Dwarkesh Podcast / episode intelligence
Speakers in the public record
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Evidence policy
Every row below preserves an exact excerpt. Identified speakers are linked; unresolved voices are labeled and excluded from people counts.
Claim ledger
32 published records
01 / evaluation
“In the west, the moment you as a soldier start losing a battle, you can retreat and surrender and it's not dishonorable because you're going to live to fight another day.”
02 / evaluation
“No. I think the problem is World War I. World War I has enormous consequences. All sides allowed their generals to make strategy.”
03 / uncertainty
“Think about low probability but high consequence events. I don't know what the probability is, but I know the consequences are huge.”
04 / commitment
“I think the Chinese have whispered in his ear, and this is pure speculation, “Buddy, if you do this, everybody on the planet is going to get nuclear weapons and all of a sudden we are going to have this little small club of people with nuclear weapons and the consequences are going to be rather horrendous.”
05 / belief
“Part of it. And I think part of it is a different issue. If you think about who the strategic leaders of World War II were, they were the conscripts of World War I.”
06 / belief
“Being around them, I think I have a sense of what it means to understand a technical field well.”
07 / uncertainty
“I don't know. But look at North Korea. Talk about a failed place. It's amazing to me how long the Kim dynasty has maintained its power.”
08 / belief
“I have no idea. I think you have to prepare for it. And it will best position you to deter it, even though you may fail at deterring it.”
09 / belief
“I suspect it would have been far better leaving Chiang kai shek with all that stuff and then it would have been useful for him in the final stages of the war to get a few wins against the Japanese to make him look good.”
10 / belief
“” I think you're going to learn a lot from this Ukraine war about what works and what doesn't.”
11 / belief
“I think the general feeling about the federal government is that there are incredible inefficiencies but it's very difficult to get rid of them.”
12 / belief
“I think you want to be ambiguous in the United States because otherwise it would enable Taiwan to do crazy stuff.”
13 / belief
“In retrospect, we think of them as part of the same great global conflict, whereas they were separated by eight years.”
14 / uncertainty
“I don't know. I would imagine cooperative adversaries. China had been a failed state for such a long time.”
15 / uncertainty
“I don't know. But I think the people who are worried about that are the Vietnamese and the Indians, the people who are likely to meet them.”
16 / uncertainty
“I'm making this up because I don't know the details of China but if you think about Deng Xiaoping, he's on the long march, he's one of the younger members.”
17 / observation
“You can do that but since the Industrial Revolution in the West, there has been a growing consensus that that's probably not the way to do things.”
18 / belief
“Something I learned from your book that I thought was really interesting, and also tragic because of the counterfactual, was one of the strategies you suggested.”
19 / belief
“I believe if you measure the number of locals who died in Iraq and Afghanistan and then they've had the civil war on top of it, it's thousands and thousands and thousands and thousands of people.”
20 / belief
“If you're a Russian of any persuasion, I suspect you'd be really angry that some American from across the seas is going to determine what kind of government you live under.”
21 / belief
“I think until recently the narrative has been that the CCP is incredibly competent and very good at engineering good policies and economic growth in China.”
22 / belief
“Before we decide that Americans are the important people in the world, or since we're in Britain now, British, and therefore anyone in between doesn't count, I believe that's wrong.”
23 / evaluation
“That lays the basis, not on purpose, of having international law where people who are eventually going to be running these independent countries have a legal training to use international law to their own kind of benefit. But anyway, Britain has this non-contiguous empire and after the war, it does not have the ability to hang on to them because of nationalism.”
24 / evaluation
“People look at sanctions and go, “Oh, they don't work because you don't make whoever's annoying you change whatever they're doing.”
25 / prediction
“You will never have stable borders and then it's easy for others to fund insurgencies because you have this dominated population that hates being dominated.”
26 / evaluation
“When there were wounded Japanese soldiers, their commanders ordered their fellow soldiers to execute them because they didn't want cripples going home.”
27 / evaluation
“What's death ground? It's when your enemy puts you on death ground, which means they're going to kill you, and therefore, you have no choice but to fight, because if you don't fight, you're dead.”
28 / evaluation
“The Chinese Communist Party has clearly made the decision that it wants to maintain a monopoly of political power. And for a while there, during Deng Xiaoping, that worked because the reforms that they wanted to make for agriculture and things, they can maintain their monopoly of power but also do things that allow people to get much wealthier.”
29 / prediction
“Because unlike Ukraine, if you have a continental position, if someone threatens you and invades on a given day, you have a choice on that given day, the day they chose, either you're going to capitulate or you're going to fight.”
30 / recommendation
“And also, I've really enjoyed your book on Japan, The Japanese Empire. And you also have these other textbooks and collections of essays, which I highly recommend because of the thorough nature and the diversity of sources.”
31 / prediction
“” I would argue the Cold War began in 1917 because we have this notion that, “Oh, I decide when wars begin.”
32 / evaluation
“I don't know, but I suspect that the sins of the West are really obvious because we have an open press.”