I tend to avoid podcasts in the style of Joe Rogan, those that begin with a 15-minute long ad block selling mushroom supplements followed by hours of meandering conversation between two people who may or may not be under the influence. Who in the world has the time?
So for that reason I avoided the podcast of one Dwarkesh Patel even as I occasionally linked to an article of his. I filed him mentally in the same “Avoid!” bucket as Lex Fridman — probably unfairly, as no one in the world can be as big of a mental bore as Fridman — without giving his podcast a chance. Although, judging by his writing on AI, I would not have liked the tone even if I had heard it. I remember, in fact, resisting the temptation to pan some of his more outlandish texts prophesying the rise of our LLM overlords with a tone which was as matter-of-fact as it was uncaring about human culture and society. My headphones are a direct link to my brain and I did not want that kind of world view to influence it.
Well a whole bunch of people are about to get influenc’d, because the New York Times has just published a glowing profile of Patel and his podcast, framing the show as a way to “eavesdrop on the A.I. elite” while burying an important fact — the one that kept me from listening in the first place — in the fourth-to-last paragraph:
Mr. Patel doesn’t see himself as a journalist, and he will do things that news organizations’ ethics rules generally prohibit, such as signing onto an amicus brief on behalf of Anthropic in its recent lawsuit against the Department of Defense, and angel-investing in companies whose founders he has interviewed (he disclosed the stakes). He believes in a “glorious transhumanist future,” and his tone isn’t adversarial. But his admirers say that his technical fluency and extensive preparation enable him to follow up or push back on superficial answers that most interviewers would simply accept. The Jensen Huang episode became heated as Mr. Patel repeatedly challenged the world’s most valuable company’s chief executive on the national-security implications of selling chips to China. “If I do cover a topic,” Mr. Patel says. “I think my reputation would suffer a lot if I don’t ask tough questions or don’t do it in a deep way.”
Of course, praising for this kind of pushback on a transhumanist podcast is like praising the host of “The Ultimate Potato Chip Podcast” for pushing back against Frito-Lay’s most recent price hike: it goes without saying that you like junk food.
But it was not this small bit of confirmation bias which made me link to the NYT. Rather, it was the same revelation that piqued Tyler Cowen’s interest, if for a different reason. Rather than paste the whole excerpt, let me provide a (human) summary: bored during the covid pandemic, a 19-year-old Patel asks the libertarian George Mason economist Bryan Caplan to be a guest on his brand-new podcast; Caplan agrees. They continue the exchange, online and in person, while Caplan is spending months in Austin, TX at the home of his billionaire friend Steve Kuhn. This wasn’t the only good billionaire-themed article in the NYT. For more reasons why Americans should probably do a bit more to clip their wings see the travails of one Sergey Brin and the series of hardships he endured that pushed him to the right. Kuhn also meets Patel and, liking the cut of his jib, offers to invest in return for equity. So do other people in the Caplan-Kuhn circle which inevitably expands all the way to your friendly neighborhood founder of Amazon. Cue NYT’s signature glazing.
Crikey. Fans of C.S. Lewis should recognize immediately the themes he raised in The Inner Ring, The Abolition of Man and That Hideous Strength, essays and books which were most likely not on Patel’s reading list during his formative years. One can only wonder whether his belief in “the glorious transhumanist future” came before or after the Silicon Valley billionaires made landfall in his young mind.