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Dwarkesh Podcast

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Deeply researched interviews. Click to read Dwarkesh Podcast, by Dwarkesh Patel, a Substack publication with hundreds of thousands of subscribers.

AI / MLHistorySociety / politics / economy

’20’21’22’23’24’25’26
Posts
189 from 22 May 2020 to 30 Oct 2026
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weekly (53 in the last year)
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personal blog
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2026 43

  1. Robert Caro – The master biographer reflects at 91
  2. What I learned about power from LBJ and Robert Moses
  3. What will computer chips look like in 2045?
  4. Si Sheppard – How did a few hundred Spanish soldiers topple two empires?
  5. Noam Brown – Agent swarms, alignment, & recursive self-improvement
  6. AI researchers debate how close we are to recursive self-improvement
  7. Pretraining progress is mostly coming from data
  8. Ajeya Cotra – Inside the OpenAI agent swarm that hacked Hugging Face
  9. The rise and fall of agent civilizations
  10. The Rise and Fall of Agent Civilizations
  11. Dylan Patel – Anthropic & OpenAI will have most of the world’s compute by 2028
  12. Ryan Greenblatt – What happens once AI can automate AI research?
  13. 8 Predictions for the Era of Continual Learning
  14. Why smarter AI models could drive up compute prices 10x
  15. Why compute might get 10x+ more expensive in coming years
  16. Adam Brown – A deep but accessible introduction to general relativity
  17. The Winning Essays for the Big Questions About AI
  18. Grant Sanderson – AI and the future of math
  19. The next big breakthrough will be AIs learning on the job
  20. The data black hole at the center of AI
  21. Ada Palmer – Machiavelli is the most misunderstood thinker of all time
  22. Alex Imas and Phil Trammell – What remains scarce after AGI?
  23. Reiner Pope – Chip design from the bottom up
  24. The mistake of conflating intelligence and power
  25. Notes on pretraining parallelisms and failed training runs.
  26. RLVR might be disproportionately bad at science
  27. Eric Jang – Building AlphaGo from scratch
  28. David Reich – Why the Bronze Age was an inflection point in human evolution
  29. Reiner Pope – The math behind how LLMs are trained and served
  30. More open questions about AI
  31. Blog prize for the big questions about AI
  32. Jensen Huang – TPU competition, why we should sell chips to China, & Nvidia’s supply chain moat
  33. What I learned this week - Can distillation be stopped, Mythos and the cybersecurity equilibrium, Pipeline RL
  34. Michael Nielsen – How science actually progresses
  35. Terence Tao – Kepler, Newton, and the true nature of mathematical discovery
  36. Dylan Patel — Deep dive on the 3 big bottlenecks to scaling AI compute
  37. The most important question nobody's asking about AI
  38. Why Leonardo was a saboteur, Gutenberg went broke, and Florence was weird – Ada Palmer
  39. Dario Amodei — "We are near the end of the exponential"
  40. Notes on Space GPUs
  41. Elon Musk — "In 36 months, the cheapest place to put AI will be space”
  42. Hiring scouts to help me find guests
  43. What I've been reading recently - Jan 10, 2026

2025 50

  1. Adam Marblestone — AI is missing something fundamental about the brain
  2. Capital in the 22nd Century
  3. Thoughts on AI progress (Dec 2025)
  4. Sarah Paine — Why Russia Lost the Cold War
  5. Thoughts on AI progress (Dec 2025)
  6. Podcast Strategy Doc (December 2025)
  7. Ilya Sutskever — We're moving from the age of scaling to the age of research
  8. RL is even more information inefficient than you thought
  9. Satya Nadella — How Microsoft is preparing for AGI
  10. Sarah Paine — How Russia sabotaged China's rise
  11. Thoughts on the AI buildout
  12. Andrej Karpathy — AGI is still a decade away
  13. Nick Lane – Life as we know it is chemically inevitable
  14. Some thoughts on the Sutton interview
  15. On The Vital Question by Nick Lane
  16. Richard Sutton – Father of RL thinks LLMs are a dead end
  17. Fully autonomous robots are much closer than you think – Sergey Levine
  18. How Hitler almost starved Britain – Sarah Paine
  19. Evolution designed us to die fast; we can change that — Jacob Kimmel
  20. China is killing the US on energy. Does that mean they’ll win AGI? — Casey Handmer
  21. Artificial meat is harder than artificial intelligence — Lewis Bollard
  22. Sarah Paine — How Imperial Japan defeated Tsarist Russia & Qing China
  23. Stephen Kotkin — How Stalin became the most powerful dictator in history
  24. Why I don’t think AGI is right around the corner
  25. On Kotkin's 2 volumes on Stalin - notes and questions
  26. Sarah Paine 6 part July lecture series - free tickets for paid subscribers
  27. A billion years of evolution in a single afternoon — George Church
  28. Why China's manufacturing economy is dominating — Arthur Kroeber
  29. "China is digging out of a crisis. And America’s luck is wearing thin." — Ken Rogoff
  30. Why I don’t think AGI is right around the corner
  31. Give AIs a stake in the future
  32. Xi Jinping’s paranoid approach to AGI, debt crisis, & Politburo politics — Victor Shih
  33. Is RL + LLMs enough for AGI? — Sholto Douglas & Trenton Bricken
  34. What will automated firms look like?
  35. Mark Zuckerberg — AI will write most Meta code in 18 months
  36. Why Rome actually fell: plagues, slavery, & ice age — Kyle Harper
  37. Questions about the Future of AI
  38. AGI is still 30 years away — Ege Erdil & Tamay Besiroglu
  39. AI 2027: month-by-month model of intelligence explosion — Scott Alexander & Daniel Kokotajlo
  40. Dwarkesh Patel Wants People to Learn Things
  41. AMA: career advice given AGI, how I research ft. Sholto & Trenton
  42. Joseph Henrich — Humans defeated smarter species with cultural evolution
  43. Notes on China
  44. Satya Nadella — Microsoft’s AGI plan & quantum breakthrough
  45. Jeff Dean & Noam Shazeer — 25 years at Google: from PageRank to AGI
  46. What fully automated firms will look like
  47. Sarah Paine — How Mao conquered China (lecture & interview)
  48. Sarah Paine — Why Japan lost WWII (lecture & interview)
  49. Sarah Paine — The war for India (lecture & interview)
  50. Tyler Cowen — The #1 bottleneck to AI progress is humans

2024 30

  1. Notes on China
  2. Adam Brown — Bubble universes, space elevators, & AdS/CFT
  3. Review of 2 books: China’s Economy by Arthur Kroeber & China Chapter in Trade Wars are Class Wars by Pettis & Klein
  4. Gwern — Anonymous writer who predicted AI trajectory on $12K/year salary
  5. Livestream Sarah Paine tonight at 7 PM Pacific on Japan at War
  6. Come watch Sarah Paine lecture live next week!
  7. Sarah Paine & Dwarkesh Patel Lecture Series
  8. @Asianometry & Dylan Patel — How the semiconductor industry actually works
  9. Daniel Yergin — Oil destroyed Hitler, fracking destroyed Putin
  10. Help me build a media empire - become my COO
  11. $2,000 thumbnail competition
  12. David Reich — How one small tribe conquered the world 70,000 years ago
  13. Joe Carlsmith — Preventing an AI takeover
  14. Dwarkesh Podcast Progress Update
  15. Notes: Energy and Civilization by Vaclav Smil
  16. Patrick McKenzie — Money laundering, big tech censorship, SBF & Japan
  17. Notes: Symbolic Species by Terrence Deacon
  18. Tony Blair — Why political leaders keep failing at major change
  19. Notes: The Language Instinct by Steven Pinker
  20. Francois Chollet — Why the biggest AI models can't solve simple puzzles
  21. Leopold Aschenbrenner — 2027 AGI, China/US super-intelligence race, & the return of history
  22. John Schulman (OpenAI Cofounder) — Reasoning, RLHF, & plan for 2027 AGI
  23. Mark Zuckerberg — Llama 3, $10B models, Caesar Augustus, & 1 GW datacenters
  24. Sholto Douglas & Trenton Bricken — How LLMs actually think
  25. Notes: The Prize by Daniel Yergin (Part 1)
  26. Demis Hassabis — Scaling, superhuman AIs, AlphaZero atop LLMs, AlphaFold
  27. Patrick Collison — Why Silicon Valley's most talented should leave
  28. Tyler Cowen — Hayek, Keynes, & Smith on AI, animal spirits, anarchy, & growth
  29. Lessons from The Years of Lyndon Johnson by Robert Caro [Narration]
  30. Will scaling work? [Narration]

2023 24

  1. Will scaling work?
  2. $2000 Clips Competition
  3. Jung Chang (Wild Swans author) — Living through history's largest man-made famine
  4. Andrew Roberts — Why Hitler lost WWII, Churchill as applied historian, & Napoleon as startup founder
  5. Dominic Cummings - COVID, Brexit, & Fixing Western Governance
  6. Paul Christiano — Preventing an AI takeover
  7. Shane Legg (DeepMind Founder) — 2028 AGI, superhuman alignment, new architectures
  8. Grant Sanderson (@3blue1brown) — Past, present, & future of mathematics
  9. Sarah C. M. Paine — Why dictators keep making the same fatal mistake
  10. Dario Amodei (Anthropic CEO) — The hidden pattern behind every AI breakthrough
  11. Andy Matuschak — The reason most learning tools fail
  12. Carl Shulman (Pt 2) — AI Takeover, bio & cyber attacks, detecting deception, & humanity's far future
  13. Carl Shulman (Pt 1) — Intelligence explosion, primate evolution, robot doublings, & alignment
  14. Contra Marc Andreessen on AI
  15. Richard Rhodes — The making of the atomic bomb
  16. Lessons from The Years of Lyndon Johnson by Robert Caro
  17. Eliezer Yudkowsky — Why AI will kill us, aligning LLMs, nature of intelligence, SciFi, & rationality
  18. Ilya Sutskever (OpenAI Chief Scientist) — Why next-token prediction could surpass human intelligence
  19. Nat Friedman (Github CEO) — Reading ancient scrolls, open source, & AI
  20. Brett Harrison — FTX US former president speaks out
  21. Marc Andreessen — AI, crypto, 1000 Elon Musks, regrets, vulnerabilities, & managerial revolution
  22. Garett Jones — Immigration, national IQ, & less democracy
  23. Lars Doucet — Progress, poverty, Georgism, & why rent is too damn high
  24. Holden Karnofsky — History's most important century

2022 27

  1. Bethany McLean — Enron, FTX, 2008, Musk, frauds, & visionaries
  2. Nadia Asparouhova — Tech elites, democracy, open source, & philanthropy
  3. Byrne Hobart - FTX, Drugs, Twitter, Taiwan, & Monasticism
  4. Edward Glaeser - Cities, Terrorism, Housing, & Remote Work
  5. Kenneth T. Jackson - Robert Moses, Hero of New York?
  6. Brian Potter - Future of Construction, Ugly Modernism, & Environmental Review
  7. Bryan Caplan - Feminists, Billionaires, and Demagogues
  8. Tyler Cowen - Talent, Collapse, & Pessimism of Sex
  9. Charles C. Mann - Americas Before Columbus & Scientific Wizardry
  10. Austin Vernon - Energy Superabundance, Starship Missiles, & Finding Alpha
  11. Steve Hsu - Intelligence, Embryo Selection, & The Future of Humanity
  12. Will MacAskill - Longtermism, Altruism, History, & Technology
  13. Joseph Carlsmith - Utopia, AI, & Infinite Ethics
  14. Fin Moorhouse - Longtermism, Space, & Entrepreneurship
  15. Alexander Mikaberidze - Napoleon, War, Progress, and Global Order
  16. Sam Bankman-Fried - Crypto, Altruism, and Leadership
  17. Agustin Lebron - Trading, Crypto, and Adverse Selection
  18. Ananyo Bhattacharya - John von Neumann, Jewish Genius, and Nuclear War
  19. Stephen Grugett (Manifold Markets Founder) - Predictions Markets & Revolutionizing Governance
  20. Pradyu Prasad - Imperial Japan, the God Emperor, and Militarization in the Modern World
  21. Razib Khan - Genomics, Intelligence, and The Church of Science
  22. Jimmy Soni - Peter Thiel, Elon Musk, and the Paypal Mafia
  23. The mystery of the miracle year
  24. Bryan Caplan - Discrimination, Poverty, & Mental Illness
  25. Richard Hanania - Foreign Policy, Fertility, and Wokeness
  26. David Deutsch - AI, America, Fun, & Bayes
  27. Contra David Deutsch on AI

2021 4

  1. Byrne Hobart - Optionality, Stagnation, and Secret Societies
  2. David Friedman - Dating Markets, Legal Systems, Bitcoin, and Automation
  3. Sarah Fitz-Claridge - Taking Children Seriously
  4. Michael Huemer - Anarchy, Capitalism, and Progress

2020 11

  1. Uncle Bob - The Long Reach of Code
  2. Scott Aaronson - Quantum Computing, Complexity, and Creativity
  3. Scott Young - Ultralearning
  4. Charles Murray - Human Accomplishment and the Future of Liberty
  5. Alex Tabarrok - Prizes, Prices, and Public Goods
  6. Caleb Watney - America's Innovation Engine
  7. Robin Hanson - The Long View
  8. Jason Crawford - The Roots of Progress
  9. Matjaž Leonardis - Science, Identity, and Probability
  10. Tyler Cowen - The Great Reset
  11. Bryan Caplan - Nurturing Orphaned Ideas