What is Dwarkesh Podcast about on PodcastMentions?

Recurring topics include history of oil, book recommendations, human accomplishment, and Robert Moses influence. Notable guests include Sarah Paine, Tyler Cowen, Bryan Caplan, and Sholto Douglas. Books this show tends to mention include How Asia Works by Joseph Studwell, The Power Broker by Robert Caro, and Open Borders: The Science and Ethics of Immigration by Bryan Caplan and Zach Weinersmith.

Which books are mentioned most on Dwarkesh Podcast?

How Asia Works by Joseph Studwell, The Power Broker by Robert Caro, and Open Borders: The Science and Ethics of Immigration by Bryan Caplan and Zach Weinersmith are the most frequently cited books currently indexed for Dwarkesh Podcast.

Which guests show up most often on Dwarkesh Podcast?

Sarah Paine (7 episodes), Tyler Cowen (4 episodes), and Bryan Caplan (3 episodes) are the most common guest appearances currently indexed for Dwarkesh Podcast.

What topics recur on Dwarkesh Podcast?

history of oil, book recommendations, human accomplishment, and Robert Moses influence are the strongest recurring transcript topics on Dwarkesh Podcast.

Dwarkesh Podcast: Episodes, Books Mentioned & Topics

Mar 6, 2026

How cosplaying Ancient Rome led to the scientific revolution

Guest: Ada Palmer

Feb 13, 2026

Dario Amodei — "We are near the end of the exponential"

Guest: Dario Amodei

Feb 5, 2026

Elon Musk — "In 36 months, the cheapest place to put AI will be space”

Guest: Elon Musk

Dec 30, 2025

Adam Marblestone — AI is missing something fundamental about the brain

Guest: Adam Marblestone

Dec 23, 2025

Thoughts on AI progress (Dec 2025)

Dec 19, 2025

Sarah Paine — Why Russia Lost the Cold War

Guest: Sarah Paine

Nov 25, 2025

Ilya Sutskever — We're moving from the age of scaling to the age of research

Guest: Ilya Sutskever

Nov 12, 2025

Satya Nadella — How Microsoft is preparing for AGI

Guest: Satya Nadella

Oct 31, 2025

Sarah Paine — How Russia sabotaged China's rise

Guest: Sarah Paine

Oct 17, 2025

Andrej Karpathy — AGI is still a decade away

Guest: Andrej Karpathy

Oct 10, 2025

Nick Lane – Life as we know it is chemically inevitable

Guest: Nick Lane

Oct 4, 2025

Some thoughts on the Sutton interview

Sep 26, 2025

Richard Sutton – Father of RL thinks LLMs are a dead end

Guest: Richard Sutton

Sep 12, 2025

Fully autonomous robots are much closer than you think – Sergey Levine

Guest: Sergey Levine

Sep 5, 2025

How Hitler almost starved Britain – Sarah Paine

Guest: Sarah Paine

Aug 21, 2025

Evolution designed us to die fast; we can change that — Jacob Kimmel

Guest: Jacob Kimmel

Aug 15, 2025

China is killing the US on energy. Does that mean they’ll win AGI? — Casey Handmer

Guest: Casey Handmer

Aug 7, 2025

Artificial meat is harder than artificial intelligence — Lewis Bollard

Guest: Lewis Bollard

Jul 25, 2025

Sarah Paine — How Imperial Japan defeated Tsarist Russia & Qing China

Guest: Sarah Paine

Jul 10, 2025

Stephen Kotkin — How Stalin became the most powerful dictator in history

Guest: Stephen Kotkin

Jul 3, 2025

Why I don’t think AGI is right around the corner

Jun 26, 2025

A billion years of evolution in a single afternoon — George Church

Guest: George Church

Jun 19, 2025

Why China's manufacturing economy is dominating — Arthur Kroeber

Guest: Arthur Kroeber

Jun 12, 2025

"China is digging out of a crisis. And America’s luck is wearing thin." — Ken Rogoff

Guest: Ken Rogoff

May 29, 2025

Xi Jinping’s paranoid approach to AGI, debt crisis, & Politburo politics — Victor Shih

Guest: Victor Shih

May 22, 2025

Is RL + LLMs enough for AGI? — Sholto Douglas & Trenton Bricken

Guests: Sholto Douglas and Trenton Bricken

May 1, 2025

What will automated firms look like?

Apr 29, 2025

Mark Zuckerberg — AI will write most Meta code in 18 months

Guest: Mark Zuckerberg

Apr 24, 2025

Why Rome actually fell: plagues, slavery, & ice age — Kyle Harper

Guest: Kyle Harper

Apr 17, 2025

AGI is still 30 years away — Ege Erdil & Tamay Besiroglu

Guests: Ege Erdil and Tamay Besiroglu

Apr 3, 2025

AI 2027: month-by-month model of intelligence explosion — Scott Alexander & Daniel Kokotajlo

Guest: Daniel Kokotajlo

Mar 25, 2025

AMA: career advice given AGI, how I research ft. Sholto & Trenton

Guests: Trenton Bricken and Sholto Douglas

Mar 12, 2025

Joseph Henrich — Humans defeated smarter species with cultural evolution

Guest: Joseph Henrich

Mar 5, 2025

Notes on China

Feb 19, 2025

Satya Nadella — Microsoft’s AGI plan & quantum breakthrough

Guest: Satya Nadella

Feb 12, 2025

Jeff Dean & Noam Shazeer — 25 years at Google: from PageRank to AGI

Guests: Jeff Dean and Noam Shazeer

Jan 30, 2025

Sarah Paine — How Mao conquered China (lecture & interview)

Guest: Sarah Paine

Jan 23, 2025

Sarah Paine — Why Japan lost WWII (lecture & interview)

Guest: Sarah Paine

Jan 16, 2025

Sarah Paine — The war for India (lecture & interview)

Guest: Sarah Paine

Jan 9, 2025

Tyler Cowen — The #1 bottleneck to AI progress is humans

Guest: Tyler Cowen

Dec 26, 2024

Adam Brown — Bubble universes, space elevators, & AdS/CFT

Guest: Adam Brown

Nov 13, 2024

Gwern — Anonymous writer who predicted AI trajectory on $12K/year salary

Guest: Gwern

Oct 2, 2024

@Asianometry & Dylan Patel — How the semiconductor industry actually works

Guests: Jon Y and Dylan Patel

$Daniel Yergin — Oil destroyed Hitler, fracking destroyed Putin artwork$

Sep 18, 2024

Daniel Yergin — Oil destroyed Hitler, fracking destroyed Putin

Guest: Daniel Yergin

Aug 29, 2024

David Reich — How one small tribe conquered the world 70,000 years ago

Guest: David Reich

Aug 22, 2024

Joe Carlsmith — Preventing an AI takeover

Guest: Joe Carlsmith

Jul 24, 2024

Patrick McKenzie — Money laundering, big tech censorship, SBF & Japan

Guest: Patrick McKenzie

Jun 26, 2024

Tony Blair — Why political leaders keep failing at major change

Guest: Tony Blair

Jun 11, 2024

Francois Chollet — Why the biggest AI models can't solve simple puzzles

Guest: Francois Chollet

Jun 4, 2024

Leopold Aschenbrenner — 2027 AGI, China/US super-intelligence race, & the return of history

Guest: Leopold Aschenbrenner

May 15, 2024

John Schulman (OpenAI Cofounder) — Reasoning, RLHF, & plan for 2027 AGI

Guest: John Schulman

Apr 18, 2024

Mark Zuckerberg — Llama 3, $10B models, Caesar Augustus, & 1 GW datacenters

Guest: Mark Zuckerberg

Mar 28, 2024

Sholto Douglas & Trenton Bricken — How LLMs actually think

Guests: Sholto Douglas and Trenton Bricken

Feb 28, 2024

Demis Hassabis — Scaling, superhuman AIs, AlphaZero atop LLMs, AlphaFold

Guest: Demis Hassabis

Feb 21, 2024

Patrick Collison — Why Silicon Valley's most talented should leave

Guest: Patrick Collison

Jan 31, 2024

Tyler Cowen — Hayek, Keynes, & Smith on AI, animal spirits, anarchy, & growth

Guest: Tyler Cowen

Jan 23, 2024

Lessons from The Years of Lyndon Johnson by Robert Caro [Narration]

Jan 19, 2024

Will scaling work? [Narration]

Nov 29, 2023

Jung Chang (Wild Swans author) — Living through history's largest man-made famine

Guest: Jung Chang

Nov 22, 2023

Andrew Roberts — Why Hitler lost WWII, Churchill as applied historian, & Napoleon as startup founder

Guest: Andrew Roberts

Nov 15, 2023

Dominic Cummings - COVID, Brexit, & Fixing Western Governance

Guest: Dominic Cummings

Oct 31, 2023

Paul Christiano — Preventing an AI takeover

Guest: Paul Christiano

Oct 26, 2023

Shane Legg (DeepMind Founder) — 2028 AGI, superhuman alignment, new architectures

Guest: Shane Legg

Oct 12, 2023

Grant Sanderson (@3blue1brown) — Past, present, & future of mathematics

Guest: Grant Sanderson

Oct 4, 2023

Sarah C. M. Paine — Why dictators keep making the same fatal mistake

Guest: Sarah C. M. Paine

Aug 8, 2023

Dario Amodei (Anthropic CEO) — The hidden pattern behind every AI breakthrough

Guest: Dario Amodei

Jul 12, 2023

Andy Matuschak — The reason most learning tools fail

Guest: Andy Matuschak

Jun 26, 2023

Carl Shulman (Pt 2) — AI Takeover, bio & cyber attacks, detecting deception, & humanity's far future

Guest: Carl Shulman

Jun 14, 2023

Carl Shulman (Pt 1) — Intelligence explosion, primate evolution, robot doublings, & alignment

Guest: Carl Shulman

May 23, 2023

Richard Rhodes — The making of the atomic bomb

Guest: Richard Rhodes

Apr 6, 2023

Eliezer Yudkowsky — Why AI will kill us, aligning LLMs, nature of intelligence, SciFi, & rationality

Guest: Eliezer Yudkowsky

Mar 27, 2023

Ilya Sutskever (OpenAI Chief Scientist) — Why next-token prediction could surpass human intelligence

Guest: Ilya Sutskever

Mar 22, 2023

Nat Friedman (Github CEO) — Reading ancient scrolls, open source, & AI

Guest: Nat Friedman

Mar 13, 2023

Brett Harrison — FTX US former president speaks out

Guest: Brett Harrison

Feb 1, 2023

Marc Andreessen — AI, crypto, 1000 Elon Musks, regrets, vulnerabilities, & managerial revolution

Guest: Marc Andreessen

Jan 24, 2023

Garett Jones — Immigration, national IQ, & less democracy

Guest: Garett Jones

Jan 9, 2023

Lars Doucet — Progress, poverty, Georgism, & why rent is too damn high

Guest: Lars Doucet

Jan 3, 2023

Holden Karnofsky — History's most important century

Guest: Holden Karnofsky

Dec 21, 2022

Bethany McLean — Enron, FTX, 2008, Musk, frauds, & visionaries

Guest: Bethany McLean

Dec 15, 2022

Nadia Asparouhova — Tech elites, democracy, open source, & philanthropy

Guest: Nadia Asparouhova

Dec 1, 2022

Byrne Hobart - FTX, Drugs, Twitter, Taiwan, & Monasticism

Guest: Byrne Hobart

Nov 28, 2022

Edward Glaeser - Cities, Terrorism, Housing, & Remote Work

Guest: Edward Glaeser

Nov 8, 2022

Kenneth T. Jackson - Robert Moses, Hero of New York?

Guest: Kenneth T. Jackson

Oct 27, 2022

Brian Potter - Future of Construction, Ugly Modernism, & Environmental Review

Guest: Brian Potter

Oct 20, 2022

Bryan Caplan - Feminists, Billionaires, and Demagogues

Guest: Bryan Caplan

Sep 28, 2022

Tyler Cowen - Talent, Collapse, & Pessimism of Sex

Guest: Tyler Cowen

Sep 14, 2022

Charles C. Mann - Americas Before Columbus & Scientific Wizardry

Guest: Charles C. Mann

Sep 8, 2022

Austin Vernon - Energy Superabundance, Starship Missiles, & Finding Alpha

Guest: Austin Vernon

Aug 23, 2022

Steve Hsu - Intelligence, Embryo Selection, & The Future of Humanity

Guest: Steve Hsu

Aug 9, 2022

Will MacAskill - Longtermism, Altruism, History, & Technology

Guest: Will MacAskill

Aug 3, 2022

Joseph Carlsmith - Utopia, AI, & Infinite Ethics

Guest: Joseph Carlsmith

Jul 27, 2022

Fin Moorhouse - Longtermism, Space, & Entrepreneurship

Guest: Fin Moorhouse

Jul 13, 2022

Alexander Mikaberidze - Napoleon, War, Progress, and Global Order

Guest: Alexander Mikaberidze

Jul 5, 2022

Sam Bankman-Fried - Crypto, Altruism, and Leadership

Guest: Sam Bankman-Fried

Jun 23, 2022

Agustin Lebron - Trading, Crypto, and Adverse Selection

Guest: Agustin Lebron

May 11, 2022

Ananyo Bhattacharya - John von Neumann, Jewish Genius, and Nuclear War

Guest: Ananyo Bhattacharya

May 5, 2022

Stephen Grugett (Manifold Markets Founder) - Predictions Markets & Revolutionizing Governance

Guest: Stephen Grugett

Apr 27, 2022

Pradyu Prasad - Imperial Japan, the God Emperor, and Militarization in the Modern World

Guest: Pradyu Prasad

Apr 20, 2022

Razib Khan - Genomics, Intelligence, and The Church of Science

Guest: Razib Khan

Apr 16, 2022

Jimmy Soni - Peter Thiel, Elon Musk, and the Paypal Mafia

Guest: Jimmy Soni

Apr 12, 2022

Bryan Caplan - Discrimination, Poverty, & Mental Illness

Guest: Bryan Caplan

Feb 24, 2022

Richard Hanania - Foreign Policy, Fertility, and Wokeness

Guest: Richard Hanania

Jan 31, 2022

David Deutsch - AI, America, Fun, & Bayes

Guest: David Deutsch

Oct 5, 2021

Byrne Hobart - Optionality, Stagnation, and Secret Societies

Guest: Byrne Hobart

Aug 9, 2021

David Friedman - Dating Markets, Legal Systems, Bitcoin, and Automation

Guest: David Friedman

Jun 4, 2021

Sarah Fitz-Claridge - Taking Children Seriously

Guest: Sarah Fitz-Claridge

May 28, 2021

Michael Huemer - Anarchy, Capitalism, and Progress

Guest: Michael Huemer

Nov 28, 2020

Uncle Bob - The Long Reach of Code

Guest: Uncle Bob

Nov 20, 2020

Scott Aaronson - Quantum Computing, Complexity, and Creativity

Guest: Scott Aaronson

Nov 16, 2020

Scott Young - Ultralearning

Guest: Scott Young

Oct 28, 2020

Charles Murray - Human Accomplishment and the Future of Liberty

Guest: Charles Murray

Oct 19, 2020

Alex Tabarrok - Prizes, Prices, and Public Goods

Guest: Alex Tabarrok

Sep 4, 2020

Caleb Watney - America's Innovation Engine

Guest: Caleb Watney

Aug 31, 2020

Robin Hanson - The Long View

Guest: Robin Hanson

Aug 25, 2020

Jason Crawford - The Roots of Progress

Guest: Jason Crawford

Aug 22, 2020

Matjaž Leonardis - Science, Identity, and Probability

Guest: Matjaž Leonardis

Jul 10, 2020

Tyler Cowen - The Great Reset

Guest: Tyler Cowen

May 22, 2020

Bryan Caplan - Nurturing Orphaned Ideas

Guest: Bryan Caplan

Dwarkesh Podcast

Quick FAQ

What is Dwarkesh Podcast about on PodcastMentions?

Which books are mentioned most on Dwarkesh Podcast?

Which guests show up most often on Dwarkesh Podcast?

What topics recur on Dwarkesh Podcast?

All episodes