He's just a bad interviewer.

An example I've noticed: A guest will have essentially addressed a question Lex has planned for later in the interview, but Lex still asks it without any sort of modification/acknowledgment of what the guest has already said, leading to a lot of repetitive talk.

He also basically ignores statements that conflict with his view.

I suspected something was bad, when Fridman managed to interview Demis Hassabis on the topic of "AI, Superintelligence & the Future of Humanity" for more than two hours in July 2022, and the topic of large language models never came up. I don't know the reason. Someone has suggested it was because it was super secret and Hassabis made a deal with Fridman before the interview to not talk about it but ... idk.

> because it was super secret

What was super secret? LLMs had been around for a while on July 2022. Also, all of the hype around LLMs since then is due to OpenAI's releases, so why would Hassabis be opposed to discussing it?

Yes, if you read again I hope you will see that we agree!

"But... idk" was at least a bit ambiguous. It could range from "this is a conspiracy theory that makes no sense" to (my original interpretation) "I'm not sure if this is true or not, what do you guys think?"

I've only watched a couple of his interviews but at least in the ones I watched, which I think this one might have been one of them, he was kind of asking experts to confirm his very positive opinions about Elon/Karpathy as opposed to focusing on stuff they were doing. I find it very strange that he is so famous and popular

He's kind of a useful idiot in the sense that he's garnered a large audience/influence, but lets the guests own that audience for the interview's duration.

It's why you see guest execs interested in controlling a narrative like Bourla, Zuckerberg, Altman...

Bourla was by far the most controversial in the interview not acknowledging that the vaccine has risks and side effects.

I took it as fast as I could because the researchers at the companies did a great job, but still how he talked about it was unscientific.

Thank you for explaining. Makes total sense now. Tried to listen to it and found it quite annoying because the interviewer gave no direction to it nor did care if a question was actually answered. Maybe I can even listen to it now accepting that simple fact.

i find cats to be annoying, but i don't go around commenting that on cat videos

But you do comment on comments about cat videos.

It's hard not to resist commenting on comments on comments about cat videos.

unless someone's pointing a laser at it and wiggling it around

Hard disagree. Maybe a little monotone in the literal sense, but he’s very knowledgeable and asks insightful questions.

From the guidelines: Please don't post shallow dismissals, especially of other people's work. A good critical comment teaches us something.

Hard disagree with the guidelines, this comment prompted lots of great discussion.

There is no need to prompt valuable reaction through cheap triggers.

I thought it was just me with this opinion. I have always thought his style reminds me of a high school kid learning how to interview, just very amateurish. Not sure how he really ever got so popular..

>99% of people will look like a child next to most of the people he interviews.

Personally I like him because he is amateurish. I think you'll find that people can relate to amateur level discussions because most people are amateurs.

By more popular people, such as Joe Rogan, who has had him on several times and seems to be a "good friend."

I think he's an excellent interviewer. My favorite podcast series by far. And even if he wasn't, I wouldn't express my disdain in such a harsh way. It's entirely unnecessary.

He still has a lot of great guests, and they have the chance to talk freely, sometimes for multiple hours. That's great. Where else do you have that? Where can I see a video of Sam Altman or whoever else talking for >2h on a wide range of interesting topics?

I think esp in the AI field, he has enough knowledge to ask the right questions, which allow the guests to really go into depth into their thought process.

See, this is what irks me. Lex's (what a name! We're surrounded by supervillains!) popularity feels very fake to me. This guy has the personality of a wet napkin, he doesn't seem smart enough to interview half the people he does, boasts about how he's a professor or something (he doesn't even live near the uni?) and it seems like rich people have settled upon this guy as a high-impact and safe bet for marketing their companies.

But then I remember entire forums full of people that consider Rationality to be a defining trait exist. And I don't think they care much about advertising, seeing how "Effective Altruism" now has hundreds of millons (billions) of dollars and chateaus.

IMO there are other podcasters that have better guests and are much more interesting. Here's one https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCdWIQh9DGG6uhJk8eyIFl1w (Curt Jaimungal)

It's maybe personal preference, but I find Lex's guests more interesting compared to that. I'm specifically interested in deep learning, neural networks, generative models, but also neuroscience and some related areas. Then I'm also interested in some tech topics, e.g. everything John Carmack talks about, etc. Lex basically interviewed all the big names in those areas.

I listen to maybe half the podcasts that Lex releases these days. He has some views that I disagree with and some traits that I find annoying, but overall I still enjoy the podcasts. There are some great guests and he allows them to speak at length on all kinds of topics. That’s the thing, the podcast is not really about him, it’s about the guests.

Also I have literally never heard him boast about being a professor, he basically doesn’t say anything about his work on the podcast at all other than that he works in AI.

He occasionally has guests that say things that anybody with two brain cells can figure out is nonsense, and Lex will simply agree with it. He's simply a bad interviewer.

I think you can be a so called “bad interviewer” and still have a good podcast hah

> He has some views that I disagree with

Yeah, “I will interview Vladimir Putin” — thanks but no :S

>boasts about how he's a professor or something (he doesn't even live near the uni?)

I've listened to at least dozens of his podcasts and I have never heard anything like this. You may be thinking of something else. It does come up that he used to work with self-driving cars but only when it's relevant, it doesn't come across as boasting IMO (he doesn't even claim to be an expert, only familiar with the main ideas of the time).

How I've built this has an interview with Sam Altman that's 1+h long

The episodes are really hit or miss. I really enjoyed the interviews with John Carmack and with Guido van Rossum. I started several other episodes that I just bailed on, though, and it's a big time investment just to get to the point where you realize you are wasting your time. So at this point I won't go out of my way to listen to episodes but I will go listen to one when it's getting talked about elsewhere.

The less Lex is talking and the more the person he's interviewing is talking, the better.

BTW if anyone who enjoyed the van Rossum and Carmack interviews has any suggestions on other episodes I might like, I'd love to have them.

Based on those two, I'd recommend the Jim Keller ones.

He might be boring, but he’s very good natured and interested in others. You would be amazed how hard it is to be genuine in this way. It’s also what makes people open up in an interesting way.

This is not a quality I know in many people, it’s very rare. It also doesn’t make him look good as an interviewer, but it does make for good interviews.

I also find the calibre of his guests much more appealing than many other podcasts.

  Lex Fridman: charisma is a dangerous thing. Flaws in communication style is a feature, not a bug in general, at least for humans in power. 

https://youtu.be/L_Guz73e6fw?t=5533

My biggest issue is how he’s often trying to pseudo intellectually (and imo disingenuously) push right wing agenda as if it’s coming from a place of sophistication (like here the first thing he did was bring up of all people Jordan Peterson doing one of the dumbest experiments with ChatGPT, something even my 10 year old niece would say is dumb and cringe inducing, and asked Sam to comment on it).

Lex interviewing MrBeast a couple months ago was the most unintentionally hilarious interview I can remember. Lex could not engage MB on _anything_, they speak entirely different languages. I don’t expect MB to be a genius, but Lex couldn’t modulate his style to connect which I thought reflected badly. Like watching two beached dolphins play table tennis.