tfw casually articulates a more insightful framework for thinking about your life's work than you've ever sketched out yourself.
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I think the one thing gwern underestimates here, probably because he spend most of his time reading and consuming media, is the siloed nature of audiences. Someone might have been on forty podcasts--but if the audience for all of those podcasts is niche, then there is still a lot
this doesn't grapple with helping an audience grapple with current events or shaping the public disource in a constructive way but rather optimizing for "getting people like gwern closer to the platonic idea of the truth." A worthy goal but it's not everything!
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His implied goal is pretty idiosyncratic. He seems to assume you want to maximize the engagement of people like Gwern. That may be a worthy goal (it's certainly good for Gwern!), but is it your goal?
I quite disagree on Mr Beast actually - his colin and samir interview was p raw without the interviewers even pushing that hard, he's got a lot to say, he actually swore a lot, i dont recall much self-promo.
Damn, hope Sarah doesn’t feel like a discarded husk from which all the sweet alpha nectar has been extracted for the next 5 years!
I’m sure she could say plenty of further interesting stuff, if only about famous military personalities— just relaying the inside scoop she’s heard.
is it a face of surprise?? 
come on now Dwarkesh you know who you are dealing with here
come on now Dwarkesh you know who you are dealing with here
White whale of Alpha would be Gary Larson (Farside) or Bill Watterson (Calvin and Hobbes)
There's an alpha pattern on X too.
The most interesting accounts tend to have between 50k-250k followers. Larger accounts become "message disciplined" into posting common thoughts they know a general audience or the algorithm will like.
Except Elon, he breaks the system
those who cry “how is lex fridman the biggest sv-adjacent podcaster when he’s such a flat interviewer???” miss that that he is (very effectively) optimizing for big guests
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Sam Altman and Mark Zuckerberg have still done a million interviews, yet you bring them onto any podcast and that podcaster will get a crazy amount of traffic no matter if they say the same things again.
You can have small time podcasters find the most unique guests ever but
Tyler Cowen is the beta interviewer, his style and depth of research is differentiated enough that even someone on a book tour he can pull out some interesting perspectives.
I love both and Lex's podcast, they both have different audience and its not fair to compare. I don't know context of above comment, but imo it seem gwern have limited or no idea about Lex's podcast audience
The worst thing in life is to be ignored. A close second is being noticed in a Gwern comment
the thinking on this is locked in short-term.
the tricky thing with it, he sort of hints at at the end: if you go hard and "off book," you may "win" the interview, but you will never get access to that person again.
And the thing any good podcaster needs, even before a list
Good but beta would be Friedman and Alpha would be obtained in those two ways (novelty or mining)
PLEASE interview Moravec. For years I've been asking why we haven't heard from him in a decade.
Are you - really - doing your best?
What is your "Magnum Opus"?
Can we all do great #work, or is that - by definition - an impossibility?
An exploration of what makes work great, and a small self-test 
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this is literally what happened in this interview between MrBeast and zuck
good point, i often opt in to listen to the big names because i always hope something new will pop out, but so far nothing
Thanks, that explains a lot about why I haven't listened to big name guests on Lex's podcast. I've listened to his longer interviews with less famous people. I wouldn't have been able to articulate this that well myself.
This is okay if all you want to do is just interview people. If you're looking for pull, it'd be better to establish a rotating cast of mid-tier statesmen and administrators. Quick, 20 minute interviews that culminate in you "interviewing" their boss.
Physical goods add up (2 bananas > 1 banana), but information is non-additive (2 copies = 1 copy)
Where does fall on this quality-of-interviewer scale? Feel like he does deep research and asks hard-hitting questions, but what do the pros think?
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You think the virtue of your podcast is that you do not do it weekly?
How you think you beat Lex to become the most influential Artificial Intelligence podcast?
wow Jimmy aka MrBeast really catching strays at the end here 
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Pushing guests to answer detailed and sometimes uncomfortable questions is what makes for the best listen.
Learnt a new term today that i shall adapt with abandon. High-expense ratio index fund of podcast interviews.
Coming from the host of the Sarah Paine podcast, who dabbles in AI on the side, this is well said
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Slightly off-topic, but is this finance analogy just super stretched or am I confused? I thought beta was an investment's sensitivity to the market, and alpha an investment's excess return over the market. So aren't both of these things just different ways of getting alpha? I
And I think that's why its extremely important to be anonymous (as much as possible). It prevents thought rot to a large extent.
This is just a subjective take disguised as something novel, but he's "right."
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(This comes from the empiricist cesspool of LessWrong, meaning they focus only on new and potentially popular ideas without caring whether they are actually true.)
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The Zuck interview is still on Lex and he needs to be called out more often. Fumbling a generational guest lineup with questions like “What’s your favorite programming language?”
Huh, makes me wonder what Moravec has been up to these past twenty years, would watch
“Beta” shouldn’t be thought of as doing more/harder than the competition, just accepting the market price for effort, i.e. getting out of it as much as you put in. But it’s a poor fit for winner-take-all domains like media
He didn't mention Soft White Underbelly. Shame. You'll learn quite a lot about **life** from people whom many might perceive as societal “misfits”. Society weaves deeper threads, often invisible. One needs "insight" (Bloodborne) to get to see life in those invisible threads.
asking overexposed ppl to talk and think about underexposed aspects of their work is hard for both interviewer and interviewee!!!
This is so good (and, ironically, suggests that there's alpha in a second gwern interview)
I think the missing value add of podcaster is the amplification of (potentially already available) perspective. I listen to you because I trust you to amplify perspectives that I find interesting. My goal is not to uncover information not available anywhere else.
Kara Swisher, of course, is the queen type-beta interviews. She has the big name tech CEOs on and gets them to give uncharacteristically news-breaking candor.
Are you - really - doing your best?
What is your "Magnum Opus"?
Can we all do great #work, or is that - by definition - an impossibility?
An exploration of what makes work great, and a small self-test
Ok I straight up cracked when he said that Lex Friedman is like the "high expense ratio index fund". 
"high-expense ratio index fund of podcast interviews" is the most savage critique of a podcast ive ever seen
Honestly, interesting, I lumped you and Friedman in the same bucket and never really explored either. I’ll have to revisit that.
Wasn’t a problem until global mass communications and free publishing. People used to travel(!) and talk to many about their work over and over again and there were entire industries that catered to every aspect of those circuits. Now, everyone’s boring after a Google search.
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