I personally liked the podcast before he rebranded it around himself. Lex is a good host who is smart enough to hold conversations with his guests, but the main appeal was always still the guests as it was the only podcast I was aware of that has only experts in CS and related fields to talk about AI and other topics
he still does this under the newer iteration of his podcast, but since shifting it to "the smart man's Joe Rogan" - I don't find myself listening as much personally
I see it the other way around: I started to enjoy more the podcast after he rebranded it.
The man put it out there about him feeling constrained about pursuing different types of guests that he was genuinely curious about, but that felt out of space within the realm of the previous branding.
Better yet - he put a lot of these decisions up to vote to his community, that he clearly feels that he owes them everything. Basically the feedback of the community was positive towards this change - and he seems really happy about it!
So now he brings guests with different types of backgrounds, from AI to Quantum Physics, where he dares to ask question about what he thinks are more profound/out of the box questions.
He knew this shift wasn't going to appeal everyone, and that's fine. It's impossible to please everyone, and he saw this path a way for him to grow and explore even though he would lose some following (clearly a small portion).
I'm really happy for him, and it's a joy to see someone put themselves out there, to risk it, and grow!
And guess what, maybe he left a void to be filled - the same void he filled that allowed him to do his own thing.
The Dan Carlin interview was a big disappointment and snoozefest for me. I LOVE Dan Carlin and would have liked to see him answer questions about current events and how he sees things playing out. Instead, the first question was about the "nature of evil".
I have to admit though, Dan Carlin on Joe Rogan isn't a good interview either. His podcasts are incredible, but maybe he just doesn't interview well.
ones where he has CS researchers / pioneers like Dennis Richie or Chris Latter, well known AI researchers like David Silver, or people from somewhat AI related fields like biology or neuroscience
other non-AI guests I'm sure are plenty interesting, that's just not what I'm looking for in a podcast
that's kinda what I mean. they both invite guests on to learn about them, their work, and the unique perspective in stuff. Rogan doesn't seem to push back as much or ask as "stimulating" questions as Friedman, and is more apt to just let his guest talk
just different styles of podcasting, with their respective pros and cons
FWIW I did like Michael Malice's gag in a recent episode where he showed up to Fridman's podcast wearing the inverse of his suit as sort of an homage to Spy vs. Spy.
Ok, someone has to do it and say something positive about Lex Fridman in this hostile environment. I like Lex Fridman a lot. I have not watched many of his broadcasts, but almost all of the ones I watched were excellent. The guests were exceptional people (Jim Keller, James Gosling, Dilep George) and Lex lets them talk most of the time while just navigating a bit an making sure that even listeners not familiar with the subject can follow.
I find it hard to listen to his Podcasts because of his "philosophical" questions that often are just a regurgitation of stereotypes. I do listen to some of his interviews, because he gets guests that rarely give long interviews like Chris Lattner, Donald Knuth and the like. He doesn't seem to do any deep prep for any of any of the guests and ends up providing his opinion on things like "the Russian soul" or whether someone is "in Love" with a programming language. It often derails the interesting conversations that he could have had with his illustrious guests. I would listen to more of his podcasts if he would follow his guests lead more and not force them into the (same) mold that he has for every show.
Perhaps harsh, but while I’d love to hear more from the guests - I find his interview style insufferable and his questions usually irritating. So much to the point that I avoid stuff he’s in.
A lot of the philosophical questions show he hasn’t read the AGI stuff, Bostrom, Yudkowsky, etc. and it’s frustrating to listen to someone who isn’t aware of some of the basic ideas.
I get a strong sense of bullshit too which makes it hard to listen to because I have to second guess everything. It feels like listening to sophomore undergrad philosophy.
Lex is bringing CS nerdiness to mainstream culture by mixing poetry/music/fitness/philosophy and I don't get why are you so bitter about it.
Yes, he didn't ask the nitty gritty questions we'd like to hear from Donald Knuth or Jim Keller or dozens of quantum computing, computational biology etc researchers he has interviewed. But if you read their blogs, that's what they like about their appearance on the podcast.
The content the HN bubble is interested in would be understood by ~5-10k people but he has 870k subscribers. If you want research-level interviews, there's https://www.quantamagazine.org/, there are research blogs, journal commentary articles, etc.
Slightly off topic but I love little gems in his podcast that take me down rabbit holes. For instance, while interviewing James Gosling, inventor of Java, he asked what a virtual machine was and this was the answer:
> [01:29:20] So And what is it? So the Java virtual machine, you can think of it in different ways. Because it was carefully designed to have different ways of viewing it, so one view of it that most people don't really realize is there is that you can view it as sort of an encoding of the abstract syntax tree in reverse Polish notation. I don't know if that makes any sense at all. I could explain it and that would blow all of our time. But the other way to think of it and the way that it ends up being explained is that it's it's like the the instruction set of an abstract machine that's designed such that you can translate that abstract machine to a physical machine. And the reason that that's important. So if you win back to the early 90s when we were talking to all of these these companies doing consumer electronics.
To have some fun I asked my coworker who is a lot smarter than me what that means which led to a fun 30 minute tangent.
Above all Lex makes his guests feel safe. That may be the main reason he can manage to get so special guests.
I recall his podcast with Stephen Wolfram. His reputation as a human being is not great and he often shows up defensive. With Lex he is not afraid to be vulnerable and is able to share a lot.
Wow I couldn't find a single comment about the app itself. And a significant portion of the comments are just so negative...
Wanted to point out that "playing dumb" is a really effective technique to get the interviewee to share their knowledge, and in a natural way.
And I have nothing but love for anyone who has the courage to have long-form discussions about technical, philosophical , and other intellectual matters in public.
Lex Fridman is a guy who talks about being open minded and humble then proceeds to block everyone that doesn't share the same set of opinions. Seems only capable of asking the same set of questions as well.
Just saw a tweet thread a couple of days ago and this question reminded me of the last tweet: https://twitter.com/Tweetermeyer/status/1341587206285053963 where a writer for The Drive and few others got blocked for questioning his research into Tesla's Autopilot safety
I'm not exactly going to curate a list of blocks. All I will say is make any constructive criticism towards him, or one of the things he seems to love such as Musk and chances are you will be blocked. He seems to even block other researchers who have never interacted with him.
Please keep personal attacks off HN no matter how you feel about someone. Perhaps you don't owe the person better, but you owe this community better if you're posting to it.
His interview with Jim Keller is a real waste. He's not a bad interviewer, but having Jim Keller's once in a blue moon interview done by someone who doesn't even know what branch prediction is a loss.
I have no reason to believe he isn't a good AI researcher, but he doesn't seem to know much about programming - that a branch predictor that just predicts what happened last time next time gets it right about 80% of the time is pretty obvious if you imagine that 90% or more of instructions executed happen in loops.
Why would an AI researcher need to be an expert programmer?
Furthermore, why would an AI researcher need to have intricate understandings of the inner workings of modern CPUs?
Lex is not a software engineer. Lex is not an electrical engineer.
I know people actively working in the AI/ML field who don't even have a B.A./B.S. - they're literally self-taught from watching YouTube videos; reading books, textbooks, articles; and listening to podcasts. And after all, wasn't that supposed to be the ultimate end-goal of all this high technology we've created for ourselves? To smash the Ivory Tower? To democratize knowledge for anyone who's willing to pursue it? These people don't understand the finer points of programming and they damn sure don't understand the finer points of CPU design... why should they? You have finite time in your day, and every hour you spend understanding the intricacies of one thing, that's an hour you've lost to understanding something else.
The promise of the Internet was supposed to be something to interconnect humanity so we could share amongst each other. Well part of that promise is relying on the expertise of others to help us, instead of having to acquire that expertise for ourselves.
Branch prediction as a concept is not a finer point of a CPU design - sure it's up to you to learn about it or not, but understanding the basics of writing CPU friendly code is really not hard in the slightest. AI workloads are some of the heaviest around at the moment, so a little can go a long way.
I am entirely self-taught in CS and I know what I know, I'm not inflicting it on anyone else I'm just saying Jim Keller doesn't do these very often and I want to hear him in more depth.
Research, and academia in particular, are very status/authority oriented, for better or worse. People with no credentials succeeding is not unheard of, but is extremely rare. Especially these days, when you’ll be competing with hordes of PhDs being pumped out by universities every year.
I found it the other way around, I got enlightened about many subjects and you took a peak on how Jim Keller perceives some problems and how he breaks them down - really remarkable.
I liked those parts, but they were strategy and I really want to hear him talk tactics too. Details on the tools and techniques they actually use to design processors are really hard to come by.
I've only heard Lex Fridman speak a few times on the Joe Rogan Experince, and I can't help but feel like he's a bullshit artist. Maybe it's just him trying to simplify things for Joe.
I see that he has a PhD in CS from Drexel and is an "AI Researcher" at MIT.
Has anybody listened to enough of his podcast to verify that he actually has anything meaningful to say in the realm of AI?
Why do you put it in quotes? He did AI research and published papers at MIT, also he taught a (or more) Deep Learning course at MIT with lots of participants, the lecture recordings are available on YouTube. I think it's quite clear he knows his stuff and isn't a bullshit artist at all.
He is well prepared for the interviews, he listens intently and asks important and curious questions to high profile researchers. The discussion is often at a level (of technicality) that I haven't seen anywhere else for a very very long time. In the age of oversimplified soundbites and 3-5 minute interviews for the lowest common denominator average lay audience on mainstream TV, Lex brings a breath of fresh air and proves that long and difficult interviews that dig deep can also have their place.
Look through his archives and pick a guest you are interested in. If you are interested in AI discussions, I'm pretty sure you'll find tons of interesting people on that list.
I've only listened to a dozen or so episodes, mostly non-AI related, but I can't really get a grasp on wether Friedman remembers any undergraduate level CS (or more advanced software engineering for that matter).
Maybe it's just a schtick to make it more approachable for "non-HN" listeners, but in the episode with Jim Keller it almost became painful. After all Friedman has a PhD in Computer Science, I would have expected more knowledge in some areas.
He knows too much about the topic to be bullshitting. Also, he does not pretend to have better answers than anyone else.
But IMHO Lex tries too hard getting deep/philosophical answers from his guests. And some guests clearly are not into “can we ever understand the brain and what would that even mean?”-type discussions.
If you want to see a real AI bullshit artist in action, look up recent appearances of Ben Goertzel.
The bigger problem with the podcast isn't his credentials or AI knowledge, it's how dry his delivery and presence are and how he basically reads off a prepared list of questions instead of having a conversation with his guests. And also the insistance to ask questions about life being a simulation and the meaning of life. He is a really poor interviewer but he has had a great selection of guests on the podcast.
You make really harsh and bitter remarks, like, "clearly he sucks at what he does, and he is cringe to ask silly questions about life and simulations... he is just lucky about his guests!!"
Like selecting, inviting and convince guests isn't part of the whole thing? Do you think these guests go out there expose themselves without having any idea of who he is, who his audience his, and the work he does?
How do you make such assessment and don't realize that maybe, just maybe, you're not his audience or that you don't understand what he is doing or his appeal, accept that and move on? He clearly works really hard to prepare these 1+ hour long interviews - this is not easy, at all!
The ridiculous thing is that when I clicked this comment section, I was expecting to see such caustic comments because there's a lot of passionate people here about CS, AI, and many other sciences... that's one of the reasons I come to HN, even though I don't have a PhD.
But damn, give the man some credit! You must understand that his inadequacies, his awkward pauses or his behavior when he makes the - indeed cringe - romanticized questions, it's part of the appeal of the whole thing? You don't get such bare boned interviewers these days, he his what he is - a MIT guy interviewing and giving visibility to bright minds that, at least myself, would have never heard of!
Is he the best interviewer? Hell no! His he improving? Yeah, bit by bit, and he has a long way to go. Some guests roll their eyes about some question? Yes, but some also don't, and that's the fun part! His he and his guests entertaining? Hell yes!
I've listened to one or two and would say he's a very good interviewer who is always well prepared. The ones I've listened to were about the philosophy of AI and related issues. For me personally, his podcasts are too long, I lack the time, but I was positively impressed.
So, no, not a bullshit artist at all in my opinion.
he still does this under the newer iteration of his podcast, but since shifting it to "the smart man's Joe Rogan" - I don't find myself listening as much personally