large numbers

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.

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.

Dwarkesh Patel interviews Richard Sutton, reinforcement learning pioneer, Turing Award winner and author of The Bitter Lesson. Sutton argues LLMs are a dead end because they cannot learn on the job, and that continual learning from experience will require a new architecture.

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.

A three-minute excerpt of a Steve Jobs interview in which he describes how monopolies let sales and marketing people displace product people, rotting a company's product sensibility, with Xerox as the example.

A three-and-a-half-hour Lex Fridman interview with international relations scholar John Mearsheimer. He discusses war and power politics, covering Israel-Palestine, Russia-Ukraine, China, NATO, and the risk of a larger war.