The Psychology Of Success | Guy Raz

A podcast pioneer on failure, resilience, luck, work/life balance, and the power of questions. Guy Raz https://www.guyraz.com/ has been instrumental in creating some of the most iconic podcasts in the world, including Wondery's How I Built This, Wow in the World and TED Radio Hour. The New York Times has described him as "one of the most popular podcasters in history." This episode is part of our monthlong Do Life Better https://www.meditatehappier.com/podcast-playlists/new-years-2025-do-life-better series. We talk about: The challenge–and gift–of failure Getting comfortable with discomfort and risk The notion of luck The balance between your relationships and your work Why scale isn't always the answer Success vs. happiness And much more Related Episodes: Do Life Better https://www.meditatehappier.com/podcast-playlists/new-years-2025-do-life-better Sanely Ambitious https://www.meditatehappier.com/podcast-playlists/sanely-ambitious #321 The Joy of Being Wrong | Adam Grant https://www.meditatehappier.com/podcast/tph/adam-grant-321 Rethinking Success | Mia Birdsong https://www.meditatehappier.com/podcast/tph/mia-birdsong Sign up for Dan's newsletter here http://www.danharris.com Follow Dan on social: Instagram https://bit.ly/3tGigG5, TikTok https://bit.ly/3FOA84J Ten Percent Happier online bookstore https://bit.ly/46TZglY Subscribe to our YouTube Channel https://bit.ly/3FybRzD Our favorite playlists on: Anxiety https://spoti.fi/3Qa8kMT, Sleep https://spoti.fi/3MjtMxF, Relationships https://spoti.fi/3QvyA5J, Most Popular Episodes https://spoti.fi/3QxZASc Full Shownotes: https://meditatehappier.com/podcast/tph/guy-raz-896

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

• 0:04Dan Harris?

  It's the 10% Happier Podcast. I'm Dan Harris.

• 0:18Dan Harris?

  Hello, everybody. How we doing? When you look at somebody who's happy, been successful in their career, it can be fascinating to ask, how did they do that? How'd they pull that off? And I'm not just talking about the tactical business decisions, or who they knew, or where they went to school. I'm talking about how did they manage their mindset through all of the inevitable ups and downs? How'd they know they were on the right path in the first place? How did they choose their partners? How hard did they work? And what did they have to sacrifice? In other words, I'm talking about the psychology of success. Today, I'm going to talk to somebody who has achieved enormous success through investigating the very process of success. Guy Raz is a podcasting pioneer. Perhaps his signature show is called How I Built This,

• 1:01Dan Harris?

  where he talks to titans of industry about how they got there. In the process, Guy has become a titan of the podcasting industry. His other shows include Wow in the World and The Great Creators. He's also written a number of books, including one called How I Built This. In this conversation, we talk about the challenge and the gift of failure. We talk about getting comfortable with discomfort and risk. We talk about the notion of luck, the balance between your relationships and your work, why scale is not always the answer, success versus happiness, and much more. Just to note, this episode is part of our month-long Do Life Better series. This week is all about work-life balance. On Monday, we had Kristin Neff and Chris Germer talking about burnout. On Wednesday, we had Nolita Tsanguiway

• 1:44Dan Harris?

  talking about mindfulness and managing stress. You might enjoy those episodes. You do not need to have heard them in order to enjoy this one. We'll get started with Guy Raz right after this. Real progress starts with action. As the executive director of the Honold Foundation, Emily Tietzworth works to expand access to solar energy in communities around the world, supporting locally-led projects that bring reliable power, greater independence, and opportunity where it is needed most. On the podcast Planet Visionaries, professional climber and Honold Foundation founder Alex Honold goes beyond the headlines with Emily to explore practical solutions for a more equitable future. In partnership with the

• 2:26Dan Harris?

  Rolex Perpetual Planet Initiative, this is Planet Visionaries. Listen or watch wherever you get your podcasts.

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• 3:34Dan Harris?

  Guy Raz, welcome to the show.

• 3:36Speaker 03

  Thank you for having me. It's great to be here.

• 3:39Dan Harris?

  I'm excited. This is a big get for us, so thanks for making time. You know, I want to talk about success, for lack of a better word. But one thing that's interesting in your work and in your life is that you spend a lot of time talking about what some people think of as the inverse of success, which is failure. You get these big titans of industry on your show and you press them to talk about failure. And then I know failure has been a real theme in your discussions of your own career. So before I ask you a specific question, does that insight land for you?

• 4:11Speaker 03

  Oh, 1,000%. A thousand percent. Yes, it's it's sort of the story of my life. And I think the story of of a lot of people's lives. And I I try and think about it. So it doesn't become this kind of pathology of self victimhood, you know, but I try to use it as a motivator, because I think failure in my life has been really hard, but it's also been an incredible gift, which sounds like a motivational speech. But it's true. It's been true in every case. It's almost like there's a force at certain points in my life. And I think a lot of people can relate to this. You will fail. You will suffer during this failure. But don't worry,

• 4:51Speaker 03

  it has to happen. And I find that theme recurring again and again, in almost every interview I do on my shows.

• 5:01Dan Harris?

  I want to talk about what you've learned from other people's failures. But let me just stay with you for a second. What are the failures that have been instructive and useful, although painful for you?

• 5:11Speaker 03

  You know, the profession that you and I kind of chose and got into is full of just like small daily failures, right? Just trying to get a story, contacting somebody who won't talk to you, not getting an assignment. It's full of strong personalities and egos and all those things. For me, I always wanted, from the time I was pretty young, you know, like in middle school, I wanted to be journalist. I was a student journalist in middle school. I was the editor of my high school paper. I was an editor of my college paper. Like, that's really what I wanted to do. There was something about that profession, not something, I knew what it was that appealed to me. And I think you could probably relate to this,

• 5:53Speaker 03

  which is, I am at my core, and I've grown, I'm almost 50. So I've I've learned to kind of navigate the world. But at my core, I'm socially awkward. I'm introverted as well. I always was, in a way, whether it was justified or not, I always felt a little bit like an outsider, a lot, for a variety of reasons. And I'm not entirely sure why, but I always did. And

• 6:18Speaker 03

  Being a reporter to me, whether it was holding a notepad or a microphone, it was like this magic tool. It was like Clark Kent going into a phone booth. He just put the cape on and then he could fly. I had this notepad, I had this microphone, and it was like permission to talk to anybody, to ask anybody a question. Because it wasn't, probably because it wasn't about me, it was about the mission or the purpose that I was serving, which was to tell the story. And so for me, pursuing journalism, becoming a newspaper reporter, it was like a way for me to actually try to be a normal human being. And so that was really what I wanted to do. And from the beginning of my career, really early on,

• 7:03Speaker 03

  I mean, where I landed was the result of failure because I really had no intention of going into broadcasting. I really wanted to be a print reporter. That was my dream. But in 1997, that was a tough job to get. I mean, I applied to every single magazine and newspaper you can imagine, from the New York Times, the Washington Post, to the Boston Globe, and the Dallas Morning News, and the San Francisco Chronicle, and the LA Times for internships, Chicago Tribune, I mean, papers that, you know, sort of barely around anymore today. The New Republic, The Nation Magazine. I got one interview and it was with The Nation Magazine, but I didn't get that internship. I didn't get any of those jobs. I had graduated college and it was rejection after rejection.

• 7:48Speaker 03

  And so I moved to, and NPR too, by the way. I had applied to NPR to be an intern twice and didn't get it. And so I moved to Washington DC when I was 21 and just started temp work. I went to a temp agency and this was a time where I think, I described this to people in their twenties and they're like, wait, what? That was a job? It was a job called data entry, where you actually typed things into a computer so that the files, the paper files, could be digitized and humans would just type all day, you know, right? And you got paid like eight bucks an hour, which in 1997 was a lot of money. And I happened to move to Washington DC to do that job because I had some friends from college there. And about two weeks after I arrived,

• 8:32Speaker 03

  I got a phone call from my dad, who received a phone call on his answering machine from somebody at a place called NPR, which he did not know what it was because he didn't, I didn't grow up listening to NPR. My parents didn't know what it was. It's somebody from... PPR NPR left a message and I scrambled. Long story short is they had an intern that they had selected for the fall of that year, who dropped out because he got a paying job and they basically went to HR, got a pile of resumes and they just started going through them, calling them. And I called back right away and I said, I'm in Washington DC. Can I come in for an interview? And that was it on How I Built This. I talk a lot about luck, which I'm a big believer in. I got an internship because I was there.

• 9:13Speaker 03

  I was a warm body and I was the first one in and I connected with the producer who was hiring. And that's why I went into broadcasting. I mean, that was the first kind of, not lesson I learned, but the first result of failure was that actually it was sort of meant to happen. I was not meant to go work in those places because I landed in broadcasting and started at NPR as an intern in 1997.

• 9:37Dan Harris?

  I want to come back to luck, but let me just stay with failure for a second. One of the things I've read about you and from you since I heard you were coming on and I started preparing for this, and this really resonated with me as somebody who's spent a lot of time in broadcast journalism, is that you felt like you got passed over for a lot of big jobs within NPR as your career progressed. Am I reading you correctly when I say that?

• 10:02Speaker 03

  Yeah, for sure. And I think this is a really common experience for people in that. Proficience is weirdly like competitive and it can be cutthroat environment. NPR was a little bit different. You know, I was at CNN for a couple of years. I had left NPR and had gone to CNN as a reporter, which was much more cutthroat. It was a completely different environment. I wasn't prepared for the world of television, but it was interesting and I still remember that time with some fondness. But you know, my dream was to, I wanted to be a foreign correspondent and I got to do that. I got to spend almost seven years overseas for NPR and then for CNN. And it was just an incredible experience. Well, I mean, there's no other way to describe it.

• 10:46Speaker 03

  I was able to cover four wars, Iraq and Afghanistan, the Balkans, Israel, Palestine, went to places that I'd never go to as a traveler, Kosovo and Kashmir, Kazakhstan, all of these unusual places where I was able to really.

• 11:05Speaker 03

  You know, see and experience things that I don't think I know I would never have been able to do if I wasn't there as a reporter and journalist. And eventually, when I came back to the United States in 2007, I had left CNN in 2006, and I didn't have another opportunity. I didn't have another job there. They offered me a position to stay in the Middle East, and I needed to come back to the United States. I was married. My wife was starting her career as a lawyer. We had to come back. And so I came back to Washington DC, kind of with my tail between my legs, begging NPR for a job. And at that time, you know, I had left a couple of years before because I went to CNN, and they were sort of like, okay, well, see you later. And they did give me a job, a temporary job, when I came back.

• 11:49Speaker 03

  And this was a really difficult period in my career because I had been overseas for seven years at that point, had covered all these wars and filed hundreds of stories. I was on CNN. And the job I got when I returned to Washington DC was to write web copy for the foreign desk at NPR. And it was a really humbling, and I use that word carefully because a lot of people use that word a lot. You know, I'm humbled to receive this honor, and I'm humbled to receive this. And you're like, no, you're not humbled? Why are you humbled to receive the honor? Just own it. But it was humbling, and I don't want to say humiliating, but a little bit. It was hard. I was coming back into the building in 2007, and I was writing web copy.

• 12:31Speaker 03

  And at the time, I had just come off from, you know, being a reporter and traveling the world. And nothing wrong with writing web copy, it was just very hard for me. But it was also a really important lesson because I had to just buckle down and do the best I could do and work really hard at doing a good job. And it took a couple of months, but eventually I was able to sort of slowly get back on the air. And, you know, I went through this sort of period of time where what I really wanted to do, what I really wanted to be was an anchor. I wanted to be the host of a news program, like All Things Considered. And I had really tried for years to get on the air and to become a host on different shows. And it was very hard.

• 13:13Speaker 03

  I couldn't convince the powers that be at the time to give me that chance. And, look, they weren't wrong. I don't always present As the most charismatic or the warmest person in different settings. I think I'm just introverted and I bring everything I can bring to the show, to the microphone, to the interview. And it was really hard for me to convince bosses there to give me a shot to be a host. And at the time, they were gatekeepers. So there were periods in my career where I really, I was constantly looking for other opportunities, like should I do this kind of work? Should I, I would be looking around for work outside of journalism.

• 13:52Speaker 03

  But eventually I did get to host Weekend All Things Considered as a trial run. The short version of it is the executive who denied me the opportunity to do it left NPR. And so all of a sudden, you know, I, the window was open and I could do it. I was given a chance to do it. And I, you know, basically ended up doing that job for a couple of years. And I really threw myself into that job. It was a weekend show, it was on Saturday and Sunday from five to six, a really small audience. But the amazing thing about it was that because the executives and the leadership at NPR didn't listen to that show, we could really experiment.

• 14:32Speaker 03

  And it was this really magical time in my career because I was working with a really talented young producer. We were both younger. We started to build a team with like interns and just recent college grads who were really smart, many of whom are still in public radio, many of whom I'm still very much in touch with today. And we started to experiment. We started to do things that were just kind of weird. It's like, remember the late show guy from CBS?

• 15:03Dan Harris?

  Ferguson?

• 15:03Speaker 03

  Ferguson, yes. He would do all these weird things, like bring out puppets and stuff on the show because it was the late show, you had a smaller audience. We were able to do some weird quirky things on the show and it was really fun. And what I really wanted to be, what I wanted to do, what I thought I wanted to do was to be the weekday host of that show. That was my dream. You know, I'd grown up like worshipping people like Robert Siegel and Noah Adams and Linda Wertheimer, who I worked with and worked for. I thought you had to tick all these boxes to do that job. You had to cover Washington, you had to be a foreign correspondent, you had to get experience, you had to do a lot of reporting, and then you got to a point and you could

• 15:46Speaker 03

  maybe do this job. And when it, when there was an opportunity, an opening to do that job, this was about 2011, this was my moment. I'd waited for this moment my whole career and I thought this was it. This is gonna be the thing I'm gonna do for the rest of my life. And I didn't get it. Not only did I not get it, but the way it was delivered to me was hard. I was given some really tough feedback. And essentially, the feedback I was given was that I didn't have the warmth of a Scott Simon, Susan Stamberg. I didn't have that kind of ability to connect with people. And I, I didn't believe that. I didn't

• 16:27Speaker 03

  agree with that. I, it was very hurtful to me. But it would prove to be this incredible gift because that decision, basically coupled with my just overall feeling like I, I was not that interested in news as much, kind of prompted me to look outside. You'll remember this. I mean, around 2011, the country was way less polarized, but there already was a lot of polarization. You know, it was the Obama era, there was a lot of anger from different parts of the country. There was the Occupy movement, there was a Tea Party movement. I was already feeling like the feedback I would get from listeners occasionally was starting to get a little bit angry. And I wasn't that interested in it. I didn't feel like

• 17:09Speaker 03

  Telling the news or reporting on the news wasn't necessarily moving the needle. I didn't feel like I was having the impact that I wanted to have when I first got into the profession, because I think a lot of people in this profession who go into journalism, go into it because they want to maybe make the world a better place, or see if they can tell stories that give people a better sense of how other people live, or, you know, perspective on how other people think. And I started to wonder whether there was another way for me to do that. And when I didn't get that job, it really prompted me again to think about what is it I want to do? And again, I started to look for work outside of media and journalism. I started to look for anything that could be interesting.

• 17:52Speaker 03

  And what happened was, at that time, the podcasting had existed, but nobody was really listening to it. You still had to plug in your iPod to a computer and download it. And, you know, it was clunky and it was just this weird kind of thing. There was Marc Maron, Joe Rogan was there, but it was still very niche, right? But NPR was starting to look into this more deeply. And at the time, TED, the organization TED, the TED Talks company, they approached NPR and they said, hey, you know, we want to start a podcast, but we don't know how to do it. And I had heard that they had approached NPR about this. So I kind of raised my hand and said, look, I think I can make this happen. I think I can create something.

• 18:35Speaker 03

  Initially, the TED people were skeptical of me because I wasn't a science person. I didn't have a science background. And I went through this very long process of trying to show them that I thought I could turn this into something interesting. And in the end, they agreed and I was brought on to help build this show. And that was a moment that was also, for me, was a transitional moment because I thought this is a way for me to kind of figure out what to do next. 2011, podcasting was still just weird, you know? And I remember when I left the news side of NPR and I started in podcasting, I got emails from some of my very prominent colleagues at NPR and they were like, podcasting?

• 19:18Speaker 03

  Who is, I still have an email from somebody you know, who is going to listen to one topic for an hour? Who, how do you keep talking about something for an hour? I did not disagree. I wasn't going into that world thinking, oh, I'm going to show them. I was going into it thinking, well, we'll see how long this lasts. Because even though I was hosting Weekend All Things Considered, it still had an audience of 3 million people. You know, it's broadcast terrestrial radio. So there are still people driving their cars. At the time, it still had a large audience. Today, the radio audiences have plummeted. But at the time, it was still significant. And we started this show. We were getting some attention, you know, and again, in a niche way.

• 20:00Speaker 03

  But slowly, we started to gain more and more momentum. And then, of course, 2014 happens. Serial, the podcast Serial, comes out. And it's kind of this watershed moment, to coin a phrase, in our industry. And it just, podcasting blows up. All of a sudden, it becomes this mainstream thing. And we were making the show Ted Radio Hour, which was a really great show. It was a combination of TED Talks and interviews I would do with people who gave the talks, with really cool production. I had worked with the same team that many of the people who worked with me on Weekend All Things Considered came with me to that show. And that was it. That's how my entree into the world of podcasting began. It began as a failure again. Like, I didn't get this thing that I thought I wanted to do,

• 20:44Speaker 03

  that I wanted to be, that I thought I would do this for the rest of my life. But if that happened, I wouldn't be doing what I do now. It would be a completely different world and life that I live. I would probably be living in Washington DC and covering the news, which I think is a really difficult job to do and a job that, frankly, I'm not that interested in doing. So it was a blessing. Again, I go back to that weird aphorism, you know? It was a blessing. And I recognize it now. As hard as it was at the time, I was depressed and miserable and felt like a failure. And, but it was meant to be.

• 21:21Dan Harris?

  Yeah, I mean, there are so many similarities between our stories. I mean, I, you know, I was in TV at ABC News and I worked the weekends, never quite cracked into the week. I did get a job as the anchor of Nightline, which was, yeah, which was a weekday show, but not really one. It wasn't Good Morning America or the Evening News, which is what I had been gunning for my whole career.

• 21:41Speaker 03

  Right, because that's what they, that's what we're conditioned to, right? You get there as a young person and you're like, you saw Peter Jennings, right? Did you see there when you started?

• 21:50Dan Harris?

  Yeah, he was, he was my mentor.

• 21:51Speaker 03

  And he's the guy and like, and your parents are probably were probably so proud of you. Like, my parents were so proud of me, they didn't know what NPR was, but then they started hearing me on the radio and their friends would say, your son's on the radio and they were so proud. And, you know, my parents are not intellectuals, are very smart, but they're not NPR, public radio people. And so for me, it was like, God, I'm gonna, you know, I'm gonna get to this place, right? Because we think that's the thing that you should be going after.

• 22:16Dan Harris?

  So what's the lesson about, for somebody listening, about failure? How should we view and respond to failure?

• 22:29Speaker 03

  It's really hard because I can't say that I respond well to it when it happens. You know, I do my best to meditate as consistently as possible and not as consistent as I should be and probably certainly not as you. But by the way, I will say, when I do consistently meditate and do things like breath work, my brain is just better, it just, it's more resilient. It responds to these things in a better way. But I hate failure. You know, there's a line, there's that famous Tom Brady line, he's like, I hate losing more than I love winning. And there's something about that line that I, I understand. There's this kind of instinctive feeling that a lot of us have, I think a lot of people share, which is failure or losing is really hard and it's scary. And then business can be catastrophic.

• 23:14Speaker 03

  But what I have tried to learn over the years, as I've gotten more experienced with failure, as I've seen what has happened in the aftermath of it, I really do try and...

• 23:27Speaker 03

  Think about it as something that's supposed to happen. I know, and I don't talk about this. I'll actually never talk about this because it's just so private. But in the world that, you know, I kind of live in, which is, you know, the Bay Area. And I don't talk about religion, but I do believe in God. And again, I'll just stop there because I know it makes some people uncomfortable or whatever. But I feel like there's a reason why things happen. And it's not predestination or, you know, a plan or something. But there's, there are elements of that that I kind of hold on to that do help me through those moments. Because I've seen it happen in the past.

• 24:08Speaker 03

  There've been so many jobs and opportunities that didn't come my way. But had they come my way, that path would not have been as rich and meaningful and fulfilling as the one that I eventually took. And I don't attribute that journey, the direction to like my fortitude or my brilliance. I mean, a lot of it was luck. There are two forks and like, that was the fork I wanted to take, but it was shut down. So I had to take that one, but it turned out to be a better one. So I try to think about it in those terms and it becomes easier as you get older for obvious reasons. Because you see each failure as a building block in growth.

• 24:52Speaker 03

  And you start to realize, and I think meditation and things like meditation and even yoga have helped me think about the concept of a journey rather than a destination, which I love. Because there is no endpoint. It's not like, you know, you plant a flag and you're like, aha, look at me. I'm hosting how I built this and I've created a successful business and it's all over. Like, and it doesn't work that way. It doesn't work that way with business. It doesn't work that way with any of the founders that I've even, you know, people who've made a billion dollars. Like, they're not like Scrooge McDuck sitting in their, you know, their vault, like throwing their money up. They're still trying to figure out how to stay active, how to do something interesting, how to engage, how to be a part of the world. And so it has become easier over time.

• 25:34Speaker 03

  And now I try to take risks that I know could fail. Smaller risks, of course, and sometimes bigger ones. But I do try to take risks that I think I need to take because. Can I digress? I'm sorry, I'm talking so long.

• 25:49Dan Harris?

  No, I love it.

• 25:50Speaker 03

  I was thinking about this idea of injury or exposing yourself to discomfort or humiliation recently. I'm very good at exercising every day. I work out every morning and I work out in a very similar way. I do very similar routines. And one of the things that I've done over the last, really over the last five years as I've gotten closer to 50 is I work out with light weights, but I do very slow repetitions. So instead of just like trying to just pump weight up and down, which the older you get, the more likely you'll get injured doing that. I go very slowly, like really painfully slowly up and painfully slowly down with light weights.

• 26:33Speaker 03

  And after six or seven repetitions, it gets extremely hard, even with 15 or 20 pounds, because you're putting so much tension on your body, but you have to create those little tears in order to stay healthy and fit. And it's a weird analogy, but it's a little bit like exposing yourself to potential ridicule with a new idea. When I interview founders of businesses or companies, they are always putting themselves out on the line because they're coming up with an idea. Most of the time, people say, "Well, if this is such a great idea, why didn't somebody come up with it before?" And then they go through a long period where it's not working and they're really embarrassed about it.

• 27:18Speaker 03

  But eventually, you know, on the show, and it eventually works out. You can pick almost any episode of How I Built This to hear a version of that story. And I was thinking about this in the context of something that I've been doing in the last, I would say, few months. And it's putting out these videos about how I built this, about what I've learned from How I Built This, about lessons that I've learned in my life. It might sound like a perfectly normal, ordinary thing to do in my profession, my world, but for me, it's been really challenging because the idea of making videos and putting my face out there and saying, here's a story about this or that, or here's why you should

• 28:00Speaker 03

  think about this or that thing in this way, is hard for me because I think a lot of people in our generation look at social media as a form of narcissism. And nobody in their teens or twenties or thirties really does. Like, most people in that age bracket don't think it's weird for people to show off their bodies, you know, to show these beautiful places around the world where they're visiting. And for me, it's harder because it's not like native to who I am to go out and to make videos about these lessons that I've learned. But I've started to do it. And sometimes, some people who have been following me or have been listening to my shows for a while have commented and they're like, this isn't you,

• 28:43Speaker 03

  or this doesn't seem like you. And sometimes that stuff stings. But I have to remember that there's a bigger audience of people who don't know how I built this, or don't know the things that I talk about. And I try and remind myself that the things that I'm making and the messages that I'm delivering are designed to be useful to them. That I'm not asking for anything in return. I just want to offer up this information, or this lesson that I've learned, and hopefully it will be useful for you. And that's it. And I've just got to plow through it and see where it goes. And it may fail, you know, I may put these out there, and it may, there may be people, more people who hate them than like them, but it's worth trying. So yeah, it's this full circle of like, you've got

• 29:28Speaker 03

  to kind of test, get out of your comfort zone, be willing to fail, and understand that the failure is okay. Like, failure happens for a reason.

• 29:38Dan Harris?

  Yeah, I hear two things in that last, in that what you called a digression, although I think it was entirely relevant. But one is, yeah, getting comfortable with discomfort, the importance of risk, it's a prerequisite for growth and expansion. And then the other thing I heard is that you have to be keenly aware of and keep in mind as much as possible to be a little Simon cynic about it, your why, your purpose. Why are you doing this? Otherwise, you don't have a North Star.

• 30:05Speaker 03

  Yeah. Simon, by the way, I went to college with Simon and he's a friend of mine. And he's such a smart person. And it's just been so cool to see how he's created a world around his ideas. You know, I just got back from a trip to Italy. We did a family trip. It's amazing. We did this two and a half week road trip with my kids, two teenagers, so my wife and my kids. And it was the first time we did a family vacation that was really a touristy vacation. You know, we had guides, we went to Florence and Siena and Ribeiro, and we learned about the Italian Renaissance. And we went to Ostia and Rome and had tours around ancient Rome. And what was so amazing about that trip was how people

• 30:50Speaker 03

  repeat themselves. I don't want to say history repeats itself, but people repeat themselves and themes repeat themselves. Like, on this idea of failure, we were in Florence. Florence, you know, has the famous cathedral. It's this black and white cathedral and it's the Duomo there. And there are these famous bronze doors on the baptistry. And they were created by this artist named Ghiberti. There was this competition in Florence. The Medici's who ran the city, they had the competition to, who wants to design the doors of the cathedral? And all of these great artists, you know, raised their hands. I mean, this is the time, there was like an 80 year period where like Leonardo and Raphael and Michelangelo like all lived. All these guys lived at the same time. It was this incredible flowering

• 31:34Speaker 03

  of culture and art and science. Anyway, so all these artists, they vied for this job. And there was a guy named Bruschi, and he was also a pretty good artist. And he really wanted this job. And he came in second place. He was the runner up. He didn't win this prize. It went to Ghiberti and Brunelleschi was, it was just a massive failure for him, personal failure. So he left Florence, which was the center of global culture. It was like the most important city in the world to be in if you were an artist, because the Medici's were just throwing money everywhere and Michelangelo was sculpting and everybody was there. Brunelleschi goes to Rome, just to see if there, there was other things for him to do there. And Rome was like, it wasn't that interesting. There

• 32:15Speaker 03

  wasn't much going on. But at the time, there was this renewed interest in ancient Rome. This is in like, the Renaissance period. All this excavation work was going on. All of a sudden, this guy Brunelleschi is like, looking at the Colosseum and studying the arches. He goes to the Pantheon and he's learning about this incredible Roman engineering, this art that was lost for almost a thousand years. He learns about how Romans used cranes and other equipment to build buildings. After about 15 years of doing this, he gets, he eventually gets work, working on the, on the Vatican, and his reputation starts to grow. Back in Florence, they're like, wait, why did this guy leave Florence? So about 10, 15 years later, they begged him to come back to Florence to work on the cathedral,

• 33:00Speaker 03

  to build the dome. And he ends up building the dome of the cathedral, which is a masterpiece. And today, everybody remembers Brunelleschi. Ghiberti's also remembered, but Brunelleschi is the guy that everybody remembers. And in order for him to be the guy who builds this beautiful, complex dome that was so, it's, it's unbelievable to think that they built this five, 600 years ago, with no modern equipment. I mean, he's the guy that everybody remembers. But in order to be that person, he had to have that failure 15, 20 years earlier. He had to kind of go into exile to Rome. He had to do that because had he not done that, he wouldn't have learned about how the Romans engineered all these things. And he wouldn't have gained that knowledge and wisdom that enabled him to

• 33:43Speaker 03

  then become this great architect. And it was so inspiring to hear that story because you hear that over and over again. Like even Michelangelo, the greatest painter in human history, like he was asked to paint the Sistine Chapel ceiling and he was so crushed because Raphael got to paint the side walls. Raphael was his like, great rival and, you know, and he's thinking, that guy got to do the side walls, I gotta do the ceiling? That's his masterpiece. I mean, that's why people go to Rome. They go to Rome to see the Sistine Chapel ceiling. No one's looking at Rafa. I mean, they're beautiful. The paintings are Rafa Eldon, but most people are just looking up, you know, and for Michelangelo, this was like this personal, like crushing kind of second helpings that he got. But you

• 34:27Speaker 03

  just never know. You never know why things happen the way they happen.

• 34:33Dan Harris?

  Coming up, Guy talks about the notion of luck and how it intertwines with that loaded term of privilege, the balance between your relationships and your work, why scale is not always the answer in business, and the balance between success and happiness.

• 34:56Speaker 04

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• 35:29Dan Harris?

  That kind of brings me back to this notion of luck. And also, I think when we're talking about luck, we should also talk about, and this is a loaded word that I always wince when I hear it or say it, but let's just say privilege too. Because I think for the two of us, we both had a lot of quote unquote failure in our careers. This is probably true for these ancient artists and sculptors and architects too. But we had nets. We both went to fancy colleges and are male in a culture where that's an advantage, et cetera, et cetera. So, yeah, just free associate for me, if you will, on this notion of luck and how it intertwines with privilege as we all think about like how to succeed.

• 36:10Speaker 03

  It's a really hard and complicated idea because, you know, for a variety of reasons, the word Has become loaded in our culture in the last few years for various reasons. And I think probably for me to break it down, there's a lot of validity to this idea that there are people who have privileges that are unearned, right? That just happened because of the way they're born. Like Prince Harry was born Prince Harry. He was born a prince. There was no way around it. He couldn't aspire to be that or to do that job. And I think that's a reality. Where I find nuance around that idea and that word is when it comes to

• 36:56Speaker 03

  other experiences of life. You know, I have interviewed people who, like Paul English is a good example. He's the founder of Kayak and he's a multi billionaire. And Paul is a man, grew up in an Irish Catholic home in South Boston, but he grew up in a rough part of town and had a very difficult upbringing as a child. He was thrown out of many, many different schools. He had enormous emotional problems and it was only in his mid twenties where he was diagnosed with bipolar disorder. But he went through hell in his life. And it's only in the last sort of 20 years where with things like meditation and yoga and medication, he's been able to find balance. So outwardly you would look at him and say, he's got it made.

• 37:41Speaker 03

  He's got everything, you know? He's this really successful billionaire, but inwardly he's had a tormented life. And I think that one of the challenges that we all face when we confront anybody, like you walk down the street and you live in New York, right? You live in the city?

• 38:00Dan Harris?

  Well, we moved out of the city to the suburbs during the pandemic.

• 38:04Speaker 03

  Got it. Okay. But you lived in the city for a long time and I always have this experience when I'm in New York, I'll be walking through New York City and I'll sort of pretend like I'm in a Robert Altman film where everyone you look at, then the movie like goes to their conversation or Quentin Tarantino film, and then like the movie just shifts and it's their story. Cause everybody you pass by is in their own movie. That's consciousness, right? Everybody is walking around where

• 38:28Speaker 03

  Star of our own movie and we don't know what's going on in someone's life. You don't know what somebody has dealt with in the last hour or week or day. Like you'll go on an airplane and you'll sit down and the person next to you might just seem like they're just a jerk or angry or they're shoving their bag under the chair. They might be headed to a funeral. They might be going to get treatment for cancer. Like you just don't know. There's that famous commencement address that David Foster Wallace gave, of course, before he died like 15 years ago. And he touches on this idea like you're standing in line behind this woman and she's taking forever. And you're just annoyed and you're mad, but what you might not know is that she's being treated for cancer.

• 39:13Speaker 03

  Just all these things that we can't know those things. We just don't have that information or that knowledge. The idea that I, I think is interesting is that, yes, there are real things like outward privilege based on a variety of factors. There are also things that we don't know about people. And I think that one of the things that I, I think makes most people interesting and actually a way that is often a way to connect with people that you might not ordinarily think you can connect with is that most people have had some kind of difficulty in their life or some kind of trauma or some kind of very painful experience or episode or a childhood memory or experience that has impacted their life.

• 39:57Speaker 03

  And so that's very real. I don't mean to minimize the notion of privilege, but I also worry that if we get too hung up on that idea, it creates a self fulfilling prophecy that others might say, well, because I wasn't born with these definitions of privilege, I can never do these things. I can never make it. And so, you know, one of the things that I've tried to do on how I built this is to really just focus on really a diversity of stories and people from really different backgrounds. Because I, I think that there are reasons to feel inspired by people who do things and create things and come from places and worlds that might not seem like.

• 40:41Speaker 03

  The path was paved for them. The flip side of this is to say that I am a big believer in luck. You know, I think luck is a, one of these big intangibles. I think I'm very lucky that I went through all these failures. The luckiest thing that happened to me in my life was meeting the person who's my wife. You know, I met her at a barbecue in Washington DC in 2000, the year 2000. She was a law student. I saw her there. We didn't talk. I then figured out a way to see her at another party the next day and I did talk to her. It was a month before I left to be the NPR Berlin correspondent. I met my wife a month before I left to go to Europe and then to be abroad for seven years. How was that going to work out?

• 41:25Speaker 03

  Why was that meant to be? But I believed it. And here we are 25 years later. We're about to celebrate our 20th wedding anniversary. And if you ask me what I'm proudest of in my life, it's not how I built this. It's not the business that, or it's not Tinkercast or Wow in the World or any of these things that I'm super proud of. I'm like, I can't believe I, I run businesses and I've got podcasts that lots of people listen to that has, you know, enabled me to build a, a life. It's my marriage first and foremost. That to me has been the most important thing and the hardest, not hardest, actually hasn't

• 42:04Speaker 03

  been hard at all because my wife is just an incredibly gracious and kind person. And, you know, I'm the difficult one in, in our marriage, but she's just an amazing person. But that's the thing I'm proudest of. But that was luck. If I didn't go to that party, she almost didn't go to the next one. I was about to leave, like all these things shouldn't have happened. And yet that's the single thing that has changed my life more than anything else.

• 42:33Dan Harris?

  You talk about relationships. Among all of these titans of ministry who you've interviewed, how important for those folks is the quality of their relationships? Do they tend to let the relationships wither because they're monomaniacally focused on work or are they drawing upon relationships as a source of strength?

• 42:51Speaker 03

  It depends, of course. It's different with every story. And there's certainly examples from the show where marriages fell apart because one of the founders was, for understandable reasons, really focused on building the business. We had an episode about a brand called Parachute, Parachute Home, which makes linens and has beautiful furniture and homewares. And the founder, Ariel Kay, you know, she, her marriage kind of unraveled while she was building that business and she had little kids. Of course, her ex-husband was also involved in raising the kids, but she was the primary caregiver and building this business with investors. And it was a lot. We've also had examples of businesses that have been started and sustained by couples.

• 43:35Speaker 03

  And one of the best examples is Cliff Bar. Cliff Bar was turned into a multi-billion dollar business with two married co-founders, Gary and Kit Erickson. And they are retired now. I just recently saw them and they are one of the most incredibly happy, strong couples I know. They're pushing 40 years of marriage and they have an incredible relationship. And I think, and I said this to Gary, and I think it's very true. You could argue that's your greatest success, not the business, but building a sustainable partnership with one person. It's hard to do. And I think that in a lot of cases, the business does get in the way. But there are also examples where it doesn't, where,

• 44:19Speaker 03

  you know, the founders really do figure out how to make it work, how to integrate their family into their work life. And I think that's much more common now. And you probably, you have two kids?

• 44:32Dan Harris?

  Just one, a boy.

• 44:33Speaker 03

  Just one. And how old is, how old is he?

• 44:35Dan Harris?

  He's nine.

• 44:36Speaker 03

  He's nine, yes. It's a great age. I have 13 and 15. You know, you probably don't like delineate between work and not work. It's not like people might say to you, oh, Dan, what are your hours, right? Like, what are your, what are the hours you work? And you're like, I'm always working, but it's because you, what you do is integrated into your life. Like you might be having dinner and have an idea or a thought and you might be talking to your wife and your son, but you also write something down. Or you might be on vacation and you see something that sparks an idea. It's not like, it's not like work and family time have to always be totally separated. I think if they're also integrated, that can work as well. And that's sort of the way I, I live my life.

• 45:18Speaker 03

  Like I will, sometimes if I go and do a live show, my family can come, they'll come. We'll just hang out, we'll go to Chicago for the weekend and do something fun and I'll do the live show and, you know, stuff like that. So I think there are ways that many founders have figured out how to kind of balance that, the personal side with the, the business side.

• 45:41Dan Harris?

  What conclusions have you drawn after having done all of these interviews and running your own companies about how hard one should work? And I asked this because I'm personally curious, but also there, there seem to be some generational differences on this that I think are very interesting. And I try to approach not from the standpoint of a grumpy old man who's saying, well, these kids don't take work seriously, but more like, huh, I wonder if these kids are on to something when they stress, you know, the, a stronger delineation between work and the rest of life?

• 46:16Speaker 03

  I mean, it's obviously a personal decision, right? I know you're the interviewer here, but if I can ask you a question, which is, because I read your book when it came out and I remember when that book came out and it was, not only did I love it because it was funny, it was very funny and really well-written and I learned a lot, but also I remember reading that book and thinking, this is a journalist who's an entrepreneur, like, and there were very few models of that. You know, there was like David Pogue had done some stuff and. There was this guy at ABC, Dan Abram. I don't know him. Dan Abram. He also did some stuff and he created businesses. So there were like a few models of that, but most people in our profession were like stuck. We like had the handcuffs on and like, we were like, well, what else could I do?

• 46:59Speaker 03

  Most people go into journalism and they're, they think, well, I don't know how to run a business. And the reality is most of them could, because there are so many things you learn as a journalist. You have to be nimble. You learn a bunch of different skills. You have to, you know, come up with a story on deadline and figure out how to get there quickly. Like you have to solve a lot of problems. There are a lot of things that you intuitively learn as a reporter or journalist that actually can work in running a business. But I remember reading that book and thinking, this is another person who's going to make that transition. I was kind of looking at those models because I knew that I don't want to work for a company. I wanted to work for myself. I didn't want to rely on the beneficence of a media organization or any organization to determine my fate.

• 47:42Speaker 03

  To say one day, well, we've got a hundred layoffs and you know, or whatever it might be. I didn't want to be in a position where one day I'd wake up and be like, I am screwed if I lose this job. And so that was a direction that I took more than 10 years ago to create my own business. And again, like looking at your book and other people who are doing things like that. And I eventually wrote my own book and then created my company. For me, work, I sort of tread lightly here, carefully here, because I love what I do. I'm very lucky. I get to talk to people and ask them about their lives and have these really intimate conversations and listen. Like what you're doing now is what I get to do every day.

• 48:26Speaker 03

  And I don't talk most of the time. I don't need to talk most of the time. I have found, and I think, you know, one of the gifts of, of this career, of getting to be a journalist. I don't call myself a journalist anymore, but having been steeped in that world is you have to listen. You have to learn how to listen. Listening is way more important than talking. And the benefits of listening, which you get out of that, I'm not the first person to say this or books about this, but the benefits are infinite to sit and to listen to somebody's ideas and then to engage with them and to ask them questions is.

• 49:01Speaker 03

  It is a privilege to be able to call somebody or call on somebody and sit down with them for, on our show, in our case, three hours on How I Built This, and really interrogate their lives, not in an adversarial way, but in a very granular and intensive way. It creates a bond with somebody. Like even this conversation, we'll talk over the course of this conversation. I've never met you, but I've read your book and I know a little bit about you. If I saw you on the streets in two years, I would say, let's, let's go get a coffee. Let's just sit down, hang out, because we've had this conversation. The thing is that's amazing is, and you know this, when you listen to somebody and you ask them questions, our brains are wired to want to like you.

• 49:44Speaker 03

  And Dale Carnegie wrote about this in How to Win Friends and Influence People. There's a whole chapter in there about like, ask questions, ask people about their lives, because that will make them more interested in you. And it's true. I develop these bonds with people, not out of design, but because that's just what happens when you're asking somebody about these intimate details of their lives. You don't have to be a journalist or reporter or host a podcast to do that. Like you can apply that to an encounter at a dinner party or at a party. By the way, when I do go to parties, and I still feel awkward in social situations, even, even though I've gotten a little better at it, my default is to just ask people a lot of questions.

• 50:27Speaker 03

  And the challenge now is that usually people say, are you just, are you interviewing me? Are you like doing your podcast thing with me? But it really is a way to build a connection with somebody. And so I don't put like a limit on work, you know? And I went to Italy and I write a newsletter every week and I was still writing that and still taking down notes for ideas and still talking to the teams that I work with, because it's just integrated into my life. So, but I think everybody has to make their own decision. I don't think there's anything wrong with saying, I don't answer emails after six and I don't answer emails on the weekends. Like that's also very healthy. But it all depends on how you want to structure it in your own life.

• 51:10Speaker 03

  And so for me, yeah, it's everywhere and nowhere all at the same time.

• 51:15Dan Harris?

  I really, there are so many similarities. First of all, that anytime I ask people questions, which I think is a great way to make relationships, I often get, are you interviewing me? I mean, that happens to me all the time. So just to point on that. But back to the work-life balance piece of it. I'm in the exact same situation. I love what I do so much. And so I'm always thinking about it and in some sense, always working. And also while I'm working, I'm also living my life and doing what I want to do. And so it's a very blurry line. I think where it gets complicated, there are two places for me at least. One is to what extent am I motivated by fear or anxiety or taking on too much as a consequence of that? And then the other piece of it is, what am I expecting from my teams?

• 52:00Dan Harris?

  Because for them, all I can expect from them is to do the best at the job that we've agreed upon, that they're, they're supposed to do, not that it should be as all encompassing for them as it is for me. And so I don't want to send them the signal that since I'm working all the time, they should be too.

• 52:18Speaker 03

  Exactly. And I think that communicating that is critical. You know, there's this something that you just said that is so important and that triggered this thought in my head, which is around this idea of scale versus sustainability. Right? And so in the world of how I built this, so many of the conversations are about scale. Like I started this farmer's market stand and I scaled it into Tate's Cookies and sold it for half a billion dollars to Mondelez. I mean, that's not the story Kathleen King told, but that's basically the story. Or, you know, Starbucks was six like coffee shops that didn't actually brew coffee, but just sold beans. And today it's the largest, the second largest quick service restaurant in the world. Right? It's scale, scale, scale, scale. You know, you start, you get investors and they want you to turn to a billion dollar company.

• 53:04Speaker 03

  The thing is, is that scale isn't always the answer and scale isn't always a sustainable answer. And it's not always a healthy answer. We did an episode of the show a couple of months ago and it was with Dominique Ansel. You'll know who he is because of you lived in New York and his famous bakery, the Dominique Ansel Bakery. And this is the guy who invented the cronut. Okay. And basically the backstory is he was an amazing pastry chef. He had worked for Daniel Balloud in New York. And then he struck out on his own. He opened a single bakery and one day he came up with this thing called a cronut and he just started serving it. And then within days, and this is in like, you know, the late 2000s.

• 53:45Speaker 03

  Lines started to form in front of the bakery until they were like two or three blocks long. Within weeks, camera crews were in front of this bakery, watching people wait in line. I still don't understand why people wait in line for anything. There's virtually nothing worth waiting in line for two hours.

• 54:01Dan Harris?

  Have you ever had a cronut?

• 54:03Speaker 03

  Yeah, they're great.

• 54:03Dan Harris?

  It's fucking delicious. Yeah.

• 54:05Speaker 03

  They're amazing. They're amazing. But two, but two hours, you wouldn't wait for two hours. You would just say, you know what? I'm gonna wait until this dies down. I'll come back in six months. And almost immediately after this happens, he is approached by every investor and person on this, unclutching cash and saying, dude, you've got to open a factory and just start making cronuts. And every supermarket should be selling cronuts and cronuts here and cronuts there. Just like license it, license your name. And then others were saying, you gotta build bakeries all over the world. And he started to do that. He built like three more bakeries in New York. He built one in LA. He built a few in Hong Kong, in Japan, in Las Vegas. He started to expand and expand. And that was the playbook. You expand. And all of a sudden, he woke up one day and he was like, I had over a thousand

• 54:50Speaker 03

  employees. I didn't feel connected to what I was doing. The work wasn't satisfying. Seeing my family, I wasn't, there were all kinds of things that were happening. And he was kind of given the gift, I say gift in air quotes, of the pandemic, because the pandemic really had an impact on the businesses and forced him to shut down many of the bakeries. But when they came out of it, what he realized was he didn't want to do any of that. And today, Dominique Gensel has a bakery, two, I think, two locations in New York and one in Las Vegas. And that's it. And they don't license a cronut. You can order them to be delivered to your house, but in general, you still have to buy most of the pastries

• 55:33Speaker 03

  they sell on site. It's a sustainable business. It's successful. It's not a hundred million dollar business. It was going in that direction of being, you know, hundreds of millions of dollars. Today, it's a business that is very successful, sustainable. It's got a really solid team working on it. Dominic Gensel is really happy and proud of what he's doing. And what I love about that episode is that scale isn't always the answer. Like oftentimes, you can build a much more interesting, fulfilling and rich life by doing something well. And if you're bringing in $10 million a year, $5 million a year, $1 million a year,

• 56:16Speaker 03

  like, does it really make a difference if you're gonna bring in two or five or 100 times that? If your life is going to be a nightmare? And I think the answer in most cases is no, I really do. And so to me, there are a lot of reasons why it makes sense. Even if you or I like love what we do and we're always doing it, like, not everyone around us wants to do it all the time. That's understandable. Again, like I identify with this Dominic Gensel story so much because we have a successful business that's sustainable in which everyone around me, I believe, because I talk to them a lot, is able to have a pretty healthy work-life balance.

• 57:00Speaker 03

  Not, probably not all the time. And certainly, you know, there are moments of stress. But I think that in general, that's important to most of the people I work with. And so we really do try and make it so.

• 57:15Dan Harris?

  I think there's a lot in that, that idea of that scale doesn't always have to be the answer. And it's not just about entrepreneurship. It's about how one approaches a career generally. There are a lot of messages from the larger culture bombarding us. Certainly when you and I were growing up, you know, lifestyles of the rich and famous MTV Cribs, that you gotta go for it, you gotta be big. I bought that. But actually, you can have, it really is individual. And it kind of goes back to what you were saying about work-life balance. It's up to you. You can have a great life with modest career ambitions. You don't have to follow anybody else's script. And so really just pick the path that's gonna scratch your particular itch.

• 57:58Speaker 03

  Dan, do you know the happiest person and the most fulfilled person? And actually, in many ways, Really, my model for aging well is my mother. My mother is a remarkable person. So is my dad too, but I just talk about my mom for me because I don't want my dad to get mad at me. Dad, I love you. My parents, they're no longer married. They're still cordial and stuff. They got divorced 30 years ago. My mother, you know, she lives in a very simple, one-bedroom condominium with her partner, who she's been with for 20 years. And they have an incredibly rich life. She takes long walks every day, hikes. She teaches five or six yoga classes a week.

• 58:42Speaker 03

  She's almost 78 years old. She's incredibly fit. She eats very simple food. She's not interested in going out to dinner and having fancy meals. They travel, but they travel really cheaply. I mean, they stay at youth hostels. They camp. They fix everything in their house. They have an incredibly rich, like Robert Waldinger, who you know well, right? And he led the famous Harvard study about happiness. And his conclusion was my mom's life, that the more relationships you have is the best determinant of happiness as you age. And I can walk around Venice, she lives in Venice, California. She knows everybody. Everybody knows my mom and they love her.

• 59:25Speaker 03

  And it's not that she was born, you know, happy and smiling and always joyful. Like, she's worked at it. She really has. She's practiced yoga for 50 years. And but she's also really worked at reminding herself why she has reasons to be happy, even with difficult things that have happened in her life and trauma that she grew up with as a child. She really does things like practice gratitude. And so, living the life she lives without the complexities of endless financial obligations and entanglements and properties and what matters to her is

• 1:00:03Speaker 03

  Friendships, relationships, experiences, her family, her kids, her grandkids, and teaching. You know, she spends a lot of time teaching senior citizens how to get healthier, how to do yoga. She teaches all these yoga classes every week. So to me, the idea of having a lot, you know, needing a lot, and it's a cliche, I know, but it's true. I mean, I, I, I see that with her. She lives on very little money and I don't know anybody happier or fulfilled than my mom.

• 1:00:37Dan Harris?

  There's a lot to be learned from your mom. There's no question.

• 1:00:45Dan Harris?

  Much more with Guy Raz coming up right after this.

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• 1:02:00Speaker 04

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• 1:02:33Dan Harris?

  As we vector toward the end of our time together, let me ask one more relationship-related question. The title of the show is "How I Built This." Does that, and I've titled many things, so I'm not trying to be persnickety about language here, but does that overlook the fact that nobody does anything on their own?

• 1:02:53Speaker 03

  Yeah, it's a horrible title. It's a horrible name. And if I could rename it, I would. Although that being said, the original name that I had for the show, and God, thank God, somebody was watching over me, that for some reason this name was already registered, but God, I would be so embarrassed if we were talking about the name of that, of the show today, was I wanted to call it "The Hustle." And thank God, that name was taken, because I would be really embarrassed, because it's not about hustlers. It's about people who work really hard and fail and fail and fail. It's not, of course, a show about "How I Built This." It's a show about risk-taking and creative thinking and struggle and setbacks

• 1:03:34Speaker 03

  and failures. And every episode, you learn about the people around the founder who helped them create it. But there's no example that I can think of on our show, or really in modern history, of anything being built by one person. You think about great creative founders, and you know, a good example is Elon Musk. Forget about his personal foibles or his politics or whatever for a moment, but just as a, an ideas person, right? He was a force that drove, you know, X, which became PayPal, and obviously Tesla, and SpaceX, and, you know, solar companies, underground hole drilling companies. He didn't actually

• 1:04:17Speaker 03

  found Tesla. He joined Tesla, you know, and bought into it, and then turned it into what it became. He did not do any of those things alone, and he would acknowledge that. I mean, PayPal and X, that involved Peter Thiel and Reid Hoffman and all these incredible people who were part of that process. Even Tesla, you know, he had great designers and great engineers around him. So- There's no question that the success of a founder is also the luck of the people that you find around you that you bring in because sometimes you bring somebody in and they're not the right person. So I acknowledge that the name How I Built This is not exactly or entirely accurate. It's not an accurate reflection of what the show is about. But

• 1:05:02Speaker 03

  as you know, in our business, sometimes we use shortcuts to make a punchier point. So would I rename it if I could? Probably. But at this point, we have the name and everybody knows it. And we do our best to mitigate that in the storytelling.

• 1:05:19Dan Harris?

  I don't think it's a terrible name at all. Guy, it's so cool to talk to you. You do such great work. So it's really cool to have you on the show. Just before I let you go, can you remind everybody of the names of your various podcasts and the book that you mentioned that you wrote? And just because I suspect people are going to want to get more from you after hearing you.

• 1:05:38Speaker 03

  Thanks. Yes, How I Built This is my show about founders, companies of some of the most well-known companies and brands in the world. I do a show called The Great Creators, which is similar to How I Built This, but it's with actors and musicians. So like Tom Hanks, or Jason Sudeikis, or Bjork. And then I do a children's show called Wow in the World. And it's a kids' science podcast for kids aged three all the way to 12. And that comes out twice a week. And those are my shows. My book also is called How I Built This. And then we've got a bunch of books through Wow in the World. And all of those are available at bookstores or Amazon. So you can search How I Built This or Wow in the World and you will find them there.

• 1:06:18Dan Harris?

  So cool to meet you, albeit virtually. Guy, thank you for coming on.

• 1:06:22Speaker 03

  Thank you, Dan. Thanks so much. Thanks for having me.

• 1:06:26Dan Harris?

  Thanks again to Guy Raz. A lot in that conversation. If you're a subscriber at DanHarris.com, you'll get a cheat sheet in your inbox. If you're not a subscriber, come check us out. One last thing I want to say before I let you go here. I want to let you know about an online event coming up at the end of January. It's called "When the Rubber Hits the Road: Living the Dharma in Difficult Times." It's presented by the Insight Meditation Community of Washington, DC, and it's happening on January 24th through the 26th. Here's a little bit of copy that describes the event via IMCW. "We're living in times that can challenge our ability to bring the compassion and wisdom we cultivate on the cushion into our everyday lives. Join beloved teachers Tara Brock, Doctors Larry and Peggy Ward, Sharon Salzberg,

• 1:07:11Dan Harris?

  Robert Thurman, Kazuhaga, Dhammapada Melissa Cardenas, and Hugh Byrne for a weekend of conversation, community, and practice. We'll discuss how Buddhist teachings help us examine our biases that fuel separation and hatred, the meaning of fierce compassion, and whether equanimity is even possible when so many people are living in trauma, fear, and uncertainty. And we'll close with how we can care for ourselves, our planet, and each other in ways that align with both our heartfelt beliefs and our individual callings. Offered by donation, the recordings are included. To register, go to IMCW.org/10%. I will put that link in the show notes. Again, that is the copy from the IMCW, folks. That's how they are describing this event.

• 1:07:54Dan Harris?

  I'm a huge fan of many, many of the folks who are involved in this event. In particular Tara Brock, who is the powerhouse behind IMCW. So I strongly recommend you check out this event. Before I go, just want to thank everybody who worked so hard to make this show. Our producers are Tara Anderson, Caroline Keenan, and Eleanor Vasili. Our recording and engineering is handled by the great folks over at Pod People. Lauren Smith is our production manager. Marissa Schneiderman is our senior producer. DJ Cashmere is our executive producer. And Nick Thorburn of the band Islands wrote our theme.

• 1:08:38Speaker 04

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