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
48 published records
01 / uncertainty
“London today? I would say I don't know. But it's not obvious that it’s coming close to its previous glories.”
02 / uncertainty
“I mean, Hungarian Jews and mathematics-–I don't know big of a trend it still is, but it's certainly nothing close to what it once was.”
03 / belief
“Again, I think I'm relatively accepting of a lot of these realities, but the thing that disappoints me a bit is how geographically clustered talent is.”
04 / evaluation
“I don't wake up in the morning and get pissed off at someone in the Middle East doing whatever, even though I might think it was wrong.”
05 / evaluation
“You say in the book, that questions tend to degrade over time if you don't replace them.”
06 / belief
“You need to focus on how the sector is different. But if you're doing that, then I think at the meta level the principles broadly stay the same.”
07 / uncertainty
“Most talent spotters don't know a lot about parents, like I don't know anything about your parents at all!”
08 / uncertainty
“I don't know, I hope there's some influence there, but it's very hard to say. Hard to measure.”
09 / belief
“More than who does? I feel what the book presents is, in fact, my view. So kind of by definition, I agree with that view.”
10 / belief
“I would think UChicago is the one school where that's not true. I agree that it's true for most schools.”
11 / belief
“In that sense, I'm not sure it's a good critique of Bryan. So for most people in the middle of the distribution, I don't think you can learn what I learned from Top 5 Emergent Ventures winners through an application and a half-hour zoom call.”
12 / belief
“I'd like to see more data. But I suspect the best moral instruction is the teachers actually being good people.”
13 / belief
“I think a lot of the students we produce have done unusual things. Certainly relative to other programs.”
14 / belief
“A lot of the IDW people: very clear peaks, which now lie in the past, and I suspect will have fairly rapid declines.”
15 / belief
“I give concrete advice to people all the time with a grain of salt. I'll tell people, “I think you should go to this school, not that school.”
16 / belief
“I think the convexity of returns to intelligence is embedded in a multiplicative model, where the IQ returns only cash out for people good at all these other things.”
17 / observation
“You actually have to be really smart to figure out things like how to lead a team, how to improve yourself, how to practice, how to outsmart the opposition, all these other things. Maybe it’s not the only way to get there, but it is very G loaded.”
18 / belief
“I think a lot of foundations give out too many large grants and not enough small grants.”
19 / evaluation
“There's a whole bunch of proposals that really need the money for capital costs, and then it matters a lot. For a lot of them, the money per se doesn't matter.”
20 / belief
“Path dependence history, the story of making it in the Big Apple and so on. But origins and where people come from are areas that I think theory is very bad at understanding.”
21 / observation
“If you focus more on learning about cultures, history, you're not going to come up with some list as the way to approach that.”
22 / belief
“I once had a debate with Marc Andreessen about this–– I think Mark tends to see things that are left-wing/right-wing as somewhat universal historical categories, and I very much do not.”
23 / uncertainty
“I don't know what I can do about it. I try actually to do something about it so I have a reaction.”
24 / belief
“I think my chance of identifying great novelists is very low. And it's one reason why it's not something I try to do.”
25 / belief
“I think the chance of there being a major war with nuclear weapons or whatever comes next.”
26 / belief
“I think exhausting the literal low hanging fruits at the technological level is the main reason.”
27 / belief
“I've thought about this quite a bit. I think the selection filters are very strong.”
28 / belief
“I don't think you can become superhuman in your energy and stamina if you're not born that way. But I think almost everyone could increase by 30% to 50%, some notable amount.”
29 / belief
“I think substack encourages posts that are too long, too whiny, and too self reflective, and too obsessed with a relatively small number of recurring topics.”
30 / belief
“I think if you meet enough people who didn't go to college, you'll see the difference, on average.”
31 / belief
“The issues realign in particular ways. I believe that’s why Conquest’s Law locally is mostly holding.”
32 / uncertainty
“I don't know what the function looks like. It just seems to me that today, we have enough diverse sources of ideas, enough wealth, enough different universities, research labs, that it ought not to go too badly.”
33 / belief
“I think deliberately with a lot of candidates, you shouldn't encourage them too much.”
34 / uncertainty
“If you look at the war against terror, I don't know who or what gets the credit, but compared to what we expected right after 9/11, it’s gone okay.”
35 / belief
“Like “Oh, I was rejected by Harvard, I had to go to UChicago, but I decided, I'm going to show those bastards.” I think we talked about that a few minutes ago.”
36 / belief
“A lot of people are at a distance, but I think you'll get more and better responses by inviting local people to do it live.”
37 / belief
“I think their ability to limit that risk, however great or small, might basically be zero.”
38 / belief
“I would say at Mercatus, we have a lot of students come through here, and we do try to teach them all in different ways about how to take more career risk.”
39 / prediction
“I think there's quite a good chance we will get more good reforms than bad ones, so capitalism, democracy, and broadly classical liberal values will advance.”
40 / evaluation
“I mean, I think of you as an optimist––at least by temperament. But this seems like one of the more pessimistic things I've heard overall, anywhere, because of the idea that not only will human civilization be decimated almost surely, but that they will never be able to recover.”
41 / evaluation
“Again, there are some great things that had terrible pitches, but I think you see way more early signs.”
42 / commitment
“We don't know why. But don't assume that just because it happened once that means you always rebuild.”
43 / commitment
“Five years from now? I think I would do more Emergent Ventures. I would finish the book I'm working on, and I might consider a sequel to Talent depending on Daniel's plans.”
44 / prediction
“I think the US, unless it totally screws up on immigration, will always have a very seriously good flow of young people that we don't ever have to enter the aging equilibrium the way Japan probably already has.”
45 / evaluation
“I wouldn't say that's their main problem, but you can't say, “oh, they don't innovate because they're too woke”, like hang out with some 63 year old Danish guys and see how woke you think they are once everyone's had a few drinks.”
46 / evaluation
“There's more people who know early on that they can do it, but not for Sam-like reasons of overconfidence. They kind of know it because they can, and there are enough early tests.”
47 / evaluation
“I'm a big fan of the view that top-level athletic performance is super cognitively intense and that most top athletes are really extraordinarily smart.”
48 / preference
“I prefer to work with people's strengths and boost their strengths, rather than have a list set out of how to reform them.”