Dwarkesh 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
22 published records
01 / uncertainty
“I don't know if you've ever seen one of those things they had in Mesoamerica called Macuahuitl.”
02 / belief
“I think people like David Keith and the other advocates for geoengineering would have said it should have happened already and that it’s way, way too slow.”
03 / belief
“Dwarkesh Patel Yeah, the pyramids there… I think I was reading your book at the time or already had read your book.”
04 / belief
“I think I got a chance to see the Teotihuacan apartments when I was there, but I wonder if we’re just looking at the buildings that survived.”
05 / belief
“I think that's the biggie. So that means funding primarily urban infrastructure for water and setting up some kind of foundation or some independent agency that's insulated from the government to actually keep those water systems going.”
06 / belief
“I mean, I don't want to pick on Texas, but I think there are equally crazy things all over the place, the impossibility of building long-distance, high-tension lines, because various states have just arbitrarily imposed rules that make it impossible.”
07 / belief
“Almost no research has gone into that. That would be another example of a kind of thing that you could do that I would argue would have a much greater impact than the person trying to get the latest flavor of cherry-flavored nose drops are something–– which is what a huge amount of research is in.”
08 / belief
“I don't understand it. So I think you guys should be hired. You know, they should make you switch roles or something.”
09 / belief
“One of the things I learned about the Comanche Indians and their role in Texas history is just totally eye-popping really amazing.”
10 / uncertainty
“I don't know too much about it, but I hear that the Silk Road stuff they're doing is not especially economically wise.”
11 / belief
“I learned so much from the books and I learned so much from talking to you, so I really really enjoyed this.”
12 / belief
“By the way, I realized I haven't gotten to all the Wizard and Prophet questions, and there are a lot of them.”
13 / evaluation
“I didn't include it in 1491 or 1493 because it was so new that I didn't know anything about it; everything was largely from Spanish and Mexican scholars about the conquest within the conquest.”
14 / evaluation
“Finally, there's the fact that the Spaniards had found all this gold and silver, which is an ideal commodity, because it's not perishable: it's small, you can put it on your ship and bring it back, and it's just great in every way.”
15 / evaluation
“Because at the same time, things like the end of colonialism, the discovery of antibiotics, and so forth, were leading to a real population rise, and the amount of human misery that would have occurred, it's really frightening to think about.”
16 / prediction
“I want to ask you again about contingency because there are so many other examples where things you thought would be universal actually don't turn out to be.”
17 / evaluation
“Because in the short run, what happened when American crops came in is that the potato, sweet potato, and maize corn were the first staple crops that were dryland crops that could be grown in the western half of China, which is very, very dry and hot and mountainous with very little water.”
18 / evaluation
“’ Haiti was and is (to no small extent because of the incredible blockade that was put on it by all the other nations) in terrible shape.”
19 / prediction
“Whether it's solar, whether it's wind, whether it's petroleum, or hydroelectric, the West is going to be economically extremely powerful, because energy is a fundamental industry.”
20 / evaluation
“From what I've read of his work, he takes it seriously enough to question how we don't actually know what those future people will want.”
21 / evaluation
“There was a huge epidemiological disparity between the two hemispheres––largely because by a quirk of evolutionary history, there were many more domesticable animals in Eurasia and the Eastern hemisphere.”
22 / recommendation
“There's a whole chapter in the book by David Wingrove and David Graeber, The Dawn of Everything about this, and they make this argument that Tehuácan is an example that we can look at as an ancient society that was much more socially egalitarian than we think.”