On January 21, American blogger Lex Friedman announced that he was going to fly to Russia to interview Vladimir Putin.

Everyone immediately began to discuss this news, since Putin rarely gives interviews to foreign journalists, and has never communicated with bloggers at all.

Lex Friedman is now the most famous interviewer on YouTube. His channel has 4.5 million subscribers, and his guests have included Donald Trump, Barack Obama, Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg and many other celebrities.

Friedman himself has a very interesting biography. He was born in the USSR under the name Alexey Fedotov, spent his childhood in Moscow, then moved to the USA, became a doctor of science, worked at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and only after that he started a YouTube channel.

Spent his childhood in the USSR


Lex Friedman in second grade

Lex Friedman was born on August 15, 1983 in Chkalovsk (now Buston), Tajik SSR. He spent his childhood first in Kyiv, then in Moscow, at the age of 11 with his parents in the USA.

His parents have Ukrainian and Jewish roots. Father, Alexander Friedman, professor of physics and director of the Institute of Technology at Drexel University (Pennsylvania, USA).

Alexander’s brother, Grigory Friedman, also lives in the United States and works as a physical science researcher at Drexel University.

In 2010, Lex Friedman received a master’s degree in computer science from Drexel University, and in 2014 he defended his doctorate at the same university. The title of his PhD is “Exploring Personality Using Behavioral Biometrics for Open Authentication.”

Managed to work at Google

In 2014, Friedman got a job at Google. He served on the Advanced Technologies and Projects Commission and strictly enforced authentication methods to replace traditional passwords.

However, after 6 months he left the company, receiving a position as a research fellow at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT).

I enjoy exploring chaos and academia. My values ​​are to do my best and come up with the coolest and most interesting ideas I can. For me, an academic environment works best where friends and colleagues around me can create that kind of atmosphere.

Lex Friedman

He started working in a team that represents a huge amount of driver behavior based on big data and psychology.

Published a very controversial study about Tesla


Lex Friedman with The Boring Company flamethrower

In 2019, while at MIT, Lex Friedman co-authored a controversial study on Tesla’s Autopilot, which argued that regular drivers remain primitive while using Autopilot.

The study found that “patterns of decreased vigilance, although common in human-machine interaction paradigms, do not hold true for AI-assisted driving.” In other words, drivers using semi-autonomous vehicles remain complex.

This study contradicted many examples of research showing that people tend to get in the way when partially automated systems are involved.

Therefore it is not surprising that it caused a lot of criticism in the scientific world . Scientists criticized the study for its small selection of people. They also suggested that people acted differently because they knew they were being watched—that is, there was a Hawthorne effect.

Missy Cummings, a former MIT professor who worked as a senior safety adviser at the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, called the study “deeply flawed.”

What happens is people like Elon Musk take that and then try to make this big deal out of proportion and say, “Science is on my side.”

Missy Cummings, Senior Safety Advisor at the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration

When Anima Anandkumar, a well-known artificial intelligence expert, tweeted in 2019 that Friedman should submit his work to peer review before igniting it in the press, Friedman blocked her and many of her other colleagues, some of whom were not even involved in the discussion . .

Made friends with Elon Musk

A week after the study was published, Elon Musk invited Friedman to the Tesla office. Musk gave a 32-minute interview on Friedman’s podcast (his first high-profile guest on the channel) in which he argued that within the next year, Tesla’s semi-autonomous systems will become so safe that if a person intervenes while driving, it could actually reduce safety.

Lex Friedman has long sympathized with Elon Musk. He was a sponsor of Tesla fans, and also posted photos with a flamethrower from The Boring Company, another Musk company.

A few weeks after the study was published, Friedman’s interview with Musk’s study was removed from the MIT website without explanation. Friedman himself moved from a research assistant position to an unpaid position in the aeronautics and astronautics department.

Now Musk and Friedman are friends. Together they are confident that Musk changes regularly on Friedman’s podcast. They also regularly boost each other’s tweets in X.

Became one of the main interviewers on YouTube

Lex Friedman created his YouTube channel in 2006, and began uploading his first videos only in 2014.

First, he published a short lecture on artificial intelligence and interviews with scientists and experts in this field. However, the channel is very niche.

It was originally called “The Artificial Intelligence Podcast.” It was later renamed The Lex Friedman Podcast, and the word “podcast” subsequently disappeared from the name.

After the release of an interview with Elon Musk in 2018, Friedman began to actively develop the interview genre. Over the course of six years, he spoke with many famous people, including politicians, businessmen and actors.. Here is just a small list of those who gave interviews to Friedman:

▶︎ Elon Musk: founder of Tesla and SpaceX
▶︎ Barack Obama: former US President
▶︎ Donald Trump: US President
▶︎ Vladimir Zelensky: President of Ukraine
▶︎ Benjamin Netanyahu: Prime Minister of Israel
▶︎ Jeff Bezos: founder of Amazon and Blue Origin
▶︎ Mark Zuckerberg: founder of Meta
▶︎ Jimmy Wales: co-founder of Wikipedia
▶︎ Sam Altman: CEO of OpenAI
▶︎ Dario Amodei: founder Anthropic
▶︎ Joe Rogan: podcaster
▶︎ Kanye West: rapper
▶︎ MisterBeast: blogger
▶︎ Matthew McConaughey: actor
▶︎ Oliver Stone: rerжyscer
▶︎ Lisa Randall: physicist
▶︎ Tucker Clarkson: magazineiest
▶︎ Vitalik Buterin: creator of the Ethereum cryptocurrency

Friedman also often communicates with scientists and historians. Since launching the podcast in 2018, he has given over 350 interviews.

Currently, Lex Friedman’s channel has 4.5 million subscribers. Over the past year, the channel’s audience has grown by 900 thousand subscribers.

Why Friedman is criticized


The most popular video on Friedman’s channel is an interview with Andrew Bustamante, a former CIA spy

As his channel grew in popularity, the amount of criticism towards Lex Friedman increased.

His channel has become a platform for those who want to speak out to a large audience. For example, Kanye West criticized the president, Joe Rogan, and psychologist Jordan Peterson questioned climate change.

Although Friedman himself tries to remain neutral in conversations, some scientists believe that his channel allows for a “cacophony of misinformation.”

However, in general, criticism does not affect its success. In the last year alone, the total number of views of his videos was 225 million.

On this Friedman platform, many scientists could share their ideas with an additional audience. Open-ended and non-technical questions Friedman made complex topics accessible to non-experts. Many people praise him for inviting a variety of guests, with whom he does not always see eye-to-eye.

How does Friedman live?


Friedman meets sparring with Mark Zuckerberg and Elon Musk

Friedman lives in a four-story townhouse in Austin, Texas. He has no wife and children. Only he and robot vacuum cleaners live in the house.

He follows a keto diet, regularly runs with brown background noise, and also practices judo and Brazilian jiu-jitsu. He has a black belt in jiu-jitsu.

Lex Friedman speaks English fluently, although not always perfectly. However, he managed to conduct the interview in English. By the way, many of his interviews on YouTube have an official audio track in English.

When to expect a conversation with Putin

Lex Friedman announced his desire to talk with Vladimir Putin after an interview with Vladimir Zelensky.

Putin’s press secretary Dmitry Peskov said that the president is ready to give an interview, and that such a conversation is indeed underway, but this is not a matter of the immediate future.

We’re really on board with this. He came out to us and said that he wanted to come to Moscow. He comes from our region. He would like to discuss the possibility of an interview with the President.

There are no exact agreements on this yet, but Alex and I are really in contact. In any case, we will be glad to see him come to Moscow.

He knows very well that this is not a short-term issue. For the president to need to give an interview, there must be some conditions that require additional clarification.

Dmitry Peskov

If the interview takes place, it will be Putin’s first conversation with a foreign blogger on YouTube.






Source: Iphones RU

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I am a professional journalist and content creator with extensive experience writing for news websites. I currently work as an author at Gadget Onus, where I specialize in covering hot news topics. My written pieces have been published on some of the biggest media outlets around the world, including The Guardian and BBC News.

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