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Chris Williamson
In this year-end review of *Modern Wisdom*, Chris Williamson celebrates the podcast's growth to becoming Spotify's eighth-largest show in 2025 while reflecting on key themes from the past twelve months, including self-esteem and integrity. He argues that low self-esteem is often rooted in a lack of …
Lex Fridman
Tuomas Sandholm, a professor and co-creator of Libratus—the first AI system to defeat top human players in heads-up no-limit Texas Hold'em—discusses how this game has become the premier benchmark for imperfect information problems in artificial intelligence. Unlike perfect information games like che …
Lex Fridman
In his discussion of markets and collective outcomes, Michael Kearns highlights how game theory serves as a mathematical framework for analyzing systems where individual interactions shape overall results. While originating in economics, this field has evolved into algorithmic game theory over the p …
Lex Fridman
The development of AlphaZero represents a profound intellectual leap in artificial intelligence, marking a transition from systems reliant on human expert data to those capable of learning entirely through self-play. In this framework, an agent learns by playing games against itself rather than rely …
Lex Fridman
In this episode of the Lex Fridman Podcast, Donald Knuth reflects on his early programming experiences at Caltech in 1957 using an IBM 650 mainframe that operated with decimal machine language rather than binary bits. His first program factored numbers by punching instructions onto cards and debuggi …
Lex Fridman
In this episode, Liv Boeree explores how luck and skill interact in poker versus life, emphasizing that while short-term outcomes are heavily influenced by chance—such as winning 52% of hands against a specific opponent over ten games—the long-term results converge toward the quality of one's decisi …
Lex Fridman
In this episode of *The Lex Fridman Podcast*, comedian and actor Will Sasso joins to discuss his extensive career spanning from *Mad TV* in 1997 to his recent work on the podcast *Dudesy*. A long-time fan, Fridman notes that he has admired Sasso since the late nineties. The conversation begins with …
Lex Fridman
Noam Brown, a research scientist at Meta AI and co-creator of groundbreaking artificial intelligence systems for poker and strategy games, explains how game theory principles like Nash equilibrium can be applied to complex scenarios involving imperfect information. In heads-up No Limit Texas Hold'em …