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
33 published records
01 / belief
“I think is a remake, but I’ve seen the original that Dale had made for his TV show and it’s still… It’s sitting in the collections of the National Museum of Nature in Ottawa, for Canada.”
02 / belief
“If you really want to understand animals, you need an understanding of what a real population and a growth of what these animals looks like. And Protoceratops is, I would argue, probably the only dinosaur where we can really do that, or at least as close as possible as you could get to any modern animal as an analog.”
03 / belief
“You need to roam further, which means, you know, if you’re a mouse and you happen to have a little bit of land and that bit doesn’t get hit, you’re fine; whereas if you’re an elephant and you need all of this land and even a chunk of it goes wrong, well that’s probably maybe not enough for you to survive anymore. So yeah, big things suffer disproportionately badly from these things, and mostly as well, we think terrestrial things generally do worse than things in water because water’s a great equilibrating medium, you know, it takes ages to heat up, it takes ages to cool down.”
04 / belief
“Yeah, but you wanted… So, it’s twofold because there’s the communication and the education part of it, which is something I’m massive on, and I think research is pointless if you don’t communicate it at some level.”
05 / belief
“I think the more recent analyses have shown that’s probably not the case, because in other words, they were basically doing fine right up to the extinction event.”
06 / belief
“There are a couple of other giant tyrannosaurs, there are a couple of giant carcharodontosaurs from South America that I would say are comparable in linear measurements, but are probably rather smaller and rather lighter, in which case your money is going to be on the bigger guy with the bigger bite.”
07 / belief
“Digging for water is critical, but it’s probably not what started it. And I think that’s where we get trapped with things like, say, the paddle tail of Spinosaurus or stuff like, or you know, or T-rex arms.”
08 / belief
“You’ve got something you can work with. And that’s why Protoceratops is so important, and I think way more important than even a lot of my fellow paleontologists realize, and I genuinely think we should be pouring a lot more research into them, because they can tell us stuff that pretty much no other dinosaur can.”
09 / belief
“There’s stuff from, like, Kyrgyzstan and places like this. I think there’s one, a relatively early one from Russia.”
10 / belief
“My book on dinosaur behavior, this is just the kind of thing I’m talking about. So, the tyrannosaur trackways of a group of tyrannosaurs is, I think, four or five tracks total.”
11 / belief
“Jurassic Park, unsurprisingly, has rather exaggerated it, so the one from, I think, Jurassic World is like twice the size it should be.”
12 / commitment
“You don’t want to be the sexiest, toughest, biggest male and you can only mate once, all right? There’s, there’s various cheats, but we won’t get into that just yet.”
13 / belief
“I think most people, you know, understandably… I’m a biologist, and I particularly pride myself on finding out about particularly weird animals.”
14 / belief
“” We put the dataset together, and then we found that actually, apart from the very biggest males, it’s really hard to tell males and females apart, and this actually really closely matched some modeling data that I’d done with a colleague, Jordan Mallon in Ottawa looking at this for alligators and trying to compare it to dinosaurs.”
15 / belief
“I think… I think I already have, to be honest. I’ve written three major papers, and one in particular with my colleague, Tom Holt, where we frankly savaged the idea that it’s a good swimmer.”
16 / belief
“There was already that selective pressure that was pushing it into a new opportunity, which gave it an… and then on and on and on, and that’s what keeps going. But it also brings up another thing, going back to dinosaurs and the behavior stuff, which again, I think has been a problem, is the functionality thing, and how there’s always been, I think, this big perception of single traits having single functions, which isn’t how a huge amount of biology works.”
17 / observation
“The trade-off is if the heat’s going to kill you, you’re probably better off being a bit paler and surviving in order to reproduce than you are being jet black but just dying instantly as soon as it gets hot.”
18 / belief
“Like, there’s a couple of plates missing, a handful of ribs, a couple of bones in the tail. I think a couple of toe bones.”
19 / belief
“I don’t think so, because I think that comes down to A) That bit of kind of classic almost Victorian speciesism, and you get these insane hypotheses like dinosaurs as a species or as a lineage became senile so they forgot to breed.”
20 / belief
“I suspect we’ve got a group of generalists and we just happen to have found them eating different things at different times.”
21 / belief
“I think Darwin had an analogy like that, of, we’ve got a few words on a few pages spread out, but between them you get an idea of what the story is and where it’s going.”
22 / belief
“You know, we have not just new species, which are often, I think, a lot less important, but just new specimens of ones we know, because again, it’s building up that database.”
23 / evaluation
“The early ones have like this midline crest, it, it really doesn’t work on a human.”
24 / preference
“Cheetahs are my go-to example for this. So cheetahs are the weird ones compared to the other cats because females are solitary, but males are social.”
25 / preference
“…that’s incredibly powerful. So Spinosaurus or the spinosaurs as a whole is my go-to example for this are the guys with famous big sail back and the weird crocodile-like head, though some of them look rather different to that, and if you look across all the species and specimens that we have, incredibly fragmentary and very badly known, but they’re all basically associated with… When you look at the gestalt, you see a whole bunch of stuff for these things.”
26 / evaluation
“We do have a couple like this, but they don’t have what I really want to see, which is if you trace the footprints of the individual carnivores, and if A’s early on, A’s footprint goes on top of B’s, but later on B’s go on top of A’s, they must have been there at the same time because there’s no way they could have been even minutes or hours apart.”
27 / prediction
“Like a juvenile Triceratops can still weigh a ton- And be the size of a rhino. They’re not that fast, and again if you get a head start on them because, as I said, I suspect they’re nocturnal, so that’s the other thing, it’s really hard to hide a T.”
28 / prediction
“I think what humans don’t quite realize is we may end up being just a chapter in a book. It might be our extinction event, self-created, perhaps a nuclear war, perhaps robots take over, perhaps we don’t know.”
29 / evaluation
“If you don’t care about the details, the story gets corrupted. So, I just wanted to say that some of the things you describe, like how many fingers, um- … it’s like that’s important to get that right, because if you do, some magical stuff can really emerge.”
30 / uncertainty
“I have very little idea because I think the data is so sparse that we can’t really say it with any confidence for anything, in my opinion.”
31 / prediction
“Well, the female offspring, the daughters, are probably going to inherit mother’s preference, “I really like red,” and the males are probably gonna have red in them because their dad had more red.”
32 / evaluation
“Most things can’t do that, and animals probably don’t like being hit in the face or hit in the eyes with a rock at a range because, again, they’re not going to know how it’s happened or how to respond to this.”
33 / evaluation
“Modifying A will kill you, therefore B never modifies, because the two are genetically linked in some way.”