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Hosts the Lex Fridman Podcast — long, unhurried conversations with scientists, engineers and public figures. Several of the interviews quoted elsewhere on this site are episodes of it.

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  Humans are amazing in part because their minds are such a complicated mess.

  Their words

  Humans are amazing. In part, because our minds are such a damn complicated mess.

  @lexfridman on Xx.com

Writes The Pragmatic Engineer, the software-engineering newsletter, and wrote The Software Engineer's Guidebook. Formerly an engineering manager at Uber, and at Microsoft/Skype and Skyscanner before that.

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  An “AI trained on person X” cannot stand in for that person, because people change their minds in light of new information and the model does not.

  Their words

  This is, by the way, also why the category of “an AI trained on person X” is absolutely BS. People change their minds in light of new information, the “AI trained on X’s writing/videos/tweets” does not

  @GergelyOrosz on Xx.com

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  In a fast-changing industry, anyone genuinely keeping up will change their mind as the developments happen.

  Their words

  Especially in technology - one of the fastest changing industries - anyone keeping up with developments WILL change their minds when those developments happen!!

  @GergelyOrosz on Xx.com

Writer and podcaster; co-author of Abundance with Ezra Klein, a staff writer at The Atlantic from 2008 to 2025, and host of the Plain English podcast.

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  Writing is itself an act of thinking, so automating the writing removes the thinking, not just the labor.

  Their words

  The act of writing is an act of thinking, and to automate our paragraphs is to populate our screens with words without filling our minds with the ideas necessary to conceive of them.

  We Can't Let AI Writing Take Over the Internetderekthompson.org

Creator of Ruby on Rails, CTO of 37signals, and creator of Omarchy.

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  Programmers who loved the mechanical act of coding are under threat; those who wanted to build things are not.

  Their words

  I think you're gonna have a hard time coping with the new reality if the only thing you loved about programming was the mechanical bits of putting the right logical constructs together to produce something other people told you to produce. Because that mechanical process is under threat. If you are, as you just mentioned, excited about building things, I don't think you're under threat at all.

  youtube.com

Co-founder and former chief executive of Uber, now chief executive of CloudKitchens and of Adams, an industrial AI company automating food, mining and transport.

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  Elon Musk's purchase of Twitter is the beginning of people being able to speak their minds again, and of disagreeing not being treated as illegal.

  Their words

  you know Elon buying Twitter is like the beginning of us being able to speak our minds and for disagreeing to not be illegal. That's a big deal. We should all thank Elon for that.

  youtube.com

Mathematician and maker of the 3Blue1Brown YouTube channel, which explains mathematics through animation. Creator of the open-source Manim animation library and founder of the Summer of Math Exposition.

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  The advantage of digital minds may be the opposite of pooling knowledge: deliberately giving agents different contexts, which is a control humans do not have over themselves.

  Their words

  You could imagine systematizing that or like having multiple different agents deliberately given different pieces of context and try to like compare and contrast there. Like we we don't have the same level of manipulation on our own context.

  youtube.com

Statistician at Carnegie Mellon; writes on complex systems, machine learning and inference, and has kept a books-read notebook since 2000 that is now thousands of entries long.

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  Resenting the Hero

  Their words

  Comparing this to The Fifth Season, it is striking how different two fantasy novels about worlds over-supplied with natural disasters, and the people with the psychic gifts to stop those disasters with their minds, can be in tone and execution. This is immensely fluffier, but it has no pretensions to be anything except candy, and succeeds as such.

  bactra.org

Founded Bridgewater Associates in 1975 and led it until stepping back from control in 2022. Author of Principles, The Changing World Order and How Countries Go Broke; publishes economic analysis at economicprinciples.org.

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  Decision criteria have to come from logical cause-and-effect understanding, not from data-mining what worked before, and not from asking an AI what to do.

  Their words

  To be clear, these criteria are not best derived by looking at what would have worked in the past and assuming that it will work in the future—i.e., data mining—or simply asking an AI what to do. They are based on logical understandings converted into decision-making systems.

  Principled Thinking and AI Need to Go Togetherraydalio.substack.com

Organizational psychologist and professor at the Wharton School. Author of Give and Take, Originals, Think Again and Hidden Potential, host of the Re:Thinking podcast, and writer of the GRANTED newsletter.

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  Blaming and shaming people only makes them defensive, dig in their heels, or tune out, rather than change their minds.

  Their words

  We know from decades of research that blaming and shaming only leads people to get defensive, dig in their heels, or tune you out altogether.

  Silence Is Not Necessarily Violenceadamgrant.substack.com

Founder of Telegram, and before it of VK.

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  Maths is essential schooling: it trains you to split big problems into small ones and to think for yourself, the same skill programming, project management and founding a company need.

  Their words

  Yeah. I still think math is essential. It's something that shapes your brain, it teaches you to rely on your logical thinking to split big problems into smaller parts, put them in the right sequence, solve them patiently, trying again if it doesn't work.

  youtube.com

Reinforcement-learning researcher; co-wrote the field's standard textbook, wrote The Bitter Lesson, and shared the 2024 Turing Award.

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  We are leaving the age of replication for an age of design, in which minds are built to a plan rather than copied without being understood.

  Their words

  then we're entering the age of design where because our AIs are designed our our our all of our physical objects are designed our buildings are designed our technology is designed and we're we're designing now uh AIs things that can be intelligent themselves and that are themselves capable of design

  youtube.com

Technology analyst whose weekly email on tech reaches over 150,000 readers. Publishes essays and an annual presentation on where the industry is going.

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  The belief that this technology will produce bioweapons and kill everyone rests on childish logical fallacies.

  Their words

  Personally, like most people in tech, I think the idea that this is all going to kind of produce bioweapons and take over the world and kill us all is just idiotic. Like I think I think it's just a bunch of kind of childish logical fallacies within that.

  youtube.com

FreeBSD developer and former FreeBSD Security Officer; founder of the Tarsnap online backup service and author of the scrypt key derivation function.

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  Shipping a half-baked product permanently damages customer trust, even after it is later fixed.

  Their words

  When AWS ships a service which is half-baked, it diminishes customer trust in AWS as a whole; even if the problems in that service ultimately get corrected (either by fixing them or in some cases by simply getting rid of a service which should never have existed in the first place) the memory of a failed launch will live on in customers' minds for years to come.

  Thoughts on (Amazonian) Leadershipdaemonology.net

Independent AI policy researcher; led policy research at OpenAI from 2018 to 2024, latterly as senior adviser for AGI readiness.

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  Changing societal outcomes requires changing minds, and the credibility many diverse co-authors lend to a conclusion is hard to replicate with AI.

  OpenAI

  Their words

  I think that changing societal outcome requires changing minds, and the "heft" that comes from many authors with different backgrounds endorsing a certain set of conclusions is hard to replicate with a link to a shared ChatGPT chat.

  Megapapers and How to Write Themmilesbrundage.substack.com

Co-founder and CEO of Google DeepMind, and a 2024 Nobel laureate in Chemistry for the protein-structure work behind AlphaFold.

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  The last steps to AGI should be taken by a CERN-style international research project, not a Manhattan Project.

  AGI

  Their words

  I hope we'll end up with something more collaborative if needed, more like a CERN project where it's research-focused and the best minds in the world come together to carefully complete the final steps and make sure it's responsibly done before deploying it to the world.

  youtube.com

Writes The Pragmatic Engineer, the software-engineering newsletter, and wrote The Software Engineer's Guidebook. Formerly an engineering manager at Uber, and at Microsoft/Skype and Skyscanner before that.

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  Not everyone gets a trophy

  Their words

  Tips and observations on how to manage the Millenial generation better. Some of these I found insightful, some were less of a surprise.

  blog.pragmaticengineer.com

Archaeologist of the Maya and the ancient Americas; directs the Maya Exploration Center and presents the ArchaeoEd podcast.

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  Every paradigm-shifting idea began as heresy, so outlandish ideas have to be kept on the table.

  Their words

  But I do also try to always remind myself that every paradigm shifting idea that humans have ever had began as heresy and lunacy. That guy was crazy up to the second. He was brilliant. And so we got to keep our minds open to the things that sound outlandish, because one of them eventually is going to lead us to the big paradigm shift.

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Astrobiologist and theoretical physicist at Arizona State University, working on assembly theory and the physics of life.

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  We are conscious because we are objects extended deep in time — consciousness is all of that history rolled up in us.

  Their words

  Yeah. I think if you’re thinking about this thinking about living things as these giant causal structures or these objects that are deep in time or whatever language we end up using to describe it seems to me that consciousness is about the fact that we have a conscious experience is because we are these temporally extended objects. Consciousness and the abstraction that we have in our minds is actually a manifestation of all the time that’s rolled up in us.

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Founder and chief executive of Pershing Square Capital Management, the activist investment firm he started in 2004.

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  Harvard's governance is broken because its self-perpetuating board can never be rebalanced from outside.

  Their words

  It's really a self-perpetuating board that effectively elects its own members. Once the balance tips, politically, one way or another, it can be kept that way forever. There's no kind of rebalancing system.

  youtube.com

Bulgarian-born writer and founder of The Marginalian (formerly Brain Pickings), a reader-funded blog on books, science, art and philosophy running since 2006.

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  The Experience Machine: How Our Minds Predict and Shape Reality

  Their words

  That is what cognitive philosopher Andy Clark explores in The Experience Machine: How Our Minds Predict and Shape Reality

  themarginalian.org

Founder of Terraform Industries and formerly a physicist at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory; writes about energy, space and manufacturing.

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  The end state of the grid is not a fifth solar backed by spinning generation, but twice the demand in solar with days of storage behind it.

  solarenergy

  Their words

  The logical end state of this displacement is not some hybrid grid with around 20% solar backed up by spinning generation, but a much more dynamic, versatile grid with around 200% solar generation and hours to days or weeks of battery storage, fully decoupling time of generation and consumption.

  Radical Energy Abundancecaseyhandmer.wordpress.com

Founded CD Baby in 1998 and sold it in 2008, giving the proceeds to a charitable trust for music education. Since then a writer and speaker: five books and 550+ articles, published first at sive.rs, which they hand-code and keep free of advertising.

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  How Minds Change

  Their words

  The psychology of how and why we believe. How we learn and change. The craft of doubt and persuasion. Insights into the social definition of truth. Epistemology. Certainty is a feeling not based on facts. Well-written with a nice balance of story-telling and deeper dives.

  sive.rs

Founded CD Baby in 1998 and sold it in 2008, giving the proceeds to a charitable trust for music education. Since then a writer and speaker: five books and 550+ articles, published first at sive.rs, which they hand-code and keep free of advertising.

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  How Religion Evolved

  Their words

  Great anthropology! So many insights into religions, tribes, friendships, organizations, the evolution of minds, superstition, and more. Got me thinking most about friendships.

  sive.rs

Programmer; makes Handmade Hero and teaches Performance-Aware Programming, and argues loudly about how software got slow.

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  The evidence from the largest software companies says programmers should take performance more seriously than they do, not less.

  Their words

  the logical conclusion would be that programmers need to take performance more seriously than they have been, not less!

  Performance Excuses Debunkedcomputerenhance.com

Journalist; wrote We Are Eating the Earth on food and climate, and writes the newsletter Emissions.

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  Changing what food is made of will work better than changing people's minds about what to eat.

  Their words

  The food and climate stuff I write about would be simple if everyone just went vegan, but it turns out to be hard to change hearts and minds, so we’re going to have to change our food.

  Get Over Your All-Natural Selfmichaelgrunwald.substack.com

Professor of Cognitive and Computational Neuroscience at the University of Sussex, co-director of the Sussex Centre for Consciousness Science, and author of Being You: A New Science of Consciousness.

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  Other Minds

  Their words

  There's a book, which isn't in the five I've chosen (though it could well have been), Peter Godfrey Smith's Other Minds, which I think is a beautiful exploration of other minds.

  fivebooks.com

Writer and novelist. Publishes essays and book notes at nateliason.com; author of the novel Husk and of Crypto Confidential.

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  Gödel Escher Bach

  Their words

  This book stretched my mind more than almost any other book I’ve read. It’s tough at parts, it’s long, but you’ll come out of it thinking about brains, minds, intelligence, and AI in an entirely new way.

  nateliason.com

Programmer; builds Mac and iOS apps, wrote WatermelonDB, and writes about tools, focus and software craft.

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  Fooled by Randomness

  Their words

  Podcast. Ramblings about randomness and all the ways in which our minds aren’t properly equipped to deal with it.

  radex.io

Programmer and writer on computer architecture, performance, and software reliability. He has worked on CPU design at Centaur Technology and on software at Google and Microsoft, and writes long-form technical essays at danluu.com.

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  Multiagent Systems: Algorithmic, Game-Theoretic, and Logical Foundations

  Their words

  The title is the worst thing about this book. Otherwise, it's a nice introduction to algorithmic game theory.

  danluu.com