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Comment by beebmam | Hacker News Reader

I found that Lex interview enlightening for two reasons. Firstly, Keller is a profoundly talented and interesting guy. And secondly, Lex is a truly painful and incompetent interviewer; virtually every time Lex spoke I begged my screen for him to stay quiet and let Keller speak.

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His guests are often so interesting that it's worth persevering through Lex's un-profound musings. (Every time he uses the word 'beautiful' or 'love' it reminds me of a pretentious teenager who lacks life experience)

Haha, I kind of agree but I’m starting to think that dumb interviewers are a feature, not a bug. They ask obvious mid questions that are difficult to answer without giving away any tricks if you had them.

He is ok. Not that bad.

Asking obvious mid questions is one thing, but Lex often interjects with his own mid opinions. Or he takes what could have been an interesting line of questioning and diverts it to banal cod-philosophy often using words like 'beautiful' or 'love' in an attempt at profundity

I had the same feeling with a lot of interviews from the past, but somehow, about a year ago, something changed. Not sure if it was a conscious decision or just the result of so much practice, but for quite something I haven’t screamed at my screen when listening to Lex.

I've noticed that as well. He frequently also gets distracted thinking about taking ideas to such an abstract level they don't really make sense any longer, he looks off at the ceiling somewhere, and then the guest continues off as if they didn't see that. It makes me crack up every time, hah.

This is in contrast to many other podcasters who stay engrossed in surface level details and never graduate to thinking about overarching concepts. Lex just zooms there too fast sometimes.

I think Lex is a very talented interviewer. His questions often seem low quality (to me), but he pushes the discussion in the correct direction. He seem to be e.g. build sentences where after the first part there is a moment for guest to throw in something or for Lex to judge guest reaction. Or maybe I'm reading too much into it, but regardless, he seem to be able to get something out of these guys which others interviews couldn't. Shining example is Stephen Wolfram who seem to be extremely hard to interview.

Agreed.

Lex's done some of my favorite geek interviews. Just from memory: Stephen Kotkin, Roger Penrose, Lisa Feldman Barrett, Everyday Astronaut, Jim Keller, his own father. Many more I'm sure, if I consulted Lex's archive.

I skip over the episodes with culture warriors. I've already had my fill, thank you very much.

That's exactly what I thought. Jim Keller had a lot of deep insights that he was boiling down to simple terms. It was obvious he had thought about these ideas for a long time and that what he was saying came from a lot of experience. He would talk about things like switching lanes in driverless cars being a matter of ballistics.

Lex Friedman just interrupted him in a whiny voice to say "it's not thaaat simple". He basically just got in Jim Keller's way. It would be like someone interrupting a john carmack presentation every few minutes to say "I don't know about all that". It was a shame.

John Carmack was on his show.

It's actually impressive Lex is this bad at something he has been doing for so many years.

Fridman's interviews are an unusual combination of being well researched and incompetently conducted. When the interviewees are so interesting and well-chosen, and otherwise not the sort of person who would get a lot of media attention (Jim Keller is one example), it is indeed painful when he interrupts the guest or... sigh... interacts with them verbally in any way, really.

Unrelated, but Fridman's proclivity for injecting Elon Musk as a discussion topic into the vast majority of his interviews is genuinely weird.

>Unrelated, but Fridman's proclivity for injecting Elon Musk as a discussion topic into the vast majority of his interviews is genuinely weird.

Or Aliens, or asking for the meaning of life.

I really enjoy Lex’s interviews. Whatever he’s doing, it brings out great content from great guests.

Lex is also absolutely boring to listen to. His tone of voice puts you to sleep.

I use his podcast to fall asleep. It has never failed me.

You need an interviewer. Lex isn't that terrible.

Does anyone have any insight into how hes managed to get such high profile guests?

I would imagine being extremely good friends with Joe Rogan helps immensely.

He had guests more famous than Rogan before ever going on JRE.

Steven Pinker and Eric Schmidt were in the first ten guests and Elon Musk wasn’t long after. I’m sure Rogan got him more high profile cage fighters and that type of guest, though.

> Does anyone have any insight into how hes managed to get such high profile guests?

Once you have some, they might have introduced him to others like a chain or linked list (if that sounds better ref)

Lex shared this on his podcast as well: It's not easy to find or get hold of Donald Knuth. But, he kept trying and finally got him. Persistence pays, I guess.

Some of the early big name guests who would be known by people outside CS and AI were MIT-affiliated (Chomsky, Krugman).

being into AI at the right time and the MIT affiliation helped.

If not Lex, which host(s) do you prefer?

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