I love the Lex Fridman podcast. So I did some digging. The following is based on data from YouTube.
First, the podcast has had a lot of views. Over 400 million views.
Lex averages 5 days between episodes and has done so consistently for a few years now.
To get a feeling for what the podcast is about, let’s look at its guests.
First, we have the most recurring interviewees. You can form your own opinion about them,
but I find the breadth of their fields fascinating. Physcists, programmers, philosophers, fighters, podcasters, teachers, and more!
The podcast’s most viewed episodes (with over 12 million for first place).
So what do they discuss on these podcasts? Based off of the titles, here’s the top 20 words and bigrams.
Basically, a lot of AI, physics, human nature, and our future.
Beyond the title, they must talk about several different stuff in the actual interview.
For the episodes with timestamps available, we can see the average number of topics per episode is around 18.
The length of the episode correlates positively with the length of the episode.
My favorite outlier is Balaji Srinivasan’s episode, at an impressive 7 hours 47 minutes and 52 seconds.
My viewership of the Lex Fridman Podcast: An update
So, I recently accessed my YouTube watch history. This is where I primarily watch and listen to podcasts.
I found that I have watched around 300 clips from this podcast, most of which are full episodes.
It is also the case that I either watch an episode over multiple days, or come back to my favorite episodes every once in a while.
With the exception of one or two names, my most listened to episodes are where the guests are master story-tellers! Steve Keen and Richard Wolff are excellent at explaining Marxism philosophically, politically and historically. Randall Kennedy, Douglas Murray, and Glenn Loury, although quite different, have a very straight-forward way of speaking on racial issues, and do so with conviction and humility. Sean Kelly and Sam Harris had great episodes here as well, although I much prefer Kelly’s educational lecturing to Harris’s. Niall Ferguson, Saagar Enjeti, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., Balaji Srinivasan each educated me so much on political history, the current state of the world and on visions for the future. The overlap here is Bret Weinstein, that discusses the state of science, power and truth (he himself has had a great podcast called The Portal; check out episode #019 with Eric Weinstein. The most intense and fascinating podcast episode in the history of podcasts). Stephen Wolfram, Frank Wilczek, Nick Lane, Sara Walker and Lee Cronin on physics, biology and science in general. Finally, some people have lived intriguing lives and have lived to tell it. Chris Voss is one of them (and not listed here: Matthew Cox, Bill Ackman, Chamath Palihapitiya, Andrew Bustamente). These are all names that were unfamiliar to me before the podcast.
Uploaded 2023–11–20; Last updated 2024–03–02