Comment by krick | Hacker News Reader

Comment by krick | Hacker News Reader

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This is too harsh in my opinion, but I agree that he isn't really a good host. I don't find him off-putting at all (actually the opposite, he seems to be a nice guy), but I really dislike the questions he asks.

This clearly is a podcast for quite technical people. His guests most of the time (like, almost always, except the cases he invites somebody because he was on a JRE) are people notable for their technical contributions. They discuss some very technical stuff the guest is known for and is literally the best possible person to teach us about. Instead he skips technical questions almost completely and opts for "what's the meaning of life"?! Come on!

When the discussion happens to be pretty technical (mostly, because the guest himself is more of a no-nonsense type of guy) it sometimes feels like some basic background necessary to understand the further explanation was skipped. I assume that it's my fault, since this is supposed to be common knowledge and host doesn't want to interrupt the guests to clarify such nonsense. And later on I understand, that Lex didn't understand that part either, but didn't make any attempts to clarify. Isn't that the point of an interview?..

I wouldn't want to offend him, but often I think "oh, such a waste!" listening to his podcasts. So much stuff is left unanswered.

So, yeah. Nice guy, but no so good interviewer. And way too romantic.

Thanks for the comment and the kind words about me being nice. I'll try to live up to that.

On the technical depth point, I agree. A lot of folks tell me they love the "meaning of life" questions. I love both the technical and the philosophical. My hope is to more and more try to go deep technically with the ML, CS, math, physics folks on the topic of their expertise, and find productive points of passionate disagreement or insight. This isn't easy, and I fail often, but I'm working hard to improve.

Thank you for your work, I hope I didn't offend you and I really wish you luck at improving (for obvious reasons).

The problem with being way too philosophical is that it restricts discussion to sharing opinions, which is totally ok, but the problem with opinions is that every single person on the planet has an opinion, but it's way more rare thing to have some knowledge. So, it may be really interesting to hear somebody's opinion about something, but as far as learning goes, I don't really gain anything from them: the more abstract and complicated the question, the less difference from asking a random person on the street. But when you have somebody in front of you, who has some knowledge that your audience (or you) doesn't have (be it technical, or an experience of making a wildly successful infotainment youtube channel, or anything else), you can learn so much more from every single conversation.

If you want to get into philosophical questions you should get some actual philosophers on the show because right now it seems like most of your guests are just making up answers to your questions on the spot and it's not very insightful. At the very least keep the questions more open ended, ask them what are the biggest road blocks to AGI and how do we get over them, or if they have some contrarian opinions about AGI.

Joe Rogan got so popular because he lets his guests drive the conversation and allows them to talk about themselves and whatever it is that they're interested in. He seems to really follow Dale Carnegie's advice from How to Win Friends and Influence People (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/How_to_Win_Friends_and_Influen...).

Joe Rogan is not a good example, since is unable to discuss complicated stuff (did you see the one with Bostrom? it was painful) and here guests are valuable for their technical knowledge. Do you want for Lex to sit there half-stoned and ask every guest if he tried DMT?

People watch JRE, because it's fun and he has a lot of very influential people as guests nowadays. It doesn't mean that more interviewers should be like him, God forbid...

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