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
48 published records
01 / recommendation
“That’s what Day of the Dead is all about. And I love Day of the Dead. Halloween’s this creepy thing where they’re all monsters, but Day of the Dead is this beautiful time where we remember our ancestors.”
02 / observation
“Cahokia was the big first city, but then it spread from the Mississippi all the way to the Atlantic.”
03 / belief
“I do think so. I think religion in South America began in the Amazon. I think there were people there, very old.”
04 / belief
“There could be things that were either wiped away or still hiding under the oceans that would completely change the way we think about things.”
05 / belief
“I am almost certain that the Maya would just gut laugh at what I think I know what they were.”
06 / belief
“My explanation, which I admit is not very solid, but I think that the magical deeds of the Hero Twins, in their creation story, at the end of the third creation, hit the magical reset button, and that it just restarted time right there, because of their magic, but that was not to say that the natural baktun cycle should be 13.”
07 / belief
“I think that most of those cities populations moved no more than 20 to 40 kilometers out and started their own farm, and they lived in perishable houses.”
08 / belief
“I think we absolutely could, and that’s actually one of the things that I’m hoping to move the needle on in my generation, with my career, is to give these cultures the respect they deserve, as standing toe to toe with the rest of our ancient civilizations we respect.”
09 / belief
“I agree. And yet there’s so much mystery all around us that … What I do like is the inbuilt humility to that worldview, that there’s this whole, you can call it a spiritual world, but a world that we don’t quite understand.”
10 / belief
“All of a sudden there’s this unwieldy huge elite class that has to be treated special by everybody else. And they start saying, “Well, I think we should fight with those guys and you guys should go take these things.”
11 / observation
“There’s these explorers. They went all the way to South America and there established their more stable existence.”
12 / belief
“I think you have some guys that have their finger on the pulse there. We need to start thinking about how we’re going to survive this, not that we’re going to make it go away.”
13 / belief
“I think that one’s pretty easy. It’s the end of the ice age, when the bathtub filled back up.”
14 / belief
“Absolutely. In fact, in my opinion, that’s almost a certainty in a lot of places.”
15 / uncertainty
“I don’t know if you ever saw that show, but there’s a point in which they’re trying to dissolve a body and they’re using hydrofluoric acid and it goes right through the ceiling.”
16 / belief
“I think if we look globally, I’d lean much more towards the human parallel development. But if I look just to the Americas and we have a shorter time period where the things that become major civilizations, now, I’ll say up to 30,000 years ago, which is still a blip in the time of humans, I think that there were shared things that those people came over with from Asia and that, as they got separated, that they had core values that then turned into things like religion and cultural customs that we can see.”
17 / belief
“There’s the ancestors and the people that drink San Pedro cactus juice, they don’t talk about the fanged deity anymore. I think Christianity in 500 years has somewhat put him in the back.”
18 / belief
“Frankly, I agree with him. It’s just like what I was just talking about. It’s the conclusion part that we differ from.”
19 / uncertainty
“I mean, it could just be the birth of memes of humor. I don’t know. I mean, again, humor.”
20 / belief
“I think about this great country that I live in and love and all the things we’ve achieved, but we’re a baby historically speaking.”
21 / belief
“I think you said that beauty and blood went hand in hand for the Aztec, maybe like the Roman Empire, was it, they just had maybe a different relationship with violence, where that stood in the purpose of life, purpose of existence.”
22 / belief
“I think that the fanged deity manifests himself through people and animals throughout the art and that there are missing stories of mythology that we don’t have anymore.”
23 / belief
“I think people walked and proselytized and places like Chavín, there’s a later one in Inca times called Pachacamac that are pilgrimage places where people come in to be healed if they’re sick, but also just to pay homage to the powers that be.”
24 / observation
“The children die. This next generation that’s half taught and now completely demoralized thinking that this is a spiritual attack, that their gods hate them, that the only way out of it is to accept this new Christianity.”
25 / belief
“I think there’s some truth to it. I mean, the Pygmies are small and the people on the plains in Africa are big.”
26 / uncertainty
“We’ve got stones and bones and not even ceramics to go on, and they didn’t have the courtesy to leave me a bunch of art I can interpret. So I don’t know what those people believed.”
27 / belief
“Coming back to the first things we talked about, I think we’re still missing a lot of stuff, especially in South America.”
28 / belief
“Brazil is big on cattle farming more than ever now, and a thing that I think is completed now is Brazil and Bolivia partnered together and built a highway all the way across and opened up a whole bunch more land, which has found more of these what we call like geometric earthworks.”
29 / belief
“I think that a lot of the developments of humans over the last thousands of years have been about we didn’t change the world when we were comfortable.”
30 / belief
“Caral, I think, starts at about 3200 BCE, and it lasts as a major civilization with a lot of other cities around it until about 1800 BCE.”
31 / uncertainty
“I don’t know how. I don’t know badly, where on my body it will occur, but it’s going to happen.”
32 / belief
“I think that the average Joe, when they hear the word civilization, they think of something that looks like Rome.”
33 / uncertainty
“Akrotiri, the ancient Greek city, it says, “The settlement was destroyed in the Theran eruption sometime in the 16th century BCE and buried in volcanic ash, which preserved the remains of the frescoes and many objects and artworks.” So we don’t know how advanced that civilization was.”
34 / commitment
“I got to write this book. This next year is the year I’m going to write my Fang deity book and I will have a whole chapter dedicated to the puppy.”
35 / belief
“I think the next waves came down and did North America and Central America, and the very first wave made it all the way down to South America and got isolated there.”
36 / uncertainty
“How advanced they were is a question and also a perspective thing. Graham really focuses in on what we don’t know and what could be.”
37 / commitment
“Now, some of the challenges may be created by ourselves as well, but we will adapt and overcome.”
38 / belief
“I think he had that same sorts of qualities because we do see him as a fierce warrior taking people’s heads off, and he is a jaguar, which in and of itself implies a certain power and ferocity, but then there are other funny things about him.”
39 / prediction
“I think we need to listen to our better angels, because if we don’t, we, as a human species, can easily devolve into just using violence against others to get what we want.”
40 / evaluation
“I think we’re misunderstanding a lot of things that we used to say were deities as just supernatural beings.”
41 / disagreement
“I think that he’s very well-read, in fact, better read than a lot of my colleagues, but his conclusions I disagree with.”
42 / evaluation
“Any kid who’s playing with blocks on the floor builds a couple towers and his brother knocks them down, and if he wants one that’s going to stay and be tall, he ends up making something with a fat base and a tiny top. And I think that building something big and tall together is one of those human things like, “We built that.”
43 / commitment
“He was brilliant. And so we got to keep our minds open to the things that sound outlandish, because one of them eventually is going to lead us to the big paradigm shift.”
44 / evaluation
“For the vast majority of human existence, we’ve been nomadic and we’ve done these wider or tighter nomadic circles depending on the geographic region where they’d know, “Okay, we’ll be in the summer in the mountains because berries and things, and then in the winter we’ll be down here and we’ll hunt,” but they’d move.”
45 / evaluation
“There was some student who surveyed like 300 people with the app I made and asked them about their Greek sign and their Maya sign, and his conclusion for his term paper was that the Maya one was working way better, which that’s fascinating.”
46 / prediction
“I think at the base of the Andes where the Amazon connects to the Andes, there’s a lot of potential there because that’s where the stone actually starts poking up.”
47 / prediction
“Now, this is just mostly guess, I’ll admit, but I think that much in the way that a lot of our evolutionary models talk about punctuated equilibrium, that there are big moments of change and then it settles out into a more slow and steady pattern, and then something big will happen again.”
48 / prediction
“I don’t know exactly the mechanics of how that would happen, but it just seems impossible that there are more languages, not less languages, in the Maya area after the last 500 years that they’ve been through.”