alt Hacker NewsDoes anyone know who Dwarkesh’s patron is that boosted him in podcast world? He isn’t otherwise highly distinguished and admitted does his show prep with AI which sometimes shows in his questions. I feel like there are a very large number of tech podcasts, but there’s some marketing effect around this guy that I just don’t understand.
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He introduced me and many others to Sarah Paine. I think that helped launch him. Maybe that was already after he had an audience though.
The funny thing is his questions to her were terrible. But she rescued it anyway.
But I think he has improved markedly as an interviewer I will say
He knew people, caught a wave, and was roommates with Dylan Patel of SemiAnalysis. They networked, got to meet the right people, developed a web of contacts and sources, and the rest is history. Treat your friends well, and it often comes back multiplied.
The marketing effect was them catching the wave at the right time, and they're just surfing the hell out of it.
In my opinion, he asks the right questions and lets the guests speak, which is something that can't be said about the rest of tech podcasts.
For example, at some point I grew very tired of the superficiality of the questions that Lex Friedman asks his very technical guests. He seems to be more interested into taking the conversation into a philosophy freshman's essay about technology instead of talking about technology itself.
Hearing the Dwarkesh podcast was a breath of fresh air in that regard.
Isn't it just the usual feedback loop that happens with popular podcasters? They have connections and get a few highly popular guests on. As long as their demeanor is agreeable and they keep the conversation interesting other high profile guests will agree to be on and thus they've created a successful show.
If you think there are as or more interesting podcasts out there, feel free to name them.
Dwarkesh is not a very good interviewer he kept asking the same question even though Dario patiently answered it about 6 times. Wasted an hour on "Why don't you spend 5 trillion on compute build out" Should have moved on but he didn't seem to grasp what Dario was saying, either not listening or not sharp enough.
The thing which distinguished him was getting good guests, before the hype hit. And he generally asks good questions and then shuts up while his guests talk.
It seems that AI people have moved on from Lex Fridman to Dwarkesh. A couple of years ago the YouTube algorithm spammed Fridman in response to basically anything, now it is Dwarkesh. Maybe they need a new face periodically.
The IPO hype is in full swing.
He knew Bryan Caplan, and interviewing him early on kickstarted things, I believe.
There was a small network of AI-intellectualism (and rationality) that grew highly relevant when AI took off post chatgpt. It feels adjacent to Tyler Cowen's network + tpot + hn/lesswrong. (I can't remember if Tyler specifically gave him a fast grant, but his first few interviews were GMU-centric.)
I personally liked that he stayed away from navel-gazing in politics when the blogosphere/podcasts went pretty heavy into that.
It did very well on twitter with a large number of high-follower-count tech people, and soon to be high-follower-count (basically AI employees). He had followed the zeitgeists general wisdom well (bat signal, work in public, you-can-just-do-things, move-to-the-arena, You-Are-the-Average-of-the-Five-People-You-Spend-the-Most-Time-With, high-horsepower). And he's just executed very well. Other people have interviewed similar people and generally gotten lower signal content. This moxie marlinspike interview is great though - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cPRi7mAGp7I .
His Sarah Paine episodes have way more listeners than his normal fare. I doubt that's the whole story, but that's surely part of it.
You could look at his early guests and see what many of them have in common
Similar wonderings occurred to me at that point in the vid where he struggled to understanding Amodei's explanation of the economics, which was pretty straightforward. Unless he was just being deliberately arsey.
I never knew about him until a few months ago when he started appearing in my YouTube recommendations, and naturally I thought the same thing because a 'nobody' like him (not in a derogatory sense) started doing interviews with the top AI bros. And the interviews are terribly boring because they feel like a cheap PR campaign. You could sit Lex Fridman instead of Dwarkesh Patel and it would feel exactly the same.
> who Dwarkesh’s patron is that boosted him in podcast world
The Indian consumer market.
Unlike China, Indians use western social media platforms so Indian tastes and trends are becoming increasingly common on the internet.
This is also why you see entirely different trends on TikTok (banned in India, allowed elsewhere), Western Social Media (banned in China, allowed elsewhere), and Chinese social media (only used by Chinese and the diaspora).
What Ben Thompson predicted with his "Four Internets" theory 6 years ago has started playing out [0].
Over the next decade, more Indian media like Dwarkesh will leak into Western social media.
[0] - https://stratechery.com/2020/india-jio-and-the-four-internet...
Same with that "MIT" interviewer who wasn't even at MIT.
And that girl Altoff ...
Literal nobodies suddenly interviewing Elon Musk, etc... within weeks.
Things rarely go "viral" on their own these days, everything is controlled, even who gets the stage, how the message is delivered, etc... as you have noticed.
With regards to who's behind, well, we might never know. However, as arcane as it might sound, gradient descent can take you close to the answer, or at least point you towards it.
I like this recent meme of Christof from Truman Show saying things like "now tell them that there's aliens" or crap like that.
Yeah I also don't understand how he is able to get such high profile guests. His interview with Jeff Dean and Noam Shazeer last year[1] is so hilariously bad. Jeff and Noam kept trying to give really insightful answers on how they see AI development shaping in coming years and he was just steering the conversation to shallow and silly tabloid gossip (why don't you "just" let AI improve the next version in a loop so we can quickly have singularity, Jeff Dean AI running in a DC, evil Jeff Dean AI escaping containment and on and on). It was just embarrassing. The interview would have been so much better with just Jeff and Noam without him.
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v0gjI__RyCY