Dwarkesh Patel | The $10,000 Email Behind Zuckerberg, Satya Nadella and Marc Andreessen

Episode #12 of Yesterday: This week, we cover the life story of Dwarkesh Patel, host of The Dwarkesh Podcast. Dwarkesh grew up in India until the age of eight, when his family moved to the United States for his father's medical career. His childhood was marked by frequent moves across the country, from Bismarck, North Dakota, to West Virginia and West Texas. While in college, he became deeply interested in intellectual ideas, which led him to start his podcast by sending a cold email to his first guest, economist Bryan Caplan. The podcast was nearly a short-lived experiment. As Patel was about to graduate with no job lined up, he received a cold email from Anil Varanasi offering him $10,000 to keep the project alive for six more months. Soon after, a blog post he wrote earned a public comment from Jeff Bezos, who told him to "please keep it up," cementing his decision to pursue it full-time. Today, The Dwarkesh Podcast is one of the top interview shows in the world, where Patel speaks with leaders in tech and science—including Mark Zuckerberg, Ilya Sutskever, and Patrick Collison—to develop a better model of the world. -- Timestamps: 00:00 Intro 03:19 Intense Mental Math Training as a Child in India 04:43 Hindu Saint Prescribed a Bath in Milk and Cow Dung 11:44 Building a Career Your Parents Advised Against 14:19 Choosing a Job Based on a $1M Salary 21:34 Ideas Are Supposed to Be Terrible When You're Young 24:51 $10,000 Wire From an Internet Stranger 28:25 Jeff Bezos' Comment Kept My Podcast Alive 29:21 The Email Strategy used to Interview the World's Top Minds 34:11 Dwarkesh's Quest to Optimize Ice Cream Consumption 41:40 Why Podcasting Is Not Competitive