Dwarkesh Patel

What Robert Caro learned about power after studying it for 50 years

23K views · 3h ago · 1:01:10

Antithesis lets you run thorough simulation tests on every PR your coding agents ship. That’s because Antithesis is FAST. On a recent project, it packed fifteen hours of simulation into each fifteen-minute run: every change could be tested in thousands of hostile worlds before being merged. Every minute your software spends in Antithesis is one of the unluckiest hours it will ever experience. Learn more at

Topics: How Caro gets people to talk · Does America need a little more Moses today? · Moses the young idealist · Watching Moses lose power · Did Moses realize he was changing? · Building during the Great Depression

What Robert Caro’s books taught me about power

86K views · 1d ago · 24:42

I recently got to interview Robert Caro, who is my favorite author of all time. This gave me the excuse to reread his biographies of Lyndon Johnson and Robert Moses. I decided to compile their lessons about power into this video essay.

What will computer chips look like in 2045?

274K views · 1w ago · 1:09:01

I spent two days touring Intel’s most advanced fab and talking to its technical leadership to understand what the chips of the future will look like. A lot of what's coming next – gate-all-around transistors, backside power, CFET, hybrid bonding – is hard to follow without actually seeing it, so we made all the awesome animated explainers that I wish I had while I was prepping.

Topics: How Intel brings up a new process node · What Intel learned from 10nm · From planar transistors to gate-all-around · Why High-NA EUV pays off for Intel but not TSMC · Could chips have evolved completely differently? · Inside Intel's "Hot Topics" meeting

How did a few hundred Spanish soldiers topple two empires? – Si Sheppard

827K views · 4w ago · 1:37:24

Guest: Si Sheppard

New episode with military historian Si Sheppard. The conquests of the Aztec and Inca empires might be the most shocking events in human history. Hernan Cortés and some hundreds of Conquistadors landed on a new continent they knew basically nothing about, and within 2 and a half years, conquered the 6 million strong Aztec empire.

Topics: Cortés’s conquest of the Aztecs · Pizarro’s conquest of the Inca · Explaining Conquistador military superiority · Could the natives have beat the Conquistadors? · The Aztecs and Incas did not learn from each other · Why Spain still lost in the long run

Sarah Paine — Why wars are so difficult to end

1.6M views · 1mo ago · 52:40

Guest: Sarah Paine

This is the final lecture in our series with Sarah Paine, and it's a fitting place to end. Sarah tackles war termination: why wars are easy to start, hard to end, and even harder to end on the terms you wanted. Using the Russo-Japanese War as a model, she explains what goes wrong when regional wars escalate into global ones, or when conventional victories turn into endless insurgencies. It's especially relevant given what's going on today.

Topics: How Japan beat a far bigger Russia · Clausewitz's culminating points of victory · What finally made Russia give up? · Gulf War: the war the US didn't pay for · Korea and the cost of shifting war aims · Sun Tzu's "death ground"