we do try to make sure that it remains accessible to folks outside the field without ever dumbing it down. It is a great honor and pleasure to be able to do this kind of episode with two of my favorite people in the AI community, Sebastian Raschka and Nathan Lambert. They are both widely respected machine learning researchers and engineers who also happen to be great communicators, educators, writers, and X posters. Sebastian is the author of two books I highly recommend for beginners and experts alike. First is Build a Large Language Model from Scratch, and Build a Reasoning Model from Scratch. I truly believe in the machine learning and computer science world, the best way to learn and understand something is to build it yourself from scratch. Nathan is the post-training lead at the Allen Institute for AI, and author of the definitive book on reinforcement learning from human feedback. Both of them have great X accounts, great Substacks. Sebastian has courses on YouTube, Nathan has a podcast. And everyone should absolutely follow all of those. This is the Lex Fridman podcast.

Episode highlight

... were standing there. Everyone is waiting, because at any moment an arrow could just fly through your neck, and there's people holding shotguns. And the anthropologist, this little guy, is standing there in the front, and he's going, "Wamole." He's going, "Brothers." And then it happened. Then you start hearing people screaming, "Mashco! Mashco!" And people are screaming and women are lifting children and running into the huts and the dogs and chickens are going nuts and— So fear.

Introduction

The following is a conversation with Joel David Hamkins, a mathematician and philosopher specializing in set theory, the foundation of mathematics, and the nature of infinity. He is the number one highest rated user on MathOverflow, which I think is a legendary accomplishment. MathOverflow, by the way, is like StackOverflow but for research mathematicians. He is also the author of several books, including Proof in The Art of Mathematics and Lectures on the Philosophy of Mathematics. And he has a great blog, infinitelymore.xyz. This is a super technical and super fun conversation about the foundation of modern mathematics and some mind-bending ideas about infinity, nature of reality, truth, and the mathematical paradoxes that challenged some of the greatest minds of the 20th century. I have been hiding from the world a bit, reading, thinking, writing, soul-searching, as we all do every once in a while. But mostly, just deeply focused on work and preparing mentally for some challenging travel I plan to take on in the new year. Through all of it, a recurring thought comes to me, how damn lucky I am to be alive and to get to experience so much love from folks across the world. I want to take this moment to say thank you from the bottom of my heart for everything, for your support, for the many amazing conversations I've had with people across the world. I got a little bit of hate and a whole lot of love, and I wouldn't have it any other way. I'm grateful for all of it. This is the Lex Fridman Podcast.

Introduction

The following is a conversation with Irving Finkel, a scholar of ancient languages, curator at the British Museum for over 45 years, and a much-admired and respected world expert on cuneiform script. More generally, he's an expert on ancient languages of Sumerian, Akkadian, and Babylonian, as well as ancient board games and Mesopotamia magic, medicine, literature, and culture. I should also mention that both on and off the mic, Irving was a super kind and fun person to talk to, with an infectious enthusiasm for ancient history that, of course, I already love but fell in love with even more. This is the Lex Fridman Podcast. To support it, please check out our sponsors in the description, or you can also find links to contact me, ask questions, get feedback, and so on.

Introduction

The following is a conversation with Michael Levin, his second time on the podcast. He is one of the most fascinating and brilliant biologists and scientists I've ever had the pleasure of speaking with. He and his labs at Tufts University study and build biological systems that help us understand the nature of intelligence, agency, memory, consciousness, and life in all of its forms here on Earth and beyond. This is the Lex Fridman Podcast. To support it, please check out our sponsors in the description, where you can also find links to contact me, ask questions, give feedback, and so on. And now, dear friends, here's Michael Levin.

Introduction

The following is a conversation with David Kirtley, a nuclear engineer, expert on nuclear fusion, and the CEO of Helion Energy, a company working on building nuclear fusion reactors and have made incredible progress in a short period of time that make it seem possible, like we could actually get there as a civilization. This is exciting because nuclear fusion, if achieved commercially, will solve most of our energy needs in a clean, safe way, providing virtually unlimited clean electricity. The problem is that fusion is incredibly difficult to achieve. You need to heat hydrogen to over 100 million degrees Celsius and contain it long enough for atoms to fuse. That's why the joke in the past has been that fusion is 30 years away, and always will be. Just in case you're not familiar, let me clarify the difference between nuclear fusion and nuclear fission. By the way, I believe according to the excellent Sample Size subreddit post by pmgoodbeer on this, the preferred pronunciation of the latter in the U.S. is nuclear fission, like vision. And in the U.K. and other countries is nuclear fission, like mission. I prefer the nuclear fission pronunciation because America. So today's nuclear power plants use nuclear fission. They split apart heavy uranium atoms to release energy. Fusion does the opposite. It combines light hydrogen atoms together, the same reaction that powers the sun and the stars. The result is that it's clean fuel from water, no long-lived radioactive waste, and inherently safe because a fusion reactor can't melt down.

Episode highlight

You said that Red Dead Redemption 2, in your opinion, is the best thing you've ever done. I think there's a strong case to be made that it's the greatest game of all time. What are the elements that make that game truly great, do you think? People searching for meaning within, amongst the violence. I think the West and all of the themes around the West really lend themselves to that. And then the gunplay was fantastic, and the horses were incredible. I think we got to spend, a smaller group of us, working on it from day one, coming up with some weird, wacky ideas that we got to embed in the game. And I think it was helpful that we got to be very creative before it had a full team on it.

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We all have the capacity to kill and murder people and do other terrible things. The question is, why we don't do those things, rather than why we do do those things, quite often. Most men have fantasized about killing someone, about 70% in two studies, and most women as well. More than 50% of women have fantasized about killing somebody. So, murder fantasies are incredibly common.

Introduction

The following is a conversation with Pavel Durov, Founder and CEO of Telegram, a messaging platform actively used by over 1 billion people. Pavel has spent his life fighting for freedom of speech, building tools that protect human communication from surveillance and censorship. For this, he has faced pressure from some of the most powerful governments and organizations on earth. In the face of this immense pressure, he has always held his ground, continuously fighting to protect user privacy and the freedom of all of us humans to communicate with each other. I got the chance to spend a few weeks with him and can definitively say that he's one of the most principled and fearless humans I've ever met. Plus, when I posted that I'm hanging out with Pavel, a lot of people, fans of his, wrote to me asking if he does, in fact, privately live the disciplined ascetic life he's known for. No alcohol, stoic mindset, strict diet and exercise, including a crazy amount of daily pull-ups and push-ups. No phone, except to occasionally test Telegram features, and so on. Yes, he's 100% that guy, which made the experience of hanging out with him really inspiring to me. I'm grateful for it and I'm grateful to now be able to call him a friend. This podcast conversation is in parts philosophical, about freedom, life, human nature, and the nature of government bureaucracies. And it is also in parts super technical because to me, it's fascinating that Telegram has a relatively small engineering team and yet is able to basically out-innovate all of its competitors with an insane rate of introducing new, unique features. Just like the meme of the Simpsons did it first, when you consider all the features we know and love in our communication apps, in almost every case, Telegram did it first. So we discuss it all, from the Kafkaesque situation he's in the midst of France, to the roller coaster of his life and career, to his philosophy on technology, freedom, and the human condition.

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Hitler invited three young tank generals to his office, and they had a plan, which was the plan to go through the Ardennes Mountains. That was the victorious idea. So it's not the drugs, actually that idea to go through the Ardennes Mountain. If you, if you think monocausal, you would say that's the reason. That idea was genius, and Hitler immediately understood it, because before, the plan was to attack in the north of Belgium, which is the same as World War I. You, it, it becomes a stalemate and they fight for months, and no one really moves, and it's bloody, and it's nothing's happening. It's bad. But that was the only plan that they had. That's why the high command said, "No, we're not gonna do it. It's stupid. But these three tank generals said, "Look, if we go with the whole army through the Ardennes Mountains," and Hitler was like, "Eh, this is not possible. This is like a mountain range. How can the whole German army fit through this eye of a needle," basically. And they said, "No, we can do it because everyone misunderstands what tanks can do. Tanks are not slow machines in the back that wait for the action to happen, and then support this somehow. We're going to use tanks in the front as race cars, basically. We're going to overpower the enemy. We're going to be in France before they know it.

Episode highlight

T. rex is definitely weird, even compared to all the other giant tyrannosaurs that are very closely related to it, because it is by far, ludicrously by far, the largest carnivore in its ecosystem. So it doesn't really have competition, actually.

Introduction

The following is a conversation with Dave Plummer, programmer and an old-school Microsoft software engineer who helped work on Windows 95, NT, and XP, building a lot of incredible tools, some of which have been continuously used by hundreds of millions of people, like the famed Windows Task Manager. Yes, the Windows Task Manager, and the zip/unzip compression support in Windows. He also ported the code for Space Cadet Pinball, also known as 3D Pinball, to Windows. Today, he's loved by many programmers and engineers for his amazing YouTube channel called Dave's Garage. You should definitely go check it out. Also, he wrote a book on autism, and about his life story, called Secrets of the Autistic Millionaire, where he gives really interesting insights about how to navigate relationships, career, and day-to-day life with autism. All this taken together, this was a super fun conversation about the history and future of programming, computing, technology, and just building cool stuff in the proverbial garage. This is the Lex Fridman Podcast. To support it, please check out our sponsors in the description, and now, dear friends, here's Dave Plummer.

From the Cold War to the War on Terror

Scott Horton and Lex Fridman discuss from the cold war to the war on terror.

Introduction

The following is a conversation with Keyu Jin, an economist at the London School of Economics, specializing in China's economy, international macroeconomics, global trade imbalances, and financial policy. She wrote the highly lauded book on China titled The New China Playbook: Beyond Socialism and Capitalism that details China's economic transformation since 1978 to today. And it dispels a lot of misconceptions about China's economy that people in the West have. This is the Lex Fridman Podcast. To support it, please check out our sponsors in the description and consider subscribing to this channel. And now, dear friends, here's Keyu Jin.

Origin story of Genghis Khan

Genghis Khan, born in approximately 1162, became the conqueror of the largest contiguous empire in history. But before that, he was a boy named Temüjin, who at nine years old, lost everything. His father, his tribe, living in poverty, abandoned to the harshness of the Mongolian steppe. From a boy with nothing to the conqueror of the world. So tell me about this boy, his childhood and the Mongolian steppe from which he came from. The story of Genghis Khan, like the story I think of all of us, it doesn't begin at birth, it begins... That's the beginning of life. The story begins long before birth, and sometimes it can be many generations before and sometimes only shortly before. But I think with Genghis Khan, a crucial thing is to understand how his parents met and then how he was conceived. And that is that one day a cart was coming across the Mongol territory and only women drove carts. Men rode horses, women also rode horses, but women owned the houses which were called gers, the tents. They owned all the household equipment, and so they had to have carts for moving back and forth. And the fact that a cart was moving meant that some woman was moving from one place to another. And in fact, her husband was with her. She was a new bride and her husband was on a horse close to her.

Episode highlight

It's hard for us humans to make any kind of clean predictions about highly nonlinear dynamical systems. But again, to your point, we might be very surprised what classical learning systems might be able to do about even fluid. Yes, exactly. I mean, fluid dynamics, Navier-Stokes equations, these are traditionally thought of as very, very difficult intractable problems to do on classical systems. They take enormous amounts of compute, weather prediction systems. These kinds of things all involve fluid dynamics calculations.

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No one anywhere who's serious believes that cookie banners does anything good for anyone, yet we've been unable to get rid of it. This is the thing that really gets me about cookie banners too. It's not just the EU, it's the entire world. You can't hide from cookie banners anywhere on this planet. If you go to goddamn Mars on one of Elon's rockets and you try to access a web page, you'll still see a cookie banner. No one in the universe is safe from this nonsense. It sometimes feels like we're barely better off. Web pages aren't that different from what they were in the late '90s, early 2000s. They're still just forms. They still just write to databases. A lot of people, I think, are very uncomfortable with the fact that they are essentially crud monkeys. They just make systems that create, read, update, or delete rows in a database and they have to compensate for that existential dread by over complicating things. That's a huge part of the satisfaction of driving a race car is driving in at the edge of adhesion, as we call it, where you're essentially just a tiny movement away from spinning out. Doesn't take much. Then the car starts rotating. Once it starts rotating, you lose grip and you're going for the wall. That balance of danger and skill is what's so intoxicating.

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We want to avoid wars, we have to have serious deterrence because our enemies need to understand, we will use selective, focused, overwhelming military power when we are facing threats like an Iranian nuclear weapon. I'm not seeing the peace through strength. I'm seeing permanent militarism and permanent war through strength.

Introduction

The following is a conversation with Terence Tao, widely considered to be one of the greatest mathematicians in history, often referred to as The Mozart of Math. He won the Fields Medal and the Breakthrough Prize in Mathematics, and has contributed groundbreaking work to a truly astonishing range of fields in mathematics and physics. This was a huge honor for me for many reasons, including the humility and kindness that Terry showed to me throughout all our interactions. It means the world. This is the Lex Fridman Podcast. To support it, please check out our sponsors in the description or at LexFridman.com/sponsors. And now, dear friends, here's Terence Tao.

Episode highlight

It was a five-year waiting list, and we got a rotary telephone. But it dramatically changed our lives. People would come to our house to make calls to their loved ones. I would have to go all the way to the hospital to get blood test records and it would take two hours to go and they would say, "Sorry, it's not ready. Come back the next day.", two hours to come back. And that became a five-minute thing. So as a kid, this light bulb went in my head, this power of technology to change people's lives. We had no running water. It was a massive drought, so they would get water in these trucks, maybe eight buckets per household. So me and my brother, sometimes my mom, we would wait in line, get that and bring it back home. Many years later, we had running water and we had a water heater, and you could get hot water to take a shower. For me, everything was discreet like that.

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And you see that manifest itself on D-Day, where you've got 6,939 vessels, of which there are 1,213 warships, 4,127 assault craft, 12,500 aircraft. 155,000 men landed, and dropped from the air, in a 24-hour period. It is phenomenal. It is absolutely phenomenal.

Introduction

The following is a conversation with Oliver Anthony, a singer-songwriter from Virginia who first gained worldwide fame with his viral hit Rich Men North of Richmond. He became a voice for many who are voiceless with his songs speaking to the struggle of the working class in modern American life. His legal name is Christopher Anthony Lunsford. Oliver Anthony was his grandfather's name. And so, Chris used this name as a dedication to his grandfather, and to 1930s Appalachia where his grandfather was born and raised.

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... black holes, curve space and time around them, in the way that we've been describing, things fall along the curves in space. If the black holes move around, the curves have to follow them, right? But they can't travel faster than the speed of light either. So what happens is black holes, let's say move around, maybe I've got two black holes in orbit around each other, that can happen. It takes a while. A wave is created in the actual shape of space, and that wave follows the black holes as black holes are undulating. Eventually those two black holes will merge. And as we were talking about, it doesn't take an infinite time, even though there's time dilation because they're both so big, they're really deforming spacetime a lot. I don't have a little tiny marble falling across an event horizon. I have two event horizons, and in the simulations you can see a bobble and they merge together and they make one bigger black hole. And then it radiates in the gravitational waves. It radiates away all those imperfections and it settles down to one quiescent, perfectly silent black hole that's spinning. Beautiful stuff. And it emits E equals MC squared energy. So the mass of the final black hole will be less than the sum of the two starter black holes. And that energy is radiated away in this ringing of spacetime. It's really important to emphasize that it's not light. None of this has to do literally with light that we can detect with normal things that detect light. X-rays, form of light, gamma rays are a form of light, infrared, optical. This whole electromagnetic spectrum, none of it is emitted as light. It's completely dark.

Episode highlight

Humans are by far the hardest part of computer graphics because millions of years of evolution have given us dedicated brain systems to detect patterns in faces and infer emotions and intent because cavemen had to, when they see a stranger, determine whether they were likely friendly or they might be trying to kill them. And so people in the world have extraordinarily detailed expectations of a face and we can notice imperfections, especially perfections arising from computer graphics limitations. Okay, one part is capturing humans and so [inaudible 00:00:33] really advanced, dedicated hardware that puts a human in a capture sphere with dozens of cameras in them taking high resolution, high frame rate video of them as they go through a range of motions. And then capturing the human face is complicated because the nuanced detail of our faces and how all the muscles and sinews and fat work together to give us different expressions. So it's not only about the shape of a person's face, but it's also about the entire range of motion that they might go through. So that's the data problem. There's a lot of other problems with computer graphics. There's technology for rendering hair, which is really hard. Because you can't render every... Again, we know the laws of physics. It would be easy to just render every hair. It would just be a billion times too slow. So you need approximations that capture the net effect of hair on rendering and on pixels without calculating every single interaction of every light with every strand of hair. That's one part of it. There's detailed features for different parts of faces. There's subsurface scattering because we think of humans as opaque, but really our skin, light travels through it. It's not completely opaque, and the way in which light travels through skin has a huge impact on our appearance.

Introduction

The following is a conversation with Jeffrey Wasserstrom, a historian of modern China. This is the Lex Fridman Podcast. To support it, please check out our sponsors in the description. And now, dear friends, here's Jeffrey Wasserstrom.

Episode highlight

I write the script in December. January, Josh Arnett, Marley Shelton, come down, fly Frank in. Shooting for 10 hours on my green screen. We shoot that opening sequence, incredible opening sequence and the visual Look, we've never seen that. I want to just take this and make it move. I just want the comic to move. Any other studio would just go make it look like any gritty crime movie, and they would miss the point that the visual is half of it. I want it to look just like this because it would be the boldest movie anyone's seen because that's how it reads when I read the book. It's like, if this was moving, it would be the most phenomenal movie. Just by being around him and working with him you get by osmosis, you learn stuff and it just ups your game because they're just swing way beyond you. Jim Cameron was like that. So when I first met him, I was trying to impress the hell out of him because I was such a big fan. I was about to go do Desperado and I went, "Hey, I just took a three-day Steadicam course because I can't afford a Steadicam operator, so I'm going to operate Steadicam myself on Desperado." Now if he was just my peer, he'd say, "Oh, I did the same thing," and I'm going to do the same thing. That would be hanging out with somebody of your I, but you want somebody who's above that. Do you know what he said? He goes, "I bought about a Steadicam, but not to operate it. I'm going to take it apart and design a better one. Us mere mortals trying to learn how to operate the camera. He's designing all new systems. That's the guy you want to hang out with, not someone who's doing what you're doing.

Episode highlight

All the people who sold the war in Iraq, they lied us into war after a war. They've bankrupted the country, damn near destroyed the dollar and no one loses their job. No one even gets in trouble over any of this. If you make everybody monsters and they're not human beings, well, you can't do diplomacy with monsters, you can't negotiate with monsters, but you can with humans. Maybe there are times where you shouldn't negotiate or you can't negotiate with humans, but it's better if you can. And we could use a lot more of that thinking. Donald Trump has put a lot of political capital chips into the middle of the table that, "I can end this war." And he's going to look very, very bad if he can't. So he's very highly incentivized to get this thing done as quick as possible. You are fighting in a way that produces more of the thing that you're fighting, and so the first step is to stop doing that. Your cure is making the patient more sick. So stop doing that. And then let's see if maybe we could heal. Where are the tapes? Why is everyone talking about the flight logs and the files? Where are the tapes? This guy was clearly taping people to blackmail them. Why does anything need to be redacted for national security? I'm sorry. You're telling me there's a pedophile ring and we can't tell you everything about it for national security? Why would that be related to national security?

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... end up chanting in front of him, "Viva la Muerte. Long-lived death." They have their counterparts today. They are the people who taunt Americans, Westerners, Israelis, and others with lines like, "We love death more than you love live."

Episode highlight

Democrats still think the currency of politics is money and the currency of politics is attention. And that's a huge difference between the two sides right now. I think the steel man is very easy to make here. Department of government efficiency. That sounds like an organization that's needed if government is inefficient. And one of the themes of our book is just how inefficient government can be, not only at building houses, building energy, often at achieving its own ends. Building high-speed rail when it wants to build high-speed rail. Adding affordable housing units when it wants to add affordable housing units. I love Ezra's line that we don't just need to think about deregulating the market. We need to think about deregulating government itself, getting the rules out of the way that keep government from achieving the democratic outcomes that it's trying to achieve. This is a world in which a department of government efficiency is a godsend. We should be absolutely obsessed with making government work well, especially if we're going to be the kind of liberals who believe that government is important in the first place.

Introduction

The following is a conversation with Michael Paulson, better known online as ThePrimeagen. He is a programmer who has entertained and inspired millions of people to have fun building stuff with software, whether you're a newbie or a seasoned developer who has been battling it out in the software engineering trenches for decades. In short, ThePrimeagen is a legendary programmer and a great human being with an inspiring roller coaster of a life story. This is the Lex Fridman Podcast. To support it, please check out our sponsors in the description. And now, dear friends, here's ThePrimeagen.

In this episode...

My strength lies not in my name, but in the backing of 1.4 billion Indians and thousands of years of timeless culture and heritage. So wherever I go, I carry with me the essence of thousands of years of Vedic tradition, the timeless teachings of Swami Vivekananda and the blessings, dreams, and aspirations of 1.4 billion Indians. When I shake hands with the world leader, it's not Modi, but 1.4 billion Indians doing so. So this isn't my strength at all. It is rather the strength of India. Whenever we speak of peace, the world listens to us, because India is the land of Gautama Buddha and Mahatma Gandhi, and Indians aren't hardwired to espouse strife and conflict. We espouse harmony instead. We seek neither to wage war against nature, nor to foster strife among nations. We stand for peace, and wherever we can act as peacemakers, we have gladly embraced that responsibility. My early life was spent in extreme poverty, but we never really felt the burden of poverty. You see, someone who is used to wearing fine shoes will feel their absence when they don't have them, but for us, we had never worn shoes in our lives. So how would we even know that wearing shoes was a big deal? We weren't in a position to compare. That's just how we lived.

DeepSeek-R1 and DeepSeek-V3

A lot of people are curious to understand China's DeepSeek AI models, so let's lay it out. Nathan, can you describe what DeepSeek-V3 and DeepSeek-R1 are, how they work, how they're trained? Let's look at the big picture and then we'll zoom in on the details. DeepSeek-V3 is a new mixture of experts, transformer language model from DeepSeek who is based in China. They have some new specifics in the model that we'll get into. Largely this is a open weight model and it's a instruction model like what you would use in ChatGPT. They also released what is called the base model, which is before these techniques of post-training. Most people use instruction models today, and those are what's served in all sorts of applications. This was released on, I believe, December 26th or that week. And then weeks later on January 20th, DeepSeek released DeepSeek-R1, which is a reasoning model, which really accelerated a lot of this discussion.

Introduction

I mean, look, we're adding a trillion dollars to the national debt every 100 days right now, and it's now passing the size of the Defense Department budget and it's compounding, and pretty soon it's going to be adding a trillion dollars every 90 days, and then it's going to be adding a trillion dollars every 80 days, and then it's going to be a trillion dollars every 70 days. And then if this doesn't get fixed, at some point, we enter a hyper-inflationary spiral and we become Argentina or Brazil. And ... The following is a conversation with Marc Andreessen, his second time on the podcast. Marc is a visionary tech leader and investor who fundamentally shaped the development of the internet and the tech industry in general over the past 30 years. He's the co-creator of Mosaic, the first widely used web browser, co-founder of Netscape, co-founder of the legendary Silicon Valley venture capital firm, Andreessen Horowitz, and is one of the most influential voices in the tech world, including at the intersection of technology and politics. This is the Lex Fridman Podcast. To support it, please check out our sponsors in the description. And now, dear friends, here's Marc Andreessen.

Milton Friedman

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. Can you talk about the big picture ideas they converge on? Yeah. So, Milton Friedman and Ayn Rand, in the biggest picture, they're both individualists, and they're skeptical of collectivities and collectivism. So, their unit of analysis is the individual. What's good for the individual? What works for the individual? Their understanding of society flows from that. They also both use this focus on individualism to justify and to support capitalism as a social and economic system. So, we can put them in a similar category. We can call them individualists. We could call them libertarians of a sort. They're also really different in how they approach capitalism, how they approach thinking.

Introduction

I hope the Kyiv Airport will open soon then it will be easier to fly in. Yes. I think that the war will end and President Trump may be the first leader to travel here by airplane. I think it would be symbolic by airplane.

Introduction

If we don't ask how long they last, but instead ask what's the probability that there have been any civilizations at all, now matter how long they lasted. I'm not asking whether they exist now or not, I'm just asking in general about probabilities to make a technological civilization anywhere and at any time in the history of the university. That, we're able to constrain. What we found was basically that there have been 10 billion trillion habitable zone planets in the universe. What that means is those are 10 billion trillion experiments that have been run. The only way that we're the only time that this whole process from abiogenesis to a civilization has occurred is if everyone one of those experiments failed. Therefore, you could put a probability, we called it the Pessimism Line. We don't really know what nature sets for the probability of making intelligent civilizations, but we could set a limit using this. We could say, look, if the probability per habitable zone planet is less than 10 to the minus-22, one in 10 billion trillion, then yeah, we're alone. If it's anywhere larger than that, then we're not the first. It's happened somewhere else. To me, that was mind-blowing. It doesn't tell me there's anybody nearby, the galaxy could be sterile. It just told me that unless nature's really has some bias against civilizations, we're not the first time this has happened. This has happened elsewhere over the course of cosmic history.

Introduction

People need to go back and read the history of the first 100 days under FDR, the sheer amount of legislation that went through, his ability to bring Congress to heel and the Senate, he gets all this stuff through. But as you and I know, legislation takes a long time to put into place, right? We've had people starving on the streets all throughout 1933 under Hoover. The difference was Hoover was seen as this do nothing joke who would dine nine course meals in the White House, and he is a filthy rich banker. FDR comes in there and every single day has fireside chats, he's passing legislation, but more importantly, he tries various different programs, then they get ruled unconstitutional, he tries even more. So what does America take away from that? Every single time, if he gets knocked down, he comes back fighting. And that was, really, part of his character that he developed after he got polio. And it gave him the strength to persevere through personally what he could transfer in his calm demeanor and his feeling of fight that America really got that spirit from him and was able to climb itself out of the Great Depression. He's such an inspirational figure.

Introduction

So what is the difference between a madman and a genius? Success. The following is a conversation with Javier Milei, the president of Argentina. He is a libertarian, anarcho-capitalist, and economist, who campaigned with a chainsaw that symbolized his promise to slash the corrupt bureaucracy of the state. He stepped into the presidency one year ago, with a country on the brink of hyperinflation, deepened debt and suffering from mass unemployment and poverty. He took this crisis head on, transforming one of Latin America's largest economies through pure free market principles. In just a few months in office, he already achieved Argentina's first fiscal surplus in 16 years, and not just avoided the hyperinflation but brought inflation down to its lowest in three years.

Introduction

If you extrapolate the curves that we've had so far, right? If you say, "Well, I don't know, we're starting to get to PhD level, and last year we were at undergraduate level, and the year before we were at the level of a high school student," again, you can quibble with what tasks and for what. "We're still missing modalities, but those are being added," like computer use was added, like image generation has been added. If you just kind of eyeball the rate at which these capabilities are increasing, it does make you think that we'll get there by 2026 or 2027. I think there are still worlds where it doesn't happen in 100 years. The number of those worlds is rapidly decreasing. We are rapidly running out of truly convincing blockers, truly compelling reasons why this will not happen in the next few years. The scale-up is very quick. We do this today, we make a model, and then we deploy thousands, maybe tens of thousands of instances of it. I think by the time, certainly within two to three years, whether we have these super powerful AIs or not, clusters are going to get to the size where you'll be able to deploy millions of these.

Introduction

Most people, most of the time are polite, cooperative, and kind until they're not. The following is a conversation with Rick Spence, a historian specializing in the history of intelligence agencies, espionage, secret societies, conspiracies, the occult and military history. This is the Lex Fridman Podcast. To support it, please check out our sponsors in the description. And now dear friends, here's Rick Spence.

Introduction

The ideas that I am talking about are ideas that are widely supported. Everything that I talk about raising them, minimum wage, health care for all, a tax system which demands the billionaires pay their fair share, those are all popular ideas, but people didn't know. You got to run for president and have 20,000 people come out to your rallies and win 23 states. They say, "Hmm. Well, maybe those ideas are not so crazy after all, and we've got to entertain them." The establishment doesn't like that. They really don't. They want to tell you, and this is their main... This is how they succeed. What they say, Lex, is, "The world is the way it is. It always will be this way. We got the wealth. We got the power. And don't think of anything else. This is the way it is. You have no power. Give up." They don't say it quite that way, but that's really what the intent is. And what we showed is, guess what? Running an outsider campaign, we took on the Democratic establishment, we came close to winning it, and we did win 23 states. And the ideas that we're talking about are the ideas that working class people, young people believe in.

Introduction

The big question for me in that timeline is why didn't we do it sooner? Why did it take so long? Why did we wait until after 12,000 years ago, really after 10,000 years ago to start seeing the beginnings of civilization? The following is a conversation with Graham Hancock, a journalist and author who for over 30 years has explored the controversial possibility that there existed a lost civilization during the last ice age and that it was destroyed in a global cataclysm some 12,000 years ago. He is the presenter of the Netflix documentary series, Ancient Apocalypse, the second season of which has just been released and it's focused on the distant past of the Americas.

Nietzsche

You have given a set of lectures on Nietzsche as part of the new Peterson Academy, and the lectures were powerful. There's some element of the contradictions, the tensions, the drama, the way you like, lock in on an idea, but then are struggling with that idea, all of that, that feels like it's a Nietzschean. Well, he's a big influence on me stylistically and in terms of the way I approached writing, and also many of the people that were other influences of mine were very influenced by him. So I was blown away when I first came across his writings. They're so intellectually dense that I don't know if there's anything that approximates that. Dostoevsky maybe, although he's much more wordy. Nietzsche is very succinct partly he was so ill because he would think all day he couldn't spend a lot of time writing. And he condenses writings into very short while this Aphoristic style he had, and it's really something to strive for. And then he's also an exciting writer like Dostoevsky and dynamic and romantic in that emotional way. And so it's really something, and I really enjoyed doing that. I did that lecture that you described, that lecture series is on the first half of Beyond Good and Evil, which is a stunning book. And that was really fun to take pieces of it and then to describe what they mean and how they've echoed across the decades since he wrote them. And yeah, it's been great.

Introduction

The following is a conversation with the founding members of the Cursor team, Michael Truell, Sualeh Asif, Arvid Lunnemark, and Aman Sanger. Cursor is a code editor based on VS Code that adds a lot of powerful features for AI-assisted coding. It has captivated the attention and excitement of the programming and AI communities. So I thought this is an excellent opportunity to dive deep into the role of AI in programming. This is a super technical conversation that is bigger than just about one code editor. It's about the future of programming and in general, the future of human AI collaboration in designing and engineering complicated and powerful systems. This is the Lex Fridman podcast. To support it, please check out our sponsors in the description. And now, dear friends, here's Michael, Sualeh, Arvid and Aman.

Introduction

For the vast majority of human existence, we've been nomadic and we've done these wider or tighter nomadic circles, depending on the geographic region, but they'd move. So once humans figured out how to stay in a place, that's the initial trigger to what would become civilization. I think you said beauty and blood went hand in hand for the Aztec.

Introduction

The way I would do it, 75% headcount reduction across the board in the federal bureaucracy, send them home packing, shut down agencies that shouldn't exist, rescind every unconstitutional regulation that Congress never passed. In a true self-governing democracy, it should be our elected representatives that make the laws and the rules, not unelected bureaucrats. Merit and equity are actually incompatible. Merit and group quotas are incompatible. You can have one or the other, you can't have both. It's an assault and a crusade on the nanny state itself. And that nanny state presents itself in several forms. There's the entitlement state, it's the welfare state, presents itself in the form of the regulatory state. That's what we're talking about. And then there's the foreign nanny state where effectively we are subsidizing other countries that aren't paying their fair share of protection or other resources we provide them. If I was to summarize my ideology, in a nutshell, it is to terminate the nanny state in the United States of America in all of its forms, the entitlement state, the regulatory state and the foreign policy nanny state. Once we've done that, we've revived the republic that I think would make George Washington proud.

Introduction

And the outcome here is a horrific man-made famine, not a natural disaster, not bad harvests, but a man-made famine as a result of then the compulsion that gets used by the Soviet state to extract those resources, cordoning off the area, not allowing starving people to escape. You put very well some of the implications of this case study in how things look in the abstract versus in practice, and those phenomena were going to haunt the rest of the experience of the Soviet Union. The whole notion that up and down the chain of command, everybody is falsifying or tinkering with or purifying the statistics or their reports in order not to look bad and not to have vengeance visited upon them reaches the point where nobody, in spite of the pretense of comprehensive knowledge, there's a state planning agency that creates five-year plans for the economy as a whole and which is supposed to have accurate statistics, all of this is founded upon a foundation of sand.

Ancient vs modern world

Rome always wins because even if they lose battles, they go to the Italian allies and half citizens and raise new armies. So how do you beat them? He can never raise that many troops himself. And Hannibal, I think correctly, figures out the one way to maybe defeat Rome is to cut them away from their allies. Well, how do you do this? Hannibal's plan is, "I'm not going to wait and fight the Romans in Spain or North Africa. I'm going to invade Italy. I'm going to strike at the heart of this growing Roman Empire. And my hope is that if I can win a couple big battles against Rome in Italy, the Italians will want their freedom back and they'll rebel from Rome and maybe even join me because most people who have been conquered want their freedom back, so this is a reasonable plan." Hannibal famously crosses the Alps with elephants. Dramatic stuff. Nobody expects him to do this. Nobody thinks you can do this. Shows up in Northern Italy. Romans send an army. Hannibal massacres them. He is a military genius. Rome takes a year, raises a second army. We know this story, sends it against Hannibal. Hannibal wipes them out.

Introduction

I don't know if you know this, but some people call you a fascist. Yeah, they do. So I figure it's all right to call them a communist. Yeah, they call me a lot worse than I call them.

Introduction

Communism makes no sense at all, totally opposed to human nature. It never works. It always evolves into dictatorship. It creates a power vacuum. When you say, "Hey, there's no structure of power here. We're all equal. It's a flat line," one guy usually gets up, because that's human nature, and goes, "I don't think so. I think if you're going to leave a power vacuum, I'm going to take that power vacuum." Corporatism hates competition. It wants monopoly and oligopoly power. Whereas capitalism loves competition and wants the free markets. When mainstream media has you hooked, you got no hope because you don't have the right information. You have propaganda, you have marketing. You don't have real news. When you're in the online world, it's chaotic. And don't get me wrong, it's got plenty of downsides, but within that chaos, the truth begins to emerge. Trump is a massive risk because of all the things we talked about earlier, but there is a percentage chance that he's such a wild card that he overturns the whole system, and that is why the establishment is a little scared of him.

Introduction

So I was trying to figure out how to do photorealistic AI photos, and it was ... Stable Diffusion by itself is not doing that well. The faces look all mangled, and it doesn't have enough resolution or something to do that well. But I started seeing these base models, these fine-tuned models, and people would train on porn, and I would try them and they would be very photorealistic. They would have bodies that actually made sense, body anatomy. But if you look at the photorealistic models that people use now, there's still core of porn there, of naked people. So I need to prompt out, and everybody needs to do this with AI startups, with imaging, you need to prompt out the naked stuff. You have to keep reminding the model, "You need to put clothes on the thing."

$1 million in cash

When you brought the $1 million in cash on Rogan's podcast, did you have security with you? We had security, but only by Joe Rogan's request. He said, "You're really going to bring it? Do you have security?" I said, "No." He's like, "Don't worry about it. I'll send my security."

Introduction

The following is a conversation with Elon Musk, DJ Seo, Matthew MacDougall, Bliss Chapman, and Noland Arbaugh about Neuralink and the future of humanity. Elon, DJ, Matthew and Bliss are of course part of the amazing Neuralink team, and Noland is the first human to have a Neuralink device implanted in his brain. I speak with each of them individually, so use timestamps to jump around, or as I recommend, go hardcore, and listen to the whole thing. This is the longest podcast I've ever done. It's a fascinating, super technical, and wide-ranging conversation, and I loved every minute of it. And now, dear friends, here's Elon Musk, his fifth time on this, the Lex Fridman podcast,

Introduction

The following is a conversation with Jordan Jonas, winner of Alone Season 6, a show where the task is to survive alone in the arctic wilderness longer than anyone else. He is widely considered to be one of, if not the greatest competitors on that show. He has a fascinating life story that took him from a farm in Idaho and hoboing on trains across America to traveling with tribes in Siberia. All that helped make him into a world-class explorer, survivor, hunter, wilderness guide, and most importantly, a great human being with a big heart and a big smile. This was a truly fun and fascinating conversation. Let me also mention that at the end, after the episode, I'll start answering some questions and we'll try to articulate my thinking on some top-of-mind topics. So, if that's of interest to you, keep listening after the episode is over. This is The Lex Fridman Podcast. Support it. Please check out our sponsors in the description. And now, dear friends, here's Jordan Jonas.

Introduction

The following is a conversation with Ivanka Trump, businesswoman, real estate developer, and former senior advisor to the president of the United States. I've gotten to know Ivanka well over the past two years. We've become good friends, hitting it off right away over our mutual love of reading, especially philosophical writings from Marcus Aurelius, Joseph Campbell, Alan Watts, Victor Franco, and so on. She is a truly kind, compassionate, and thoughtful human being. In the past, people have attacked her, in my view, to get indirectly at her dad, Donald Trump, as part of a dirty game of politics and clickbait journalism. These attacks obscured many projects and efforts, often bipartisan, that she helped get done, and they obscured the truth of who she is as a human being. Through all that, she never returned the attacks with anything but kindness and always walked through the fire of it all with grace. For this, and much more, she is an inspiration and I'm honored to be able to call her a friend.

Introduction

Hardship will show you who your real friends are. That's for sure. Can you read the quote once more? "Don't eat with people you wouldn't starve with."

Introduction

Can you have a conversation with an AI where it feels like you talked to Einstein or Feynman, where you ask them a hard question, they're like, "I don't know," and then after a week, they did a lot of research- They disappear and come back, yeah.

Introduction

You have an origin of life event. It evolves for 4 billion years, at least on our planet. It evolves a technosphere. The technologies themselves start having this property we call life, which is the phase we're undergoing now. It solves the origin of itself and then it figures out how that process all works, understands how to make more life, and then can copy itself onto another planet so the whole structure can reproduce itself. The following is a conversation with Sara Walker, her third time in this podcast. She is an astrobiologist and theoretical physicist interested in the origin of life and in discovering alien life on other worlds. She has written an amazing new upcoming book titled Life As No One Knows It, The Physics of Life's Emergence. This book is coming out on August 6th, so please go pre-order it now. It will blow your mind. This is The Lex Fridman Podcast. To support it, please check out our sponsors in the description. And now, dear friends, here's Sara Walker.

Introduction

The following is a conversation with Kevin Spacey, a two-time Oscar-winning actor, who has starred in Se7en, The Usual Suspects, American Beauty, and House of Cards. He is one of the greatest actors ever, creating haunting performances of characters who often embody the dark side of human nature. Seven years ago, he was cut from House of Cards, and canceled by Hollywood and the world, when Anthony Rapp made an allegation that Kevin Spacey sexually abused him in 1986. Anthony Rapp then filed a civil lawsuit seeking $40 million. In this trial and all civil and criminal trials that followed, Kevin was acquitted. He has never been found guilty nor liable in the court of law.

Introduction

If we create general superintelligences, I don't see a good outcome long-term for humanity. So there is X-risk, existential risk, everyone's dead. There is S-risk, suffering risks, where everyone wishes they were dead. We have also idea for I-risk, ikigai risks, where we lost our meaning. The systems can be more creative. They can do all the jobs. It's not obvious what you have to contribute to a world where superintelligence exists. Of course, you can have all the variants you mentioned, where we are safe, we are kept alive, but we are not in control. We are not deciding anything. We're like animals in a zoo. There is, again, possibilities we can come up with as very smart humans and then possibilities something a thousand times smarter can come up with for reasons we cannot comprehend. The following is a conversation with Roman Yampolskiy, an AI safety and security researcher and author of a new book titled AI: Unexplainable, Unpredictable, Uncontrollable. He argues that there's almost 100% chance that AGI will eventually destroy human civilization. As an aside, let me say that I'll have many often technical conversations on the topic of AI, often with engineers building the state-of-the-art AI systems. I would say those folks put the infamous P(doom) or the probability of AGI killing all humans at around one to 20%, but it's also important to talk to folks who put that value at 70, 80, 90, and is in the case of Roman, at 99.99 and many more nines percent.

Introduction

The act of remembering can change the memory. If you remember some event and then I tell you something about the event, later on when you remember the event, you might remember some original information from the event as well as some information about what I told you. And sometimes if you're not able to tell the difference, that information that I told you gets mixed into the story that you had originally. So now I give you some more misinformation or you're exposed to some more information somewhere else and eventually your memory becomes totally detached from what happened. The following is a conversation with Charan Ranganath, a psychologist and neuroscientist at UC Davis specializing in human memory. He's the author of, Why We Remember. Unlocking Memory's Power To Hold On To What Matters. This is the Lex Fridman podcast. To support it, please check out our sponsors in the description. And now, dear friends, here's Charan Ranganath. Danny Kahneman describes the experiencing self and the remembering self and that happiness and satisfaction you gained from the outcomes of your decisions do not come from what you've experienced, but rather from what you remember of the experience. So can you speak to this interesting difference that you write about in your book of the experiencing self and the remembering self?

Bushmaster snakes

So for people who don't know, bushmaster snakes, what are these things? These are vipers, I believe it's the largest viper on Earth.

Introduction

The whole point of relativity is to say there's no such thing as right now when you're far away. That is doubly true for what's inside a black hole. You might think, "Well, the galaxy is very big." It's really not. It's some tens of thousands of light years across and billions of years old. You don't need to move at a high fraction of the speed of light to fill the galaxy. The number of worlds is ...

Introduction

When we go to the dojos there, we all get thrown by people that never come out to be world champions. They're just in the mix or they're going through three years of university and then they go. We had a guy, we had a guy that came in. He was business guy, came in with his suitcase in his tie up like that. And he's in his lunch hour. He's in his lunch hour, right? So it's got to be quick. Yeah.

Introduction

Naively I certainly thought that all humans would have words for exact counting, and the Piraha don't. Okay, so they don't have any words for even one. There's not a word for one in their language. And so there's certainly not a word for two, three or four. And so that blows people's minds often. Yeah, that's blowing my mind.

Introduction

There's two people in the back, two of her homegirls wearing sheisty masks. I'm like, "What are we doing? Where are we going?" She goes, "We're going to go film the riot. We're going to Lake Street." We drive down there, Kmart is burning, Target is burning, everything is on fire. She has the Sony a7, she gives me a microphone and she's like, "Go talk to that guy." That was the guy with a molotov cocktail in his hand who had just burned Kmart down. I go, "What should I ask him? She goes, "What's on your mind?" I walk up to him and I'm like, "What's on your mind?" The following is a conversation with Andrew Callaghan, host of Channel 5 on YouTube, where he does Gazelle style interviews with fascinating humans at the edges of society. The so-called vagrants, vagabonds, runaways, outlaws, from QAnon adherence to fish heads, O'Block residents, and much more. He created the documentary that I highly recommend called This Place Rules, on the undercurrents that led to the January 6th Capitol riots. This is the Lex Fridman podcast. To support it, please check out our sponsors in the description. Now, dear friends, here's Andrew Callaghan.

Introduction

If I hate you, that's great, but if I have a story to support that hate, that's even better. One of your favorite words, "Jihad."

Introduction

It's a sad state of affairs when some of the most influential voices in our country will label someone a lover or supporter of dictators simply because you're saying, "Hey, we shouldn't be going to war. There is another way." The following is a conversation with Tulsi Gabbard, who was a longtime Democrat, including being the vice chair of the Democratic National Committee. She endorsed Bernie in 2016 and Biden in 2020. She has been both loved and heavily criticized for her independent thinking and bold political stances, especially on topics of war and the military industrial complex. She served in the US military for many years, achieving the rank of Lieutenant Colonel. And now she's the author of a new book called For Love of Country.

Introduction

The person who controls the algorithm controls the world, right? And if you are committed to one specific platform as your singular source of information or affiliated platforms, then whoever controls the algorithm or the programming there controls you. The following is a conversation with Mark Cuban, a multi-billionaire businessman, an investor and star of the series Shark Tank, longtime principal owner of the Dallas Mavericks, and is someone who is unafraid to get into frequent battles on X, most recently over topics of DEI, wokeism, gender and identity politics with the likes of Elon Musk and Jordan Peterson. This is the Lex Fridman podcast. To support it, please check out our sponsors in the description. And now, dear friends, here's Mark Cuban.

Introduction

Khabib beat Conor. Putin was on FaceTime before he even made it to the locker room. Trump sitting president, ex-president, watching all the fights calling, wants to talk about the fights. Valentina Shevchenko, every time she goes home, she meets with the president of the country. The list goes on and on and on. Elon Musk, Zuckerberg, I mean, the list goes on and on and on. The most powerful people in the world are all obsessed with fighting. The following is a conversation with Dana White, the president of the UFC, a mixed martial arts organization that revolutionized the art, the sport, and the business of fighting. And Dana is truly the mastermind behind the UFC. This is the Lex Fridman Podcast. To support it, please check out our sponsors in the description. And now, dear friends, here's Dana White. Do you remember when you saw your first fight?

Introduction

The United States has 1,770 nuclear weapons deployed, meaning those weapons could launch in as little as 60 seconds and up to a couple of minutes. Some of them on the bombers might take an hour or so. Russia has 1,674 deployed nuclear weapons. Same scenario. Their weapons systems are on par with ours. That's not to mention the 12,500 nuclear weapons amongst the nine nuclear armed nations. The sucking up into the nuclear stem, 300 mile an hour winds, you're talking about people miles out getting sucked up into that stem. When you see the mushroom cloud, Lex, that would be people 30, 40 mile wide mushroom cloud blocking out the sun, and that speaks nothing of the radiation poisoning that follows. In addition to the Launch on Warning concept, there's this other insane concept called Sole Presidential Authority. And you might think, in a democracy that's impossible, right? You can't just start a war. Well, you can just start a nuclear war if you are the commander in chief, the President of the United States. In fact, you're the only one who can do that. We are one misunderstanding, one miscalculation away from nuclear Armageddon. No matter how nuclear war starts, it ends with everyone dead.

Introduction

I think compute is going to be the currency of the future. I think it'll be maybe the most precious commodity in the world. I expect that by the end of this decade, and possibly somewhat sooner than that, we will have quite capable systems that we look at and say, "Wow, that's really remarkable." The road to AGI should be a giant power struggle. I expect that to be the case. Whoever builds AGI first gets a lot of power. Do you trust yourself with that much power?

Introduction

That's a good point. No, no, that's a good point. Now, some people accuse me of speaking very slowly, and they're advised on YouTube to turn up the speed twice to three times whenever I'm on. One of the reasons I speak slowly is because I attach value to every word I say.

Growing up in South Africa

Growing up in South Africa, you said it was a violent place. What are some formative moments that you remember from that time? South Africa was, so I grew up in apartheid South Africa, but more specifically the fall of apartheid. I was a teenager in the '80s and our community would, part of our social life frankly, was the anti-apartheid protests and to go be with white people, Black people, kind of mixing it all altogether. The most formative experiences, frankly, how much I appreciate a place like America where we have value for human life. So, that was a country where human life was not valued. It's a weird thing to come from that to here where we take it so seriously, if someone dies in a war or something like that, and we just didn't take it seriously.

Introduction

I see the danger of this concentration of power through proprietary AI systems as a much bigger danger than everything else. What works against this is people who think that for reasons of security, we should keep AI systems under lock and key because it's too dangerous to put it in the hands of everybody. That would lead to a very bad future in which all of our information diet is controlled by a small number of companies who proprietary systems. I believe that people are fundamentally good, and so if AI, especially open source AI can make them smarter, it just empowers the goodness in humans.

Introduction

What happened during World War II? Was that once the Germans started to run out of manpower, they created foreign legion groups. But because those people were not Aryans, they couldn't be trusted. So they were put under the command of Heinrich Himmler and the commando SS, and became known as SS Waffen units, and one of such units was created in Ukraine. The following is a conversation with Serhii Plokhy, a historian at Harvard University and the director of the Ukrainian Research Institute, also at Harvard. As a historian, he specializes in the history of Eastern Europe with an emphasis on Ukraine. He wrote a lot of great books on Ukraine and Russia, the Soviet Union, on Slavic peoples in general across centuries, on Chernobyl and nuclear disasters, and on the current war in Ukraine, a book titled The Russo-Ukrainian War: The Return of History.

Introduction

... he said very specifically, "Depending on the questions you ask Putin, you could be arrested or not." And I said, "Listen to what you're saying. You're saying the US government has control over my questions and they'll arrest me if I ask the wrong question. How are we better than Putin if that's true?" Killing Navalny during the Munich Security Conference in the middle of a debate over $60 billion in Ukraine funding. Maybe the Russians are dumb. I didn't get that vibe at all. I don't think we kill people in other countries to affect election outcomes. Oh wait, no, we do it a lot and have for 80 years. The following is a conversation with Tucker Carlson, a highly influential and often controversial political commentator. When he was a Fox, Time Magazine called him the most powerful conservative in America. After Fox. He has continued to host big, impactful interviews and shows on X, on the Tucker Carlson podcast, and on tuckercarlson.com. I recommend subscribing, even if you disagree with his views. It is always good to explore a diversity of perspectives. Most recently, he interviewed the President of Russia of Vladimir Putin. We discussed this, the topic of Russia, Putin, Navalny, and the War in Ukraine at length in this conversation. Please allow me to say a few words about the very fact that I did this interview. I have received a lot of criticism publicly and privately when I announced that I'll be talking with Tucker.

Introduction

The only person who'll cause you more harm than a thief with a dagger is a journalist with a pen. The following is a conversation with Bill Ackman, a legendary activist investor who has been part of some of the biggest and at times, controversial trades in history. Also, he is fearlessly vocal on X, FKA Twitter, and uses the platform to fight for ideas he believes in. For example, he was a central figure in the resignation of the President of Harvard University, Claudine Gay, the saga of which we discuss in this episode. This is the Lex Fridman podcast to support it. Please check out our sponsors in the description. And now to you, friends, here's Bill Ackman.

Early robots

Well, I was always a builder from a young age. I was lucky. My father was a frustrated engineer, and by that, I mean he wanted to be an aerospace engineer, but his mom from the old country thought that that would be like a grease monkey, and so she said no. So he became an accountant. But the result of that was our basement was always full of tools and equipment and electronics, and from a young age, I would watch him assembling an ICO kit or something like that. I still have a couple of his old ICO kits.

Introduction

You always know when you live in Gaza that it's only a matter of time before the next bombs drop. You know if you're in Gaza that you are waiting for your death. People dream about going out in the world and pursuing education. People dream about going out in the world and pursuing economic opportunity. In Gaza, your idea of opportunity is an opportunity to see the next year. That has been the case. And so, when we talk about this not existing in a vacuum, if people only hear about Gaza on October 7th, that is a major part of the problem. And that is, again, part of the problem of our ignorance and our apathy. Why is it that the plight of the people of Gaza is not brought up until an attack happens on Israel? The following is a conversation with Imam Dr. Omar Suleiman, his second time on the podcast. He is a Palestinian American, a Muslim scholar, a civil rights leader, president of the Yaqeen Institute for Islamic Research, and is one of the most influential Muslims in the world. Our previous conversation was focused on Islam. This time the focus was on Gaza and Palestine.

Introduction

Something has to happen with Iran. There has to be some diplomatic bilateral communication there. No. What has to happen is the containment of Iran.

Introduction

She found $40,000 in cash in my freezer one night. So she's like, "What is going on?" So we have this conversation and I tell her, "Look, people are looking for me." "Who?" "Law enforcement." "Which ones?" "All of them." She's like, "For what?" I go, "Mostly bank fraud." And she's like, "Well, how are they not finding you? I mean, people know you like your general contractor," which I met four months before, this guy, six months before, this one, two months before. She's like, "So-and-so, so-and-so..." And I'm like, "Right. Right." She's like, "I mean, they've got your name, they've got your... I go, "Well, that's identity theft." And she was like, "What do you mean?" I said, "Well, my name's not... it's not Joseph Carter." "What is your name?" I go "Look, don't even worry about it." The following is a conversation with Matthew Cox, a conman recently released from federal prison where he served 13 years for bank fraud, mortgage fraud, identity theft, passport fraud, and other charges. He has admitted guilt to all of it. He has written true-crime stories of many of his fellow prisoners. And now he continues this work by interviewing criminals about their crimes on his YouTube channel that I recommend called Inside True Crime. Exploring the mind of a criminal is exploring human nature at the extremes, often in its most raw and illuminating form. And that is something I definitely want to do with this podcast to understand the human mind and everything it is capable of. This is the Lex Fridman Podcast. To support it, please check out our sponsors in the description. And now, dear friends, here's Matthew Cox.

Introduction

I am standing on the edge of the cliff the entire night, and if I mess something up, mess it up, what even is a mistake? But if I do a little clunker or whatever it is, it's like, so what? I wouldn't have played half the stuff that I'm playing if I wasn't constantly standing on the edge of the cliff, like wild. Why stand at the edge of the cliff?

Introduction

The following is a conversation with Guillaume Verdon, the man behind the previously anonymous account @BasedBeffJezos on X. These two identities were merged by a doxxing article in Forbes titled, Who Is @BasedBeffJezos, The Leader Of The Tech Elite's E/Acc Movement? So let me describe these two identities that coexist in the mind of one human. Identity number one, Guillaume, is a physicist, applied mathematician, and quantum machine learning researcher and engineer receiving his PhD in quantum machine learning, working at Google on quantum computing, and finally launching his own company called Extropic that seeks to build physics-based computing hardware for generative AI. Identity number two, Beff Jezos on X is the creator of the effective accelerationism movement, often abbreviated as e/acc, that advocates for propelling rapid technological progress as the ethically optimal course of action for humanity. For example, its proponents believe that progress in AI is a great social equalizer, which should be pushed forward. e/acc followers see themselves as a counterweight to the cautious view that AI is highly unpredictable, potentially dangerous, and needs to be regulated. They often give their opponents the labels of quote, "doomers or decels" short for deceleration, as Beff himself put it, "e/acc is a mimetic optimism virus."

Introduction

That's all that matters, that he got there, that he got to the place to act like a fighter. To do what we want him to do, to be ready to persevere, to go beyond the comfort level, to do another round. He didn't want to. Damn right he didn't want to, but he knew we want him to. And he knew in order to pass the test, he had to do it. He goes, "Now, it's going to be your job to get him in the gym, make him mentally stronger, make him face things, and teach him how to slip punches and create holes, and fill those freaking holes with devastating punches..." There's a cuss, "... with punches with bad intentions." The following is a conversation with Teddy Atlas, a legendary and, at times, controversial boxing trainer and commentator. When I was going to this conversation with Teddy, I was ready to talk boxing, styles, matches, techniques, tactics, and his analysis of individual fighters, like Mike Tyson, Michael Moorer, Klitschkos, Usyk, Povetkin, Lomachenko, Triple G, Canelo, Muhammad Ali, Sugar Ray Leonard, Hagler, Duran, Floyd, and on and on and on. Like I said, I came ready to talk boxing, but I stayed for something even bigger, the Shakespearian human story of Teddy Atlas, Cus D'Amato, and Mike Tyson.

Introduction

The following is a conversation with Jeff Bezos, founder of Amazon and Blue Origin. This is his first time doing a conversation of this kind and of this length. And as he told me, it felt like we could have easily talked for many more hours, and I'm sure we will. This is the Lex Fridman Podcast. And now, dear friends, here's Jeff Bezos.

Introduction

Every star in the sky probably has planets and life is probably emerging on these planets. But I think the commentorial space associated with these planets is so different. Our causal cones are never going to overlap or not easily. And this is the thing that makes me sad about alien life, why we have to create alien life in the lab as quickly as possible because I don't know if we are going to be able to build architectures that will intersect with alien intelligence architectures. Intersect, you don't mean in time or space-

Introduction

The following is a conversation with Lisa Randall, a theoretical physicist and cosmologist at Harvard. Her work involves improving our understanding of particle physics, supersymmetry, baryogenesis, cosmological inflation, and dark matter. This is the Lex Friedman podcast. To support it, please check out our sponsors in the description. Now, dear friends, here's Lisa Randall.

Humor and absurdity

So what do you find funny? What makes you giggle in the most joyful of ways? The suffering of others? I mean, there are YouTube videos of fat people falling down and they're really funny.

Introduction

The following is a conversation with John Mearsheimer, a professor at University of Chicago and one of the most influential and controversial thinkers in the world. He teaches, speaks and writes about the nature of power and war on the global stage, in history and today. Please allow me to say, once again, my hope for this little journey I'm on. I will speak to everyone on all sides with compassion, with empathy, and with backbone. I'll speak with Vladimir Putin and with Volodymyr Zelenskyy, with Russians and with Ukrainians, with Israelis and with Palestinians, with everyone. My goal is to do whatever small part I can to decrease the amount of suffering in the world by trying to reveal our common humanity. I believe that in the end, truth and love wins. I will get attacked for being naive, for being a shill, for being weak. I'm none of those things, but I do make mistakes and I will get better. I love you all.

War and human nature

The following is a conversation with Elon Musk, his fourth time on this, the Lex Fridman Podcast. I thought you were going to finish it. It's one of the greatest themes in all of film history. Yeah, that's great.

Hamas attack on Israel

We did a lot of this conversation before the Hamas attack on Israel, and we decided to sit down again and finish the discussion to address the current situation which is still developing. If I may allow me to summarize the situation as it stands today, it's morning Monday, October 9th. On Saturday, October 7th at 6:30 AM Israel time, Hamas fired thousands of rockets into Southern Israel. The rocket attacks served as cover for a multi-pronged infiltration of Israel territory by over 1000 Hamas militants. This is shortly after at 7:40 AM. The Hamas militants went door to door in border towns killing civilians and taking captives, including women and children. In response to this, Israeli Air Force began carrying out strikes in Gaza, also fighting on the ground in Israel to clear out Hamas militants from Israel territory and preparing to mobilize Israeli troops for potential ground attack on Hamas and Gaza. Now, of course, this is what it appears to be right now, and this along with other things might change because the situation is still developing. The IDF is ordering civilian residents of Gaza to evacuate their homes for their safety. Benjamin Netanyahu declared war in several statements and warned Israelis to brace themselves for a long and difficult war. Just today, Israeli ministers ordered a "complete siege of Gaza interrupting supplies of electricity, food, water, and fuel from Israel to Gaza." As of now, October 9th, the death toll is over 1200 people and over 130 hostages taken to Gaza by Hamas. As I said, the events are rapidly unfolding, so these numbers will sadly increase, but hopefully our words here can at least in part, speak to the timeless underlying currents of the history and as you write about the power dynamics of the region. For people who don't know, Gaza is a 25 miles long, six miles wide strip of territory along the Mediterranean Sea. It borders Israel on the east and north and Egypt on the southwest. It's densely populated, about 2.3 million people, and there's been a blockade of Gaza by Israel and Egypt since 2007 when Hamas took power. I could just summarize that Hamas is a Palestinian militant group which rules the Gaza Strip. It originated in 1988, and it came to power in Gaza in 2006. As part of its charter, it's sworn to the destruction of Israel, and it is designated by the United States, European Union, UK, and of course Israel as a terrorist group.

Introduction

The following is a conversation with Mark Zuckerberg, Inside the Metaverse. Mark and I are hundreds of miles apart from each other in physical space, but it feels like we're in the same room because we appear to each other as photorealistic Kodak Avatars in 3D with spatial audio. This technology is incredible and I think it's the future of how human beings connect to each other in a deeply meaningful way on the internet. These avatars can capture many of the nuances of facial expressions that we humans use to communicate and motion to each other. Now, I just need to work on upgrading my emotion expressing capabilities of the underlying human. This is the Lex Fridman Podcast. And now, dear friends, here's Mark Zuckerberg. This is so great. Lighting change? Wow.

Introduction

... if the goal is the project of human knowledge, which is to know the world as it is, you cannot know the world as it is without knowing what people really think. What people really think is an incredibly important fact to know. Every time you're actually saying, "You can't say that," you're actually depriving yourself of the knowledge of what people really think. You're causing what [inaudible 00:00:24], who's on our Board of advisors calls preference falsification. You end up with an inaccurate picture of the world.

Introduction

We have been encouraged culturally to criticize people we're in long-term relationships with. Not new relationships. New relationships, you put the person on a pedestal, you're allowed to just... Oh, they're wonderful. But every trope out there in every form of popular media is the wife rolling her eyes at the husband, and the husband being like, ugh, this loathsome harpy that castrated me, as if people are just passive players in their lives. And I think that is an incredibly toxic message to send to people, that this is how we should be relating to our partner. Don't take the piss out of your partner in front of people. The successful relationships I've seen are where people are just cheering for their partner, where they're thick as thieves, where there is just this feeling of, man, they like each other. They got each other's back like you wouldn't believe. Man, you could take sides against anybody. But take sides against their partner? You're going down. And when you see a couple that has that, that's so hard to break. But I think that comes from having a steadfast, no, I don't do that. I don't shit talk my partner, and you don't shit talk my partner to me. Because I think we're just so criticized by the world, the world is so full of criticism, we criticize ourselves so harshly, that having a partner who no matter what is like, "You've got this. I'm with you. Okay yeah, you screwed up. I see it. Look, I'm not going to lie to you about your blind spots. You screwed up. But you know what? People screw up sometimes. You got a right to screw up. A lot of people screw up. Come on, get up. Let's go. I know you have it in you." If you have that person, I feel like that's a superpower.

Introduction

I hope with my books I'm saying, "This isn't a how-to guide, but this is somebody you can walk alongside." You can see Einstein growing up Jewish in Germany. You can see Jennifer Doudna growing up or as an outsider, or Leonardo da Vinci or Elon Musk, in really violent South Africa with a psychologically difficult father, and getting off the train when he goes to an anti-apartheid concert with his brother and there's a man with a knife sticking out of his head, and they step into the pool of blood and it's sticky on their soles. This causes scars that last the rest of your life. The question is not how do you avoid getting scarred, it's how do you deal with it. The following is a conversation with Walter Isaacson, one of the greatest biography writers ever, having written incredible books on Albert Einstein, Steve Jobs, Leonardo da Vinci, Jennifer Doudna, Benjamin Franklin, Henry Kissinger, and now a new one on Elon Musk. We talked for hours, on and off the mic. I'm sure we'll talk many more times. Walter is a truly special writer, thinker, observer, and human being.

Introduction

Whenever we start a new project, it has to have these ingredients of simultaneous complexity. It has to be novel in terms of the synthetic biology, material science, robotics, engineering, all of these elements that are discipline based or rooted must be novel. If you can combine novelty in synthetic biology with a novelty in robotics, with a novelty in material science, with a novelty in computational design, you are bound to create something novel. The following is a conversation with Neri Oxman, an engineer, scientist, designer, architect, artist, and one of the kindest, most thoughtful and brilliant human beings I've ever gotten to know. For a long time, she led the mediated matter group at MIT that did research and built incredible stuff at the intersection of computational design, digital fabrication, material science, and synthetic biology, doing so at all scales from the microscale to the building scale. Now she's continuing this work at a very new company for now called Oxman, looking to revolutionize how humans design and build products working with nature, not against it.

Introduction

Listen, when it comes to romantic relationships, if it's not a 100% in you, it ain't happening. And I've never seen a violation of that statement where it's like, "Yeah, it's mostly good." And this is like the negotiations, already it's doomed. And that doesn't mean someone has to be perfect. The relationship has to be perfect, but it's got to feel a 100% inside, like yes, yes, and yes. The following is a conversation with my dear friend Andrew Huberman, his fourth time on this podcast. It's my birthday, so this is a special birthday episode of sorts. Andrew flew down to Austin just to wish me a happy birthday, and we decided to do a podcast last second. We literally talked for hours beforehand and a long time after late into the night. He's one of my favorite human beings, brilliant scientists, incredible teacher, and a loyal friend. I'm grateful for Andrew. I'm grateful for good friends, for all the support and love I've gotten over the past few years. I'm truly grateful for this life, for the years, the days, the minutes, the seconds I've gotten to live on this beautiful earth of ours. I really don't want to leave just yet. I think I'd really like to stick around. I love you all. This is the Lex Fridman podcast. And now, dear friends, here's Andrew Huberman.

Introduction

There is a certain perspective where you might be thinking, what is the longest possible game that you could be playing? A short game is, for instance, cancer is playing a shorter game than your organism. Cancer is an organism playing a shorter game than the regular organism. Because the cancer cannot procreate beyond the organism, except for some infectious cancers like the ones that eradicated the Tasmanian devils, you typically end up with a situation where the organism dies together with the cancer, because the cancer has destroyed the larger system due to playing a shorter game. Ideally, you want to, I think, build agents that play the longest possible games. The longest possible games is to keep entropy at bay as long as possible, by doing interesting stuff. The following is a conversation with Joscha Bach, his third time on this podcast. Joscha is one of the most brilliant, and fascinating minds in the world, exploring the nature of intelligence, consciousness, and computation. He's one of my favorite humans to talk to about pretty much anything and everything. This is the Lex Fridman Podcast. To support it, please check out our sponsors in the description. Now, dear friends, here's Joscha Bach.

Introduction

Regardless of whatever was written in these books that were written thousands and thousands of years ago, the fact of the matter is no one has a right to go on slaughtering people, removing them from their homes and then continuing to live in their homes, continuing to drink coffee on their balconies decades and decades later, with no shame, with no introspection, with no reflection. No one has the right to do that. No one has the right to keep an entire population of people in a cage, which is what's happening to people in the West Bank who have no freedom of movement, which is what's happening in Gaza, which is blockaded to water, air, and land, and is deemed uninhabitable by human rights organizations like the UN. No one has a right to do that. The following is a conversation with Mohammed el-Kurd, a world-renowned Palestinian poet, writer, journalist, and an influential voice speaking out and fighting for the Palestinian cause. He provides a very different perspective on Israel and Palestine than my previous two episodes with Benjamin Netanyahu and Yuval Noah Harari. I hope his story and his words add to your understanding of this part of the world as it did to mine. I'll continue to have difficult long-form conversations such as these always with empathy and humility but with backbone. And please allow me to briefly comment about criticisms I receive of who I am as an interviewer and a human being. I am not afraid to travel anywhere or challenge anyone face-to-face, even if it puts my life in danger. But I'm also not afraid to be vulnerable, to truly listen, to empathize, to walk a mile in the well-worn shoes of those very different from me. It's this latter task, not the former one, that is truly the most challenging in conversations and in life, but to me, it is the only way. This is the Lex Fridman podcast. To support it, please check out our sponsors in the description. And now, dear friends, here's Mohammed el-Kurd.

Introduction

If we now find ourselves inside this kind of world of illusions created by an alien intelligence, that we don't understand, but it understands us, this is a kind of spiritual enslavement that we won't be able to break out of, because it understands us, it understands how to manipulate us, but we don't understand what is behind this screen of stories and images and songs. The following is a conversation with Yuval Noah Harari, a historian, philosopher, and author of several highly acclaimed, highly influential books, including Sapiens, Homo Deus and 21 Lessons for the 21st Century. He is also an outspoken critic of Benjamin Netanyahu and the current right-wing government in Israel. While much of this conversation is about the history and future of human civilization, we also discuss the political turmoil of present day Israel, providing a different perspective from that of my recent conversation with Benjamin Netanyahu.

Introduction

We should never, and I never sit aside and say, oh, they're just threatening to destroy us. They won't do it. If somebody threatens to eliminate you as Iran is doing today, and as Hitler did then and people discounted it, well, if somebody threatens to annihilate us, take them seriously and act to prevent it early on. Don't let them have the means to do so because that may be too late. The following is a conversation with Benjamin Netanyahu, prime Minister of Israel, currently serving his sixth term in office. He's one of the most influential, powerful, and controversial men in the world, leading a right-wing coalition government at the center of one of the most intense and long-lasting conflicts and crises in human history.

Introduction

It's not our business to change the Russian government. And anybody who thinks it's a good idea to do regime change in Russia, which has more nuclear weapons than we do, is I think irresponsible. And Vladimir Putin himself has had... We will not live in a world without Russia and it was clear when he said that, that he was talking about himself and he has his hand on a button that could bring Armageddon to the entire planet. So why are we messing with this? It's not our job to change that regime, and we should be making friends with the Russians. We shouldn't be treating him as an enemy. Now we've pushed him into the camp with China. That's not a good thing for our country. And by the way, what we're doing now does not appear to be weakening Putin at all. The following is a conversation with Robert F. Kennedy Jr, candidate for the President of the United States, running as a Democrat. Robert is an activist, lawyer and author who has challenged some of the world's most powerful corporations seeking to hold them accountable for the harm they may cause. I love science and engineering. These two pursuits are, to me the most beautiful and powerful in the history of human civilization. Science is our journey, our fight for uncovering the laws of nature and leveraging them to understand the universe and to lessen the amount of suffering in the world. Some of the greatest human beings I've ever met, including most of my good friends, are scientists and engineers. Again, I love science, but science cannot flourish without epistemic humility, without debate, both in the pages of academic journals and in the public square, in good faith, long form conversations.

Introduction

What possible ideas do you have for how human species ends? Sure. I think the most obvious way to me is wire heading. We end up amusing ourselves to death. We end up all staring at that infinite TikTok and forgetting to eat. Maybe it's even more benign than this. Maybe we all just stop reproducing. Now, to be fair, it's probably hard to get all of humanity.

Why AI will save the world

Marc Andreessen and Lex Fridman discuss why ai will save the world.

Introduction

We've never bowed down to government pressure anywhere in the world, and we never will. We understand that we're hardcore, and actually, there is a bit of nuance about how different companies respond to this, but our response has always been just to say no. If they threaten to block, well, knock yourself out. You're going to lose Wikipedia. The following is a conversation with Jimmy Wales, co-founder of Wikipedia, one of, if not the most impactful websites ever, expanding the collective knowledge, intelligence, and wisdom of human civilization. This is Lex Fridman podcast. To support it, please check out our sponsors in the description. Now, dear friends, here's Jimmy Wales.

Advice for young people

Matthew McConaughey and Lex Fridman discuss advice for young people.

AI and open source movement

Mark Zuckerberg and Lex Fridman discuss ai and open source movement.

Drinking with Joe Rogan and Tom Segura

Bert Kreischer and Lex Fridman discuss drinking with joe rogan and tom segura.

Switching programming languages

Chris Lattner and Lex Fridman discuss switching programming languages.

Microfluidic bubble computation

Neil Gershenfeld and Lex Fridman discuss microfluidic bubble computation.

Martin Luther King Jr.

Randall Kennedy and Lex Fridman discuss martin luther king jr..

Most beautiful idea in astronomy

Anna Frebel and Lex Fridman discuss most beautiful idea in astronomy.

Freedom of thought and liberal arts

Harvey Silverglate and Lex Fridman discuss freedom of thought and liberal arts.

Computation and nature of reality

Stephen Wolfram and Lex Fridman discuss computation and nature of reality.

Donald Trump: Pros and cons

David Pakman and Lex Fridman discuss donald trump: pros and cons.

Early days of Boston Dynamics

Robert Playter and Lex Fridman discuss early days of boston dynamics.

Impact of AI on the job market

Manolis Kellis and Lex Fridman discuss impact of ai on the job market.

Robots and human connection

Simone Giertz and Lex Fridman discuss robots and human connection.

Open letter to pause Giant AI Experiments

Max Tegmark and Lex Fridman discuss open letter to pause giant ai experiments.

Mathematics in the Soviet Union

Edward Frenkel and Lex Fridman discuss mathematics in the soviet union.

Graham Hancock and ancient civilizations

Paul Rosolie and Lex Fridman discuss graham hancock and ancient civilizations.

Advice for young people

Eliezer Yudkowsky and Lex Fridman discuss advice for young people.

From non-profit to capped-profit

Sam Altman and Lex Fridman discuss from non-profit to capped-profit.

Johnny Depp and Amber Heard trial

Shannon Curry and Lex Fridman discuss johnny depp and amber heard trial.

Military industrial complex

Sam Harris and Lex Fridman discuss military industrial complex.

Negotiation with terrorists

Chris Voss and Lex Fridman discuss negotiation with terrorists.

Alexander Volkanovski vs Islam Makhachev

Craig Jones and Lex Fridman discuss alexander volkanovski vs islam makhachev.

Deep Blue vs Garry Kasparov

Ginni Rometty and Lex Fridman discuss deep blue vs garry kasparov.

Separation of families

Aaron Smith-Levin and Lex Fridman discuss separation of families.

Donald Trump and Republican Party

Tim Urban and Lex Fridman discuss donald trump and republican party.

Black hole information paradox

Andrew Strominger and Lex Fridman discuss black hole information paradox.

Dominance and submissiveness

Aella and Lex Fridman discuss dominance and submissiveness.

Advice for young people

Paul Conti and Lex Fridman discuss advice for young people.

Greatest car engine of all time

Tim Dodd and Lex Fridman discuss greatest car engine of all time.

Alien life in our Solar System

David Kipping and Lex Fridman discuss alien life in our solar system.

Lincoln and election of 1860

Jeremi Suri and Lex Fridman discuss lincoln and election of 1860.

2022 nuclear fusion breakthrough explained

Dennis Whyte and Lex Fridman discuss 2022 nuclear fusion breakthrough explained.

Colleyville synagogue hostage crisis

Omar Suleiman and Lex Fridman discuss colleyville synagogue hostage crisis.

10 million dollars vs 10 million subscribers

MrBeast and Lex Fridman discuss 10 million dollars vs 10 million subscribers.

History of life on Earth

Betül Kaçar and Lex Fridman discuss history of life on earth.

2024 presidential election

Bhaskar Sunkara and Lex Fridman discuss 2024 presidential election.

Surviving an earthquake on a volcano

Nathalie Cabrol and Lex Fridman discuss surviving an earthquake on a volcano.

Trotsky, Lenin, and Stalin

Michael Malice and Lex Fridman discuss trotsky, lenin, and stalin.

Advice for young people

Ed Calderon and Lex Fridman discuss advice for young people.

Investigating politics and corruption

Coffeezilla and Lex Fridman discuss investigating politics and corruption.

Greatest poker player of all time

Noam Brown and Lex Fridman discuss greatest poker player of all time.

Roger vs Bear, Lion, Gorilla, and Anaconda

Roger Gracie and Lex Fridman discuss roger vs bear, lion, gorilla, and anaconda.

The essence of a video game

Todd Howard and Lex Fridman discuss the essence of a video game.

Benevolent Dictator for Life (BDFL)

Lex Fridman and Lex Fridman discuss benevolent dictator for life (bdfl).

Cyber attack threats against civilians

Chris Tarbell and Lex Fridman discuss cyber attack threats against civilians.

Worst-case climate change scenario

Bjørn Lomborg and Lex Fridman discuss worst-case climate change scenario.

Childhood and forgiveness

Chamath Palihapitiya and Lex Fridman discuss childhood and forgiveness.

Big government and institutions

Destiny and Lex Fridman discuss big government and institutions.

Kanye 'Ye' West

Let's start with a difficult topic. What do you think about the comments made by Ye formerly known as Kanye West about Jewish people? They're awful and antisemitic and they seem to get worse over time. They started off with the bizarre death con 3 tweet, and then they went into even more stereotypical garbage about Jews and Jews being sexual manipulators. I think that was the Pete Davidson, Kim Kardashian stuff, and then Jews running all of the media, Jews being in charge of the financial sector. Jewish people... I called it on my show, there's Sherman Nazism, and it is. It's like right from protocols of the Elders of Zion type stuff.

Testifying against Donald Trump

Fiona Hill and Lex Fridman discuss testifying against donald trump.

Supreme Leader Ruhollah Khomeini

Abbas Amanat and Lex Fridman discuss supreme leader ruhollah khomeini.

Artificial general intelligence

Andrej Karpathy and Lex Fridman discuss artificial general intelligence.

Sex and the future of humanity

Lex Fridman and Lex Fridman discuss sex and the future of humanity.

Donald Trump's ban from social media

Balaji Srinivasan and Lex Fridman discuss donald trump's ban from social media.

Greatest chess player of all time

Hikaru Nakamura and Lex Fridman discuss greatest chess player of all time.

Love and relationships

Kate Darling and Lex Fridman discuss love and relationships.

Bear vs Gorilla vs Lion vs Anaconda

John Danaher and Lex Fridman discuss bear vs gorilla vs lion vs anaconda.

Hans Niemann cheating scandal continued

GothamChess and Lex Fridman discuss hans niemann cheating scandal continued.

Meaning of life

Annaka Harris and Lex Fridman discuss meaning of life.

Multi-scale competency architecture

Michael Levin and Lex Fridman discuss multi-scale competency architecture.

Greatest poker player of all time

Daniel Negreanu and Lex Fridman discuss greatest poker player of all time.

Loneliness and depression

Will Sasso and Lex Fridman discuss loneliness and depression.

Women in the Middle East

Lex Fridman and Lex Fridman discuss women in the middle east.

Evolution of information processing

Ray Kurzweil and Lex Fridman discuss evolution of information processing.

How World War I started

Christopher Capozzola and Lex Fridman discuss how world war i started.

Greatest chess player of all time

Botez Sisters and Lex Fridman discuss greatest chess player of all time.

Introduction

Well, the source of energy at the origin of life is the reaction between carbon dioxide and hydrogen. And amazingly, most of these reactions are exergonic, which is to say they release energy. If you have hydrogen and CO2, and you put them together in a Falcon tube and you warm it up to, say, 50 degrees centigrade, and you put in a couple of catalysts and you shake it, nothing's going to happen. But thermodynamically that is less stable. Two gases, hydrogen and CO2, is less stable than cells. What should happen is you get cells coming out. Why doesn't that happen is because of the kinetic barriers. That's where you need the spark. The following is a conversation with Nick Lane, a biochemist at University College London, and author of some of my favorite books on biology, science, and life ever written, including his two most recent titles, Transformer: The Deep Chemistry of Life and Death, and The Vital Question: Why Is Life the Way It Is? This is the Lex Fridman Podcast. To support it, please check out our sponsors in the description. And now, dear friends, here's Nick Lane.

Advice for young people

John Vervaeke and Lex Fridman discuss advice for young people.

China and American relations

Noam Chomsky and Lex Fridman discuss china and american relations.

Game 6 of the 2021 World Chess Championship

Magnus Carlsen and Lex Fridman discuss game 6 of the 2021 world chess championship.

Mutually assured destruction

Liv Boeree and Lex Fridman discuss mutually assured destruction.

Advice for young people

Jordan Peterson and Lex Fridman discuss advice for young people.

Nietzsche's eternal recurrence

Duncan Trussell and Lex Fridman discuss nietzsche's eternal recurrence.

Advice for young people

Magatte Wade and Lex Fridman discuss advice for young people.

Most powerful intelligence agencies

Andrew Bustamante and Lex Fridman discuss most powerful intelligence agencies.

Advice for young people

John Carmack and Lex Fridman discuss advice for young people.

Autonomous weapon systems

Ryan Graves and Lex Fridman discuss autonomous weapon systems.

Advice for young people

Brian Armstrong and Lex Fridman discuss advice for young people.

Neural networks

Oriol Vinyals and Lex Fridman discuss neural networks.

Understanding the universe

Martin Rees and Lex Fridman discuss understanding the universe.

Advice for young people

Robert Barron and Lex Fridman discuss advice for young people.

Advice for young people

Steve Keen and Lex Fridman discuss advice for young people.

Testing artificial intelligence

Richard Haier and Lex Fridman discuss testing artificial intelligence.

Becoming a KGB agent

Jack Barsky and Lex Fridman discuss becoming a kgb agent.

Putin, Ukraine, and Russia

Joe Rogan and Lex Fridman discuss putin, ukraine, and russia.

Open sourcing AlphaFold & MuJoCo

Demis Hassabis and Lex Fridman discuss open sourcing alphafold & mujoco.

Famous Blue Raincoat by Leonard Cohen

Susan Cain and Lex Fridman discuss famous blue raincoat by leonard cohen.

Living in the Far North

Jonathan Reisman and Lex Fridman discuss living in the far north.

Advice for young people

Douglas Murray and Lex Fridman discuss advice for young people.

Governments and corporations

Richard Wolff and Lex Fridman discuss governments and corporations.

Advice for young people

Tony Fadell and Lex Fridman discuss advice for young people.

Evolutionary game theory

Donald Hoffman and Lex Fridman discuss evolutionary game theory.

Artificial intelligence

Robin Hanson and Lex Fridman discuss artificial intelligence.

Political division on social media

Jonathan Haidt and Lex Fridman discuss political division on social media.

Cat Stevens and Harry Chapin

Dan Reynolds and Lex Fridman discuss cat stevens and harry chapin.

Russian invasion of Ukraine

Stephen Kotkin and Lex Fridman discuss russian invasion of ukraine.

Is Anthony Strangis a sociopath?

Sarma Melngailis and Lex Fridman discuss is anthony strangis a sociopath?.

George and Gilbert

Bobby Lee and Lex Fridman discuss george and gilbert.

Putin interview language barrier

Oliver Stone and Lex Fridman discuss putin interview language barrier.

Martin Luther King Jr.

Glenn Loury and Lex Fridman discuss martin luther king jr..

Austrian vs Keynesian economics

Saifedean Ammous and Lex Fridman discuss austrian vs keynesian economics.

Launch toward the Second Sun

Chris Mason and Lex Fridman discuss launch toward the second sun.

Evolution of mating evaluation

David Buss and Lex Fridman discuss evolution of mating evaluation.

Rise and Fall of the Third Reich

Grimes and Lex Fridman discuss rise and fall of the third reich.

Advice for young people

Cristiano Amon and Lex Fridman discuss advice for young people.

Communication with aliens

Sara Walker and Lex Fridman discuss communication with aliens.

Advice for young people

Skye Fitzgerald and Lex Fridman discuss advice for young people.

Difficult conversations

Andrew Huberman and Lex Fridman discuss difficult conversations.

Introduction

Remember George Washington, you know how he died? Well-meaning physicians bled him to death. And this was the most important patient in the country, maybe in the history of the country, and we bled him to death trying to help him. So when you're actually inflating the money supply at 7%, but you're calling it 2% because you want to help the economy, you're literally bleeding the free market to death. But the sad fact is, George Washington went along with it because he thought that they were going to do him good. And the majority of the society, most companies, most conventional thinkers, the working class, they go along with this because they think that someone has their best interest in mind and the people that are bleeding them to death, they believe that prescription because their mental models are just so defective. The following is a conversation with Michael Saylor, one of the most prominent and brilliant Bitcoin proponents in the world. He is the CEO of MicroStrategy, founder of Saylor Academy, graduate of MIT. And Michael was one of the most fascinating and rigorous thinkers I've ever gotten a chance to explore ideas with. He can effortlessly zoom out to the big perspectives of human civilization and human history, and zoom back in to the technical details of blockchains, markets, governments and financial systems. This is the Lex Fridman podcast. To support it, please check out our sponsors in the description. And now, dear friends, here's Michael Saylor.

Beautiful simplicity in music

Rick Rubin and Lex Fridman discuss beautiful simplicity in music.

Talk therapy and psychoanalysis

Karl Deisseroth and Lex Fridman discuss talk therapy and psychoanalysis.

Israeli–Palestinian conflict

Chris Blattman and Lex Fridman discuss israeli–palestinian conflict.

Phishing and social engineering

Brett Johnson and Lex Fridman discuss phishing and social engineering.

Swarm robotics and self-assembling space habitats

Ariel Ekblaw and Lex Fridman discuss swarm robotics and self-assembling space habitats.

Advice for young people

David Wolpe and Lex Fridman discuss advice for young people.

Universal programming language for chemistry

Lee Cronin and Lex Fridman discuss universal programming language for chemistry.

Nazi tobacco industry's denial campaign

Robert Proctor and Lex Fridman discuss nazi tobacco industry's denial campaign.

Social media and mental health

Mark Zuckerberg and Lex Fridman discuss social media and mental health.

Snowden and whistleblowers

Nicole Perlroth and Lex Fridman discuss snowden and whistleblowers.

Strength vs skill vs strategy

Devon Larratt and Lex Fridman discuss strength vs skill vs strategy.

How our brain processes film and music

Tim Urban and Lex Fridman discuss how our brain processes film and music.

Biggest problem with big pharma

John Abramson and Lex Fridman discuss biggest problem with big pharma.

Alien hardware in US possession

Garry Nolan and Lex Fridman discuss alien hardware in us possession.

Death, mystical experiences and collective consciousness

Philip Goff and Lex Fridman discuss death, mystical experiences and collective consciousness.

Effective grappling and takedowns

Georges St-Pierre and Lex Fridman discuss effective grappling and takedowns.

Intellectual honest and life lessons

Thomas Tull and Lex Fridman discuss intellectual honest and life lessons.

Three challenges of machine learning

Yann LeCun and Lex Fridman discuss three challenges of machine learning.

What it's like to be a scientist

Brian Keating and Lex Fridman discuss what it's like to be a scientist.

Edmund Burke and the French Revolution

Yaron Brook and Lex Fridman discuss edmund burke and the french revolution.

Future of human interaction

Mark Normand and Lex Fridman discuss future of human interaction.

Great Barrington Declaration and lockdowns

Jay Bhattacharya and Lex Fridman discuss great barrington declaration and lockdowns.

Joe Rogan and Bret Weinstein vs Sam Harris

Michael Malice and Lex Fridman discuss joe rogan and bret weinstein vs sam harris.

When will Tesla solve self-driving?

Elon Musk and Lex Fridman discuss when will tesla solve self-driving?.

Collapse of the American Empire

Ray Dalio and Lex Fridman discuss collapse of the american empire.

Programming language design

Peter Wang and Lex Fridman discuss programming language design.

Clinical trials

Albert Bourla and Lex Fridman discuss clinical trials.

Our role in fighting against atrocities

Norman Naimark and Lex Fridman discuss our role in fighting against atrocities.

Joe Rogan, Brett Weinstein, and Sam Harris

Jamie Metzl and Lex Fridman discuss joe rogan, brett weinstein, and sam harris.

Nobel Prize likelihood for theory of everything

Peter Woit and Lex Fridman discuss nobel prize likelihood for theory of everything.

1996 Olympic Games in Atlanta

Tom Brands and Lex Fridman discuss 1996 olympic games in atlanta.

U.S. invasion of Afghanistan

Robert Crews and Lex Fridman discuss u.s. invasion of afghanistan.

Selling Instagram to Facebook

Kevin Systrom and Lex Fridman discuss selling instagram to facebook.

Champion mentality and handling losses

Ben Askren and Lex Fridman discuss champion mentality and handling losses.

Sensor suites for long haul trucking

Boris Sofman and Lex Fridman discuss sensor suites for long haul trucking.

Writing, storytelling, and books

Neal Stephenson and Lex Fridman discuss writing, storytelling, and books.

How history will remember the current pandemic

Niall Ferguson and Lex Fridman discuss how history will remember the current pandemic.

Gain-of-function research of viruses

Francis Collins and Lex Fridman discuss gain-of-function research of viruses.

Tesla and revolutionizing the trucking industry

Steve Viscelli and Lex Fridman discuss tesla and revolutionizing the trucking industry.

Russian approach to randori

Jimmy Pedro and Lex Fridman discuss russian approach to randori.

Medical devices and FDA classification

Michael Mina and Lex Fridman discuss medical devices and fda classification.

Cardano NFT collaboration with Wolfram Alpha

Stephen Wolfram and Lex Fridman discuss cardano nft collaboration with wolfram alpha.

Proper, positive, and misuse of drugs

Carl Hart and Lex Fridman discuss proper, positive, and misuse of drugs.

Emergence and complexity

Brian Greene and Lex Fridman discuss emergence and complexity.

Edward Snowden and government surveillance

Alex Gladstein and Lex Fridman discuss edward snowden and government surveillance.

Yeonmi Park, starvation, and mental health

Kelsi Sheren and Lex Fridman discuss yeonmi park, starvation, and mental health.

A map of how chimps, gorillas, and humans are all related

Richard Wrangham and Lex Fridman discuss a map of how chimps, gorillas, and humans are all related.

Advice for young people

RZA and Lex Fridman discuss advice for young people.

Nietzsche and nihilism

Sean Kelly and Lex Fridman discuss nietzsche and nihilism.

What is beautiful about mathematics?

Jo Boaler and Lex Fridman discuss what is beautiful about mathematics?.

Electrons for computation and light for communication

Jeffrey Shainline and Lex Fridman discuss electrons for computation and light for communication.

Advice for young people

Travis Oliphant and Lex Fridman discuss advice for young people.

Lex on his judo competition experience

Travis Stevens and Lex Fridman discuss lex on his judo competition experience.

Learning representations by back-propagating errors

Jay McClelland and Lex Fridman discuss learning representations by back-propagating errors.

How to form a knowledge base of the universe

Douglas Lenat and Lex Fridman discuss how to form a knowledge base of the universe.

What it means to be a great firefighter

Niels Jorgensen and Lex Fridman discuss what it means to be a great firefighter.

Knuth-Morris-Pratt Algorithm

Donald Knuth and Lex Fridman discuss knuth-morris-pratt algorithm.

Video games and other immersive experiences

Jaron Lanier and Lex Fridman discuss video games and other immersive experiences.

Sharing an office with AI experts

Rodney Brooks and Lex Fridman discuss sharing an office with ai experts.

Coronaviruses and Influenza. What's the difference?

Vincent Racaniello and Lex Fridman discuss coronaviruses and influenza. what's the difference?.

Will we spend more time in virtual reality?

Wojciech Zaremba and Lex Fridman discuss will we spend more time in virtual reality?.

Most Beautiful Moments in Science

Jed Buchwald and Lex Fridman discuss most beautiful moments in science.

Philosophical Implications of General Relativity

Barry Barish and Lex Fridman discuss philosophical implications of general relativity.

Humans vs AI: Who is more dangerous?

Joscha Bach and Lex Fridman discuss humans vs ai: who is more dangerous?.

Psychedelics were the source of collective intelligence

Brian Muraresku and Lex Fridman discuss psychedelics were the source of collective intelligence.

Scent of a Woman is better than "John Wick"

Matt Walker and Lex Fridman discuss scent of a woman is better than "john wick".

What it takes to build a successful startup

Luís and Lex Fridman discuss what it takes to build a successful startup.

Will AI prevent the self-destruction of human civilization?

Jeff Hawkins and Lex Fridman discuss will ai prevent the self-destruction of human civilization?.

The Eagle and the Dragon: A Story of Strength and Reinvention

Chris Duffin and Lex Fridman discuss the eagle and the dragon: a story of strength and reinvention.

Non-contrastive learning energy based self supervised learning methods

Ishan Misra and Lex Fridman discuss non-contrastive learning energy based self supervised learning methods.

Who is the greatest endurance athlete of all time?

Zach Bitter and Lex Fridman discuss who is the greatest endurance athlete of all time?.

How can ancient geometry be used to understand reality

Cumrun Vafa and Lex Fridman discuss how can ancient geometry be used to understand reality.

What does it take to be a woman CEO of a meat company?

Anya Fernald and Lex Fridman discuss what does it take to be a woman ceo of a meat company?.