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Culture War Roundup for the week of February 6, 2023

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Why is Lex Fridman single?

(I apologize if this is brief for a top level post. I just want the community's take on it.)

  • -52

His podcast seems like the exact kind of thing I should be into and yet I can't stand to listen to it. Perhaps women get the same feeling from him on dates.

It's because he could easily be replaced by a chatbot. He talks frequently about "love" and yet seems completely incapable of expressing love.

He has also had some morons on his show, and he acts like they're providing some sort of profound insight on life. For instance: Destiny, Chamath. He also let the founder of Cardano on his show, and let him spew absolute verbal diarrhea for like 5 hours. Lex is supposed to be some sort of intelligent computer programmer, but was unable to identify this guys completely nonsensical technobabble. And I'm not kidding, this went on for 5 motherfucking hours.

He also constantly preaches love and how we should be willing to have difficult conversations, and yet is pretty notorious on reddit for banning anybody from his subreddit who even vaguely questions him.

Finally...he really leaned into "MIT artificial intelligence researcher" but his degrees actually come from Drexel University, where his father is a physics professor. He isn't exactly lying about his education, since it does seem like he did something at MIT at some point, but he isn't really being honest either. It also seems sortof rude/insulting towards his dad to imply that Drexel isn't good enough to be proud of.

I don't know. I really used to like Lex, and I really should like the people he has on his podcast, but he just seems so fake that it's hard to get past him anymore.

For instance: Destiny, Chamath.

Any bitcoin person for that matter: Michael Saylor, Balaji Srinivasan, etc.

i don't think he researches his guests that well before he interviews them, so his questions tend to be vague instead of specific . This does not mean it's bad. his success demonstrates that whatever he does is working. Sometimes just letting an expert talk for hours works, too.