Is Lex Fridman the world's most dangerous podcaster?

Telegraph

28-03-2025

If a student tells me they want to be a famous journalist, I say: 'don't join a newspaper, get a podcast.'
Lex Fridman, a 41-year-old computer scientist and tech podcaster, has a YouTube channel with nearly five million subscribers. Since he set up the channel six years ago, he's gone from interviewing fellow academics – Steven Pinker, Max Tegmark – to world leaders. He's sat down with Trump, Musk, Netanyahu, Bezos and Narendra Modi. In January, he spoke with Zelensky and he's announced he'll be talking to Putin soon.
If he does so, it will be a remarkable scoop. In the past, journalistic coups of this order went to a Mike Wallace or a Barbara Walters. That Putin might sit down with an 'amateur' – and one who was all-but-unknown five years ago – fuels concern that podcasting has created a new ecosystem of soft-interviews that favour the politicians.
Memories are raw of when erstwhile Fox News host Tucker Carlson met Putin last February and allowed the puffy-faced dictator to wang on about Russian history with barely any critical engagement. (Tucker was later filmed touring a Russian supermarket, praising its 'cheap and fresh' groceries.)
Fridman is a more appealing personality. He brings a zen-like quality to his craft, dressed simply in a black suit and tie, and his earnest, intellectual conversations can run to three hours long. He spends a vast amount of time on research, and explains how the sausage is made for viewers. ('Preparing for Rick Rubin' – the record producer – 'was me listening to hundreds of songs he produced and even learning some on guitar'.)
Admirers call him an open-minded listener; critics say he gets these names because they know he rarely interrupts, that he's fundamentally naive. Fridman once mused, 'If you talk to Hitler in 1941, do you empathise with him, or do you push back?' Most professionals would push back because they want to 'signal' to fellow journalists that they're on 'the right side. But if you actually want to understand the person, you should empathise.'
Alexey Alexandrovich Fridman, a Russian Jew, was born in the former Soviet Union in 1983. His father, Alexander, was a celebrated plasma physicist. When Lex was about 11 the family moved to the Chicago area; he earned degrees in computer science at Drexel University and began a career in academia that led to work with Google and MIT.
At MIT, he began to brand himself as a public intellectual. He uploaded lectures on his personal YouTube channel and updated his Twitter profile photo to one of him looking professorial, standing in front of a blackboard full of equations. (The equations, claimed a colleague, had nothing to do with the subject.)
In 2019, Fridman published a non-peer-reviewed study about Tesla Auto-pilot that claimed human beings do not become distracted when semi-automated systems, such as in a car, kick in. This contradicted decades of research (and common sense), but must have been music to the ears of Elon Musk, the founder of Tesla, who granted Fridman an interview one week after Fridman began posting about the study.
The work eventually disappeared from the MIT website. Yet Fridman, now gaining fame, moved to Austin, Texas and became a kind of public confessor to the tech-bro elite, who evidently enjoyed being interviewed by someone who, unusually, understood what they were saying. If Tom Wolfe were to invent a tech-bro, it would be Fridman. In a famous 2020 video, the martial arts fan detailed his daily routine: visualisation, exercise, a keto diet, salt-pills and relaxation with Dostoevsky. You can, if you wish, watch a video of Fridman and Mark Zuckerberg wrestling.
So how did such self-actualised, ultra-modern tech-boys like Fridman fall into the realm of McDonalds-munching Trump? Fridman would likely argue that the Trumpites are a phenomenon, so he simply wants to understand them. But the relationship goes beyond curiosity. Lex is friendly with Ivanka Trump and her husband Jared Kushner; in November 2023, he tweeted that he'd spent Thanksgiving with them, watching The Godfather.
There are also overlaps in world-view. Trump is a disruptor in the circuit board of politics; the tech-bros believe the system, our entire civilisation, needs to be rebooted. Crucially, they also self-perceive as outsiders, however elite their education, and see themselves as misunderstood by the legacy media. 'Journalists annoy the hell out of me,' Lex told the historian Dan Carlin. 'They make up stuff all the time. So I can put myself in the mindset of a person' – like Putin – 'that thinks that it is OK to remove that kind of shallow, fake news voice from the system.' (Fridman made clear this wasn't something he would do in practice.)
Hence podcasting has become a safe space within which misunderstood men can interview each other. During the 2024 election, Trump eschewed meetings with key broadcasters yet did sit down with Logan Paul (6.6 million views), This Past Weekend with Theo Von (14 million), Flagrant (7 million) and The Joe Rogan Experience (37.8 million). Forbes Magazine reported that 20 per cent of likely voters watched one of the Trump podcasts, and it led to a consequential swing in votes among young men especially. In the 2020 election, Trump lost by 15 points among young men; at the most recent election, he won by 14 – an unprecedented nearly 30-point swing.
Helen Lewis, a staff writer at The Atlantic and follower of tech conservatism, wittily dubbed it 'Trump's red-pill podcast tour', full of product placement, unchecked facts and bizarre moments ('Cocaine will turn you into a damn owl, homie,' explained Theo Von. 'And is that a good feeling?' asked Trump).
Fridman's interview was one of the toughest: he raised Trump's false claims that the 2020 election was stolen and his connection to the late paedophile Jeffrey Epstein. Yet all was brushed off. Lewis tells me: 'The entire encounter between Fridman and Trump reminds me of a squid under attack creating a cloud of ink. Fridman asks big, broad questions' – does Trump believe in God, is power corrupting? – 'and Trump pumps out platitudes. You learn nothing… [Fridman] appears unaware of the concept that politicians lie. Or at minimum, spin. When you're interviewing a public intellectual, they are there to explain their ideas. But that's not why politicians do interviews. They are there to propagandise.' Lewis is concerned that the new media has become the thing it accused the old media of: court politics, a game for the well-connected.
For example, Fridman introduced his interview with Modi, published this month, as 'one of the most moving conversations and experiences of my life'. Modi is elsewhere accused of sectarianism and presiding over an increasing atmosphere of authoritarianism in India. In particular, critics allege that he tolerated the 2002 riots in Gujarat when he was chief minister of the province. Fridman cautiously asked about the inter-communal violence which left up to 1,900 dead; Modi praised his politeness and gave a lawyerly reply. 'A lot of people love you,' came Fridman's challenging follow-up, but 'a lot of journalists seek clickbait headlines, make accusations, because they operate under incentive, because they want the headline, the cheap shot.' So, 'How do you deal with critics?'
I'm lucky to have gotten the chance to attend game 3 of Heat vs Celtics in Miami last night, and to hang out & have great conversations with @IvankaTrump & @jaredkushner. This was my first time at a live basketball game. Energy was wild! Thank you for this amazing experience 🙏 pic.twitter.com/n0YznttkOQ
— Lex Fridman (@lexfridman) May 22, 2023
Pre-internet, the only way for a politician to get publicity was to appear on the BBC or CNN, hence journalists could afford to be aggressive. Now the politician can go elsewhere, and one has to adjust the format to land the interview (Newsnight has gone from one-on-one interrogations to a round table chat). Much of the anti-Fridman feeling is perhaps jealousy that he's cornered a market so many 'professionals' have lost access to.
So what does Fridman himself believe? In a discussion with Bernie Sanders, Fridman expressed sympathy towards his views on healthcare reform. With Tucker Carlson he questioned Carlson's claim that America is corrupt and economically failed. As for Zelensky, he appeared genuinely surprised that the Ukrainian leader didn't wish to speak with him in Russian (Zelensky's first language) – and stated that it is his 'dream' that Zelensky, Trump and Putin could just sit down and agree to a peace deal: 'You have to look at [Putin] as a serious person who loves his country and loves the people in his country.' Zelensky replied that Putin does not love his country, but is sacrificing it, that when interviewed by Tucker, he had sat 'bare-assed pontificating about tribes'.
Lewis writes: 'I suspect if Fridman interviews Putin, it will turn out like the Tucker Carlson interview. Fridman will ask him open-minded questions and Putin will lecture him about Prince Oleg and Prince Vladimir. Carlson came away from that encounter insisting that Putin had not filibustered him. But he had.'
Fridman is not a cynic generating outrage for clicks 'n cash. He's an idealist; a brotherhood-of-man-ist who thinks if he can get Zelensky and Putin on his podcast, they will see their similarities and agree. In reality, as Zelensky says, Putin belongs to a different century, talking a different moral language, and unless an interviewer understands this, they risk giving an open mic to evil.