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Comment by ceilingcorner | Hacker News Reader

I used to like this podcast but two behaviors by the host ultimately turned me off:

- Lex’s weird comments and massive oversimplification of ethical topics. He always seems to ask people if X is Good or Evil, with no consideration of nuance. I get that he’s a computer scientist and not a ethicist, but I somewhat expected more.

- He doesn’t question the guest or curate the discussion very well. Some of the episodes are 3, 4, 5 hours long, which is madness. I want to listen to his guests, but I can’t spend 5 hours on a conversation that has an hour of insight. This is the job of a good host.

Overall the strength of his podcast comes from the quality of guests. I wish he would take his role as journalist/interviewer a little more seriously.

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To counter:

-unnuanced prompts/questions tend to trigger better responses. highly nuanced questions don't. it's up to the answerer to freely craft their response w/ little cognitive load or host-assumptions to manage.

-some of the longer podcasts are where the veil of persona disappears & one can see the authentic guest. I like long, deep, authentic conversations personally.

I was going to reply to the comment directly but I completely agree with what you said here.

And to add more to your second point: Lex is catering to people who want long form interviews. There are thousands of other podcasts that fit the interview to the time rather than fit the time to the interview for those that don't like this.

Yeah exactly. There's a whole lotta non-deep-conversational shortform interview shows out there.

- I don’t think Lex asks open-ended questions, he asks exceedingly basic ones that often betray a lack of knowledge on the topic.

- Long is not equal to deep. There is a lot of empty filler content that isn’t authentic or relevant.

Asking basic questions might be annoying for a spectator who is already an expert and is just trying to find the latest tid bits of information in the field but for the vast majority of people the basic questions are the ones they want answered. Having a specialist engage in an open ended conversation with a non expert is often more interesting because it is a better approximation of the conversation the listener would have with the same person. I’m not sure what you mean by filler, to me shorter interviews have a higher percentage of filler since people usually have about 40 minutes of standard dialogue on hand. It’s only when you go well past the hour mark that you start to get the unscripted stuff that you wouldn’t normally hear without getting to know the person.

It’s only when you go well past the hour mark that you start to get the unscripted stuff that you wouldn’t normally hear without getting to know the person.

You see, for me this is almost always the stuff I don't care about. It almost always ends up either rambling personal anecdotes and the two of them sharing 'funny' stories or two people pontificating on subjects way outside their areas of expertise. Both of which are completely uninteresting to me.

Two blokes chatting bollocks about stuff they don't really understand is only fun if I'm one of them.

As an interviewee, I'm going to be exhausted after an hour on mic and talking about whatever random things come to mind--which are probably mostly random digressions that aren't very interesting. I have been taped for longer than that--with a break or two--but with the intent that the footage was going to be heavily edited.

I'm not even in the efficiency "play it at 2x" camp. But I pretty much have zero interest in hearing two or more people randomly ramble on. The fact that NPR/NPR-like podcasts and radio shows tend to have segments on even 1 hour shows probably says something about what pros find works best.

(I'm also a fan of shorter conference presentations although at large conferences, I appreciate that there are logistical issues associated with moving people between rooms too frequently.)

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