Lucretius
Where On the Nature of Things was mentioned: 2 timestamped quotes from 2 episodes across 1 podcast.
“is Lucretius’ On the Nature of Things, De rerum natura, which is our best capsule of ancient atomism and the atoms and vacuum theory of matter. It's written around the BC/AD turn, and drifts”
Machiavelli is the most misunderstood thinker of all time – Ada Palmer · Dwarkesh Podcast
“selection seems much more well developed. There was a Roman poet called Lucretius who had a poem where there was a precursor of Darwinian selection. And I feel like that”
Eliezer Yudkowsky — Why AI will kill us, aligning LLMs, nature of intelligence, SciFi, & rationality · Dwarkesh Podcast