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 the right way to think about it is that I’m not attracted to most people, but I can be attracted to people regardless of gender.”
02 / uncertainty
“I don’t know that everyone is always going to meet lots of people at the same time that they’re going to love. But I think that there’s been a move towards more people embracing open relationships and non-traditional relationship structures, and I think that is healthy to at least have as an option.”
03 / belief
“The biggest thing that researchers find people misunderstand about bisexuality is that it’s a phase and that it’s this idea that it’s transient, that it’s always changing, and that it’s a stepping stone. So, I think a lot of people still see bisexuality as on the way to gay town.”
04 / belief
“” I think that’s interesting and I think that sort of “pics or it didn’t happen” so that the social media generation obviously is perhaps even more in line with that also in terms of how you deal with that in social context.”
05 / belief
“The point is to then prevent it, and to prevent it in ourselves because that’s I think ultimately what has to happen.”
06 / belief
“Of course, it’s heinous, but I have this real sympathy for that, and I think that’s important for us to have, though.”
07 / belief
“I think the point of describing that was that we often label that as evil or bad.”
08 / belief
“We had no way of reliably cataloging information, never mind the scientific method, never mind reliably sharing it with one another, or fact-checking quickly with things like Google. So I mean, we’re so close to facts, but that in some ways, I think, is the… The worry is that we’ve gotten comfortable feeling like we can just access things that aren’t modified or that are less likely to be modified, and now they’re more likely to be.”
09 / belief
“Hmm. Because I do, and I think that’s why I’m so interested in concepts and ideas.”
10 / belief
“I think you could be a troubled straight person, a troubled homosexual person, a troubled asexual person. And just thinking about why and which aspects are maybe missing, I think, is really healthy for people to do.”
11 / belief
“I mean, he was a tricky person because I think he was profoundly lonely, and this is something we see with a lot of serial killers is that they have this loneliness, which I think not only contributes to them committing the crimes in the first place, but also allows them to get away with things because they don’t have as much of a social network or any social network that is helping them to do what’s called reality monitoring, to understand what’s true and what’s not.”
12 / belief
“Definitely, and I think that research consistently shows that bisexual men are more likely to identify as gay or straight.”
13 / belief
“There’s this wide range of things, and I think people also feel often deeply ashamed about the things that they are interested in. And I think that is also really sad because it makes it more likely that people are going to not be able to live that part of themselves and also that they think there’s something wrong with them.”
14 / belief
“I think I’m… I actually reduced those people down to a few concepts about the characteristics of their face, and I might be visualizing the concepts.”
15 / belief
“I think you mentioned somewhere, maybe in an interview, that there was some concern of being sexualized when you covered the topic of sexuality.”
16 / belief
“I don’t think it’s true. And I think that there can be an uncautious approach to memory, as you were saying, where you have someone who is saying things and your role as a therapist is to help them manage their emotions now and to feel better, and that’s the other thing is that they have a very different role than I do.”
17 / belief
“The research on human sexuality, I think, is interesting because we keep finding that people have these desires that they feel weird about, that… Unless they have a community or an app that you can go to to live those fantasies, they can feel quite troubling to the individual and they can make you unwell.”
18 / belief
“What are these insights that I’ve won from this experience?” And so I think that is an important part of resilience that we ideally need to celebrate and teach more than… The opposite, which is hanging in the negatives.”
19 / belief
“I mean, I also speak with people who I think are, or have, committed terrible crimes, and I’ve spoken to these people because, as a criminal psychologist, that’s often part of my job. So, what’s interesting, I think, when you’re speaking to people who have committed really terrible crimes, or certainly who’ve been convicted of terrible crimes, is that not only is it potentially insightful because they might give you a real answer and not just a controlled narrative about why they committed these crimes.”
20 / belief
“You used the analogy of a Wikipedia page for memory. I think that’s a pretty useful way to think about it.”
21 / belief
“I think all of us are capable of doing basically the worst things we can imagine. And one of the reasons I think that is because you can see neighbors turning on each other, especially if you look historically at the start of wars or big political moments where you have people who would have called each other friends turning each other in to the police, killing each other, doing terrible things.”
22 / uncertainty
“I just think from my mind, there was just a, “You can’t go there.” That’s… I don’t know how to empathize with that person.”
23 / belief
“I want the complete version history of your memory, and then I can tell you whether I think things have gone wrong here.”
24 / recommendation
“When I do corporate talks, I tell people the prompt that I use to use the cognitive interview, which is the best practices in memory interviewing, because you can also tell AI tools to do the appropriate kind of interviewing if you’re talking about memory things.”
25 / preference
“I mean, this is also why we like fiction because it allows you to maybe be somebody else, have someone else’s thoughts in your mind for a while and you really get to live it, as that for a bit.”
26 / recommendation
“Because if we want society to be safer, it should be based purely on what is most likely to deter crime and who is most likely to engage in it, and that’s where I think we’ve got it upside down.”
27 / preference
“I think that’s what people fear. So, a lot of the Nietzsche quotes I use are… some of them I like because they speak to the chapters I write about, and the issues I write about.”
28 / commitment
“There’s nothing inherent to anything that makes it evil. And so I also think that we need to dismantle that and empathize with people we call evil, because if we’re saying that this is the worst kind of act or worst kind of manifestation of what somebody can be, so if someone can destroy others, torture others, hurt others… I work as a criminal psychologist, so I work a lot on sexual abuse cases, on rape cases, on murder trials, and so in those contexts, that word “evil” is used all the time.”
29 / recommendation
“They’re actually a normal memory process. And that insight is why I wrote The Memory Illusion because I think people need to just understand that their minds work like this, and that they’re really glitchy when it comes to the accuracy of their autobiographical memories.”
30 / prediction
“I think in general, we have the way that we look at lots of crimes upside down. So we put murderers in prison for a really long time because we think that that’s justice, which is, sure, that’s one version where it’s, you know, an eye for an eye kind of.”
31 / evaluation
“Now, on the other hand, we obviously need to be careful not to assume that because in pornography BDSM is almost ubiquitous, it feels, that that means everybody wants this.”
32 / evaluation
“” And you can sort of see the delight in discovery as well. And I think sometimes scientists read as callous because we enjoy this discovery of knowledge and the discovery of insights.”
33 / evaluation
“Does that mean that it’s the implications of how your friends and family will see you that’s the problem? So he created this much more complex scale, which I think is really interesting for everybody to do, no matter what their sexuality is.”