Dwarkesh Podcast
Dwarkesh Podcast episodes converted into bullet points.
Episodes
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How Machiavelli's Florence bargained with Cesare Borgia for survival – Ada Palmer
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 Machiavelli of participating in a coup attempt, fired, tortured, and exiled him. Machiavelli could have fled his exile and worked for any number of different principalities that would have been eager to make use of his talents. Instead, he decided to rot in the countryside and compile his career’s lessons about power, politics, and human nature into a book he dedicated to the very man whose new regime had tortured and exiled him, Lorenzo di Piero de’ Medici. But at least the Medici were in a position to use his insights to defend Florence. Machiavelli the patriot did not want any other hands to touch this book, because those hands, armed with these lessons, might pose an existential danger to Florence. The closest modern analogy, at least as Machiavelli would have seen it, would be Szilard’s letter warning FDR about the possibility of a nuclear fission bomb. What were those insights? And how were they inspired by Machiavelli’s dangerous diplomatic missions all across Europe, and his extensive reading of antiquity? Watch this episode with Ada Palmer to find out! By the way, Ada is launching a new podcast which I’m very excited about. The first season will be about Machiavelli – a perfect way to dive deeper into the topics we discussed in this episode. Subscribe at Beforecast’s website to be notified of the first episode: https://beforecast-seven.vercel.app/ Subscribe on YouTube: @Beforecast Follow her on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/adapalmer Check out her FixTheNews Podcast episode: https://savingtheworldpod.transistor.fm/ And if you want even more Ada check out her books and more: https://www.adapalmer.com/ 𝐄𝐏𝐈𝐒𝐎𝐃𝐄 𝐋𝐈𝐍𝐊𝐒 * Transcript: https://www.dwarkesh.com/p/ada-palmer-2 * Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/ada-palmer-machiavelli-is-the-most-misunderstood/id1516093381?i=1000772996754 * Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/episode/1Wx4gaPNEuauMODv8W2XTA?si=Bzfl_SSvSXCr4Xh4u2Q6lg 𝐒𝐏𝐎𝐍𝐒𝐎𝐑𝐒 * Cursor recently saved one of my podcast recordings. When a video file from a shoot came out corrupted, I pointed Cursor at it: it recovered the footage on its own, tracking down the right reference file from the file’s metadata and realigning the out-of-sync audio. My whole team now uses Cursor for everyday tasks, not just coding. Get started at https://cursor.com/dwarkesh * Jane Street’s hiring process has been going viral on Twitter lately. The memes are pretty funny, but I wanted to see what their interviews were actually like. So I had Ricson, one of Jane Street’s ML researchers, walk me through a retired puzzle: he gave me an image dataset where 50% of the files had been corrupted – I had to figure out how to recover them. If you’re interested in these sorts of puzzles, you can find Jane Street’s open roles at https://janestreet.com/dwarkesh * Crusoe is turning the AI datacenter buildout into an industrial process. At their massive Colorado factory, they assemble Spark units, modular datacenters with power, cooling, and fire suppression built in. They also manufacture specific components in-house to skip the longest lead times. Crusoe has experience running these Spark units on a range of energy sources, including solar and used EV batteries, ensuring they don’t get bottlenecked by grid availability. Learn more at https://crusoe.ai/dwarkesh To sponsor a future episode, visit https://dwarkesh.com/advertise. 𝐓𝐈𝐌𝐄𝐒𝐓𝐀𝐌𝐏𝐒 00:00:00 – How Florence bargained with Cesare Borgia for survival 00:15:08 – Machiavelli’s analytical innovations 00:23:58 – Why popes became warlords 00:36:13 – Why the common people demanded nepotism 00:47:57 – Cesare Borgia brought terror to rulers and justice to the people 00:57:55 – Art as a proxy for war 01:06:41 – Florence, a city famous in hell 01:15:57 – The Prince was a job application to Machiavelli’s torturers 01:41:39 – During the Renaissance, original ideas had to be couched in antiquity 01:50:44 – Why copyright began with the Inquisition 02:02:12 – Machiavelli wasn't Machiavellian
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What remains scarce after AGI? – Alex Imas and Phil Trammell
Economics of AGI episode w Alex Imas and Phil Trammell.
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Chip design from the bottom up – Reiner Pope
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.
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What rebuilding AlphaGo teaches us about self-play, RL, and future of LLMs - Eric Jang
Eric Jang walks through how to build AlphaGo from scratch, but with modern AI tools.
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David Reich – Bronze Age shock, the Neanderthal puzzle, & the sudden spread of farming
David Reich is back.
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How GPT, Claude, and Gemini are actually trained and served – Reiner Pope
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 enco...
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Jensen Huang – Will Nvidia’s moat persist?
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!
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Michael Nielsen – Why aliens will have a different tech stack than us
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.
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Terence Tao – How the world’s top mathematician uses AI
We begin the episode with the absolutely ingenious and surprising way in which Kepler discovered the laws of planetary motion.
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Dylan Patel — The single biggest bottleneck to scaling AI compute
Dylan Patel, founder of SemiAnalysis, provides a deep dive into the 3 big bottlenecks to scaling AI compute: logic, memory, and power.
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Why Leonardo was a saboteur, Gutenberg went broke, and Florence was weird – Ada Palmer
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).
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Dario Amodei — “We are near the end of the exponential”
Dario Amodei thinks we are just a few years away from “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, how AI will diffuse throughout the economy, whether Anthropic is underinvesting in compute given their timel...
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Elon Musk – "In 36 months, the cheapest place to put AI will be space”
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.
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Adam Marblestone – AI is missing something fundamental about the brain
Adam Marblestone is CEO of Convergent Research. He’s had a very interesting past life; Research Scientist at Google Deepmind on their neuroscient team; has worked on brain computer interfaces to quantum computing and nanotech to formal mathematics.
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Sarah Paine – Why Russia Lost the Cold War
This is the final episode of the Sarah Paine lecture series, and it’s probably my favorite one.
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Ilya Sutskever – We're moving from the age of scaling to the age of research
Ilya & I discuss SSI’s strategy, the problems with pre-training, how to improve the generalization of AI models, and how to ensure AGI goes well.
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Satya Nadella – How Microsoft thinks about AGI
As part of this interview, Satya Nadella gave me and Dylan Patel (founder of SemiAnalysis) an exclusive first-look at their brand-new Fairwater 2 datacenter.
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Sarah Paine — How Russia sabotaged China's rise
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...
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Andrej Karpathy — “We’re summoning ghosts, not building animals”
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 educ...
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“I find it almost disturbing that the universe favors life this strongly” – Nick Lane
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 th...
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Richard Sutton – Father of RL thinks LLMs are a dead end
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 sca...
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Fully autonomous robots are much closer than you think – Sergey Levine
Sergey Levine is one of the world’s top robotics researchers and co-founder of Physical Intelligence. He 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.
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Sarah Paine – How Hitler almost starved Britain
In this lecture, 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...
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Evolution designed us to die fast; we can change that — Jacob Kimmel
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 biologica...
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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 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...
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Artificial meat is harder than artificial intelligence — Lewis Bollard
This episode was 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 factory farming so efficient? How can we make the lives of the 23+ billion animals living on factory farms more bearable? How...
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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 immediately invited her back for another series: she graciously agreed, and we’ll be releasing the results online over the coming weeks and month...
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Stephen Kotkin — How Stalin became the most powerful dictator in history
Stephen Kotkin is arguably the world’s foremost expert on Joseph Stalin and has written a massive 2-volume biography about him (with a 3rd volume in the works).
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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.
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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 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...
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"China is digging out of a crisis. And America’s luck is wearing thin." — Ken Rogoff
Ken Rogoff, former chief economist of the IMF, 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 explains how China is trapped: in order to so...
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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 more. Victor Shih is an expert on the Chinese political system, as well as their banking and fiscal policies, and he has amassed more bi...
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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 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’...
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Mark Zuckerberg — AI will write most Meta code in 18 months
Zuck on: * Llama 4, benchmark gaming, open vs source * Intelligence explosion, business models for AGI * DeepSeek/China, export controls, & Trump * Orion glasses, AI relationships, and not getting reward-hacking by our tech
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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 a mini Ice Age, leaving Rome devastated by famine and disease. I chatted with historian Kyle Harper about this and much else: * Rome as...
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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 convinced we'll see explosive economic growth (with the economy literally doubling every 1 or 2 years). This discussion offers a totally di...
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AI 2027: month-by-month model of intelligence explosion — Scott Alexander & Daniel Kokotajlo
Scott Alexander and Daniel Kokotajlo break down every month from now until the 2027 intelligence explosion. Scott is author of the highly influential blogs Slate Star Codex and Astral Codex Ten. Daniel resigned from OpenAI in 2024, rejecting a non-disparagement clause and risking millions in equi...
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AMA: career advice given AGI, how I research ft. Sholto & Trenton
I recorded an AMA! I had a blast shooting the shit 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 availa...
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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 years. I’ve always found this cultural evolution deeply mysterious. How do you discover the 10 steps for processing cassava so it won’t...
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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, * Whether Office commoditizes LLMs or the other way around,
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Jeff Dean & Noam Shazeer — 25 years at Google: from PageRank to AGI
This week I welcome two of the most important technologists 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 Shaze...
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Sarah Paine — How Mao conquered China (lecture & interview)
In this episode, Prof Paine looks at Maoist China. How did Mao go from military genius to peacetime disaster? How did the patriotic hero inflict history’s worst catastrophe on China? How can someone shrewd enough to win a civil war outnumbered 5 to 1 make decisions like "let's have peasants make...
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Sarah Paine — Why Japan lost WWII (lecture & interview)
The fatal flaw in Japan's military culture that cost them WWII. This is the second in a trilogy: a lecture series by Professor Sarah Paine of the Naval War College. In this episode, Prof Paine dissects the ideas and economics behind Japanese imperialism. The oil shortage which caused the war; the...
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Sarah Paine — The war for India (Lecture & interview)
How the rivalry between China and India reshaped Asia forever. I’m thrilled to launch a trilogy of 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, Bhut...
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Tyler Cowen — The #1 bottleneck to AI progress is humans
This is my fourth interview with the pre-eminent infovore Tyler Cowen – and yet I’m always hearing new stuff from him. We talked at the Progress Conference 2024 about why he thinks AI won't drive explosive economic growth, the real bottlenecks on progress, him now writing for AIs instead of human...
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Adam Brown — Bubble universes, space elevators, & AdS/CFT
Adam Brown is a founder and lead of BlueShift which 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 Eins...
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Gwern — Anonymous writer who predicted AI trajectory on $12K/year salary
Gwern's blog: https://gwern.net/. Gwern is a pseudonymous researcher and writer. After the episode, I convinced Gwern to create a donation page where people can help sustain what he's up to. Please go here to contribute: https://donate.stripe.com/6oE9DTgaf6oD0M03cc. Thank you to my friend Chris P...
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@Asianometry & Dylan Patel — How the semiconductor industry actually works
Dylan Patel runs Semianalysis, the leading publication and research firm on AI hardware: https://www.semianalysis.com/. Jon Y runs @Asianometry, the world’s best YouTube channel on semiconductors and business history.
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Daniel Yergin — Oil destroyed Hitler, fracking destroyed Putin
𝐄𝐏𝐈𝐒𝐎𝐃𝐄 𝐋𝐈𝐍𝐊𝐒 * Transcript: https://www.dwarkeshpatel.com/p/daniel-yergin * Apple Podcasts: http://apple.co/3RFuS7b/ * Spotify: http://spoti.fi/3APeQ3L * Me on Twitter: https://x.com/dwarkesh_sp
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David Reich — How one small tribe conquered the world 70,000 years ago
There's a second audio track with better sound: English (US).
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Joe Carlsmith — Preventing an AI takeover
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 excellent essay series on Otherness and control in the age of AGI: https://joecarlsm...
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Patrick McKenzie — Money laundering, big tech censorship, SBF & Japan
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. Plus unconstitutional censorship,...
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Tony Blair — Why political leaders keep failing at major change
Chatted with former Prime Minister Tony Blair about: * What he tells the dozens of world leaders who come seek advice from him * What he learned from Lee Kuan Yew * Intelligence agencies track record on Iraq & Ukraine * How much of a PM’s time is actually spent governing * What will AI’s July 191...
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Francois Chollet — Why the biggest AI models can't solve simple puzzles
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 discuss...
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Leopold Aschenbrenner — 2027 AGI, China/US super-intelligence race, & the return of history
Chatted with my friend Leopold Aschenbrenner about the trillion dollar cluster, unhobblings + scaling = 2027 AGI, CCP espionage at AI labs, leaving OpenAI and starting an AGI investment firm, dangers of outsourcing clusters to the Middle East, & The Project. Read the new essay series from Leopold...
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John Schulman (OpenAI Cofounder) — Reasoning, RLHF, & plan for 2027 AGI
John Schulman on how posttraining tames the shoggoth, and the nature of the progress to come...
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Mark Zuckerberg — Llama 3, $10B models, Caesar Augustus, & 1 GW datacenters
Zuck on: * Llama 3 * open sourcing towards AGI * custom silicon, synthetic data, & energy constraints on scaling * Caesar Augustus, intelligence explosion, bioweapons, $10b models, & much more
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Sholto Douglas & Trenton Bricken — How LLMs actually think
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...
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Demis Hassabis — Scaling, superhuman AIs, AlphaZero atop LLMs, AlphaFold
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
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Patrick Collison — Why Silicon Valley's most talented should leave
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).
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Tyler Cowen — Hayek, Keynes, & Smith on AI, animal spirits, anarchy, & growth
It was a great pleasure speaking with Tyler Cowen for the 3rd time. We discussed how Hayek, Keynes, Smith, and other great economists help us make sense of AI, growth, risk, human nature, anarchy, central planning, and much more. The topics covered in this episode are too many to summarize. Hope...
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Jung Chang (Wild Swans author) — Living through history's largest man-made famine
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...
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Andrew Roberts — Why Hitler lost WWII, Churchill as applied historian, & Napoleon as startup founder
Andrew Roberts is the world's best biographer and one of the leading historians of our time. 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,...
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Dominic Cummings — Inside the collapse of western government
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).
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Paul Christiano — Preventing an AI takeover
Talked with Paul Christiano (world’s leading AI safety researcher) about: * Does he regret inventing RLHF? * What do we want post-AGI world to look like (do we want to keep gods enslaved forever)? * Why he has relatively modest timelines (40% by 2040, 15% by 2030), * Why he’s leading the push to...
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Shane Legg (DeepMind Founder) — 2028 AGI, superhuman alignment, new architectures
I had a lot of fun chatting with Shane Legg - Founder & 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...
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Grant Sanderson (@3blue1brown) — Past, present, & future of mathematics
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 * Do...
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Sarah C. M. Paine — Why dictators keep making the same fatal mistake
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...
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George Hotz vs Eliezer Yudkowsky
George Hotz and Eliezer Yudkowsky will hash out their positions on AI safety, acceleration, and related topics.
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Andy Matuschak — The reason most learning tools fail
A few weeks ago, I sat beside Andy Matuschak to record how he reads a textbook. Even though my own job is to learn things, I was shocked with how much more intense, painstaking, and effective his learning process was. So I asked if we could record a conversation about how he learns and a bunch of...
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Carl Shulman (Pt 2) — AI Takeover, bio & cyber attacks, detecting deception, & humanity's far future
The second half of my 7 hour conversation with Carl Shulman is out! My favorite part! And the one that had the biggest impact on my worldview. Here, Carl lays out how an AI takeover might happen: * AI can threaten mutually assured destruction from bioweapons, * use cyber attacks to take over phy...
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Carl Shulman (Pt 1) — Intelligence explosion, primate evolution, robot doublings, & alignment
In terms of the depth and range of topics, this episode is the best I’ve done. No part of my worldview is the same after talking with Carl Shulman. He's the most interesting intellectual you've never heard of. We ended up talking for 8 hours, so I'm splitting this episode into 2 parts. This part...
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Richard Rhodes — The making of the atomic bomb
It was a tremendous honor & pleasure to interview Richard Rhodes, author of The Making of the Atomic Bomb. We discuss: * similarities between AI progress & Manhattan Project (developing a powerful, unprecedented, & potentially apocalyptic technology within an uncertain arms-race situation) * vis...
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Eliezer Yudkowsky — Why AI will kill us, aligning LLMs, nature of intelligence, SciFi, & rationality
For 4 hours, I tried to come up reasons for why AI might not kill us all, and Eliezer Yudkowsky explained why I was wrong. We also discuss his call to halt AI, why LLMs make alignment harder, what it would take to save humanity, his millions of words of sci-fi, and much more. If you want to get t...
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Ilya Sutskever (OpenAI Chief Scientist) — Why next-token prediction could surpass human intelligence
Asked Ilya Sutskever (Chief Scientist of OpenAI) about: * time to AGI * leaks and spies * what's after generative models * post AGI futures * working with MSFT and competing with Google * difficulty of aligning superhuman AI
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Nat Friedman (Github CEO) — Reading ancient scrolls, open source, & AI
Nat Friedman was the CEO of Github from 2018 to 2021. Before that, he started and sold two companies - Ximian and Xamarin. He is also the founder of AI Grant and California YIMBY. And most recently, he has created and funded the Vesuvius Challenge - a million dollar prize for reading an unopened...
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Brett Harrison — FTX US former president speaks out
I flew out to Chicago to interview Brett Harrison, who is the former President of FTX US President and founder of Architect. In his first longform interview since the fall of FTX, he speak in great detail about his entire tenure there and about SBF’s dysfunctional leadership. He details how the i...
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Marc Andreessen — AI, crypto, 1000 Elon Musks, regrets, vulnerabilities, & managerial revolution
My podcast with the brilliant Marc Andreessen is out! We discuss: * how AI will revolutionize software * whether NFTs are useless, & whether he should be funding flying cars instead * a16z's biggest vulnerabilities * the future of fusion, education, Twitter, venture, managerialism, & big tech
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Garett Jones — Immigration, national IQ, & less democracy
Garett Jones is an economist at George Mason University and he is the author of The Cultural Transplant, Hive Mind, and 10% Less Democracy. This episode was fun and interesting throughout! He explains: * How migrants bring their values to their new countries, * Why national IQ matters, * How the...
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Lars Doucet — Progress, poverty, Georgism, & why rent is too damn high
One of my best episodes ever. Lars Doucet is the author of Land is a Big Deal, a book about Georgism which has been praised by Vitalik Buterin, Scott Alexander, and Noah Smith. Sam Altman is the lead investor in his new startup, ValueBase: https://www.valuebase.co/. Talking with Lars completely c...
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Holden Karnofsky — History's most important century
Holden Karnofsky is the co-CEO of Open Philanthropy and co-founder of GiveWell. He is also the author of one of the most interesting blogs on the internet, Cold Takes. We discuss: * Are we living in the most important century? * Does he regret OpenPhil’s 30 million dollar grant to OpenAI in 2016?...
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Bethany McLean — Enron, FTX, 2008, Musk, frauds, & visionaries
This was one of my favorite episodes ever. Bethany McLean broke the Enron story & has written some of the best finance books out there. We discuss: * The astounding similarities between Enron & FTX, * How visionaries are just frauds who succeed, * What caused 2008, and whether we are headed for a...
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Nadia Asparouhova — Tech elites, democracy, open source, & philanthropy
Nadia Asparouhova is currently researching what the new tech elite will look like at nadia.xyz. She is also the author of Working in Public: The Making and Maintenance of Open Source Software. We talk about how: * American philanthropy has changed from Rockefeller to Effective Altruism * SBF repr...
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Byrne Hobart - FTX, Drugs, Twitter, Taiwan, & Monasticism
Perhaps the most interesting episode so far.
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Edward Glaeser - Cities, Terrorism, Housing, & Remote Work
Edward Glaeser is the chair of the Harvard department of economics, and the author of the best books and papers about cities (including Survival of the City and Triumph of the City).
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Kenneth T. Jackson - Robert Moses, Hero of New York?
I had a fascinating discussion about Robert Moses and The Power Broker with Professor Kenneth T. Jackson.
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Brian Potter - Future of Construction, Ugly Modernism, & Environmental Review
It was a pleasure to welcome Brian Potter on the podcast! Brian is the author of the excellent Construction Physics blog, where he discusses why the construction industry has been slow to industrialize and innovate.
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Bryan Caplan - Feminists, Billionaires, and Demagogues
It was a fantastic pleasure to speak to Bryan Caplan for a third time on the podcast! His most recent book is Don't Be a Feminist: Essays on Genuine Justice.
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Tyler Cowen - Why Society Will Collapse & Why Sex is Pessimistic
It was my great pleasure to speak once again to Tyler Cowen. His most recent book is called Talent, How to Find Energizers, Creatives, and Winners Across the World.
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Charles C. Mann - Americas Before Columbus & Scientific Wizardry
Charles C. Mann is the author of my favorite history books, including 1491: New Revelations of America before Columbus. 1493: Uncovering the New World Columbus Created, and The Wizard and the Prophet: Two Remarkable Scientists and Their Dueling Visions to Shape Tomorrow's World.
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Austin Vernon - Energy Superabundance, Starship Missiles, & Finding Alpha
Austin Vernon is an engineer working on a new method for carbon capture, and he has one of the most interesting blogs on the internet, where he writes about engineering, software, economics, and investing.
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Steve Hsu - Intelligence, Embryo Selection, & The Future of Humanity
Steve Hsu is a Professor of Theoretical Physics and of Computational Mathematics, Science, and Engineering at Michigan State University, and one of the founders of the company Genomic Prediction.
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Will MacAskill - Longtermism, Effective Altruism, History, & Technology
Will MacAskill is one of the founders of the Effective Altruist movement and the author of the upcoming book, What We Owe The Future.
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Joseph Carlsmith - Utopia, AI, & Infinite Ethics
Joseph Carlsmith is a senior research analyst at Open Philanthropy and a doctoral student in philosophy at the University of Oxford.
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Fin Moorhouse - Longtermism, Space, & Entrepreneurship
Fin Moorhouse is a Research Scholar and assistant to Toby Ord at Oxford University's Future of Humanity Institute. He is the cohost of the Hear This Idea Podcast.
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Alexander Mikaberidze - Napoleon, War, Progress, and Global Order
Alexander Mikaberidze is a Professor of History at Louisiana State University and the author of The Napoleonic Wars: A Global History
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Sam Bankman-Fried - Crypto, FTX, Altruism, & Leadership
I flew to the Bahamas to interview Sam Bankman-Fried, the CEO of FTX!
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Agustin Lebron - Trading, Crypto, and Adverse Selection
Agustin Lebron began his career as a trader and researcher at Jane Street Capital, one of the largest market-making firms in the world. He currently runs the consulting firm Essilen Research, where he is dedicated to helping clients integrate modern decision-making approaches in their business.
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Ananyo Bhattacharya - John von Neumann, Jewish Genius, and Nuclear War
Ananyo Bhattacharya is the author of The Man from the Future: The Visionary Life of John von Neumann. He is a science writer who has worked at the Economist and Nature. Before journalism, he was a medical researcher at the Burnham Institute in San Diego, California. He holds a degree in physics f...
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Manifold Markets Founder - Predictions Markets & Revolutionizing Governance
Stephen Grugett is a cofounder of Manifold Markets, where anyone can create a prediction market. We discuss how prediction markets can change how countries and companies make important decisions.
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Pradyu Prasad - Imperial Japan, the God Emperor, and Militarization in the Modern World
Today I talk to Pradyu Prasad (blogger and podcaster) about the book "Hirohito and the Making of Modern Japan" by Herbert P. Bix. We also discuss militarization, industrial capacity, current events, and blogging.
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Razib Khan - Genomics, Intelligence, and The Church of Science
Razib Khan is a writer, geneticist, and blogger with an interest in history, genetics, culture, and evolutionary psychology.
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Jimmy Soni - Peter Thiel, Elon Musk, and the Paypal Mafia
Jimmy Soni is the author of The Founders: The Story of Paypal and the Entrepreneurs Who Shaped Silicon Valley.
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Bryan Caplan - Labor Econ Versus the World
I interview the economist Bryan Caplan about his new book, Labor Econ Versus the World, and many other related topics.
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Richard Hanania - Foreign Policy, Fertility, and Experts
Richard Hanania is the President of the Center for the Study of Partisanship and Ideology and the author of Public Choice Theory and the Illusion of Grand Strategy: How Generals, Weapons Manufacturers, and Foreign Governments Shape American Foreign Policy.
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David Deutsch - AI, America, Fun, & Bayes
David Deutsch is the founder of the field of quantum computing and the author of The Beginning of Infinity and The Fabric of Reality.
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Byrne Hobart - Optionality, Stagnation, and Secret Societies
Byrne Hobart writes The Diff, a newsletter about inflections in finance and technology with 24,000+ subscribers.
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David Friedman - Dating Markets, Legal Systems, Bitcoin, and Automation
David Friedman is a famous anarcho-capitalist economist and legal scholar.
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Sarah Fitz-Claridge - Taking Children Seriously | The Lunar Society #15
Sarah Fitz-Claridge is a writer, coach, and speaker with a fallibilist worldview. She started the journal that became Taking Children Seriously in the early 1990s after being surprised by the heated audience reactions she was getting when talking about children.
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Michael Huemer - Anarchy, Capitalism, and Progress
Michael Huemer is a professor of philosophy at the University of Colorado. He is the author of more than sixty academic articles in epistemology, ethics, metaethics, metaphysics, and political philosophy, as well as eight amazing books.
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Uncle Bob - The Long Reach of Code, Automating Programming, and Developing Coding Talent
Robert Martin (aka Uncle Bob) is a programming pioneer and bestselling author of Clean Code. We discuss the prospect of automating programming, spotting and developing coding talent, occupational licensing, quotas, and the elusive sense of style.
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Scott Aaronson - Quantum Computing, Complexity, and Creativity
Scott Aaronson is a Professor of Computer Science at The University of Texas at Austin, and director of its Quantum Information Center. He's the author of one of the most interesting blogs on the internet: https://www.scottaaronson.com/blog/
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Scott Young - Ultralearning, The MIT Challenge
Scott is the author of Ultralearning and famous for the MIT Challenge, where he taught himself MIT's 4 year Computer Science curriculum in 1 year.
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Charles Murray - Human Accomplishment and the Future of Liberty | The Lunar Society #10
I ask Charles Murray about Human Accomplishment, By The People, and The Curmudgeon's Guide to Getting Ahead.
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Alex Tabarrok - Prizes, Prices, and Public Goods
Alex Tabarrok is a professor of economics at George Mason University and with Tyler Cowen a founder of the online education platform http://MRU.org.
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Caleb Watney - America's Innovation Engine
Caleb Watney is the director of innovation policy at the Progressive Policy Institute.
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Robin Hanson - The Long View and The Elephant in the Brain
Robin Hanson is a professor of economics at George Mason University. He is the author of The Elephant in the Brain and The Age of Em.
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Jason Crawford - The Roots of Progress & the History of Technology
Jason Crawford writes at The Roots of Progress about the history of technology and industry and the philosophy of progress.
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Matjaž Leonardis - Science, Identity and Probability
Matjaž Leonardis has co-written a paper with David Deutsch about the Popper-Miller Theorem. In this episode, we talk about that as well as the dangers of the scientific identity, the nature of scientific progress, and advice for young people who want to be polymaths.
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Tyler Cowen - The Great Reset
Tyler Cowen is Holbert L. Harris Professor of Economics at George Mason University and also Director of the Mercatus Center.
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Bryan Caplan - Nurturing Orphaned Ideas, Education, and UBI
Bryan Caplan is a Professor of Economics at George Mason University and a New York Times Bestselling author. His most famous works include The Myth of the Rational Voter, The Case Against Education, and Open Borders: The Science and Ethics of Immigration.
