Lex Fridman Podcast #367 – Sam Altman

The long ones are the best to me because I enjoy interesting conversations rather than edited quick cut tiktok/twitter hot take style stuff.

There's also the passivity of it. I can't read while I drive, but I can listen, and length doesn't really matter in these cases because it's a way for me to pass time as much as anything else.

May just not be your cup of tea though!

Yes! People really do have time to do all sorts of long attention span things. Podcasts for me are a mostly-downtime activity. They fall into the same category of activity as chilling on the couch with a good book. But the advantage is I can be doing something else while I’m listening - like driving, cooking, drawing or going for a walk.

You have just as many hours in your week as I do. We all need some downtime from time to time. I think podcasts are a delightful option. (If you find the right ones!)

You don’t just… sit there and listen. (At least I don’t). Slap on some headphones and go for a walk, do household errands, etc. Put it on the background during your commute. Some folks have it on the background while they work, like people have done with radio shows for decades.

There are podcasts that try to edit down long conversations but they tend to cut the tangential and inadvertently revealing good stuff to deliver main points. If you just want main points you should just read an article.

Ad free, plays videos in background and after closing screen

Think of it as a conversation that you can listen in on if you want to.

For example, I first used Google in summer 2000 at a college internship, one where I flailed and didn't really know how to program. In high school and even college I could write code, but not anything real. (The CS program I went to was good, but focused on CS).

I think my programming skill and productivity took off when I had access to the web, and more people posted content to the web.

It really is like an external brain. Tim Berners-Lee isn't wrong; we just take it for granted now (and large parts of it have been ruined by advertising.)

And this is from a person who read the MS-DOS manual from front to back when I was a teenager. I also installed a Borland C compiler from a bunch of floppy disks, yet never really managed to write much of a C program.

So Google (in addition to education) made me much more productive, and StackOverflow attests that it has made millions of programmers similarly more productive. But yet I lived through a huge programmer tech boom in San Francisco for over a decade -- increasing staff, increasing salaries, etc.

What would be different about 2023?

It seems clear that the demand to build things will just get larger, just as it got larger from 2000 to now. There seems to be a "fixed pie" fallacy in the opposite view.