Here's my conversation with Don Lincoln about some of the biggest open questions in physics, including dark energy, dark matter, the matter-antimatter imbalance, quantum vacuum, quantum foam, and the quest to unify the laws of physics. Don is a particle physicist at Fermilab who has spent decades working at the frontiers of high energy physics. He is also a great teacher & writer. I highly recommend his courses & books. One of my favorite lecture series he has given is The Evidence for Modern Physics where he breaks down the experiments that validate some of the weird laws of physics we have, and what it would take to validate even the weirder ones. It's not enough to come up with a beautiful theory. You also have to show through experiment that the theory is likely to be correct. This process often doesn't get the love it deserves, even though it's often the most important and difficult part of the scientific process. I ❤️ physics. The conversation is here on X in full and is up everywhere else (see comment). Timestamps: 0:00 - Introduction 0:49 - Unifying the laws of nature 15:20 - General relativity 32:27 - Electroweak force 44:09 - How particle colliders work 1:02:12 - Higgs boson discovery 1:12:32 - Theory of everything 1:42:17 - Physics of empty space 1:49:41 - Antimatter 2:10:31 - Dark energy 2:14:20 - Dark matter 2:42:56 - Future of physics

I've been on a wild travel journey in China for several weeks, with only a backpack, making new friends and meeting & getting to know people from all walks of life. I've been truly humbled and inspired by everyone's kindness. Next, I'm hopping over to Taiwan (first time for me) to hang out with Jensen, attend Computex, eat a bunch of street food, and just have fun talking to all kinds of folks around the city & beyond. After that, no plans, anything goes. As always, please give travel suggestions or fill out coffee form if you want to hang out in Taiwain or anywhere else in the world. Love you all! ❤️

I'm traveling the world for a bit, starting with China but then hopping around the globe, anywhere. Open to any adventure. No plans, only a backpack. Hoping to meet & get to know humans from all walks of life. The pic is from a long hike on the Great Wall. For me, as a fan of history, this was an epic experience. In China, first I'm visiting a few big cities & talking to engineers at the heart of China's AI revolution. After that, if feeling crazy enough, I'm hitchhiking (first time) across rural China for a few weeks. Hitchhiking because I think it's the best way to meet rural folks who I would otherwise never get the chance to meet. I hope to do the same in US and other places. I have a request, if you have a travel recommendation, fill out the form(s) below if you feel like it. Or share with folks who might have advice about such travel. Form 1 - travel recommendation: If you can, recommend to me an interesting place I should visit anywhere in the world. For this, fill out form 1. Not touristy stuff, but something off the beaten path, that tourists may not know about, but is legendary. It could be as remote as meeting a herder in the mountains who is a local legend. Asia, Middle East, Europe, India, South/North America, Africa, Australia, anywhere. In China, I'm hoping to visit maybe Heibei, Shanxi, Shaanxi, Gansu, Sichuan, Yunnan, etc, so recommendations for spots to visit are helpful. Form 2 - coffee: If you want to grab a coffee with me anywhere in the world, fill out form 2 (please don't use form 1 for that). Anyway, I hectically tossed stuff in backpack. Realizing I don't have a clear plan of any kind, which is probably the only way to do it. LFG. Love you all ❤️

Here's my conversation all about @FFmpeg, the legendary open-source software powering most video on the Internet. In the episode, I talk with Jean-Baptiste Kempf and Kieran Kunhya. JB is lead developer of VLC and Kieran is FFmpeg contributor, codec engineer, and the person behind the now-infamous @FFmpeg account on X. VLC (@videolan), by the way, is also a legendary piece of open-source software: it's a video player that can open basically anything & has been downloaded over 6 billion times. I think both FFmpeg and VLC are two of the most important and impactful software systems ever created, both open source, and both created & maintained by volunteers: brilliant engineers from all walks of life. Thank you to everyone who contributed to FFmpeg and VLC, and in general to all engineers giving their heart & soul to building systems used by millions (or billions) of people, and often doing so not for money, status, or fame, but purely for the love of building great software and doing good for the world. Thank you to the builders! 🙏❤️ Shoutouts in this chat to @ID_AA_Carmack @karpathy @elonmusk @TimSweeneyEpic and everyone who is a contributor & fan of open source! It's here on X in full and is up everywhere else (see comment). Timestamps: 0:00 - Episode highlight 2:17 - Introduction 5:35 - Weirdest things VLC opens 9:59 - How video playback works 19:20 - Video codecs and containers 30:07 - FFmpeg explained 51:07 - Linus Torvalds 55:46 - Turning down millions to keep VLC ad-free 1:10:04 - FFmpeg & Google drama 1:29:18 - FFmpeg developers 1:35:55 - VLC and FFmpeg 1:40:29 - History of FFmpeg 1:43:46 - Reverse engineering codecs 1:57:01 - FFmpeg testing 2:01:08 - Assembly code (handwritten) 2:25:26 - Rust programming language 2:34:42 - FFmpeg and Libav fork 2:43:04 - Open source burnout 2:50:51 - x264 and internet video 3:04:07 - Video compression basics 3:11:04 - CIA and fake VLC 3:21:39 - Ultra low latency streaming 3:39:07 - AV2 codec and video patents 3:48:59 - VLC backdoors 3:59:14 - Video archiving 4:05:51 - Future of FFmpeg and VLC

Here's my conversation with historian Lars Brownworth all about the Vikings, from the start of the Vikings Age to the conquest of Europe and beyond. This was an epic & mind-blowing conversation. It's here on X in full and is up everywhere else (see comment). Timestamps: 0:00 - Episode highlight 1:17 - Introduction 2:37 - The start of the Viking Age 12:30 - Viking military strategy, tactics & technology 26:13 - Ragnar Lothbrok 35:40 - The Great Heathen Army 40:23 - Rollo and Normandy 50:34 - Viking religion and Valhalla 1:01:06 - Viking explorers 1:06:13 - Vikings in North America 1:19:35 - Vikings in the East 1:39:14 - Byzantine Empire 1:47:57 - History and human nature

Here's my conversation with Jensen Huang, CEO of NVIDIA, the most valuable & one of the most influential companies in the history of human civilization. It is the engine powering the AI revolution. This was a fascinating & inspiring conversation, in parts super-technical on engineering of every part of the AI stack, memory, power, supply chain (TSMC, ASML, etc), in parts about leadership & psychology, and in parts personal & philosophical about life, consciousness, mortality, and human nature. It's here on X in full and is up everywhere else (see comment). Timestamps: 0:00 - Introduction 0:33 - Extreme co-design and rack-scale engineering 3:18 - How Jensen runs NVIDIA 22:40 - AI scaling laws 37:40 - Biggest blockers to AI scaling laws 39:23 - Supply chain 41:18 - Memory 47:24 - Power 52:43 - Elon and Colossus 56:11 - Jensen's approach to engineering and leadership 1:01:37 - China 1:09:50 - TSMC and Taiwan 1:15:04 - NVIDIA's moat 1:20:41 - AI data centers in space 1:24:30 - Will NVIDIA be worth $10 trillion? 1:34:39 - Leadership under pressure 1:48:25 - Video games 1:55:16 - AGI timeline 1:57:29 - Future of programming 2:11:01 - Consciousness 2:17:22 - Mortality

Here's my conversation with Jeff Kaplan, a legendary Blizzard game designer of World of Warcraft and Overwatch, which are two of the biggest, most influential games ever made. Jeff is one of the most genuine & awesome human beings I've ever met: kind, thoughtful, hilarious, and still & forever a gamer through and through. This was a truly fun & inspiring conversation. We talk about it all: the lows, the highs, the memes, the details of the game design process, and the new game he's been secretely working on: The Legend of California. I got a chance to play the game with Jeff, and it's incredibly beautiful (and fun). You can wishlist it on Steam now. I can't wait to play it with all of you! Conversation is here on X in full and is up everywhere else (see comment). Timestamps: 0:00 - Episode highlight 1:27 - Introduction 4:07 - Early games: Pac-Man, Zork, Doom, Quake 18:33 - Writing career - 170 rejection letters 34:06 - EverQuest obsession 47:04 - Getting hired at Blizzard 1:02:32 - Lowest point in Jeff's life 1:08:37 - One of Us 1:12:54 - Early Blizzard culture 1:32:36 - Building World of Warcraft 1:50:20 - How WoW changed video games 2:07:42 - Single-player vs Multi-player 2:28:35 - How Blizzard made great video games 2:54:25 - Online toxicity 3:01:59 - Why Titan failed 3:19:09 - Overwatch in six weeks 3:46:07 - Best Overwatch heroes 3:54:37 - The challenge of matchmaking 3:58:01 - Rust 4:08:22 - Why Jeff left Blizzard 4:30:35 - Diablo IV 4:32:03 - Getting back to making video games 4:40:59 - The Legend of California 4:54:44 - Greatest video game of all time 5:02:51 - AI and future of video games