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
20 published records
01 / uncertainty
“Today I have the pleasure of interviewing George Church. I don't know how to introduce you.”
02 / observation
“An enzyme that's normally made in, let's say the brain, you could make in the liver, if the point is just to get it into the blood.”
03 / observation
“We call it chemical / biochemical / exotic material libraries. The point is that they're libraries.”
04 / belief
“I would say mostly GWAS for humans, maybe for animals in general. For animals with synthetic biology, the smaller and the cheaper and faster replicating, the more experiments you can do.”
05 / belief
“I think right now, the baby step, or actually the pretty big baby step, is to eliminate diseases or at least make it possible for people to eliminate their own diseases as they see fit.”
06 / belief
“As a consequence, I think we have a kind of international set of alumni that are quite nice to each other even though they're supposedly in cutthroat fields.”
07 / belief
“We could stand on the shoulders of the electronics giants to go a little bit faster to catch up. I would say we do.”
08 / belief
“I think on net it was a good thing that the NSF and the NIH and all these budgets were blown up and got DOGE’d and so forth…” I'm not saying you think this is likely, but suppose there ends up being a positive story told in retrospect.”
09 / belief
“I think that evolution has a tendency to go with what works. The investment in making a whole new base pair would have been high.”
10 / belief
“I think if we just start looking at the geysers that are coming out of various moons of Jupiter and Saturn, there's so much water.”
11 / prediction
“It's going to go pretty fast with just regular AI without AGI. But if you add to it AGI… It'll also be a positive feedback loop, because the more people that get fixed or get access to good healthcare, the more people will be helping prompt the AI, if that's necessary.”
12 / evaluation
“Very often there's low-hanging fruit that people just think is improbable. But it's there because biology has all these gifts where it just hands over to us levers that we can flip.”
13 / prediction
“I think pretty soon we'll have a system where we can have 34 new non standard amino acids being used simultaneously with the standard ones in a E.”
14 / evaluation
“I guess I am curious if there is some long-run vision, where… To give another example, in cybersecurity, as time has gone on, I think our systems are more secure today than they were in the past because we found vulnerabilities and we've come up with new encryption schemes and so forth.”
15 / prediction
“I think we're on the cusp of getting the tools to do that, like the transcription factor I was talking about earlier, harnessing migration, gradients of diffusion factors, chemotaxis and so forth.”
16 / evaluation
“I would say that if you wanted to make a copy of a complicated book, it would be easier to take photographs of each of the pages than to completely translate it into another language—trying to get all the nuances of the poetry and so forth—if your goal is just to replicate it.”
17 / prediction
“Just like I wrote a paper long ago about the dangers of having the synthetic capabilities we have for making synthetic viruses, and to some extent of having new genetic codes.”
18 / evaluation
“This is not like COVID-19, where millions of people were dying if we delayed the science. This is something where, if there ever is a crisis, it's because we created it, it's not because we're trying to solve it.”
19 / prediction
“With biology, the kind of evidence would be that you show in a laboratory using prebiotic conditions a really simple way to get life. It's harder to prove the negative because we don't know all the possible prebiotic conditions.”
20 / prediction
“There may be some, probably not some law of physics, but some economic or complexity issue that we don't know about that becomes a brick wall.”