Dwarkesh Podcast

Dwarkesh Podcast

Deeply researched interviews www.dwarkesh.com

Episodes

Ada Palmer – Machiavelli is the most misunderstood thinker of all time

June 16, 2026 • 128 mins
Had Ada Palmer back on – this time to talk about Machiavelli, perhaps the most misunderstood thinker of all time.Machiavelli cut his teeth as a high-level diplomat for Florence, a position from which he got to closely observe the most important rulers in Europe at the time, including the ones who were on the path to destroying his dearly beloved Florence.In 1513 the Medici retook control of Florence and, wrongly suspecting Ma...
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Alex Imas and Phil Trammell – What remains scarce after AGI?

June 4, 2026 • 76 mins
Economics of AGI episode w Alex Imas and Phil Trammell.There’s a bunch of important questions about how we deal with AI that only economics can answer.What is the optimal way to tax and redistribute the wealth that will be generated? How should countries not in the AI supply chain index into the gains? Is there any world where inequality doesn’t explode?It might seem like these questions have obvious answers, but the fi...
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Reiner Pope – Chip design from the bottom up

May 22, 2026 • 80 mins
New blackboard lecture with Reiner Pope: how do chips actually work - starting with basic logic gates, and working up to why GPUs, TPUs, FPGAs, and the human brain each look the way they do.Reiner is CEO of MatX, a new chip startup (full disclosure - I’m an angel investor). He was previously at Google, where he worked on software efficiency, compilers, and TPU architecture.Watch this one on YouTube so you can see the chalkboa...
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Eric Jang – Building AlphaGo from scratch

May 15, 2026 • 157 mins
Eric Jang walks through how to build AlphaGo from scratch, but with modern AI tools.Sometimes you understand the future better by stepping backward. AlphaGo is still the cleanest worked example of the primitives of intelligence: search, learning from experience, and self-play. You have to go back to 2017 to get insight on how the more general AIs of the future might learn.Once he explained how AlphaGo works, it gave us the context ...
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David Reich – Why the Bronze Age was an inflection point in human evolution

May 8, 2026 • 133 mins
David Reich is back.He and collaborator Ali Akbari just published a paper that overturns a long-standing consensus about human evolution — that natural selection has been dormant in our species since the agricultural revolution.By scaling ancient DNA sequencing and developing a new statistical method, they found that selection has actually sped up.Selection went especially bonkers during the Bronze Age (around 3,000 years ago...
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Elon Musk — "In 36 months, the cheapest place to put AI will be space”

May 5, 2026 • 169 mins
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Fully autonomous robots are much closer than you think – Sergey Levine

April 29, 2026 • 88 mins
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Reiner Pope – The math behind how LLMs are trained and served

April 29, 2026 • 133 mins
Did a very different format with Reiner Pope - a blackboard lecture where he walks through how frontier LLMs are trained and served.It’s shocking how much you can deduce about what the labs are doing from a handful of equations, public API prices, and some chalk.It’s a bit technical, but I encourage you to hang in there – it’s really worth it.There are less than a handful of people who understand the full st...
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Unlock The Future - Intro

April 28, 2026 • 47 secs
Welcome to Darkness Podcast, the show where we dive into the world of technology shaping our lives today and tomorrow. From artificial intelligence transforming industries, to breakthroughs in space exploration, to the gadgets we can’t live without—this is your front‑row seat to innovation.In the next few minutes, we’ll explore not just the tools and devices, but the ideas and people behind them. Technology isn&rs...
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Jensen Huang – TPU competition, why we should sell chips to China, & Nvidia’s supply chain moat

April 15, 2026 • 103 mins
I asked Jensen about TPU competition, Nvidia’s lock on the ever more bottlenecked supply chain needed to make advanced chips, whether we should be selling AI chips to China, why Nvidia doesn’t just become a hyperscaler, how it makes its investments, and much more. Enjoy!Watch on YouTube; read the transcript.Sponsors* Crusoe’s cloud runs on state-of-the-art Blackwell GPUs, with Vera Rubin deployment scheduled for l...
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Michael Nielsen – How science actually progresses

April 7, 2026 • 123 mins
Really enjoyed chatting with Michael Nielsen about how we recognize scientific progress.It's especially relevant for closing the RL verification loop for scientific discovery.But it's also a surprisingly mysterious and elusive question when you look at the history of human science.We approach this question stories like Einstein (who claimed that he hadn't even heard of the famous Michelson-Morley experiment, which is supposed to ha...
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Terence Tao – Kepler, Newton, and the true nature of mathematical discovery

March 20, 2026 • 83 mins
We begin the episode with the absolutely ingenious and surprising way in which Kepler discovered the laws of planetary motion.People sometimes say that AI will make especially fast progress at scientific discovery because of tight verification loops.But the story of how we discovered the shape of our solar system shows how the verification loop for correct ideas can be decades (or even millennia) long.During this time, what we know...
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Dylan Patel — Deep dive on the 3 big bottlenecks to scaling AI compute

March 13, 2026 • 150 mins
Dylan Patel, founder of SemiAnalysis, provides a deep dive into the 3 big bottlenecks to scaling AI compute: logic, memory, and power.And walks through the economics of labs, hyperscalers, foundries, and fab equipment manufacturers.Learned a ton about every single level of the stack. Enjoy!Watch on YouTube; read the transcript.Sponsors* Mercury has already saved me a bunch of time this tax season. Last year, I used Mercury to reque...
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The most important question nobody's asking about AI

March 11, 2026 • 24 mins
Read the full essay here: https://www.dwarkesh.com/p/dow-anthropicTimestamps(00:00:00) - Anthropic vs The Pentagon(00:04:16) - The overhangs of tyranny(00:05:54) - AI structurally favors mass surveillance(00:08:25) - Alignment...to whom?(00:13:55) - Coordination not worth the costs

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Why Leonardo was a saboteur, Gutenberg went broke, and Florence was weird – Ada Palmer

March 6, 2026 • 122 mins
Renaissance history is so much wilder and weirder than you would have expected. Very fun chatting with Ada Palmer (historian, novelist, and composer based at the University of Chicago).Some especially fascinating things I learned from the conversation and her excellent book, Inventing the Renaissance:Not only did Gutenberg go bankrupt in the 1450s (after inventing the printing press), but so did the bank that foreclosed on him, and...
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Dario Amodei — "We are near the end of the exponential"

February 13, 2026 • 142 mins
Dario Amodei thinks we are just a few years away from AGI — or as he puts it, from having “a country of geniuses in a data center”. In this episode, we discuss what to make of the scaling hypothesis in the current RL regime, why task-specific RL might lead to generalization, and how AI will diffuse throughout the economy. We also dive into Anthropic’s revenue projections, compute commitments, path to profita...
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Elon Musk — "In 36 months, the cheapest place to put AI will be space”

February 5, 2026 • 169 mins
In this episode, John and I got to do a real deep-dive with Elon. We discuss the economics of orbital data centers, the difficulties of scaling power on Earth, what it would take to manufacture humanoids at high-volume in America, xAI’s business and alignment plans, DOGE, and much more.Watch on YouTube; read the transcript.Sponsors* Mercury just started offering personal banking! I’m already banking with Mercury for bus...
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Adam Marblestone — AI is missing something fundamental about the brain

December 30, 2025 • 109 mins
Adam Marblestone is CEO of Convergent Research. He’s had a very interesting past life: he was a research scientist at Google Deepmind on their neuroscience team and has worked on everything from brain-computer interfaces to quantum computing to nanotech and even formal mathematics.In this episode, we discuss how the brain learns so much from so little, what the AI field can learn from neuroscience, and the answer to Ilya&rsqu...
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Thoughts on AI progress (Dec 2025)

December 23, 2025 • 12 mins
Read the essay here.Timestamps00:00:00 What are we scaling?00:03:11 The value of human labor00:05:04 Economic diffusion lag is cope00:06:34 Goal-post shifting is justified00:08:23 RL scaling00:09:18 Broadly deployed intelligence explosion

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Sarah Paine — Why Russia Lost the Cold War

December 19, 2025 • 114 mins
This is the final episode of the Sarah Paine lecture series, and it’s probably my favorite one. Sarah gives a “tour of the arguments” on what ultimately led to the Soviet Union’s collapse, diving into the role of the US, the Sino-Soviet border conflict, the oil bust, ethnic rebellions and even the Roman Catholic Church. As she points out, this is all particularly interesting as we find ourselves potentially ...
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