Speakers in the public record
Claim mix
belief 8evaluation 7uncertainty 2preference 2commitment 1prediction 1recommendation 1
Evidence policy
Every row below preserves an exact excerpt. Identified speakers are linked; unresolved voices are labeled and excluded from people counts.
Claim ledger
The useful parts, with receipts.
22 published records
“If anything, the demand is equally or perhaps even more important because if there's not a mechanism, if there's not institutions that let you turn this kind of exploitation into cash flow, the institution's not gonna go very far.”
- Publisher
- Dwarkesh Podcast
“In fact, it obscures the importance of modern slavery because modern slavery is uniquely important and it's uniquely tied up with certain kinds of market exchange and certain kinds of production, certain kinds of racial ideologies.”
- Publisher
- Dwarkesh Podcast
“I think there's no doubt that pre-industrial populations, and again, populations—so you still have your Isaac Newtons, who whatever infected him as a kid, didn't slow him down—but at the population level, I think there's no doubt that not only were pre-industrial populations shorter, this is just a total fact that we know from their bones, but they probably also, on average, had a lower distribution of cognitive abilities.”
- Publisher
- Dwarkesh Podcast
“I think that's an excellent note to close on. Just to plug one more time, we've been discussing Plagues Upon the Earth, which is the history of disease going back through the Neolithic to modern times, Fate of Rome which discusses the plagues and history of the Roman Empire considering climate and biology.”
- Publisher
- Dwarkesh Podcast
“On slavery in particular, I think actually that's one of the strong suits of the movie.”
- Publisher
- Dwarkesh Podcast
“If you were from on high to design self-sustaining innovation, I think you would want to bring those elements into proximity.”
- Publisher
- Dwarkesh Podcast
“I don't know if it's a plausible explanation that cheap slave labor reduced the incentives for mechanization and engineering and other crafts or if not.”
- Publisher
- Dwarkesh Podcast
“Of the greater Greek world or individual city-states like Athens? We think of Athens as being a couple 100,000 people.”
- Publisher
- Dwarkesh Podcast
“If you read Gibbon, writing in the 1770s, I think he says that the happiest time in human history was this period you're talking about.”
- Publisher
- Dwarkesh Podcast
“A previous guest of mine, Nat Friedman, I don’t know if you saw this, launched this challenge called the Vesuvius Challenge.”
- Publisher
- Dwarkesh Podcast
“I think Will Durant had this quote that the Roman Empire fell for longer than most empires have lasted.”
- Publisher
- Dwarkesh Podcast
“I think you discuss in the book the possibility that the death rate might have been close to or even over 60% wherever the Black Death hit.”
- Publisher
- Dwarkesh Podcast
“It's a deep question and what I think we don't think enough about is how, in a really fundamental way, hard are some problems to solve?”
- Publisher
- Dwarkesh Podcast
“I mean, first thing, it's important, I think you were starting to get at this, that there's never a generation of humans that has the opportunity to make this choice once and for all, like, should we stay hunting mammoths or should we become sedentary farmers with basically torturous dentistry and die by diarrhea?”
- Publisher
- Dwarkesh Podcast
“The reason I wanted to have you on is because I don't think I've encountered that many other authors who can connect biology, economics, history, and climate into explaining some of the big things that have happened through human history in the way you can.”
- Publisher
- Dwarkesh Podcast
“If we take that perspective seriously, was life before human population exploded and we had agriculture just much more pleasant, at least in comparison?”
- Publisher
- Dwarkesh Podcast
“COVID-19 was impossible to contain because it took several days before you really presented with clinical illness.”
- Publisher
- Dwarkesh Podcast
“In the case of the plague, if you were really knowledgeable about the basics of ecology and evolution of disease, you would never be like, "I think that every now and then a rodent disease from Central Asia is gonna wipe out half of the continent".”
- Publisher
- Dwarkesh Podcast
“Because we need to understand how the earth system works, how the climate system works in order to be able to model what's happening, we need an empirical record of what the climate has done.”
- Publisher
- Dwarkesh Podcast
“I love Pliny the Elder's encyclopedia, but if you look in the big picture, the contribution that the Roman Empire makes to our knowledge of how nature works and then the applied technology that comes out of that is really pathetic for five, 600 years.”
- Publisher
- Dwarkesh Podcast
“I think the actual fertility for foragers is sort of like reasonable—I don’t know if sustainable is the right word because I don’t mean in an ecological sense but more so—it keeps your population constant.”
- Publisher
- Dwarkesh Podcast
“The example I use in the book is the very famous diary of Samuel Pepys, who's this incredible figure and is very close to Newton and that social group and his name is on the first edition of the Principia.”
- Publisher
- Dwarkesh Podcast