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I’m a little late to the party on this one, but two weeks ago, Dwarkesh Patel had a really excellent episode in which he interviewed Nvidia founder and CEO Jensen Huang:
Zvi Mowshowitz had what I thought was a very good in-depth breakdown and analysis of the discussion, which covered Nvidia’s technology, their business moat, and the question of chip sales to China:
Dwarkesh is rightfully gaining recognition as one of the podcast world’s best interviewers. He’s not an adversarial interviewer like Isaac Chotiner; his goal is not to get you to slip up, or to expose the contradictions in your thinking. Instead, he tries to draw his subjects out and help them explain their worldviews to the audience.
As someone who also prefers this style of interview, I can attest that it’s actually very difficult to pull off. It’s all too easy to slip into doing a softball puff piece — fawning all over your guests and treating them like gurus dispensing wisdom from a mountain. This is an even easier trap for someone like Dwarkesh, who is very young and who is primarily known for interviewing people instead of for dispensing his own thoughts. So it’s extremely impressive that he consistently avoids this trap — he always manages to challenge and provoke his subjects, rather than just letting them spout their usual talking points.
Rarely, though, do we see Dwarkesh actually debate his subjects. In his interview with Jensen, they really get into it on the subject of chip export controls to China. Those export controls — which Trump has significantly loosened — are preventing China from purchasing the best AI chips. Jensen, whose company sells those chips, wants to sell more of them to China. Dwarkesh thinks that’s not a great idea, and pushes back hard.
I actually wrote a post on export controls not too long ago, and I was wondering whether to write another:
