Cortés, Pizarro and three Sarah Paine wars fill Dwarkesh Patel's week
Eight uploads moved from World War I to Korea to the fall of the Aztecs, on a channel that has passed a billion views in total.
Dwarkesh PatelStory of Why this story? The channel's weekly summary: what went up this week, what is drawing views now, and where the channel stands among similar channels.
How Korea Went from Civil War to Near World War - Sarah Paine
Dwarkesh Patel's channel describes itself in three words, "Deeply researched interviews," and it has gathered more than a billion views. This week the research went mostly backward in time.
Sarah Paine, the Naval War College historian who has become a regular voice here, carried three of the eight uploads. "Why nobody could stop World War I - Sarah Paine" opened her run, "Russia Couldn't Afford to Keep Fighting" followed, and "How Korea Went from Civil War to Near World War" became the week's most watched, now close to 800,000 views. Its comment section reads like a family archive. Many viewers write about grandfathers, professors and security guards who served in Korea, and several simply say they could listen to her for hours. Others single out the maps and animations.
Then the conquistadors arrived. Military historian Si Sheppard sat down for a long episode on how Hernán Cortés and Francisco Pizarro, with a few hundred soldiers, brought down the Aztec and Inca empires. The chapters run from Tenochtitlan to Mughal India, and the description ties it all to a modern worry: AI takeover, it argues, would not be the first time a strange, technologically stronger force outmaneuvered a much larger established order. A shorter cut, "How Conquistadors Conquered the Aztecs," is now drawing views faster than anything else on the channel.
The week opened on the present, with OpenAI researcher Noam Brown on "Why LLMs Might Hit a Wall," a quieter start beside the history.
All of it lifted the channel well above its usual daily pace. Among podcast and interview channels of similar size, Stiff Socks Podcast and ALL THE SMOKE are also having big weeks, Tim Ferriss and Colin and Samir are running around double their norm, and All-In Podcast and The Connect are quieter than usual.
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The videos drawing views on Dwarkesh Patel right now
How Conquistadors Conquered the Aztecs - Si Sheppard634,722 views · 2026-10-01
Why nobody could stop World War I - Sarah Paine475,363 views · 2026-09-28
Russia Couldn't Afford to Keep Fighting - Sarah Paine171,006 views · 2026-09-30
How did a few hundred Spanish soldiers topple two empires? – Si Shepp…156,832 views · 2026-10-01
Why LLMs Might Hit a Wall - Noam Brown52,877 views · 2026-09-26
- Channel
- Dwarkesh Patel
- Subscribers
- 1,430,000
- Videos published this week
- 8
- Video published
- September 29, 2026
- Video views so far
- 785,717
- Views on its first day
- 319,485
The numbers
Here is how Dwarkesh Patel's week looks in figures.
💡 Test your knowledge
What was the name of the Aztec capital that Cortés and his allies captured in 1521?
Tenochtitlan, built on an island in Lake Texcoco, fell to Cortés and his Indigenous allies in 1521, and Mexico City now stands on its site.
