Lex Fridman
👤 PersonVoice Profile Active
This person's voice can be automatically recognized across podcast episodes using AI voice matching.
Appearances Over Time
Podcast Appearances
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.
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.
And now a quick few second mention of each sponsor.
Check them out in the description or at lexfriedman.com slash sponsors.
It is in fact the best way to support this podcast.
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.
Choose wisely, my friends.
And now, on to the full ad reads.
I do try to make them interesting, but if you skip, please still check out the sponsors.
I enjoy their stuff, maybe you will too.
To get in touch with me, for whatever reason, go to lexfriedman.com slash contact.
Alright, let's go.
This episode is brought to you by Shopify, a platform designed for anyone to sell anywhere with a great looking online store.
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.
And this is truly an incredible engineering team.
And I could talk about this for many hours, and perhaps it's good to give an example.
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.
C++.
was the core language for close-to-hardware optimizations, memory efficiency across hundreds of millions of items.
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.