PODCAST

Dwarkesh Podcast

Dwarkesh Patel

Deeply researched interviews www.dwarkesh.com

technology

All Episodes

90:36

Sarah Paine – How Russia sabotaged China's rise

Dwarkesh Podcast ·

2025/10/31

In 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 was particularly interesting to me because, in my opinion, the Chinese Civil War is 1 of the top 3 most important events of the 20th century. And to understand why it transpired as it did, you need to understand Stalin’s role in the whole thing.Watch on YouTube; read the transcript.SponsorsMercury helps you run your business

145:19

Andrej Karpathy — AGI is still a decade away

Dwarkesh Podcast ·

2025/10/17

The 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 previous ~2.5 centuries of 2% GDP growth, why self driving took so long to crack, and what he sees as the future of education.It was a pleasure chatting with him.Watch on YouTube; listen on Apple Podcasts or Spotify.Sponsors* Labelbox helps you get data that is more detailed, more accurate, and higher signal than you could get

80:08

Nick Lane – Life as we know it is chemically inevitable

Dwarkesh Podcast ·

2025/10/10

Nick 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 may be wrong, but I find it remarkable that with just that starting point, you can explain so much about why life is the way that it is — the things you’re supposed to just take as givens in biology class:* Why are there two sexes? Why sex at all?* Why are bacteria so simple despite being around for 4 billion years? Why is

11:39

Some thoughts on the Sutton interview

Dwarkesh Podcast ·

2025/10/04

I 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) - Imitation learning is continuous with and complementary to RL(00:08:26) - Continual learning(00:10:31) - Concluding thoughts Get full access to Dwarkesh Podcast at www.dwarkesh.com/subscribe

66:22

Richard Sutton – Father of RL thinks LLMs are a dead end

Dwarkesh Podcast ·

2025/09/26

Richard 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 him, my steel man of Richard’s position is this: LLMs aren’t capable of learning on-the-job, so no matter how much we scale, we’ll need some new architecture to enable continual learning.And once we have it, we won’t need a special training phase — the agent will just learn on-the-fly, like all humans, and indeed, like all

88:28

Fully autonomous robots are much closer than you...

Dwarkesh Podcast ·

2025/09/12

Sergey 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 robots. His median estimate for when robots will be able to run households entirely autonomously? 2030.If Sergey’s right, the world 5 years from now will be an insanely different place than it is today. This conversation focuses on understanding how we get there: we dive into foundation models for robotics, and how we scale

95:17

How Hitler almost starved Britain – Sarah Paine

Dwarkesh Podcast ·

2025/09/05

In 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 this framework to today, arguing that Russia and China are similarly constrained by their geography, making them vulnerable in any conflict with maritime powers (like the U.S. and its allies).Watch on YouTube; listen on Apple Podcasts or Spotify.Sponsors* Labelbox partners with researchers to scope, generate, and deliver the

104:40

Why evolution designed us to die fast, & how we can...

Dwarkesh Podcast ·

2025/08/21

Jacob 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 already optimized for longevity. We also talk about why drug discovery has been getting exponentially harder, and what a new platform for biological understanding to speed up progress would look like. As a bonus, we get into the nitty gritty of gene delivery and Jacob’s controversial takes on CAR-T cells. For full disclosure, I am an angel investor in

68:22

China is killing the US on energy. Does that mean...

Dwarkesh Podcast ·

2025/08/15

How will we feed the 100s of GWs of extra energy demand that AI will create over the next decade? On this episode, Casey Handmer (Caltech PhD, former NASA JPL, founder & CEO of Terraform Industries) walks me through how we can pull it off, and why he thinks a major part of this energy singularity will be powered by solar. His views are contrarian, but he came armed to defend them.Watch on YouTube; listen on Apple Podcasts or Spotify.Sponsors* Lighthouse helps frontier technology companies like

68:05

The surprising economics of the meat industry – Lewis...

Dwarkesh Podcast ·

2025/08/07

A deep dive with Lewis Bollard, who leads Open Philanthropy’s strategy for Farm Animal Welfare, on the surprising economics of the meat industry.Why is factory farming so efficient? How can we make the lives of the 23+ billion animals living on factory farms more bearable? How far off are the moonshots (e.g., brainless chickens, cultivated meats, etc.) to end this mass suffering? And why does the meat industry have such a surprising amount of political influence?For decades, innovation in the meat

115:37

Sarah Paine: How Imperial Japan Defeated Tsarist...

Dwarkesh Podcast ·

2025/07/25

After 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 back for another series: she graciously agreed, and we’ll be releasing the results online over the coming weeks and months!This first lecture is focused on the balance of power in East Asia at the turn of the 20th century. Specifically, how did Japan (population 47M) defeat China (400M) and Russia (130M) to become Asia's

132:41

Stephen Kotkin — How Do We Explain Stalin?

Dwarkesh Podcast ·

2025/07/10

The Stephen Kotkin episode. Kotkin is arguably the world’s foremost expert on Joseph Stalin and has written a massive 2-volume biography of Stalin (with a 3rd volume in the works).No other individual had more of a profound impact on the 20th century than Stalin. He held the power of life and death over every single person across 11 time zones, and he killed tens of millions of people, utterly consumed by an ideology aimed at building paradise on Earth.And, he was one half of the biggest and most

14:01

Why I don’t think AGI is right around the corner

Dwarkesh Podcast ·

2025/07/03

I’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 thoughts stand as of June 2025. If you want to read the original post, you can check it out here. Get full access to Dwarkesh Podcast at www.dwarkesh.com/subscribe

93:45

Godfather of Synthetic Bio on De-Aging,...

Dwarkesh Podcast ·

2025/06/26

George 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 that these improvements (e.g., orders of magnitude decrease in sequencing & synthesis costs, precise gene editing tools like CRISPR, AlphaFold-type AIs, & the ability to conduct massively parallel multiplex experiments) have put us on the verge of some massive payoffs: de-aging, de-extinction, biobots that combine the best of

146:43

China’s Manufacturing Dominance: State Directives &...

Dwarkesh Podcast ·

2025/06/19

Arthur 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 the most useful, detailed resource I've found of how China actually works.On this episode, we discuss how China achieved high-tech manufacturing dominance, and where they'll go from here. By Arthur’s account, the Chinese government is like a giant VC fund: they decide on key priorities and then spend hundreds of billions of

96:04

“China’s digging out of a crisis. And America’s luck...

Dwarkesh Podcast ·

2025/06/12

Ken Rogoff is the former chief economist of the IMF, a professor of Economics at Harvard, and author of the newly released Our Dollar, Your Problem and This Time is Different.On this episode, Ken predicts that, within the next decade, the US will have a debt-induced inflation crisis, but not a Japan-type financial crisis (the latter is much worse, and can make a country poorer for generations).Ken also explains how China is trapped: in order to solve their current problems, they’ll keep leaning on

89:09

Xi Jinping’s paranoid approach to AGI, debt crisis, &...

Dwarkesh Podcast ·

2025/05/29

On this episode, I chat with Victor Shih about all things China. We discuss China’s massive local debt crisis, the CCP’s views on AI, what happens after Xi, and more.Victor Shih is an expert on the Chinese political system, as well as their banking and fiscal policies, and he has amassed more biographical data on the Chinese elite than anyone else in the world. He teaches at UC San Diego, where he also directs the 21st Century China Center.Watch on YouTube; listen on Apple Podcasts or

144:01

How Does Claude 4 Think? — Sholto Douglas & Trenton...

Dwarkesh Podcast ·

2025/05/22

New episode with my good friends Sholto Douglas & Trenton Bricken. Sholto focuses on scaling RL and Trenton researches mechanistic interpretability, both at Anthropic.We talk through what’s changed in the last year of AI research; the new RL regime and how far it can scale; how to trace a model’s thoughts; and how countries, workers, and students should prepare for AGI.See you next year for v3. Here’s last year’s episode, btw. Enjoy!Watch on YouTube; listen on Apple Podcasts or

10:18

The Last Human CEO

Dwarkesh Podcast ·

2025/05/01

Based on my essay about AI firms.Huge thanks to Petr and his team for bringing this to life!Watch on YouTube.Thanks to Google for sponsoring. We used their Veo 2 model to make this entire video—it generated everything from the photorealistic humans to the claymation octopuses. If you’re a Gemini Advanced user, you can try Veo 2 now in the Gemini app. Just select Veo 2 in the dropdown, and type your video idea in the prompt bar. Get started today by going to gemini.google.com.To sponsor a future

75:23

Mark Zuckerberg – Llama 4, DeepSeek, Trump, AI...

Dwarkesh Podcast ·

2025/04/29

Zuck on:* Llama 4, benchmark gaming* Intelligence explosion, business models for AGI* DeepSeek/China, export controls, & Trump* Orion glasses, AI relationships, and preventing reward-hacking from our tech.Watch on Youtube; listen on Apple Podcasts and Spotify.----------SPONSORS* Scale is building the infrastructure for safer, smarter AI. Scale’s Data Foundry gives major AI labs access to high-quality data to fuel post-training, while their public leaderboards help assess model capabilities. They

110 results

Dwarkesh Podcast

All Episodes

Similar Podcasts

Lead With AI

Tamara Nall

Linux in the Ham Shack

Black Sparrow Media

Data Engineering Podcast

Tobias Macey

Eye On A.I.

Craig S. Smith

Reflections

Livewire Labs