#461 – ThePrimeagen: Programming, AI, ADHD, Productivity, Addiction, and God
Episode publishedPodcast: Lex Fridman PodcastLex Fridman Podcast
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The following is a conversation with Michael Paulson, better known online as the Primogen. He is a programmer who has entertained and inspired millions of people to have fun building stuff with software, whether you're a newbie or a seasoned developer who has been battling it out in the software engineering trenches for decades. In short, the Primogen is a legendary programmer and a great human being with an inspiring roller coaster of a life story. And now a quick few second mention of each sponsor. Check them out in the description. It is in fact the best way to support this podcast. We got
I can tell you the first time that I ever felt love in programming or felt that joy or that excitement Sure. Which was in college. It was the second class data structures. And the teacher that was teaching Ray Babcock, he was talking about linked list. Now, you you have to learn Java at Montana State University when I went. And so he's off there kind of explaining this whole linked list thing and all that, and then he shows code. And in the code, it's like abstract class node or whatever it was. I can't remember what it was. And then it had a private member, and that private member was of type
Let's, wax philosophical about a linked list. It is pretty profound for people who don't know. A node in a linked list doesn't know anything about the world it's in. It only knows about the thing it's linked to its neighbor. Maybe that's symbolic. It's a metaphor for all of us humans. There's billions of us on this planet. We only know about our local little network. Yeah. And it's kinda beautiful. And you realize, like, in that little simple data structure, you can construct arbitrarily large systems, and they they're like roots that go through memory. And then, of course, that's where you ge
was the what was the thing? What was the, like, the one that taught you? Because I think we all probably you probably did factorial where you, like, you know, just do, like, a quick factorial of it. It just doesn't hit home. What was the thing that kinda made it hit home? I
don't remember the first. I remember my first. How
do you not remember your first? It was magic. I've
had so many that just I mean, you are a
Lisp guy. You're probably pretty used to the recursion.
Yeah. All I remember is just surrounded by c of parentheses. I mean, that's that's really probably when I, in high school, I think it was either Java or c plus plus. Wow. How do I not remember that? It must have been c plus plus. And then college, it was the generic bullshit software engineering classes were, Java, but then the the Renegades, the cool kids were all using Lisp. That's that's when you're doing the AI, the quote, unquote AI at that time. That's that was Lisp. If you wanna write a chess engine, you would use Lisp. And so for me, probably the moment I really fell in love with progr
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