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
31 published records
01 / belief
“I think Israelis are obsessed with genocide because they have enacted genocide against us.”
02 / belief
“Palestinian fighters say they need arms to defend themselves against the Israeli occupation and military incursions into the camp during which Palestinian civilians including children have been killed. So those are the, I would say, different perspectives on the many people on both sides who have been killed, many more Palestinians.”
03 / observation
“I do believe that whatever you want to call it, one state, two state, 48 states, 29 states, whatever you want to call it, refugees need to return, land needs to be given back, wealth needs to be redistributed, and a recognition of the Nakba needs to happen. That is the only way we could move forward.”
04 / uncertainty
“I don’t know. That’s my mom’s saying, but I don’t know, it’s probably a proverb that I first heard from my mom, but it’s [foreign language 01:57:40], the most evil of an atrocity is what makes you laugh.”
05 / uncertainty
“I mean, in our case, it was the international community, but in our case also, it wasn’t just the international community, it was the hundreds of thousands of people in Palestine and abroad who were marching on the streets getting beaten and brutalized in Jerusalem, and I don’t know, sometimes arrested in places like Germany and so on and so forth, who forced themselves inside the media cycle.”
06 / belief
“I’m quoting, I think word for word, “committing to the establishment of a Jewish state in Palestine”, as if Palestine was the British to give away.”
07 / uncertainty
“One side has makeshift weapons and the other side is one of the most sophisticated armies in the world, so I don’t know how effective violence could be in this case.”
08 / observation
“The only way Morocco could normalize relations with the Israeli regime is so that the Israeli regime could recognize Moroccan sovereignty over in the Western Sahara, which just happened actually last week.”
09 / belief
“I think everybody in the world should be able to vote for American elections, actually.”
10 / belief
“I think my Arabic writing is much superior to my English writing, but I choose to write in English because I think there’s a disparity and there’s a chasm between what is said in Arabic in the street in Palestine and what is said here about Palestinians, both by anti-Palestinian racists and people who are pro-Palestine and advocates for Palestine.”
11 / belief
“I mean, I think all religious based states are a bad idea, all nation states are a bad idea, but whatever, if that’s what they want do, that’s what they want to do.”
12 / uncertainty
“I don’t know, by not shooting a journalist doing her job in the Jenin refugee camp.”
13 / belief
“Everything else to me is just secondary, regardless of what I think personally of any of those people.”
14 / commitment
“I will quote my dear friend Robert Barre, who’s a lawyer who says, “The solution, justice comes about through recognition, return, and redistribution.”
15 / evaluation
“As one human being to another, you’re describing quite brilliantly that the contents of people’s hearts don’t matter as much as the policies and the contents of the courts and the laws and what actually is going on on the streets in terms of actions, but this is also a human story.”
16 / belief
“We could include Morocco. And, again, these Abrahamic Accords, they are promoted and marketed and talked about as some kind of religious reconciliation, which I think is the most disgusting thing ever, because they’re not about religious reconciliation.”
17 / belief
“I think people, this is what people do, when they are confronted by a great evil, they liken it to some other great evil, and this is where the Hitler analogy came from.”
18 / belief
“Absolutely. I think if there was no occupation, there would be no violence. It’s quite obvious.”
19 / uncertainty
“I saw Cornel West on CNN. I don’t know if he’s going to go far with his campaign.”
20 / belief
“I’m surrounded by good people and I don’t even think of it as a strength. I think of this as my obligation.”
21 / commitment
“I edit all the time and I can’t move on from one sentence until it’s perfect. But I will say, my other writer friends here in New York do not face how easily disrupted my writing is by other news.”
22 / evaluation
“The West Bank, I think hilariously George Bush described it as Swiss cheese because of the holes.”
23 / evaluation
“That is incredibly impressive. And it also sends a message that as long as we have a boot on our neck, we are going to continue fighting.”
24 / evaluation
“These people live in dire, excruciating circumstances and it is so courageous, in my opinion, that they even think to defend themselves against one of the most lethal, one of the most sophisticated armies in the world, against a nuclear state that can wipe them out in the matter of seconds.”
25 / evaluation
“I think our campaign to defend our homes was particularly successful because it was honest to what was happening on the ground, because it refused to follow the strategy that we have used in our advocacy before, where we shrink ourselves and we turn the other cheek and we try to convince American lawmakers and American diplomats and journalists of our humanity because we wait for their approval.”
26 / evaluation
“The Israeli courts would look at the Israeli documents, which we argue are falsifies and fabricated, and they would take them at face value without authentication, and they refused to look at our documents.”
27 / evaluation
“People like Zangwill said that this was a country without a people, and Palestinians who have existed there, who have cultivated the lands, who had diverse cultural and religious and political practices, they were completely erased. And other people like Jabotinsky were a lot more explicit and a lot more honest and said that, “We need to fight the Palestinians because they loved their land, much like the Red Indians loved their lands,” and he had a paper called the Iron Wall: Colonization of Palestine Must Go Forward.”
28 / preference
“I want to reject that completely and I want to lean into the humor of the past few years of my life because I think that’s really what the world needs and what I need to be writing.”
29 / evaluation
“We also cannot wait to cite a confession from a former Israeli soldier who’s guilty conscience is keeping them up at night. And we use all of these confessions or slip ups as evidence to prove that this is a racist country that is enacting racist acts, but we don’t need this because the material proof is on the ground.”
30 / evaluation
“They can find ways to participate in civil society. They can even smuggle sperm from prison to give a life outside of it because in their philosophy of prisons, they understand that these structures, these buildings were built to break your spirits.”
31 / evaluation
“I would argue, a lot of the time, it’s dubious, it’s malicious, the fact that these little pieces of context that frame the entire story get lost.”