How Lex Fridman prepares for podcasts

all right I got a question on how I prepare for podcast so this has uh evolved and expanded more and more over time there are some podcasts that I

prepare hundreds of hours for in AI terms let's say first I'm training a solid backgound model by consuming as much variety on the topic as possible a

lot of this comes down to picking High signal sources whether it's blogs books podcasts YouTube videos X accounts and so on for this conversation with

president zalinski for example since February 20122 I've spoken with hundreds of people on the ground I've read Kindle or audiobook about 10 books fully and

then I skimmed about 20 more and I don't mean books about zalinski although he does appear in some of them I mean books

where this conversation was fully in the back of my mind as I'm reading the book so for example I read red famine by an

apple Bal it's about hore does it directly relate to zalinski not on the surface no but it sort of continues to weave the fabric of my

understanding of a people of the history of the region but it's really important for me to read books from various perspectives and I'm always trying to

calculate the bias under which the author oper operates and adjusting for that in my brain as I integrate the information for example an apple bomb's

book Gulag is very different from Alexander solon's Gulag archipelago the former is a rigorous comprehensive historical account the

latter is a literary psychological and personal portrait of Soviet Society both I think are extremely valuable on the

bias front for example the rise and fall of the Third Reich by William sh is a good example it is full of bias but he was there and to me he has written

probably one of the greatest if not the greatest book on the Third Reich ever but like I said it has a lot of inaccuracies and biases you can read about them online if you like but my job

in this case and in all cases is to adjust based on my understanding of the author's biases and take the wisdom from the text where it could be found and uh putting the inaccuracies aside into the

proverbial dust bins of History so as I'm reading I'm writing down my thoughts as they come up always digging for some deeper insight about

human nature if I'm at my computer I'll write it down in Google doc sometimes use notion or obsidian if I'm not on my computer I'll use Google

keep so for example if I'm listening to an audiobook and I running along the river if a good idea comes to mind I'll stop think for a few seconds and then do

speech to text note in Google Keep by the way listening to audiobook at 1X speed old school and eventually I get a

gigantic pile of thoughts and notes that I look over to refresh my memory but for the most part I just throw them out it's a background model building process by

the way llms are increasingly becoming useful here for organization purposes but have not yet uh been useful at least for me and I do try a lot for insight

extraction or Insight generation purposes I should mention that my memory for specific facts names dates quotes is terrible what I remember well is high

level ideas that's just how my brain works for Better or For Worse I realize that sometimes forgetting all of the details and the words needed to express

them makes me sound simplistic sick and even unprepared I'm not but that's life we have to accept our flaws and roll with them aside from books I also listen

to a lot of podcasts and YouTube videos where people are talking about the topic so for the president zalinsky episode I listen probably to hundreds of hours of content from his supporters and from his

critics from all sides again I choose who to listen to based not on their perspective but based on SNR signal to noise ratio if I'm regularly getting

insights from a person I will continue listening to them whether I agree or disagree in the end this turns out to be a lot of hours of prep but to say that it's X hours per episode is not accurate

because a lot of this preparation transfers from one guest to another even when there's an insane level of variety in the guests we're all humans after all

there is a thread that connects all of it together somehow if you look closely enough for more technical gu in stem Fields I'll read papers a lot of

papers and also technical blog posts and Technical tweet threads this is a very different process for AI or CS related topics I will run other people's code I will write my own Implement stuff from

scratch if it's a software company I'll use their tools and software if relevant but in the actual conversation I constantly am searching for simple but profound insights at various levels of

abstraction sometimes this means asking a trivial question in hopes of uncovering the non-trivial counterintuitive but fundamental idea that opens the door to

a whole new way of looking at the field and actually every guest is their own puzzle like preparing for Rick Rubin was me listening to hundreds of songs he

produced and even learning some on guitar like hurt by johanny cash preparing for the cursor Team episode meant obviously I had to use cursor

fully for several weeks all of his features so I switched completely for VSCO to cursor for Paul rosley round two

especially I literally went deep into the jungle with Paul and almost died uh fully taking the leap toward adventure with him when it gets close to the

conversation I'll start working on the actual interview questions and notes and there I'm asking myself what am I personally curious about

like I love podcasts I'm a big fan of many many podcasts and so I asked myself what would I want this person to explain on a podcast and maybe what aspect of

their thought process or their Humanity would I want to be surfaced or have the chance to be surfaced in the actual conversation I always try to put my ego aside

completely and do whatever it takes to have a good conversation and serve The Listener this means ask questions simply trying to Define terms and give context

if needed being open-minded vulnerable curious and challenging the guests when needed despite the claims on the internet I do ask a lot of challenging

questions including follow-ups but always with empathy I don't need to be right I don't need to Signal my moral or intellectual superiority to anyone I try

to do the opposite actually because I want the guest to open up and I trust the intelligence of The Listener to see for themselves if the guest is full of [ __ ] or not to detect the flaws and the

strengths of how the guest thinks or who they are deep down a lot of times when interviewers Grill the guest it doesn't reveal much

except give a dopamine hit to the echo Chambers who hate the guest as I said in the intro I believe the line between good and evil does run through the heart of every

man the result in conversations are sometimes a failure sometimes because they're are too short sometimes because the chemistry was just not working sometimes because I [ __ ] it

up I try to take risks give it everything I got and enjoy the roller coaster of it all no matter what and as I said I trust the listener to put it

all together and I trust the critic to tear it apart and I love you all for it e