Dwarkesh Podcast – Détails, épisodes et analyse

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 human history is turning out to be wrong, from the ‘Out of Africa’ theory to the evolution of language, and this is all thanks to the research from David Reich’s lab.

Buy David Reich’s fascinating book, Who We Are How We Got 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.

Sponsor

This episode is brought to you by Stripe, financial infrastructure for the internet. Millions of companies from Anthropic to Amazon use Stripe to accept payments, automate financial processes and grow their revenue.

If you’re interested in advertising on the podcast, check out this page.

Timestamps

(00:00:00) – Archaic and modern humans gene flow

(00:20:24) – How early modern humans dominated the world

(00:39:59) – How bubonic plague rewrote history

(00:50:03) – Was agriculture terrible for humans?

(00:59:28) – Yamnaya expansion and how populations collide

(01:15:39) – “Lost civilizations” and our Neanderthal ancestry

(01:31:32) – The DNA Challenge

(01:41:38) – David’s career: the genetic vocation

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 calls in any language, 24/7. Their technology uses "conversational pathways" for accurate, versatile communication across sales, operations, and customer support. You can try Bland yourself by calling 415-549-9654. Enterprises can get exclusive access to their advanced model at bland.ai/dwarkesh.

- Stripe is financial infrastructure for the internet. Millions of companies from Anthropic to Amazon use Stripe to accept payments, automate financial processes and grow their revenue.

If you’re interested in advertising on the podcast, check out this page.

Timestamps:

(00:00:00) - Understanding the Basic Alignment Story

(00:44:04) - Monkeys Inventing Humans

(00:46:43) - Nietzsche, C.S. Lewis, and AI

(1:22:51) - How should we treat AIs

(1:52:33) - Balancing Being a Humanist and a Scholar

(2:05:02) - Explore exploit tradeoffs and AI

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 podcast platform. Read the full transcript here. Follow me on Twitter for updates on future episodes.

Timestamps

(00:00:00) - Advice for 20-30 year olds

(00:12:12) - Progress studies

(00:22:21) - Arc Institute

(00:34:27) - AI & Fast Grants

(00:43:46) - Stripe history

(00:55:44) - Stripe Climate

(01:01:39) - Beauty & APIs

(01:11:51) - Financial innards

(01:28:16) - Stripe culture & future

(01:41:56) - Virtues of big businesses

(01:51:41) - John

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, or any other podcast platform. Read the full transcript here. Follow me on Twitter for updates on future episodes.

Timestamps

(0:00:00) - John Maynard Keynes

(00:17:16) - Controversy

(00:25:02) - Fredrick von Hayek

(00:47:41) - John Stuart Mill

(00:52:41) - Adam Smith

(00:58:31) - Coase, Schelling, & George

(01:08:07) - Anarchy

(01:13:16) - Cheap WMDs

(01:23:18) - Technocracy & political philosophy

(01:34:16) - AI & Scaling

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.

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.

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 Cultural Revolution don't condemn Mao

- how Mao starved and killed 40 million people during The Great Leap Forward in order to exchange food for Soviet weapons

Wild Swans is the most moving book I've ever read. It was a real privilege to speak with its author.

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) - Growing up during Cultural Revolution

(00:15:58) - Could officials have overthrown Mao?

(00:34:09) - Great Leap Forward

(00:48:12) - Modern support of Mao

(01:03:24) - Life as peasant

(01:21:30) - Psychology of communist society

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.

Timestamps

(00:00:00) - Post WW2 conflicts

(00:10:57) - Ukraine

(00:16:33) - How Truman Prevented Nuclear War

(00:22:49) - Taiwan

(00:27:15) - Churchill

(00:35:11) - Gaza & future wars

(00:39:05) - Could Hitler have won WW2?

(00:48:00) - Surprise attacks

(00:59:33) - Napoleon and startup founders

(01:14:06) - Robert’s insane productivity

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

(00:00:00) - One day in COVID…

(00:08:26) - Why is government broken?

(00:29:10) - Civil service

(00:38:27) - Opportunity wasted?

(00:49:35) - Rishi Sunak and Number 10 vs 11

(00:55:13) - Cyber, nuclear, bio risks

(01:02:04) - Intelligence & defense agencies

(01:23:32) - Bismarck & Lee Kuan Yew

(01:37:46) - How to fix the government?

(01:56:43) - Taiwan

(02:00:10) - Russia

(02:07:12) - Bismarck’s career as an example of AI (mis)alignment

(02:17:37) - Odyssean education

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 into a new proof system, and how this could solve alignment by explaining model's behavior

- and much more.

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.

Open Philanthropy

Open Philanthropy is currently hiring for twenty-two different roles to reduce catastrophic risks from fast-moving advances in AI and biotechnology, including grantmaking, research, and operations.

For more information and to apply, please see the application: https://www.openphilanthropy.org/research/new-roles-on-our-gcr-team/

The deadline to apply is November 9th; make sure to check out those roles before they close.

Timestamps

(00:00:00) - What do we want post-AGI world to look like?

(00:24:25) - Timelines

(00:45:28) - Evolution vs gradient descent

(00:54:53) - Misalignment and takeover

(01:17:23) - Is alignment dual-use?

(01:31:38) - Responsible scaling policies

(01:58:25) - Paul’s alignment research

(02:35:01) - Will this revolutionize theoretical CS and math?

(02:46:11) - How Paul invented RLHF

(02:55:10) - Disagreements with Carl Shulman

(03:01:53) - Long TSMC but not NVIDIA