Trump Tells Lex Fridman the Stick Usually Wins

The montage at the top of the episode already tells you the temperature. Fridman notes that some people call Trump a fascist; Trump says that is why he figures it is all right to call them communists, because they call him worse. Fridman, an independent, says he does not think Kamala Harris is a communist. Trump's reply is that you have to fight fire with fire.

This is episode 442 of the Lex Fridman Podcast, recorded in early September 2024. Donald Trump was the 45th president and the Republican nominee. The television debate with Harris was days away; Election Day was about two months out. The talk would run from the psychology of winning to Ukraine, the 2020 election, the border, inflation, NATO, Jeffrey Epstein, and death.

What follows is what Trump actually said, attributed to him, in the order he said it. The interesting part is not only the claims. It is the repeating method: withhold the plan, keep the other side uncertain, and treat almost every contest as a negotiation.

Fridman's first real question is psychological. Trump has said he loves winning; what drives him more, the love of winning or the hate of losing? Trump will not pick. "Maybe equally, maybe both. I don't like losing and I do like winning." He says he has never sorted out which force is larger.

He has spent a lot of time around elite athletes — Tiger Woods, Jack Nicklaus, Michael Jordan, Arnold Palmer. Champions, he says, have something different, and you can see it over a weekend or a single game. Talent is not always the tell. At the end of the weekend, the same people win.

There is no single type. Palmer was the nicest guy you would ever meet; other champions are not nice at all, only focused on the job. The common trait, as Trump tells it, is that they are driven beyond ordinary measure. They do not give up. They carry a passion that people who do less well simply do not have.

Fridman puts it bluntly: Trump has called politics a dirty game, so how do you win? Trump's answer is not a theory of institutions. You get the word out. You use sense. You have to feel where things are going, and you have to feel what is right, because what is popular and what is good for the country are not always the same thing.

He is watching the platforms change. Traditional television, he says, is getting older and maybe less significant. New platforms are starting to dominate. He did Spaces with Elon Musk and got numbers "like nobody's ever heard before" — numbers he says you would not get on radio or television no matter how good the show. Sitting on a large podcast is, for him, part of the same bet.

The jump from business to politics, he argues, is a wall most people never clear. He knows successful businesspeople who would love to copy him and cannot pull the trigger. Some cannot speak; they choke. It is hard to stand in front of thousands, talk for an hour and a half, and have nobody leave. The reverse trip is no easier. Politicians who go into business generally do not do well either. Different talents, different skills.

He knows people who have talked about running for president for 15 years. They are big in business, well known, and they never do it. "It takes guts to run," he says. It is also, in his words, a dangerous profession. You have to give up a lot. Captivating a crowd is not a side skill in this telling. It is the job.

Fridman asks the question everyone wants asked: what would a deal look like that both Vladimir Putin and Volodymyr Zelenskyy would accept? Trump will not describe it. If he wins, he says, he can make a deal as president-elect, "guaranteed." The war should never have happened. Once it started, the deal got much harder. He thinks the death numbers will come in far higher than official counts, because a building two blocks long comes down and the report is that one person was mildly injured.

Would Putin give back territory already taken? Trump says he does not know, and that the question would not even arise if the war had been stopped at the start. Ukraine, in his telling, is being demolished — a great culture largely destroyed. Carrot or stick? It depends on the person. You have to guess, or know, which one matters. In war, he thinks the stick is generally more successful.

He will not share an exact plan for China either, for the same reason. Part of it is surprise. If he gives the plan away, he cannot use it. Japan, he notes, is starting to re-arm because China is taking islands. He sees a real chance of World War III in Ukraine or the Middle East, and he wants the next five months to end fast. He calls Biden checked out, going to the beach, and he calls Harris's path to the nomination a coup: Biden had 14 million primary votes, she had none, and "she was a joke until six weeks ago."

He watched her CNN interview and called it a softball — "multiple choice" questions he renames "multiple guess." He does not think she did well. As for the coming debate, he notes he never debated until politics; his first was the Rosie O'Donnell exchange. He became president, then got millions more votes the second time after being told 63 million would be enough to win, and still "lost by a whisker."

Fridman presses the hardest question of the night on behalf of independents he knows. They like Trump's policies, like that he is a dealmaker, like that he talks about ending wars. They are troubled by the 2020 claims of widespread fraud and by the fake-elector scheme. What can he say to those voters?

Trump does not pivot. "I think the fraud was on the other side. I think the election was a fraud." Many people wanted answers, he says, and when you cannot challenge an election it gets worse, not better. His reform list is paper ballots, voter ID, same-day voting, and proof of citizenship, because he claims people who are not citizens are already voting.

Asked how to avoid the insanity and division of the last result, whether he wins or loses, he first says he does not focus on the past. Then he hopes it will not be close. He is leading in the polls; it looks close; he thinks in the end it will not be. He cannot believe people would vote for a record he sums up as inflation, a bad economy, and the border.

Immigration is where Trump gets concrete. He calls it the worst border in the history of the world. People are coming not only from South America but from prisons, jails, mental institutions, and "insane asylums," he says — drug dealers and human traffickers among them. He names Aurora, Colorado, and describes Venezuelan groups taking over buildings with rifles. Harris, he adds, was the "border czar" who now says she was not.

The directional claim is the one worth writing down. Crime in those sending countries is way down, he says, because they are taking people out of their prisons. If he ran one of those countries, he would do the same. "I can't believe they're going so slowly." The United States, in this telling, is the destination for other nations' prisoners and mental patients, and no country can afford it.

The solution comes in layers. Get the criminals out fast. Get the people from mental institutions back into mental institutions. Work on the rest. He cites Dwight Eisenhower as a moderate who still hated watching people pour in. He thinks he won in 2016 because of the border, and he says the border now is 25 times worse.

Then he reaches for the exhibit. In the last week of his presidency, Border Patrol produced a chart of the lowest number of people coming into the country in recorded history. At a rally he looked to the right, said there is the chart, and added that it was not a pleasant experience. That chart is the evidence he wants. He says he had the border fixed, and that he will get it back to that again.

Fridman asks about Project 2025, the conservative policy blueprint Democrats spent the cycle tying to Trump. Trump's cut is clean. He has nothing to do with it, and he has purposely not read it so he can say he has no idea what it is about. He has heard of things in it he does not like, and some things everyone would like. He thinks it is unfortunate they put it out. It still, he insists, has absolutely nothing to do with him.

On marijuana he has moved. Medical marijuana, friends and doctors have told him, has been "absolutely amazing." Recreational use he can live with if it is age-restricted and done in a lawful, controlled way. He likes how Florida is approaching it. New York, he says, smells of marijuana in the streets, and that is not a system. Referenda on the issue have been very hard to beat; he thinks they will generally pass.

Fridman mentions ayahuasca, jokes that Congress might be better if everyone took mushrooms, and notes veterans using psychedelics for PTSD. Trump is not a "drug guy," and he stays cautious. His team put out a statement that day and would put out another, more specific one the following week. The through-line is medical use and control, not a culture-war lecture.

Joe Rogan is a negotiation posture. Trump says there was no real tension, that he likes him, and that he only sees him walking into the UFC with Dana White. Would he do the podcast? "I guess I'd do it, but I haven't been asked and I'm not asking anybody." He calls Rogan "sort of a liberal guy" who likes RFK Jr., which Trump likes too. On posting, the trouble is reposts, because you do not know the account underneath. His own words are safer. He calls Truth Social his typewriter, used on couches and beds, often after 3 a.m. — and he does not understand why that is a scandal, given time zones.

The country seems more divided than ever, Fridman says. What can Trump do about it? Get rid of "these two people," Trump answers. They are not equipped to run the country. Biden is a disaster; he thinks Harris will be worse. The convention is over, the honeymoon period is over, and he says he is leading in just about all the polls. November 5, in this telling, is the most important election the country has ever had: lose it, and he is not sure there will be another, because it will become a communist country, or close.

Fridman pushes him toward a positive vision. Trump says criticism is required because the other side is nasty. He cites the Atlantic story that he called World War I dead "suckers and losers," calls it made up, and says he has 26 witnesses that nothing of the kind was said. He also hammers Harris's McDonald's claim, calling it a lie, "not a big lie, but it's a big lie," and saying he will keep hammering it.

The longest stretch of the hour is Arlington. Gold Star families who lost children in the Afghanistan withdrawal asked him to a three-year reunion. He says he had brought them to his home once, stayed four hours, and then made the cemetery visit even though the logistics were hard. After a ceremony they asked him down to the gravestones for pictures. He did not, in his telling, shake hands and leave, and he was not looking at his watch.

That night, he says, he got a call that the Biden administration was accusing him of using Arlington for publicity. The families later put out a statement that they had asked him to be there. He calls the withdrawal the most embarrassing moment in the country's history: 13 dead soldiers, Americans left behind, billions in equipment now being sold. It should have been done at Bagram, he says, not a small airport in the middle of town. Asked what he respects about people on the left, he offers a line of fatalism first: "Life is what you do while you're waiting to die, so you might as well do a good job."

Fridman says many listeners, himself included, do not think Harris is a communist. "Well, she's a Marxist," Trump answers. Fridman notes that her father is a Marxist economist; Trump says that is a little unusual. Fridman then tries a softer frame: some of her campaign talk, including grocery price controls, is the kind of thing people in government assume will never actually happen.

Trump will not grant the discount. It could come to reality. Price control, he says, has been tried about 121 times in different places over the years and has never worked once. It leads to communism, to socialism, to empty shelves, and to tremendous inflation. It is a bad idea. This is the closest the conversation comes to an argument with a number attached, even if he does not source the 121.

Fridman reminds him that some people call him a fascist. "Yeah, they do. So I figure it's all right to call them a communist." He says they hit him with something terrible, he hits back, and then the coverage is about what Trump said. Fight fire with fire. The country has an enemy from the outside and an enemy from within, and the enemy from within, in his phrasing, is "radical left lunatics." Fridman notes the large moderate middle that likes some of his policies and does not see the impending destruction of America. Trump does not give that middle much room.

His foreign-policy boast is a record: no wars while he was president, "not since 78 years," and ISIS defeated. He quotes Hungary's Viktor Orbán saying the world needs Trump back because China, Russia, and everybody were afraid of him. Trump prefers the word respect. He ended Nord Stream 2; Biden, he says, approved it, so the United States was defending Germany while Germany paid Russia billions for energy. Allies, under his pressure, paid hundreds of billions more. "You wouldn't have NATO if it wasn't for me."

Fridman asks a clean psychological question. Trump was the most powerful man in the world and may be again. What does that power do to him? Is there a threat it corrupts how he sees the world? Trump says no. He was there four years. He could have done "a big number" on Hillary Clinton and did not, because putting a president's wife in prison looked terrible. Crowds chanted "lock her up." He told them they had won, and that you do not bring the country together by putting her in jail.

Then, he says, they went to work on him. Russia was a hoax. The 51 intelligence officials were a hoax. The whole stack was hoaxes and scams. His opponents, in this telling, suffer from massive Trump Derangement Syndrome, and he does not know if it is curable. The conclusion he wants you to take is that power did not bend him; being opposed did not either.

On UFOs he would push the Pentagon to release more footage. On the Kennedy files, he released a lot in his first term, had people beg him not to, and says he will do more very early on. Epstein he handles carefully. He never went to the island, "fortunately," though a lot of people did. Why did smart, powerful people get so close? "He was a good salesman," a hail-fellow type with assets like islands to throw around. Why has the client list not been made public? "It's very interesting, isn't it? Probably will be." He would take a look at it.

What gives him strength when he is attacked? "You can't care that much." People who care about everything people are saying end up choking. Death comes up quietly. A rich friend in his mid-80s thinks about it every minute, and starts phone calls with "tick, tock." Trump thinks religious people have a better feeling toward dying, and that the country was a better place with religion as a guide — without it, there are no real guardrails. He closes the interview the way he opened the campaign: he loves the country, he wants it to be great, and this is the last chance. Put the hour together and the method is consistent. Ukraine is surprise. Afghanistan is the stick. NATO is a bill. Rogan is "I'm not asking." Manufacture uncertainty and fear, then transact.

Fridman keeps the suit on and does his AMA. He has been doing the podcast more than six years, still feels like an imposter on most days, and still does the outreach, scheduling, and research himself. For world leaders he tries to put on a historian's hat. He admires William Shirer, who was there for the rise of the Third Reich and tried to cover it as objectively as one could. Academic historians ding Shirer for editorializing; Fridman respectfully disagrees.

Public discourse, as he draws it, sits on a spectrum between the ephemeral and the eternal. Outrage mobs and clickbait chase the current viral storm. When the battle of the day is done, most of it is forgotten, and a few true ideas remain. That is what the historian hopes to capture. Long conversations are not only about covering content. Duration relaxes people. They go on tangents. They banter about details. "It's in the details that the beautiful complexity of the person is brought to light."

As an immigrant he says he loves the United States and believes people on the left and the right who step into politics love it too. He has reached out to Harris and would also want Tim Walz, AOC, Bernie Sanders, Barack Obama, the Clintons, J.D. Vance, Vivek Ramaswamy, George W. Bush. He comments on Pavel Durov's arrest in France and on X being banned in Brazil, and treats both as government power grabs for censorship. Benjamin Franklin's line on liberty and temporary safety is the frame he wants.

A programmer writes in with a fear Fridman shares: AI will exceed his skills and he will slip into irrelevance. Fridman has the same uncomfortable feeling watching Claude write approximately correct code. He thinks professional programming will become writing natural-language prompts, and that the move is to ride the wave — he has gone from Emacs to VS Code to Cursor — and become a big-picture designer rather than a low-level tinkerer. "Don't compete with AI for your job, learn to use the AI to do that job better." He closes with advice to a 27-year-old who feels like a scientist in his heart: lean into the anxiety, find a good advisor, and do epic work. Then he reads Kipling's "If."