Lex Fridman Podcast / episode intelligence
Speakers in the public record
Claim mix
Evidence policy
Every row below preserves an exact excerpt. Identified speakers are linked; unresolved voices are labeled and excluded from people counts.
Claim ledger
34 published records
01 / recommendation
“I mentioned to you that I’m traveling to have some very difficult conversation with high profile figures both in the war in Ukraine and in Israel and Palestine. And I read the Wikipedia articles around that, and I also read books on the conflict and the history of the different regions.”
02 / belief
“In so doing, help increase the chance that we can propagate the flame of human consciousness out towards the stars. And I think another important one, if we fail to do that.”
03 / belief
“I think in 10 years, we probably will have a lot more AI supporting tools like I’ve talked about, and probably your search experience would be you can ask a question and get the answer rather than from our body of work.”
04 / belief
“I think even when just two people make up stuff about you or lie about you or say mean things about you or bully you, that can feel like a crowd.”
05 / belief
“I think what you also realize is there has to be, for Wikipedia credible sources, verifiable sources, and there’s a dance there because some of the sources are pieces of journalism.”
06 / belief
“I would say particularly in the last whatever, 15 years, we’ve seen a real decimation of local media, local newspapers.”
07 / belief
“I live in the UK, I live in London, I’ve never seen on the streets the kind of the thing that there’s a lot of reports of people actively angry because someone else is wearing a mask, that sort of thing in public. So because it became very politicized, then clearly if Wikipedia… No, so anyway, if you go to Wikipedia and you research this topic, I think you’ll find more or less what I’ve just said.”
08 / belief
“I think persisting with the business model behind Wikipedia is such an inspiring story, because we live in a capitalist world.”
09 / uncertainty
“Yeah, two people liked it. And I don’t know, maybe you can comment on whether there’s truth to it, but I just found it interesting because I’ve been doing a lot of research on World War II recently.”
10 / belief
“I think right now, this sort of enormous step forward we’ve seen and has become public in the last year of the large language models really is something else.”
11 / observation
“The reason is a biography of a living person, if you get it wrong, you can actually be quite hurtful, quite damaging.”
12 / belief
“I think what happens, again, with social media is when there is that grappling process in Wikipedia and a decision is made to remove a paragraph or to remove a thing or to say a thing, you’re going to notice the one direction of the oscillation of the grappling and not the correction.”
13 / evaluation
“Again, it didn’t go viral because it was kind of silly, and if anything would’ve gone viral, it was me responding, but that’s one where it’s like, actually, I’m happy to respond because a lot of people don’t know that I don’t work there and that I don’t make millions, and I’m not a billionaire.”
14 / belief
“I just want to raise the question.” And then there’s this really interesting conversation that goes on where I think the general consensus was, you know what, this isn’t like the alarming headline racist thing on the front page of Wikipedia, holy moly, that sounds bad.”
15 / belief
“I mean, one of the things that people are sometimes surprised to hear me say is I actually think Larry Sanger doesn’t get enough credit for his early work in Wikipedia, even though I think co-founder’s not the right title for that.”
16 / belief
“On the deprecation of news sources is really interesting because I think what you’re saying is ultimately you want to make a article by article decision, use your own judgment.”
17 / belief
“I think there is a Wikipedia entry called something like the moon is made of cheese, where it talks about this is a common sort of joke or thing that children say or that people tell to children or whatever.”
18 / belief
“I doubt if the main article Moon, it may mention cheese, probably not even because it’s not credible and it’s not even meant to be serious by anyone, or the article on the Earth certainly won’t have a paragraph that says, well, most scientists think it’s round, but certain people think flat.”
19 / belief
“Rather than showing you things we think you’re going to like, we want to show you some things that we think you will disagree with, but which we have some signals that suggest it’s of quality,” I’m like, “Now, that sounds interesting.”
20 / belief
“Mm-hmm. And I think Stack Overflow currently has policies against using GPT. There’s a contentious kind of tension.”
21 / belief
“If the people who are saying things that get engagement, if it’s not too awful, but it’s just, maybe it’s not a racist uncle, but maybe it’s an uncle who posts a lot about what an idiot Biden is, which isn’t necessarily an offensive or blockable or bannable thing, and it shouldn’t be, but if that’s the discourse that gets elevated because it gets a rise out of people, then suddenly in a society, it’s like, “Oh, we get more of what we reward,” so I think that’s a piece of what’s gone on.”
22 / belief
“Whereas I would say, 15 years ago, a photo randomly circulating on Twitter, in most cases, the worst you could do, and this did happen, is misrepresent the battlefield.”
23 / belief
“Humans were formally assessed as a species of least concern in 2008. I think Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy would slightly disagree.”
24 / belief
“Somehow, to correct that, I think because everybody feels the pain of that, everybody suffers the pain of that, I think we’ll be forced to fix that as a society, to figure out a way around that.”
25 / evaluation
“We should launch this as a side project, the idea of here’s a Wiki where we can start playing around.” But actually, we got more work done in two weeks than we had in almost two years because people were able to just jump on and start doing stuff, and it was actually a very exciting time.”
26 / evaluation
“Actually, and I’ve said this to Elon about Twitter Blue, which I think wasn’t rolled out well and so forth, but the piece of that that I like is to say, look, actually, if there’s a model where your revenue is coming from people who are willing to pay for the service, even if it’s only part of your revenue, if it’s a substantial part, that does change your broader incentives to say, actually, are people going to be willing to pay for something that’s actually just toxicity in their lives?”
27 / preference
“But there is a very, very harsh drop off because what I like is high quality disagreement.”
28 / prediction
“My understanding is it’s improved dramatically and also because the new methods of training don’t necessarily involve identical corpuses to try to match things up, but rather reading and understanding with tokens and large language models, and then reading and understanding, and then you get a much richer … Anyway, apparently it’s quite improved, so I think that now, it is quite possible that these smaller language communities are going to say, “Oh, well finally, I can put something in an English and I can get out Zulu that I feel comfortable sharing with my community because it’s actually good enough, or I can edit it a bit here and there.”
29 / preference
“I think engineers, for the most part, want to create platforms that are open and unbiased that create all kinds of perspective because that’s super exciting to have all kinds of perspectives battle it out, but still is there a degree to which the personal political bias of the editors might seep in in silly ways and in big ways?”
30 / evaluation
“No, I agree. But the one thing I’ve said in the past, and this depends on who that person is and what they’re doing, but it’s like I think my credibility, my general credibility in the world should be the equal of a New York Times reporter.”
31 / evaluation
“His ability to name members of the board, his control of the company is pretty hard to break even if financial results aren’t as good as they could be because he’s taken a step back from the perfect optimization to say, “Actually, for the longterm health in the next 50 years of this organization, we need to reign in some of the things that are working for us in making money because they’re actually giving us a bad reputation.”
32 / prediction
“There’s a lot of reasons why it might not be good.” And even back then, I didn’t think as much as I have since about a business model can tend to drive you in a certain place, and really thinking that through in advance is really important because you might say, “Yeah, we’re really, really keen on community control and neutrality,” but if we had an advertising based business model, probably that would begin to erode.”
33 / disagreement
“Well, I don’t agree with everything he has to say, because I think that’s not a meaning that can motivate most people in their own lives.”
34 / evaluation
“I like the example, as a parent I would say our entries on early childhood development probably aren’t as good as they should be because a lot of the Wikipedia volunteers… Actually we’re getting older, the Wikipedians, so that demographic has changed a bit.”