First Sarah Paine lecture & interview is out! How Imperial Japan (population 47M) crushed Tsarist Russia (130M) and Qing China (400M). For me, the most interesting thing was that Japan's surprise attack on Port Arthur at the beginning of the Russo-Japanese War (1904) helps us

TBPN How have you not had Alan Turing on the pod yet??? Dwarkesh Podcast Dwarkesh Patel

All the interviewees from the Dwarkesh Podcast with an X account and the host Dwarkesh Patel in one X list. The following are the guests not on X. 🧵x.com/i/lists/195033…

I filmed a video version of my post 'Why I Don’t Think AGI Is Right Around The Corner' so I could show it to my YouTube audience. You can watch it too I guess. 0:00:00 - Continual Learning 0:08:06 - Computer Use 0:11:27 - Reasoning 0:12:45 - So what are my predictions?

Before I interviewed Lewis Bollard, I had assumed that factory farming was on its way out (especially given new tech like cultivated meat around the corner). Unfortunately this is far from inevitable: factory farms are already incredibly efficient machines for making meat (the

Just $1 can help avert 10 years of farmed animal suffering. I decided to give $250,000 as a donation match to FarmKind after learning about the outsized opportunities to help. FarmKind directs your contributions to the most effective charities in this area. Please

The U.S. meat lobby spends around $45M per election cycle. Far from tech or finance money. And yet, no meaningful animal welfare bill gets through without them stopping it. Part of the answer to their success is that they are never fighting alone. Agriculture, insurance, and

Ending factory farming isn't about making everyone vegetarian. The animal welfare movement made the same mistake as early environmentalists - turning a systems problem into a personal virtue test. No major social reform succeeded by first converting millions to change their

I donated $2,000 to FarmKind and got Dwarkesh Patel to match my donation! you should consider donating too and help him get to $250k!

Lewis Bollard explains Richard Dawkins' counterintuitive theory: intelligence might actually protect us from the worst of suffering. "Less intelligent animals might feel pain and fear more acutely than more intelligent animals. And that's because they can't rationalize it.

When an industry optimizes for one metric, it often breaks everything else. In factory farming, this creates compounding suffering. Lewis Bollard explains how trying to solve pig boredom opens a spiral of unintended consequences. “At each step, there is a new solution that

We're just getting started Lewis!

It's hard to grasp the scale of factory farming. Lewis Bollard described what he saw at one farm with 200,000 hens in battery cages (each hen crammed together with 4-6 other hens in a space the size of a microwave oven for years on end, unable to even flap their wings).

People don’t appreciate how effective corporate campaigns have been on animal welfare. As opposed to policy change (often gets gridlocked by the meat industry) or moonshot cultivated meat tech (might be decades away from being competitive). This is a pro-market story! We can

The largest meat producers exploit climate rhetoric as cover for avoiding reforms. One of the biggest knows from its own surveys that consumers care more about animal welfare than climate. So when asked to adopt higher-welfare breeds or give animals more room, meat producers

Ruthlessly optimizing efficiency created the factory farming problem. But in some cases, efficiency gains from tech can have a positive impact on animal welfare. Here Lewis Bollard describes how in-ovo sexing "went from 10 years ago just being a vague idea to today, it's

As measured by GDP, AI will be super undervalued. How would the datacenter of geniuses show up in GDP? GDP would show raw inputs (aka chip & energy), and raw outputs (aka cost of tokens). But wouldn't clearly reflect the value of the crazy new shit that's being cooked up in

Casey Handmer argues that investment in natural gas is doomed, even if there were no near-term geopolitical or financial risks from an AI bubble or China invading Taiwan. The fundamental problem: gas turbines need 20 years to pay back, but solar and batteries have already won on

Casey Handmer argues AI pricing is so elastic that Anthropic could raise subscription prices 10x to fund new gas turbines. If that’s true, why is solar still the future? “The learning rate for natural gas is nowhere near as steep as solar… there are very few manufactured