Lex Fridman is a research scientist at MIT. <https://web.mit.edu/directory/?id=lexfridman&d=mit.edu>
I doubt there are any notable research contributions from him. His actual PhD is from Drexel - Not MIT.
Lex got his PhD at Drexel over a decade ago. If he had pursued an academic career, he would most likely be an associate professor by now. Working as a researcher at a lab at a university that you aren’t a faculty member of is basically “failure to launch” at this stage.
But Lex is a successful podcaster. His dad is a successful academic and scientist (at Drexel.) Lex is not that, but he plays one on the internet.
The rest are at least 6 years old.
So what is he doing as a research scientist. Don’t get me wrong - I like his podcast. I think he gets good guests. But he’s not doing any level of research.
Not just that but I would also suggest to stop using the Internet Archive in general, as it is obviously not a reliable source of truth like Wikipedia or many news outlets with specialized people that spend a non-trivial amount of their time carefully checking all of this information.
Very normal stuff.
Nah, that's just reddit. At this point it's safer to take anything that's popular on reddit as either outright wrong or so heavily out of context that it's not relevant.