>It's naive to think that you get a retired-Google-CEO-billionare by cold calling Hey, you cut out the quote where I conditionally qualified my statement with

>It's naive to think that you get a retired-Google-CEO-billionare by cold calling Hey, you cut out the quote where I conditionally qualified my statement with "later guests who were not colleagues at MIT or his previous contract work at Google,". Anyway, it seems reasonable to presume that his connections at Google went up the chain and reached Eric Schmidt. So it wouldn't have been a true cold call. He said Elon Musk happened because his A.I. research on Tesla self-driving was already seen by Elon. Some of the early guests who were professors via his MIT connections. Some guests (especially physicists) might have been connections with his dad who is a physics professor. His older brother runs a biotech company so that may also spur some introductions. With "6-degrees-of-separation" being what it is, what looks like a cold-call to outsiders ("how did he get Eric Schmidt?!?") could have actually been a friend-of-a-friend or colleague-of-a-colleague. I'm a nobody and I happen to know the billionaire fund manager and owner of a major sports team. With 3-degrees of separation with various past co-workers, I can connect the dots to several CEOs of major corporations. That doesn't mean they'd agree to be on my hypothetical podcast if I asked them but if a few of them said "yes", some viewers would wonder, "how did he manage to get X with a cold call?" -- The answer is that my extended social graph is invisible to viewers and it really wasn't a cold call. Examples of "later" guests that are more "cold calls" with no help from MIT/Google were Dan Carlin (Hardcore History) and some of the female guests who weren't scientists. This isn't speculation because the guests themselves said they looked at Lex's previous podcasts to see his work. In general, the playbook for a new podcaster (with no audience of millions yet) to get guests follows a similar trajectory: 1) Start with personal connections to build a body of work. Cold-calling famous people won't work at this early stage because they don't have any prior work to see to if it's worth their time. 2) The previous podcasts episodes can start to act as a résumé so host doesn't have to rely on personal connections. The ever-increasing audience numbers also pads the résumé and adds credibility to the interviewer. 3) The transition eventually happens where interviewer can get new guests based on reputation more than personal connections.