Experts Brain Health Lex Fridman

Lex Fridman · 44 episodes · 731 sourced insights

What Lex Fridman says about brain health

Everything Lex Fridman and guests said about brain health across 44 episodes — each point linked to the exact second on YouTube. Sourced expert opinion, not medical advice.

In their own words

Tenenbaum claims 'we don't really have any real AI' — only AI technologies that do single tasks without common sense or general intelligence.
00:02:06Josh Tenenbaum · Lex Fridman Podcast · Feb 2018
Most foundational deep learning and reinforcement learning papers (backprop, perceptron, temporal difference) were originally published in psychology and cognitive science journals.
00:08:47Josh Tenenbaum · Lex Fridman Podcast · Feb 2018
Andrej Karpathy emailed Tenenbaum saying that despite five years passing, 'I don't believe we've made very much progress' on real image understanding.
00:26:50Josh Tenenbaum · Lex Fridman Podcast · Feb 2018
The core CBMM goal: build a robot that can spontaneously help humans around the house the way an 18-month-old child does, without being programmed or instructed.
00:43:50Josh Tenenbaum · Lex Fridman Podcast · Feb 2018
Tenenbaum proposes that evolution built game-engine-like tools (approximate physics and simple agent planning) into the human brain as the cognitive core.
00:51:38Josh Tenenbaum · Lex Fridman Podcast · Feb 2018
His group's 2015 Science cover paper achieved human-level one-shot concept learning of handwritten characters by inverting probabilistic 'drawing programs.'
01:09:42Josh Tenenbaum · Lex Fridman Podcast · Feb 2018
He frames the oldest dream of AI — Turing's and Minsky's — as building a machine that starts like a baby and learns like a child, which he believes can be worked on now.
01:13:49Josh Tenenbaum · Lex Fridman Podcast · Feb 2018
The high-resolution central region of human vision (the fovea) is only about the size of your thumb held at arm's length, yet the brain stitches glimpses into a rich whole-world representation.
00:12:24Josh Tenenbaum · Lex Fridman Podcast · Feb 2018
People can estimate how far the wall behind them is and roughly how many people are behind them despite not having looked, showing the brain tracks the unseen world.
00:13:26Josh Tenenbaum · Lex Fridman Podcast · Feb 2018
Industry image-captioning systems surpassed human accuracy on held-out test sets but suffer 'dataset overfitting,' producing absurd captions on random web images.
00:21:08Josh Tenenbaum · Lex Fridman Podcast · Feb 2018
A baby reaching behind himself for an unseen cup demonstrates 'object permanence' — representing objects as enduring even when out of sight for a minute or more.
00:36:35Josh Tenenbaum · Lex Fridman Podcast · Feb 2018
In Warneken and Tomasello's experiments, human 18-month-olds spontaneously help adults in novel situations, while chimps rarely do so reliably or flexibly.
00:40:43Josh Tenenbaum · Lex Fridman Podcast · Feb 2018
Tenenbaum's 'intuitive physics engine' predicts human judgments about falling blocks by running a few short, low-precision game-style physics simulations.
00:52:09Josh Tenenbaum · Lex Fridman Podcast · Feb 2018
Infant knowledge is studied via 'looking time' methods — babies look longer at surprising scenes — and his model linked low probability events to longer looking times.
00:57:17Josh Tenenbaum · Lex Fridman Podcast · Feb 2018
A model using the MuJoCo robotics physics engine plus Bayesian inverse planning predicts which object a person is reaching for before they touch it, matching human timing.
01:01:26Josh Tenenbaum · Lex Fridman Podcast · Feb 2018
Neurons are slow yet the brain computes intelligent behavior fast on almost no energy — a burrito powered a student writing 300 lines of code.
01:25:41Josh Tenenbaum · Lex Fridman Podcast · Feb 2018
Tenenbaum speculates a single biological neuron may be as computationally powerful as a CPU core, implying the brain could be like ~10 billion cores.
01:29:20Josh Tenenbaum · Lex Fridman Podcast · Feb 2018
The way we remember is not a replay of experience but something totally different, biased by the beginning, end, and peaks of an event rather than its full content.
00:01:33Charan Ranganath · Lex Fridman Podcast · May 2024
Memory is fundamentally about the present and future, not the past; the brain is optimized to learn what's most useful for understanding the present and predicting the future.
00:02:35Charan Ranganath · Lex Fridman Podcast · May 2024
Episodic memories are encoded most efficiently at points of high prediction error, uncertainty, or surprise rather than constantly, and the hippocampus shows heightened activity at these 'event boundaries.'
00:29:14Charan Ranganath · Lex Fridman Podcast · May 2024
Ranganath's core advice: you don't want to remember more, you want to remember better, by focusing on what's important.
00:31:48Charan Ranganath · Lex Fridman Podcast · May 2024
Mentor Marcia Johnson pioneered the problem of how we tell the difference between memories of things that actually happened versus things we merely imagined, since both are constructions in the head.
00:54:37Charan Ranganath · Lex Fridman Podcast · May 2024
There is no such thing as true or false memories; all memories mix actual details with inferences, and repeated remembering plus misinformation can fully detach a memory from what happened.
01:45:38Charan Ranganath · Lex Fridman Podcast · May 2024
Adding episodic memory to AI is superficially easy but deeply hard because we don't understand episodic memory; the key open problems are when to record a moment and what information to prioritize.
02:38:19Charan Ranganath · Lex Fridman Podcast · May 2024
What Ranganath finds most beautiful about the mind is the internal model, a kind of 'dark energy' that connects all our sensory experiences into a unified universe of mind from only a small sample of the world.
03:05:27Charan Ranganath · Lex Fridman Podcast · May 2024
Infantile amnesia covers roughly the first two years of life with essentially no episodic memories, followed by childhood amnesia where memories are only fragmentary, partly because the hippocampus and rapidly-changing neocortex are still developing.
00:14:36Charan Ranganath · Lex Fridman Podcast · May 2024
Menopause is rare in the animal world; orcas are one of the few other species that have it, and orca pods are led by grandmothers who pass on traditions to younger generations.
00:20:51Charan Ranganath · Lex Fridman Podcast · May 2024
Ebbinghaus's earliest quantitative memory studies showed people lose about 60% of arbitrary nonsense information within a day, and no one has managed to violate these basic forgetting curves.
00:32:50Charan Ranganath · Lex Fridman Podcast · May 2024
The human brain uses only about 12 to 20 watts, operating on a 'less is more' principle of reusing information rather than storing everything.
00:32:50Charan Ranganath · Lex Fridman Podcast · May 2024
fMRI works because deoxygenated hemoglobin is more magnetizable than oxygenated blood; increased local brain activity raises blood flow and lowers deoxygenated hemoglobin concentration, producing more signal about six seconds after the activity.
01:14:22Charan Ranganath · Lex Fridman Podcast · May 2024
One theory holds that fMRI may largely measure astrocytes (glial support cells) meeting metabolic demands rather than neurons spiking directly, since astrocytes anaerobically metabolize glucose to recycle glutamate from synapses.
01:23:45Charan Ranganath · Lex Fridman Podcast · May 2024
Surveys suggest about 75% of people report having experienced deja vu, which is theorized to be an artificial sense of familiarity from a partial match to prior experience, and can precede seizures in some epilepsy patients.
01:39:21Charan Ranganath · Lex Fridman Podcast · May 2024
'Social contagion' describes how memory misinformation spreads like a virus once two people share a memory, with more trusted or powerful people having greater influence in shaping the shared narrative.
01:48:12Charan Ranganath · Lex Fridman Podcast · May 2024
Dopamine is theorized to be about the discomfort and drive that energizes reward-seeking rather than pleasure itself; Ranganath's curiosity studies found dopamine-circuit activity was driven by the question, not the answer.
02:02:16Charan Ranganath · Lex Fridman Podcast · May 2024
During the pandemic, students reported that days felt like they were passing slower while weeks felt faster, because repetitive same-context experiences create one long monotonous event with few distinct memories.
02:17:22Charan Ranganath · Lex Fridman Podcast · May 2024
Eagleman notes children under about seven can have an entire brain hemisphere removed (hemispherectomy) and still function nearly normally.
00:06:14David Eagleman · Lex Fridman Podcast · Aug 2020
He explains he chose 'livewired' over 'plasticity' because the brain never reaches an endpoint, it rewires constantly your whole life.
00:10:54David Eagleman · Lex Fridman Podcast · Aug 2020
He is openly skeptical that invasive brain-computer interfaces like Neuralink will become a mainstream consumer business.
00:26:18David Eagleman · Lex Fridman Podcast · Aug 2020
Using the Kalahari-bushman-and-radio analogy, he speculates free will might have a source outside the visible machinery of the brain.
00:48:35David Eagleman · Lex Fridman Podcast · Aug 2020
His lab's brain-scan study showed people empathize more with in-group hands being stabbed, even with arbitrary coin-toss tribes.
00:54:13David Eagleman · Lex Fridman Podcast · Aug 2020
He predicts GPT-3 will never do a really good job because it has no model of what it's like to be a human.
01:08:10David Eagleman · Lex Fridman Podcast · Aug 2020
He reveals he gave up his lab and spends 90% of his time running Neosensory, calling it the most important thing happening right now.
01:21:35David Eagleman · Lex Fridman Podcast · Aug 2020
The visual cortex hardens quickly because visual data is stable, while motor and somatosensory cortex stay malleable because the body keeps changing.
00:12:26David Eagleman · Lex Fridman Podcast · Aug 2020
An alligator's brain is essentially the same now as 100,000 years ago, whereas humans drop into the world with a 'half-baked' brain to absorb culture.
00:14:31David Eagleman · Lex Fridman Podcast · Aug 2020
Hundreds of thousands of people already hear and see via cochlear and retinal implants that speak 'the dialect of silicon valley,' not biology.
00:30:53David Eagleman · Lex Fridman Podcast · Aug 2020
Some people with physical Alzheimer's damage show no symptoms while alive because constant cognitive challenge builds new neural roadways.
00:36:33David Eagleman · Lex Fridman Podcast · Aug 2020
Each neuron contains the entire human genome, and the brain has roughly half a quadrillion connections.
00:46:30David Eagleman · Lex Fridman Podcast · Aug 2020
The Mars rover Curiosity effectively died when a wheel got stuck, while a wolf simply gnaws off a trapped leg and relearns to walk.
01:15:21David Eagleman · Lex Fridman Podcast · Aug 2020
Neosensory's wristband lets deaf people 'hear' through skin vibrations, becoming a new qualia, for $399, far cheaper than a cochlear implant.
01:22:37David Eagleman · Lex Fridman Podcast · Aug 2020
Eagleman has tested sensory expansion, feeling infrared and ultraviolet, and once located a hidden night-vision camera by following the sensation on his wrist.
01:31:23David Eagleman · Lex Fridman Podcast · Aug 2020
Huberman calls it mind-blowing that the master circadian clock coordinates every organ in the body simply by oscillating temperature.
00:09:53Andrew Huberman · Lex Fridman Podcast · Feb 2021
He pushes back on sleep anxiety, arguing science has 'gone too far' and that you can function well on disrupted sleep if you stay calm.
00:18:12Andrew Huberman · Lex Fridman Podcast · Feb 2021
He claims there's no evidence eight hours beats six, and consistency of sleep duration matters more than total amount.
00:23:27Andrew Huberman · Lex Fridman Podcast · Feb 2021
Citing Satchin Panda's work, mice eating freely but only within a restricted window stayed lean while the same food spread over 24 hours made them fat and sick.
01:01:15Andrew Huberman · Lex Fridman Podcast · Feb 2021
Lex describes the 'hack' of telling himself he feels good while running and actually starting to feel better, which Huberman frames as real biology.
00:57:37Andrew Huberman · Lex Fridman Podcast · Feb 2021
Huberman frames REM dreaming as self-induced trauma therapy where you replay intense emotion with epinephrine switched off.
01:21:22Andrew Huberman · Lex Fridman Podcast · Feb 2021
A Nature paper from UC Davis shows chemists modifying psychedelics to keep neuroplasticity while removing the hallucinogenic component.
01:37:18Andrew Huberman · Lex Fridman Podcast · Feb 2021
Lex reveals he privately archived and processed Joe Rogan's entire YouTube video catalog to do blink and pupil tracking research.
02:06:37Andrew Huberman · Lex Fridman Podcast · Feb 2021
Huberman jokes he avoids 'why' questions because he 'wasn't consulted at the design phase' of human biology.
00:01:35Andrew Huberman · Lex Fridman Podcast · Feb 2021
Your temperature minimum sits about two hours before your natural wake time and is a key landmark for shifting your circadian clock with light.
00:14:32Andrew Huberman · Lex Fridman Podcast · Feb 2021
A 20-minute non-sleep deep rest protocol can reset basal ganglia dopamine to post-sleep levels, per a Danish study.
00:25:30Andrew Huberman · Lex Fridman Podcast · Feb 2021
Inhaling speeds the heart up and exhaling slows it down, the basis of heart rate variability you can manipulate in real time.
00:46:13Andrew Huberman · Lex Fridman Podcast · Feb 2021
Testosterone's main effect is to make effort feel good, and cholesterol gets diverted toward either cortisol or testosterone, not both.
00:54:31Andrew Huberman · Lex Fridman Podcast · Feb 2021
Salt and electrolytes, not sugar, often fix the shakiness people feel while fasting.
01:08:29Andrew Huberman · Lex Fridman Podcast · Feb 2021
London taxi drivers' hippocampal place cells replay their city routes during sleep, the same spatial replay seen in rodents.
01:18:18Andrew Huberman · Lex Fridman Podcast · Feb 2021
MDMA is unusual because it elevates dopamine and serotonin simultaneously, a state Huberman says may have never before existed in human history.
01:38:20Andrew Huberman · Lex Fridman Podcast · Feb 2021
Acetylcholine from the nucleus basalis can permanently rewire the neocortex around a focused event, a basis for accelerated learning.
01:56:53Andrew Huberman · Lex Fridman Podcast · Feb 2021
Every blink resets your perception of time via a dopaminergic mechanism, and alert people blink less.
02:10:48Andrew Huberman · Lex Fridman Podcast · Feb 2021
Poggio argues recent AI breakthroughs (deep learning, reinforcement learning) originated from neuroscience and bets future breakthroughs will too.
00:11:07Tomaso Poggio · Lex Fridman Podcast · Jan 2019
His hunch is the brain's face-recognition area is not hardwired but a plastic region designed to be imprinted very quickly in early life.
00:20:11Tomaso Poggio · Lex Fridman Podcast · Jan 2019
He partly disagrees with Max Tegmark: rather than compositionality coming purely from physics, our brains may be wired as deep networks so we only solve compositional problems.
00:36:28Tomaso Poggio · Lex Fridman Podcast · Jan 2019
Deep networks have more good (zero-loss) minima than there are atoms in the universe, due to over-parameterization, explaining why optimization works.
00:43:26Tomaso Poggio · Lex Fridman Podcast · Jan 2019
Poggio's proof: deep hierarchical networks with local connectivity can completely avoid the curse of dimensionality for compositional functions.
00:47:33Tomaso Poggio · Lex Fridman Podcast · Jan 2019
He calls claims that AI is more dangerous than nuclear weapons (by Musk and Bostrom) misleading, saying nuclear weapons deserve more worry.
00:57:33Tomaso Poggio · Lex Fridman Podcast · Jan 2019
Researchers can stimulate specific brain areas with magnetic fields and actually change a person's ethical decisions.
01:04:25Tomaso Poggio · Lex Fridman Podcast · Jan 2019
Einstein was the worst of five physics PhD students at ETH Zurich and the only one who didn't get an academic position after graduating.
00:02:35Tomaso Poggio · Lex Fridman Podcast · Jan 2019
Human DNA does not have many more genes than the fruit fly Drosophila, which is roughly 95 percent hard-coded by genes.
00:18:35Tomaso Poggio · Lex Fridman Podcast · Jan 2019
Marge Livingstone raised baby monkeys deprived of seeing faces; their brains developed no face-preference area.
00:20:43Tomaso Poggio · Lex Fridman Podcast · Jan 2019
In that deprivation experiment, monkeys often saw the technicians' blue gloves, and some brain cells became hand-sensitive instead of face-sensitive.
00:22:18Tomaso Poggio · Lex Fridman Podcast · Jan 2019
In 1950s neuroscience it was briefly believed the brain was equipotential, that any part was equivalent to any other.
00:23:23Tomaso Poggio · Lex Fridman Podcast · Jan 2019
Reading works compositionally: you don't read every letter but combine syllables into words and words into sentences.
00:34:52Tomaso Poggio · Lex Fridman Podcast · Jan 2019
The universal approximation theorem is essentially the same as a much older result that any continuous function can be approximated by a polynomial.
00:45:29Tomaso Poggio · Lex Fridman Podcast · Jan 2019
In a Google X experiment, subjects seeing through a nearby robot's cameras felt their self had moved to where the robot was.
01:11:54Tomaso Poggio · Lex Fridman Podcast · Jan 2019
Belcampo represents less than 1% of US-raised animals; the rest is factory farmed, which Lex says haunted him after his visit.
00:00:30Anya Fernald · Lex Fridman Podcast · Jul 2021
Fernald argues industrial farming has 'de-skilled' agriculture, turning it from art and science into entry-level employment.
00:45:16Anya Fernald · Lex Fridman Podcast · Jul 2021
She claims converting damaged and underutilized rangeland to regenerative ag could sequester 20-40% of the world's carbon.
00:45:47Anya Fernald · Lex Fridman Podcast · Jul 2021
Belcampo's 25,000 acres have been third-party verified as carbon-impact negative.
00:49:25Anya Fernald · Lex Fridman Podcast · Jul 2021
She pushes back on the 'ditch meat for plant-based' narrative, arguing meat can be part of the climate solution if we eat less and pay more.
00:50:26Anya Fernald · Lex Fridman Podcast · Jul 2021
On a high-grain diet a cow's rumen looks 'black and shiny' inside versus green and compost-smelling in grass-fed animals.
01:01:17Anya Fernald · Lex Fridman Podcast · Jul 2021
Fernald reveals her early Sicily cheese job answered to 'multiple masters' and her boss later went to federal prison for corruption.
01:17:52Anya Fernald · Lex Fridman Podcast · Jul 2021
She is pro-hunting, calling hunted game the cleanest, happiest meat and wild animals the truly 'happiest cows.'
01:33:18Anya Fernald · Lex Fridman Podcast · Jul 2021
Cooking and smelling food while hungry can lower your hunger by roughly 40%, changing your satiety threshold.
00:11:32Anya Fernald · Lex Fridman Podcast · Jul 2021
How meat cooks is governed more by muscle function and collagen content than by fat content.
00:28:38Anya Fernald · Lex Fridman Podcast · Jul 2021
Load-bearing muscles like cheek and shin are full of collagen that must be liquefied with low, slow, moist heat.
00:29:40Anya Fernald · Lex Fridman Podcast · Jul 2021
Lex notes he read a paper arguing the killing of an animal can never truly be humane.
00:51:58Anya Fernald · Lex Fridman Podcast · Jul 2021
Ruminants like cows have five stomachs to process low-calorie, high-fiber grass that would make humans sick.
00:54:33Anya Fernald · Lex Fridman Podcast · Jul 2021
In the 1950s commercial chickens took about 54 weeks to reach full weight; in confinement today it can be 2.5 weeks.
00:56:07Anya Fernald · Lex Fridman Podcast · Jul 2021
A truly grass-fed chicken doesn't exist because chickens are monogastric omnivores that need grain density.
00:56:38Anya Fernald · Lex Fridman Podcast · Jul 2021
An animal's omega-3-to-6 ratio can change within a week of switching to grain.
01:01:17Anya Fernald · Lex Fridman Podcast · Jul 2021
Conventional beef can have a 1:30 omega-3-to-6 ratio while Belcampo's grass-fed beef gets as low as 1:1.
01:08:30Anya Fernald · Lex Fridman Podcast · Jul 2021
Fernald was technically a professional musician, playing oboe in a Sicilian municipal band for 50 euro per funeral.
01:32:18Anya Fernald · Lex Fridman Podcast · Jul 2021
The only way to beat the exponential curse of dimensionality is to use another exponential by making models compositional.
00:02:39Yoshua Bengio · Lex Fridman Podcast · Sep 2016
Distributed representations let the number of distinguishable regions grow exponentially while parameters grow only linearly.
00:11:42Yoshua Bengio · Lex Fridman Podcast · Sep 2016
In high-dimensional parameter spaces, training mostly encounters saddle points rather than bad local minima.
00:27:13Yoshua Bengio · Lex Fridman Podcast · Sep 2016
Most local minima in large neural nets concentrate in a narrow band just above the global minimum.
00:32:03Yoshua Bengio · Lex Fridman Podcast · Sep 2016
Bengio names unsupervised learning as the biggest challenge ahead for AI.
00:38:16Yoshua Bengio · Lex Fridman Podcast · Sep 2016
Model-based reinforcement learning needs unsupervised learning because dangerous states (like fatal driving mistakes) can never be sampled enough.
00:46:09Yoshua Bengio · Lex Fridman Podcast · Sep 2016
Backpropagation, while powerful, has no clear biological implementation in the brain.
00:59:28Yoshua Bengio · Lex Fridman Podcast · Sep 2016
A 2012 experiment in Antonio Torralba's lab at MIT found hidden units in a scene-recognition net that humans could assign clear semantic interpretations to.
00:16:25Yoshua Bengio · Lex Fridman Podcast · Sep 2016
In the 1990s many researchers abandoned neural nets due to theory showing exponentially many local minima in the training objective.
00:25:42Yoshua Bengio · Lex Fridman Podcast · Sep 2016
As network size increases, the distribution of achievable training costs concentrates around a single good value.
00:29:22Yoshua Bengio · Lex Fridman Podcast · Sep 2016
A two or three year old understands intuitive Newtonian physics without ever being taught equations, purely from unsupervised learning.
00:39:52Yoshua Bengio · Lex Fridman Podcast · Sep 2016
Bengio's lab has a paper applying supervised-style credit assignment ideas to sequence prediction in reinforcement learning.
00:51:57Yoshua Bengio · Lex Fridman Podcast · Sep 2016
Bengio proposed 'target prop,' a way of generalizing backprop by propagating targets to each layer.
01:00:34Yoshua Bengio · Lex Fridman Podcast · Sep 2016
Recent work on gradient estimation in deep recurrent nets produces updates resembling spike-timing-dependent plasticity (STDP) observed by neuroscientists.
01:00:34Yoshua Bengio · Lex Fridman Podcast · Sep 2016
A 2009 visualization experiment showed that hundreds of random initializations never converge to the same local minimum.
01:09:06Yoshua Bengio · Lex Fridman Podcast · Sep 2016
Keller claims x86 is 'arguably the worst architecture on the planet' yet one of the most popular, arguing instruction sets evolve slowly and 'don't matter very much.'
00:11:55Jim Keller · Lex Fridman Podcast · Feb 2021
Contrarian take: 'the future of computing is inefficiency not efficiency' because scaling across many computers beats per-computer efficiency.
00:46:34Jim Keller · Lex Fridman Podcast · Feb 2021
Tenstorrent built hardware that natively runs graphs rather than emulating them like GPUs do, the core thesis of the company.
00:53:18Jim Keller · Lex Fridman Podcast · Feb 2021
Keller predicts AI will not just learn physics but 'understand physics in ways that we can't understand,' a step beyond Wolfram's physics-by-equation.
01:25:59Jim Keller · Lex Fridman Podcast · Feb 2021
He frames consciousness as a half-second-behind, single-threaded post-hoc narrative running atop a massively parallel brain.
01:50:46Jim Keller · Lex Fridman Podcast · Feb 2021
Personal revelation: Keller became 'an expert in benzo withdrawal,' detailing the suffering his brother-in-law Jordan Peterson endured.
02:00:10Jim Keller · Lex Fridman Podcast · Feb 2021
On GameStop/Robinhood, he argues 'we know five percent of what really happened' and the people who made the most money aren't the ones being discussed.
02:08:31Jim Keller · Lex Fridman Podcast · Feb 2021
Keller reveals he is writing a book about love, framing love as a 'function that generates newness and novelty.'
02:25:07Jim Keller · Lex Fridman Podcast · Feb 2021
On JavaScript: doing 'the crappy thing fast' and iterating by listening to developers often beats waiting for perfect.
00:09:19Jim Keller · Lex Fridman Podcast · Feb 2021
Intel won partly by going open early (licensing x86 to ~seven makers) while rivals like Z80 stayed proprietary to one source.
00:14:32Jim Keller · Lex Fridman Podcast · Feb 2021
On AMD's Zen, defining all module interfaces before writing RTL let teams test pieces independently and dramatically improved quality.
00:38:48Jim Keller · Lex Fridman Podcast · Feb 2021
'A beautiful design can't be bigger than the person doing it' — good design matches human cognitive limits to module size.
00:39:18Jim Keller · Lex Fridman Podcast · Feb 2021
A Tesla chose a tiny computer over a resistor to measure battery current because the computer was cheaper than the resistor.
00:47:34Jim Keller · Lex Fridman Podcast · Feb 2021
Modern self-driving trains an arbitrarily large network that works, then refactors it down to what fits and is affordable to ship.
01:17:08Jim Keller · Lex Fridman Podcast · Feb 2021
Keller preps his mind before sleep with problems he wants to solve, then directs and remembers his dreams to work on them.
01:42:31Jim Keller · Lex Fridman Podcast · Feb 2021
He cites a statistic that roughly one-third of ocean bacteria die every day from viral invasion.
02:06:29Jim Keller · Lex Fridman Podcast · Feb 2021
On fear of humiliation: 'you're the only person on the planet' who cares about your embarrassment; everyone else forgets it.
02:20:26Jim Keller · Lex Fridman Podcast · Feb 2021
Love is functional: we habituate to everything except what we love, which keeps it new and makes us notice problems instantly.
02:26:08Jim Keller · Lex Fridman Podcast · Feb 2021
Hart openly admits to using heroin, cocaine, MDMA, cannabis and other hard drugs he studies in his private life.
00:01:32Carl Hart · Lex Fridman Podcast · Oct 2021
He claims the predominant effects of cannabis, cocaine, heroin, methamphetamine and psilocybin are overwhelmingly positive.
00:07:18Carl Hart · Lex Fridman Podcast · Oct 2021
He argues the main health concern with regular heroin use is constipation, not the dramatic harms usually portrayed.
00:21:16Carl Hart · Lex Fridman Podcast · Oct 2021
Hart asserts addiction has almost nothing to do with drugs themselves since the vast majority of users never become addicted.
00:21:49Carl Hart · Lex Fridman Podcast · Oct 2021
He says all drugs people seek, including cocaine and heroin, should be legally regulated and available to adults.
00:24:56Carl Hart · Lex Fridman Podcast · Oct 2021
He states his job as department chair from 2016-2019 was more detrimental to his health than his drug use ever was.
00:33:15Carl Hart · Lex Fridman Podcast · Oct 2021

What Lex Fridman recommends for brain health

Affiliate link — we may earn a commission at no extra cost to you.

Man's Search for Meaning

Viktor Frankl

recommended in 8 eps · 3 experts Book

The Ascent of Money

Niall Ferguson

recommended in 7 eps · 1 expert Book

The Brothers Karamazov

Fyodor Dostoevsky

recommended in 6 eps · 2 experts Book

The Beginning of Infinity

David Deutsch

recommended in 6 eps · 3 experts Book

Deep Work

Cal Newport

recommended in 5 eps · 2 experts Book

On Writing

Stephen King

recommended in 5 eps · 3 experts Book

Trauma: The Invisible Epidemic

Paul Conti

recommended in 4 eps · 2 experts Book

A Fighter's Heart

Sam Sheridan

recommended in 4 eps · 3 experts Book

How to Win Friends and Influence People

Dale Carnegie

recommended in 4 eps · 4 experts Book

The Circadian Code

Satchin Panda

recommended in 3 eps · 2 experts Book

On the Move

Oliver Sacks

recommended in 3 eps · 2 experts Book

The Selfish Gene

Richard Dawkins

recommended in 3 eps · 1 expert