Hacker News Reader

Comment by nebulous1 | Hacker News Reader

Lex's guest list is absurd. I'm honestly not sure how he's managed to pull it off.

network effects mostly. how Joe Rogan did it? not by being a genius. (by being mostly entertaining and a bit informative, and Lex built on this by being mostly informative and almost completely anti-entertaining)

> network effects mostly.

Many guests, for Joe and Lex, say that they are fans that listen to the podcast. At least some of these people do it because they're passionate about what they do, and want to talk about it with someone who they enjoy.

Joe doesn’t constantly talk about himself, let’s guests talk, is curious about everything, open to non-mainstream ideas. That gets you pretty far. Lex is similar but with a stronger niche in tech, and ML in particular.

> mostly informative and almost completely anti-entertaining

I don’t agreee with this. I love Lex Fridman podcasts and watched almost all episodes, and most of the times I watch it for entertainment. There is some surface level information in few episodes, but that doesn’t seem to be the norm.

Who else can bridge the neurotypical spectrum? Maybe Eric Weinstein from the portal but he stopped that.

Is that the finance guy who claimed he solved a theory of everything for physics?

This whole section of the so-called "intellectual dark web" should be treated with lots of skepticism.

Oh, please indulge me on why? How much are you aware of his actual work compared to what you are told of it? And his projects don’t reflect on the nature of his ability to do other things. One must be careful to generalize an assumption over cohorts. If an individual has different political views than you, they aren’t suddenly more dumb. This is a hard thing for our species to work through at the moment.

I encourage you to look deeper into Eric Weinstein and less the memetic construct encapsulating a particular ideology and agenda through symbolic word.

i mean, first you target important no name scientists, there are so many scientists doing amazing work that the general public has no idea about and i'm sure these people are easier to convince to come on the show than high profile people, once you build up a following you start trying to contact higher level profile people and even if you get one, the next one will be easier.

He has the quality of being unformidable. The guests are very relaxed on his show I find. Tim Ferris is similar. Contrast to say Sam Harris, who although very erudite, perspicacious and articulate, asks paragraph long multipart questions and spends around 50% of his air time talking. Tyler Cowen is a better example of a formidable interviewer, who keeps things quite short and punchy and is always a little lighthearted.

Great explanation - Tyler Cowen is a good interviewer for sure. For some reason have never been able to get into Lex Fridman by contrast.

Honestly his guest list is so good, I thought for several years that he must be working for the Kremlin and honeypotting folks behind the scenes (or something)

>Kremlin

I take seriously the idea that Lex has an under-the-table relationship with government, but if you think the Kremlin is the likely suspect I've got a VR headset to sell you...

For someone who constantly applies bothsideism in the discussion of the Ukraine war and uses "Putin's regime" and "Zelensky's regime" in the same sentence (you can find an example in a very recent interview), I'd say he's not doing a good job of being a US government shill.

(Yes, I know that the original meaning of the word regime does not necessarily imply dictature, his intensions there were very clear and open - there are both sides and they are somehow comparable).

This is something I see really common with Joe Rogan, but it's also an "active measures" tactic taught by multiple generations of Russian (and Soviet) intelligence agencies. Bring in a bunch of reputable individuals and pepper them in with fringe thinkers who support your geopolitical objectives. In the 60s and 70s, more often than not, these could be people with totally naive objectives nice sounding objectives like denuclearization and world peace. Today, a lot of these folks come from both the far left and far right. Matt Taibbi (who worked in to former Soviet Union for many years) fits this profile

The public ability to hold coherent viewpoints on topics gradually erodes.

At the same time, find a way to blackmail some of the most powerful people (Elon?) or buy them out (Trump)

Or I could be totally wrong and Lex could just be a bleeding heart dude who tries to sympathize with both sides on every topic (I hope this is the case).

Reply on news.ycombinator.com