Introducing Source Material — the weekly series where the designers & creatives shaping culture share the references that shaped them. Our first guest is Thom Bettridge: Editor-in-Chief of @i_D and founder of Content World. 00:00 - Introducing Source Material 00:08 Joe's Magazine (First Issue) 00:49 Colors: A Book about a Magazine About the Rest of the World 01:27 Balenciaga Archetype magazine 02:00 032c 33 (Frank Ocean Cover) 02:28 All-In Nº9 03:32 Highstyle (Migos Cover) 04:23 i-D 374 (“The Unknown Issue” Enza Khoury Cover) 05:42 i-D 375 (“The Beta Issue” Born In 2025 Cover) 06:50 Outro

On recruiting great ppl: - great people are (a) rare, and (b) always have tons of options - therefore once you decide a candidate is great you cannot hesitate or delay. You must drop everything and rearrange heaven and earth to get them - there are small things (sending flowers), medium things (comp), and big things (their identity and dreams) - you want the barbell strategy-- put all your energy into small things and big things. Leave medium things till the end Small things: - ppl massively underestimate the power of small gestures. TL;DR: love-bomb the candidate - spend more time than money. Expense accounts are abundant but time is scarce. It's an expensive signal no one can fake - stay in close contact over text and phone - send them a first edition used book or an analog oscilloscope or some other random thing they mentioned in passing they like. Make these unique, everyone sends wine - invite them to computer history museum or moma or something. Spend time with them! Treat these meetings as dates, make them unique. Everyone buys dinner - be persistent but not annoying. Sometimes ppl need time alone, you should respect that. Big things: - there is a gap between what the candidate is doing in life and how they see themselves in the privacy of their dreams. Your job is to help them bridge this gap - to bridge the gap you must first understand it. Take the candidate on walks to museums and parks. Walks help the candidate drop their guard so you can learn about them. Try hard to get to know them, to understand their dreams - use your mission, your culture, your people, your company to paint a world for them in which the gap no longer exists. You may need to adjust the role or even change it altogether. For great ppl it is worth it - don't assume ppl want what you want, dreams can take all kinds of shapes. Maybe they want their work to matter, maybe they want a bigger team, maybe they want to code and avoid meetings, maybe they want to be in the center of the action, maybe they want to learn, maybe all or some or none of the above. Find out! Medium things (aka closing): - you've constructed a world the candidate is excited to live in. The purpose of this phase is to remove mundane obstacles to make this world easy to enter - I don't think I ever sold a candidate on a dream and then lost them on comp. Ppl just want to be compensated fairly and work out some life constraints - I don't have much to add to all the comp advice out there. My philosophy on comp/closing is to get this part done and move on, don't penny pinch too much, and give more equity --- Failure modes/don't do this: - do not ignore candidate's spouse/parents. They have an outsized role in the decision. Most of what I said about the candidate applies to them too (love bomb them, understand their dreams, etc.) - counterintuitive, but do not talk about the company or even the mission too much. The candidate and their dreams are front and center. At this stage you, the role, the mission are only relevant to the degree they can make candidate's dreams come true - same w/ perks, what the day is like, etc. Don't blindly talk about these-- use them as tools to reenforce how the candidate seems themselves - don't get mad if ppl reject you, it happens. Maybe it's not a fit for them now but will be a great fit four years from now. Maybe they become a customer. Maybe you work for them ten years later. Play the long game.

2/2 Second, on the messaging around AI.  I do not agree that my messaging has been disproportionately negative.  In fact it has been about equally balanced between risks and benefits: I’ve written one major essay about each, and even in interviews where I discuss the risks, I make sure to frequently mention the incredible benefits as well as proposing possible solutions to the risks (short clips from my interviews that end up on social media tend to be disproportionately negative, as that gets clicks).  In fact, I wrote Machines of Loving Grace because I didn’t feel the AI industry was painting an inspiring enough picture of how the technology could radically transform the world for the better.  The bulk of the essay is devoted to refuting skepticism of AI’s potential in health and biology, and showing why I think it will actually be possible to cure most human disease in ~5-10 years, as crazy as it may sound to ordinary people and frankly to biologists as well (I used to be one!).  And, if you read my most recent essay (Policy on the AI Exponential), I discuss concrete proposals for how to streamline the FDA process to make sure the deluge of AI-accelerated drugs isn’t slowed down by the regulatory process.  I feel the urgency here: I lost my father to Hepatitis C only a few years before the development of direct-acting antivirals (sofosbuvir), which cure 95% of patients and probably would have cured him. I do agree that the public has a negative view of AI (and that this is a big problem), but I don’t think it is primarily caused by me or any other AI leader warning about AI’s risks.  I think it is fundamentally a crisis of trust.  I think that ordinary people don’t trust companies, governments, or the tech industry and always suspect that we are cooking up some new way to screw them over.  The causes of this go back decades and AI is just the latest iteration of it.  I don’t think that a glitzy marketing campaign with a positive spin (which some have advocated that Anthropic do) is the way to win back that trust — at this point, saying that AI will cure cancer is more a cliche than it is inspiring, and most people think it is deceptive.  The thing that will work is *actually curing cancer*.  I think by far the most accurate criticism of AI companies including Anthropic is that we haven’t yet delivered on our big promises to benefit the world.  That is totally on us, and I think it’s the criticism you should be making, instead of all this stuff about messaging and marketing. We are however doing our best to fix this: Anthropic is ramping up its efforts very quickly in biology and medicine, and we hope to have incredible results in the coming years and some early glimmers in the coming months.  When we’ve actually accomplished something real, the whole world will hear about it, as loudly as possible, you have my word on that.  But until then I don’t want to make empty promises, and in the meantime I feel compelled to speak honestly about the very real risks of AI and how to address them.  Honesty is the right thing on the merits, and in terms of public credibility and trust it is no worse than, and may in fact be better than, an approach that ignores or distracts from risks which people instinctively understand are real.