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
29 published records
01 / belief
“I think that there are things we miss that are right in front of us that are truly beautiful.”
02 / belief
“Certainly, yes. But look, I’m allowed to change my opinion. I can next week say it’s Lawrence of Arabia, or a week after that I can say Sullivan’s Travels.”
03 / belief
“I think if I were to go back that far, I probably would’ve found a way to not have been as concerned about revealing my sexuality and hiding that for as long as I did.”
04 / belief
“Ernest Hemingway once said that the world is a fine place and worth fighting for, and I agree with him on both counts.”
05 / belief
“I think the last scene, the ending scene, and the car ride leading up to it, where it’s mostly on you in conversation with Morgan Freeman and Brad Pitt, it’s one of the greatest scenes in film history.”
06 / commitment
“I woke up.” And I learn a lot… I have a different feeling about death now than I did seven years ago, and I am on the path to being able to be in a place where I’ve resolved the things I needed to resolve, and I won’t probably get to all of it in my lifetime, but I certainly would like to be at a place where if I were to drop dead tomorrow, it would’ve been an amazing life.”
07 / belief
“Just to clarify, I think you are often too pushy with the flirting and that manifests itself in multiple ways.”
08 / belief
“I think betrayal is a really interesting word, but I think if you’re going to be betrayed, it has to be by those who truly know you.”
09 / belief
“I think Sam Mendes actually said in the now documentary, something like, With great theater, with great stories, you find humor on the journey to the heart of darkness,” something like this very poetic.”
10 / belief
“David Fincher said about you … he was talking in general, I think, but also specifically in the moment of House of Cards … said that you have exceptional skill, both as an actor and as a performer, which he says are different things.”
11 / uncertainty
“There’s a lot that I don’t know, there’s a lot I have to learn, and that is a very exciting place to feel that I’m in.”
12 / belief
“Some of the most moving conversations that I have had when I was determined to take accountability have been those people have said, “Thank you so much and I think I can forgive you now.”
13 / uncertainty
“You can’t… I think even to me now, none of it sounds right. But I don’t know that I could have said anything that would’ve been satisfactory to anybody.”
14 / belief
“You’re learning, you’re growing, you’re trying, and there is an incredible trust that happens. And I was, of course, fortunate that some of the things I learned and observed about being a part of that family, being included in that family, and being a part of creating that family, I was able to observe from people like Jack Lemmon, who led many companies that I was fortunate to work in and be a part of.”
15 / belief
“I had no memory of it, but if it had happened, if this embarrassing moment had happened, then I would owe him an apology. That was what I said, and then I said, “And while I’m at it, I think I’ll come out.”
16 / belief
“People go to church every week to be forgiven, and I believe that forgiveness, and I believe that redemption are beautiful things.”
17 / belief
“I think a lot of people live lives of quiet desperation in a job they don’t like in a marriage they’re unhappy in.”
18 / belief
“We got into a different thing in the late ’50s and ’60s, and a lot of actors are feeling it, which I’m not saying it’s a bad thing, it’s just that if you want to keep an audience engaged, as Fincher does, and I believe successfully does in all of his work, pace, timing, movement, clarity, speed, are admirable to achieve.”
19 / belief
“I think because Fincher hates indulgence, and he wants people to talk the way they do in life, which is we don’t take big dramatic pauses before we speak.”
20 / evaluation
“We had complete creative control, but over time they started to get themselves involved because look, this is what happens to networks.”
21 / preference
“I don’t need to say a thing.” So I was often cutting dialogue because it just wasn’t needed because that relationship between… And I’d learned, that I’d experienced doing Richard III, was so extraordinary where I literally watched people, they were like, “Oh, I’m in on the thing and this is, oh, so awesome.”
22 / evaluation
“Yeah, and also because I so well remember, I think the work that Brad did, and also Morgan did in that scene, but the work that Brad had to do where he had to go … I remember rehearsing with him as we were all staying at this little hotel nearby that location, and we rehearsed the night before we started shooting that sequence, and it was just incredible to see the levels of emotions he had to go through, and then the decision of, “What do I do, because if I do what he wants me to do, then he wins.”
23 / commitment
“I will try to do better than that, to respect due process in service of the truth, and I hope to have the courage to always think independently and to speak honestly from the heart, even when the eyes of the outraged mob are on me.”
24 / evaluation
“Yeah, and I also think that the film was powerful because you had three very honest and genuine portrayal of young people, and then you had Lester behaving like a young person doing things that were unexpected. And I think that the honesty with which it dealt with those issues that those teenagers were going through, and the honesty with which it dealt with what Lester was going through, I think are some of the reasons why the film had the response that it did from so many people.”
25 / preference
“It can be helpful, but improv is, I’m such a big believer in the writing and in serving the writing and doing the words the writer wrote that improv for me, unless you’re just doing comedy, and I mean, I love improv in comedy.”
26 / preference
“One of the things that I feel that I try to do in my work, is when I read something for the first time, when I read a script or play, and I am absolutely devastated by it, it is the most extraordinary, the most beautiful, the most life-affirming or terrifying, it’s then a process weirdly of working backwards, because I want to work in such a way that that’s the experience I give to the audience when they first see it, that they have the experience I had when I read it.”
27 / preference
“I thought about it, and I had this feeling, I can’t even quite describe it, but I had this feeling that it would be really good if I didn’t take billing in the film, and the reason I felt that was because I knew that by the time this film would come out, it would be the last one of the three movies that I’d just shot, the fourth one.”
28 / belief
“I tend to think, that there’s something about that quality of wanting to have people enjoy themselves. And when you saddle that against what maybe he means as an actor, which is more dramatic, or more text-driven more … look, I’ve always believed that my job, not every actor feels this way, but my job, the way that I’ve looked at it, is that my job is to serve the writing, and that if I serve the writing, I will in a sense serve myself, because I’ll be in the right world, I’ll be in the right context, I’ll be in the right style.”
29 / commitment
“I mean, I’ve been working so hard over these last seven years to have the conversations I needed to have, to listen to people, to understand things from a different perspective than the one that I had and to say, “I will never behave that way again for the rest of my life.”