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Comment by st1x7 | Hacker News Reader

Every time I run across an episode of this podcast I need to weigh in my interest in a great guest versus having to listen to Lex's monotone voice and meaning-of-life type questions. The disparity is amazing - the list of guests is easily the best out of any podcast that has guests that I've ever come across; and the delivery of the host is just about the worst I've come across too. I guess I'll listen to this one.

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I think there's an unfortunate convergence of format and questioning. He asks a lot of the same questions of almost every guest. "Are we living in a simulation? What is consciousness? Etc." This feels like a waste of these guests if it's unrelated to their area of interest. In general, it smacks of lack of preparation.

But perhaps this creates the opportunity for someone to make a series of supercuts, where Lex doesn't need to appear, but we get the appearance of a series of luminaries discussing a recurring question, and the differences and similarities among responses can be more apparent. A virtual panel, smeared across time.

There's a Canadian interviewer named "Nardwuar the Human Serviette" who mainly does interviews with rappers/musicians. Before each interview, he conducts the most in-depth research on them that anyone has ever conducted, mentioning people, places, early inspirations from their childhood and musical career, things that only a handful of people, the rappers' parents or only themselves could know - which often astounds, confuses or even frightens them.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QZP8OwCdO1E

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5RKbSi87J5Q

I agree with the previous comments, Lex' guests are really great, maybe the above can serve as inspiration :)

Tyler Cowen (from Conversations with Tyler) does a variant of this, but a bit less creepy than that sounds :).

I love Tyler Cowen's podcast.

I've never felt that Lex's interviewing was so poor that it was a reason not to listen to one of his interviews. He still gets interesting people to talk about interesting things.

Yes, amazing guest list, I do wonder how it took off like that.

Edit: in contrast, Rob Reid's After On podcast has somewhat similar guests (not an all-stars list, no AI folks except Stuart Russell & Rodney Brooks), but he's my favourite interviewer. The amount of research he does before each interview is insane, to the point he already knows what the guest will say and what are the most interesting items to talk about. But he still lets the guest tell the story themselves.

That can be said the same with Guy Raz. I highly recommend everyone to give How I Built This a listen.

Second that. He's great. His new book is also highly recommended. I listened to it via audible

I’m a fan of the show for the guests but not the interviews, if that makes any sense. He asks questions that are too general. I never get a sense from the episodes of what it’s actually like to run the business. I never get an understanding of what are the important things in their industry. It’s too much “aw shucks” this hard personal thing happened and you overcame it. Which is fine on its own, but I want to learn about business on a business show.

Lex is a good interviewer, he's thoughtful and goes into depth. I've enjoyed many of his interviews. It's like he's a more stoic version of Joe Rogan.

Some of his guests, however, are a very bad choice. In particular I am thinking of Eric Weinstein who has been on TWICE. Weinstein is a master-class bullshtter, who opines on his theory of everything yet has NOTHING to show for it. He also manages to pull in politics, academia, culture, and the kitchen sink, all obfuscated by turgid rhetoric.

On average I'd rate him a pretty good interviewer however it seems like the quality has declined recently. E.g., his interview with Michael Malice a few weeks ago, where he (Lex) confessed to pulling an all-nighter before the interview, and so wasn't on his game. It showed. Hopefully the lesson he took from that experience is he shouldn't pull all-nighters before an interview.

As the commenter above said, lots of 'meaning of life' questions that just aren't that interesting.

On the contrary, Weinsten is a genius, a contrarian and a patriot who is not afraid to call a spade a spade. Thank the deity that there are still people like that and they can reach the rest of us with little mediation by establishment types.

"Genius", "contrarian" and "patriot" are all characterizations that don't have any basis in reality. What has he ACTUALLY DONE other than talk up a storm that amounts to not much at all? AFIAK, he's just an employee of Peter Thiel.

Are you judging his ideas or his track record?

Really? Even if you do not accept his intelectual firepower which is demonstrated by his credentials and even more so, obvious in any of the public long form conversations he has had, you cannot honestly say he is not a contrarian or a patriot. Come on. His tweeter feed, the people he interviews, the themes he discusses, all of that speaks of love for the country and a rejection of conventional thinking.

He’s a social critic. “What have you actually done?” is the most common non sequitur used to silence critics and dissidents since time immemorial. It’s irrelevant. Anyone is allowed to be a critic. Their accomplishments have no bearing on the veracity of their arguments. That would be an appeal to authority.

It’s an appeal to the authority of credibility. The more you speak through the language of results, the more credible you are. It’s this appeal to credibility that people rely on when they choose doctors or lawyers.

You say it like credibility in those two contexts are a bad thing.

Doctors and lawyers are about the only occupations where a professional’s mistake could cost a client his/her life. No other professions come close, which is part of why the training is long and the practitioners require a license to practice.

Our modern world is so tightly coupled that lots of us are working in professions where mistakes can cost lives.

If his arguments were clear and interesting, it would be a different story.

This person purports to have "a theory of everything" up his sleeve yet won't communicate it properly because he doesn't trust the physics community. That doesn't stop him from lengthy podcasts and interviews, like with Lex, where he uses a firehose of specialist jargon against a general audience. To what end? I can't imagine.

The obscurantist IDW stuff appears to be nothing more than a vaguely libertarian stance mildly against progressives and mostly in academia-- boring and not even close to "dissident".

The oppressed outsider wiling to say the truth against all odds is a meme invented by hucksters like Weinstein so they can sell you their supplements/ads/patreon subscription. It has little basis in reality. (it's obviously true since these people usually have bigger platforms than any "establishment types" who criticize them)

Someone in another comment compared Lex to Joe Rogan, and I think that comparison is apt. He is only as interesting as his guest's ability to break out of the box his questions put them into. And just like Rogan, Fridman has a very questionable set of guests which he doesn't truly challenge at any point in the conversation.

> The disparity is amazing - the list of guests is easily the best out of any podcast that has guests that I've ever come across; and the delivery of the host is just about the worst I've come across too.

If the guests would feel in the same way, then they wouldn’t be talking with Lex.

So it's most likely an issue you have. I personally don't mind Lex at all and really like his style, especially his "simple" questions, because how great minds answer these "simple" questions can be quite interesting.

> If the guests would feel in the same way, then they wouldn’t be talking with Lex.

I am often reminded of this anecdote:

"Von Neumann would carry on a conversation with my 3-year-old son, and the two of them would talk as equals, and I sometimes wondered if he used the same principle when he talked to the rest of us." (Teller)

> how great minds answer these "simple" questions can be quite interesting

Yes for sure. But rather than directly ask the naive question which we simple listeners want to ask, I want a smart interviewer to give us some quick signposts about schools of thought on this and where the interviewee probably comes from given what they've said in the past. Then you can get a deeper answer. Even, perhaps especially, when they disagree with the way in which the interviewer has framed the question.

> But rather than directly ask the naive question which we simple listeners want to ask, I want a smart interviewer to give us some quick signposts about schools of thought on this and where the interviewee probably comes from given what they've said in the past. Then you can get a deeper answer. Even, perhaps especially, when they disagree with the way in which the interviewer has framed the question.

If you don't like Lex's style, well, then don't listen to him. A lot of people seem to like and enjoy him. Asking someone to change to better fit your own expectations, honestly, seems quite a bit to ask, and at the end might not work that well, if it doesn't fit himself.

Sure, you can critique whatever you want, but Lex doesn't really has to listen and also shouldn't, if he has that many listeners by just doing his thing.

Oh right, I wouldn't call my moaning here helpful advice! Nor expect everyone's tastes to agree.

Maybe I'm hoping someone will tell me who I should listen to, instead.

Sometimes it‘s quite funny why you like certain people, how you weight the positive and negative attributes, because there‘s no person you like everything about. So you might dislike one person for certain attributes, but there‘s this other person you like with the same negative attributes, but in this case you don‘t weight them that much, it‘s easier to overlook them, because other positive attributes outweigh them.

So, what I‘m trying to say with this? I don‘t quite know, just a bit of a brain dump. Perhaps you‘re getting some hints for other podcasts.

His list of guests is amazing and he sometimes has interesting lines of inquiry, but too often he very clearly has his own axe to grind which can get quite annoying.

The endless "I am so very humble" spiel also gets tiresome, especially when punctuated by claims like "all journalists are trash (except those with a unique scientific curiosity, like me, of course)".

Every time a run across an episode of this podcast I am inclined to press play, often when I've never even heard of the guest. Yes his voice is very monotone but I find it calming. He challenges his guests with philosophical questions while most interviewers stick to the subject material. He adds just enough humor to lighten the mood, but not too much to derail the conversation. He takes that extra second before speaking to make sure his response or next question is genuine.

Lex, since you disagree with Joe Rogan's advice on not reading the comments, I know there's a slight possibility that you read this. I want to thank you for the fulfilling content, congratulate you on your success as a podcast host, and tell you that you are an inspirational person.

It’s unfortunate that this is your take. I find his questions to be out of sincere wonder. He’s finding himself in life and the podcast is a journey we are joining him on as he finds out. I find his podcast amazing and this one especially great given how cool Chris Lattner is. And if it means anything it seems Chris and Lex are legit friends.

Same. It's my favorite podcast right now, I enjoy Lex's demeanor and line of questioning. I think it really helps understand the mental model with which these folks approach life.

I think it's a good example of 'you can't please everybody'. For my part I hope he stays the course.

Totally agreed. It's so frustrating to me that out of the thousands of brilliant interviewers out there, we got this guy somehow bubbling up to the top. Maybe he brings the conversation down to the masses? His "philosophical" questions are often so bad that they don't even parse for his interviewees!!!

I think it's more that he puts in the work (doing and promoting the podcast) and he manages to get great guests.

It doesn’t hurt that his father is a highly respected plasma scientist—a small but not insignificant factor in his ability to land great guests.

https://drexel.edu/engineering/news-events/news/archive/2019...

This is not why he gets these guests. Lex is very famous in his own right. His episodes on Joe Rogan's podcast are some of the most popular he's put out. He's a well respected researcher in his own right. Chris Lattner did not go on this podcast because Lex's dad is a physicist.

I think his affiliation with MIT probably helped to start with, but you still have to shoot your shot. He interviewed three billionaires before episode 20 (none of which would give a shit about plasma physics btw, lol).

Kyle Vogt and Elon Musk are explainable with MIT, being a researcher heavily involved with self driving. Schmidt, yeah dunno how he got him so early on. He seems pretty well connected in technology in general to be honest. Still has nothing to do with his dad.

I have the same issues with Fridman. I wonder how he's able to get these A-list guests? Is it just that he's the only one in the space doing these kinds of podcasts? I heard his interview with Jim Keller (chip designer extraordinaire) and Fridman did ask some good questions, but there were also some very cringey questions and others that seemed to indicate he was out of his depth (at least with the topic at hand). In spite of it, Keller had a lot of good things to say. So I'll probably listen to this Lattner interview and cringe at points and find what Chris has to say interesting in spite of it.

I m trying to figure out what is it that throws people off? There are successful podcasters that are far more clueless than Lex (e.g. Joe rogan) and he s not interrupting much. In general the interviewee is usually the center of attention, and they seem to be actually going pretty deep on presenting their theses or personal ideas (e.g. sebastian thrun, joscha bach, george hotz, lisa feldman, james gosling). As for a few cringey questions in 1.5 hours, it's like a restful interlude, after all talking can become exhausting. Do people think the interviewees are offended by Lex's (few) obsessions (Musk,dostoyevsky,his soviet past)? It certainly doesnt seem so judging from their reactions during the interview and after (in twitter etc).

Being in MIT probably gave him easy access to the interesting people that started off his podcast, but beyond that i think his affable , empathetic and easy style is rather attractive, so people don't say no to him, and many have returned back.

I think blinkingled below in the comments put it really well:

"yes it is different and it can feel like stoned teenager with disorganized thoughts asking questions that form mid sentence"

i like him but essentially he started the podcast with interviewing someone for a class he was teaching at MIT. MIT has some of the smartest people in the world on the faculty or visiting to give lectures, which gave him easy access to interview them.

And after getting the ball rolling its not hard to get new guests by listing your previous guests as well as your view counts.

It is pretty clear Jim Keller did something pretty remarkable at Apple and then AMD (I know less about his work at Tesla). I tried to dig into the stuff he's said and written to understand what he did and how he did it. Say what you want about Fridman's interview style, that interview was probably the most insightful thing I found.

> and the delivery of the host is just about the worst I've come across too.

I like Lex's style - the guests always deliver on interesting conversations, which is the point of the podcast. Lex is playing a role that I think facilitates this.

I’ve done a couple of his surveys and mentioned that I think those questions are a waste of time.

Donald Knuth handled it well.

Do we live in a simulation?

Hanging out debating unanswerable questions all the time has zero value.

Not to be a romantic, but what do you think of neuralink (asked to someone in unrelated field to fulfill weird Musk quota the podcast seems to have)?

I don't understand the obsession with Elon Musk some seemingly smart individuals seem to have. Seems like such a waste of time.

It could be in this case a kind of arranged deal. Lex made a controversial paper about Tesla driver monitoring not being needed (based on users selected from an unbiased pool of... Tesla online fan clubs), flattering to Tesla's position, and promoted it before getting peer review. A few weeks later he had Musk on the podcast and got onto the Joe Rogan podcast and brought into a kind of mutual-shilling podcast circle.

https://www.thedrive.com/tech/27359/mit-study-showing-high-f...

Starship, it's all about starship. If he succeeds with it humanity as a species can expanse beyond this gravity well in a few decades.

Not sure what this fixation on mars is about, tough.

I've done the same and tell him I enjoy them. I think it's informative how the people he interviews frame the question (or not) and approach the answer.

They are at a predictable spot in the podcast (the end), so it's pretty easy to just stop listening when he brings them up.

I get this with Kara Swisher's Recode. Great guests but she talks over them and interrupts them to tell anecdotes about herself.

I keep reading this complaint and I do not understand it at all. For me Lex's delivery is refreshing. He is sincere, naive, full of wonder and never interjects himself as a subject. His obvious decency is for sure part of the reason he can get such wonderful guests. I hope he changes very little about his delivery.

Thank you for saying this! Good to know that I'm not alone.

As someone who occasionally interviews people, what are you really looking for? That is, what could Lex do better in your opinion?

I feel the same way at OP, amazing guests, but can't he push them a bit?

What I'd like is more like what Tyler Cowen does, on non-tech subjects [1]. He gives the impression of having read all their books (and their opponents') not just having skimmed Wikipedia over breakfast. He keeps it moving, and often gets people a little bit off-balance, not aggressively, but enough to make people think afresh and not just repeat what they always say.

Besides people's work, he'll ask them serious questions about (say) their known interest in some kinds or Jazz, or unrelated things about characters they would have run into at MIT in the 70s, or about the Russian education system. (I presume he has people helping him prepare, but maybe he's just like this all the time.)

[1] https://conversationswithtyler.com/

Tyler is an exceptionally good interviewer, in a way you can only get by exceptional preparation. We’re lucky to have him.

I haven’t heard a better interviewer since Charlie Rose (who had a team working for him, of course).

Does anyone know of similar interviewers in this vein? Long form and exceptionally-prepared?

> I haven’t heard a better interviewer since Charlie Rose

Really? Rose is a serial interrupter. Might as well have Gary Vee interview people if you think Charlie Rose is any good.

Yeah, they obviously have different interview styles, but a lot of the difference can be explained by the mediums, and their respective backgrounds. Personally I appreciate them both, but I can respect that you wouldn't find his style enjoyable.

However, I'll defend Rose, in that he always picked interesting guests, and did good prep work. It's true that he steered the conversation in the direction he wanted it to go. But, of course, he had 60 minutes, and was recording for a broad television audience. The constraints were/are very different from Tyler's, personality differences notwithstanding.

If you listen to the interviews where he gets to break out of the normal 60 minute boundaries, I think you'll find his style shifts with the medium. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LOUzTd-Ge_g

I've never heard of Gary Vee. However, based on a cursory search, I don't think a hyperbolic comparison helps your argument! :)

I am a big Tyler Cowen fan and like his choices for guest but it is almost on listenable to me. He prepares his exact questions beforehand and tends to stick to them instead of having a conversation. It makes his delivery wooden and the interview boring.

push them on what? Lex does technical people and i dont think cowen would be able follow them, plus he steers away from politics.

I mean don't leave them on autopilot, then you get the same stump speech they have given many times. Instead push them off-trail just a bit, make them talk about some unexpected connection or comparison, so they have to think.

Agree that Cowen himself wouldn't be the right guy, at least not if you want to hear the technical side.

Tip no.1 for getting great guests

Not denigrating people in public...

Many great things about Lex. One I like most is his quickness to ask basic questions. Chris Lattner mentions it as a great trait of his own -- sincerely trying to learn, rather than impress you

So well done Lex

Different culture / expectations. Most people evidently like him and almost all of his interlocutors reportedly enjoy it.

Yeah he’s not a very good interviewer

I don't mind him, it feels like he is figuring things out still but I like that at times it can turn in to what feels like a quiet conversation between friends. Which can be illuminating and heart warming. Quite unexpected for a podcast like this.

I've watched from the beginning, he's getting better and it's clear to me anyway that he's trying. I think it's just a difficult skill to acquire if it's not something that is naturally in your wheelhouse.

I listen because I enjoy the guests he's able to land and what seems to be an authentic interest in how they think and approach the world. It would be great if there were more podcasters having these conversations, but as far as I can tell there aren't. So the question is if the world's better off with or without these interviews as-is. To me the answer is clearly the former.

After 3 minutes of commercials and this voice I had to switch off. Too bad, I am sure CL had interesting stuff to say.

This is not a radio broadcast, you can skip ahead to the interesting stuff (there's an outline with timestamps lower on the linked webpage). You can even download the episode and listen to it in your favorite player.

Yup, I realised that as well :-) By then I was too tired of this voice.

Gotta be hush hush with these comments, I think most long term listeners who have a science background will agree with you here, but before you know it you'll be banned by him

Maybe listen at 1.5x speed?

I have also unsubscribed because of Lex's monotone voice.

We can agree to disagree. To me, Lex is the “whole human” in the sense that he lets his humanity hang out there while talking with very interesting people.

I have mostly worked in the field of AI (practical projects, not much research) since 1982. I feel strongly that AI systems that work with us, augmenting what makes us human and unique, is great. AI systems that aim to forcing human behavior into tight and strict protocols are simply bad. AI helping exploitive surveillance capitalism systems is bad. The human and basic humanity comes first.

Well if you are such a badass just listen to it in 2x speed or faster like the rest of us.

you don't like thinking about the meaning of life?

Well, Mr. Creosote is annoying

I feel the same with with Sam Harris's podcasts. He always has super interesting guests on but I feel like he's barely putting in effort to even speak, almost like vocal fry, and somehow ends up complaining about social media in every interview.

I just refuse to listen to a three hour podcast. I have a one hour limit, and even then I have my finger on the skip button. I also usually listen at between 1.5x and 2x, never slower than 1.2x because they sound stoned at 1x. I've wondered if they deliberately slow them down a bit. Life is short, and there are many podcasts.

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