Lex Fridman

It's just so much kindness and goodness.

And just simple joy and being a fan of a thing was there.

Okay, so let's talk about some of the greatest books of all time.

And I should also give a shout out to an excellent podcast you did with Sonya Walger, who's a friend of yours, but she had a great podcast.

She has guest picked their five favorite, most impactful books and so on.

You picked five fiction books, one for each decade of your life.

For the audience, they should go listen to that conversation, but you picked Winter Holiday by Arthur Ransom.

The second one was Wuthering Heights by Emily Bronte, then Tender is the Night by F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Thin Red Line by James Jones, and Middlemarch by George Eliot.

But just zooming out, reflecting back on that conversation, what do you think, if an alien came, what are some candidates for books that you would recommend to them?

You also spoke highly of Scott Fitzgerald and Hemingway.

As one must be.

That, by the way, is a phenomena of writing, maybe no longer, maybe still, that, you know, people like Franz Kafka who died in obscurity, like all these writers who died in obscurity, nobody knows them and they become famous later.

That is just so interesting.

That's such an interesting, you know, and Franz Kafka in particular is fascinating because he wanted all of his work to be burnt, destroyed.

So that insecurity, speaking of the critical voice is just...

And I think he's one of the best writers of the 20th century.

Of course, the dystopian novels are really interesting.

1984, Brave New World.

It's almost like because of its fame and it's almost like cliche and you think of the character.

And the book I've read more than any other book is Animal Farm by George Orwell.