He isn’t the best interviewer because he doesn’t have the experience yet but the podcasts are very good because he gives the guests an open stage, he is never adversarial and he never seem to push the interview into a specific direction.
Overall it wouldn’t surprise me if many of the guests would just enjoy to sit down and talk to someone who is without sounding too elitists a smart as they are, being able to reach to a lot of other people is just a bonus.
He's been running the podcast for two and a half years, and this episode makes 160.
How much experience do you reckon it takes to get "good" at interviewing?
I don't know if you've ever interviewed someone, but that kind of awareness and quick thinking is really really hard.
It's crazy to me that people are now claiming that asking "hard questions" is what is ruining journalism. As if we need more of Cuomo interviewing Cuomo on CNN.
As a counterpoint, watch the end of his podcast with Elon Musk, where he made him read the Carl Sagan quote [1]. This was quite brilliant I thought.
Large number of views/listens thanks to Joe Rogan + extremely safe interviewing style to keep the momentum going.
It's really not all that impressive given the absence of alternatives (try searching Wolfram on youtube and see how many other podcasts show up) - it's more surprising how bad the podcast discovery scene is that almost anyone who self promotes through Joe Rogan and puts in the work becomes a top 100 podcast worldwide.
Your criticism is an example of taking your personal opinion that he has no charisma or interviewing skills and then incorrectly projecting it on to guests that don't share your opinion.
Think about how the guests must voluntarily agree to be interviewed by Lex. Some might go through these steps:
1) get inquiry email from Lex : "Hi, I have a podcast and I'd love to interview you. [... blah blah blah ...] For reference, here are some links to interviews with previous guests [...]"
2) hmmm... who is this Lex guy?!? Let me look at his previous interviews...
3) Ok, he's non-threatening, engaging, and intellectual with his questions. I can sit down and chat with him for few hours.
People oversell the "connections" angle. Yes, he has some connections (Drexel, MIT, ex-contractor at Google, etc) but that just means some warm introductions and a potential guest will politely reply to an email inquiry. Guests can still decline the podcast. Connections don't guarantee the guest will actually agree to talk for 2 hours on camera.
E.g. Chris Lattner has been interviewed by Lex 2 times. Unless he's lying, his comment doesn't seem like he shares your opinion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24831157
EDIT to reply: "just by cold emailing."
I didn't say he was only sending out cold emails. (I mentioned "warm introductions.")
In any case, the main point of my comment is that you are (inadvertently?) insulting some of his guests. In other words, have you considered the possibility that many of his guests enjoy Lex's interviewing style?
I think Brendan Eich has got to be one of my favourite people to hear anecdotes about early web history. He was around at some pivotal moments, was in with the business side of things but also super technical. He’s also just very good at talking, he never appears to talk himself into a corner, somehow always avoids getting into the weeds, there’s a lucidity to all his answers that’s somehow very impressive. I wonder how much preparation he puts into his interviews.
As for Lex, personally I really like his style. He operates at a different pace to many of the people he’s interviewing, but I find this often enables him to see interesting parallels and analysis. It’s not always perfect, and maybe there’s room for improvement, though it gives the whole show an authenticity that it might not otherwise have if it were too polished.
I feel like his style works very well with all the guests he has on. They all seem to get on very well, which has a massive positive effect on how the guest interacts. Sure he has some prepared questions, but he also goes off piste quite a bit, and when he gets back to the prepared questions, I generally find they are well researched and very relevant.
I’d also like to know how he gets so many great guests on the show.
One issue I’ve had with Greek philosophy is that although I know there’s interesting content within the stories, it all feels very distant, I can’t pronounce many of the names, a lot of the stories don’t feel super relevant, so there isn’t much that ‘sticks’ in my head.
It’s a bit like reading Shakespear, I rarely get into it, spending all my thought decrypting low level meaning/semantics, and I just never get to the interesting higher level story arcs, or when I do, my flow is too easily broken by some weird old English saying that I am unacquainted with. I guess it’s like any language, lots of practice necessary.
I’ll have to take another look at the Socratic method in more detail. If it’s a technique you are using, based on your interviews that I’ve listened to, then it’s clearly beneficial.
Javascript is still the only meaningful "Full Stack" platform and responsible for Billions of dollars in online business and Trillions of dollars in business value.
There were a few bits where it got a tad uncomfortable, maybe even cringey (though I think that’s a stretch), sometimes because Lex was being a bit argumentative, or because some of his comments and questions were a bit lame, but there were also some bits where I felt Keller was being a bit prickley.
Overall though I learnt a lot, Keller has a very interesting angle on the tech sector because of where / how he’s been involved.
Even though there were a few places where they clashed a bit, there were also some fun shared humour parts and I felt it ended well. Sounded like they got on quite well despite their differences.
If I have some time (unlikely), I might watch the video version, it would be interesting to see if there’s a big difference in how the interviews come across when there is a video component.
So far I’ve only listened to a few. I mostly listen via the podcast feed.
I posted the ones I liked to my linkblog (https://links.markjgsmith.com):
[2020-12-26] Lex Friedman Podcast #80 - Vitalik Buterin - Ethereum, Cryptocurrency, and the Future of Money - Fascinating and well paced conversation with the founder of Etherium covering a wide range of topics including Satoshi Nakamoto, blockchains, proof of work and identity, PKI and digital signatures, Bitcoin, money, the Etherium origin story, smart contracts, software engineering and project governance challenges, proof of stake and consensus algorithms, sharding of storage and computation, Etherium 2.0, games built using smart contracts, Uniswap, AI and crypto, and closes on Immortality
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=3x1b_S6Qp2Q
[2021-02-13] Lex Friedman Podcast #159 – Richard Craib: WallStreetBets, Numerai, and the Future of Stock Trading - Looks at the recent WalkStreetBets and Gamestop Saga that caused such a stir in the trading markets, then moves on to talk about hedge funds, shorting, new ways crypto and AI could change the world of finance, aswell as more esoteric topics like running a startup and the meaning of life
https://lexfridman.com/richard-craib
I might have a listen to the cringey one you linked to. I wonder if it was just an off day for him or perhaps he didn’t gel well with the guest.
#162 – Jim Keller: The Future of Computing, AI, Life, and Consciousness
https://lexfridman.com/jim-keller-2
I haven’t listened to it yet, the topics covered in the show notes look pretty cool.
My initial reaction was that, of the people you listed, Steve Wosniak would be the best fit. I attended a lecture he gave a number of years ago, it was very inspiring. He’s not very ‘corporate’ so I think he’d get on really well with Lex.
But I am perhaps showing my bias here, I’d also be very interested to see how versatile Lex’s interview style is with Gates, Bezos and Zuckerberg.
https://faculty.nps.edu/dedennin/publications/National%20Com...
Redmond is in WA not CA. If your point is about commercial pressure, not just SV bashing, then please listen to my tale of David Hyatt and grad school friend (Hyatt writing draft code and rewriting five times) from the interview with Lex. That was an academic assignment, not commercial work.
The point is not about Silicon Valley, commercialization of the Web (although as Dorothy Denning observed, the pre-Web Academic Internet was a more secure world only because not many attackers yet), or academic pressure. WiB applies to biology. I have friends at a synth-bio startup, one tweeted humorously the other month about how bad a hack evolution is!
https://www.goodreads.com/author/quotes/670307.Friedrich_A_H...
Did you listen to Eich’s statements acknowledging the errors and also the hypothesis of what would have been if not JavaScript? Since you have done some accounting, what have been the productivity gains and new frontiers opened by C? What is the amortization of damage over the length of delay?
So we don't have to wonder at all, it would have turned out exactly the way it did and the reason is because things like undefined behavior, zero terminated strings, null pointers, etc have positive utility underappreciated by academics.
If C had been designed as a safer language (with even just small improvements that would not have been hard to implement), it would still be widely used and there would be fewer security problems associated with it. It is the Just World Fallacy [0] to assume that the most widespread language became so on its merits and not based on its historical context.
We booted the ada disk first thing in the morning, changed some writeln() statements, and kicked off the build.
After lunch, the executable was ready (this was not "hello world", but a system with maybe 50K SLOC.
Not practical on that date, with machines that existed. As for writing code that worked, and eliminating defects by language design, ada has no peer. Even in 2021.
Today compile time is not a problem.
Brendan Eich is going to be attacked by Google somehow for something, maybe through lobbying in Congress around cryptocurrencies. These ideas are a credible threat to their advertising revenue.
Is their moat as wide as they think it is? They don't exactly have a healthy revenue diversity.
If you like I can say 10 years but that doesn't advance the conversation in any meaningful way.
Is it worth jumping back in for another try?
Might be worth another shot, but maybe just pick the podcasts in the areas you're interested in. I can see how some guests may be a turn off.
So now he brings people who study quantum physics, philosophers, thinkers, writers, and he's free to ask more open ended questions.
The MIT AI podcast => AI podcast => Lex Podcast worked out great for him, though...but it feels kind of gross. There are some fascinating guests, but it feels like the content is good in spite of Lex and his “journey”.
Gladly, he isn't still Sam Harris (although the "love" and "beauty" is getting annoying too) or Rogan (lol). There are really interesting episodes, and I overall like the naive questions sometimes.
I think The After-On will restart soon and takes the spot filled by Lex right now.
The biggest part of a "good interview" is getting the guest to say "yes" to being interviewed.
The issue that people overlook with "challenging questions" is that the guest must agree to be interviewed in the first place. If the interview is denied, then the "lack of challenging questions" is a moot point because the guest never made himself/herself available to be made uncomfortable.
In other words, let's say Lex starts out of the gate 3 years ago with a hard-hitting style. This instantly increases his rejection rate and decreases his guest count. Then later guests he tries to pitch to also look at those previous challenging interviews which is distasteful to them and they also decline the invitations creating a snowball effect.
You can't replay history with (as of today) 160 podcasts and say they should have been more challenging -- because we wouldn't even have the 160 podcasts to complain about.
Yes, journalists like Kara Swisher like to challenge/ambush/provoke/etc their guests but not everybody wants to be interviewed by her. See the chicken & egg issue?
Lex isn't poor at challenging questions. In reality, he's building a body of work that solidifies his reputation for interviews in a friendly conversational style that doesn't threaten the guest. This reputation attracts many types of guests that a bigger journalist like Kara Swisher can't get.
Charlie Rose, Joe Rogan, Larry King - they didn't really push very hard either.
Sometimes just giving a people a forum to speak works just fine.
Lex has a very odd personality for media - but it works fine for this format, in this industry, and he's smart and curious enough to ask reasonable questions.
He 'talks up' to his interviewees like he's one of their team members of interns and that's fine.
Also, it’s a little ironic that the web sucks mostly due to excessive/ unnecessary JavaScript, so Brendon Eich is responsible for both the disease and the cure. (I say this as someone who actually enjoys writing JavaScript, I should add.)
As an aside, I wish there was a simple/standard way to link to podcast episodes.
Seems to me the way it should work is that a podcast has its own website with a URL for each episode, but makes the episodes available through many different platforms. The indieweb folks have a term for this sort of thing, POSSE, Publish (on your) Own Site, Syndicate Elsewhere. [0]
Many podcasts upload to YouTube, which naturally supports linking to a specific time in an episode.
Related: it's a pity so many podcasts seem to view it as a their duty to obscure the URLs of the audio files.
I wonder how things would’ve turned out differently, had he implemented Scheme instead. Lisp in the browser.
As I said, in the beginning (Mocha in ten days), == was just as strict if operand types differ: false result. The lesson is to say "no" by default and reflex to RFEs, consider only on repeated request and be willing to find what they truly want that's not a hole in the head ;-).
The other sloppiness in JS is `var obj = {prop:42}; obj.prep` where you get undefined instead of a thrown exception (as you would get in Python). That was due to 10 day rush and little time after for core language work leaving 0 time to add try-catch-finally.
Thanks, Brendan!
