Latest news with #LexFridmanPodcast
Time of India
03-08-2025
- Entertainment
- Time of India
'D*ck heads': Joe Rogan sparks debate after calling jiu jitsu a filter for fake people and big egos
'D*ck heads': Joe Rogan sparks debate after calling jiu jitsu a filter for fake people and big egos (Image Via X) UFC commentator and podcast host Joe Rogan , 57, has kicked off a fresh debate in the martial arts world. Joe Rogan said on The Joe Rogan Experience, episode #2359, that Brazilian jiu-jitsu (BJJ) draws the nicest, most grounded people. He thinks the cause is straightforward: BJJ is very challenging both mentally and physically, and only people with actual grit and humility persevere with it long-term. His take has left fans and fighters divided. Can a combat sport really shape someone's character? Or is that just a romantic idea about martial arts? Joe Rogan says Jiu-Jitsu filters out ego and fakes In a conversation with artist Mike Maxwell, Joe Rogan described jiu-jitsu not just as a sport, but as a life-changing experience. "Jiu-jitsu is one of the most rewarding things in life, because it's super hard to do. It's really good for your head. Jiu-jitsu people in general, like you get d**k heads in every walk of life, but you get the nicest people for the most part. You get people of character, because you have to have character to stick it out. If you've been doing jiu-jitsu [for] eight years, I'm 99% sure I can hang out with you. Like, you're a dude who's got his s**t together." Joe Rogan Experience #2359 - Mike Maxwell He explained that the difficulty of BJJ humbles people quickly. You constantly get tapped out, make mistakes, and have to keep showing up. It's not for people who want instant results or who can't take failure. Rogan believes this process builds real patience, honesty, and self-awareness qualities that shape how people treat others too. According to him, ego simply doesn't survive in jiu-jitsu. If you want to stick around, you've got to learn to lose, learn, and respect your opponents. by Taboola by Taboola Sponsored Links Sponsored Links Promoted Links Promoted Links You May Like Specialist Down Jackets for Ultralight Adventures Trek Kit India Learn More Undo Also Read: 'There's A Line In The Sand': Joe Rogan Says Trump Admin 'Gaslighting' Supporters - Epstein Case Why Joe Rogan believes grappling builds real-world confidence Rogan knows what he's talking about. He began taekwondo as a teen, won the U.S. Open at 19, and later earned a black belt in BJJ under Jean Jacques Machado. He's also a big advocate for grappling in real-world situations. On the Lex Fridman Podcast, he said arts like jiu-jitsu and judo give people true confidence because they teach calm, control, and how to stay safe if a fight ever goes to the ground. While some argue no sport guarantees good values, Rogan believes BJJ trains more than the body it trains who you are. For real-time updates, scores, and highlights, follow our live coverage of the India vs England Test match here. Catch Rani Rampal's inspiring story on Game On, Episode 4. Watch Here!
The Star
27-07-2025
- Entertainment
- The Star
Who is watching all these podcasts?
The following are the run times of some recent episodes of several of YouTube's more popular podcasts: 'This Past Weekend w/ Theo Von,' No. 595: Two hours, 14 minutes. 'Club Shay Shay,' No. 172: Two hours, 59 minutes. 'The Shawn Ryan Show,' No. 215: Five hours, four minutes. 'Lex Fridman Podcast,' No. 461: Five hours, 20 minutes. These shows follow the same general format: people sitting in chairs, in generically designed studios, talking. And, like many of the biggest podcasts these days, these shows are all released as videos. They don't feature particularly fancy camerawork, or flashy graphics, or narratives. All of them require time commitments typical of feature films, ballgames or marathon performance art installations. Yet going by YouTube's statistics, hundreds of thousands of people have viewed all of the above episodes. Which leads to comments such as this, as one fan wrote after a recent episode of Von's show: 'Truly, this podcast was amazing to watch.' So a genre of media named for an audio device – the iPod, discontinued by Apple in 2022 – and popularised by audiences enamoured of on-demand listening has transformed in recent years into a visual one. It's well established that the American brain is the prize in a war for attention online, a place that incentivises brief and sensational content, not static five-hour discussions about artificial intelligence. So what gives? Who exactly is watching the supersize video talk shows that have come to define podcasting over the past several years? At the highest level, the audience for video podcasts is simply people who consume podcasts. 'Who is watching these?' said Eric Nuzum, a podcast strategist. 'A person who loves podcasts who happens to be near a screen.' Indeed, according to an April survey by Cumulus Media and media research firm Signal Hill Insights, nearly three-fourths of podcast consumers play podcast videos, even if they minimize them, compared with about one-fourth who listen only to the audio. Paul Riismandel, president of Signal Hill, said this split holds across age groups – it's not simply driven by Generation Z and that younger generation's supposed great appetite for video. But dive a bit deeper into the data, and it becomes clear that how people are watching podcasts – and what counts as watching – is a far more revealing question. According to the Signal Hill survey, about 30% of people who consume podcasts 'play the video in the background or minimise on their device while listening.' Perhaps this person is folding laundry and half-watching 'Pod Save America,' or has 'The Joe Rogan Experience' open in a browser tab while they do busy work at the office. That describes Zoë McDermott, a 31-year-old title insurance producer from Pennsylvania, who said she streams video of Von's show on her phone while she works. 'I don't have the ability to watch the entire thing through, but I do my glance-downs if I hear something funny,' McDermott said. 'It's passive a little bit.' Still, this leaves everyone else – more than half of YouTube podcast consumers, who say they are actively watching videos. Here, it gets even trickier. YouTube, the most popular platform for podcasts, defines 'views' in a variety of ways, among them a user who clicks 'play' on a video and watches for at least 30 seconds: far from five hours. And the April survey data did not distinguish between people who were watching, say, four hours of Lex Fridman interviewing Marc Andreessen from people who were viewing the much shorter clips of these podcasts that are ubiquitous on TikTok, Instagram Reels, X and YouTube itself. All of which makes it hard to pinpoint a 'typical' podcast viewer. Is it a couple on the couch with a bucket of popcorn, streaming to their smart TV? Is it a young office worker scrolling through TikTok during his commute? Or is it the same person engaging in different behaviour at different points in the day? Alyssa Keller, who lives in Michigan with her family, said sometimes she watches 'The Shawn Ryan Show' on the television with her husband. But more often, she puts the video on the phone for a few hours while her children are napping. This means she sometimes has to watch marathon episodes in chunks. 'I've been known to take multiple days,' she said. 'Nap times only last for like two hours.' In February, YouTube announced that more than 1 billion people a month were viewing podcasts on its platform. According to Tim Katz, head of sports and news partnerships at YouTube, that number is so large that it must include users who are actually mainlining five-hour talk shows. 'Any time you have a number that large, you're going to have a broad swath of people consuming in lots of different ways,' Katz said. Recently, The New York Times asked readers if and how they consume video podcasts. Many of the respondents said they played video podcasts in the background while attending to work or chores, and still treated podcasts as audio-only products. A few said they liked being able to see the body language of podcast hosts and their guests. Still others said that they didn't like video podcasts because they found the visual component distracting or unnecessary. Video can have its drawbacks. Lauren Golds, a 37-year-old researcher based in Virginia, said she regularly hate-watches podcasts at work – in particular 'On Purpose,' which is hosted by British entrepreneur and life coach Jay Shetty. She said she had had awkward encounters when co-workers have looked at her screen and told her that they love the show she's watching. 'There's no way to say it's garbage and I'm watching it for entertainment purposes to fill my need for hatred,' Golds said. One thing a 'typical' podcaster consumer is less likely to be these days is someone listening to a full-attention-required narrative program. Say 'podcast' and many people still instinctively think of painstakingly produced, deeply reported, audio-only shows such as 'Serial' and 'This American Life,' which listeners consumed via audio-only platforms such as Apple Podcasts and the iHeartRadio app. Traditional podcasts relied on host-read and scripted ads to make money, and on media coverage and word of mouth for discovery. And it was a lot of money, in some cases: In 2019, to take one example, Spotify acquired Gimlet – one of the defining podcast producers of the 2010s – as part of a US$340mil (RM1.4bil) investment in podcast startups. Now, the size of the market for video podcasts is too large to ignore, and many ad deals require podcasters to have a video component. The platforms where these video podcasts live, predominantly YouTube and Spotify, are creating new kinds of podcast consumers, who expect video. McDermott, the Von fan, said the video component made her feel like she had a friendly guest in her home. 'It feels a little more personal, like somebody is there with you,' she said. 'I live alone with my two cats and I'm kind of in a rural area in Pennsylvania, so it's just a little bit of company almost.' The world of podcasts today is also far more integrated into social media. Clips of video podcasts slot neatly into the Gen Z and millennial behemoths of TikTok and Instagram. The sophisticated YouTube recommendation algorithm suggests relevant new podcasts to viewers, something that wasn't possible in the old, siloed model on other platforms. To get a sense of just how much things have changed, imagine the viral podcast appearances of the 2024 presidential campaign – Donald Trump on Von's podcast and Kamala Harris on 'Call Her Daddy' – happening without YouTube, TikTok, Instagram and X. You can't. In a sign of the times, in June, radio company Audacy shuttered Pineapple Street Studios, a venerable podcast producer known for its in-depth narrative shows such as 'Wind of Change' and Ronan Farrow's 'The Catch and Kill Podcast.' Jenna Weiss-Berman, who co-founded Pineapple Street, is now head of audio at comedian and actress Amy Poehler's Paper Kite Productions. Poehler's new podcast, 'Good Hang with Amy Poehler,' is typical of the genre: a charismatic, well-known host, interviewing other charismatic, well-known people. Weiss-Berman said she was concerned that the costs associated with high-quality video production would be prohibitive for smaller podcast creators, who faced almost no barrier to entry when all the genre required was a few microphones. 'If you want to do it well, you need a crew and a studio,' Weiss-Berman said. For podcasters with an established audience, the potential of video to open up new audiences for the world of talk podcasts is obvious. (The Times has introduced video podcasts hosted by some of its more recognisable columnists.) Adam Friedland, a comedian who started his video interview show in 2022, first came to prominence on an irreverent and lewd audio-only hangout podcast with two fellow comedians. He got an early taste of the limitations of traditional podcast distribution when he discovered fan cutups of the funniest moments of his old show on YouTube. 'There was an organic growth to it,' Friedland said. 'We weren't doing press or promoting it.' Friedland's new show is an arch interview program with high-profile guests and considerably fewer impenetrable – not to mention scatological – references. Along with that, distribution over YouTube has made a once cult figure something a bit closer to a household name, as he discovered recently. 'There was a regular middle-aged guy at a Starbucks who said he liked the show,' Friedland recalled. 'Some guy holding a Sweetgreen.' Friedland's show is the rare video podcast with a distinctive visual point of view. The vintage-looking set is a reconstruction of 'The Dick Cavett Show.' And Friedland made it clear that he prefers people to watch the show rather than listen to it. The many ways that Americans now consume podcasts – actively and passively, sometimes with another device in hand, sometimes without – bears an obvious similarity to the way Americans consume television. 'I think podcasts could become kind of the new basic cable television,' said Marshall Lewy, chief content officer of Wondery, a podcast network owned by Amazon. Think: shows that are cheaper to produce than so-called premium streaming content, consumed by audiences used to half-watching television while scrolling their smartphones, in a wide variety of genres. Indeed, although talk dominates among video podcasts, Lewy said he thought the trend for video would lead to more shows about food and travel – categories beloved by advertisers – that weren't ideal when podcasts were audio only. All of which calls into question the basic nature of the term 'podcast.' Riismandel, who runs the research firm Signal Hill, said he thought the category applied to any programming that could be listened to without video and still understood. According to Katz, the YouTube executive, the nature of the podcaster is undergoing a redefinition. It includes both audio-only podcasters moving to video, as well as social media content creators who have realised that podcasts present another opportunity to build their audiences. One concern with the shift to video, according to former Vox and Semafor video boss Joe Posner, is that people who are less comfortable on screen will be left out. This could lead to a deepening gender divide, for example, since women are much more likely to face harassment over their looks, especially from an engaged online fan base – and therefore potentially less likely to want to be on camera for hours on end. Still, for all the eyeballs moving to YouTube, audio remains the way most consumers experience podcasts, according to the April survey, with 58% of people listening to only audio or to a minimised or backgrounded video. And although YouTube is now the most used platform for podcast consumption, per the survey, it's far from monolithic; a majority of podcast consumers say they use a platform other than YouTube most often, whether it's Spotify or Apple Podcasts. That's why at least one pillar of audio-first podcasting doesn't see much to be alarmed about. Ira Glass, creator of the foundational long-form radio show 'This American Life,' said the fact that the podcast tent has gotten bigger and thrown up a projector screen doesn't threaten a program like his. 'That's a strength, not a weakness – that both things exist and are both called the same thing,' Glass said. He stressed that audio-only podcasting has formal strengths that video podcasts don't. 'There's a power to not seeing people,' Glass said. 'There's a power to just hearing things. It just gets to you in a different way. But if people want to watch people on a talk show, that seems fine to me. I don't feel protective of podcasting in that way. I don't have snowflake-y feelings about podcasts.' – ©2025 The New York Times Company This article originally appeared in The New York Times.
Business Insider
26-07-2025
- Business
- Business Insider
Meta just hired the co-creator of ChatGPT in an escalating AI talent war with OpenAI
Shengjia Zhao, a co-creator of ChatGPT and former lead scientist at OpenAI, is joining Meta as chief scientist of its Superintelligence Labs. CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced Zhao's appointment on Friday in a social media post, and called him a "pioneer" in the field who has already driven several major AI breakthroughs. Zhao previously helped build GPT-4 and led synthetic data efforts at OpenAI. According to the post, Zhao will now work directly with Zuckerberg and Meta's newly appointed chief AI officer, Alexandr Wang, the founder and CEO of Scale AI. The new hire comes during Zuckerberg's multibillion-dollar AI spending spree, including a $15 billion investment in Scale AI and the creation of Meta Superintelligence Labs, a new division focused on foundational models and next-gen research. In addition to Zhao, the company has lured away the three researchers who built OpenAI's Zurich office — Lucas Beyer, Alexander Kolesnikov, and Xiaohua Zhai — all of whom previously also worked at Google's DeepMind. The Superintelligence Labs team is now comprised of a lineup of names previously seen with OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google. But the war for AI talent is far from over. Databricks VP Naveen Rao likened the competition to "looking for LeBron James," estimating that fewer than 1,000 people worldwide can build frontier AI models. Companies without the cash for massive pay packages are turning to hackathons and computing power as incentives. Perplexity CEO Aravind Srinivas said a Meta researcher he tried to poach told him to ask again when the company has "10,000 H100s." AI tech workers have previously told Business Insider that Meta's Mark Zuckerberg has been emailing prospects directly and even hosting AI researchers at his home, while OpenAI CEO Sam Altman has made personal calls to potential hires. Tech company executives have mixed feelings about Meta's poaching efforts. "Meta right now are not at the frontier, maybe they'll they'll manage to get back on there," said Demis Hassabis, the CEO of Google DeepMind, on an episode of the "Lex Fridman Podcast," which aired on Friday. "It's probably rational what they're doing from their perspective because they're behind and they need to do something," Hassabis added. During a July 18 episode of the podcast "Uncapped with Jack Altman," OpenAI CEO Sam Altman criticised some of Meta's "giant offers" to his company's employees, and called the strategy "crazy."
Business Insider
26-07-2025
- Business
- Business Insider
Meta just hired the co-creator of ChatGPT in an escalating AI talent war with OpenAI
Meta just escalated the AI talent war with OpenAI. Shengjia Zhao, a co-creator of ChatGPT and former lead scientist at OpenAI, is joining Meta as chief scientist of its Superintelligence Labs. CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced Zhao's appointment on Friday in a social media post, and called him a "pioneer" in the field who has already driven several major AI breakthroughs. Zhao previously helped build GPT-4 and led synthetic data efforts at OpenAI. According to the post, Zhao will now work directly with Zuckerberg and Meta's newly appointed chief AI officer, Alexandr Wang, the founder and CEO of Scale AI. The new hire comes during Zuckerberg's multibillion-dollar AI spending spree, including a $15 billion investment in Scale AI and the creation of Meta Superintelligence Labs, a new division focused on foundational models and next-gen research. In addition to Zhao, the company has lured away the three researchers who built OpenAI's Zurich office — Lucas Beyer, Alexander Kolesnikov, and Xiaohua Zhai — all of whom previously also worked at Google's DeepMind. The Superintelligence Labs team is now comprised of a lineup of names previously seen with OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google. But the war for AI talent is far from over. Databricks VP Naveen Rao likened the competition to "looking for LeBron James," estimating that fewer than 1,000 people worldwide can build frontier AI models. Companies without the cash for massive pay packages are turning to hackathons and computing power as incentives. Perplexity CEO Aravind Srinivas said a Meta researcher he tried to poach told him to ask again when the company has "10,000 H100s." AI tech workers have previously told Business Insider that Meta's Mark Zuckerberg has been emailing prospects directly and even hosting AI researchers at his home, while OpenAI CEO Sam Altman has made personal calls to potential hires. Tech company executives have mixed feelings about Meta's poaching efforts. "Meta right now are not at the frontier, maybe they'll they'll manage to get back on there," said Demis Hassabis, the CEO of Google DeepMind, on an episode of the "Lex Fridman Podcast," which aired on Friday. "It's probably rational what they're doing from their perspective because they're behind and they need to do something," Hassabis added. During a July 18 episode of the podcast "Uncapped with Jack Altman," OpenAI CEO Sam Altman criticised some of Meta's "giant offers" to his company's employees, and called the strategy "crazy." "The degree to which they're focusing on money and not the work and not the mission," said Sam Altman. "I don't think that's going to set up a great culture."
CNBC
23-07-2025
- Business
- CNBC
Google CEO: Young people who learn this tactic can become more successful than most—it's crucial to career growth
Google and Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai has some advice for young professionals: When you see someone in your workplace who's smarter than you are, do everything you can to learn from them. "Try to get yourself in a position where you're working with people who you feel are stretching your abilities. [That] is what helps you grow," Pichai, 53, said on an episode of the "Lex Fridman Podcast," which aired on June 5. Earlier in his own career — he was an engineer at Applied Materials and McKinsey & Co. consultant before joining Google in 2004 — Pichai experienced multiple moments of working "with people who I felt were better than me," he said. He described the feeling of talking to a colleague and having a "Wow!" moment when he realized that their skills and knowledge surpassed his own. "You want that feeling a few times [early in your career]," said Pichai. If you feel daunted by the realization that your skills lag behind those of some colleagues, try to be "open-minded enough" to commit to spending time around those people whose talents exceed your own, Pichai said. Gravitating toward and observing those people can help you learn by absorbing as much of their expertise and work ethic as possible, according to research into the "Positive Spillover" effect by Northwestern University. In the tech industry, just sitting within 25 feet of a high performer at work can boost your own performance by up to 15 percent, Northwestern researchers found in a 2017 study. "Putting yourself in uncomfortable positions" can help you develop new beneficial skills and practices, said Pichai, adding: "I think, often you'll surprise yourself." Pichai isn't the only successful executive to share this advice. Surrounding yourself with smart people who have good values is "enormously important," billionaire investor Warren Buffett told attendees of Berkshire Hathaway's annual shareholder meeting in May. "You are going to have your life progress in the general direction of the people that you work with," said Buffett, Berkshire Hathaway's longtime CEO, adding that "you'll learn all the time" if you surround yourself with impressive people. Buffett has preached that message for more than two decades, noting at Berkshire Hathaway's 2004 shareholder meeting that young people can especially benefit from "[hanging] out with people better than you." When you're less experienced in the workplace, your mindset is likely to be more malleable, helping you learn and adopt positive habits more easily, he observed.
