I'm hiring!

Hey, everybody. I don't know if you followed the 03 news last week, but honestly, it was a big surprise to me how fast this level of capabilities has emerged. You might remember my episode a few months ago with Francois Chollet about when he was announcing the arc prize, and it was supposed to be a canary in the coal mine for AGI, and now it's saturated. So look, I think we're at what late February 2020 was for

COVID, but for AI. And if you're paying attention, you kind of have an idea of the general direction in which the world is headed. You know that, as was the case with COVID, within a very short amount of time, every single world leader, every single CEO, every single institution, members of the general public are going to realize pretty soon that the main thing we as a world are dealing with is COVID, or in this case, AI. And

It was in the initial early months of COVID when many of the most important decisions were made, decisions which ended up either saving or costing millions of lives. That's when we launched Operation Warp Speed. That's also when we decided to not pursue human challenge trials, right? So when this March 2020 moment comes for AI, where will people turn to to get the deep, thoughtful analysis on the basis of which they're going to make decisions?

Will they get it from the Joe Rogan experience? Will they get it from CNN or the New York Times or the Washington Post? I think it will look in vain at the front pages of those institutions to find even mention of 03, much less some technical analysis about what this direction of trading implies for the future of AI and its timeline and what we should do about it.

Look, I'm sure that many fine people work at these institutions and they're reporting on other topics that's quite good, but they're totally dropping the ball on what is the most important topic, not only in our time, but potentially any time. And I, for one, think it's our responsibility to step up and do a better job here.

And look, we know that AGI isn't the end of the story here. We know that what follows, at least plausibly, is an intelligence explosion and superhuman intelligence. And do you expect to find in these papers or this new media ecosystem the deep, thoughtful analysis of what that might look like? Are you expecting to find coverage of what's actually happening in China, which is actually quite crucial to understanding the EI picture and which

Many people have such strong takes about without any granular understanding of the political or technical situation there. I spent two weeks there just last month in order to get a better understanding, and I'm planning on making more episodes about that topic. So look, we can either leave this discourse, the coverage on the basis of which some of the most important decisions in human history will be made. We can leave it up to these absolutely mediocre people who are handling it now, or we can step up and say, no, this moment calls for something better.

It calls for something better, not just from what they're doing, but also from, honestly, what I'm doing. I started the podcast in 2020, actually, when COVID hit and my classes, I was in college, my classes went online. And so it's actually kind of ironic to use this COVID analogy. And it's grown beyond my wireless expectations. Over the last year, it's more than 10x. Now, we have reached almost a million listeners on average per episode. And

I think that this show could not only become an order of magnitude bigger by the end of 2025, but an order of magnitude better. A lot of people give this podcast a lot of credit. I think it's good, not great. And I think there's so much room for improvement. There's so much low-hanging fruit from how the interviews are done to how we promote it. It's honestly embarrassing how much low-hanging fruit there is. But we do need to make this level of improvement because that's what this moment calls for. And I've committed to

I'm committed to pursuing this mission of producing the highest quality contemporaneous coverage of what I think is the most important moment in history. And I need two key partners in order to execute on this ambitious vision.

I need a chief manager and an editor in chief. The pay is going to be competitive with major tech companies. And in fact, I'll pay $20,000 if you refer somebody for this role. So let's talk about the general manager first. You're going to be running this business and you're going to be my partner in leading it. And so I need an absolutely killer operator and leader here. You're going to be running a business that is growing 10x a year. And I need somebody who can

personally grow at that slope to keep up. And you're also going to be the leader and ambassador for our business and our brand, including to current and future sponsors. And so I need somebody who is not only incredibly ambitious, but also a consummate professional. And I need somebody with tremendous entrepreneurial energy, because we're going to have so many opportunities, especially as we grow, to do cool and useful things.

The other position I'm looking for is editor in chief. And just to be clear, this is not like a video editor. This is like managing editor. You're going to be my creative partner. You'll be the chief strategist who is helping us figure out how we promote high quality intellectual content.

And the overhang here in terms of how much better our content can do if we're super intelligent and better than anybody else promoting it is like shocking as somebody who has an inside view here. My episode at Sarah Payne was plateaued like 40,000 views about a year ago. And then we just figured out, we cracked how to promote it well with shorts and clips and other things. And now it's like 1.6 million views on YouTube alone.

So there's this like 20x overhang here and I need somebody super talented because the low-hanging fruit here is just so worth taking. There's a couple of key skills that I want to spend my unicorn points on here. First, you need to be a genuine polymath because you will have to provide some incredibly rare judgment about how to cut, frame, promote,

title, describe episodes ranging from AI to history to genetics. And you need to understand these topics in order to supply this judgment to our team because you have to tell a story about why this is the most interesting thing on the internet. And so the second thing I'm looking for is somebody who is a poster, a storyteller who is savvy and clever about these kinds of things. And the third thing I'm looking for

Is somebody who is good at integrating LLM's and building LLM tools?

Just this last weekend, I was building a few scripts that have totally improved our ability to process these episodes. We got Gemini with audio to make human-level transcripts. And then you can just have these LLMs give you a first draft of all the promotional material we need. And these first drafts are better than anything I could have come up with myself. And I think there's so much room and opportunity to integrate these tools and build internal tooling to give us even more edge here.

You might have seen me post about hiring a COO a couple of months ago. And I made the mistake of combining what are in effect two different executive roles into one. And so unfortunately, I didn't end up finding a great mutual fit. And so look, I understand that if you're a super talented person, you have a lot of opportunities. There's a million different things you could be doing, right? Instead of being my chief manager, you can be head of operations at some super profitable SaaS company. Or instead of being my editor in chief, you could be the head of comms there.

So look, I know there's a ton of different things you could do.

And I'm a capitalist. I think it's totally okay to engage in mutually beneficial trades, even at a SaaS company. But let me submit to you that at this particular moment in history, improving and elevating the conversation around where AI is headed, what we should do about it, is the most valuable thing we could be doing. At least one of the most valuable things we could be doing. And we have unique leverage and ability here to do that.

This podcast has found itself at the right place at the right time to produce something useful. It wasn't pre-planned in many ways we got lucky, but now that we find ourselves here, we have the opportunity and responsibility to build something useful. Our mission is to produce the highest quality intellectual content in the world.

Our mission is to find the David Rijks and the Sierra pains of every single field out there from AI, of course, to history, to science, to everything else you can imagine. And we are going to produce the best contemporaneous coverage of the development of AGI, the development of ASI. If you find this mission compelling or you know somebody who might and you'd like to refer them, go to dwarkeshpatel.com slash roles. All right. See you in the next episode.