Lex by Claude

Lex Fridman's spacious, winding interviews are a thing of beauty - he fully explores the byways of brilliant minds. It’s clear to me and millions of people why his unique style of open-ended interviews are so popular. But clocks tick on, oblivious to our desire to extract every drop of wisdom, pushing forward time until our next and following meeting is upon us.?

In my work, it’s part of my job to explore use cases for emerging technologies. Pondering the unforgiving persistence of time against the desire of my peers to glean more than just headlines from Lex’s pod, I realized there was an opportunity to play with a new friend: Claude.?

"Claude, be my executive summary machine!" I asked one day, inundating the bot with pages of Lexian discourse. Claude processed diligently, but failed to return consistent results… at first. This is where I began to understand the current shortcomings of GenAI technology, and how working together like R2 and Anakin makes for the most impressive results.?

After an attempt of simply dumping the transcript of a three-hour interview, I returned to the script and after careful contemplation decided it would be more efficient to have Claude summarize each topic of the interview. This returned more consistent results, and after several attempts Claude was able to consistently return a short summary of a topic followed by a list of key points.?

Claude couldn’t understand the meaning of stylistic choices like bold, italic, double-hyphens, or nested lists; and, far be it for me to judge but Claude has a terrible time with custom tables as well. However, with some finesse and getting to know one another, Claude became a valuable partner.?

After a rocky start we started returning truncated accounts full of resonant insights in prose and lists. With care, I curated Claude's selections into a concentrated compilation - the essence in a readily digestible dose.?

Once we had completed all topics of the three-hour interview I realized this was still too long for an ordinary person to digest as a wholesome daily fruit of knowledge. But first an essential ingredient was still missing. I longed to hear these eloquent passages in the recognizable intonations of Lex himself. A dash of digital impersonation gave me just that.

I identified several tools to clone Lex Fridman’s voice using audio ripped from a YouTube video and finally decided on Play HT (www.play.ht) because it was basically free and the quality was okay too. You can make up to one cloned voice for free -- you have to pay for multiple voice clones and HD quality.?

Lex's full banquets remain an irreducible joy. But with Claude's aid, I was able to further reduce the summaries of each topic into a concise script and have it read by an uncanny likeness of Lex himself. It took me less time than a typically interview to complete, and it can be relished by anyone who thrives on bleeding edge of thought but for whom life rarely grants a holiday.

Read the full summaries on my blog: https://www.malesniak.com/my-blog//p/lex-by-claude.html

Listen to the Lex by Claude summary audio on Soundcloud: https://on.soundcloud.com/BKWsE