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•2 hr 48 min•Transcript available on Metacast 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 , o...
Jan 23, 2025•2 hr 8 min•Transcript available on Metacast 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 this! Watch o...
Jan 16, 2025•2 hr 13 min•Transcript available on Metacast 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•Transcript available on Metacast In order to apply, or to refer someone else, please fill out this short form ! For more information, visit dwarkeshpatel.com/roles . Our mission is to publish the highest quality intellectual content in the world, to find the David Reichs and Sarah Paines of every field, and to produce the best contemporaneous coverage of the emergence of AGI. I need the help of two key partners in order to achieve this mission. * General Manager : A killer operator who will run and lead our business. * Editor-i...
Dec 27, 2024•9 min•Transcript available on Metacast 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. Sponsors - Deep...
Dec 26, 2024•3 hr 44 min•Transcript available on Metacast 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•2 hr 37 min•Transcript available on Metacast 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•Transcript available on Metacast 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•Transcript available on Metacast 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•2 hr 56 min•Transcript available on Metacast 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•3 hr 31 min•Transcript available on Metacast 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•Transcript available on Metacast 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 cyber t...
Jun 26, 2024•53 min•Transcript available on Metacast 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•2 hr 34 min•Transcript available on Metacast 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•5 hr 31 min•Transcript available on Metacast 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 (00:16:57) - Plan for AGI 2025 (00:29:19) - Teaching models to reason (00:40:50) - The Road to Cha...
May 15, 2024•2 hr 37 min•Transcript available on Metacast Mark Zuckerberg on: - Llama 3 - open sourcing towards AGI - custom silicon, synthetic data, & energy constraints on scaling - Caesar Augustus, intelligence explosion, bioweapons, $10b models, & much more Enjoy! Watch on YouTube . Listen on Apple Podcasts , Spotify , or any other podcast platform. Human edited transcript with helpful links here . Timestamps (00:00:00) - Llama 3 (00:08:32) - Coding on path to AGI (00:25:24) - Energy bottlenecks (00:33:20) - Is AI the most important technology ever...
Apr 18, 2024•1 hr 18 min•Transcript available on Metacast Had so much fun chatting with my good friends Trenton Bricken and Sholto Douglas on the podcast. No way to summarize it, except: This is the best context dump out there on how LLMs are trained, what capabilities they're likely to soon have, and what exactly is going on inside them. You would be shocked how much of what I know about this field, I've learned just from talking with them. To the extent that you've enjoyed my other AI interviews, now you know why. So excited to put this out. Enjoy! I...
Mar 28, 2024•3 hr 12 min•Transcript available on Metacast Here is my episode with Demis Hassabis, CEO of Google DeepMind We discuss: * Why scaling is an artform * Adding search, planning, & AlphaZero type training atop LLMs * Making sure rogue nations can't steal weights * The right way to align superhuman AIs and do an intelligence explosion Watch on YouTube . Listen on Apple Podcasts , Spotify , or any other podcast platform. Read the full transcript here . Timestamps (0:00:00) - Nature of intelligence (0:05:56) - RL atop LLMs (0:16:31) - Scaling and...
Feb 28, 2024•1 hr 2 min•Transcript available on Metacast We discuss: * what it takes to process $1 trillion/year * how to build multi-decade APIs, companies, and relationships * what's next for Stripe (increasing the GDP of the internet is quite an open ended prompt, and the Collison brothers are just getting started). Plus the amazing stuff they're doing at Arc Institute , the financial infrastructure for AI agents, playing devil's advocate against progress studies, and much more. Watch on YouTube . Listen on Apple Podcasts , Spotify , or any other p...
Feb 21, 2024•2 hr 55 min•Transcript available on Metacast It was a great pleasure speaking with Tyler Cowen for the 3rd time. We discussed GOAT: Who is the Greatest Economist of all Time and Why Does it Matter? , especially in the context of how the insights of Hayek, Keynes, Smith, and other great economists help us make sense of AI, growth, animal spirits, prediction markets, alignment, central planning, and much more. The topics covered in this episode are too many to summarize. Hope you enjoy! Watch on YouTube . Listen on Apple Podcasts , Spotify ,...
Jan 31, 2024•2 hr 42 min•Transcript available on Metacast This is a narration of my blog post, Lessons from The Years of Lyndon Johnson by Robert Caro . You read the full post here: https://www.dwarkeshpatel.com/p/lyndon-johnson Listen on Apple Podcasts , Spotify , or any other podcast platform. Follow me on Twitter for updates on future posts and episodes. Get full access to Dwarkesh Podcast at www.dwarkeshpatel.com/subscribe...
Jan 23, 2024•37 min•Transcript available on Metacast This is a narration of my blog post, Will scaling work? . You read the full post here: https://www.dwarkeshpatel.com/p/will-scaling-work Listen on Apple Podcasts , Spotify , or any other podcast platform. Follow me on Twitter for updates on future posts and episodes. Get full access to Dwarkesh Podcast at www.dwarkeshpatel.com/subscribe...
Jan 19, 2024•26 min•Transcript available on Metacast A true honor to speak with Jung Chang. She is the author of Wild Swans: Three Daughters of China (sold 15+ million copies worldwide) and Mao: The Unknown Story . We discuss: - what it was like growing up during the Cultural Revolution as the daughter of a denounced official - why the CCP continues to worship the biggest mass murderer in human history. - how exactly Communist totalitarianism was able to subjugate a billion people - why Chinese leaders like Xi and Deng who suffered from the Cultur...
Nov 29, 2023•2 hr 31 min•Transcript available on Metacast Andrew Roberts is the world's best biographer and one of the leading historians of our time. We discussed * Churchill the applied historian, * Napoleon the startup founder, * why Nazi ideology cost Hitler WW2, * drones, reconnaissance, and other aspects of the future of war, * Iraq, Afghanistan, Korea, Ukraine, & Taiwan. 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. Times...
Nov 22, 2023•1 hr 19 min•Transcript available on Metacast Here is my interview with Dominic Cummings on why Western governments are so dangerously broken, and how to fix them before an even more catastrophic crisis. Dominic was Chief Advisor to the Prime Minister during COVID, and before that, director of Vote Leave (which masterminded the 2016 Brexit referendum). 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 (00:00:0...
Nov 15, 2023•3 hr 34 min•Transcript available on Metacast Paul Christiano is the world’s leading AI safety researcher. My full episode with him is out! We discuss: - Does he regret inventing RLHF, and is alignment necessarily dual-use? - Why he has relatively modest timelines (40% by 2040, 15% by 2030), - What do we want post-AGI world to look like (do we want to keep gods enslaved forever)? - Why he’s leading the push to get to labs develop responsible scaling policies, and what it would take to prevent an AI coup or bioweapon, - His current research ...
Oct 31, 2023•3 hr 7 min•Transcript available on Metacast I had a lot of fun chatting with Shane Legg - Founder and Chief AGI Scientist, Google DeepMind! We discuss: * Why he expects AGI around 2028 * How to align superhuman models * What new architectures needed for AGI * Has Deepmind sped up capabilities or safety more? * Why multimodality will be next big landmark * and much more Watch full episode on YouTube , Apple Podcasts , Spotify , or any other podcast platform. Read full transcript here . Timestamps (0:00:00) - Measuring AGI (0:11:41) - Do we...
Oct 26, 2023•44 min•Transcript available on Metacast I had a lot of fun chatting with Grant Sanderson (who runs the excellent 3Blue1Brown YouTube channel) about: - Whether advanced math requires AGI - What careers should mathematically talented students pursue - Why Grant plans on doing a stint as a high school teacher - Tips for self teaching - Does Godel’s incompleteness theorem actually matter - Why are good explanations so hard to find? - And much more Watch on YouTube . Listen on Spotify , Apple Podcasts , or any other podcast platform. Full ...
Oct 12, 2023•2 hr 31 min•Transcript available on Metacast I learned so much from Sarah Paine, Professor of History and Strategy at the Naval War College. We discuss: - how continental vs maritime powers think and how this explains Xi & Putin's decisions - how a war with China over Taiwan would shake out and whether it could go nuclear - why the British Empire fell apart, why China went communist, how Hitler and Japan could have coordinated to win WW2, and whether Japanese occupation was good for Korea, Taiwan and Manchuria - plus other lessons from WW2...
Oct 04, 2023•2 hr 25 min•Transcript available on Metacast 
