Wiki / People
Dwarkesh Patel is a writer and podcast host known for long, carefully prepared interviews with AI researchers, founders, scientists, and historians. His main job is running the Dwarkesh Podcast: research a topic deeply, then sit with the world expert and ask the questions that matter. In 2025 he co-authored The Scaling Era, an oral history of the AI boom, with Stripe Press.
Patel’s contribution is not building models. It is building the record of how the people who do build them think. He prepares like a student preparing for an oral exam, then runs interviews that mix scaling laws, alignment, compute, economics, and history.
The show started in college in 2020 as The Lunar Society, named after the 18th-century Birmingham club of inventors and scientists. He later renamed it Dwarkesh Podcast after listeners kept confusing “Lunar” with crypto slang. Early guests said yes because the questions were serious. Later guests said yes because earlier ones told them to.
Outside the mic, he writes essays on compute, AGI timelines, and how intelligence and power get confused. The podcast and writing sit in the same project: make the AI era legible while it is still happening.
As of 2026, this is his published book. The rest of his corpus is podcast episodes and essays on dwarkesh.com.
Patel’s closest working relationships are with the people who keep showing up in his feed: AI lab leaders, safety researchers, and public intellectuals who treat long-form conversation as real work. He is not a lab employee. His access comes from reputation for preparation. Co-author Gavin Leech (Arb Research) shaped The Scaling Era with him. The Stripe Press relationship puts the oral history next to other progress-focused books.
Guests often recommend other guests. That network effect is the social graph of the show: Anthropic, DeepMind, OpenAI/SSI, Nvidia, Meta, and independent researchers all sit in overlapping conversations about scaling, alignment, and what comes after cheap intelligence.
A sample of notable guests, linked to their org or personal site (not the episode page). Full list lives in the podcast archive.