The Past and Future of AI (with Dwarkesh Patel)

Welcome to Econ Talk, Conversations for the Curious, part of the Library of Economics and Liberty. I'm your host, Russ Roberts of Shalem College in Jerusalem and Stanford University's Hoover Institution. Go to econtalk.org where you can subscribe, comment on this episode, and find links and other information related to today's conversation. You'll also find our archives with every episode we've done going back to 2006. Our email address is mail at econtalk.org.

We'd love to hear from you. Today is March 25th, 2025, and my guest is podcaster and author Dorakesh Patel. You can find him on YouTube at substack at Drakesh.com. He is the author with Gavin Leach of The Scaling Era, an Oral History of AI 2019 to 2025, which is our topic for today along with many other things I suspect. Dwarkesh, welcome to Econ Talk.

Thanks for having me on, Russ. I've been a fan, I was just telling you, for ever since I think probably before I started my podcast, I've been uh a big fan, so it's actually really cool to get to talk to you. Well, I I really appreciate it and I admire your work as well. We'll we'll uh we're gonna talk about it some. Uh you start off uh saying early in the book, and I should say this book is from Stripe Press, which

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