Dwarkesh

speaker

1,722 appearances 5 recordings 1 series first heard Apr 2025 last heard 25 Nov

Dwarkesh’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

Trend

recordings per month · last 12 months

Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 2 in all, peaking in Nov 2025 with 1.

Appearances

newest first · ▶ plays the moment

Dwarkesh Podcast · Sarah Paine — How Russia sabotaged China's rise · 31 Oct 2025 podcast

You know, he doesn't seem communist enough to want China to become fully communist.

He, like, cares more about real geopolitic.

But did Stalin, as a communist, he thought, okay, there's going to be at some point, the whole world is going to be communist.

And he thought that he personally would be managing the whole world?

If Stalin hadn't died, do you think a Sino-Soviet split was still inevitable?

Because yes, there wouldn't have been Khrushchev's secret speech.

Obviously, Stalin wouldn't have condemned the cult of personality, but the grievances you mentioned would still exist.

This, I think, is a really interesting thing to consider from this lecture, that, you know, in retrospect, maybe one of the most important things, if not the most important thing that happened in the 20th century, is the Chinese Civil War.

At the time, you know, you wouldn't think of this as a... Especially World War II has just happened...

You wouldn't think of this as, if you were living in 1948 or 1949, you wouldn't think of this as the main thing happening in the world.

But given that we know in retrospect this is a really big country with a huge population, we should be paying a lot of attention to its internal political development.

And I wonder if we should apply the same logic today where there's other countries with huge populations where we don't think a lot about what's happening.

India or Nigeria.

I mean, I really couldn't tell you the first thing about Nigeria, even though I know that it's a big country with a huge population.

Let's not try, because I don't know anything about it either.

Okay.

I want to zoom in on one particular episode during this period that I think is fascinating.

So in 1936, the communists in China kidnap Chiang Kai-shek, who is the leader of the Nationalists.

And they're about to kill him.

And Stalin radios in over the comment term.

Showing 381–400 of 1,722 · page 20 of 87