Zuck has an interview out for it as well,
https://twitter.com/dwarkesh_sp/status/1780990840179187715
I have a hunch that some of the more professional folks there game the algorithm. If you ever wanna find a place where people share algo optimization secrets, it’s OF creators on reddit.
It’s not just training with other people but becoming used to receiving physical insult, it dampens our baseline fear of physical attack that we all feel in our factory default configuration.
I do have a few gripes though, which might just be from personal preference. A lot of the time the language used by both the host and the guests is unnecessarily obtuse. Also the host is biased towards being optimistic about LLMs leading to AGI, and so he doesn't probe guests deep enough about that, more than just asking something along the lines of "Do you think next token prediction is enough for AGI?". Most of his guests are biased economically or academically to answer yes. This is then taken as the premise of the discussion following.
Having said that, I do agree that it is much better and deeper than other podcasts about AI.
Dwarkesh is excellent at what he does - lots of research beforehand (which is how he lands these great guests), but then lets the guest do most of the talking, and encourages them to expand on what they are saying.
It you are critisizing the guest or giving them too much push back, then they are going to clam up and you won't get the best out of them.
A couple of his interviews I'd recommend:
- Dario Amodei (Anthropic CEO)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nlkk3glap_U
- Richard Rhodes (Manhatten project, etc - history of Atom bomb)
On the other hand, Yudkowsky was a terrible guest, in terms of his public speaking skills. He came across as combative. His answers were terse and he spent little time on background information or otherwise making an effort to explain his reasoning in a way more digestible for a general audience.
The main strength of Dwarkesh is the caliber of guests he is able to attract, especially for being so new to the game. Apparently he'll research a potential guest for a couple of weeks before cold e-mailing them with some of his researched questions and asking if they'll come on his podcast, and gets a very high acceptance rate since the guests appreciate the questions and effort he has put into it (e.g. maybe Zuck enjoying being asked about Augustus, and not just about some typical FaceBook fare).
If you were inclined to give him another try, then I'd recommend the Richard Rhodes or Dario Amodei episodes, not because of any great Dwarkesh interviewing skills, but because of what the guests have to say. If you are a techie then the Sholto + Bricken one is also good - for same reason.
As far as AI optimism, I gather Dwarkesh has moved to SF, so that maybe goes with the territory (and some of his friends - like Sholto + Bricken - being in the AGI field). While arguably being a bit too deferential, he did at least give some pushback to Zuck on AI safety issues such as Meta's apparent lack of any "safe scaling" tests, and questioning how Zucks "increased AI safety via democratization" applied to bio threats (how is putting capability to build bio weapons in hands of a bad actor mitigated by others having AI too).
Maybe I'll check out Dwarkesh, but even seeing him mentioned him in the same breath as Fridman gives me pause ...
The short answer, imho, is trust. No one gets turned into an embarrassing soundbite talking to Lex. He doesn't try to ask gotcha questions for clickbait articles. Generally speaking "the press" are not your friend and they will twist your words. You have to walk on egg shells.
Lex doesn't need to express original ideas. He needs to get his guests to open up and share their unique perspectives and thoughts. He's been extremely successful in this.
An alternative question is why hasn't someone more charismatic taken off in this space? I'm not sure! Who knows, there might be some lizard brain secret sauce behind the "flat" podcast host.
Interviewers shouldn't be aggressive, antagonistic or clickbaity but they should put opposing views to their guests so that the guest can respond. Testing ideas like this is a fundamental way of learning and establishing an understanding of a topic.
Dwarkesh has recently reached the level where he's also interviewing these high profile AI/tech people, but it's so much more enjoyable to listen to, because he is such a better interviewer and skips all the nonsense questions about "what is love?" or getting into politics.
I don’t listen to a three hour interview to listen to the interviewer! I want to hear what the guest has to say.
Until now, this format basically didn’t exist. The host was the star, the guest was just a prop to be wheeled out for a ten second soundbite.
Nowhere else in the world do you get to hear thought leaders talk unscripted for hours about the things that excite them the most.
Lex enables that.
He’s like David Attenborough, who’s also worn the exact same khakis and blue shirt for decades. He’s not the star either: the wildlife is.
I have never listened to Dwarkesh but I will give him a go. One thing I was a little put off by just skimming through this episode with Zuck is that he’s doing ad-reads in the middle which Lex doesn’t.
Early on I got really fed up with him when I discovered him. Like his first interview with mark zuckerberg where he asks him multiple times to basically say his life is worthless, his huge simping to Elon musks, asking empty questions repeatedly, and being jealous of Mr Beast.
But yeah for whatever reason lately I’ve dug his podcast a lot. Those less good interviews were from a couple years ago. Though I wish he didn’t obsess so much about twitter
There is no real commentary to pull from his interviews, at best you get some interesting stories but not the truth.
Lex says he wants open honest conversation, but Carlson was just doing the same stunningly dishonest grift he does every time he has a mic in front of him. So dumb.
The trouble is self-styled "both sides" types believe that since they take the both sides approach, they have insulated themselves from the kinds of politicization that compromises the extremes. But the manner in which you position yourself relative to those extremes is every bit as politicized and every bit as liable to the same cognitive biases and rationalizations.
Misinformed climate skeptics often regard themselves in this way, as not taking one side or the other on global warming. They mistakenly believe that this orientation has elevated them above equivalently offensive extremes, but in truth they have compromised their own media literacy by orienting themselves in that manner.
There are numerous instances of this all over the political spectrum, Cornell West talking to left-wing academics in left-wing academic language about how "nobody" thinks Obama is truly left-wing. Journalists during the Iraq war had a both sides approach that cashed out as extremely hawkish and apologetic in defense of the Iraq war.
The Lex Friedman version is a "centrist" in a specific kind of media environment that lends disproportionate visibility towards its own set of boutique topics. The combination of optimism about technology and trends especially around AI and crypto and some libertarian leaning politics surrounding it, which at its periphery finds itself disproportionately saturated by right-wing memeing and politics. And so it's a form of centerism that's in the center of a world as described by those things. But for him and his viewers it's something they consider a perfectly neutral state of nature that's free of any adornment of ideology.