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
21 published records
01 / belief
“I think that’s true, but I think in Mesopotamia it was different in terms of its potency and immediacy because there are no skyscrapers in Iraq.”
02 / belief
“I think so. But the paradoxical thing about Tom Lehrer is that when he’s talking about the bomb and all that, and devices, and international trouble, it’s so unchanged.”
03 / evaluation
“See, this is the important perspective that nobody considers. Because the thing is, when you have something which is contemporary, if you’re a clever journalist or a clever thinker, you can write essays about it, you can talk about it and you can see it, but you can only see it from the perspective from which you operate.”
04 / belief
“I think if you put them on a bus all wearing the same clothes, you wouldn’t know.”
05 / belief
“I think the big mistake for mankind was the creation of monotheistic religions, because they brought evil into the world.”
06 / belief
“I think my dad recorded them off the radio on a reel-to-reel tape recorder, and I learned them all by heart because they were so fantastic.”
07 / belief
“I do. I think the fireside narrative matters. You know, when we were kids it would be twerps with a guitar sitting around a fire on holiday.”
08 / belief
“I think the right way to think about it is the way the British Museum thinks about it.”
09 / belief
“I would say negligible, because I regard it as a literary matter— …which is not predicated on the existence of flood in people’s minds.”
10 / belief
“Many times what makes moments really precious is that they’re going to be gone. I think that’s not a trivial thing for us humans to really contend with.”
11 / belief
“The rivers, sometimes there wasn’t enough water, sometimes there was too much, sometimes there was far too much water. So the mechanism that the waters could be used as a destructive force by the powers that be is a plausible Mesopotamian mechanism and is based, in a sort of sense, in my opinion, in reality.”
12 / evaluation
“He’s called the Father of Assyriology, but I think he’s the Stepfather of Assyriology because when he first got these inscriptions, he wrote a long book about it, which was almost entirely wrong.”
13 / evaluation
“” So whenever you have the verb, it’s some form of divide or division. But actually, it’s not, because divide is like the primary root, but there’s maybe 10 nuances of what that can mean in English, where the one at the bottom and the one at the top, you’d hardly know they were connected.”
14 / prediction
“I don’t know, because you know that everyone’s going to die. I think the real tragedy would be, is if we’re not supposed to.”
15 / preference
“I read those stories a million times when I was a kid, and one of the things which impresses me most of all was this point quoted by Holmes, not original to him, that it is theoretically possible to infer the Niagara Falls from a raindrop.”
16 / evaluation
“Because I think you have an idea, and the idea then drives the brain, and the brain has another idea.”
17 / evaluation
“Now, the thing is, there are thousands of those tablets written in about 2100 to 2000 BC, thousands of them, about the size of a box of matches. So people like to generalize about the Sumerians at this time of the world, but they probably all came out of two rooms, because they were dumped when they were no longer needed in some kind of room, and the archaeologists in the 19th century came down on these, and then all the locals came and they dug them up and they sold them all over the place, and they’ve gone all over the world.”
18 / evaluation
“Or whatever it would be. But I think probably you have to allow for a strong creative principle surfacing in Homo sapiens at a quite early age, because of the paintings on cave walls… You try drawing a running antelope in color on a wall.”
19 / evaluation
“The Elamite language is much more difficult, but they got a lot of it too. So it was a very romantic thing because the inscription was carved on a mountain face far above the plain, and Henry Rawlinson, who was an upstanding young British officer who claimed to decipher cuneiform quite unjustifiably, climbed up there with some miserable kid and made squeezes of the whole thing overlooking the plain, thousands of feet up in the air, and brought those back, and they were used in the decipherment.”
20 / commitment
“Anyway, I started it, and after about, I don’t know, maybe one or two lessons, I knew this was going to be my life’s work.”
21 / evaluation
“Because what happened was that the Babylonians in the south, in my opinion, they worked hand-in-glove with the Elamites from Iran.”