Classics

The full-length Numberphile interview with mathematician and hedge fund founder Jim Simons. He discusses his path from mathematics and codebreaking to founding Renaissance Technologies, his use of algorithms in markets, and his philanthropy.

Brian Kernighan interviews Unix co-creator Ken Thompson at VCF East 2019. Thompson recounts how he was hired at Bell Labs, writing the Unix kernel in about three weeks, the origins of B and TMG, pipes, and other anecdotes.

In Ars Technica's War Stories, Naughty Dog co-founder Andy Gavin explains how the team squeezed Crash Bandicoot onto the original PlayStation. They overwrote Sony library code in RAM, built custom animation compression, and streamed assets around slow seek times.

A long interview by Blender Guru with Ton Roosendaal, creator of Blender. They cover Blender's origins, the move to open source, why Ton is not driven by money, Autodesk, and what sets Blender apart from other open source projects.

A short clip from a Richard Feynman interview in which he explains fire, describing how burning wood releases sunlight stored by the tree, which built itself mostly from air. It showcases his curiosity and plain-spoken explanations.

Lex Fridman interviews legendary chip architect Jim Keller about Moore's Law, microprocessor design, and first-principles thinking. Keller draws on his work at AMD, Apple, Tesla and Intel, discussing instruction sets, transistor budgets, and self-driving.

Numberphile visits Cliff Stoll, the man behind ACME Klein Bottles, and sees how he stores a thousand glass Klein bottles in a crawlspace under his house. A remote-controlled forklift fetches them.

A 72-minute Q&A with Linus Torvalds at DebConf 14. Topics include the pain of distributing Linux binaries, distro fragmentation, kernel backwards compatibility, GPLv2 versus GPLv3 and conduct.

Tim Dodd of Everyday Astronaut tours SpaceX's Starbase with Elon Musk as guide. They cover the high bay, grid fins, Raptor V2, the HLS lander and stage separation, and Musk explains his engineering management process.

A restored HD upload of the 1983 BBC series Fun to Imagine, in which Richard Feynman talks informally about everyday science. Topics include jiggling atoms, fire, rubber bands, magnets, electricity, mirrors, seeing, big numbers and ways of thinking.

The full 1971 Dutch television debate between Noam Chomsky and Michel Foucault on human nature, with subtitles. They discuss creativity, knowledge, power and politics.

Joe Armstrong, creator of Erlang, interviews Alan Kay at Code Mesh. They discuss the meaning of object orientation, message passing, the META II paper, and the state of computer science.

A short excerpt from a 1994 interview of Steve Jobs in which he says everything around us was made up by people no smarter than you, and that you can change and shape the world.

A standing whiteboard conversation at Lang.NEXT 2012 among Carl Hewitt, Erik Meijer and Clemens Szyperski about the actor model. Hewitt, who originated the model, explains its foundations.

Numberphile talks with mathematician Ron Graham about the magnitude of Graham's number, building up from arrow notation to show how impossibly large it is. It is part of a series of videos on this number.

A 1983 BBC interview in which Richard Feynman is asked how magnets work and explains why 'why' questions are hard to answer in everyday terms. He reflects on what counts as an explanation and the limits of analogy.

John Oliver interviews Edward Snowden about NSA surveillance, including street interviews showing people have not thought about what the government can see. The segment famously frames the issue through private photos.

Jon Stewart appears as a guest on CNN's Crossfire in 2004 and criticizes hosts Tucker Carlson and Paul Begala for turning political debate into partisan theater that hurts America.

A long Machine Learning Street Talk interview with Kenneth Stanley, creator of NEAT and novelty search, about his book on why greatness cannot be planned. They discuss open-endedness, the tyranny of objectives, serendipity and the evolution of ideas.

A short clip of Steve Jobs describing the computer as a bicycle for the mind. He compares human efficiency of travel to what computers do for mental work.

Patrick Stewart on the BBC's Parkinson talk show talks humorously about going bald, how it affected his career and relationships, and how he came to accept it.

A 1968 Firing Line interview in which Milton Friedman explains the negative income tax, a proposal to replace welfare bureaucracy with direct payments.

Channel 4 News's full interview with Jordan Peterson, in which Cathy Newman presses him on the gender pay gap, patriarchy, campus protests and postmodernism. It was widely discussed for its confrontational style.

An excerpt of Simon Sinek on Inside Quest discussing millennials in the workplace. He covers parenting, technology, social media dopamine and what that means for managers.

A three-minute clip of Jeff Bezos describing his Regret Minimization Framework: imagining yourself at 80 to decide whether to leave a Wall Street job to start Amazon.

A 1985 interview by G. Edward Griffin with former KGB operative Yuri Bezmenov. He describes long-running Soviet efforts at ideological subversion and manipulation of US public opinion.

A two-minute clip of Richard Feynman explaining why he considers much of social science pseudoscience. He stresses how easy it is to fool yourself and how much care real knowledge takes.

A Computer History Museum oral history with Avie Tevanian covering his math talent, work on the Mach microkernel at CMU, joining NeXT, leading NEXTSTEP development and the 1996 Apple acquisition.

The full 1984 interview with Yuri Bezmenov, a former KGB operative, in which he lays out four stages of ideological subversion. It is a long interview with G. Edward Griffin.

A short clip of Richard Feynman answering an interviewer's question about why magnets repel, explaining that a 'why' question depends on a shared framework of understanding. It illustrates how hard it is to explain fundamentals to a layperson.

An excerpt from the 1983 BBC series Fun to Imagine in which Richard Feynman describes how he and a mathematician friend counted in their heads in different ways, one verbally and one visually. It shows that people can reach the same goal through quite different mental methods.

A /noclip interview with Tarn Adams of Bay 12 Games about Dwarf Fortress: where the ASCII simulation came from, how it works, and the plans for its Steam release. It includes his telling of the famous bug in which cats were poisoned by alcohol.

An Autoline After Hours episode where Sandy Munro discusses his complete teardown of the BMW i3, along with automotive journalists. It covers the car's carbon fiber construction and manufacturing technology.

Rhonda Patrick interviews Salk Institute researcher Satchidananda Panda about circadian rhythms and the timing of food. They cover time-restricted feeding and its links to obesity, muscle mass, heart health, and light exposure.

A Channel 9 conversation recorded at GOTO 2012 between Anders Hejlsberg (TypeScript) and Lars Bak (Dart). They discuss the two languages and different approaches to making JavaScript development safer, including runtime type checking.

Myst co-creator Rand Miller recounts how the HyperCard-built game struggled to run on 1x CD-ROM drives. He and his brother Robyn compressed image and audio data heavily to get acceptable performance. Part of Ars Technica's War Stories series.

Ezra Klein interviews Democratic pollster David Shor, who walks through survey data and charts explaining the 2024 election results. They discuss voter shifts, the education divide and what Democrats got wrong.

Asian Boss interviews Professor Kim Woo-joo of Korea University Guro Hospital about COVID-19 in early 2020. He covers masks, testing, aerosol spread, and South Korea's response.

Rhonda Patrick interviews Dr. Bill Harris, co-inventor of the Omega-3 Index and author of more than 300 papers on fatty acids. They cover EPA and DHA dosing, fish oil studies such as REDUCE-IT, and how omega-3 levels relate to health and longevity.

A short clip of Steve Jobs at the 2010 D8 conference, interviewed by Walt Mossberg, defining privacy as people knowing what they are signing up for, in plain English and repeatedly. The discussion centered on location data.

A short street interview from Invisible People with Keith, a homeless man in Los Angeles who lost his housing-industry job in the crash and moved from painkillers to heroin because it was cheaper. He talks candidly about the grip of addiction.

An Ars Technica War Stories episode in which Richard Garriott and Starr Long describe Ultima Online's planned virtual ecology and how players wrecked it. Players slaughtered the animals and also broke the in-game economy.

Slavoj Zizek and Paul Holdengraber discuss surveillance and whistleblowers at the International Authors' Stage, ranging over Snowden, Assange, Pussy Riot and humor.

Curt Jaimungal interviews biologist Michael Levin of Tufts about consciousness, bioelectricity, emergence, and cancer research. The conversation challenges reductionist views of life.

Rhonda Patrick interviews USC gerontologist Valter Longo about fasting, the fasting-mimicking diet, and their effects on longevity, cancer, and multiple sclerosis. They discuss mechanisms such as IGF-1 and autophagy and clinical trials.

Alexei Navalny phones an FSB chemical-weapons specialist, posing as a senior official, and gets him to describe the 2020 Novichok poisoning and its cover-up. The video is in Russian; HN commenters point to English subtitles.

A BSD Now episode featuring a long interview with Joyent CTO Bryan Cantrill on dtrace, ZFS, pkgsrc, containers and more. It includes his rant on why Linux epoll is flawed and stories from Sun.

Destin Sandlin of Smarter Every Day explains Multi-Domain Operations through footage from his last mission at RIMPAC 2018. He covers missile and torpedo testing and interviews military leaders about the cyber and information domains.