Unfortunately, Huberman was frequently cut off and redirected, so he didn't get a chance to fully expound on his ideas. I wish Joe would have just given him the floor in that interview.
He seems oblivious to the fact that his interviews with scientists and other highly intelligent personalities are listened to in their entirety mostly by people who are very curious about the subject matter. His usual stoner meathead schtick - interjecting with nonsense about monkeys, aliens, telepathic communication, etc - really needs to take a backseat.
Lex Fridman is somewhat better though still very imperfect.
Joe Rogan is the force that keeps the interview digestible instead of getting too narrow for most people.
People don't listen to Rogan interviews so that they can expect to understand the whitepaper the scientist published afterwards, they listen for the accessible conversation as if they were just overhearing two strangers meet on the bus seats in front of them. He's a comedian.
Yeah, I occasionally watch some Joe Rogan interview and it's never because of Joe Rogan. Rogan often just lowers the level of discourse with his contributions.
That's intentional (as hombre_fatal points out) but not with quite as derisive an implication as yours.
The point is not for the guest to get super deep into their specific area of expertise for an uninterrupted hour. It's specifically, by design, a conversation with a layman.
Why not? By asking things like that, he gives the experts the chance to address those ideas and present a more informed and/or grounded perspective of them. Honestly I think a lot of the time this is exactly why he asks things like that.
I agree, it's interesting for him to bring up the layperson superficial critiques and other ideas that float around a given subject that many people may not ask outright because of their oftentimes fringey natured questions. But they still wonder about those questions nevertheless. Joe gets all that stuff aired out more or less.
> I wish Joe would have just given him the floor in that interview.
You can't be serious. People don't watch JRE for a scientitic lecture.
If you want a lecture or to dig deeper, go look for it. It's strange how odd people are. They go to a basketball and whine about it not being a football game.
What's next? People are going to whine about how Joe didn't go over Tesla's quarterly financial statement with elon musk?
Both serve a useful function. Some of us might find Joe frustrating, but he's a genial and entertaining interviewer. He's further on the entertainment spectrum than Lex, who is probably a better bet for most of us because we're probably more interested in the content.
That's not a knock against Joe though. The fact he's so entertaining and relatable attracts in a huge audience his interviewees would otherwise never reach, and that's fantastic. OK maybe they don't get to expound their ideas as broadly and deeply, but the fact that they get exposure to so many people at all is a huge win.
Lex's guest list has broadened recently to more closely resemble Joe's, with recent interviews on UFO's and MMA. Which seem like organic interests for Lex but I don't care for when he interviews on these topics
I'm a big fan of Lex, but we have to see that he basically kickstarted his podcasting career by using his MIT cred then made it into a personal thing. Basically it started as the accompanying podcast for the Artificial General Intelligence course at MIT, given by Lex. Given that it's a podcast for an MIT course, he managed to get a very highly esteemed AI guest list, because who would refuse to give an interview as part of MIT lecture materials? In the beginning it had less to do with Lex as a person I think.
With that ex-guest list, he managed to continue after the course as "AI podcast", now not connected to a specific course. But if you tell people this podcast had X and Y top expert in it, you can get many more top people.
Again after some time he rebranded it all under his name as Lex Podcast and is slowly entering culture war territory and is becoming a second Joe Rogan.
I guess he used good tactics, but I'm not sure the initial guests would all agree that their interviews are now part of the Lex-branded podcast.
He started tame and uncontroversial, gained "fuck you money" (his phrasing) and is now using it to spread his broader views.
His interview of his own father is just about the best thing ever.
One surprising reward from my recent addiction to podcasts are the fresh looks at people I thought I knew. Roger Penrose, Malcolm Gladwell, others. So rewarding.
The long dialog format of podcasts is a much welcome relief. Allowing people to finish a thought, the unhurried back & forth.
I recently watched "I Am Not Your Negro" on Netflix. The footage of James Baldwin on programs like Dick Cavett Show is so much like today's podcast. Made me hungry for more.
But I predict there will be a strong backlash against him as he reveals more of his culture war views and how he agrees with Jordan Peterson on some issues etc. I think over the next months many previous guests will disown him.
I've thought about this. Too much. For purposes of this reply, Jordan Peterson will be the exemplar for a self described Rationalists and new atheists (whatever they call themselves) and misc intellectual dark web characters.
My primary criticism is lack of novelty. I've heard it all before. Tell me something new.
A positive example of this, for contrast, is how Ezra Klein is able to have constructive conversations with people he disagrees with. Most recently David French. So I've learned stuff from people I would have never given the time of day. Which reflects poorly on me, I know. But I'm trying to change.
My second criticism is my befuddlement. I just can't figure out what most of the celebrity pundits are saying. I've given Ben Shapiro, Jordan Peterson, and many others more of my time and attention than I care to admit. Because I want to know what others find compelling about their ideas. And mostly I'm just not getting it.
Going in, I thought "Ok, I utterly oppose anything and everything O'Keefe has said and done. He's just a troll in the mold of Lee Atwater. But Eric sounds smart. I'd like to hear O'Keefe describe what he does in his own words." I'm a masochist, I know.
Whatever Eric's criticism of O'Keefe is, I couldn't understand it. I actually listened twice. Because these are smart people, right? Surely I'm missing something.
Alas, Eric's not even wrong. His notions, assumptions, basis for "journalism" are so far off base as to not being worth criticism.
Like a lot of smart people, Eric assumes his obvious competency in areas outside of his own expertise. He's not just willfully ignorant (incurious) of journalism as a profession and it's tortured history, he actively rejects it. So he's doing a drunken sailor's walk thru a problem domain that has already been thoroughly beaten to death by many others with far more intention.
So I learned nothing.
The end result is I now regard Eric as another boring dilettante and don't take him seriously. He's apparently got some heterodox theories about physics, cosmology, or whatever, that might prove interesting. But I'll let people smarter than me chew on those.
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The thing I most enjoy, savor from Lex's podcast is the novelty, the unexpected learning. I've read Emperor's New Mind and I've read the back and forth about Penrose's theories. So I wasn't expecting anything. But having Penrose himself relate the backstory and his own learning since that book was published made me smile.
Another episode that delighted me was Corecursive's interview of DHH. I really dislike Ruby, right? My study group worked thru a Ruby book, back when RoR was the new hotness. It's not quite the bight on humanity like PHP or JavaScript, but it's pretty bad. Though I was aware of DHH, I didn't know anything about him. I thought, "Well, I like Adam Gordon Bell and if he thinks DHH is work talking to, I'll at least listen for a bit". And I just fucking loved DHH. I want to be DHH. I regret not paying attention to him for all these years. https://corecursive.com/045-david-heinemeier-hansson-softwar...
If he's into a group's approach -- you mentioned Joe Rogan , Jordan Peterson, guess I'll vaguely add Sam Harris, etc. -- and they all make money being independent podcasters, then surely he wants to compete in that space.
Yes, add to that Bret and Eric Weinstein. Essentially he's joining the "intellectual darkweb" as Eric Weinstein calls it.
But I guess the initial big name AI people will be pissed off that they are associated with him, because of gender and race issues.
For example at this point I wouldn't want to share his interviews in an AI related company on informal internal corporate communication channels even if relevant workwise, because Lex will be (or already is) known as "problematic" regarding his broad views.
That sounds like a problem with your company first and foremost. If you ignore useful information from people you dislike, your competitors will innovate faster than you.
I've listened to a number of his recent episodes in full and haven't really heard any culture wars topics addressed. Is this related to his recent episode with Joe Rogan?
He seems oblivious to the fact that his interviews with scientists and other highly intelligent personalities are listened to in their entirety mostly by people who are very curious about the subject matter. His usual stoner meathead schtick - interjecting with nonsense about monkeys, aliens, telepathic communication, etc - really needs to take a backseat.
Lex Fridman is somewhat better though still very imperfect.