I have no idea whether this applies to Lex, or if there are better explanations, but... he probably just asks. In my limited experience with my little podcast in the sports analytics world, I'm consistently surprised by who says yes, and how few people say no. ~90% of the people I've asked to be a guest have said yes, and those who have said no haven't done so because they're "too famous" or something like that.
Working at MIT and having a small history of good guests probably helps.
The guests themselves make value judgments of whether this polite, motivated, knowledgeable, reasonably boring guy with a sizeable audience and good credentials can help them to spread their own messages without much journalistic pushback.
His audio quality is also not bad.
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Personal opinion: The interviews are far too long. I'd like an informed opinion of the best (as opposed to most famous or controversial or odd) guests. If a biology expert told me Lex's interview with Eric Lander was a Must Listen, I'd value that more than, "oh! It's three hours of Elon Musk, but his personal values are well-known and haven't changed."
I would listen to a few very interesting conversations unedited OR a larger collection of reasonably interesting, short, heavily curated conversations. I enjoy hearing about subjects I normally don't encounter, and some of his guests bring this experience. Listening to months of audio to find these gems is not for me.
I prefer a small group of podcasts that have shorter episodes, entertaining/engaging hosts, interesting guests,
Personally I find 20 to 30 minute interviews the sweet spot. Sometimes I’ll go a bit shorter and sometimes a bit longer but for 1:1 something like an hour feels too much most of the time.
I like the long conversations, because it’s easier to be a fake person for 30 minutes, but comparatively it’s hard to fake being a genuine person or expert on a topic for 2 or 3 hours.
I'm sure it's a fault of my attention span but I tend to be a fan of 30 minute conference presentations and otherwise distilling topics down to about that length. Otherwise, it often feels like you're dragging things out. I'm not having a date with the person. I want to discover for my audience what key insights they have.
I do sometimes have longer podcast conversations with people I know well but 20-30 minutes feels like the natural sweet spot for my typical interview.
Not OP, but they're referring to situations when players call their own lines. (Virtually all amateur matches.) If you are horrible (or blatantly biased) at calling lines, your opponent can call the tournament referee, and you may end up with a line judge. But that takes time, and only happens after you aggravate your opponent. If you wait until a key moment to make a bad call in your favor, your opponent won't be able to reverse it, even if they call the referee and get a third party to call the lines for the rest of the match.
This is a particularly big issue in competitive junior tennis, unfortunately.
Those Antarctic islands are the Balleny Islands. I took a cruise a couple of years ago from NZ to Antarctica, and we were able to land on Borradaile island [1], one of the Ballenys. I can't find my notes for the exact figure, but the historian on board said that, including us, only a few hundred people had ever set foot there. Many expeditions pass within sight of them, but landing is treacherous--IIRC, we went onshore for about an hour in the morning, and by lunch it no longer would've been possible to do so.
Yes! Balleny! That is a really great story, I'm jealous you got to go there. That aligns with my understanding that it's very difficult to actually land there even if you plan it really well. Sounds like you had the luck of a lifetime, amazing.
Broadly speaking, major chords sound bright and happy. Minor chords sound dark and sad.
The C major scale consists of C-D-E-F-G-A-B-C. The A-minor scale consists of A-B-C-D-E-F-G-A. Those are the same notes, but if you play each of those patterns on a keyboard, the first one sounds happy, the second one sounds sad.
A C-major chord (technically, triad) is made up of C-E-G, the first, third, and fifth notes of the scale. Again, sounds happy. The A-minor triad is A-C-E ... sad.
But if you play a melody -- that is, one note at at a time -- it isn't always clear whether it's happy or sad. In most western music, though (including virtually all pre-1900 classical music and the vast majority of modern pop), the piece will end ("resolve") with a clearer "happy" or "sad" type of chord. That final chord is what determines the key.
(In a huge amount of classical and popular music, the final chord is the same as the opening chord, but not always. When they're different, the final chord tells you the key.)
It is just a convention, not a rule. It is very common in classical music for a piece in a minor key to end on a major chord (called a Picardy 3rd) or in some cases to end on the dominate 5th - which is a major chord. The latter though, isn't usually the absolute end of a piece because it leaves you hanging (rather like ending "Happy Birthday" on the word "to" - and leaving off the "you").
Maybe it would make for some interesting taxidermy post-mortem... though I suppose it would be difficult to differentiate between "this chicken whose head I just cut off" and "this one lived for 18 months"!
Yep. I drove a cab for about a year (2003ish, college town of ~200,000 people), and the company I drove for did this. It wasn't a big business, but there were a few substantial accounts, notably the local university hospital system, which sent around a lot of specimens in very serious-looking containers. Pre-ubiquitous GPS, shared taxi dispatching and routing involved a lot of yelling and guessing.
Per the article, he spent years in concentration camps, but only a few days at Auschwitz.