He does BJJ and has comedian friends, so he went on the Joe Rogan Podcast and established a fanbase. In podcasting, the discovery system is quite low signal to

He does BJJ and has comedian friends, so he went on the Joe Rogan Podcast and established a fanbase. In podcasting, the discovery system is quite low signal to noise; because there are so many podcasts and the content itself is hard to inspect (episodes are multiple hours long and it's expensive to do transcription over the millions of episodes posted every day). So because podcast organization is hard, the strongest signal for those looking for a new podcast is popularity. Joe Rogan has the most popular podcast in the world, so he has the capability of spawning popularity boosts to other podcasts. If that podcast is somewhat competent, then that popularity can be captured for the long term, which is what Lex did. Also, Lex's podcast has great academic and computer science guests that you don't usually get to have long-form conversations with. It's a high quality podcast with great production value for such a small operation.