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Comment by pizzathyme | Hacker News Reader

It sounds like you’re evaluating the tone and charisma while others are evaluating the content and dialog.

He is very wooden, but I agree with the others, his questions are incredible and cut straight to the point. For example while others (Tim Ferriss) might have asked Zuckerberg “How do you deal with negative sentiment around you and your work?” Lex asked something like “Many people believe that your products are destroying democracy, that social networks polarize us into bubbles, and you are one of the most hated men in America. How do you contend with that?” Wow and ouch! Amazing conversations

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That's clearly a prepared question. He sucks at following up AKA actually interviewing.

I tried listening to his conversation with Brian Armstrong.

He insisted multiple times that being "canceled by the woke mob" is something that the government does to you because they are afraid of losing power to common people on the internet. That's not just kind of wrong, or kind of skewed, that's a complete inversion of reality.

You could replace him with a markov chain trained in the right wing conspiracy media bubble and get basically the same quality questions.

He = Armstrong or Fridman insisting on being canceled by the woke mob? Unclear if you're saying that was Fridman's view or Armstrong's view and Fridman didn't push back.

He = Fridman. Armstrong was much more clear and eloquent.

Fridman really seemed to be going for applause lines from a very specific crowd, not anything particularly coherent. I think he's realized that his growth as a podcaster comes from the demographic that frequents hosts like Jordan Peterson, Joe Rogan, and Ben Shapiro, and the more he can get them engaged the higher his numbers will get. But the topics that demographic cares about aren't AI and ML.

Just as a point of pushback on the audience, I'm not a listener of any of the shows that you mentioned; my most listened to other podcasts include Tyler Cowen, Vergecast, Trade Talks, Vox, and the Charter Cities Podcast

I think he's pivoting pretty sharply. If you look at the first podcasts he has listed on IMDb: * Andrew Ng: Deep Learning, Education, and Real-World AI * Michael I. Jordan: Machine Learning, Recommender Systems, and the Future of AI * Marcus Hutter: Universal Artificial Intelligence, AIXI, and AGI * John Hopfield: Physics View of the Mind and Neurobiology * Alex Garland: Ex Machina, Devs, Annihilation, and the Poetry of Science * Ann Druyan: Cosmos, Carl Sagan, Voyager, and the Beauty of Science

Compare to his last few episodes: * Steve Keen: Marxism, Capitalism, and Economics * Richard Haier: IQ Tests, Human Intelligence, and Group Differences * Susan Cain: The Power of Introverts and Loneliness * Douglas Murray: Racism, Marxism, and the War on the West * Richard Wolff: Marxism and Communism

That's a pretty hard pivot in topics that he's covering. If discussion about whether BLM is Marxism intent on destroying the West isn't the content you're looking for, I don't think you're the audience he's targeting anymore.

The pivot happened ages ago, his podcast was originally called something like the Artificial Intelligence Podcast, and then changed to the Lex Fridmin podcast along with a change in more general guests. I do wish he focused more on computer related topics, but his guests still tend to be very interesting.

That's a good point, I do find myself just skipping over those episodes though rather than throwing out the podcast as a whole (I'm also trying to be better about that in general including with books which I would religiously read from beginning to end no matter the quality which is silly).

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