Nadia Asparouhova — Tech elites, democracy, open source, & philanthropy

ℹ️ EPISODE INFO

Released

December 15, 2022

Duration

1h 22m

Channel

Dwarkesh Podcast

Watch on YouTube

▶ Open ↗

📝 EPISODE DESCRIPTION

Nadia Asparouhova is currently researching what the new tech elite will look like at nadia.xyz. She is also the author of Working in Public: The Making and Maintenance of Open Source Software. We talk about how:

• American philanthropy has changed from Rockefeller to Effective Altruism
• SBF represented the Davos elite rather than the Silicon Valley elite,
• Open source software reveals the limitations of democratic participation,
• & much more.

𝐄𝐏𝐈𝐒𝐎𝐃𝐄 𝐋𝐈𝐍𝐊𝐒

• Transcript: https://www.dwarkeshpatel.com/p/nadia-asparouhova
• Apple Podcasts: https://apple.co/3VZy8wX
• Spotify: https://spoti.fi/3V080AD

𝐓𝐈𝐌𝐄𝐒𝐓𝐀𝐌𝐏𝐒 00:00:00 - Intro 00:00:26 - SBF was Davos elite 00:09:38 - Gender sociology of philanthropy 00:16:30 - Was Shakespeare an open source project? 00:22:00 - Need for charismatic leaders 00:33:55 - Political reform 00:40:30 - Why didn’t previous wealth booms lead to new philanthropic movements? 00:53:35 - Creating a 10,000 year endowment 00:57:27 - Why do institutions become left wing? 01:02:27 - Impact of billionaire intellectual funding 01:04:12 - Value of intellectuals 01:08:53 - Climate, AI, & Doomerism 01:18:04 - Religious philanthropy

🎤 SPEAKERS

• Nadia Asparouhova

  guest

• Dwarkesh Patel

  host

🧾 EPISODE SUMMARY

In this episode of Dwarkesh Podcast, featuring Nadia Asparouhova and Dwarkesh Patel, Nadia Asparouhova — Tech elites, democracy, open source, & philanthropy explores tech elites, philanthropy, and why meritocracies drift into aristocracies Nadia Asparouhova and Dwarkesh Patel discuss how different elite cultures—Wall Street, Silicon Valley startups, and crypto—shape philanthropy, media influence, and governance. Nadia argues that effective altruism and figures like SBF are closer to quantitative, globalist finance elites than to founder‑driven startup culture, and worries that today’s meritocratic tech billionaires will calcify into tomorrow’s aristocracy.

🔗 RELATED EPISODES

David Reich – Bronze Age shock, the Neanderthal puzzle, & the sudden spread of farming

Jensen Huang – TPU competition, why we should sell chips to China, & Nvidia’s supply chain moat

Dario Amodei — “We are near the end of the exponential”

Andrej Karpathy — “We’re summoning ghosts, not building animals”

Why Leonardo was a saboteur, Gutenberg went broke, and Florence was weird – Ada Palmer

Richard Sutton – Father of RL thinks LLMs are a dead end