[GorbachevyChase]

Does anyone know who Dwarkesh’s patron is that boosted him in podcast world? He isn’t otherwise highly distinguished and admitted does his show prep with AI which sometimes shows in his questions. I feel like there are a very large number of tech podcasts, but there’s some marketing effect around this guy that I just don’t understand.

[DarkCrusader2]

Yeah I also don't understand how he is able to get such high profile guests. His interview with Jeff Dean and Noam Shazeer last year[1] is so hilariously bad. Jeff and Noam kept trying to give really insightful answers on how they see AI development shaping in coming years and he was just steering the conversation to shallow and silly tabloid gossip (why don't you "just" let AI improve the next version in a loop so we can quickly have singularity, Jeff Dean AI running in a DC, evil Jeff Dean AI escaping containment and on and on). It was just embarrassing. The interview would have been so much better with just Jeff and Noam without him.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v0gjI__RyCY

[kshahkshah]

He introduced me and many others to Sarah Paine. I think that helped launch him. Maybe that was already after he had an audience though.

The funny thing is his questions to her were terrible. But she rescued it anyway.

But I think he has improved markedly as an interviewer I will say

[ekelsen]

Same thing was true of his interview with Tony Blair. It was such a night and day difference between the two. Tony's skill, knowledge and polish saved the interview and made it enjoyable despite the interviewer.

[diego_sandoval]

In my opinion, he asks the right questions and lets the guests speak, which is something that can't be said about the rest of tech podcasts.

For example, at some point I grew very tired of the superficiality of the questions that Lex Friedman asks his very technical guests. He seems to be more interested into taking the conversation into a philosophy freshman's essay about technology instead of talking about technology itself.

Hearing the Dwarkesh podcast was a breath of fresh air in that regard.

[observationist]

He knew people, caught a wave, and was roommates with Dylan Patel of SemiAnalysis. They networked, got to meet the right people, developed a web of contacts and sources, and the rest is history. Treat your friends well, and it often comes back multiplied.

The marketing effect was them catching the wave at the right time, and they're just surfing the hell out of it.

[AIorNot]

yeah no offense against Dwarkesh, and good luck to him, but he's just a kid -it would have cool to have someone with some real ML chops or industry knowledge and good comm skills to host these talks..anyway I am impressed by scope of his guests.. but I do think he doesn't have the experience to counter beyond fawning over them or else steering the topic to less insightful conversation

He kinda reminds me the of the Alex O Conner -same age group -very smart but inexperienced with the heavy hitters

[sosodev]

Isn't it just the usual feedback loop that happens with popular podcasters? They have connections and get a few highly popular guests on. As long as their demeanor is agreeable and they keep the conversation interesting other high profile guests will agree to be on and thus they've created a successful show.

[jstummbillig]

If you think there are as or more interesting podcasts out there, feel free to name them.

[NitpickLawyer]

> more interesting podcasts out there

For deep dives into AI stuff google deep mind's podcast with Hannah Fry is very good (but obviously limited to goog stuff). I also like Lex for his tech / AI podcasts. Much better interviewer IMO, Dwarkesh talks way too much, and injects his own "insights" for my taste. I'm listening to a podcast to hear what the guests have to say, not the host.

For more light-weight "news-ish" type of podcast that I listen to while walking/driving/riding the train, in no particular order: AI & I (up to date trends, relevant guests), The AI Daily Brief (formerly The AI Breakdown - this is more to keep in touch with what's released in the past month) and any other random stuff that yt pops up for me from listening to these 4 regularly.

[boredtofears]

I can't think of an interviewer who interjects their viewpoint more and tries to get his guest to acknowledge/agree to his typically shallow level analysis than Lex. The only redeeming quality about his podcast are the guests he gets. I don't think Dwarkesh is great but he's leagues better.

[fatherwavelet]

I just don't understand this view on Lex Fridman at all.

Fridman is quite good at letting the guest speak. The whole show is exceptionally good at keeping a conversation moving.

I think there are technical haters on Lex but that is stupid because Lex is in sales. He is selling a podcast. From a sales perspective, Lex is incredibly good.

It is like saying the chef is only a good cook because of the quality of the ingredients. Yes, exactly. The chef isn't a farmer growing their own organic vegetables for the dishes. The art is in the choice and ability to source quality ingredients and then bring it all together as a full dish.

A podcast is not a lecture or audio book.

[boredtofears]

I guess you're right - getting your podcast big enough that it becomes a necessary checkbox for book/media tours is a skill. You're correct that he brings absolutely nothing to the podcast, but he interrupts plenty - usually with superficial pet theories about the "oneness of the universe" or "how all we need is love, actually". He never seems well prepared for his guest beyond a chatgpt summary, never gets any kind of interesting answer out of a guest that they weren't already going to give, just absolutely zero criticality to anything in the interview.

A podcast with guests is an interview. Interviewing is a skill. The difference between a good and bad interviewer is night and day.

[FiberBundle]

Lex as in Lex Fridman? I'm baffled that anyone would say that Lex Fridman is a better interviewer than Dwarkesh. Fridman is the one who continuously rambles some incoherent nonsense and completely lacks the intelligence and knowledge to ask reasonable questions.

[moralestapia]

[flagged]

[dang]

Please don't do this here.

[werahsg]

It seems that AI people have moved on from Lex Fridman to Dwarkesh. A couple of years ago the YouTube algorithm spammed Fridman in response to basically anything, now it is Dwarkesh. Maybe they need a new face periodically.

The IPO hype is in full swing.

[reducesuffering]

It's because Fridman is a bad interviewer. He gets great guests, and then literally adds nothing and no pushback at all or critical digging.

[Uhhrrr]

The thing which distinguished him was getting good guests, before the hype hit. And he generally asks good questions and then shuts up while his guests talk.

[small_model]

Dwarkesh is not a very good interviewer he kept asking the same question even though Dario patiently answered it about 6 times. Wasted an hour on "Why don't you spend 5 trillion on compute build out" Should have moved on but he didn't seem to grasp what Dario was saying, either not listening or not sharp enough.

[qassiov]

He knew Bryan Caplan, and interviewing him early on kickstarted things, I believe.

[big_toast]

There was a small network of AI-intellectualism (and rationality) that grew highly relevant when AI took off post chatgpt. It feels adjacent to Tyler Cowen's network + tpot + hn/lesswrong. (I can't remember if Tyler specifically gave him a fast grant, but his first few interviews were GMU-centric.)

I personally liked that he stayed away from navel-gazing in politics when the blogosphere/podcasts went pretty heavy into that.

It did very well on twitter with a large number of high-follower-count tech people, and soon to be high-follower-count (basically AI employees). He had followed the zeitgeists general wisdom well (bat signal, work in public, you-can-just-do-things, move-to-the-arena, You-Are-the-Average-of-the-Five-People-You-Spend-the-Most-Time-With, high-horsepower). And he's just executed very well. Other people have interviewed similar people and generally gotten lower signal content. This moxie marlinspike interview is great though - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cPRi7mAGp7I .

[sciolizer]

His Sarah Paine episodes have way more listeners than his normal fare. I doubt that's the whole story, but that's surely part of it.

[Recursing]

You could look at his early guests and see what many of them have in common

[moralestapia]

Same with that "MIT" interviewer who wasn't even at MIT.

And that girl Altoff ...

Literal nobodies suddenly interviewing Elon Musk, etc... within weeks.

Things rarely go "viral" on their own these days, everything is controlled, even who gets the stage, how the message is delivered, etc... as you have noticed.

With regards to who's behind, well, we might never know. However, as arcane as it might sound, gradient descent can take you close to the answer, or at least point you towards it.

I like this recent meme of Christof from Truman Show saying things like "now tell them that there's aliens" or crap like that.

[TMWNN]

> Same with that "MIT" interviewer who wasn't even at MIT.

Lex Fridman is a research scientist at MIT. <https://web.mit.edu/directory/?id=lexfridman&d=mit.edu>

[orochimaaru]

The question is why? He is mostly focused on his podcast and lives in Texas.

I doubt there are any notable research contributions from him. His actual PhD is from Drexel - Not MIT.

[TMWNN]

https://lex.mit.edu/

https://lids.mit.edu/people/research-staff

[comfysocks]

Lex’s position at MIT would make sense for a grad student or perhaps someone early in their career as an academic. But Lex is neither a student nor faculty member at MIT. So what’s he doing? This type of thing is usually unpaid or low paying for non-faculty.

Lex got his PhD at Drexel over a decade ago. If he had pursued an academic career, he would most likely be an associate professor by now. Working as a researcher at a lab at a university that you aren’t a faculty member of is basically “failure to launch” at this stage.

But Lex is a successful podcaster. His dad is a successful academic and scientist (at Drexel.) Lex is not that, but he plays one on the internet.

[orochimaaru]

His paper on Tesla was widely panned as being not academically rigorous and more of an advertisement.

The rest are at least 6 years old.

So what is he doing as a research scientist. Don’t get me wrong - I like his podcast. I think he gets good guests. But he’s not doing any level of research.

[aipatselarom]

Whatever you do please DO NOT look up these links on the Internet Archive.

Not just that but I would also suggest to stop using the Internet Archive in general, as it is obviously not a reliable source of truth like Wikipedia or many news outlets with specialized people that spend a non-trivial amount of their time carefully checking all of this information.

[aipatselarom]

I checked the guy's Wikipedia page and the opening paragraph says he's linked to MIT like five times, lmao.

Very normal stuff.

[TMWNN]

A lot of people believe that Fridman is not affiliated with MIT even though the university says it is. <https://lex.mit.edu/> It's a recurring thing in the Talk page for the Wikipedia article.

[NitpickLawyer]

> A lot of people

Nah, that's just reddit. At this point it's safer to take anything that's popular on reddit as either outright wrong or so heavily out of context that it's not relevant.

[TMWNN]

Oh, sure, I learned a long time ago that Reddit is a very reliable anti-indicator. But given that HN isn't nearly as bad (but there are moments), it's still strange that people would just repeat something about someone else that they could disprove for themselves in 30 seconds.

[squidbeak]

Similar wonderings occurred to me at that point in the vid where he struggled to understanding Amodei's explanation of the economics, which was pretty straightforward. Unless he was just being deliberately arsey.

[pllbnk]

I never knew about him until a few months ago when he started appearing in my YouTube recommendations, and naturally I thought the same thing because a 'nobody' like him (not in a derogatory sense) started doing interviews with the top AI bros. And the interviews are terribly boring because they feel like a cheap PR campaign. You could sit Lex Fridman instead of Dwarkesh Patel and it would feel exactly the same.

[co_king_3]

Who's he doing the interview with?

[schmidtleonard]

Exactly, it's the Lex Fridman gambit: a reputation for asking safe questions to powerful people tends to snowball because "safe, popular interview platform" is something they are all looking to self-promote on.

If you want to see the mask slip, watch Lex's interview with Zelensky.

[HDThoreaun]

Friedman's Zelensky interview was terrible but I think that has more to do with him being a russian nationalist than a bad podcast host