Lex Fridman

Lex Fridman (born 15 August 1983) is a Russian-American computer scientist and podcaster. Since 2018 he has hosted the Lex Fridman Podcast, where he interviews notable figures from various fields such as science, technology, sports, and politics.

Fridman rose to prominence in 2019 after Elon Musk praised his study which concluded that drivers remained focused while using Tesla's semi-autonomous driving system. The study was criticized by AI experts and was not peer-reviewed.

Early life and education
Fridman was born in the Soviet Union and grew up in Moscow. He is Jewish. His father Alexander Fridman is a plasma physicist and professor at Drexel University. His brother Gregory was 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. 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".

MIT
In 2014, Fridman was hired by Google to continue his dissertation work on the use of AI for identity authentication, but left the company after only six months stating that he prefers the "chaos of research and the academic environment". In 2015, he moved to MIT's AgeLab to work on "psychology and big-data analytics to understand driver behavior."

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).

Lex Fridman Podcast
Fridman began his podcast in 2018. 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, physicist Lisa Randall, and writer Mohammed El-Kurd. In 2024, the Boston Globe reported that the podcast had attracted 3.6 million subscribers.

In October 2022, 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."

Reception
Frank Wilczek stated that “Lex is at a higher intellectual level” than many journalists who cover science. In contrast, 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".

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 [Joe] 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". 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. A 2024 article in Bloomberg, by Ellen Huet, commented that Fridman's podcast is seen by tech CEOs as a friendlier alternative to more adversarial interviews with traditional journalists.

Personal life
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.