Dwarkesh Podcast
by Dwarkesh Patel
Latest episode
What Robert Caro learned about power after studying it for 50 years
What Robert Caro learned about power after studying it for 50 years
About this podcast
Deeply researched interviews
www.dwarkesh.com
Episodes
The newest 50 of 145 episodes
- What Robert Caro learned about power after studying it for 50 years · 1 h 1 minThe Robert Caro interview. Watch on YouTube; read the transcript. Sponsors * Antithesis lets you run thorough simulation tests on every PR your coding agents ship. That’s because…
- What I learned about power from LBJ and Robert Moses · 25 minI recently got to interview Robert Caro, who is my favorite author of all time. This gave me the excuse to reread his biographies of Lyndon Johnson and Robert Moses, and to…
- What will computer chips look like in 2045? · 1 h 9 minI spent two days touring Intel’s most advanced fab and talking to its technical leadership to understand what the chips of the future will look like. A lot of what's coming next…
- Si Sheppard – How did a few hundred Spanish soldiers topple two empires? · 1 h 37 minNew episode with military historian Si Sheppard. The conquests of the Aztec and Inca empires might be the most shocking events in human history. Hernan Cortés and some hundreds…
- Noam Brown – Agent swarms, alignment, & recursive self-improvement · 1 h 20 minNew episode with Noam Brown. We talk about multi-agent, Navier-Stokes, and what the current explosion of maths progress tells us about what happens once you automate AI research…
- AI researchers debate how close we are to recursive self-improvement · 1 h 37 minNew episode with John Schulman, Beren Millidge and Charlie O’Neill. I got together with some of the most insightful AI researchers I know who are at the openish companies…
- Ajeya Cotra – Inside the OpenAI agent swarm that hacked Hugging Face · 2 h 20 minAjeya Cotra is a researcher at METR, where she works on threat modeling for loss-of-control risks from advanced AI. Before that, she led the technical AI safety program at what…
- The rise and fall of agent civilizations · 25 minThis is a video recording of a post I wrote last week. You can read the original here. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get…
- Dylan Patel – Anthropic & OpenAI will have most of the world’s compute by 2028 · 1 h 16 minHad a lot of fun chatting again with my twin brother Dylan Patel. We went through lab economics over the next few years - the shift from inference to training as RSI draws near…
- Ryan Greenblatt – What happens once AI can automate AI research? · 2 h 12 minRyan Greenblatt is the Chief Scientist at Redwood Research, where he works on technical AI safety research. He's also lead author on the "Alignment faking in Large Language…
- 8 Predictions for the Era of Continual Learning · 9 minRead the essay here. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.dwarkesh.com
- Why smarter AI models could drive up compute prices 10x · 11 minThis is a video recording of a post I wrote last week. If you want to read the original you can check it out here. Thanks to Mercury for sponsoring this video. Mercury’s built-in…
- Adam Brown – A deep but accessible introduction to general relativity · 1 h 38 minAdam Brown is back! General relativity is said to be the most beautiful idea the human mind has ever produced. Most of us will never get to fully appreciate its elegance by…
- Grant Sanderson – AI and the future of math · 1 h 33 minAlways so much fun to chat with Grant. AI has been making much faster progress in math than in other fields. As a result, mathematics is showing us, very concretely, what AI…
- The next big breakthrough will be AIs learning on the job · 20 minRead it here. Thanks to Mercury for sponsoring this essay. Mercury has automated basically my entire bill pay process for my business. I just give contractors a dedicated email…
- The data black hole at the center of AI · 12 minRead the transcript here. Thanks to Mercury for sponsoring this essay! Mercury just released a new feature called Command, which gives me AI right in my banking platform. And…
- Ada Palmer – Machiavelli is the most misunderstood thinker of all time · 2 h 8 minHad Ada Palmer back on – this time to talk about Machiavelli, perhaps the most misunderstood thinker of all time. Machiavelli cut his teeth as a high-level diplomat for Florence…
- Alex Imas and Phil Trammell – What remains scarce after AGI? · 1 h 16 minEconomics of AGI episode w Alex Imas and Phil Trammell. There’s a bunch of important questions about how we deal with AI that only economics can answer. What is the optimal way…
- Reiner Pope – Chip design from the bottom up · 1 h 20 minNew blackboard lecture with Reiner Pope: how do chips actually work - starting with basic logic gates, and working up to why GPUs, TPUs, FPGAs, and the human brain each look the…
- Eric Jang – Building AlphaGo from scratch · 2 h 37 minEric Jang walks through how to build AlphaGo from scratch, but with modern AI tools. Sometimes you understand the future better by stepping backward. AlphaGo is still the…
- David Reich – Why the Bronze Age was an inflection point in human evolution · 2 h 13 minDavid Reich is back. He and collaborator Ali Akbari just published a paper that overturns a long-standing consensus about human evolution — that natural selection has been…
- Reiner Pope – The math behind how LLMs are trained and served · 2 h 13 minDid a very different format with Reiner Pope - a blackboard lecture where he walks through how frontier LLMs are trained and served. It’s shocking how much you can deduce about…
- Jensen Huang – TPU competition, why we should sell chips to China, & Nvidia’s supply chain moat · 1 h 43 minI asked Jensen about TPU competition, Nvidia’s lock on the ever more bottlenecked supply chain needed to make advanced chips, whether we should be selling AI chips to China, why…
- Michael Nielsen – How science actually progresses · 2 h 3 minReally enjoyed chatting with Michael Nielsen about how we recognize scientific progress. It's especially relevant for closing the RL verification loop for scientific discovery…
- Terence Tao – Kepler, Newton, and the true nature of mathematical discovery · 1 h 23 minWe begin the episode with the absolutely ingenious and surprising way in which Kepler discovered the laws of planetary motion. People sometimes say that AI will make especially…
- Dylan Patel — Deep dive on the 3 big bottlenecks to scaling AI compute · 2 h 30 minDylan Patel, founder of SemiAnalysis, provides a deep dive into the 3 big bottlenecks to scaling AI compute: logic, memory, and power. And walks through the economics of labs…
- The most important question nobody's asking about AI · 25 minRead the full essay here: https://www.dwarkesh.com/p/dow-anthropic Timestamps (00:00:00) - Anthropic vs The Pentagon (00:04:16) - The overhangs of tyranny (00:05:54) - AI…
- Why Leonardo was a saboteur, Gutenberg went broke, and Florence was weird – Ada Palmer · 2 h 2 minRenaissance history is so much wilder and weirder than you would have expected. Very fun chatting with Ada Palmer (historian, novelist, and composer based at the University of…
- Dario Amodei — "We are near the end of the exponential" · 2 h 22 minDario Amodei thinks we are just a few years away from AGI — or as he puts it, from having “a country of geniuses in a data center”. In this episode, we discuss what to make of…
- Elon Musk — "In 36 months, the cheapest place to put AI will be space” · 2 h 49 minIn this episode, John and I got to do a real deep-dive with Elon. We discuss the economics of orbital data centers, the difficulties of scaling power on Earth, what it would take…
- Adam Marblestone — AI is missing something fundamental about the brain · 1 h 49 minAdam Marblestone is CEO of Convergent Research. He’s had a very interesting past life: he was a research scientist at Google Deepmind on their neuroscience team and has worked on…
- Thoughts on AI progress (Dec 2025) · 12 minRead the essay here. Timestamps 00:00:00 What are we scaling? 00:03:11 The value of human labor 00:05:04 Economic diffusion lag is cope00:06:34 Goal-post shifting is justified…
- Sarah Paine — Why Russia Lost the Cold War · 1 h 54 minThis is the final episode of the Sarah Paine lecture series, and it’s probably my favorite one. Sarah gives a “tour of the arguments” on what ultimately led to the Soviet Union’s…
- Ilya Sutskever — We're moving from the age of scaling to the age of research · 1 h 36 minIlya & I discuss SSI’s strategy, the problems with pre-training, how to improve the generalization of AI models, and how to ensure AGI goes well. Watch on YouTube; read the…
- Satya Nadella — How Microsoft is preparing for AGI · 1 h 27 minAs part of this interview, Satya Nadella gave Dylan Patel (founder of SemiAnalysis) and me an exclusive first-look at their brand-new Fairwater 2 datacenter. Microsoft is…
- Sarah Paine — How Russia sabotaged China's rise · 1 h 30 minIn this lecture, military historian Sarah Paine explains how Russia—and specifically Stalin—completely derailed China’s rise, slowing them down for over a century. This lecture…
- Andrej Karpathy — AGI is still a decade away · 2 h 25 minThe Andrej Karpathy episode. During this interview, Andrej explains why reinforcement learning is terrible (but everything else is much worse), why AGI will just blend into the…
- Nick Lane – Life as we know it is chemically inevitable · 1 h 20 minNick Lane has some pretty wild ideas about the evolution of life. He thinks early life was continuous with the spontaneous chemistry of undersea hydrothermal vents. Nick’s story…
- Some thoughts on the Sutton interview · 12 minI have a much better understanding of Sutton’s perspective now. I wanted to reflect on it a bit. (00:00:00) - The steelman (00:02:42) - TLDR of my current thoughts (00:03:22)…
- Richard Sutton – Father of RL thinks LLMs are a dead end · 1 h 6 minRichard Sutton is the father of reinforcement learning, winner of the 2024 Turing Award, and author of The Bitter Lesson. And he thinks LLMs are a dead end. After interviewing…
- Fully autonomous robots are much closer than you think – Sergey Levine · 1 h 28 minSergey Levine, one of the world’s top robotics researchers and co-founder of Physical Intelligence, thinks we’re on the cusp of a “self-improvement flywheel” for general-purpose…
- How Hitler almost starved Britain – Sarah Paine · 1 h 35 minIn this lecture, military historian Sarah Paine explains how Britain used sea control, peripheral campaigns, and alliances to defeat Nazi Germany during WWII. She then applies…
- Evolution designed us to die fast; we can change that — Jacob Kimmel · 1 h 44 minJacob Kimmel thinks he can find the transcription factors to reverse aging. We do a deep dive on why this might be plausible and why evolution hasn’t optimized for longevity. We…
- China is killing the US on energy. Does that mean they’ll win AGI? — Casey Handmer · 1 h 8 minHow will we feed the 100s of GWs of extra energy demand that AI will create over the coming decade? On this episode, Casey Handmer (Caltech PhD, former NASA JPL, founder & CEO of…
- Artificial meat is harder than artificial intelligence — Lewis Bollard · 1 h 8 minA deep dive with Lewis Bollard, who leads Open Philanthropy’s strategy for Farmed Animal Welfare, on the surprising economics of the meat industry. Why is factory farming so…
- Sarah Paine — How Imperial Japan defeated Tsarist Russia & Qing China · 1 h 55 minAfter my last lecture series with Sarah Paine ended, I still had so many questions. I knew we’d only scratched the surface of Sarah’s scholarship, so I immediately invited her…
- Stephen Kotkin — How Stalin became the most powerful dictator in history · 2 h 12 minThe Stephen Kotkin episode. Kotkin is arguably the world’s foremost expert on Joseph Stalin and has written a massive 2-volume biography on him (with a 3rd volume in the works)…
- Why I don’t think AGI is right around the corner · 14 minI’ve had a lot of discussions on my podcast where we haggle out timelines to AGI. Some guests think it’s 20 years away - others 2 years. Here’s an audio version of where my…
- A billion years of evolution in a single afternoon — George Church · 1 h 33 minGeorge Church is the godfather of modern synthetic biology and has been involved with basically every major biotech breakthrough in the last few decades. Professor Church thinks…
- Why China's manufacturing economy is dominating — Arthur Kroeber · 2 h 26 minArthur Kroeber is a leading researcher on Chinese tech and macro, a founding partner at Gavekal Dragonomics, and author of "China's Economy: What Everyone Needs to Know." It's…
