systems thinking

A short clip from an ACM and Computer History Museum interview in which Leslie Lamport discusses writing his paper on time, clocks and the ordering of events. He explains its link to special relativity.

A Vanity Fair Summit conversation between Elon Musk and Sam Altman, moderated by Andrew Ross Sorkin. They discuss the future of technology, including AI and the simulation hypothesis.

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.

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.

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.

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.

JetBrains interviews Zig creator Andrew Kelley about why Zig has no 1.0 after a decade, why the project left GitHub, and why it bans AI contributions. He also covers what makes Zig better than C and his views on open source.

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.

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.

An OpenZFS office hours session with ZFS co-creator Matt Ahrens answering questions on topics such as hole birth time, send/receive buffers, device removal, block pointer rewrite and performance with many snapshots.

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 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.

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 Channel 9 Going Deep interview in which Brian Beckman talks with Rich Hickey, creator of Clojure, about the language's design. It covers Clojure's persistent data structures, reference types and its approach to concurrency on the JVM.

A 2015 interview in which physicist Freeman Dyson, then 91, argues that global warming concerns are exaggerated, that CO2 is beneficial and that climate models oversimplify complex systems. It is posted on a channel that opposes climate consensus.

Peter Robinson interviews Peter Thiel at the Hoover Institution about Thiel's essay The Straussian Moment. Thiel discusses how people trust the will more than the intellect and reason, and how the question of human nature has been abandoned.

A Computer History Museum oral history interview with Dave Cutler, covering his youth, early work on operating systems at DuPont and Digital Equipment, and his path toward VMS and Windows NT. This is part one of a long-form interview.

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.

Tim Dodd of Everyday Astronaut talks with Elon Musk right after Musk's 2019 Starship presentation. Musk discusses Starship's design, why SpaceX favors conventional engines over aerospikes, and how deleting parts and processes speeds up development.

A panel conversation with Stewart Brand at Ethereum's Devcon4, where he recounts his life and work 'hacking civilization' and discusses the role of institutions in decentralization.

A 1979 CBC radio interview in which Ted Nelson tries to explain how computers could serve as tools for thinking and visualizing. The interviewer keeps failing to grasp the idea, and Nelson patiently answers again and again.

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 Computer History Museum interview in which John Markoff of the New York Times talks with Douglas Engelbart about his life and research. It covers the influences and struggles behind his work on the mouse, hypertext and collaborative computing, and his aim of helping humanity tackle complex problems.

John Gruber interviews Craig Federighi and Greg Joswiak after WWDC 2020 about the Mac transition to Apple silicon, macOS Big Sur and iOS 14.

Jason Calacanis interviews Peter Thiel at LAUNCH Festival 2015 about contrarian thinking, investing, and building companies such as PayPal, Palantir and Facebook.