Dwarkesh, Lex, & Ezra

I am eternally grateful to Dwarkesh Patel for creating real competition to the Lex Fridman Podcast. I find Lex to be a completely unbearable podcast host, capable neither of contributing anything I want to hear himself, nor eliciting interesting opinions from his guests. That made it a tragedy that for so long he seemed to monopolize the big name guests in CS, AI, tech, and the like. I’m also not that enthralled by his secondary bro-y focus, much preferring Dwarkesh’s excursions into history, China, and the like.

However, as of late, particularly after his relatively combative episode with Nvidia’s Jensen Huang, there has been more chatter online about whether Dwarkesh too could be lacking in some ways. Most of this conversation has been picking sides: determining whether Dwarkesh or Jensen was right about whether AI chips should be sold to China, and which one of them was the more skillful debater. Although those are interesting questions, I’d like to ask something else: whether the nearly 40 minutes spent pressing Jensen on this produced the best possible podcast as an artifact, and whether Dwarkesh’s craft could be improved by dropping things sooner.

Interview Podcasts

Dwarkesh’s podcast fits into the broader genre of interview podcasts. These are perhaps the most dominant form of podcast, usually involving some persistent host, along with a rotating cast of guests per episode who they converse with. Guests are typically chosen to be noteworthy or interesting figures within the field or domain that the podcast and its host focus on. The host and guest then engage in a somewhat free-form conversation, with the host usually guiding and bringing up topics, but allowing the guest to provide most of the content.

This is in opposition to podcasts with more simultaneous participants, where keeping a single thread of conversation and taking turns at the mic can be harder, as well as podcasts that are exposition of a scripted narrative, often by only one person. You can see why interviewing is such a popular format. Rather than relying on the host or hosts to be a constant wellspring of new and unique thought at the pace demanded by the modern internet, they only need each guest to have enough depth to make one interesting episode. Topics fall out naturally from their expertise, and the variety keeps things interesting.

Conversation

With so many of these interview podcasts aiming to feel like a sort of conversation, a natural question for us to help elucidate their purpose might be “why should somebody listen to such a podcast instead of having a conversation of their own?” Surely it would be more engaging to be part of the conversation rather than a passive observer to it, and that would in turn help you learn more. Well, there are a few obvious difficulties with that, mostly centered around scale.

Many of the most exciting guests with interesting knowledge and experience are in high demand. We can’t all get our turn talking to the CEO of the most valuable company on the planet. However, if one person records their conversation with him to a podcast, then all of us can listen in. Additionally, if we’re all going to hear that same conversation, then it becomes worth the host’s time to prepare well: reading up on relevant context and planning out good questions that will result in hearing better stories. Maybe this lets all of us get access to a better dialogue than we would have had ourselves.

The Platonic Ideal

Still, there is a way in which the best version of this for me as an audience member is one close to the conversation I might’ve had myself if I had the same level of access to guests and time to prepare for interviewing them. I synthesize information best when I am actively working with it. So in much the same way as I felt the best way to listen to lectures in college was to try and constantly predict where the next five minutes would go and what conclusions would be drawn, I like to listen to podcasts by silently looking for holes in the explanations and arguments given, or connections to other interests.

That is to say, during a lot of my listening I am effectively considering what questions I might ask, or where I might take the conversation if I were the host. So there’s a special joy I get, when in fact a podcast’s host has the same curiosity as I do (or that I would, if only I had the same level of preparation). In these cases they are able to explore that idea and get the answers for me. In doing so, they are getting as close as possible to the world in which I actually got to have these conversations. In contrast, when they go on tangents I don’t care about, or prevent the guest from exploring something interesting, that gets further away.

The Ezra Klein Show

For me, the podcast host who comes closest to this ideal is Ezra Klein. He clearly does the reading, and can engage meaningfully with guests across a variety of topics (even if that makes it a pity that so much of his content is now focused just on politics). Quite reliably, when a guest says something interesting that I’d want to tug on more, or something questionable that I’d want to challenge, he’s there first, able to channel the conversation in the direction I’d like it to go. Maybe this is just another way of saying that I think Ezra is smart.

However, just as important to me as this in creating a good listening experience is that he’s empathetic. He’s empathetic to the listener, making sure to define terms and bring in context explicitly, even if he and the guest are both familiar with them. He’s also empathetic to the guest, clearly trying to feel out what they’re interested in talking about. As a rule of thumb, he almost never seems to object to the same thing more than once. Sometimes a guest will say something nonsensical that he pushes back on, and the guest will find themselves repeating their original position, or unable to respond properly. In these cases, rather than pressing the point to win the argument and expose them as inconsistent, Ezra just moves on, keeping the guest comfortable and allowing the audience to see that on their own. Although my monkey brain sometimes wants the confrontation, in retrospect I’m always glad to be able to spend more time on what the guest is thoughtful and has good points about rather than sticking in the areas where they are wrong and should be ignored.

Returning to Dwarkesh

Dwarkesh clearly also puts in the research time, talking in a recent episode about how he wishes he could be tested on the topics to cement his learning. However, it is in this second aspect where he sometimes falls short. He self-admits to often playing devil’s advocate, which can be a fine conversational device, but sometimes leads to the conversations getting stuck: where there is fundamental disagreement between him and the guest, or something he wants the guest to say more on or acknowledge, which they are unwilling to do. In the aforementioned Jensen interview, he spends nearly 40 minutes trying repeatedly to get Jensen to say that giving China more compute is dangerous. In these cases, it feels like I am denied the ability to explore the full space of the guest’s mind and ideas because we must devote so much time to this focus of Dwarkesh’s.

When people have tried to explain to me the appeal of Lex Fridman, they often say something quite close to this: that he acts as an unthreatening blank slate, in a way that is attractive to guests and allows them to get out their ideas without being obstructed. While I appreciate Dwarkesh’s ability to be an engaged host, and think this produces a better result than just a monologue, it’s possible there’s something to this. Maybe he too can eventually find a middle path that produces a better product for the audience even if it wins fewer debates decisively. The art of podcasting is largely about extracting from each guest the stories and knowledge only they can give, and a concession forced out of them by the host can’t be that.