Ask HN: Why is Lex Fridman so successful with his “tech” podcasts?
- He comes off as genuine because his personality and delivery is not typical in the entertainment business.<p>- His conversations go on for as long as they need to, which many people prefer to shows with clear time constraints.<p>- Big name guests<p>- Many people are interested in artificial intelligence, Bitcoin, aliens, robotics, hacking, and tech in general.<p>- Some of his guests&#x2F;topics veer away from the norm, which adds variety.  My favorite is when he interviewed a cybercriminal: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=cC1LFC0KFSw" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=cC1LFC0KFSw</a><p>- He is able to make his guests do most of the talking and isn&#x27;t overly dominant in any conversation.<p>- There&#x27;s absolutely no razzle dazzle to his show, which many people prefer and is something loathe about the rest of modern entertainment.<p>All that said, I believe YouTube also heavily pushes Lex&#x27;s podcast.  I used to watch every single episode of his show, but now I can&#x27;t stand it because YouTube&#x27;s suggestion algorithm got into a cycle where it relentlessly pushed his content in front of me.  As I&#x27;ve mentioned before on HN, I could guarantee you that if I put on something totally unrelated like Spongebob Squarepants clips and fell asleep, in the morning I would wake up to Lex Fridman&#x27;s droning monotone voice.  Even after I unsubscribed to his channel recently, it took several days for the algorithm to catch on.  Now it&#x27;s back to pushing old JRE episodes in front of me, but at least that&#x27;s something different for a change.<p>I can&#x27;t imagine I&#x27;m the only one that experiences this.  Maybe not with Lex Fridman, but perhaps something else.  It&#x27;s not even like I watch tech content on YouTube.  Whether this is an error of the algorithm or the result of Lex paying off YouTube, I have no idea.<p>So I might as well inject my opinion here.  I started to dislike Lex&#x27;s show anyway, despite YouTube playing it like a broken record, because I realized that Lex is kind of a fake smart guy.  I&#x27;ll give him credit for creating a successful and often interesting show, and I&#x27;m sure he&#x27;s by no means dumb, but if you pay close attention, many of the questions he asks his guests are totally inane and even ruin the current conversation.  I think this is because Lex really has very poor conversational skills, which is also why he relies heavily on his canned questions he wrote down.  He also used to, and still kind of does, play up his affiliation with MIT.  Thing is, though he may have spoken there in some capacity, he&#x27;s not a professor, and it&#x27;s really not clear at all whether he&#x27;s some kind of genius in the field.  If he&#x27;s at all competent in the field then where does he get all this time to podcast.  I normally wouldn&#x27;t have a problem with this at all and wouldn&#x27;t care, but he really straddles the edge of being a fake guru.<p>One of the most obvious and perhaps notorious examples is his appreciation of Python.  I remember him bringing it up frequently, sometimes inappropriately, yet he actually had little if anything nuanced to say about it.  My impression is that he learned it because that&#x27;s what&#x27;s taught for use in data science and AI.  That&#x27;s all fine and good on its own, but who hasn&#x27;t met that guy who learned just a single programming language and started acting like it&#x27;s the one language to rule them all?  Not only have many of us met that guy, but some of us have been that guy.  I was that guy early in my career when I learned Ruby.  That sort of fixation, I believe, suggests surface-level knowledge and a lack of real world experience.<p>But because of his monotone, sometimes mumbling delivery, I think people don&#x27;t realize that most of what he says really isn&#x27;t all that intelligent or nuanced.  His style I think short circuits the brain in its passive listening state and people aren&#x27;t truly comprehending what he&#x27;s saying.  He can seem profound because of his persona and his occasional weird romanticizing of otherwise unromantic ideas, but when you pay close attention you might agree that he&#x27;s sounds like a poser.<p>I could be completely off base, though.  Maybe it&#x27;s just me who feels this way.  I mention it because I do think his ability to play up his persona is a part of his success, but one might not want to closely examine it because they may find it to actually be very hollow.<p>To his credit, maybe that&#x27;s why podcasting really seems to be his true calling.  I think he wouldn&#x27;t have time for it if research was actually his passion.  His prosaic questions and responses may appeal better to those who sit outside the tech scene but are still interested in his content.  I&#x27;ve met more than one &quot;normie&quot; who I discovered was listening to Lex&#x27;s show, which initially surprised me.  For that crowd, I think Lex allows them to feel smart while not overwhelming them with subject matter and discussion that&#x27;s out of their league.