That is a strength, not a weakness. It's valuable to see why people, even those with whom we disagree, think the way they do. There's already far too much of a tendency to expel heretics in today's society, so the fact that Lex just patiently listens to people is a breath of fresh air.
How? It's fine to have on people with all different viewpoints, including awful ones, but I think pushing back when they're on some bullshit is good and necessary. Otherwise you're just uncritically spreading fake junk to a huge audience, which leads to more people believing in fake junk.
The trouble is self-styled "both sides" types believe that since they take the both sides approach, they have insulated themselves from the kinds of politicization that compromises the extremes. But the manner in which you position yourself relative to those extremes is every bit as politicized and every bit as liable to the same cognitive biases and rationalizations.
Misinformed climate skeptics often regard themselves in this way, as not taking one side or the other on global warming. They mistakenly believe that this orientation has elevated them above equivalently offensive extremes, but in truth they have compromised their own media literacy by orienting themselves in that manner.
There are numerous instances of this all over the political spectrum, Cornell West talking to left-wing academics in left-wing academic language about how "nobody" thinks Obama is truly left-wing. Journalists during the Iraq war had a both sides approach that cashed out as extremely hawkish and apologetic in defense of the Iraq war.
The Lex Friedman version is a "centrist" in a specific kind of media environment that lends disproportionate visibility towards its own set of boutique topics. The combination of optimism about technology and trends especially around AI and crypto and some libertarian leaning politics surrounding it, which at its periphery finds itself disproportionately saturated by right-wing memeing and politics. And so it's a form of centerism that's in the center of a world as described by those things. But for him and his viewers it's something they consider a perfectly neutral state of nature that's free of any adornment of ideology.
I felt that way until he had Carlson on. Carlson is a grade A TV talking head grifter who just spins up sensationalist narratives to drive views. No background, no expertise, just a guy who mastered which buttons to push to get average joe's raging.
Lex says he wants open honest conversation, but Carlson was just doing the same stunningly dishonest grift he does every time he has a mic in front of him. So dumb.
I do have a few gripes though, which might just be from personal preference. A lot of the time the language used by both the host and the guests is unnecessarily obtuse. Also the host is biased towards being optimistic about LLMs leading to AGI, and so he doesn't probe guests deep enough about that, more than just asking something along the lines of "Do you think next token prediction is enough for AGI?". Most of his guests are biased economically or academically to answer yes. This is then taken as the premise of the discussion following.
Having said that, I do agree that it is much better and deeper than other podcasts about AI.
There's a difference to being a good chatshow/podcast host and a journalist holding someone's feet to the fire!
Dwarkesh is excellent at what he does - lots of research beforehand (which is how he lands these great guests), but then lets the guest do most of the talking, and encourages them to expand on what they are saying.
It you are critisizing the guest or giving them too much push back, then they are going to clam up and you won't get the best out of them.
I decided to listen to a Dwarkesh episode as a result of this thread. I chose the Eliezer Yudkowsky episode. After 90 minutes, Dwarkesh is raising one of the same 3 objections for the n-teenth time, instead of leading the conversation in an interesting direction. If his other AI episodes are in the vein as other comments describe, then this does seem to be plain old positive AGI optimism bias rather than some special interview technique. In addition, he's very ill-prepared in that he doesn't seem to have attempted to understand the reasons some people have for believing AGI to be a threat.
On the other hand, Yudkowsky was a terrible guest, in terms of his public speaking skills. He came across as combative. His answers were terse and he spent little time on background information or otherwise making an effort to explain his reasoning in a way more digestible for a general audience.
I think with any talk show it mostly comes down to how interesting the guests are. I kind of agree with you that Dwarkesh's steering of the conversation isn't the best, but he seems to put his guests at ease and maybe they are more forthcoming as a result. He is also obviously smart, and it seems that encourages his guests to feel compelled to give deeper/more insightful/technical answers than if they had been, say, talking to some clueless journalist. This was notable in his interview with Ilya Sutskever, who otherwise seems to talk down to his interviewers.
The main strength of Dwarkesh is the caliber of guests he is able to attract, especially for being so new to the game. Apparently he'll research a potential guest for a couple of weeks before cold e-mailing them with some of his researched questions and asking if they'll come on his podcast, and gets a very high acceptance rate since the guests appreciate the questions and effort he has put into it (e.g. maybe Zuck enjoying being asked about Augustus, and not just about some typical FaceBook fare).
If you were inclined to give him another try, then I'd recommend the Richard Rhodes or Dario Amodei episodes, not because of any great Dwarkesh interviewing skills, but because of what the guests have to say. If you are a techie then the Sholto + Bricken one is also good - for same reason.
As far as AI optimism, I gather Dwarkesh has moved to SF, so that maybe goes with the territory (and some of his friends - like Sholto + Bricken - being in the AGI field). While arguably being a bit too deferential, he did at least give some pushback to Zuck on AI safety issues such as Meta's apparent lack of any "safe scaling" tests, and questioning how Zucks "increased AI safety via democratization" applied to bio threats (how is putting capability to build bio weapons in hands of a bad actor mitigated by others having AI too).
I haven't listened to Dwarkesh, but I take the complaint to mean that he doesn't probe his guests in interesting ways, not so much that he doesn't criticize his guests. If you aren't guiding the conversation into interesting corners then that seems like a problem.
He does a lot of research before his interviews, so comes with a lot of good questions, but then mostly let's the guests talk. He does have some impromptu follow-ups, but mostly tries to come back to his prepared questions.
I struggle to blame people for speaking in whatever way is most natural to them, when they're answering hard questions off the cuff. "I apologize for such a long letter - I didn't have time to write a short one."
I think AGI is less a "generation" problem and more a "context retrieval" problem. I am an outsider looking in to the field, though, so I might be completely wrong.
I don't know Dwarkesh but I despise Lex Fridman. I don't know how a man that lacks the barest modicum of charisma has propelled himself to helming a high-profile, successful podcast. It's not like he tends to express interesting or original thoughts to make up for his paucity of presence. It's bizarre.
Maybe I'll check out Dwarkesh, but even seeing him mentioned him in the same breath as Fridman gives me pause ...
I mostly agree with you. I listened to Fridman primarily because of the high profile AI/tech people he got to interview. Even though Lex was a terrible interviewer, his guests were amazing.
Dwarkesh has recently reached the level where he's also interviewing these high profile AI/tech people, but it's so much more enjoyable to listen to, because he is such a better interviewer and skips all the nonsense questions about "what is love?" or getting into politics.
The question you should ask is: why are high-profile guests willing to talk to Lex Fridman but not others?
The short answer, imho, is trust. No one gets turned into an embarrassing soundbite talking to Lex. He doesn't try to ask gotcha questions for clickbait articles. Generally speaking "the press" are not your friend and they will twist your words. You have to walk on egg shells.
Lex doesn't need to express original ideas. He needs to get his guests to open up and share their unique perspectives and thoughts. He's been extremely successful in this.
An alternative question is why hasn't someone more charismatic taken off in this space? I'm not sure! Who knows, there might be some lizard brain secret sauce behind the "flat" podcast host.
Yes, of course. His guests love being able to come on and present their view with very little critical analysis of what they are saying. It is fantastic PR for them.
Interviewers shouldn't be aggressive, antagonistic or clickbaity but they should put opposing views to their guests so that the guest can respond. Testing ideas like this is a fundamental way of learning and establishing an understanding of a topic.
My earlier comparison was basically saying now that high-profile guests are talking to a much better interviewer (Dwarkesh), we no longer have to rely on Lex as the only podcast with long-form interviews of these guests.
I would have thought folks wouldn’t care less about superfluous stuff like “charisma” on HN and would like a monotone, calm robot-like man that 95% of podcast just lets their gust speak and every now and then just asks a follow-up/probing question. Thought Lex was pretty good at just going with the flow of the conversation and not sticking too much with the script.
I have never listened to Dwarkesh but I will give him a go. One thing I was a little put off by just skimming through this episode with Zuck is that he’s doing ad-reads in the middle which Lex doesn’t.
I'll agree that "interesting thoughts" may be up to interpretation, but imma fight you on the charisma thing. I looked up "flat affect" in the dictionary and there were no words, only a full-page headshot of Lex Fridman.
I'm simply pointing out the answer to your "I don't understand why people like him" question. If you can't understand why people don't share your hatred for something, then odds are that the disconnect is because they don't share your reasons for hating it.
Yeah, I'm a big fan of Lex because I think he is really good at building connections, staying intellectually curious, and helping peopl open up, but he is absolutely not big with charisma! I don't know if he normally talks so flat or not, but in the podcast I don't think he could be more flat if he tried. He's also not great at asking questions, at least not spontaneously. Seems really good at preparation though.
I listen to Lex relatively often. I think he often has enough specialized knowledge to keep up at least somewhat with guests. His most recent interview of the Egyptian comedian (not a funny interview) on Palestine was really profound, as in one of the best podcasts I’ve ever listened to.
Early on I got really fed up with him when I discovered him. Like his first interview with mark zuckerberg where he asks him multiple times to basically say his life is worthless, his huge simping to Elon musks, asking empty questions repeatedly, and being jealous of Mr Beast.
But yeah for whatever reason lately I’ve dug his podcast a lot. Those less good interviews were from a couple years ago. Though I wish he didn’t obsess so much about twitter
