Lex Fridman

Lex Fridman (born 15 August 1983) is a Russian-American computer scientist and podcaster.

He hosts the Lex Fridman Podcast, in which he interviews guests, which have included prominent figures in various fields, including science, technology, sports, and politics.

He then went on to obtain BSc. and MSc. degrees in computer science at Drexel University in 2010, and completed his PhD in electrical and computer engineering at Drexel in 2014.

His PhD dissertation, Learning of Identity from Behavioral Biometrics for Active Authentication, was completed under the advisement of engineering educators Moshe Kam and Steven Weber and sought to "investigate the problem of active authentication on desktop computers and mobile devices".

In 2014, Fridman got a job at Google, but left the company after only six months working there.

In 2015, he moved to MIT's AgeLab to work on "psychology and big-data analytics to understand driver behavior."

Fridman started his podcast in 2018 and rose to prominence in 2019 after he coauthored a non-peer reviewed study which concluded that drivers remained focused while using Tesla's semi-autonomous system, which received a positive response from Elon Musk, but was criticized by artificial intelligence experts.

Fridman was born in the Soviet Union and grew up in Moscow.

He is of Jewish descent.

His father Alexander Fridman is a plasma physicist and professor at Drexel University.

His brother Gregory is also a professor at Drexel.

When he was about 11, soon after the collapse of the Soviet Union, Fridman's family moved from Russia to the Chicago area.

He attended Neuqua Valley High School in Naperville, Illinois.

Fridman began his podcast in 2018.

In 2019, Fridman published a non-peer-reviewed study about Tesla Autopilot finding that drivers using semi-autonomous vehicles stayed focused, contrasting with established research on how humans interact with automated systems.

Following his Tesla Autopilot study, Fridman was flown to Tesla offices for an interview with Elon Musk.

Fridman's study on Tesla Autopilot was criticized for its methodology by Missy Cummings, a professor at Duke University and advisor for the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, who described it as "deeply flawed".

AI researcher Anima Anandkumar suggested Fridman should submit his study for peer review before seeking press coverage.

Following the interview with Musk, his podcast episodes saw significant growth.

The study was later removed from MIT's website.

Following the publication of the study, he left AgeLab and took up an unpaid role in MIT's Department of Aeronautics and Astronautics.

As of 2023, he is a research scientist at the MIT Laboratory for Information and Decision Systems (LIDS).

It was originally titled The Artificial Intelligence Podcast, but changed to The Lex Fridman Podcast in 2020.

Episodes of the podcast have included businessman Elon Musk, Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg, Wikipedia co-founder Jimmy Wales, actor Matthew McConaughey, rapper Kanye West, film director Oliver Stone, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, historian Yuval Noah Harari, and writer Mohammed el-Kurd.

In October 2022, shortly after his Twitter and Instagram accounts were restricted for making antisemitic posts, Kanye West made a two-hour-and-26 minute appearance on Fridman's podcast.

During the interview, West made a "series of incendiary and false statements about the Holocaust, abortion and the Jewish people."

Alongside a link to the interview with West, Fridman posted on X that, "I believe in the power of tough, honest, empathetic conversation to increase the amount of love in the world."

According to research experts interviewed by Business Insider in April 2023, Fridman "lacks the publications, citations and conference appearances required to be taken seriously in the hypercompetitive world of academia".

Computational biologist Lior Pachter said "some scientists and academics fear Fridman is contributing to the 'cacophony of misinformation'", while another AI researcher thought that Fridman may have "abandoned academic rigor in pursuit of fame".

In contrast, his former colleague Sertac Karaman, LIDS's director, stated: "Dr. Fridman has been a research scientist at MIT LIDS and in our research group. I have known him for many years, and been very impressed by his ideas and his research accomplishments."

Nathan J. Robinson of Current Affairs wrote, "Fridman is not an idealogue and seems genuine in his desire to empathetically understand leftists (he has also interviewed Richard Wolff, Steve Keen, and Noam Chomsky) and to be fair to all sides, he has hosted a debate between 'skeptical environmentalist' Bjorn Lomborg and climate journalist Andrew Revkin. But as with Rogan, it is hard to avoid noticing a certain lack of balance. There are far more right-leaning 'intellectual dark web' types than leftists [...]."

Robinson added that "the Fridman podcast is an excellent way to see how the posture of neutrality actually fails to adequately challenge falsehoods and toxic beliefs."

A 2023 article by Elizabeth Lopatto in The Verge stated that Fridman's podcast "has a following among the tech elite" and said that Fridman "is a softball interviewer" (someone who does not ask confrontational or probing questions of interviewees).

Ben Samuel argued in another 2023 article in Haaretz that Fridman failed to challenge claims made on his podcast by Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

Fridman holds a first degree black belt in Brazilian jiu-jitsu, awarded by Rick and Phil Migliarese at Balance Studios in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.

Fridman lives in Austin, Texas.