How an unknown podcaster bagged an interview with Tony Blair

In lockdown, many a podcast was started by bored young men in their bedrooms. Most did not stick the landing once restrictions were lifted.

American tech podcaster Dwarkesh Patel is a notable exception. Then 19, Patel cold-emailed acclaimed economist and bestselling author Bryan Caplan to ask if he would appear in his first-ever podcast episode, which was published on YouTube in May 2020.

“He assumed I had an actual podcast. I didn’t even have a name for a podcast. But he was kind enough, he did it,” Patel told the tech magazine Mercury in February.

How things have changed: today Patel, just 23, aired his interview with former prime minister 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.”

Then there’s the extent of his preparation. To interview Demis Hassabis three months ago, Patel had read “most of DeepMind’s papers from the last couple of years,” he told the Mercury tech magazine, adding that he had “talked to a dozen AI researchers in preparation for that interview”.

Indeed, his quick wit has been praised by Amazon boss Jeff Bezos, who in 2022 called his show “thoughtful and thought-provoking”, and respected US economist Tyler Cowen, who has described Patel as “one of the very best interviewers around”.

“He’ll ask questions you couldn’t possibly think of asking, but when he asks them you know you want to hear the answer,” says the insider.

And though Patel does not set out to bag scoops, he is nevertheless starting to “shape the dialogue in Silicon Valley”, the tech expert says. In his interview with Patel in April, Zuckerberg said for the first time that he thought energy supply could slow down the development of Artificial Intelligence.

“Everyone else had been saying that computing power would be the big problem,” says the source. “As the CEO of Meta that’s a big deal and it does shape what people talk about.”

Blair himself has been taking an increasing interest in technology and the “incredibly small” Silicon Valley bubble around it, where the source says that “everyone listens to the same stuff” and “everyone follows the same discourse and the same podcasts”.

So the logic of talking to someone non-threatening like Patel is easy to discern, says Christopher Pich, an associate professor and expert in political branding from the University of Nottingham.

“If other high-profile tech specialists are being interviewed on this podcast then it makes sense that Blair wants to appear as part of that conversation and that group,” he says.

On top of that, “the 10-year anniversary of the Tony Blair Institute is coming up and he might want to use that appearance to raise its profile on the world stage.”

The Tony Blair Institute for Global Change, founded by the ex-prime minister in 2016, has science and technology at its heart and has been run partially out of an office in San Francisco. By tapping into this niche, Blair might be looking to “connect with influential people in that space”.

In this hour-long conversation Patel has not deviated from his usual niche line of questioning, though instead of his standard “tech bro” uniform of T-shirt and shorts he has donned a sharp blue suit and orange tie.

Sure enough, much of the hour-long interview Patel posted online this afternoon covers the work of the Tony Blair Institute, which gets a shoutout within the first minute of the session. Plenty of airtime is given to the former Prime Minister’s views on AI, too; at one point he tells Patel that “I wouldn’t design the healthcare system in the UK today as it is now if we had the benefit of generative AI”.

Christopher Pich, however, suspects that the seemingly unusual appearance isn’t so removed from all that’s happening in Britain. Blair hasn’t given any interviews to mainstream publications since the election was called and so might instead be using his session with Patel to “remind people that he’s part of Labour’s history, and also could be part of the narrative of Labour’s next chapter.

“Maybe, a bit like Lord Cameron, he’s gearing up to join Keir Starmer’s cabinet – showing that he’s very well connected and respected globally.” Blair is keen to point out that he has often raised the prospect of a coming AI revolution with “my own party, the Labour Party, which will probably win this election”.

Or maybe the former prime minister “just thought that this would be a nice thing to do for someone with a small platform,” says Pich. Given the immense level of preparation Patel invests in his work, it’s easy to see why someone with an interest in his work would want to throw him a bone.

Ahead of today’s episode release members of the Tony Blair Institute had already shared rave reviews. “Well worth listening to the whole episode on Wednesday,” said the think tank’s chief policy strategist Benedict Cooney on X, along with a behind-the-scenes snap of Blair and the 23-year-old in conversation.

Patel declined to speak to The Telegraph about how he bagged an interview with Blair, or what it was like to grill such a big name given that he left university just three short years ago.

Not a surprise as Patel has little interest “in soundbites or clickbait”, says the insider, as he “is not optimising for the maximum number of views”.