Dwarkesh Podcast
Episodes 142 total
China is killing the US on energy. Does that mean they’ll win AGI? — Casey Handmer
How 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…
Artificial meat is harder than artificial intelligence — Lewis Bollard
A 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 factor…
Sarah Paine — How Imperial Japan defeated Tsarist Russia & Qing China
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 immediat…
Stephen Kotkin — How Stalin became the most powerful dictator in history
The 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 volu…
Why I don’t think AGI is right around the corner
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…
A billion years of evolution in a single afternoon — George Church
George Church is the godfather of modern synthetic biology and has been involved with basically every major biotech breakthrough in the last few decades.Profess…
Why China's manufacturing economy is dominating — Arthur Kroeber
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…
"China is digging out of a crisis. And America’s luck is wearing thin." — Ken Rogoff
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 Tim…
Xi Jinping’s paranoid approach to AGI, debt crisis, & Politburo politics — Victor Shih
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…
Is RL + LLMs enough for AGI? — Sholto Douglas & Trenton Bricken
New episode with my good friends Sholto Douglas & Trenton Bricken. Sholto focuses on scaling RL and Trenton researches mechanistic interpretability, both at Ant…
What will automated firms look like?
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…
Mark Zuckerberg — AI will write most Meta code in 18 months
Zuck on:* Llama 4, benchmark gaming* Intelligence explosion, business models for AGI* DeepSeek/China, export controls, & Trump* Orion glasses, AI relationships…
Why Rome actually fell: plagues, slavery, & ice age — Kyle Harper
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…
AGI is still 30 years away — Ege Erdil & Tamay Besiroglu
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 co…
AI 2027: month-by-month model of intelligence explosion — Scott Alexander & Daniel Kokotajlo
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 Code…
AMA: career advice given AGI, how I research ft. Sholto & Trenton
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 gues…
Joseph Henrich — Humans defeated smarter species with cultural evolution
Humans have not succeeded because of our raw intelligence.Marooned European explorers regularly starved to death in areas where foragers thrived for 1000s of ye…
Notes on China
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.--…
Satya Nadella — Microsoft’s AGI plan & quantum breakthrough
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…
Jeff Dean & Noam Shazeer — 25 years at Google: from PageRank to AGI
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 co…