I'll try to balance out the negative comments here. The reason I keep coming back to Lex is that his podcast is doing something no other does, which is just ha

I'll try to balance out the negative comments here. The reason I keep coming back to Lex is that his podcast is doing something no other does, which is just having a good faith conversation with interesting and highly intelligent people. No grift. No narrative. No ulterior motive (as far as i can tell?). Hell he doesnt even have ads in his videos. I cannot stress what a turnoff it is when an podcast pauses for 5 minutes to tell me about "athletic greens". Its not too bro-y (joe rogan) its not too edgy and psuedo intellectual (sam harris). It's just pure interesting conversation for 3 hours. As an interviewer he's good at 2 things. One is getting at the "essence" of what makes his guests interesting, what is the beauty in their work. He does his research and he asks good questions. He also doesnt monologue too much, which is rare among podcasters. Second is that he draws out the human element of his guests. As a host he is humble and curious. He asks about love and death, suffering, and the meaning of life. No other podcast I know does that. I think his shtick of a "robot looking for meaning and love" is novel and amusing. Especially given there's so much fear and dystopic thinking over the future of technology, I think it's the right way to think about AI. I'm sure a lot of what we see on screen is performative, and he's much more "flesh and blood" off camera, but that doesn't take away from the quality of the interviews. Lastly, I'm a mere programmer. I'm not a scientist or in machine learning, which I think is where most of his critics come from. I've seen similar threads on reddit /r/MachineLearning that outright denigrate lex as "not a true scientist, didn't really go to MIT, blah blah". It just comes across as jealousy. But then I guess if you're already a science genius, you're not going to get much out of his podcast. I think lex worked hard and deserves his success. He used his brand to build a platform, get high profile guests, improve his brand further, and so on. The conversations and guests are always interesting and unique, so overall his project is a net positive for me.