Dwarkesh Patel's roommate introduced him to Paul Graham's essays in college, sparking startup experiments including a furniture resale business. Inspired by Karl Popper's philosophy via David Deutsch, he built popperplay.com to let users generate and refute questions. His side-project podcast eventually became his main platform.
I got hooked up with this roommate my freshman or sophomore year who was super into Paul Graham essays, and he introduced me to them. And then I got super into this, and we would talk about it all the time, and we're trying out these ridiculous startup ideas. Like, he had one where, um, we would buy your— instead of you throwing out your old furniture, we would buy it off you and then store it somewhere and resell it or something. And we spent like a couple weekends. I was just helping him out. We would U-Haul this furniture around. Um, and then I had one. Actually, I had this one. I made this website where I was really into David Deutsch's ideas, and he's into this idea of criticism and refutation as this is how knowledge grows. And he's into this philosopher Karl Popper who laid this out initially. So I made this website. I'm like, okay, this will be a cool thing to do. There should be a website where the content has these primitives of coming up with questions and then refuting them and blah, blah, blah. So let me make a forum that does this. And I said, well, it's influenced by the ideas of Karl Popper, so I'm going to call it popperplay.com. I didn't know what poppers were back then. And I would like all these people. I mean, at the time I didn't know anybody, so I would just like cold DM people who are in this community like, hey, like Benzedrine and the— Yeah, I mean, I think poppers is like, you know, like loosens up your, loosens up your sphincter, right? So it's like used for—
There's probably many kinds of poppers.
So anyways, I would invite, I would invite cold email, cold DM people who are in this community like, hey, I made this website. I'm inspired by your idea. Ideas. It's called Puffer Flake.
Um, pretty interesting. Yeah, inbound.
Yeah, that's right. Anyway, so I was just doing stuff like that. And then as a student, I was sort of like, I was like middle of the pack basically. I wasn't like, you know, in computer science itself, I wasn't like killing it or something, but I wasn't terribly falling behind either. But this is the podcast was another thing I was also doing on the side. And that, that's the one that took off. Yeah.
