Speakers in the public record
Claim mix
belief 12evaluation 6uncertainty 6prediction 4recommendation 2commitment 2
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.
32 published records
“When something gets bigger, your volume increases a lot faster than your surface area does. So for something enclosed, like a tank or a pipe, the cost goes down per thing of unit you're transporting because you can carry a larger amount or a smaller amount of material.”
- Publisher
- Dwarkesh Podcast
“Today, I have the pleasure of speaking with Brian Potter, who is an engineer and the author of the excellent Construction Physics blog, where he writes about how the construction industry works and why it has been slow to industrialize and innovate. It's one of my favorite blogs on the internet, I highly, highly recommend that people check it out.”
- Publisher
- Dwarkesh Podcast
“How I think about that is that you kind of see a similar structure in anything that's project-based or anything where there's an element of figuring out what you're doing while you're doing it.”
- Publisher
- Dwarkesh Podcast
“Yeah, again, I'm going to sort of cheat a little bit and do it in terms of space and time, because I think most countries that are doing a good job at building massive amounts of stuff are not ones that are basically doing it currently.”
- Publisher
- Dwarkesh Podcast
“I don't know if you're familiar with the longtermist movement, maybe you’ve come across this before, but one thing they've proposed is not like a doctrine or anything, but on the periphery, some idea I saw was that just as we have environmental review we should have a posterity review so that you're analyzing the impacts of your actions on generations way down the line.”
- Publisher
- Dwarkesh Podcast
“There's a famous law in software that says that a project will take longer than you expect even after you recount for the fact that it will take longer than you expect.”
- Publisher
- Dwarkesh Podcast
“I think, on some level, they're expecting that you would just see a return just from building something that's really impressive and the biggest thing on some particular axis or whatever.”
- Publisher
- Dwarkesh Podcast
“I don't know if we discussed this, but an interesting part of the book is where he talks about transistor design.”
- Publisher
- Dwarkesh Podcast
“The new Google headquarters (I don't know how new it is, but on the newer side), is basically this big, big giant, dome-type thing with a lot of structural detail visible and a lot of just light coming in this big, giant open space.”
- Publisher
- Dwarkesh Podcast
“Like you, I've definitely heard talk of it and I've seen the little YouTube clips of them knocking down all these towers that it turns out they didn't need or the developer couldn't, finish or whatever. I don't know a huge amount about that.”
- Publisher
- Dwarkesh Podcast
“The risk is that people will just say, “Okay well, we’ll go and litigate this project immediately, and then when we do, we will say that they did not look hard enough at these impacts and if they can't marshal the resources we needed to study some particular flowering species and it only has a flowering period of two weeks in the spring and the time period was up before that happens,” then the court is good, which is a thing that happens in NEPA apparently.”
- Publisher
- Dwarkesh Podcast
“The first conversation was really interesting, and then afterwards, I realized that I’d forgotten to ask Brian about this really interesting theory that Scott Alexander and others have written about.”
- Speaker
- Not verified from transcript
- Publisher
- Dwarkesh Podcast
“I have a friend who was with you at the Oxford Refugees Conference, Connor Tabarrok. I don't know if you remember him.”
- Publisher
- Dwarkesh Podcast
“I don't know if you saw this, by the way, but about a year or two ago, Microsoft announced that they were building this new office for developers in India and they were looking at this very interesting architectural details and craftsmanship that made it look like you know for everything from the furniture to the floor layout to the arches of the entrances.”
- Publisher
- Dwarkesh Podcast
“I think things that are really easy for a machine to do can be put together without a lot of persistent measurement or stuff like that in-field.”
- Publisher
- Dwarkesh Podcast
“I suspect that you're just gonna start to see robotics and systems like that take a larger and larger share of the tasks on the construction site over time.”
- Publisher
- Dwarkesh Podcast
“The complaint is that “Oh all buildings have to be a cylinder of glass or a rectangle of glass or whatever,” but I think one reason that is true is that, while it may not be super interesting from the outside, when you're on the inside of a building, you actually kind of want a whole lot of glass.”
- Publisher
- Dwarkesh Podcast
“I think there are a lot of examples where if you don't have the context on why they were built a certain way, you wouldn't understand what was going on.”
- Publisher
- Dwarkesh Podcast
“I think a co-sign solution to this kind of thing would be optimal where if the view is worth more to you than the apartment is worth to somebody else, then you can just pay them to not build there.”
- Publisher
- Dwarkesh Podcast
“I think there's probably something to that where you go to architecture school and architecture school is adjacent to art school in the way that you learn how to design buildings, but you also learn a specific way of looking and thinking about them.”
- Publisher
- Dwarkesh Podcast
“Very broadly, I would say that I see a lot of innovation happening. So I think that's a good place to sort of look and see what's going on.”
- Publisher
- Dwarkesh Podcast
“Reliably seeing their costs continue to rise, I think there's no reason to believe that that's not a big part of it.”
- Publisher
- Dwarkesh Podcast
“There's been a lot of talk about a potential real estate bubble in China because they're building housing in places where people don't really need it.”
- Publisher
- Dwarkesh Podcast
“If they slow it down enough, sometimes the project becomes unattractive and it gets canceled. That's kind of what a lot of these groups hope for and so basically instead of great uncertainty and solid coordination problems, it creates all this new uncertainty where people will like very deliberately try to avoid the NEPA process because they do not know how long it will take and how much it will cost to get their project approved and in some cases going through the process will take a very very very very long time.”
- Publisher
- Dwarkesh Podcast
“I think that the value of 3D printing is basically entirely predicated on how successful they are at figuring out how to like deliver more components of the building using their system.”
- Publisher
- Dwarkesh Podcast
“Then once we started mass producing conventional lumber, we stopped doing that because it was much cheaper to build out of two-by-fours than it was to build big heavy posts.”
- Publisher
- Dwarkesh Podcast
“I asked a few people who I thought would know about it, “Is there any book written that actually explains what it’s like to get something built in china or what building things in china are actually like, and they're all like, “No, I don't know any source that exists.”
- Publisher
- Dwarkesh Podcast
“I think one of the people mentioned that the Victorian style of house basically came about because of mass production methods, which made really ornate wood decorations really, really cheaply.”
- Publisher
- Dwarkesh Podcast
“You tend to see a lot more houses like that built out of prefab construction and other factory-built methods because it's just physically more difficult to achieve that on-site.”
- Publisher
- Dwarkesh Podcast
“All of a sudden, you could build things in ways that you couldn't do before steel, and you could use so much less structure to build fine concrete, because it was like liquid.”
- Publisher
- Dwarkesh Podcast
“I should figure out a way to automate this process.” So I made a very simple web app where when you searched for shoes or something, it would automatically search the very nice brands of shoes and all the typos of the brand name.”
- Publisher
- Dwarkesh Podcast
“Focus on software and then work at one of the many more new startups that are now tackling the construction space. They're increasingly in need of software developers and that would probably be a lower-risk way to do it because you don't need to necessarily go to a fancy school to become a software developer.”
- Publisher
- Dwarkesh Podcast