AMA: career advice given AGI, how I research ft. Sholto & Trenton

I recorded an AMA! I had a blast chatting with my friends Trenton Bricken and Sholto Douglas. We discussed my new book, career advice given AGI, how I pick guests, how I research for the show, and some other nonsense. My book, “The Scaling Era: An Oral History of AI, 2019-2025 https://press.stripe.com/scaling” is available in digital format https://www.amazon.com/Scaling-Era-Oral-History-2019-2025-ebook/dp/B0F22SKW5Y/ref=tmm_kin_swatch_0 now. Preorders for the print version https://www.amazon.com/Scaling-Era-Oral-History-2019-2025/dp/1953953557/ref=tmm_hrd_swatch_0 are also open! Watch on YouTube https://youtu.be/XLaRfZ4AHn8; listen on Apple Podcasts https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/dwarkesh-podcast/id1516093381 or Spotify https://open.spotify.com/episode/4yso3gE93kHV6vGZw2cgtp?si=c1dfbe07b63343f8. Timestamps (0:00:00) - Book launch announcement (0:04:57) - AI models not making connections across fields (0:10:52) - Career advice given AGI (0:15:20) - Guest selection criteria (0:17:19) - Choosing to pursue the podcast long-term (0:25:12) - Reading habits (0:31:10) - Beard deepdive (0:33:02) - Who is best suited for running an AI lab? (0:35:16) - Preparing for fast AGI timelines (0:40:50) - Growing the podcast This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.dwarkesh.com https://www.dwarkesh.com?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_1

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Dwarkesh Patel?

  Today, this is gonna be an Ask Me Anything episode. I'm joined with my friends Trenton Bricken and Sholto Douglas. You guys do some AI stuff, alright? Double.

• 0:12Dwarkesh Patel?

  They're researchers at Anthropic. Other news, I have a book launching today. It's called A Scaling Era. I hope one of the questions ends up being why you should buy this book. But we can come two words with one stone, but, um, okay, let's just get at it. What's the first question that we gotta answer? Take his way.

• 0:28Trenton Bricken?

  So I wanna ask the flyball question that I heard before of why should ordinary people care about this book? Like, why should my mom buy and read the book?

• 0:38Dwarkesh Patel?

  Yeah. First, let me tell you about the book, what it is. So, you know, these last few years, I've been interviewing AI labs, CEOs, researchers, people like you guys, obviously, but also scholars from all kinds of different fields, economists, philosophers, and they've been addressing, I think, what are basically the gnarliest, most interesting, most important questions we've ever had to ask ourselves. Like, what is the fundamental nature of intelligence? What will happen when we have billions of extra workers? How do we, how do we model out the economics of that? How do we think about an intelligence that is greater than the rest of humanity combined? Is that even a coherent concept?

• 1:21Dwarkesh Patel?

  And so what I'm super delighted with is that with Stripe Press, we made this book where we compiled and curated the best, most insightful snippets across all these interviews. And you can read Dario addressing why does scaling work? And then on the next page is Demis explaining DeepMind's plans for whether they're gonna go with the RL route and how much of the AlphaZero stuff will play into the next generation of LLMs. And on the next page is, of course, you guys going through the technical details of how these models work. And then there's so many different fields that are implicated. I mean, I feel like AI is one of the most multi-discipliner fields that one can imagine

• 2:03Dwarkesh Patel?

  because there's no field, no domain of human knowledge that is not relevant to understanding what a future society of different kinds of Things will look like. There's, you know, you can have like Carl Schulman talk about how the scaling hypothesis shows up and primate brain scaling from chimpanzees to humans. On the next page might be an economist trying to argue with like Tyler Cowen and explaining why he doesn't expect explosive economic growth and why the bottlenecks will eat all that up. Anyways, so that's why your mom should buy this book. It just like, it is the distillation of all these different fields of human knowledge. Apply it to the most important questions that humanity is facing right now.

• 2:40Trenton Bricken?

  I do like how the book is sliced up by different topics and across interviews.

• 2:44Dwarkesh Patel?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 2:45Trenton Bricken?

  So it does seem like a nice way to listen to all of the interviews in one digestible way.

• 2:52Dwarkesh Patel?

  There's two interviews I've done that haven't been released publicly before that are in the book. So one was that Jared Kaplan, who's one of your co-founders. And this is another example where it's like, he's like a physicist and he's explaining scaling from this like very mathematical perspective about data manifolds. And then on the same next page, you have like a totally different perspective. It's like Goran talking about, you know, why, why can't we just have like distilled, like, why did general intelligence actually evolve in the first place? What is the actual evolutionary purpose of it? And it's like page by page, right? You can just get addresses, even for me, I mean, like the person who's been on the other end of these conversations. It was actually really cool to like read it and just be like, oh, I actually like, I now I realize how these insights connect to each other.

• 3:36Trenton Bricken?

  Yeah, the only other thing that stood out to me as well is the introduction section.

• 3:39Dwarkesh Patel?

  The only thing that stood out to you.

• 3:42Trenton Bricken?

  Yeah, yeah, that was, that was really the only thing that was noteworthy. I just mean, stood out in accessibility.

• 3:49Dwarkesh Patel?

  Yeah.

• 3:49Trenton Bricken?

  Is the introduction section and the diagrams for like all the different inputs that enable you to train a machine learning model. Stripe press books are also just beautiful and have these nice like side captions for explaining what parameters are, what a model is, these sorts of things.

• 4:05Dwarkesh Patel?

  Actually, when we did our episode together, a bunch of people, I don't know if you saw this, independently made these like blog posts and Anki cards and shit where they're like explaining the concept, because we just kind of passed over some things. And hopefully, we've given a similar treatment to every single interview I've done, where you can read a very technical interview with a lapsy or something, or an engineer, or a researcher, and then the side is like, here's more context, here's more definitions, here's more commentary. And yeah, I feel like it elevated the conversations.

• 4:37Sholto Douglas?

  So in other words, my parents will finally understand what I do for a job. Why would they do? They get it very well.

• 4:44Dwarkesh Patel?

  Maybe my parents will.

• 4:45Sholto Douglas?

  Your parents will.

• 4:48Trenton Bricken?

  All mine need to know is that my name's in a book.

• 4:50Dwarkesh Patel?

  Yeah. You're a co-author.

• 4:52Trenton Bricken?

  They're like, cool.

• 4:55Sholto Douglas?

  Shall we get into the AMA questions? Let's do it. So Brian Krav asks, "The issue you raise with Dario and occasionally tweet about relating to models not making connections across disparate topics, some sort of combinatorial attention challenge, what are your thoughts on that now? Do you solve it with scale, thinking models, or something else?"

• 5:11Dwarkesh Patel?

  By the way, so the issue is, one of the questions I asked Dario is, look, these models have all of human knowledge memorized, and you would think if a human had this much stuff memorized, and they were moderately intelligent, they could be making all these connections between different fields. And there are examples of humans doing this, by the way. There's Donald Swan or something like this. This guy noticed that the way, what happens to your brain after magnesium deficiency is exactly the kinds of, I don't know, structure you see during a migraine. So he's like, okay, you take magnesium supplements, and we're gonna cure a bunch of migraines. And it worked. And there's many other examples of things like this, where you just like notice two different connections between pieces of knowledge. Why, if these LLMs are intelligent, are they not able to use this unique advantage

• 5:55Dwarkesh Patel?

  they have to make these kinds of discoveries? I feel a little shy, like, me giving answers on AI shit with you guys here. But, so, actually, Scott Alexander addressed this question in one of his AMA threads, and he's like, look, humans also don't have this kind of logical omniscience, right? He used the example of, in language, if you really thought about, like, why are two words connected? It's like, oh, I understand, like, why rhyme has the same etymology as another word, if you really thought about, but you just, like, don't think about it, right? There's like this combinatorial explosion. I don't know if that addresses the fact that we know humans can do this, right? Like, the humans have, in fact, done this, and I don't know of a single example of LLMs ever having done it. Actually, yeah, what is your answer to this?

• 6:37Sholto Douglas?

  I think my answer at the moment is that the pre-training objective doesn't necessarily, like it imbues you with this nice, flexible, general knowledge about the world, but doesn't necessarily imbue you the skill of making novel connections or like research.

• 6:51Trenton Bricken?

  Yeah.

• 6:51Sholto Douglas?

  The kinds of things that people are trained to do through PhD programs and through the process of exploring and interacting with the world. And so I think at a minimum, you need significant RL in at least similar things to be able to approach making novel discoveries. And so I would like to see some early evidence of this as we start to build models that are interacting with the world and trying to make scientific discoveries and sort of modeling the behaviors that we expect of people in these positions. Because I don't actually think we've done that in a meaningful or scaled way as a field, so to speak.

• 7:27Trenton Bricken?

  Yeah, riffing off that with respect to RL, I wonder if models currently just aren't good at knowing what memories they should be storing. Like, most of their training is just predicting the next word on the internet and remembering very specific facts from that. But if you were to teach me something new right now, I'm very aware of my own memory limitations, and so I would try to construct some summary that would stick. And models currently don't have the opportunity to do that. Memory scaffolding in general is just very primitive right now.

• 7:59Sholto Douglas?

  Right, like Coldplay's Pokemon.

• 8:01Trenton Bricken?

  Exactly, yeah. Or like, someone worked on it, it was awesome, it got far, but another excited Anthropic employee then iterated on the memory scaffold and was able to very quickly improve on it.

• 8:12Sholto Douglas?

  Interesting.

• 8:13Trenton Bricken?

  So yeah, that's one. I do also just wonder if models are idiot savants. The best analogy might be to Kim Peek. So Kim Peek was born without a corpus callosum, if I recall correctly. Each hemisphere of his brain operated quite independently. He could read a page of a book. So he'd open a book, there'd be two pages visible. Each eye would read one of the pages. And he had a perfect encyclopedic memory of everything he'd ever read. But at the same time, he had other debilitations.

• 8:46Dwarkesh Patel?

  Yeah.

• 8:46Trenton Bricken?

  Functioning socially, these sorts of things. And it's just kind of amazing how good LLMs are at very niche topics, but can totally fail at other ones still.

• 8:55Dwarkesh Patel?

  I really want to double click on this thing of why there's this trade off between memorization, like, yeah, why does cutting it off? Like, apparently, it's sort of, it's connected to this debilitation. But why can't we, like, Wikitext is not that, it's like 5 megabytes of information. The human brain can store much more. So what is the human brain just not want us to memorize these kinds of things? And is actively pruning? And, yeah, I don't know. But we don't have to do it right now. We'll do a separate episode.

• 9:22Trenton Bricken?

  The one thing I'll say on that is like, there is another case study of someone with a perfect memory.

• 9:26Dwarkesh Patel?

  Yeah.

• 9:26Trenton Bricken?

  So they never forgot anything.

• 9:27Dwarkesh Patel?

  Yeah.

• 9:27Trenton Bricken?

  But their memory was too debilitating.

• 9:29Dwarkesh Patel?

  Hmm.

• 9:30Trenton Bricken?

  It'd be like, your context window for the transformer is like

• 9:34Dwarkesh Patel?

  Hmm.

• 9:35Trenton Bricken?

  trillions of tokens.

• 9:36Dwarkesh Patel?

  Yeah.

• 9:36Trenton Bricken?

  And then you spend all your time attending to pass things and like

• 9:39Dwarkesh Patel?

  Right.

• 9:40Trenton Bricken?

  are too trapped in the details

• 9:41Dwarkesh Patel?

  Yeah.

• 9:42Trenton Bricken?

  to extract any meaningful, generalizable insights from it.

• 9:45Dwarkesh Patel?

  Terrence Deacon, whose book you recommended, had this interesting insight about how we learn best when we're children. But we forget literally everything that happened to us when we were children, right? We have total amnesia. And adults have this in-between where we don't remember exact details, but we can still like learn in a pretty decent way. And then LLMs are on the opposite end of this gradient where they'll get the exact phrasing of Wikitext down, but they won't be able to generalize in these very obvious ways.

• 10:11Trenton Bricken?

  Yeah, a little bit like Guen's theory, optimize the theory, no?

• 10:13Dwarkesh Patel?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. I think I probably got it from that.

• 10:17Trenton Bricken?

  Yeah, yeah. Guen has definitely had a big influence on all this for me as well.

• 10:20Dwarkesh Patel?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. I mean, I feel like what's underappreciated on the podcast is like, we have this like group chat. And we also just like meet up a lot in person. And just all the offer from the podcast just comes from you and a couple other people just feeding me like ideas and nudges and whatever. And then I can just use that as an intuition pump during the conversation.

• 10:40Trenton Bricken?

  Yeah, you're not the only one.

• 10:42Dwarkesh Patel?

  What do you mean?

• 10:43Trenton Bricken?

  Oh, like, I'd benefit immensely from

• 10:44Dwarkesh Patel?

  Oh, right.

• 10:45Trenton Bricken?

  just hearing what everyone else has to say.

• 10:46Dwarkesh Patel?

  Yeah.

• 10:47Trenton Bricken?

  And then, yeah, it's all, it's all regurgitation in a way.

• 10:49Dwarkesh Patel?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 10:51Trenton Bricken?

  Another question?

• 10:51Dwarkesh Patel?

  Yes.

• 10:52Trenton Bricken?

  Maybe Rabid, maybe Rabid Monkey asks, imagine you have a 17-year-old brother slash nephew just starting college. What would you recommend he study, given your AGI timelines?

• 11:08Dwarkesh Patel?

  I don't know, become a podcaster? I feel like that job's still gonna be around. It's funny, because I started computer science. And in retrospect, I mean, at the time, like, you know, you could have become a software engineer or something. Instead, you became a podcaster. It's like kind of an irresponsible career move. But in retrospect, it's like, it kind of worked out, just as these guys are getting automated.

• 11:27Sholto Douglas?

  I get asked this question all the time.

• 11:28Dwarkesh Patel?

  Yes, okay, go ahead.

• 11:29Sholto Douglas?

  And one answer that I like to give is that you should think about the next couple of years as increasing your individual leverage by like a huge factor every year. So already, software engineers will come up and say, you know, I'm two times faster. Or in new languages, I'm five times faster than I was last year. I expect that trend line to continue, basically, as you sort of go from this model of, well, I'm working with some model that's assisting me on my computer. And it's like, like basically a pairing session to I'm managing a small team, through to I'm managing like a division or a company, basically, that is like targeting a task. And so I think that deep technical knowledge in fields will still matter in four years. Like, it absolutely will.

• 12:10Sholto Douglas?

  Because you will be in the position of managing dozens, or like, you're sort of, your individual management bandwidth will be maxed out by trying to manage like teams of AIs. And this kind of thing. And maybe AIs, you know, maybe we end up like a truly like singularity world, where you have AIs managing AIs and this kind of stuff. But I think in a very wide part of the like possibility spectrum, you are managing enormous, like vastly more resources than an individual could command today.

• 12:37Dwarkesh Patel?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 12:38Sholto Douglas?

  And you should be able to solve so many more things with that.

• 12:40Dwarkesh Patel?

  That's right. And I think like, I would emphasize that this is not just Coke. Like, it genuinely is a case that these models lack the kind of long-term coherence, which is like absolutely necessary for making a successful company. Like, just like getting a fucking office is like kind of complicated, right? It's like you had to deal with all these. And so you can just imagine that for a sector after sector, like, the economy is really big.

• 13:02Sholto Douglas?

  And really complex.

• 13:03Dwarkesh Patel?

  Exactly. And so especially if it's, I mean, I don't know the details, but I assume if it's like a data sparse thing, where you kind of just like got to know what's actually, what is the context of what's happening in the sector or something, I feel like you'd be in a good position. Maybe the other thought I have is that it's, it's really hard to like plan your career in general. And I don't know what advice that implies, because I remember being super frustrated. I mean, I was in college, and the reason I was doing the podcast was to figure out what it is I want to do. It wasn't the podcast itself. You know, go on like 80,000 hours or whatever, career advice. And it's just like, in retrospect, it was all kind of mostly useless. And it just like, just try doing things. I mean, especially with AI, we just like, don't know what it's gonna. Like, it's so hard to forecast what kind of transformations there will be.

• 13:47Dwarkesh Patel?

  So try things, do things. I mean, it's such banal, vague advice, but I am quite skeptical of career advice in general.

• 13:54Sholto Douglas?

  Well, maybe the like, piece of career advice I'm not skeptical of is put yourself close to the frontier. Because you have a much better vantage point.

• 14:00Dwarkesh Patel?

  That's right.

• 14:01Sholto Douglas?

  Right? Like, you can study deep technical things, whether it's computer science or biology or like, and get to the point where you can see what the issues are. Because it's actually like remarkably obvious at the frontier what the problems are. And it's very difficult to see.

• 14:14Dwarkesh Patel?

  But actually, do you think there is an opportunity? Because one of the people, one of the things people bring up is the, um, maybe the people who are advancing their career and have all this tacit knowledge will be in a position to be accelerated by AI. But you guys, four years ago or two years ago, when you were getting discovered or something, that kind of thing, where you have a GitHub open issue and you try to solve it, is that just like, that's done and so the onboarding is much harder?

• 14:38Sholto Douglas?

  It's still what we look for in hiring.

• 14:39Dwarkesh Patel?

  Yeah.

• 14:42Trenton Bricken?

  I'm in favor of the learn fundamentals, gain useful mental models. But it feels like everything should be done in an AI-native way. Or like, top-down instead of your bottom-up learning. So first of all, learn things more efficiently by using the AI models. And then just know where their capabilities are and aren't.

• 15:01Dwarkesh Patel?

  Yeah.

• 15:02Trenton Bricken?

  And I would be worried and skeptical about any subject which prioritizes rote memorization of lots of facts or information.

• 15:07Dwarkesh Patel?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 15:09Trenton Bricken?

  Instead of ways of thinking.

• 15:10Dwarkesh Patel?

  Yeah.

• 15:11Trenton Bricken?

  But if you're always using the AI tools to help you, then you'll naturally just have a good sense for the things that it is and isn't good at.

• 15:17Dwarkesh Patel?

  That's right. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 15:18Sholto Douglas?

  Next one. What is your strategy, method, or criteria for choosing guests?

• 15:23Dwarkesh Patel?

  The most important thing is, do I want to spend one to two weeks reading every single thing you ever written, every single interview you ever recorded, talking to a bunch of other people about your research? Because I get asked by people who are like quite influential often to be like, would you have me on your podcast? And more often than not, I say no, for two reasons. One is just like,

• 15:48Dwarkesh Patel?

  Like, okay, you're influential or something. It's not fundamentally that interesting as an interview prospect. Not from like, I don't think about the hour that I'll spend with you. I think about like the two weeks, because this is my life, right? The research is my life and I want to have fun while doing it. So just like, is this going to be an interesting two weeks to spend? Is it going to help me with my future research or something? And the other is, big guests don't really matter that much in the, in like, if you just look at what are the most popular episodes? Or what in the long run helps the podcast grow? By far, my most popular guest is Sarah Payne. And she, before I interviewed her, was just like, a scholar, who was not publicly well-known at all, and I just found her books quite interesting. Same goes with, so my most popular guest are Sarah Payne,

• 16:32Dwarkesh Patel?

  and then Sarah Payne, Sarah Payne, Sarah Payne, because I did a lecture series with her. That's awesome. And, by the way, from a viewer minute adjusted basis, I host a Sarah Payne podcast, where I occasionally talk about a... And then is David Reich, who is a geneticist of ancient DNA. I mean, he's like, somewhat well-known, but he had a bestselling book, but he's not like, he's not Satya Nadella or Mark Zuckerberg, who are the next people on the list. And then again, I think that like, pretty soon, it's like, you guys, or Leopold, or something, and then you get to the Lab CEOs or something. So, big names just don't matter that much, like, for what I'm actually trying to do. And so it's just like, well, and it's also really hard to predict who's going to be the David Reich or Sarah Payne. So just like, have fun, talk to whoever you want to spend time researching,

• 17:14Dwarkesh Patel?

  and it's a pretty good proxy for what will actually be popular.

• 17:18Sholto Douglas?

  What was the specific moment, if there was one, that you realized that producing your podcast was a viable, long-term strategy?

• 17:26Dwarkesh Patel?

  I think when I was shopping around ad spots for a Mark Zuckerberg episode. And which were, which are, you know, like, now that I look back on it, it's like, not in retrospect that mind-blowing, but at the time, I'm like, oh, I could actually hire an editor, full-time, or maybe more editors than one. And from there, like, turning into a real business. That's when I, because before, I just like, didn't, people would tell me like, oh, these other podcasts are making whatever, whatever amount of money. And I'd be like, how? You know? I have this running joke with one of my friends that... I don't know if you've seen me do this, but every time I encounter like a young person who's like, "What should I do with my life?" I'm like, "You gotta start a blog. You gotta be the Matt Levine of AI. You can do this." It's like a totally empty niche. You could like, it's a, you can,

• 18:12Dwarkesh Patel?

  and I have this running joke with them where they're like, "You're like a country bumpkin who's like won the lottery." And you're like, you go up to everything, everyone's like, "Guys, the scratch pad. Get the scratch pad."

• 18:24Trenton Bricken?

  I, I, I do wanna press on that a bit more, cuz your immediate answer to the 17-year-old was to start a podcast.

• 18:30Dwarkesh Patel?

  Yeah.

• 18:30Trenton Bricken?

  So like, what, what niches are there? What sort of things would you be excited to see in like, new blogs, podcasts?

• 18:36Dwarkesh Patel?

  I mean, I wonder if you guys think this too, but I think this like Matt Levine of AI.

• 18:41Trenton Bricken?

  Absolutely.

• 18:42Dwarkesh Patel?

  Is like a totally open niches of, as far as I can tell. And I apologize to those who are trying to fill it in.

• 18:48Trenton Bricken?

  I was like, "Oh, I'm aware of at least one blog that's trying to do this."

• 18:52Dwarkesh Patel?

  The other thing I'd really emphasize is it is really hard to do this based on other people's advice, or to say like, "Here's a niche I'm..." Like, I, at least I'm trying not to fill like a specific niche. And if you think about any sort of successful new media thing out there, there's, it has two things which are true. It's like often not just geared towards one particular topic or interest. And two, it's, the most important thing is that it is propelled by a single person's vision. It's not like a collective or whatever. And so I would just really emphasize, sorry, the thing I really wanna emphasize is, it, it can be done. Two, you can make a lot of money at it, which is not the most important thing, probably for the kind of person who would succeed at it,

• 19:35Dwarkesh Patel?

  but still is just worth knowing that it's a viable career. Three, that, I, yeah, that basically you're gonna feel like shit in the beginning, where it's like, all your early stuff is gonna kinda suck. Maybe some of it will get appreciated, but... It seems like bad advice to say, still stick through it in case you actually are terrible, because some people are terrible. In case you are not, like, just do it, right? Like, what is the three months of blogging on the side really going to cost you? And people just don't actually, seriously, do the thing for long enough to actually get evidence, or get the sort of RL feedback on like, oh, this is how you do it, this is how you frame an argument, this is how you make a compelling thing that people will want to read or watch.

• 20:16Sholto Douglas?

  Blogging is definitely underrated. I think, like, most of us have probably-

• 20:19Dwarkesh Patel?

  Sir, you both had blogs which are relevant. I don't know if they're actually relevant to getting that-

• 20:23Sholto Douglas?

  They were like, somewhat relevant.

• 20:25Dwarkesh Patel?

  Yeah.

• 20:26Sholto Douglas?

  But I think more so that we have all read almost all the blogs-

• 20:30Dwarkesh Patel?

  That's right.

• 20:31Sholto Douglas?

  -that do in-depth, like, treatises on AI.

• 20:33Dwarkesh Patel?

  That's right.

• 20:34Sholto Douglas?

  Like, if you write something that is high-quality, it is almost, like, invariably going to be, like, shared around Twitter and read.

• 20:39Dwarkesh Patel?

  Oh, this is so underappreciated.

• 20:41Sholto Douglas?

  Yeah.

• 20:42Dwarkesh Patel?

  So, two pieces of evidence. I was talking to a very famous blogger you would know, and I was asking him, "How often do you discover a new, like, undiscovered blogger?" And he was like, "It happens very rarely, like, maybe once a year."

• 20:56Dwarkesh Patel?

  And I asked him, "How long after you discover him, or her, does the rest of the world discover them?" And he's like, "Maybe a week."

• 21:04Sholto Douglas?

  Interesting, yeah.

• 21:04Dwarkesh Patel?

  And what it suggests is, like, it's actually really efficient, like, oh, so, I have some more takes. Let's hear it, let's hear it. This is the AMA. So, I believe that slow compounding growth in media is kind of fake.

• 21:20Dwarkesh Patel?

  Like, Leopold's situation or RNS, it's not like he was building up an audience for a long time, for years or something, it just, like, it was really good. Just agree or agree with it. And if it's good enough, literally everybody who matters, and I mean that literally, will read it. I mean, I think it's like, Heart is like Zero Shot, something like that. But the fundamental thing to emphasize is, the compounding growth, at least for me, has been, I feel like I've gotten better. And it's not so much that somehow the three years of having 1,000 followers was somehow, like, a compounding, you know, I don't think it was that, I think it was just, like, it took a while to get better.

• 21:54Sholto Douglas?

  Yeah, certainly when Leopold posted that like the next day, it's almost like you can picture it like being so almost stapled. Not it wasn't, but it was stapled to walls, so to speak on Twitter.

• 22:02Dwarkesh Patel?

  That's right.

• 22:02Sholto Douglas?

  Like, you know, everyone was talking about it. You went to any event for the following week, every single person in the entire city was talking about that essay.

• 22:09Dwarkesh Patel?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 22:10Sholto Douglas?

  Um, it's like Renaissance Florence.

• 22:11Dwarkesh Patel?

  That's right, that's right, that's right. Yeah, the world is small.

• 22:14Trenton Bricken?

  Yeah, what would you say is your first big success? I I'm trying to think back to when I first found your podcast. I distinctly remember you had your blog post on the Anus Mirabellus.

• 22:23Dwarkesh Patel?

  Hmm.

• 22:24Trenton Bricken?

  And Jeff Bezos retweeted it, I think.

• 22:26Dwarkesh Patel?

  Yeah.

• 22:27Trenton Bricken?

  I I'm trying to remember if you if it was even before that or not, but but yeah, what I'm curious.

• 22:31Dwarkesh Patel?

  I feel like that was it.

• 22:32Trenton Bricken?

  Okay.

• 22:32Dwarkesh Patel?

  Yeah, yeah. I I mean, it wasn't something where I'm like, it was some big insight that deserved to blow up like that. It was just taking some shots on goal. They were all like, whatever, inside porny. And then one of them, um, I guess caught the right guy's attention and, um, yeah, but I think that was it.

• 22:48Sholto Douglas?

  Yeah, that's something else which is underappreciated, which is that a piece of writing doesn't need to have a fundamentally new insight so much as give people a way to express cleanly. A set of ideas that they already are like aware of in a like sort of broader way. And if it's really crisp and like articulate, then even still, that's very valuable.

• 23:05Dwarkesh Patel?

  And sorry, the one thing I should emphasize, which I think is maybe the most important thing to the feedback loop. It's not the compounding growth of the audience.

• 23:14Dwarkesh Patel?

  I don't even think it's the compounding, like it's me getting more shots on goal in terms of doing the podcast. I actually don't think you improve that much by just doing the same thing again and again. If there's like no reward signal, just you'll keep doing whatever you were doing before. I genuinely think the most important thing has been the podcast is good enough that it merits me getting to meet people like you guys. Then I become friends with people like you. You guys teach me stuff. I produce more good podcasts, so hopefully slightly better. That helps me meet people in other fields. They teach me more things. Like with the China thing recently, I wrote this like blog post about a couple of stories about things that happened in China. And that alone has like netted me an amazing China network in the matter of like one blog post, right?

• 23:57Dwarkesh Patel?

  And so hopefully, uh, if I do an episode on China, I will be better as a result. And hopefully that happens across field after field. And so just getting to meet people like you is actually the main sort of flywheel.

• 24:07Sholto Douglas?

  Interesting. So move to San Francisco.

• 24:10Dwarkesh Patel?

  Yes, if you're trying to do AI, yeah.

• 24:12Sholto Douglas?

  Next questions. Shall we do?

• 24:16Dwarkesh Patel?

  Can we do a...

• 24:18Sholto Douglas?

  A very important question. From JacktPajit. How much can you bench?

• 24:25Dwarkesh Patel?

  You can't lie, because we both know the answer.

• 24:30Dwarkesh Patel?

  At one point, I did bench 225 for 4. Now, I think I'm probably like 20 pounds lighter than that, or something. The reason you guys are asking me this is because I've gotten left in with both of you. And I remember Trent and I were doing, like, pull-ups and bench. And then we'd like bench, and he'd like throw on another plate or something. And then, like, instead of pull-ups, he'd like be cranking out these muscle-ups.

• 24:58Trenton Bricken?

  It's all technique.

• 25:02Dwarkesh Patel?

  Yeah, so they both bench more than me. But I try my best.

• 25:07Trenton Bricken?

  Ask again in six months.

• 25:09Sholto Douglas?

  Yeah, yeah, exactly.

• 25:12Sholto Douglas?

  What's your favorite history book? There's a wall of them behind you.

• 25:17Dwarkesh Patel?

  Oh, I mean, obviously, the Caro-LBJ biographies.

• 25:20Sholto Douglas?

  Oh, okay.

• 25:21Dwarkesh Patel?

  Yeah. Sorry, the main thing I took away from those books is LBJ had this quote that he would tell his debates, in his early twenties, he'd debate to these, like, poor Mexican students in Texas. And he used to tell them, "If you do everything, you'll win." I think it's an underrated quote, so that's the main thing I took away. And you see it through his entire career, where there's a reasonable amount of effort, which, you know, goes by like 20/80. You do the 20 to get the 80% of the effect. And then you go beyond that to get like, "Oh, no, I'm not just gonna do the 20%, I'm gonna just like do the whole thing." And there's a level even beyond that, which is like, like, this is like, just like, an unreasonable use of time. This is gonna have no ultimate impact, and still try doing that.

• 26:04Dwarkesh Patel?

  Yeah.

• 26:05Trenton Bricken?

  You've shared on Twitter, using Anki. And even like a Claude integration.

• 26:10Dwarkesh Patel?

  Yeah.

• 26:10Trenton Bricken?

  Do you do book clubs? Do you use Goodreads? And what are you reading right now?

• 26:15Dwarkesh Patel?

  I don't use, I don't have book clubs. I do, the, um, but the Spacetrader tradition has just genuinely been a huge, like, uplift in my ability to learn. Mostly because it's not even the long-term impact over years. Though I think that is part of it, and I do regret all the episodes I did without using Spacetrader, because all the insights have just sort of faded away. The main thing is, if you're studying a complicated subject, for, at least for me, it's been super helpful to...

• 26:46Dwarkesh Patel?

  Consolidate. So it's like, if you don't do it, you feel like a general where you're like, "I'm gonna wage a campaign against this country," and then you like climb one hill. And then the next day you gotta retreat, and then you climb the same hill.

• 26:59Dwarkesh Patel?

  There might be a sort of more kosher analogy.

• 27:03Dwarkesh Patel?

  Sorry, and the other question was, what am I reading right now?

• 27:04Sholto Douglas?

  Yeah.

• 27:06Dwarkesh Patel?

  Oh, my friend Alvaro de Menard, author of Fantastic Anachronism. Can I just pull it up? Actually, it's right here.

• 27:12Sholto Douglas?

  Yeah.

• 27:14Dwarkesh Patel?

  I hope he's, I hope he's okay with me sharing this, but he wrote, he made like a hundred copies of this translation he did of his favorite Greek poet. And they're like, yeah, Kavafi, hopefully I didn't mispronounce it. That one has an inscription for Gruen, because that's his coffee. But it's, it's super delightful, and that's what I've been reading recently.

• 27:35Sholto Douglas?

  Any insights from it so far?

• 27:38Dwarkesh Patel?

  Poets will hate this framing. I feel like poetry is like, it's like TikTok.

• 27:50Dwarkesh Patel?

  Where it's like, you get this like, quick vibe of a certain thing, and then you like, huh, like swipe, and then you get the next vibe, swipe. Alvaro.

• 28:04Sholto Douglas?

  How do you go about learning new things or preparing for an episode? Like, what is that? You mentioned the one to two week period where you're like, deep diving on a person. What does that actually look like?

• 28:12Dwarkesh Patel?

  It's very much the obvious thing. Like, you read their books, their papers, you read the papers. If they have colleagues, you try to talk to them to better understand the field. I will also mention that I, all I have to do is ask some questions. And I do think it's a much, I think it's much harder to like, learn a field to be a practitioner than just learn enough to ask interesting questions. But yeah, for that, like, it's very much the obvious thing you'd expect.

• 28:37Sholto Douglas?

  Based, Carl Sagan asks, "What are your long-term goals and ambitions?"

• 28:44Dwarkesh Patel?

  Yeah, the AGI kind of just makes the prospect of a long term harder to articulate, right? You know the Peter Thiel quote about what is your 10-year plan? And why can't you do it in six months? Like, it's especially salient. Given timelines. For the foreseeable future, grow the podcast and do more episodes, maybe more writing. But yeah, so we'll see what happens after like 10 years or something. The world might be different enough. Yeah, so basically podcast for now.

• 29:17Sholto Douglas?

  Something you've spoken to me about, and particularly when you were when you're trying to hire people for the podcast, was what you wanted to achieve with the podcast. Like, in what way do you want the podcast to like shape the world, so to speak? Do you have any thoughts on that? Or, because I remember you talking like, I really want people to actually understand AI and like how this might change their lives or like, you know, how like what we could be doing now to shape the world such that it ends up better.

• 29:39Dwarkesh Patel?

  Yeah. I don't know. So I have contradictory views on this. On the one end, I do.

• 29:51Dwarkesh Patel?

  I do know that important decisions are being made right now in AI. And I do think, I mean, riffing on what we were saying about situational awareness. If you do something really good, it has a very high probability of one-shotting the relevant person. You know, people are just generally reasonable. If you make a good argument, it'll go places. The, on the other hand, I just think it's very hard to know what should be done. It's like, you've got to have the very correct world model, and then you've got to know how in that world model, the action you're taking is going to have the effect you anticipate. And even in the last week, I've changed my mind on some pretty fundamental things about what I think about the possibility of an intelligence explosion or transformative AI as a result of talking to the Epoch folks.

• 30:32Sholto Douglas?

  Yep.

• 30:33Dwarkesh Patel?

  Basically, the TLDR is, I want the podcast to just be an epistemic tool for now until I, because I think it's just very easy to be wrong. And so just having a background level of understanding of the relevant arguments is the highest priority.

• 30:46Sholto Douglas?

  Makes sense.

• 30:46Dwarkesh Patel?

  Yeah. What's your sense? What should I be doing?

• 30:49Trenton Bricken?

  I mean, I think the podcast is awesome. And a lot more people should listen to it. And there are a lot more guests I'd be excited for you to interview.

• 30:55Dwarkesh Patel?

  Nice, nice. I'd give you a X.

• 30:57Trenton Bricken?

  Seems like a pretty good answer for now.

• 30:59Sholto Douglas?

  Yeah, I think making sure that like, there is a great debate of ideas. On not just AI, but on like other fields and everything is incredibly high leverage and value. How do you groom your beard? It's majestic.

• 31:14Dwarkesh Patel?

  I don't know what to say, just genetics.

• 31:19Dwarkesh Patel?

  I do trim it, but.

• 31:20Sholto Douglas?

  No beard oil?

• 31:22Dwarkesh Patel?

  Sometimes I do beard oil. How often? Once every couple of days. Okay.

• 31:26Trenton Bricken?

  That's not sometimes. That's pretty often. Do you have different shampoo for your head and your beard?

• 31:31Dwarkesh Patel?

  No.

• 31:32Trenton Bricken?

  What kind of shampoo do you use?

• 31:33Dwarkesh Patel?

  Anti-dandruff.

• 31:36Trenton Bricken?

  Do you condition that?

• 31:39Dwarkesh Patel?

  Yeah.

• 31:40Trenton Bricken?

  How often do you shampoo?

• 31:43Dwarkesh Patel?

  What's your answer to this?

• 31:44Speaker 03

  We're giving people the answers that they want.

• 31:48Trenton Bricken?

  Big beard oil. Yeah, you can sell some ad slots to different shampoo companies and we can edit it. Maybe we sell an ad slot, who knows?

• 31:57Dwarkesh Patel?

  Sorry, you had this idea of merch. Do you want to explain this?

• 32:00Trenton Bricken?

  Yes, yeah, yeah, yeah. So people should react to this. Someone should make it happen. Dwar Kesh wants merch, but he doesn't want to admit that he wants it. Or he doesn't want to make it himself because that seems tacky. So I really want a plain white tee with just Dwar Kesh's beard in the center of it. And that's it, nothing else.

• 32:17Dwarkesh Patel?

  But you were saying it should be like, have a different texture than the rest of the shirt.

• 32:20Trenton Bricken?

  Oh, so, so, and I was really ripping off it. Where maybe like, a limited edition set can have some of your beard hair actually sewn into the shirt.

• 32:32Trenton Bricken?

  That'd be pretty cool. I would, I would pay, I would pay for that. How much?

• 32:36Dwarkesh Patel?

  I've got like patches all over my beard.

• 32:39Trenton Bricken?

  Depends on how much hair. If it's like, one is like in there somewhere versus like the whole thing. Like, do I have to dry clean it? Can I wash it as like, on the delicate setting? Like.

• 32:52Trenton Bricken?

  But really, I think you should get merch. If you want to grow the podcast, which apparently you do, then this is one way to do it.

• 32:58Dwarkesh Patel?

  Beard hair.

• 33:02Sholto Douglas?

  Which historical figure would be best suited to run a frontier AI lab?

• 33:06Dwarkesh Patel?

  This is definitely a question for you guys.

• 33:08Trenton Bricken?

  Oh, no, I mean, I'm curious what your take is first. You've spoken to more of the heads of AI labs than I have.

• 33:14Dwarkesh Patel?

  I was gonna say LBJ?

• 33:19Dwarkesh Patel?

  Sorry, is the question who would be best at running an AI lab or who would be best for the world?

• 33:22Trenton Bricken?

  Yeah, what outcome do you want?

• 33:26Dwarkesh Patel?

  Because I imagine it seems like what the best lab, AI lab CEO succeed at is raising money, building a pipe, setting a coherent vision. I don't know how much it matters for the CEO themselves to have good research taste or something. But it seems like their role is more as a sort of emissary to the rest of the world. And I feel like LBJ would be pretty good at this. Like, just getting the right concessions, making projects move along, coordinating among different groups to... Maybe, oh, Robert Moses.

• 34:00Trenton Bricken?

  Yeah.

• 34:00Dwarkesh Patel?

  Again, not necessarily best for the world, but just in terms of like making shit happen.

• 34:04Sholto Douglas?

  Yeah, I mean, I think best for the world is a pretty important precondition.

• 34:07Dwarkesh Patel?

  Oh, right. There's a Lord Atwood quote of, "Great people are very rarely good people." So it's hard to think of a great person in history who are like, I feel like they'd really move the ball forward and also I trust their moral judgment.

• 34:20Sholto Douglas?

  We're lucky in many senses with like the set today.

• 34:23Dwarkesh Patel?

  That's right.

• 34:23Sholto Douglas?

  Like, the set of people today are both like, they try and care a lot about the moral side as well as sort of drive the labs forward.

• 34:31Dwarkesh Patel?

  This is also why I'm skeptical of big grand schemes like nationalization or some public-private partnership, or just generally shaking up the landscape too much. Because I do think we've, we're in like one of the better... I mean, the sort of like the difficulty of whether it's alignment or whether it's some kind of deployment, um, safety risks. That is just like the nature of the universe is going to make that some level of difficulty. But the human factors in a lot of the counterfactual universes, I feel like we don't end up with people. Like, we could even be in a universe where they don't even pay lip service. This is like not an idea that anybody had. They could have an ASI takeover. Um, I think the thing we live in a pretty good counterfactual universe.

• 35:12Sholto Douglas?

  Yeah, we got a good, good set of gameplays on the board.

• 35:15Dwarkesh Patel?

  That's right, that's right.

• 35:16Trenton Bricken?

  How are you preparing for fast timelines?

• 35:19Dwarkesh Patel?

  If there's fast timelines, then there will be this six month period in which the most important decisions in human history are being made. And I feel like having an AI podcast during that time might be useful. That's basically the plan.

• 35:35Trenton Bricken?

  Have you made any shorter term decisions, um, with regards to like spending or health or anything else?

• 35:43Dwarkesh Patel?

  After I knew Zuckerberg, my business bank balance was negative 23 cents. Uh, when the ad money hit, I immediately reinvested it in Nvidia. So that is the, um, sorry, but you're asking from a sort of altruistic perspective.

• 35:59Trenton Bricken?

  No, no, just in general, like, have you, have you changed the way you live at all because of your AGI timelines?

• 36:06Dwarkesh Patel?

  I never looked into getting a Roth IRA.

• 36:10Sholto Douglas?

  He brought us Fiji water before.

• 36:13Trenton Bricken?

  Which is in plastic bottles.

• 36:14Sholto Douglas?

  It's all cash exchange.

• 36:17Dwarkesh Patel?

  What, have you guys changed your lifestyle as a result?

• 36:21Sholto Douglas?

  Not really, no. I just like work all the time.

• 36:24Dwarkesh Patel?

  But you were doing that anyways, or would you not?

• 36:26Trenton Bricken?

  Uh.

• 36:29Sholto Douglas?

  I would probably be going very intensely at whatever, like, thing I'd picked to devote myself to.

• 36:33Dwarkesh Patel?

  Yeah. How about you?

• 36:35Trenton Bricken?

  I canceled my 401k contributions the other week. Yeah, yeah, that, that felt like a, a more serious one. Um, it's, it's hard for me to imagine a world in which I'm like, have all this money that's just sitting in this account and waiting till I'm 60 and things look so different then.

• 36:52Dwarkesh Patel?

  But you could be like a trillionaire with your marginal 401k contributions.

• 36:56Trenton Bricken?

  I guess, but you also can't invest it in like specific things and, um, I don't know. I might change my mind in the future and, and can restart it. Um, and I've been contributing for a few years now.

• 37:07Dwarkesh Patel?

  On a more serious note, one thing I have been thinking about is. How could you use this money to an altruistic end? And basically, if there's somebody who's up and coming in the field that I know, which is like making content, could I use money to support them? And I'm of two minds on this. One, there are people who did this for me, and it was counterfactually responsible for me continuing to do the podcast, when it just like did not make sense as a, there were like a couple hundred people listening or something.

• 37:36Dwarkesh Patel?

  I want to shout out Anil Varanasi for doing this. And also Leopold, actually, for the foundation he was previously running. On the other hand, it's like, I feel like I would, it's the thing about what that blogger was saying, that the good ones you actually do notice. It's like, it's hard to find a hidden talent. Maybe I'm totally wrong about this. But I'd feel like if you, if I put up a sort of grant application, I give you money if you're trying to make a blog. I'm actually not sure about how well that would work.

• 38:04Sholto Douglas?

  There's different things you could do, though. Like there's, I'll give you money to move to San Francisco for two months. And, and like, you know, sort of meet people and, and like, sort of get more like context and taste, and like feedback on what you're doing. And like, it's not so much about the money or time. It's like, it's putting them in an environment where they can more rapidly grow. Like, that's something that one could do. I mean, you also, I think you'd do that like quite proactively in terms of you like deliberately introduce people that you think will be interesting to each other and this kind of stuff.

• 38:31Dwarkesh Patel?

  Yeah.

• 38:31Sholto Douglas?

  Yeah.

• 38:32Dwarkesh Patel?

  No, I mean, that's very fair. And I, obviously, I've benefited a ton from moving to San Francisco.

• 38:36Sholto Douglas?

  Yes.

• 38:36Dwarkesh Patel?

  It's unlikely that I would be doing this podcast, at least on AI.

• 38:39Sholto Douglas?

  Yes.

• 38:39Dwarkesh Patel?

  The degree I am if I wasn't here. So maybe it's a mistake to judge people based on the quality of their content as it exists now and just throw money at them, not throw money, but give them enough money to move to SF to get caught up in this intellectual milieu and then maybe do something interesting as a result.

• 38:56Sholto Douglas?

  Yeah.

• 38:56Trenton Bricken?

  The, the thing that most readily comes to mind is the MATS program for AI research. And this seems like it's just been incredibly successful at giving people the time, the funding,

• 39:06Dwarkesh Patel?

  Yeah.

• 39:07Trenton Bricken?

  and the, like, social status justification to do AI safety-relevant research with mentors.

• 39:15Dwarkesh Patel?

  Oh, and you, you have a similar program.

• 39:17Sholto Douglas?

  We have the Anthropic Fellows program.

• 39:19Dwarkesh Patel?

  That's right, yeah.

• 39:19Sholto Douglas?

  Yeah.

• 39:19Dwarkesh Patel?

  And then what is your, um, I know you're probably selecting for a slightly different thing, but... I assume it's gonna be power law dominated and have you noticed a pattern among the even with the mass fellows or your fellows? Who is just like, this was, this made the whole thing worth it?

• 39:33Trenton Bricken?

  Yeah, I mean, there have been multiple people who Anthropic and other labs have hired out of this program. So I think the return on investment for it has been massive. And yeah, apparently the fellows, I think there are 20 of them are like really good.

• 39:46Dwarkesh Patel?

  What is the trick to making it work well or finding that one person?

• 39:49Trenton Bricken?

  I think it's gotten much better with time where the early fellows, some of them did good work and got good jobs. And so then now later fellows, like the quality bar has just risen and risen and risen. And there are even better mentors now than before. So it's this really cool flywheel effect. But originally, it was just people who like, didn't have the funding or time to like, make a name for themselves or do ambitious work. So it was kind of like giving them that niche to do it.

• 40:20Dwarkesh Patel?

  Right, right, right.

• 40:20Trenton Bricken?

  Seems really key.

• 40:21Sholto Douglas?

  Yeah. You can do other things that doesn't have to be money, you know, like you could put out ideas for things you'd be really interested in reading.

• 40:28Dwarkesh Patel?

  That's right. Yeah, yeah, yeah. There's something coming there.

• 40:32Sholto Douglas?

  Okay, there we go.

• 40:33Dwarkesh Patel?

  So if this episode hopefully will launch Tuesday at the same time as the book. By the way, which you can get at stripe.press/scaling. But on Wednesday, which is the day after, hopefully there's something useful for you here.

• 40:45Sholto Douglas?

  Okay, exciting. Any other questions we wanna ask?

• 40:49Dwarkesh Patel?

  The thing I have takes on, which I rarely get asked about, is distribution.

• 40:54Trenton Bricken?

  Distribution of AI?

• 40:55Dwarkesh Patel?

  No, no, sorry. Like Mr. Beast told, the distribution.

• 40:58Trenton Bricken?

  Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 41:01Dwarkesh Patel?

  Where people, I think rightly focus on the content. And if that's not up to snuff, I think you won't succeed. But to the extent that somebody is trying to do similar things, the thing that consistently underrate is

• 41:18Dwarkesh Patel?

  Putting the, yeah, putting the time into getting distribution right. I just take like random takes about, for example, the most successful thing for my podcast in terms of growth has been YouTube Shorts. It's a thing you would never have predicted beforehand. And, you know, they're like responsible for like, basically at least half the growth of the podcast or something.

• 41:41Sholto Douglas?

  I buy that.

• 41:42Dwarkesh Patel?

  Yeah.

• 41:42Sholto Douglas?

  Well, wouldn't you predict it? Like, I mean, like, I mean, I guess there's the contrast of like the long form deep content and like YouTube Shorts and stuff, but I definitely think they're good hooks.

• 41:52Dwarkesh Patel?

  That's right, yeah, yeah.

• 41:52Sholto Douglas?

  Yeah.

• 41:53Dwarkesh Patel?

  And I have like takes on how to write tweets and stuff. The main intuition being like, write like you're writing to a group chat.

• 41:58Sholto Douglas?

  Yeah.

• 41:58Dwarkesh Patel?

  Um, to a group chat of your friends rather than this like formal or whatever. I don't know. I, I, I, just like these sort of like.

• 42:05Trenton Bricken?

  Yeah, no, I mean, what else comes to mind here? Maybe it's interesting the difference between like TikTok and YouTube Shorts.

• 42:11Dwarkesh Patel?

  Oh, yeah, we've never cracked TikTok.

• 42:12Trenton Bricken?

  Yeah, why not? Like, you've tried.

• 42:14Dwarkesh Patel?

  Yeah. I mean.

• 42:16Sholto Douglas?

  Tried, have you done everything?

• 42:17Dwarkesh Patel?

  I know, I have not done it.

• 42:18Trenton Bricken?

  If you read these poems.

• 42:23Trenton Bricken?

  Maybe you're like in a bubble bath with like some beard shampoo on.

• 42:27Sholto Douglas?

  Reading poems? That'd be incredible if you had, I bet you that would go viral. You have to do that now.

• 42:36Trenton Bricken?

  Reading a poem uncross your legs. Last, last episode it was the interpretability challenge, now it's DoorDash in a bubble bath. You gotta sell the book somehow, you know?

• 42:47Trenton Bricken?

  We literally do it like Margot Robbie.

• 42:49Sholto Douglas?

  Exactly, explaining the CD and this and stuff. So what is scaling?

• 42:59Trenton Bricken?

  And that's how you crack distribution.

• 43:06Trenton Bricken?

  But, yeah, no, like, when we did our episode, it launched and you were sharing interesting tidbits about how it was doing and the thumbnail you wanted to use and the title. And I think I even asked you, like, to share more details because it seemed interesting and cool and subtle things. But it seemed like you also kind of just hated it, like playing this game of like really having to optimize all these knobs, so like.

• 43:29Dwarkesh Patel?

  What I, what I realized, I mean, talent is everything, so having, I'm, I'm really lucky to have.

• 43:37Dwarkesh Patel?

  Three to four editors who I'm incredibly proud to work with. I don't know how to hire more of them. Like, they're just so good and self-directed. So honestly, I don't have the tips to how to correct that. I hired those guys. So one of them was a farmer in Argentina. One of them was a freshman master student in Sri Lanka. One of them was a former editor for one of Mr. Beast's channels. The other is a director in Czechoslovakia, who makes these AI animations that you've seen in the No Sun China. And he's working on more essays like that. So I don't know how to replicate that catch again.

• 44:10Sholto Douglas?

  God, that's a pretty widely cos net, I'm gonna be honest. Damn.

• 44:14Dwarkesh Patel?

  But they're all like, god damn.

• 44:16Trenton Bricken?

  And this was just through your challenges and just tweeting about.

• 44:18Dwarkesh Patel?

  That's right, yeah. So I had a competition to make clips of my podcast. I rounded up a couple of them this way. Yeah, it's hard to replicate because I've tried.

• 44:27Trenton Bricken?

  Yeah. Why do you think this works so well with the video editors? Because you tried a similar approach with your chief of staff.

• 44:34Dwarkesh Patel?

  Yeah. The difference is with the video editor, I think there is this arbitrage opportunity where there are people. It is fundamentally a sort of, are you willing to work hard and obsess about getting better over time?

• 44:50Dwarkesh Patel?

  Which all of them go above and beyond on. But you can just find people in other countries who are like... And it's not even about the wages. Like, I've 10x'd their salaries or something like that. It's just about getting somebody who is really data-tail oriented. And there is this global arbitrage there. Whereas with the general manager... By the way, so the person I ended up hiring and who I'm super excited to work with is your childhood best friend, Max Herons.

• 45:14Trenton Bricken?

  Max is so great.

• 45:15Dwarkesh Patel?

  And he would have plenty of other opportunities. There's not this like weird arbitrage where, you know, you find some farmer in Argentina.

• 45:22Trenton Bricken?

  But yeah, it is striking that you were looking for a while and then you just kind of mentioned offhand that Max was looking for something new.

• 45:29Dwarkesh Patel?

  I genuinely... This is gonna be like a total 12-year-old learns about the world kind of question. But I genuinely don't know how big companies hire. Because I was trying to find this person for a year. And I'm really glad about the person I ended up hiring. But it was just like, if I needed to hire 100 people for a company, let alone 1,000 people, I just like do not know how to find people like this at scale.

• 45:52Sholto Douglas?

  Yeah, I mean, I think this is like the number one issue that startup CEOs have, hiring. Like, it's just relentlessly the number one.

• 45:59Dwarkesh Patel?

  And the thing I was stunned with is how... It didn't seem like my platform helped that much. I got like, close to a thousand applications across the different rounds of publicizing it that I did. And a lot of, I think, really cool people applied. But the person that I ended up hiring was somebody who was just a reference.

• 46:18Dwarkesh Patel?

  You know, like a mutual friend kind of thing.

• 46:21Dwarkesh Patel?

  And a couple of other top contenders were also this way. So, it's weird. Like, the best people in the world don't want to apply, at least to things like this. And you just gotta seek them out, even if you think you have a public platform or something.

• 46:33Trenton Bricken?

  Yeah. Yeah, I mean, the job might just be so out of distribution from anything else that people would do.

• 46:39Dwarkesh Patel?

  That's right, yeah.

• 46:42Trenton Bricken?

  So, Aditya Ray asks, "How do you make it on Substack as a newbie writer?"

• 46:46Dwarkesh Patel?

  Okay. I think if you're starting from scratch, there's two useful hacks. One is podcasting, because you don't need to have some super original new take. You can just interview people who do, and you can leverage their platform. And two is writing book reviews. Again, because you have something to react to, rather than having to come up with a unique worldview of your own. There's probably other things, and it's really hard to give advice in advance, just try things. But those, I think, are just like good, cool starts.

• 47:16Sholto Douglas?

  The book reviews is a good suggestion. I actually use like Gawne's book reviews as a way to recommend books to people.

• 47:21Dwarkesh Patel?

  By the way, this is a totally undersupplied thing. Because I, if anybody has book reviews, Jason Furman is this economist who has like a thousand, you know, Goodreads reviews. And I like, I probably have visited his Goodreads on a hundred independent visits.

• 47:34Trenton Bricken?

  Wow.

• 47:35Dwarkesh Patel?

  Same with the Gawne book reviews or something, right? So, book reviews are a sort of very undersupplied thing if you're looking to get started making some kind of content.

• 47:44Trenton Bricken?

  I like that.

• 47:44Dwarkesh Patel?

  Yeah. Cool, thank you guys so much for doing this.

• 47:47Sholto Douglas?

  Yeah, this was fun.

• 47:48Dwarkesh Patel?

  We'll turn the tables on you again pretty soon, but...

• 47:51Sholto Douglas?

  Yeah. How does it feel being a hot seat?

• 47:54Dwarkesh Patel?

  It's nice.

• 47:59Dwarkesh Patel?

  Nobody ever asks me questions.

• 48:02Speaker 03

  Nobody ever asks how is Dorka?

• 48:08Trenton Bricken?

  Yeah, yeah, super excited for the book launch.

• 48:10Dwarkesh Patel?

  Thank you.

• 48:10Trenton Bricken?

  The website's awesome, by the way.

• 48:11Dwarkesh Patel?

  Appreciate it.

• 48:12Trenton Bricken?

  Oh, yeah. Yeah.

• 48:14Dwarkesh Patel?

  Stripe dot press slash scaling.

• 48:18Trenton Bricken?

  Yeah.

• 48:19Dwarkesh Patel?

  Cool.

• 48:19Trenton Bricken?

  Cool.

• 48:19Dwarkesh Patel?

  Thanks, guys.

• 48:20Trenton Bricken?

  Thanks.

• 48:21Dwarkesh Patel?

  Okay, I hope you enjoyed that episode. So, as we talked about, my new book is out. It's released with Stripe Press. It's called The Scaling Era. And it compiles the main insights across these last few years of doing these AI interviews. And I'm super pleased with how it turned out. It really elevates the conversations and adds the necessary context. And just seeing them all together even reminded me of many of the most interesting segments and insights that I had myself forgotten. So I hope you check it out. Go to the link in the description below to buy it. Separately, I have a clips channel now on YouTube. People keep complaining about the fact that I put clips and the main video on the same channel, so request granted. There is a new clips channel, but please do subscribe to it so we can get it kickstarted.

• 49:06Dwarkesh Patel?

  And while you're at it, also make sure to subscribe to the main channel. Other than that, just honestly, the most helpful thing you can do is share the podcast. If you enjoyed it, just send it on Twitter, put it in your group chats, share it with whoever else you think might enjoy it. That's the most helpful thing. If you want to learn more about advertising on future episodes, go to dwarkesh.com/advertise. Okay, see you on the next one.