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
37 published records
01 / preference
“I was good at… I was a ready-fire-aim guy, and I always partnered with people who were very anal and perfectionist because where I could just go, go, go, go, go, go, they would keep me inside the baselines.”
02 / evaluation
“No, I worked at it. Because going back to what I said earlier about curiosity, you have to be insanely curious because the world is always changing.”
03 / evaluation
“Somebody who’s agile, because as you learn new things and the environment around you changes, you have to be able to adapt and make the changes.”
04 / recommendation
“” I read a book about Roy Cohn, and Roy Cohn was the ultimate deny, deny, deny, and that was one of Trump’s mentors.”
05 / belief
“I think he tried to go too big. He had too big an ambition, which cost him in the end, not financially and personally, but just in terms of being able to stick it out with them, but that’s what makes him a great entrepreneur.”
06 / belief
“In America, yes. But if we look at humans in general, and Jordan Peterson, I think unjustly, incorrectly brought up Auschwitz.”
07 / prediction
“Like I said earlier, I’m a big believer that there’s going to be millions and tens of millions of models and people will take their expertise and either get hired for it and contribute or create their own models and license.”
08 / belief
“I’m not dismissing human nature at all, but there’s a difference. I think that human nature, self-preservation influences those decisions.”
09 / belief
“I just worry about… I don’t care about Trump or Biden, I care about democracy. I just worry.”
10 / uncertainty
“Back then, if they had 250,000 followers and now we’re on TikTok where he might get 50 some thousand views or likes, I don’t know how many views, but likes, I’ve never seen any evidence that Dylan McDermott influenced people to transition their gender.”
11 / belief
“A lot of it was mafia driven, but it was, people found that spark because I think that is natural.”
12 / belief
“I think you have to be able to find your way to whatever it is that puts a smile on your face every day.”
13 / belief
“You got a little bit of an argument about open source. I think you stepped in between Vinod Khosla and Mark Andreessen.”
14 / belief
“In 2000, I think January, you purchased a majority stake in the NBA team, Dallas Mavericks for $285 million.”
15 / belief
“I think America has been really good at having these two blue and red, always at tension with each other, dividing the populace, and in the process of doing that, figuring stuff out.”
16 / belief
“I think we’ve just got a culture of consumption and more. And to get more, you’ve got to… Creating a business gives you the greatest potential upside and the greatest leverage on your time, but it also creates the most risk.”
17 / belief
“I think that’s a smart choice, but it’s just a business decision for everybody else.”
18 / belief
“Where other people were saying, oh, I think you can go up higher, higher, higher.”
19 / belief
“I believe in the power of individuals to realize their potential no matter where they come from.”
20 / belief
“I think there’s a name for that rule, but once you bring up Hitler, the conversation ends.”
21 / belief
“The backstory of that is Bill Gurley came to me and said, “Mark, there’s this guy, Travis, that has this company, Red Swoosh, which is a peer-to-peer networking company that I think you can help.”
22 / uncertainty
“In fact, in my own life, the society was such that, I don’t know if they’ve helped much at the thing I was good at.”
23 / uncertainty
“The point is that if you looked at impressions when you run an ad, you’re curious about impressions and who sees them, but if you look at the impressions related to Dylan McDermott, like I just said, I bet 90% or more were in conservative media, and I don’t know how many followers she had, 250,000 followers or whatever when the Bud Light ad came out.”
24 / belief
“If you’re trying to accomplish something within an organization because you think there’s a problem and there’s people speaking out saying look, we’re getting it wrong, I think I’m a victim of all this, and the company… Then leadership has got to make a decision.”
25 / prediction
“Whatever pricing we get, we’re going to post them all so that every company who’s our size or even bigger will have a template that they can work on, which will take it away from the big three insurance companies and the big three PBMs.”
26 / belief
“I would get into fights with NBA, put aside the refs, but getting in fights in the NBA, I would say NBA, nothing but attorneys, because they had no marketing skills whatsoever.”
27 / belief
“Much of American history was defined by intense radical racism and sexism. But in the recent years, there was a correction and I think the nature of the criticism is that there’s an overcorrection where DEI programs at universities and companies, when they’re not doing their job well, are often hard to criticize because when you criticize them within the company or so on, they have a very strong immune system.”
28 / evaluation
“Now, if you didn’t do your homework and you go out there and you sell whatever it is and you’ve raised money or whatever, just to pivot, you’ve already shown that you haven’t been able to read the market. And so it’s not that pivots can’t work and always don’t work.”
29 / evaluation
“It’s very insulated and very controlled, like you said, we work outside them, we won’t work with them. And so because of that, we don’t have access to every medication because they’ve told a lot of the big brand manufacturers that if they work with us, they’ll take them off their formularies or change the rebate structure so that they won’t be prescribed as much.”
30 / evaluation
“What did we do wrong? And when I would interview people for jobs, 99% of the people I’ve ever interviewed I’ve wanted to hire, because in my mind, it was like, okay, I can figure out how to make this person work.”
31 / preference
“Then now you can give me an example of any type of business and it’ll take me two seconds to figure out how they make money and how I can make them more productive. And I think that’s probably my biggest skill, being able to just drill down to what the actual need is, if any.”
32 / prediction
“Whoever’s competing against you, if you do a B or C, they’re going to try to do C, D and E, and you better be prepared for that to come, because otherwise they’re out of business too.”
33 / prediction
“It’s all uncertainty. But I think if you’re delusional, that works against you because everything’s grounded in reality.”
34 / evaluation
“Of course it does, but the facts are still the facts. And in red states, they’re going to be checking every ID, they’re going to be making sure that’s not the case, and you can also make the argument, “Well, in the blue state, it doesn’t matter.”
35 / prediction
“” You’re going to get a variety of outputs and you have to make that decision yourself. That’s what I think is going to happen with AI as well, because I think brands… There’s no way the Mayo Clinic and the Harvard Medical School are just going to contribute all their IP to ChatGPT, or Gemini, or whatever.”
36 / evaluation
“I think a lot of… I just don’t trust the supposed volume- I just don’t trust the supposed volume that people say it’s happening at, versus everything I’ve read and seen.”
37 / evaluation
“No, because I think having a diverse student body helps make for kids who are better prepared for the real world.”