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 combin...
Jun 26, 2025•1 hr 34 min
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...
Jun 19, 2025•2 hr 27 min
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 leani...
Jun 12, 2025•1 hr 36 min
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 Spotify...
May 29, 2025•1 hr 29 min
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 Spotify...
May 22, 2025•2 hr 24 min
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 f...
May 01, 2025•10 min
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 capa...
Apr 29, 2025•1 hr 15 min
800 years before the Black Death, the very same bacteria ravaged Rome, killing 60%+ of the population in many areas. Also, back-to-back volcanic eruptions caused a mini Ice Age, leaving Rome devastated by famine and disease. I chatted with historian Kyle Harper about this and much else: * Rome as a massive slave society * Why humans are more disease-prone than other animals * How agriculture made us physically smaller (Caesar at 5'5" was considered tall) Watch on Youtube ; listen on Apple Podcas...
Apr 24, 2025•1 hr 23 min
Ege Erdil and Tamay Besiroglu have 2045+ timelines, think the whole "alignment" framing is wrong, don't think an intelligence explosion is plausible, but are convinced we'll see explosive economic growth (economy literally doubling every year or two). This discussion offers a totally different scenario than my recent interview with Scott and Daniel . Ege and Tamay are the co-founders of Mechanize (disclosure - I’m an angel investor), a startup dedicated to fully automating work. Before founding ...
Apr 17, 2025•3 hr 8 min
Scott and Daniel break down every month from now until the 2027 intelligence explosion. Scott Alexander is author of the highly influential blogs Slate Star Codex and Astral Codex Ten . Daniel Kokotajlo resigned from OpenAI in 2024, rejecting a non-disparagement clause and risking millions in equity to speak out about AI safety. We discuss misaligned hive minds, Xi and Trump waking up, and automated Ilyas researching AI progress. I came in skeptical, but I learned a tremendous amount by bouncing...
Apr 03, 2025•3 hr 4 min
I recorded an AMA! I had a blast chatting with my friends Trenton Bricken and Sholto Douglas. We discussed my new book, career advice given AGI, how I pick guests, how I research for the show, and some other nonsense. My book, “ The Scaling Era: An Oral History of AI, 2019-2025 ” is available in digital format now. Preorders for the print version are also open! Watch on YouTube ; listen on Apple Podcasts or Spotify . Timestamps (0:00:00) - Book launch announcement (0:04:57) - AI models not makin...
Mar 25, 2025•50 min
Humans have not succeeded because of our raw intelligence. Marooned European explorers regularly starved to death in areas where foragers thrived for 1000s of years. I’ve always found this cultural evolution deeply mysterious. How do you discover the 10 steps for processing cassava so it won’t give you cyanide poisoning simply by trial and error? Has the human brain declined in size over the last 10,000 years because we outsourced cultural evolution to a larger collective brain? The most interes...
Mar 12, 2025•1 hr 53 min
I’m so excited with how this visualization of Notes on China turned out. Petr , thank you for such beautiful watercolor artwork. More to come! Watch on YouTube . ---------- Timestamps (0:00:00) - Intro (0:00:32) - Scale (0:05:50) - Vibes (0:11:14) - Youngsters (0:14:27) - Tech & AI (0:15:47) - Hearts & Minds (0:17:07) - On Travel Get full access to Dwarkesh Podcast at www.dwarkesh.com/subscribe...
Mar 05, 2025•20 min
Satya Nadella on: Why he doesn’t believe in AGI but does believe in 10% economic growth; Microsoft’s new topological qubit breakthrough and gaming world models; Whether Office commoditizes LLMs or the other way around. Watch on Youtube ; listen on Apple Podcasts or Spotify . ---------- Sponsors Scale partners with major AI labs like Meta, Google Deepmind, and OpenAI. Through Scale’s Data Foundry, labs get access to high-quality data to fuel post-training, including advanced reasoning capabilitie...
Feb 19, 2025•1 hr 16 min
This week I welcome on the show two of the most important technologists ever, in any field. Jeff Dean is Google's Chief Scientist, and through 25 years at the company, has worked on basically the most transformative systems in modern computing: from MapReduce, BigTable, Tensorflow, AlphaChip, to Gemini. Noam Shazeer invented or co-invented all the main architectures and techniques that are used for modern LLMs: from the Transformer itself, to Mixture of Experts, to Mesh Tensorflow, to Gemini and...
Feb 12, 2025•2 hr 15 min
Third and final episode in the Paine trilogy! Chinese history is full of warlords constantly challenging the capital. How could Mao not only stay in power for decades, but not even face any insurgency? And how did Mao go from military genius to peacetime disaster - the patriotic hero who inflicted history’s worst human catastrophe on China? How can someone shrewd enough to win a civil war outnumbered 5 to 1 decide "let's have peasants make iron in their backyards" and "let's kill all the birds"?...
Jan 30, 2025•1 hr 48 min
This is the second episode in the trilogy of a lectures by Professor Sarah Paine of the Naval War College. In this second episode, Prof Paine dissects the ideas and economics behind Japanese imperialism before and during WWII. We get into the oil shortage which caused the war; the unique culture of honor and death; the surprisingly chaotic chain of command. This is followed by a Q&A with me. Huge thanks to Substack for hosting this event! Watch on YouTube . Listen on Apple Podcasts , Spotify...
Jan 23, 2025•2 hr 8 min
I’m thrilled to launch a new trilogy of double episodes: a lecture series by Professor Sarah Paine of the Naval War College, each followed by a deep Q&A. In this first episode, Prof Paine talks about key decisions by Khrushchev, Mao, Nehru, Bhutto, & Lyndon Johnson that shaped the whole dynamic of South Asia today. This is followed by a Q&A. Come for the spy bases, shoestring nukes, and insight about how great power politics impacts every region. Huge thanks to Substack for hosting t...
Jan 16, 2025•2 hr 13 min
I interviewed Tyler Cowen at the Progress Conference 2024. As always, I had a blast. This is my fourth interview with him – and yet I’m always hearing new stuff. We talked about why he thinks AI won't drive explosive economic growth, the real bottlenecks on world progress, him now writing for AIs instead of humans, and the difficult relationship between being cultured and fostering growth – among many other things in the full episode. Thanks to the Roots of Progress Institute (with special thank...
Jan 09, 2025•1 hr
Adam Brown is a founder and lead of BlueShift with is cracking maths and reasoning at Google DeepMind and a theoretical physicist at Stanford. We discuss: destroying the light cone with vacuum decay, holographic principle, mining black holes, & what it would take to train LLMs that can make Einstein level conceptual breakthroughs. Stupefying, entertaining, & terrifying. Enjoy! Watch on YouTube , read the transcript , listen on Apple Podcasts , Spotify , or your favorite platform. Sponsor...
Dec 26, 2024•2 hr 44 min
Gwern is a pseudonymous researcher and writer. He was one of the first people to see LLM scaling coming. If you've read his blog , you know he's one of the most interesting polymathic thinkers alive. In order to protect Gwern's anonymity, I proposed interviewing him in person, and having my friend Chris Painter voice over his words after. This amused him enough that he agreed. After the episode, I convinced Gwern to create a donation page where people can help sustain what he's up to. Please go ...
Nov 13, 2024•1 hr 37 min
A bonanza on the semiconductor industry and hardware scaling to AGI by the end of the decade. Dylan Patel runs Semianalysis , the leading publication and research firm on AI hardware. Jon Y runs Asianometry , the world’s best YouTube channel on semiconductors and business history. * What Xi would do if he became scaling pilled * $ 1T+ in datacenter buildout by end of decade Watch on YouTube . Listen on Apple Podcasts , Spotify , or any other podcast platform. Read the full transcript here . Foll...
Oct 02, 2024•2 hr 10 min
Unless you understand the history of oil, you cannot understand the rise of America, WW1, WW2, secular stagnation, the Middle East, Ukraine, how Xi and Putin think, and basically anything else that's happened since 1860. It was a great honor to interview Daniel Yergin, the Pulitzer Prize winning author of The Prize - the best history of oil ever written (which makes it the best history of the 20th century ever written). Watch on YouTube . Listen on Apple Podcasts , Spotify , or any other podcast...
Sep 18, 2024•1 hr 28 min
I had no idea how wild human history was before chatting with the geneticist of ancient DNA David Reich . Human history has been again and again a story of one group figuring ‘something’ out, and then basically wiping everyone else out. From the tribe of 1k-10k modern humans who killed off all the other human species 70,000 years ago; to the Yamnaya horse nomads 5,000 years ago who killed off 90+% of (then) Europeans and also destroyed the Indus Valley. So much of what we thought we knew about h...
Aug 29, 2024•1 hr 56 min
Chatted with Joe Carlsmith about whether we can trust power/techno-capital, how to not end up like Stalin in our urge to control the future, gentleness towards the artificial Other, and much more. Check out Joe's sequence on Otherness and Control in the Age of AGI here . Watch on YouTube . Listen on Apple Podcasts , Spotify , or any other podcast platform. Read the full transcript here . Follow me on Twitter for updates on future episodes. Sponsors: - Bland.ai is an AI agent that automates phone...
Aug 22, 2024•2 hr 31 min
I talked with Patrick McKenzie (known online as patio11) about how a small team he ran over a Discord server got vaccines into Americans' arms: A story of broken incentives, outrageous incompetence, and how a few individuals with high agency saved 1000s of lives. Enjoy! Watch on YouTube . Listen on Apple Podcasts , Spotify , or any other podcast platform. Read the full transcript here . Follow me on Twitter for updates on future episodes. Sponsor This episode is brought to you by Stripe , financ...
Jul 24, 2024•2 hr 2 min
I chatted with Tony Blair about: - What he learned from Lee Kuan Yew - Intelligence agencies track record on Iraq & Ukraine - What he tells the dozens of world leaders who come seek advice from him - How much of a PM’s time is actually spent governing - What will AI’s July 1914 moment look like from inside the Cabinet? Enjoy! Watch the video on YouTube . Read the full transcript here . Follow me on Twitter for updates on future episodes. Sponsors - Prelude Security is the world’s leading cyb...
Jun 26, 2024•53 min
Here is my conversation with Francois Chollet and Mike Knoop on the $1 million ARC-AGI Prize they're launching today . I did a bunch of socratic grilling throughout, but Francois’s arguments about why LLMs won’t lead to AGI are very interesting and worth thinking through. It was really fun discussing/debating the cruxes. Enjoy! Watch on YouTube . Listen on Apple Podcasts , Spotify , or any other podcast platform. Read the full transcript here . Timestamps (00:00:00) – The ARC benchmark (00:11:10...
Jun 11, 2024•1 hr 34 min
Chatted with my friend Leopold Aschenbrenner on the trillion dollar nationalized cluster, CCP espionage at AI labs, how unhobblings and scaling can lead to 2027 AGI, dangers of outsourcing clusters to Middle East, leaving OpenAI, and situational awareness. Watch on YouTube . Listen on Apple Podcasts , Spotify , or any other podcast platform. Read the full transcript here . Follow me on Twitter for updates on future episodes. Follow Leopold on Twitter . Timestamps (00:00:00) – The trillion-dollar...
Jun 04, 2024•4 hr 31 min
Chatted with John Schulman (cofounded OpenAI and led ChatGPT creation) on how posttraining tames the shoggoth, and the nature of the progress to come... Watch on YouTube . Listen on Apple Podcasts , Spotify , or any other podcast platform. Read the full transcript here . Follow me on Twitter for updates on future episodes. Timestamps (00:00:00) - Pre-training, post-training, and future capabilities (00:16:55) - Plan for AGI 2025 (00:29:18) - Teaching models to reason (00:39:45) - The Road to Cha...
May 15, 2024•1 hr 35 min
