Dwarkesh Patel: belief

Transcript context

…There's pros and cons there, right? I think many people make the decision that the thing that they want to prioritize is a wonderful life with their family. They do wonderful work in the hours that they do and that's incredibly impactful. I think this is true for many people at Google. Maybe they don't work as many hours as in your typical startup mythologies. But the work that they do is incredibly valuable. It's very high-leverage because they know the systems and they're experts in their field. We also need people like that. Our world rests on these huge systems that are difficult to manage and difficult to fix. We need people who are willing to work on, and help, and fix, and maintain those in frankly a thankless way. That isn't as high publicity as all of this AI work that we're doing. I am ridiculously grateful that those people do that. I'm also happy that there are people that find technical fulfillment in their job and doing that well and also maybe they draw a lot more out of spending a lot of hours with their family. I'm lucky that I'm at a stage in my life where I can go in and work every hour of the week. I'm not making as many sacrifices to do that. One example sticks out in my mind of this sort getting to the yes on the other side of a no. Basically every single high-profile guest I've done so far, I think maybe with one or two exceptions, I've sat down for a week and I've just come up with a list of sample questions. I just try to come up with really smart questions to send to them. In that entire process I've always thought, if I just cold email them, it's like a 2% chance they say yes. If I include this list, there's a 10% chance. Because otherwise, you go through their inbox and every 34 seconds, there's an interview for some podcast or interview. Every single time I've done this they've said yes. You just ask the right questions,…

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