Books recommended on Lex Fridman Podcast
Lex Fridman and guests brought up 36 books across 11 recent episodes, 6 of them explicit recommendations — each with the episode, the minute, and what was said.
Lex Fridman · US · YouTube · Jump to episode by episode ↓
Latest mentions
Books mentioned on this show
- 1 Build a Large Language Model (from Scratch)Sebastian RaschkaAmazon 1 episode · 1 recommended
- 2 Build a Reasoning Model from ScratchSebastian RaschkaAmazon 1 episode · 1 recommended
- 3 Jungle KeeperPaul RosolieAmazon 1 episode · 1 recommended
- 4 MeditationsMarcus Aurelius AureliusAmazon 1 episode · 1 recommended
- 5 Season of the witchDavid TalbotAmazon 1 episode · 1 recommended
- 6 The fourth turningWilliam StraussAmazon 1 episode · 1 recommended
- 7 1984George OrwellAmazon 1 episode
- 8 Apple in ChinaPatrick McGeeAmazon 1 episode
- 9 BeowulfSeamus HeaneyAmazon 1 episode
- 10 Bullshit JobsDavid GraeberAmazon 1 episode
- 11 Echoes from EdenDax DasilvaAmazon 1 episode
- 12 Einstein's Unfinished DreamDon LincolnAmazon 1 episode
- 13 For Whom the Bell TollsErnest HemingwayAmazon 1 episode
- 14 Frederick Douglass : AutobiographiesFrederick DouglassAmazon 1 episode
- 15 GenesisBernard BeckettAmazon 1 episode
- 16 Lectures on the Philosophy of MathematicsJoel David HamkinsAmazon 1 episode
- 17 Mein KampfAdolf HitlerAmazon 1 episode
- 18 Moby DickHerman MelvilleAmazon 1 episode
- 19 Mother of GodPaul RosolieAmazon 1 episode
- 20 New Roman EmpireAnthony KaldellisAmazon 1 episode
- 21 One Flew Over the Cuckoo's NestKen KeseyAmazon 1 episode
- 22 Oxford English DictionarySarah RyanAmazon 1 episode
- 23 Reinforcement Learning from Human FeedbackNathan LambertAmazon 1 episode
- 24 Streams of gold, rivers of bloodAnthony KaldellisAmazon 1 episode
- 25 The Adventures of Huckleberry FinnMark TwainAmazon 1 episode
- 26 The epic of GilgameshBenjamin R. FosterAmazon 1 episode
- 27 The God particleLeon M. LedermanAmazon 1 episode
- 28 The Jungle BookRudyard KiplingAmazon 1 episode
- 29 The Lord of the RingsJ.R.R. TolkienAmazon 1 episode
- 30 The NormansLars BrownworthAmazon 1 episode
- 31 The PoliticsAristotleAmazon 1 episode
- 32 The QuranAllahAmazon 1 episode
- 33 The Sea WolvesAmazon 1 episode
- 34 The Volsunga SagaJessie L. WestonAmazon 1 episode
- 35 Uncle Tom's CabinHarriet Beecher StoweAmazon 1 episode
- 36 War and PeaceЛев ТолстойAmazon 1 episode
Episode by episode
DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Agentic Engineering, Vibe Coding & Linux | Lex Fridman Podcast #501 · 2026-08-26
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“Can you steel man the case that you are in fact experiencing in a state of delusion, like One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, and can you argue against it?”
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“David Graeber wrote this wonderful piece Bullshit Jobs, back in, I think it was maybe early 2010s. Based on a poll he did in the UK asking people, at that time, would... I think the question was something like, Would”
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“I read this book The Fourth Turning. You check that out. It talks about this notion of history working in cycles, and there are these, phases to history, and they name them and so forth.”
Khabib Nurmagomedov: Dagestan, MMA, UFC, Islam, Conor, Fedor & Football | Lex Fridman Podcast #500 · 2026-08-12
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“I'm starting to study Arabic now, but I've been reading the Quran since I was a child. I know the alphabet very well, the pronunciation rules. I can read it well.”
Gary Gallagher: American Civil War, Slavery, Lincoln, Grant & Lee | Lex Fridman Podcast #499 · 2026-07-28
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“You have Uncle Tom's Cabin earlier in the decade in 18-- and what... And the impact that that had on attitudes towards slavery.”
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“some books that I think I should listen to and haven't ever gotten around to reading. I did Moby Dick that way.”
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“But I've never read War and Peace, and I don't think I ever will.”
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“We should read Mein Kampf. We should read books that capture a certain moment in history, even if it's a hateful moment in history.”
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“one of the texts I assigned in the class was Huckleberry Finn. And a lot of the students said they wouldn't read Huckleberry Finn because they knew it had language in it.”
The Rise and Fall of the Roman Empire and the Byzantine Empire | Lex Fridman Podcast #498 · 2026-06-30
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“Streams of Gold, Rivers of Blood: The Rise and Fall of Byzantium, 955 AD to the First Crusade, this is a period where there's some flourishing.”
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“my editor asked me to write the big history, the new Roman Empire, the thousand page of the whole thing.”
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“In The Politics, Aristotle's giving advice to tyrants on how to protect themselves because tyrants are usually hated.”
Biggest Mysteries in Physics: Antimatter, Dark Energy & ToE - Don Lincoln | Lex Fridman Podcast #497 · 2026-05-29
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“So the reason they call it the God particle is this book by Leon Lederman, and if you read his book, he he says, Well, you know, we call it the God particle”
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“I wrote this book for Oxford, Einstein's Unfinished Dream, and Einstein's unfinished dream was to come up with a theory of everything”
Vikings, Ragnar, Berserkers, Valhalla & the Warriors of the Viking Age | Lex Fridman Podcast #495 · 2026-04-09
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The Sea WolvesMentioned
“A historian and author of many excellent history books, including The Sea Wolves: A History of the Vikings and The Normans: From Raiders to Kings.”
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“A historian and author of many excellent history books, including The Sea Wolves: A History of the Vikings and The Normans: From Raiders to Kings.”
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“He's a ring giver. You know, think Beowulf here, right? He's got this large personal army which wants to join him.”
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“During grad school, I was reading Frederick Douglass' autobiography, and he said I could sit with Plato and Cicero, and they would not flinch.”
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“You should read the Meditations because this is not just some dry whatever talking to himself. It's a human talking about being human.”
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“Fear not death, for the hour of your doom is set, and none may escape it. Better to fight and fall than to live without hope.”
Jeff Kaplan: World of Warcraft, Overwatch, Blizzard, and Future of Gaming | Lex Fridman Podcast #493 · 2026-03-11
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“Well, I've been reading, you know, 1984 or Green Hills of Stranglethorn, and I think it's amazing.”
State of AI in 2026: LLMs, Coding, Scaling Laws, China, Agents, GPUs, AGI | Lex Fridman Podcast #490 · 2026-01-31
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“Sebastian is the author of two books I highly recommend for beginners and experts alike. First is Build a Large Language Model from Scratch”
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“and Build a Reasoning Model from Scratch. I truly believe in the machine learning world, the best way to learn and understand something is to build it yourself”
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“Nathan is the post-training lead at the Allen Institute for AI, author of the definitive book on Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback”
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“The book Apple in China by Patrick McGee, he talked about how hard the Apple engineers worked to set up the supply chains in China”
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“I need to get him a copy of Season of the Witch, which is a history of SF from 1960 to 1985”
Paul Rosolie: Uncontacted Tribes in the Amazon Jungle | Lex Fridman Podcast #489 · 2026-01-13
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“He has a new book coming out in a few days titled Jungle Keeper that you should definitely go pre-order now. It tells some intense stories about his time in the jungle over the past several years.”
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“But they'd find the time to give us an hour of reading every night, whether it was Lord of the Rings or Sherlock Holmes or Jane Goodall.”
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“And one chapter was Lulu the Giant Anteater for Mother of God, and the other chapter was me, JJ and Pico out on the river catching anacondas, and just talking about how amazing the jungle was.”
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“You read like For Whom the Bell Tolls. The air was crisp, and the water was sweet, and the wine was good, and the afternoon was warm. These are not complicated sentences, but when he puts them together into a”
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“I can say, for example, Write me The Jungle Book, but make it sound like Cormac McCarthy wrote it. And it'll be like, The jungle was dark and stern, and the boy was.”
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“He gave me this book that he has recently written, Echoes from Eden. Signed it. He wrote, Thank you, brother, for your love of the wild.”
Infinity, Paradoxes, Gödel Incompleteness & the Mathematical Multiverse | Lex Fridman Podcast #488 · 2025-12-31
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“He is also the author of several books, including Proof in the Art of Mathematics and Lectures on the Philosophy of Mathematics.”
Deciphering Secrets of Ancient Civilizations, Noah's Ark, and Flood Myths | Lex Fridman Podcast #487 · 2025-12-12
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“We know it best from this Assyrian library set of tablets. There are 12 of them.”
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“Not only in the Epic of Gilgamesh, but it was also in the book of Genesis. It was literary dependence.”
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“Have you ever opened a full-size volume of the Oxford English Dictionary? I have a whole set. I love them.”