Lex Fridman

[[File:Prime Minister of Bharat, Shri Narendra Damodardas Modi meets Lex Fridman.jpg|thumb|right|Fridman (right) meeting with [[India]]n Prime Minister [[Modi]] in 2025]]
{{cquote|While I’m all for debates between [[Climate change|climate denialists]] and climate experts, if the denialists’ falsehoods aren’t exposed, the audience will go away less informed than they came in.||| Nathan J. Robinson<ref>Nathan J. Robinson, [https://www.currentaffairs.org/news/2023/01/the-guy-who-just-loves-everyone The Guy Who Just Loves Everyone], ''Current Affairs'', January 5, 2023</ref>}}

'''Alexei "Lex" Fridman''' {{lived|1983|}}<ref name=bday>[https://archive.ph/Gch8d Thank you for the birthday wishes!…] by Lex Fridman (8:28 PM · Aug 15, 2023) ''Twitter'' (archived from 10 Jan 2026 20:07:31 UTC).</ref> is a [[Russian]]-[[American]] engineer, podcaster, and vlogger. His YouTube show has almost 5 million [[YouTube]] subscribers in January 2026.<ref>https://www.youtube.com/c/lexfridman</ref> He got started interviewing people in computer science and the software industry, but expanded to interviewing senior officials, [[technology]] executives, and [[media]] personalities. His guests have included some Internet microcelebrities such as [[Max Tegmark]], {{wpl|Scott Aaronson||,}} {{wpl|Liv Boeree||,}} and [[Aella]]. He describes his interview style as balanced and empathetic,<ref>Scott Kirsner, [https://www.bostonglobe.com/2024/02/14/business/lex-fridman-mit-science-ambassador-podcast/ How podcaster Lex Fridman became MIT’s highest-profile science ambassador], ''Boston Globe Today'', February 14, 2024 https://archive.ph/hfcYW</ref> which is one name for letting his guests share [[antivax]] talking points and [[conspiracy theories]] and replying with the occasional "Those are big words."<ref>[https://lexfridman.com/robert-f-kennedy-jr-transcript Transcript for Robert F. Kennedy Jr: CIA, Power, Corruption, War, Freedom, and Meaning | Lex Fridman Podcast #388]</ref>{{efn|Weirdly, he and RFK were not referring to [[big words]] as most people understand them, i.e., lengthy words such as 'sesquipedalianism'. He meant "that is an [[extraordinary claim]]" but did not follow up by asking for extraordinary evidence.}}

==Career==
Fridman was born in the [[USSR]]<ref>Kateryna Tyshchenko, [https://www.pravda.com.ua/eng/news/2024/11/30/7487065/ Zelenskyy agrees to record podcast with American interviewer Lex Fridman], ''Ukrainska Pravda'', November 30, 2024</ref> and emigrated to the United States as a child in 1994.<ref name=black>Julia Black, [https://www.businessinsider.com/lex-fridman-podcast-anti-woke-elon-musk-ai Peace, love, and Hitler: How Lex Fridman's podcast became a safe space for the anti-woke tech elite], ''Business Insider'', April 12, 2023</ref> He went to {{wpl|Drexel University}} in Philadelphia for a bachelor's degree and received a PhD in electrical and computer engineering there in 2014.<ref>https://drexel.edu/engineering/news-events/news/archive/2018/October/fridman-to-lead-ai-lecture/</ref> He is sentimental about the Russian soul and Russian language.<ref name=black/>

Afterwards Fridman worked on projects for [[Google]] and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) while exploring the potential of [[social media]]. Julia Black has documented how he shared his MIT lectures on a personal YouTube channel like [[Jordan Peterson]], participated in a [[Tesla Motors|Tesla]] fan forum, and made contact with [[Elon Musk]] on [[Twitter]].<ref name=black/> He also wrote poems about desire for women and trained in sports including distance running, judo, and Brazilian jiu-jitsu (a popular style in Mixed Martial Arts). Fridman is very interested in a kind of masculinity defined by fitness, violence, [[Diet woo|rigorous diets]], and [[heterosexuality]] but does not identify as part of the [[Manosphere]]. In 2018 he launched a podcast about [[artificial intelligence]] where he interviewed researchers and executives.

In 2019 Fridman released a controversial preprint on Elon Musk's Tesla Autopilot.<ref>Lex Fridman, Daniel E. Brown, Julia Kindelsberger, Linda Angell, Bruce Mehler, and Bryan Reimer, "Human Side of Tesla Autopilot: Exploration of Functional Vigilance in Real-World Human-Machine Collaboration" https://hcai.mit.edu/tesla-autopilot-human-side.pdf or [https://dn720705.ca.archive.org/0/items/tesla-autopilot-human-side/tesla-autopilot-human-side.pdf archive.org] </ref><ref name=black/><ref>''Merge Now'' podcast #2: Dr Missy Cummings on Tesla's Autopilot Study [https://open.spotify.com/episode/3gbEaFSTxej0MY9ztjIUp4 Spotify]</ref> Musk loved it and flew Fridman to his office for a chat. Afterwards Fridman's podcast audience grew and included a wide variety of guests including more CEOs. He rebranded it from ''The Artificial Intelligence Podcast'' to the ''Lex Fridman Podcast'' in 2020.<ref name=black/> After Musk challenged Mark Zuckerberg to a cage fight in 2023, Fridman interviewed Zuckerberg and taught him some Brazilian jiu-jitsu techniques.<ref>[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1Wy-6z17up4 Mark Zuckerberg vs Lex Fridman in Jiu Jitsu], Lex Fridman YouTube channel, June 25, 2023</ref>

As Fridman's podcasting career grew, his academic career shrank. The preprint on Autopilot was never published with [[peer review]], and is no longer hosted by MIT. His homepage,<ref>https://lexfridman.com/</ref> university page,<ref>https://lex.mit.edu/</ref> and Google Scholar<ref>https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=wZH_N7cAAAAJ&hl=en</ref> list just two academic publications or preprints after 2020.<ref>"Value of Temporal Dynamics Information in Driving Scene Segmentation" https://doi.org/10.1109/TIV.2021.3094836 was published in 2021, and "CLERA: a unified model for joint cognitive load and eye region analysis in the wild" https://doi.org/10.1145/3603622 was published in 2023. Contrary to Google Scholar, the paper on [[face masks]] and [[COVID-19]] was published in 2020 and merely updated in 2024.</ref> As of January 2026 Fridman has an unpaid position as research scientist with MIT but lives in Austin, [[Texas]].<ref name=black/>

==Example of his interview style==
{{cquote|I am forever grateful for the wisdom and love I've encountered in the meandering journey of doing these conversations. I can honestly say that I can die a happy man having had the chance to pause and witness so many moments of magic, at once fleeting and unforgettable. Thank you.|||Lex Fridman<ref>https://lexfridman.com/podcast</ref>}}

Although Fridman's podcasts are often hours long, that time is not filled with in-depth discussion drawing on his engineering training and access to a research library. He mostly lets his guests speak and avoids confrontation or pushing. While he occasionally invites two guests to debate, such as [[Bjørn Lomborg]] versus {{wpl|Andrew Revkin}} on climate change, 99% of episodes have just one guest, so listeners do not have alternative perspectives. Fridman did not object when [[Graham Hancock]] told him that we have no idea how the [[Pyramid|pyramids]] of [[Egypt]] were built:

{{quotebox|Now, yeah, ramps are proposed as the solution, but where are the remains of those ramps? If you’re going to carry blocks weighing up to two or three tons right to the top of the Great Pyramid to complete your work, you’re going to need a ramp that’s going to extend out into the desert for more than a mile at a 10 degree slope. And it’s calculated that a 10 degree slope is about the maximum slope that human labor can haul objects up a ramp. And that ramp can’t just be compacted sand, since heavy objects are being hauled up. It’s going to have to be made of very solid material, almost as solid as the pyramid itself. Where is it?<ref>https://lexfridman.com/graham-hancock-transcript</ref>}}

Fridman and Hancock almost certainly traveled to their interview on roads with a hard dense surface over soft, squishy earth, and anyone who has visited Egypt has seen mud-brick buildings which dissolve in the rain or are dug up and spread over fields when they are no longer needed.  Worn-out mud brick even has a name in Egyptian Arabic ({{wpl|Sebakh|''Sebakh''}}). A scale model of a pyramid was successfully built in 1997 by dragging blocks along a ramp that spiraled around the pyramid, reducing the length and amount of material needed.<ref>PBS Nova, "This Old Pyramid," 1997 https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/transcripts/1915mpyramid.html</ref> While the Great Pyramid could have been built in several different ways, its not true that stones could never have been dragged on wooden sleds or rollers over a ramp of local materials or that such a ramp could never have been removed afterwards. Given his education, Fridman must have put aside these objections and just let his guest share his [[bullshit]].

Fridman pushed back somewhat when [[Kanye West]] complained about "Jewish media" and told him that [[Holocaust denial#Holocaust|the real Holocaust]] was [[Planned Parenthood]]: 

{{quotebox|With all due respect. I grew up in the [[Soviet Union]]. I'm [[Jewish]]. Parts of my family perished in the [[Holocaust]] of [[Nazi Germany]]. I have to push back that there is a difference of the atrocities at that scale at that time.<ref>''Lex Fridman Podcast'' #332 (October 24, 2022) minutes 34-35 as transcribed at [https://podcasts.musixmatch.com/podcast/lex-fridman-podcast-01gv03qx000094ej6zhdmch4mj/episode/332-kanye-%E2%80%98ye-west-interview-01hjz7abr0s9jvzptbvqrevxe9 https://podcasts.musixmatch.com/]</ref>}}

Although he has the equivalent-sized audience of a major [[media]] organization, Fridman has not adopted [[Journalism|journalistic]] ethical standards such as keeping social distance between himself and the people he interviews. When he interviewed [[Donald Trump]], Fridman mentioned "my good friend, [[Joe Rogan]]… I think you’ve said some not so nice things about Joe, and I think that was a bit unfair."<ref>https://lexfridman.com/donald-trump-transcript</ref> Fridman stands behind these questions, whereas later in the same interview he mentions that "some people" have questions about the [[Epstein Files]] but does not ask those questions directly. Elon Musk, another friend, has appeared on the show several times, as has Fridman's martial-arts partner [[Mark Zuckerberg]]. Old Media journalist [[Helen Lewis]] is amused by the audacity:
{{quotebox|(Fridman) is a personal friend of (podcast guests) Ivanka Trump and Jared Kushner, and boasted on LinkedIn last year that he had spent [[Thanksgiving]] at their house, watching ''The Godfather''. In doing so, he wasn’t breaking any kind of norm. By podcasting standards, his refusal to join in with Trump’s thumbs-up in the preinterview photo counts as Cronkite-like rectitude.<ref>Helen Lewis, [https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2024/09/trump-lex-fridman-podcast-tour/679702/ Trump's Red-Pill Podcast Tour], ''The Atlantic'', September 4, 2024 https://archive.ph/KbGHo#selection-723.0-730.0</ref>}}

Journalist {{wpl|Ellen Huet}} noted that software CEOs have long wanted people who will share their [[public relations]] message and won't ask awkward questions or juxtapose their statements with comments from critics.<ref>[https://www.bloomberg.com/news/newsletters/2024-03-29/lex-fridman-s-podcasts-give-tech-ceos-a-friendly-place-for-pr Tech CEOs Find Friendly Podcast Hosts Help Get Out Their Talking Points] by Ellen Huet (March 29, 2024 at 4:05 AM PDT) ''Bloomberg''.</ref> Social media personalities absorb the reflected glory of their wealthy and powerful guests, and the guests reach a youthful audience without the experience to see what is being left out.

==Guests of interest to RationalWiki== 
Many of Fridman's guests are very famous such as Senator [[Bernie Sanders]] or YouTuber MrBeast. Some are writers or academics who want to expand their audiences such as [[historian]] Greg Aldrete and [[xenophobic]] [[Brexit|Brexiteer]] [[Douglas Murray]]. Many are Internet figures from Musk's circle such as {{wpl|Grimes}} and [[Eliezer Yudkowsky]]. Softball interviews are pleasant for guests who want a platform and for listeners who want [[insight porn]], but they are easily exploited by guests who are [[Deceit|dishonest]], [[ignorant]], or have an agenda. A list of episodes is available on [https://lexfridman.com/podcast Fridman's website] and includes many other guests with RationalWiki entries.

==See also==
* [[Joe Rogan]], a podcaster with a similar style, [[politics]], and audience but without Fridman's academic and technical ''gravitas''. In 2023 Fridman celebrated his birthday with Rogan and other "amazing friends."<ref name=bday/>

==Notes==
{{reflist|group=note}}

==References==
{{reflist|2|80%}}

{{DEFAULTSORT:Fridman, Lex}}
[[Category:Engineers]]
[[Category:Living people]]
[[Category:Muskiverse]]
[[Category:Podcasts]]
[[Category:Russia]]
[[Category:Texas]]
[[Category:United States]]
[[Category:YouTube]]

Categories: Engineers, Living people, Muskiverse, Podcasts, Russia, Texas, United States, YouTube