Book · recommended on 4 episodes
1984
George Orwell ISBN 1405862416
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George Orwell ISBN 1405862416
Find it on AmazonAffiliate link — we may earn a commission at no extra cost to you.
This book by George Orwell has come up 4 times on Lex Fridman. 4 of those mentions were genuine on-air recommendations, not just passing references. The people who brought it up: Dan Houser, Dan Kokotov, Dmitri Dolgov, Lex Fridman. The earliest mention we indexed is from 2020-12-20 and the most recent from 2025-10-31. Every occurrence below links to the episode page and to the exact second it was said on YouTube.
Winston Smith lives in a society where the government controls people every second of the day. He fights this world with love. But it's dangerous: love for another person can be punished by death - and Big Brother is always watching. Orwell's classic story shows that there is no freedom unless ideas and beliefs can be questioned. This is as true today as when it was written, more than fifty years ago. --back cover
“Love 1984... became obsessed by it. And it's got the elements of that creeping into A Better Paradise. But it's so good.”— Dan Houser
The guest here is Dan Houser: Legendary video game creator, co-founder of Rockstar Games, and lead writer behind the Grand Theft Auto and Red Dead Redemption series. He has since founded a new company, Absurdventures, building new worlds across books, comics, audio, and games. Rockstar co-founder Dan Houser on creating GTA and Red Dead Redemption, the craft of storytelling in games, and his new studio Absurdventures.
“1984 by George Orwell is one of the most impactful books ever written”— Lex Fridman
The guest here is Lex Fridman (solo): AI researcher and host of the Lex Fridman Podcast. This is a solo video in which he reads and reflects on a classic book rather than interviewing a guest. Lex Fridman summarizes George Orwell's 1984 and shares personal takeaways on love, hate, power, and resisting totalitarianism.
“i mean 1984 is good of course as well like if you're talking about you know dystopian novels of the future”— Dan Kokotov
The guest here is Dan Kokotov: VP of Engineering at Rev.ai, the speech-to-text company behind Rev.com's human captioning/transcription and its ASR engine. A programmer-turned-manager who immigrated from Russia in 1991. Rev's VP of engineering explains how AI and human transcribers combine to build the world's best speech-to-text engine.
“orwell's 1984 you asked what made an impression on me and books that people should read that one i think falls in the category of both”— Dmitri Dolgov
The guest here is Dmitri Dolgov: CTO of Waymo, the autonomous driving company that began as Google's self-driving car project in 2009. He has worked on the project since the DARPA Urban Challenge era and helped lead it to the first at-scale public driverless ride-hailing deployment. Waymo CTO Dmitri Dolgov on building a truly driverless car, scaling beyond Phoenix, and why aggression isn't the same as good driving.
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