How an unknown podcaster bagged an interview with Tony Blair

How did a 20-something computer science graduate book such a name? Patel, who now lives in a “hacker house” in the trendy Hayes Valley area of San Francisco, is no nepo-baby. Born in India, he came to America at the age of nine when his father, a doctor, obtained an HB-1 work visa. 

It also can’t be the size of his following, which is modest – 60,000 on X, formerly Twitter, and just shy of 200,000 on YouTube, the main platform he uses to share his work.

Neither can it be a crack team of publicists, bookers and advisors. Patel recently posted an advert for his first employee, a full-time editor paid upwards of $100,000 a year. 

Instead, his success is down to his specialised knowledge of the tech industry and his disinterest in the mainstream news agenda. 

When he started, his guests were esoteric figures unknown outside of Silicon Valley. But the interviews were admired by people in tech and helped him to land bigger names with a wider profile: British DeepMind boss Demis Hassabis, as well as Dario Amodei, the boss of competing AI company Anthropic, and Ilya Sutskever, co-founder of ChatGPT-maker OpenAI. 

Last November, he broadcast a 200 minute-long interview with Dominic Cummings, the former chief political advisor’s first since his sit down with the BBC’s Laura Kuenssberg in 2021.

And in April, Patel conducted a 90-minute conversation with Mark Zuckerberg, who last gave an interview to British journalists (again at the BBC) in 2020. 

“He has amassed a following of big fans, and the podcast is in the top 10 of tech podcasts listened to globally now, so Dwarkesh is really making his mark,” says one tech insider and self-described Dwarkesh Patel fan. “Obviously, Dominic Cummings is very plugged into the Silicon Valley ecosystem and so he’s probably a consumer of [tech podcasts] himself.”

Patel’s interviewing style is relatively benign, far from Paxman-like attack dog. “He’s incredibly well read and will really stretch people’s thinking on certain topics, but in a way that’s not contrarian,” says the insider. “It’s more like a dinner-table conversation on steroids in terms of intellect.”