first video

A short excerpt of Elon Musk, interviewed by Kevin Rose, explaining first-principles reasoning with the example of the car versus improving horse carriages. He warns it takes much more mental energy than reasoning by analogy.

The full 2010 D8 conference interview of Steve Jobs by Walt Mossberg and Kara Swisher. He discusses Flash, privacy, multitouch, payments and what motivates him.

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.

A Numberphile interview with Donald Knuth about how he came to write the first book on surreal numbers after a lunch with John Conway. He tells the story casually in about 14 minutes.

A 1983 interview clip in which David Bowie questions MTV VJ Mark Goodman about why the channel played so few videos by black artists.

Kevin Rose interviews Elon Musk in 2012 about his companies PayPal, SpaceX and Tesla. It includes Musk's short explanation of reasoning from first principles versus by analogy.

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.

Part one of Errol Morris's First Person interview with Murray Richman, a New York lawyer who defends mob figures. He talks about how he sees the law and his clients.

A five-hour Lex Fridman interview with John Carmack covering Doom, Quake, VR, AGI, programming, games and rockets.

The full, long-form FRONTLINE interview with Steve Bannon, recorded in 2019 for the documentary series on the Obama-to-Trump era. He discusses his populist politics, the Trump campaign and White House, and his view of the establishment.

Tiffany Fong's phone interview with Sam Bankman-Fried shortly after FTX filed for bankruptcy. He discusses the alleged backdoor, FTT collateral, political donations, and his legal position.

IGN plays through the first episode of the original Doom with its creator John Romero providing commentary. Romero shares stories, design secrets and behind-the-scenes details about the levels, including E1M1.

A student interviews Kirsten Carlson, who does not have an internal monologue, and she answers questions about how she thinks. The video grew out of a viral article about people lacking inner speech.

Wildlife videographer Dani Connor Wild talks with Oscar-winning sound designer Mark Mangini about how her red squirrel recording became the desert mouse sound in Dune.

A one-minute clip of Steve Jobs at the D3 conference in 2005 discussing virtual reality. He compares VR headsets to headphones for video, an analogy later applied to Apple's Vision Pro.

Noam Chomsky talks with the University of Washington's Upon Reflection about how languages change over time, why a national language is a modern idea, and how language is a system of communication rooted in human nature.

A very long livestream in which Ron Gilbert and Frank Cifaldi look at the making of The Secret of Monkey Island, including its SCUMM source code, which they edit and recompile live.

Matt Damon appears on Hot Ones, eating progressively spicier wings while discussing his film career and promoting Stillwater. He also explains how the decline of the DVD market changed which movies get made.

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 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 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.

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.

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.

Jason Calacanis interviews investor Chris Sacca on This Week in Startups. Sacca discusses what makes a founder, his investments such as Kickstarter, and his personal story of losing money and recovering.

Unreleased 1996 footage of the Wired editors interviewing Bill Gates when he visited their office. Gates talks about software, the internet and Microsoft's thinking at the time. The video is about 53 minutes long.

Adam Neely interviews Damien Riehl and Noah Rubin about their project to generate and copyright every possible melody as MIDI. The video explains their reasoning and how it bears on music copyright lawsuits.

Dave Plummer interviews Dave Cutler, architect of VMS and Windows NT, in a roughly three-hour conversation about his career and the history of Windows.

A two-minute video of Ira Glass on the creative process, describing the gap between taste and skill when starting out and urging you to keep producing until your work matches your taste.

A Computer History Museum oral history panel with four 3dfx founders on the company's rise with Voodoo Graphics and Glide, and its fall into bankruptcy. It runs about two and a half hours.

Part two of Jason Calacanis's long interview with investor Chris Sacca on This Week in Startups. Sacca discusses his investments in Facebook, Twitter and Uber, and how he hustled his way to the top.

A 1952 filmed interview in which Romney Wheeler talks with philosopher Bertrand Russell at his home in Surrey. Russell discusses his outlook and reflects on how the world changed over the first half of the century.

Pat Wyatt, a veteran game programmer who worked at Blizzard and ArenaNet, speaks at HandmadeCon 2015 in a conversation with Casey Muratori. He discusses network code and architecture in games he worked on, including mistakes on Diablo and the success of Guild Wars.

EEVblog interviews Richard Stephenson of NASA's Canberra Deep Space Communications Complex about how the 70m DSS-43 dish is used to contact Voyager 2. It covers the ground antenna and low-noise receiver side of deep space communication. This is a 2023 re-release of a 2017 video.

Second half of a 2017 Computer History Museum live event in which former Apple software chief Scott Forstall is interviewed by John Markoff about creating the original iPhone. He tells stories about Steve Jobs and the team and the origins of the iPhone software.

Everyday Astronaut takes a tour of SpaceX's Starbase with Elon Musk as guide. Topics include the Raptor engines, launch escape systems, the heat shield and the first orbital test.

A podcast episode in which GPT-4 red teamer Nathan Labenz describes using the model before release, finding it human-level but not human-like, and discussing its weaknesses and worrying capabilities. It closes with speculation about GPT-5.

Brian Kernighan explains how grep came to be, written overnight by Ken Thompson, and how it got its name from the ed command g/re/p. He also covers the lineage from QED to ed that led to it.