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” is available in digital format now. Preorders for the print version are also open!

Watch on YouTube; listen on Apple Podcasts or Spotify.

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

Humans have not succeeded because of our raw intelligence.

Marooned European explorers regularly starved to death in areas where foragers thrived for 1000s of years.

I’ve always found this cultural evolution deeply mysterious.

How do you discover the 10 steps for processing cassava so it won’t give you cyanide poisoning simply by trial and error?

Has the human brain declined in size over the last 10,000 years because we outsourced cultural evolution to a larger collective brain?

The most interesting part of the podcast is Henrich’s explanation of how the Catholic Church unintentionally instigated the Industrial Revolution through the dismantling of intensive kinship systems in medieval Europe.

Watch on Youtube; listen on Apple Podcasts or Spotify.

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Sponsors

Scale partners with major AI labs like Meta, Google Deepmind, and OpenAI. Through Scale’s Data Foundry, labs get access to high-quality data to fuel post-training, including advanced reasoning capabilities. If you’re an AI researcher or engineer, learn about how Scale’s Data Foundry and research lab, SEAL, can help you go beyond the current frontier at scale.com/dwarkesh.

To sponsor a future episode, visit dwarkesh.com/p/advertise.

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Joseph’s books

The WEIRDest People in the World

The Secret of Our Success

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Timestamps

(0:00:00) - Humans didn’t succeed because of raw IQ

(0:09:27) - How cultural evolution works

(0:20:48) - Why is human brain size declining?

(0:32:00) - Will AGI have superhuman cultural learning?

(0:42:34) - Why Industrial Revolution happened in Europe

(0:55:30) - Why China, Rome, India got left behind

(1:21:09) - Loss of cultural variance in modern world

(1:31:20) - Is individual genius real?

(1:43:49) - IQ and collective brains

I’m so excited with how this visualization of Notes on China turned out. Petr, thank you for such beautiful watercolor artwork. More to come!

Watch on YouTube.

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Timestamps

(0:00:00) - Intro

(0:00:32) - Scale

(0:05:50) - Vibes

(0:11:14) - Youngsters

(0:14:27) - Tech & AI

(0:15:47) - Hearts & Minds

(0:17:07) - On Travel