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Dwarkesh Podcast

Dwarkesh Podcast

Written by: Dwarkesh Patel
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Deeply researched interviews

www.dwarkesh.comDwarkesh Patel Science
Episodes
  • Ada Palmer – Machiavelli is the most misunderstood thinker of all time

    Ada Palmer – Machiavelli is the most misunderstood thinker of all time
    Jun 16 2026
    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 left 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 these books, because those hands, armed further 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, subscribe on YouTube, follow her on Patreon, and if you want even more Ada, check out her FixTheNews Podcast episode, and check out her books and more.Watch on YouTube; read the transcript.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 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 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 crusoe.ai/dwarkeshTimestamps(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 Get full access to Dwarkesh Podcast at www.dwarkesh.com/subscribe
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    2 hrs and 8 mins
  • Alex Imas and Phil Trammell – What remains scarce after AGI?

    Alex Imas and Phil Trammell – What remains scarce after AGI?
    Jun 4 2026

    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 first thing economics teaches you is that your intuitions can often be entirely wrong.

    It was very helpful to chat through these things with Alex and Phil.

    Watch on YouTube; read the transcript.

    Sponsors

    Jane Street invests heavily in turning smart people into exceptional researchers and engineers. In addition to their apprenticeship model, Jane Street runs lectures and bootcamps in their in-office classrooms -- managers clear their teams’ schedules to encourage attendance. If you’d like to work at a place that takes learning this seriously, Jane Street is hiring. Check out their open roles at janestreet.com/dwarkesh

    Google’s Gemini Omni has incredible video editing capabilities -- you can upload a video and have Omni change the background, adjust lighting, or add specific elements. But Omni is also a preview of how future frontier models will be trained -- fully multimodal on both input and output. You can try it yourself in the Gemini app at gemini.google or in Flow at flow.google

    Cursor used targeted RL with textual feedback to help train their Composer 2.5 model. One of their researchers, Sasha Rush, gave me an impromptu blackboard lecture to explain how this form of on-policy self-distillation works -- I posted the full thing on X. If you want to try Composer 2.5, go to cursor.com/dwarkesh

    Timestamps

    (00:00:00) – Will capital share increase?

    (00:19:36) – Messy Middle scenario

    (00:25:57) – How to tax and redistribute AI wealth

    (00:30:02) – Why demand collapse is unlikely

    (00:39:26) – Human employees would be hard to integrate into the machine economy

    (00:43:08) – What if some humans (or AIs) value wealth accumulation intrinsically?

    (01:01:28) – What should developing countries do?



    Get full access to Dwarkesh Podcast at www.dwarkesh.com/subscribe
    Show More Show Less
    1 hr and 16 mins
  • Reiner Pope – Chip design from the bottom up

    Reiner Pope – Chip design from the bottom up
    May 22 2026

    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 chalkboard. Read the transcript.

    Sponsors

    * Crusoe was one of only five GPU clouds that made the gold tier in SemiAnalysis' most recent ClusterMAX report. Gold-tier providers like Crusoe delivered 5-15% lower TCO than silver-tier clouds, even with identical GPU pricing. This is because optimizations like early fault detection and rapid node replacement don't necessarily show up in the sticker price, but still matter a ton in the real world. Learn more at crusoe.ai/dwarkesh

    * Cursor is where I do most of my work—from reading research papers to visualizing technical concepts to coding up internal tools for the podcast. Most recently, I used it to build two different review interfaces for my essay contest, one that anonymizes submissions for scoring and another that lets me see applicants' essays next to their resumes and websites. Whatever you're working on, you should try doing it in Cursor. Get started at cursor.com/dwarkesh

    * Jane Street let me ask Ron Minsky and Dan Pontecorvo, two senior Jane Streeters, a bunch of questions about how they use AI. We discussed everything from the types of models they're training to how they think about the future of trading to why they're more bullish than ever on hiring technical talent. You can watch the full conversation and learn more about their open positions at janestreet.com/dwarkesh

    Timestamps

    00:00:00 – Building a multiply-accumulate from logic gates

    00:16:31 – Muxes and the cost of data movement

    00:26:10 – How systolic arrays work

    00:39:11 – Clock cycles and pipeline registers

    00:51:51 – FPGAs vs ASICs

    01:03:25 – Cache vs scratchpad

    01:07:27 – Why CPU cores are much bigger than GPU cores

    01:12:00 – Brains vs chips

    01:15:33 – A GPU is just a bunch of tiny TPUs



    Get full access to Dwarkesh Podcast at www.dwarkesh.com/subscribe
    Show More Show Less
    1 hr and 21 mins
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