Guy Raz — “How I Built This” and Solving Our Big Problems

On today’s Daily Stoic Podcast, Ryan talks with How I Built This creator and host Guy Raz about how we deal with big collective action problems in an era of increased polarization, harnessing entrepreneurial energy to help society, and more. Guy Raz is a podcast creator and host with a combined audience of over 19 million downloads a month. He is the creator and host of How I Built This, a podcast about entrepreneurs, and also co-created NPR’s TED Radio Hour and Wow in the World. Guy joined NPR in 1997 and has worked every single newsroom job from production assistant to news anchor. This episode is brought to you by GoMacro. GoMacro is a family-owned maker of some of the finest protein bars around. They're vegan, non-GMO, and they come in a bunch of delicious flavors. Visit http://gomacro.com and use promo code STOIC for 30% off your order plus free shipping. This episode is also brought to you by Amazon Alexa. Amazon Alexa is the perfect system to use to set up your house with Smart Home functionality—and with the new Amazon Smart Lighting Bundle, it’s easy to get started. Just connect your Amazon Echo Dot with your first Sengled color changing light bulb and you’re on your way. Visit Amazon.com/dailystoic to get 20% off the bundle.***If you enjoyed this week’s podcast, we’d love for you to leave a review on Apple Podcasts. It helps with our visibility, and the more people listen to the podcast, the more we can invest into it and make it even better. Sign up for the Daily Stoic email: http://DailyStoic.com/signupFollow @DailyStoic:Twitter: https://twitter.com/dailystoicInstagram: https://www.instagram.com/dailystoic/Facebook: http://facebook.com/dailystoicYouTube: https://www.youtube.com/dailystoicFollow Guy Raz: Homepage: https://guyraz.com/Twitter: https://twitter.com/guyrazInstagram: https://www.instagram.com/guy.razFacebook: https://www.facebook.com/NPRGuyRaz/See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info. 📢 Share | ⚙️ Manage Subscription

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:04Ryan Holiday?

  Welcome to the Weekend Edition of the Daily Stoic. Each weekday, we bring you a meditation inspired by the ancient Stoics, something that can help you live up to those four Stoic virtues of courage, justice, wisdom, and temperance. And here on the weekend, we take a deeper dive into those same topics. We interview Stoic philosophers. We reflect. We prepare. We think deeply about the challenging issues of our time. And we work through this philosophy in a way that's more possible here when we're not rushing to work or to get the kids to school, when we have the time to think, to go for a walk,

• 0:46Ryan Holiday?

  to sit with our journals, and to prepare for what the future will bring.

• 0:53Ryan Holiday?

  Hey, everyone. It's Ryan Holiday. Welcome to another episode of the Daily Stoic Podcast. You know, I don't talk a lot about what you might call my day job here, because to many of you, I'm sure this sort of is my day job. But although I write my own books, one of the things at Brass Check, my company does and has done for a long time is sort of advise on, produce, in some cases, conceptualize or create projects that other authors put out or that publishers are looking for. And so, over the years, I've gotten to work with all sorts of cool authors and entrepreneurs and businesses. You know, Brass Check's worked with everyone from Google to Twitter. We've worked with Tim Ferriss.

• 1:37Ryan Holiday?

  We've worked with Tony Robbins. A few years ago, I got this inquiry from an agent at UTA who was working on a book about a potential radio show that they were maybe going to launch. The project didn't come to anything right then, but that show ended up launching, How I Built This with Guy Raz, which is one of the biggest podcasts in the world, one of the podcasts I've listened to more than any other podcast I've listened to. You know, hours and hours of Guy interview some of the biggest entrepreneurs in history, living entrepreneurs in the world. And so when the project came back around and they were trying to conceptualize how you would, you would build a book around the show, Brass Check, my writing partner, Niels,

• 2:22Ryan Holiday?

  who I've had on the podcast recently, were lucky enough to sort of advise on the project. And, and actually, I suggested that the book sort of be built around one of my favorite classic books. It's a book called How They Succeeded: Life Stories of Successful Men Told by Themselves by a long-dead self-help author named Orison Swett Martin. This book was actually really influential when I was writing Obstacles the Way. So anyways, that book is now out by the excellent Guy Raz. It's a fantastic book and he's my guest today. I was so excited to talk to Guy because he's not just a sweet human being, but a very thoughtful human being. And it's sort of become a philosopher, I would say, of entrepreneurship.

• 3:04Ryan Holiday?

  And so his new book, How I Built This: The Unexpected Path to Success from the World's Most Inspiring Entrepreneurs, to me, could not be more timely than this moment, dealing with an economic crisis, dealing with the collapse of institutions. As we talk about in the interview, America and the world face all sorts of enormous collective action problems. And what we need is smart, creative, bold, visionary people who can help us solve that in both the private and the, the public sectors. And, and this is something I think that dovetails nicely with Stoicism. Not only was Zeno famously an entrepreneur who suffers a sort of a setback and a disaster, not unlike the kind that Guy talks about on his show almost every week.

• 3:48Ryan Holiday?

  But, but the Stoics were business people and entrepreneurs and inventors and, and artists who then also applied that same ethos, that same commitment, that same creativity to the public sector. They applied themselves to politics as much as they applied themselves to, to, you know, achieving profit. And, and I think it's that sort of mix of Sort of public and professional obligations. Again, the Stoics believed that we were obligated to contribute to the public good. And remember, Marcus says that the fruit of this life is good character and acts for the common good. That could be starting a company that employs 10 people or a company that employs 10,000

• 4:29Ryan Holiday?

  people, or it could, you know, employ, it could be, you know, running for public office or, you know, running a, you know, regulatory agency that protects tens of thousands or millions of people. And so, and I talk about, obviously, this in the new book, Lives of the Stoics, which you can preorder now. But, you know, a Stoic, a philosopher, is obligated to contribute. And it doesn't matter who you are, it doesn't matter what you're doing, whether you're running a tech company, whether you're an industry titan, this, the philosophical ideas we talk about here deserve to be applied to that. As Marcus says, stares you in the face, no role is so well-suited to philosophy as the one you happen to be in right now.

• 5:09Ryan Holiday?

  And I think Guy's wonderful show is an illustration of what some of these philosophical ideas, particularly resiliency and overcoming obstacles, look like in the real world. And then also, let's hope we can apply some of the lessons here to the, the big problems society faces. You can check out Guy's new book, it's out September 15th, How I Built This, The Unexpected Path to Success from the World's Most Inspiring Entrepreneurs. And of course, if you are looking for another great podcast to listen to, it's hard to beat How I Built This. So thanks to Guy for coming on. I think you're gonna like this interview.

• 5:44Speaker 01

  The idea that our problems are granular, that's real. There are granular things that have to happen. But the, the reality is, human beings have to sacrifice. Like, they cannot, you know, you look at the fires in, in the West, and you look at massive income inequality, and, and all these things that, that combined are creating these huge problems, crises, and extreme anxiety for, for most of us. And what it comes down to is, are we willing to be less selfish? You know, are we willing to do things that will require personal sacrifices to actually make enormous changes? And, and that, to me, is what What I think we have to be talking about.

• 6:29Ryan Holiday?

  No, you're you're right. And to for people who missed what what we were talking about right before we hit record is is that, yeah, we talk about some of these and we got to reform the Electoral College, or we have to, you know, we have to have a Green New Deal, we have to, you know, we talk about these sort of big, almost like moonshoty projects or things. And it's like, but we can't also just like get people to wear masks, or, you know, we can't people, we can't get people to not throw gender reveal parties during a pandemic during wildfire season. It's like, it's we're so, it's like, we can't handle the small end and the big end. And it's very hard not to get deeply discouraged by that.

• 7:09Speaker 01

  I was thinking about this and how to frame it, because on the one hand, you can say, God, you know, we humans, and we American humans are particularly selfish, right? But the problem with saying that is that when you, when you shame people, they don't respond well. And and I wonder whether part of it is framing this idea as sacrifice, because sacrifice has happened in the United States. I mean, Americans sacrificed during World War Two on a massive scale. And so sacrifice is not uncommon to to humans or to Americans. The problem is, is that we've all become so comfortable in the worlds we live in, our

• 7:49Speaker 01

  ability to, you know, get whatever we need delivered, or go anywhere we want to go, or buy, you know, things that are increasingly inexpensive and cheap because they're manufactured overseas without without in any way, understanding or accepting the consequences of those actions. And we were all guilty of it, you know?

• 8:12Ryan Holiday?

  Totally. And your point about shaming is well taken, because I saw this great line, I was thinking about writing something about this for Daily Stoic, but they were saying that, you know, we see people partying at the beach, or not wearing a mask, and we want to attack that one person. And their point was, look, you don't actually need the line was so good, they said, we don't need everyone to wear a mask, we just need more people to wear masks. And so I think one of the things we're caught in in our sort of social media culture, and our ability to sort of peek in and monitor everyone we know, is that we're really focused on individuals, like, why is this person not doing that? Why is this celebrity doing X? And really, what we need to do is create a story or a narrative like your point about

• 8:56Ryan Holiday?

  sacrifice that just gets as many people as possible on board as opposed to thinking that what we need is each person to bully their neighbor into behaving properly.

• 9:08Speaker 01

  I was thinking about this recently because in California, a couple of weeks ago, there were rolling blackouts in part of the state. And I actually experienced three hours of no power. And it was because the grids were so overloaded with people using their air conditioning systems. And one of the reasons why the grid shut down was because over the past several years, California has transitioned to more renewable energy. So they've shut down fossil fuel plants and kind of transitioned to power, to wind power and solar power plants. And the transition is still happening. But you know, there are going to be some hiccups along the way. And part of that is that the system isn't fully

• 9:51Speaker 01

  online. And yet, people freaked out about the fact that for two or three hours, they didn't have air conditioning. And it just, it occurred to me that, and of course, I'm oversimplifying it because some people really, you know, it's a life or death issue. But the fact that, you know, there might be some inconveniences to completely transition to renewable energy has to be something that people are willing to accept. Otherwise, we're going to have to make unimaginable sacrifices. And if you, if you look at the rate and pace of change when it comes to the climate, it's not happening in a linear way. It's happening exponentially. It's not like the fires are going to be worse in California next year. The hurricanes are going to be slightly worse. They're going to be much

• 10:36Speaker 01

  worse if we don't begin to make really serious sacrifices now. And that, that, that may be inconvenient now, but if we don't do the inconvenient things now, in five or 10 years, we may be pining for the days when it was merely inconvenient. You know what I mean?

• 10:56Ryan Holiday?

  No, I saw a commercial a few years ago that I love, I think about all the time. And obviously it was talking more, it was like, it was a commercial about like paying down your credit card debt or some, some service that helps you do this. And basically like, you know, someone gets a bill at a restaurant, someone gets a bill at a bar, someone gets their, you know, some, some bill or whatever, the, the same conceit over and over again. And each time the person says, no, I like, you know, your bill is a hundred dollars. They say, no, I would rather pay three hundred dollars later. And they keep doing this over and over again. And the, the point being, when you put it on your credit card, it's not costing what it costs now. It's costing what it is compounded by this obscene interest rate. And so I think about that all the time when I, not financial decisions, although I generally try to avoid debt.

• 11:40Ryan Holiday?

  I go, you know, if I do this now, you know, if I pay the tax or the bill or the, take the hit now, what am I saving myself in the future? And for whatever reason, it's become, this is what leaders are supposed to be able to help society do. But unfortunately, we've, we've lost the ability to think like that about the big collective action problems that we have as a society.

• 12:03Speaker 01

  And you know, I mean, you're somebody who's, who's, who's become a scholar of the ancient world. And in the ancient world, and, and even in the modern world, we, we were able to marshal our energy in a collective way, generally to, to do things like fight wars, right? And, and some, sometimes that energy was, um, was, was incredibly destructive. And sometimes that energy saved humanity. You know, you think about Britain during the Second World War and how that country came together and sacrificed in, in a way that really no other Western power did. And today we, we are facing a different battle. We're facing a battle around the world and here in the United States, you know,

• 12:45Speaker 01

  to make our society better, stronger, more resilient. And to me, it's an inspiring call. Like it, it doesn't have to be. It doesn't have to be something that scares people. You know, the call to make our country more just and equitable and fairer and kinder is, to me, is inspiring because it means strengthening our country, our society, our culture, our, you know, our common goals and really, you know, using our differences and diversity as a source of strength. And I think if there's a way to marshal a national consensus, you know, create a national movement to really fight for those things, fight for a better

• 13:28Speaker 01

  country, fight for a better environment, I think it can be done. I mean, if we can marshal that energy that was used to fight wars and tyranny, I believe we have to do it using the same methods and with the same energy for, I think, a much more challenging battle that we face that is not versus other humans or nations, but versus our own, our own future and our ability to, to have a sustainable planet.

• 14:02Ryan Holiday?

  Well, no, speaking about where you are, have you read the William James essay, A Moral Equivalent to War?

• 14:09Speaker 01

  No, I haven't read that.

• 14:10Ryan Holiday?

  You would, you would love it. It's, I think, very apropos of our times. His point is that war is horrendous and awful, and yet also war, it's hard to argue, doesn't draw out some great virtues of the human species, you know, camaraderie and sacrifice and valor and bravery and all these things. And his point is that we want to make war go away, but then if you do that, where do you get, where do you, one, train those virtues and, two, what outlet do you provide for them? And his point is that society needs moral equivalence of war that allow, you know, so the civilian conservation corps in the

• 14:52Ryan Holiday?

  Great Depression is a great example of a moral equivalent to war. And, you know, I, when people are amazed at how the United States was able to mobilize so quickly, that hundreds of thousands of young Young American men had been training, you know, rebuilding forests and clearing roads and planting trees for, you know, four or five years leading up to the war. That that was a big part of it. And so I think this dovetails actually nicely into what what you're talking about in the book, because it does feel like one of the few elements of our society that has not objectively failed over the last few months has been the military to some degree, but also like private enterprise seems to be doing pretty well.

• 15:36Ryan Holiday?

  Like, is there something that you have observed in all of these founders that you've talked to, these sort of visionaries? Like, is there an ingredient that they have that our regulatory state is missing? Or what is it?

• 15:51Speaker 01

  Well, I mean, look, I think, first of all, I am a big believer in healthy, strong regulation. Because in fact, and this is a bit of a digression, one of the reasons why I believe the United States is such a litigious country is because regulators don't really enforce the law. They essentially say, we'll let courts do it. But if you go to Europe, actually, Europe is far less litigious than the US because the state really regulates industry in such a way that it protects consumers. So it really reduces the number of lawsuits. But put that aside for a second, and I would say, I would say this. What the entrepreneurs that I've I've interviewed on How I Built This and that are featured

• 16:34Speaker 01

  in this book, what they have in common is pretty obvious, and most people listening will know it. They are unshakably optimistic in their product or service. They're incredibly resilient. They, you know, they get beat down and they get back up to fight another day. The question is, how do they get there? How do they actually have that? And and you know this, Ryan, from all of your reading and all of all of your studies and all of your writing, that some people have it, right? It's like some people can naturally shoot a basketball better than other people. The reality, though, is most people don't. You know, most of us are, we're afraid of rejection because rejection is hard.

• 17:19Speaker 01

  You know, I think we are naturally sort of wired to seek out validation. You know, I have an idea, I'm going to tell my friend Ryan Holiday about my idea, and I respect Ryan, and I really hope he loves it. And it's crushing if if you say to me, yeah, I don't, I don't know, I don't know if that's gonna work. I don't know if someone's gonna buy that. I don't know, like, you sure you want to do that? Or or it could be even harsher than that. And so I think what happens is most of us have a fear of pursuing a big idea, or or building a product or service, or even trying to be disruptive in our own companies where we might work, or in a community where we live, if we want to change something, because we're afraid of judgment and rejection.

• 18:04Speaker 01

  And and that's normal. It's natural. We want validation. It's it boosts our serotonin and our cortisol and all those things, right? The the difference between people who actually are able to withstand the rejection and the fear, and those who aren't, is practice, like anything else. I mean, you write about the obstacle as the way, right? These are people who basically go for the obstacle. They go right to it, and they keep hitting it, and they keep going through it. It's not easy. And some people have developed it because they were exposed to it earlier in their careers or in their lives. You know,

• 18:47Speaker 01

  a lot of the people on the show were salespeople. If you're a salesperson, if you're Sarah Blakely, and you're selling fax machines door to door, you're gonna hear a lot of no's. You're gonna hear a lot of people say, no soliciting, please leave my property. Over time, that is going to build the kind of resilience you will need to actually launch something that is gonna have a profound impact on our culture or our society. And for her, it was Spanx, right? Right. I just did an interview with a guy named Topo Awatana, the founder of Calendly. And Calendly is an amazing product. It's free, you know, it's it's a it's solved the calendaring problem for many people, the back and forth emails, hey, let's meet then, no, I can't

• 19:31Speaker 01

  do that, let's do that, you know? He he solved this problem. And You know, he, the road to creating a business was a very fraught one. I mean, he, he started several ventures. They were all failures. He tried to sell movie projectors and he tried to sell a knockoff of the big green egg grill. Failed. Yeah. But what Tobe understood was that eventually he would succeed. And part of that came from an experience he had as a younger man selling alarm systems, home alarm systems, door to door. Imagine, this is a young man from Nigeria who came to the United States at age 15.

• 20:13Speaker 01

  He's a college student in Athens, Georgia, going door to door, trying to sell people a home alarm system. He's getting 500 rejections a week. He's getting doors slammed in his face. But he kept going because he knew that eventually he would get a yes. And the commission he would make on that money, as he told me, was more money than he'd ever seen in his life. Eventually, he became a sales rep for a software company. All of those experiences, hearing all of those no's as a sales rep, really helped him develop the skills and the resilience to actually start a business. It's sort of like, people will often ask me, and I'm sure they ask you a version of this question too, which is, what's your secret to being a great interviewer?

• 20:57Speaker 01

  How do you, well, tell me what the secret is so I can do it. Or people say, Ryan, what's your secret to being a great writer? What do I need to do? Now, the reality is, there's no secret. There's no secret. There's no, I don't, I don't have a key that's going to unlock the secret. It's, you have to stand- The key is experience. You have to stand at the free throw line and you have to shoot 100,000 free throws. And the first 20,000, you're not going to make them. They're going to suck. And if you listened to my interviews 20 years ago, they sucked. I had to go through that to learn how to be good at it. And it's the same thing with building resilience. It's the same exact thing. And, and the ability to withstand rejection is the single most important skill that all of these entrepreneurs have developed.

• 21:43Ryan Holiday?

  No, I think that's, I think that's interesting. And, and your point about the regulatory state is, I wasn't trying to say that we shouldn't have a regulatory state. I'm saying it does seem that our, that our private institutions have been quite resilient and our political and other institutions have been more fragile than we thought. And it, it is interesting. I feel, I feel like I've, like when you came on the line, I could, I've listened to so many of your interviews, I could just like hear the, the room tone of, of, of you. I think one of the benefits of your show and in the book too, is that you do get to benefit from these other people's experience, right? Like you, you can learn the lessons that they learned the hard way.

• 22:24Ryan Holiday?

  I think Socrates says, you know, by reading, we gain quite easily what other people gained, you know, at, at great difficulty. But at the same time, you are ultimately going to have to get knocked on your ass like a bunch of times. And there's really no way around that. But we love, you know, we love the story of the Mark Zuckerbergs. They start their first company, it's worth billions of dollars. That was one of the things I, I found so interesting about the sort of the cross sample of people you interview. Most of them are not young. Most of them, a good chunk of them were not in Silicon Valley and a good chunk of them weren't starting, you know, web apps and tech companies. Like I think even our, even our vision of what an entrepreneur is, is somewhat misleading and unrepresentative.

• 23:07Speaker 01

  A hundred percent. You know, I, I'm honored, but also a little puzzled when people occasionally describe how I built this as a, as a tech show. Because only about 10 or 15% of all of the people who've been on that, on our show or in the book, come from the tech world. It's a very tiny number. I have a bias towards things, towards products and services that people can build and that seem doable and realistic. You know, you're exactly right about, about this idea of entrepreneurship. I think so many of us in our minds think Silicon Valley or the tech world.

• 23:48Speaker 01

  The reality is, the vast majority of entrepreneurs in the United States are sole proprietorships. It's like somebody who's making bracelets on Etsy, or somebody who owns an HVAC business, or a corner store. A house painter. A house painter, you know, a personal trainer, right? Those are entrepreneurs. And oftentimes, they don't even think about themselves that way. And in fact, they are often the most, you know, they're on the front lines of entrepreneurship and oftentimes have the potential to be the most creative. One of the reasons why I really focus on things that are tangible, that you can hold, is because I want people to understand that the people in this book, the people on the show, are no different than you and me.

• 24:33Speaker 01

  Like, you can imagine, right? Taking pita bread and toasting it, cutting it up and toasting it, and sprinkling Parmesan on it, and then selling it to people. Well, that's what Stacy Madison did. You know, she was a social worker. She turned a pita chip, like baggies of pita chips, that she was packaging with twist ties, and selling out of a sandwich cart that she had in downtown Crossing in Boston. Selling it for a dollar, she turned that into Stacy's pita chips, you know? With very, almost no outside investment, and all of it came from her friends and family. And that was only after people were coming to her sandwich cart asking for pita chips, you know? Tate's Bake Shop, I mean, it's the same story.

• 25:17Speaker 01

  You can imagine baking cookies and turning it into, or 1-800-GOT-JUNK. I mean, Brian Scudamore had a truck, and he started hauling junk out of people's homes in the $800 truck he bought. And then when fees from hauling stuff out of people's homes paid for his truck, he bought another truck and then hired a friend. And that's how he started the business, you know? And I'm really inspired by those stories because I really think that they connect with most of us. Most of us are not going to go and code an app like Stripe. We don't have... Those skills, you know, the Collison brothers are geniuses. One went to Harvard, one went to MIT at like 16 years old. You know, these guys were able to code the line to create this internet payment system.

• 26:03Speaker 01

  But most of us are more like Stacy Madison, you know, which is what I love. And that's why I think, to me, entrepreneurship, of course, it is Stripe and it's Airbnb and Uber as well. But it's also, you know, it's also people like Nancy Twine, who created Brio Gio, which is now one of the fastest selling hair care products at Sephora, that she really built literally on her own with no experience in that world and very little money as well. So that's, that's why I like to focus on, on people like that. Because as I say, I, I think they're more like us.

• 26:38Ryan Holiday?

  No, and I, I butt up against that with, with the philosophy stuff, right? Because people have this image of philosophy, either being this, you know, distant, dead, white guy who's a genius like Aristotle, or they think it's some turtleneck professor at Harvard. They don't think, you know, Epictetus was a slave and they don't think of the generals and the soldiers. And they also don't think that the vast majority of philosophers who have ever lived, we've never heard of, because they didn't write anything down. They were just philosophical in how they live. And so we tend to, it's like we mythologize the stuff to a level where it then becomes unattainable. Maybe that's, maybe we do that so we don't have to try. But one of the things I've sensed from you, and this is sort of there briefly in the book, but not, not too much.

• 27:22Ryan Holiday?

  I got this sense that you kind of have almost a love hate relationship with entrepreneurs and entrepreneurship. Like I know your parents were entrepreneurs. I know now you're, if you had to take, your, your show is an entrepreneurial venture. And, and yet you're, you don't quite see yourself of that world.

• 27:42Speaker 01

  It's interesting. I mean, I you're right in the sense that it doesn't come naturally to me. You know, I was I grew up at a time I'm in my mid 40s. So I grew up at a time when the safe and respectable path to a successful life was studying hard, going to good school and getting a job, you know, a professional job like a lawyer or a doctor or, you know, some kind of an accountant or in finance, right? But which none of those things appealed to me. I mean, for me, it was journalism. And that really was the path I took. You know, that's what what I thought I wanted to do. I also think that when I was younger, there was a kind of a shady. It seemed like there was a shadiness about what we thought of as I mean, no one talked about entrepreneurs.

• 28:27Speaker 01

  It was like pitchmen, you know, it was like people selling selling their their things on on infomercials on late night TV. It was a different world and also a less transparent world. So you weren't always able to really know what was behind the products that were being pitched to you. The reality is that the world has, you know, I think over the last 20 years has changed so dramatically when it comes to entrepreneurship and and building businesses. It's easier today than it it's ever been before to start a company. I mean, you can start one in the next hour by, you know, going to legal zoom and forming a corporation or an LLC or sole proprietorship or whatever it might be.

• 29:08Speaker 01

  I think over time, you know, as I as I kind of understood the kind of career that I wanted to have, the ideas of entrepreneurship became much clearer because really what I what what it what occurred to me fairly early in my career actually was that I didn't want to rely on on anyone else to determine the course of my career, the path of my career. You know, I I ran into so many obstacles, which I love that you talk about that and you've tattooed on your arm. Because I ran into so many obstacles. In throughout my career, in the form of people saying, no, you can't do this, or you can't be this, or you can't have that position, or you, you know,

• 29:52Speaker 01

  you're not right for this. Like, I had people tell me, you're not right to be a host of an NPR show. You don't have the voice. You don't have the personality. You know, I had people say, you're, you don't sound warm. You're too much of a war reporter. You, you, you, you cover the military. That's what I used to do. You don't have what it takes. And I really internalized that early in my career. It really affected me. And it was only when I stopped believing that, and I started to tell myself, I need to get control over my career and over what I want to do with my life, which was very simple, by the way. I, it wasn't about making money or being famous or any of that. I wanted an interesting life. That was it. I wanted to do things that were interesting.

• 30:34Speaker 01

  I wanted to travel around the world. I wanted to talk to interesting people. I wanted to be able to be energized by the things that I was exposed to. And once I kind of made that decision in my mind, I, I kind of began to chart a path slowly that would lead me to my own kind of entrepreneurial journey, which was, you know, leaving the company I worked for and creating my own business. And, you know, here I am today. And so it's true. I didn't come from that. You know, my, my parents were entrepreneurs. They had a small business, a jewelry store. And I saw them struggle to get that off the ground. My dad was in his 40s when he launched that.

• 31:16Speaker 01

  But eventually, he was able to, you know, raise four children on that small business and, and give them a good life. And so it's taken me a while in my life to kind of reassess his experience and to understand that actually, it was all worthwhile, even though when I was a kid, I saw a lot of struggle. And so today, you know, I've kind of made this, it's sort of like a full circle, right? Which is, I have a much deeper appreciation for, obviously for entrepreneurship, now that I've, you know, gained a really strong understanding of it and have become one myself. But it doesn't come naturally to me. It's, it's still something I have to work very hard at.

• 31:59Ryan Holiday?

  No, and I wonder if that's why you're so good at talking about it and breaking it down because you're like, you know, they'll talk about like the best baseball player, the best baseball coaches were pretty good at baseball, but not great. Because when it's naturally there, you, it's just operating in an intuitive level. Like, what I like about your stuff is you, you talk about it, but you're not, you're not just a cheerleader where it's like, everyone should do this, everyone can do this, it's easy, all you need is an idea, and then you become a billionaire. I get the sense also you have a, not a jadedness about it, but there's a little bit of cynicism there for you about maybe some of the sort of Silicon Valley mythology and marketing apparatus that has started to be built around

• 32:43Ryan Holiday?

  this entrepreneurial trend in our culture.

• 32:46Speaker 01

  I mean, I think, I think I would, I would say maybe skepticism rather than cynicism, just because I think that cynicism scares me. I think it can be really dangerous, but skepticism's important. I mean, one of the, one of the things that I am skeptical about is this rush towards quick money. You know, you see a lot of, a lot of smart people, I mean, some of the smartest people on earth are concentrated in the tech sector, in Silicon Valley, in Austin, Texas, in Boston, Massachusetts. And, you know, it's still the case that some

• 33:25Speaker 01

  of the greatest minds in the United States are focused on creating more, you know, software as a service, the better version of, you know, accounting or, or team management or productivity software, you know, they're focused-

• 33:42Ryan Holiday?

  Or games.

• 33:43Speaker 01

  Or games, or apps, and they're making a lot of money off of it. I know this because my children play all these games, buy the in-app purchases. Look-

• 33:53Speaker 01

  I'm not, I don't want to take anything away from anybody because people, you know, want to make a living. At the same time, I don't think there are enough Pat Browns in the world. You know, Pat Brown, he could have done anything he wanted to do. He was a biochemist at Stanford. He was on the fast track to winning a Nobel Prize. He had done incredible research, cancer research, that helps to create treatments for cervical cancer and breast cancers. He'd done groundbreaking AIDS research in the 80s. This is a guy, you know, he had tenured Stanford, and he just realized that he really wanted to make a huge contribution to the world in some way with the knowledge he had. And he chose

• 34:36Speaker 01

  to focus on climate change, and that was the genesis of his company, Impossible Foods. Like, it is now worth, you know, many billions of dollars. He doesn't care. He lives in the same condo he's lived in for the last 35 years, in Palo Alto. He does not care about money at all. He cares about one thing, which is reducing human consumption of mass-produced animal meat. He wants to produce meat from plants. He has already done so with the Impossible Burger, and he's going to improve it and make steaks and chops and other things over time. But he knew and knows that 15% of global climate emissions come from the production of livestock, clearing forests and raising too many animals for

• 35:20Speaker 01

  mass consumption. And that, to me, is the kind of big swing that is inspiring. You know, that's, that's the kind of story I want to hear more of. I want to hear, I want to see, and if, and if, how I built this in some way can inspire more Pat Browns and fewer, you know, service, you know, software as a service developers, then, then that's, then we've, like, we've done our job. You know what I mean?

• 35:44Ryan Holiday?

  Sure. No, no, I think that brings this full circle in a nice way, which is, society is facing all of these enormous collective action problems, from the pandemic to climate changes, you mentioned wildfires and, and... You know, broken government and, you know, all these things. And, and I think it's important that, that we see, what we need is that entrepreneurial spirit applied to those problems as well. And that starts with, as you said, the sort of belief in the agency that, that an individual can have an impact on. The Pat Brown story doesn't work if he doesn't think a human can do that.

• 36:24Speaker 01

  Exactly, 100%. And here's the thing, I think that, I mean, there are incredibly inspiring people like Bill Gates, who are putting their money into, into things that will change the world for the better. The reality is, though, that if there's one thing I don't want this book or the show to be, is to leave people with the impression that only business can solve these problems, that only private enterprise and entrepreneurs can solve these problems. It can't. There has to be a robust government solution to a lot of our problems, and it can happen. I mean, look at the United States government. During the Great Depression, there were millions of people out of work, so it created the, the

• 37:09Speaker 01

  WPA to put people to work. After World War II, millions of people came home with no prospects, so they created the GI Bill. You know, the government can, it can send somebody to the moon, right? You, you need, you need that kind of scale to solve huge problems. And I think it's really important for us to say and to acknowledge that while the way our government is structured and the leaders who are running the government now are not up to the task, the institutions of government are. You know, I lived in Washington DC for 15 years. My wife worked for the government. I saw some of the brightest minds in the United States devoted and committed to making this country a better place.

• 37:53Speaker 01

  Many of them are no longer working in government because they were pushed out or, you know, they were not part of this administration. There is a, not a role, there is the most important singular role for government to scale change in concert with business and private enterprise. And it has to happen because we don't have another choice. And, and, and, and we are, we are at a place in history, a point in history where we've got to do it. We've got, we've got, we've got to marshal our energy and do it.

• 38:27Ryan Holiday?

  No, and I just, I just finished, Walter, he wrote this book in the eighties, but Walter Isaacson wrote a book about the wise men, which was the sort of the entrepreneurs of the twenties and thirties, the Ivy League, you know, elite of that time, all sort of collectively decide, you know, we're going to take a break from Wall Street and private enterprise, and then the railroads, which is the Silicon Valley of, you know, today. And they went to work for FDR and Truman and Kennedy. And, and so I think that's the other part of this, your point is well taken. It's not that everything should be privatized and run by entrepreneurs. It's that some of these entrepreneurs and, and great minds who have been so well rewarded

• 39:09Ryan Holiday?

  in the private sector need to start looking and saying, how can I give back? And how can I contribute to society outside of just philanthropy? But how could I bring that expertise into government and, and help government learn some of the lessons that, you know, private enterprise has, has figured out over the last few years?

• 39:30Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, a hundred percent, a hundred percent. I mean, there is so much talent in this country. And we need that talent working at a national, at a national scale, you know.

• 39:47Ryan Holiday?

  In global scale.

• 39:48Speaker 01

  In a global scale. And you can't do that through private enterprise alone. And we have to, my hope is that if there is a, and I know some, some people listening may not like what I'm going to say, but I really hope there's a change in government this year. I think it's absolutely crucial. You know, whatever your politics are, I, I think we're at a really incredibly challenging moment in our history. And there is so much untapped talent in the United States.

• 40:18Speaker 01

  That has the ability and the capacity to really reshape this century in a positive way. And I know I sound like I'm talking in, you know, I don't know, superlatives, or I can't quite articulate what I'm trying to say, but I-

• 40:32Ryan Holiday?

  No, you're right. These are not our best people, to borrow somebody's phrase.

• 40:37Speaker 01

  Yeah. I mean, I'm sure there are people in the White House who are currently saying that about themselves, you know, but, but we have incredible talent. We, we need to marshal that energy. It's, we don't have a choice. We have to.

• 40:50Ryan Holiday?

  I love it. Guy, thanks so much. Appreciate it.

• 40:53Speaker 01

  Ryan, thank you. And thank you for, for reading the manuscript and your input on the book. I really appreciate it.

• 40:58Ryan Holiday?

  Of course. If you're liking this podcast, we would love for you to subscribe. Please leave us a review on iTunes or any of your favorite podcast listening apps. It really helps. And tell a friend.