Ask HN: Who is the Joe Rogan of coding? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Who is the Joe Rogan of coding?

11 pointsckvamme27 comments

Who are some great interviewers / podcasters for technical coding topics; like Joe is for MMA? Or Machine Learning Street Talk is for ML, etc.

I'd love to hear in depth interviews with people like:

- Video game lead engineer - SpaceX flight systems engineer - DeepMind infra. engineer - HFT firm engineer - etc. etc.

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The closest I know of is Lex Friedman, but when he still gets technical guests on his show it's usually more about high level topics around AI and tech rather than the specifics about code or ML, although that sometimes happens. It's a great show to check out regardless.

I find Changelog podcasts (https://changelog.com/podcasts) very high quality.

Some examples:

- Richard Hipp (SQLite creator) (https://changelog.com/podcast/454)

- Co-founder of Cockroach Labs (Massive scale and ultra-resilience)

The Restic episode (Alexander Neumann) was also good: https://changelog.com/podcast/434.

I like how all episodes have transcripts so you can read/search instead of listening as well.

https://www.se-radio.net/

Eg:- https://www.se-radio.net/2008/01/episode-84-dick-gabriel-on-...

The se-radio.net episodes with Rich Hickey (Language designer), and David Heckerman (AI researchers) and many others were also great.

Shawn Swyx Wang has been doing some fantastic interviews with various web dev engineers in his "Swyx Mixtape Podcast" series:

https://www.youtube.com/c/swyxTV/featured

I’d recommend Adam Gordon Bell

https://corecursive.com/

I second this recommendation. Listen to the last two episodes and be gladly surprised.

Casey Muratori and Jonathan Blow have done a lot of in-depth speaking about video game programming.

What does that even mean?

I believe they mean someone with the charisma and depth to give great interviews with many interesting people but specifically in this case, people that code. Much of Joe's audience would tune out after a few minutes of coding discussion. So in this case, an interviewer that can pull in some of the top developers from around the world and be able to carry on interesting conversations with them that would draw in an audience of developers. ckvamme, please correct me if I am wrong.

>charisma and depth

Are we watching the same person? I like Rogan's interviews, but he draws out good content by being dopey and asking simple questions, not by being charismatic and deep.

What you describe matches some of his interviews. It really varies by topic, how much he is personally interested in it and how much research he has done. Some of the dopey persona is an act to put himself a few rungs lower than the guest and it seems to work most of the time.

Not sure. Honestly a right wing hack that spreads vaccine misinformation and ivermectin as the only true covid cure is the opposite of what I want in a programming podcast.

That's what I was thinking. A dispenser of garbage information from a garbage hack of a person? I can name a few narcissists I know that have no technical knowledge, despite their claims. Is that what you're looking for?

Well if that's all you reduce Rogan down to, then sure. But it would totally ignore why so many people tune in to his show.

Rogan is entertaining, like a drunk guy at a party. And his content is generally useless, for the same reason.

I guess it depends on how you look at it.

I discovered interesting people like Lex Friedman, Sean Caroll, Eric Weinstein, through Rogan's show.

Granted, I don't watch JRE anymore but back when I did I found it to be a gateway to people I might not have discovered otherwise. To me that was useful.

> a right wing hack

He votes for Bernie Sanders.

This doesn't really answer the question, but if you touch on PHP the PHP Internals podcast can be very informative. A lot of interviews of the people writing the RFCs for the next versions. And the host is the creator/maintainer of XDebug.

https://phpinternals.news/

Joe Rogan interviewed John Carmack. Does that count?

Carmack’s Twitter is a fun follow

Terry Davis

Thread asks who is, not who was.

Lex Fridman. At first I thought, who is this unheralded plebe and how is he getting famous people to talk to him? Turns out he's thoughtful, oddly charismatic, sufficiently smart, and most importantly, non-cringey.

> At first I thought, who is this unheralded plebe and how is he getting famous people to talk to him?

Not to take anything away from Fridman (he's great!), but I'd imagine being a research scientist at MIT probably helps a lot with that. :-)

> and most importantly, non-cringey.

Whatever you're smoking, I'd love to take a hit because Friedman is absolutely cringy. Smart, yes, but mostly cringy.

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