Show HN: Lex Fridman AI Podcast Search
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he still does this under the newer iteration of his podcast, but since shifting it to "the smart man's Joe Rogan" - I don't find myself listening as much personally
other non-AI guests I'm sure are plenty interesting, that's just not what I'm looking for in a podcast
I have to admit though, Dan Carlin on Joe Rogan isn't a good interview either. His podcasts are incredible, but maybe he just doesn't interview well.
The man put it out there about him feeling constrained about pursuing different types of guests that he was genuinely curious about, but that felt out of space within the realm of the previous branding.
Better yet - he put a lot of these decisions up to vote to his community, that he clearly feels that he owes them everything. Basically the feedback of the community was positive towards this change - and he seems really happy about it!
So now he brings guests with different types of backgrounds, from AI to Quantum Physics, where he dares to ask question about what he thinks are more profound/out of the box questions.
He knew this shift wasn't going to appeal everyone, and that's fine. It's impossible to please everyone, and he saw this path a way for him to grow and explore even though he would lose some following (clearly a small portion).
I'm really happy for him, and it's a joy to see someone put themselves out there, to risk it, and grow!
And guess what, maybe he left a void to be filled - the same void he filled that allowed him to do his own thing.
just different styles of podcasting, with their respective pros and cons
Mindscape (deep dives on various topics, host is a theoretical physicist): https://www.preposterousuniverse.com/podcast/
Brain Inspired (AI & neuroscience interviews): https://braininspired.co/
Thesis Review (interviews with researchers about their PhD thesis): https://cs.nyu.edu/~welleck/podcast.html
Machine Learning Street Talk (discussions & interviews about ML): https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCMLtBahI5DMrt0NPvDSoIRQ
Also, I like that he is not trying to be everybody's darling: https://youtu.be/_hni6uuorKk?t=367
Perhaps harsh, but while I’d love to hear more from the guests - I find his interview style insufferable and his questions usually irritating. So much to the point that I avoid stuff he’s in.
A lot of the philosophical questions show he hasn’t read the AGI stuff, Bostrom, Yudkowsky, etc. and it’s frustrating to listen to someone who isn’t aware of some of the basic ideas.
I get a strong sense of bullshit too which makes it hard to listen to because I have to second guess everything. It feels like listening to sophomore undergrad philosophy.
Yes, he didn't ask the nitty gritty questions we'd like to hear from Donald Knuth or Jim Keller or dozens of quantum computing, computational biology etc researchers he has interviewed. But if you read their blogs, that's what they like about their appearance on the podcast.
The content the HN bubble is interested in would be understood by ~5-10k people but he has 870k subscribers. If you want research-level interviews, there's https://www.quantamagazine.org/, there are research blogs, journal commentary articles, etc.
> [01:29:20] So And what is it? So the Java virtual machine, you can think of it in different ways. Because it was carefully designed to have different ways of viewing it, so one view of it that most people don't really realize is there is that you can view it as sort of an encoding of the abstract syntax tree in reverse Polish notation. I don't know if that makes any sense at all. I could explain it and that would blow all of our time. But the other way to think of it and the way that it ends up being explained is that it's it's like the the instruction set of an abstract machine that's designed such that you can translate that abstract machine to a physical machine. And the reason that that's important. So if you win back to the early 90s when we were talking to all of these these companies doing consumer electronics.
To have some fun I asked my coworker who is a lot smarter than me what that means which led to a fun 30 minute tangent.
https://www.happyscribe.com/public/lex-fridman-podcast-artif...
I recall his podcast with Stephen Wolfram. His reputation as a human being is not great and he often shows up defensive. With Lex he is not afraid to be vulnerable and is able to share a lot.
Wanted to point out that "playing dumb" is a really effective technique to get the interviewee to share their knowledge, and in a natural way.
And I have nothing but love for anyone who has the courage to have long-form discussions about technical, philosophical , and other intellectual matters in public.
I have no reason to believe he isn't a good AI researcher, but he doesn't seem to know much about programming - that a branch predictor that just predicts what happened last time next time gets it right about 80% of the time is pretty obvious if you imagine that 90% or more of instructions executed happen in loops.
For example, I really liked these two approaches regarding Moore's Law (Jim Keller: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c01BlUDIlK4 , and David Patterson : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c01BlUDIlK4 )
Furthermore, why would an AI researcher need to have intricate understandings of the inner workings of modern CPUs?
Lex is not a software engineer. Lex is not an electrical engineer.
I know people actively working in the AI/ML field who don't even have a B.A./B.S. - they're literally self-taught from watching YouTube videos; reading books, textbooks, articles; and listening to podcasts. And after all, wasn't that supposed to be the ultimate end-goal of all this high technology we've created for ourselves? To smash the Ivory Tower? To democratize knowledge for anyone who's willing to pursue it? These people don't understand the finer points of programming and they damn sure don't understand the finer points of CPU design... why should they? You have finite time in your day, and every hour you spend understanding the intricacies of one thing, that's an hour you've lost to understanding something else.
The promise of the Internet was supposed to be something to interconnect humanity so we could share amongst each other. Well part of that promise is relying on the expertise of others to help us, instead of having to acquire that expertise for ourselves.
I am entirely self-taught in CS and I know what I know, I'm not inflicting it on anyone else I'm just saying Jim Keller doesn't do these very often and I want to hear him in more depth.
I see that he has a PhD in CS from Drexel and is an "AI Researcher" at MIT.
Has anybody listened to enough of his podcast to verify that he actually has anything meaningful to say in the realm of AI?
So, no, not a bullshit artist at all in my opinion.
But IMHO Lex tries too hard getting deep/philosophical answers from his guests. And some guests clearly are not into “can we ever understand the brain and what would that even mean?”-type discussions.
If you want to see a real AI bullshit artist in action, look up recent appearances of Ben Goertzel.
He is well prepared for the interviews, he listens intently and asks important and curious questions to high profile researchers. The discussion is often at a level (of technicality) that I haven't seen anywhere else for a very very long time. In the age of oversimplified soundbites and 3-5 minute interviews for the lowest common denominator average lay audience on mainstream TV, Lex brings a breath of fresh air and proves that long and difficult interviews that dig deep can also have their place.
Look through his archives and pick a guest you are interested in. If you are interested in AI discussions, I'm pretty sure you'll find tons of interesting people on that list.
Maybe it's just a schtick to make it more approachable for "non-HN" listeners, but in the episode with Jim Keller it almost became painful. After all Friedman has a PhD in Computer Science, I would have expected more knowledge in some areas.
You make really harsh and bitter remarks, like, "clearly he sucks at what he does, and he is cringe to ask silly questions about life and simulations... he is just lucky about his guests!!"
Like selecting, inviting and convince guests isn't part of the whole thing? Do you think these guests go out there expose themselves without having any idea of who he is, who his audience his, and the work he does?
How do you make such assessment and don't realize that maybe, just maybe, you're not his audience or that you don't understand what he is doing or his appeal, accept that and move on? He clearly works really hard to prepare these 1+ hour long interviews - this is not easy, at all!
The ridiculous thing is that when I clicked this comment section, I was expecting to see such caustic comments because there's a lot of passionate people here about CS, AI, and many other sciences... that's one of the reasons I come to HN, even though I don't have a PhD.
But damn, give the man some credit! You must understand that his inadequacies, his awkward pauses or his behavior when he makes the - indeed cringe - romanticized questions, it's part of the appeal of the whole thing? You don't get such bare boned interviewers these days, he his what he is - a MIT guy interviewing and giving visibility to bright minds that, at least myself, would have never heard of!
Is he the best interviewer? Hell no! His he improving? Yeah, bit by bit, and he has a long way to go. Some guests roll their eyes about some question? Yes, but some also don't, and that's the fun part! His he and his guests entertaining? Hell yes!