The Inside Story of the 50 Who Built Modern AI With Kevin Roose
Kevin Roose joins Every to discuss his bestselling book The AGI Chronicles, built from interviews with about 150 people behind modern AI, plus how he used AI to research it and his new podcast, Machine Gods.
The gist
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Roose expects no federal AI regulation without a crisis, and proposes required safety testing before model release, like drug testing, then coordinated slowing of the frontier.
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Roose wrote every word himself but ran a council of Claude agents in Claude Code, with personas like skeptic and historian, that caught factual errors.
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Roose says he couldn't have written the book without NotebookLM, which let him query all his research and find which sources told which stories.
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He uses Claude, ChatGPT and Gemini daily, but still writes in Google Docs because it is quick and easy to share with producers.
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Roose sorts tasks into weightlifting, where struggle helps, like parenting, and forklifting, like startup paperwork, which he happily hands to AI.
Kevin Rose uses it
"I'm playing with everything. Literally, like I can't keep track... But yeah, I'm using right now Claude, ChatGPT, Gemini for some things."
▶ Play at 31:09250 creators recommend it, including Riley Brown, Chris Koerner, and This Week in Startups.
See all on the Claude page
Kevin Rose uses it
"I had a council of Claudes that would review chapters. When I finished a draft, I would feed it into Claude Code, which I had set up to run this sort of swarm of agents. I assigned each of these agents a persona or a perspective... It did catch a couple of factual errors that ..."
▶ Play at 25:37108 creators recommend it, including Riley Brown, Liam Ottley, and Peter Yang.
See all on the Claude Code page
Kevin Rose uses it
"I could not have written this book without tools like NotebookLM, which allowed me to just sort of dump all of my research material into a notebook or a series of notebooks and just ask questions, help me spot connections... and it would comb through every piece of source mate..."
▶ Play at 27:247 creators recommend it, including Alex Mathew, Ethan Mollick, and Fred Graver.
See all on the NotebookLM page
Kevin Rose uses it
"But yeah, I'm using right now Claude, ChatGPT, Gemini for some things."
▶ Play at 31:09159 creators recommend it, including John Coogan, Riley Brown, and Peter Yang.
See all on the ChatGPT page
Kevin Rose uses it
"I am mostly using Google Docs. You know, it has many issues, but for just pure, like, I want to quickly open up a doc, and these days I'm usually writing for the show, so I'm writing with producers in the doc too, so it just is the best way. I did experiment with using sort of..."
▶ Play at 32:0312 creators recommend it, including Jason Calacanis, Peter Yang, and TBPN.
See all on the Google Docs pageWhat they recommend · 5 picks
"I had a council of Claudes that would review chapters. When I finished a draft, I would feed it into Claude Code, which I had set up to run this sort of swarm of agents. I assig..."
"I could not have written this book without tools like NotebookLM, which allowed me to just sort of dump all of my research material into a notebook or a series of notebooks and ..."
"I am mostly using Google Docs. You know, it has many issues, but for just pure, like, I want to quickly open up a doc, and these days I'm usually writing for the show, so I'm wr..."
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