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Lex Fridman

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98154 total appearances
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Lex Fridman Podcast
#487 – Irving Finkel: Deciphering Secrets of Ancient Civilizations & Flood Myths

The following is a conversation with Irving Finkel, who is a scholar of ancient languages, curator at the British Museum for over 45 years, and is a much admired and respected world expert on cuneiform script, and more generally on ancient languages of Sumerian, Akkadian, and Babylonian, and also on ancient board games and Mesopotamian magic, medicine, literature, and culture.

Lex Fridman Podcast
#487 – Irving Finkel: Deciphering Secrets of Ancient Civilizations & Flood Myths

I should also mention that both on and off the mic, Irving was a super kind and fun person to talk to, with an infectious enthusiasm for ancient history that of course I already love, but fell in love with even more.

Lex Fridman Podcast
#487 – Irving Finkel: Deciphering Secrets of Ancient Civilizations & Flood Myths

And now a quick few second mention of each sponsor.

Lex Fridman Podcast
#487 – Irving Finkel: Deciphering Secrets of Ancient Civilizations & Flood Myths

Check them out in the description or at lexfriedman.com slash sponsors.

Lex Fridman Podcast
#487 – Irving Finkel: Deciphering Secrets of Ancient Civilizations & Flood Myths

It is in fact the best way to support this podcast.

Lex Fridman Podcast
#487 – Irving Finkel: Deciphering Secrets of Ancient Civilizations & Flood Myths

We got Shopify for selling stuff online, Miro for brainstorming ideas with your team, Chevron for reliable energy that powers data centers, Element for electrolytes, and AG1 for my daily multivitamin.

Lex Fridman Podcast
#487 – Irving Finkel: Deciphering Secrets of Ancient Civilizations & Flood Myths

Choose wisely, my friends.

Lex Fridman Podcast
#487 – Irving Finkel: Deciphering Secrets of Ancient Civilizations & Flood Myths

And now, on to the full ad reads.

Lex Fridman Podcast
#487 – Irving Finkel: Deciphering Secrets of Ancient Civilizations & Flood Myths

I do try to make them interesting, but if you skip, please still check out the sponsors.

Lex Fridman Podcast
#487 – Irving Finkel: Deciphering Secrets of Ancient Civilizations & Flood Myths

I enjoy their stuff, maybe you will too.

Lex Fridman Podcast
#487 – Irving Finkel: Deciphering Secrets of Ancient Civilizations & Flood Myths

To get in touch with me, for whatever reason, go to lexfriedman.com slash contact.

Lex Fridman Podcast
#487 – Irving Finkel: Deciphering Secrets of Ancient Civilizations & Flood Myths

Alright, let's go.

Lex Fridman Podcast
#487 – Irving Finkel: Deciphering Secrets of Ancient Civilizations & Flood Myths

This episode is brought to you by Shopify, a platform designed for anyone to sell anywhere with a great looking online store.

Lex Fridman Podcast
#487 – Irving Finkel: Deciphering Secrets of Ancient Civilizations & Flood Myths

So of course, Shopify is great as an app, as a service, but the thing that always fascinates me is the engineering behind the scenes.

Lex Fridman Podcast
#487 – Irving Finkel: Deciphering Secrets of Ancient Civilizations & Flood Myths

And this is truly an incredible engineering team.

Lex Fridman Podcast
#487 – Irving Finkel: Deciphering Secrets of Ancient Civilizations & Flood Myths

And I could talk about this for many hours, and perhaps it's good to give an example.

Lex Fridman Podcast
#487 – Irving Finkel: Deciphering Secrets of Ancient Civilizations & Flood Myths

Like, they built a custom search engine rather than using Elasticsearch or any of the off-the-shelf engines that will require significant re-architecture at their scale.

Lex Fridman Podcast
#487 – Irving Finkel: Deciphering Secrets of Ancient Civilizations & Flood Myths

C++.

Lex Fridman Podcast
#487 – Irving Finkel: Deciphering Secrets of Ancient Civilizations & Flood Myths

was the core language for close-to-hardware optimizations, memory efficiency across hundreds of millions of items.

Lex Fridman Podcast
#487 – Irving Finkel: Deciphering Secrets of Ancient Civilizations & Flood Myths

They created RankFlow, a domain-specific language combining Python-like simplicity with C++ performance, rejected hybrid Python calling C++ approaches due to deployment complexity, version skew, and operational overhead.

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