How I Built Resilience (Special Edition): Guy Raz

On this special episode, Stacey Vanek Smith interviews Guy about his brand new book, How I Built This: The Unexpected Paths to Success from the World's Most Inspiring Entrepreneurs. Stacey asks Guy about growing up with entrepreneurial parents, working overseas as a war reporter, and how elements of entrepreneurship have mirrored the trajectory of his own career. These conversations are excerpts from our How I Built Resilience series. Pre-order the How I Built This book at: https://smarturl.it/HowIBuiltThisSee Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

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

• 0:00Guy Raz?

  We get support from US Bank. A question I love asking founders. What's the one decision you almost didn't make? The one that changed everything? Because it's never the obvious stuff. It's never, I decided to start a company. It's the small, boring, Tuesday afternoon decision you barely remember making until you realize it's the reason everything after it either worked or didn't. Say you're 18 months in. Business is growing. You've got expenses coming from six directions. Gas for the van, office supplies, your phone bill, team lunches that are actually client meetings, and you're putting it all on whatever card you grabbed in year one. You're not thinking about it. Why would you? You've got bigger problems.

• 0:45Guy Raz?

  But here's the thing. Path A, you keep going like that. End of the year, you're sorting through statements, trying to figure out what went where. You've left hundreds, maybe thousands, on the table in rewards you never earned. Money that could have gone back into the business. Path B, you pause and get the US Bank Triple Cash Rewards Visa Business Card. Now, you're earning 3% cash back on gas and EV charging, office supply stores, cellphone service, and restaurants. You pick up an extra $750 cash back as a bonus. And you've got a low APR on purchases and balance transfers for 12 months while you're scaling. Same business, same expenses, two completely different outcomes

• 1:30Guy Raz?

  based on one small decision. Visit usbank.com/business to learn more. The creditor and issuer of this card is US Bank National Association, pursuant to a license from Visa USA, Inc. Some restrictions apply. Our presenting sponsor today is Anthropic, the team behind Claude. Every founder on this show started with a hard question. Not the marketing plan, the 2:00 AM kind. Is this idea any good? Am I the one to build it? Should I quit my job? Anthropic got built the same way. A public benefit corporation founded on one Hard question. How do we make sure AI goes well for people?

• 2:14Guy Raz?

  So they asked over 100,000 people their hopes and their fears and are publishing what they find, even the uncomfortable parts. Me? I've got my own hard question about AI. Here it is. If everyone has access to something that can help them write the business plan, build the prototype, analyze the market, maybe even come up with the idea. What separates the people who actually build something from everyone else? I don't have a clean answer yet, so I've been sitting with it with Claude. There's hope in hard questions. Ask yours at claude.ai/hibt.

• 2:54Guy Raz?

  Does your team want a website that looks and feels handcrafted but is still fast to ship? Well, Framer is built exactly for that. With Framer, you design on a visual canvas with responsive layouts, hosting and a CMS built in, so the work is production ready from day one. And you can get it done with help from Framer's AI agents. Framer is the AI website builder that helps creators, teams and businesses ship production-ready sites faster than ever while getting every detail right. Prompt, inspect, edit and publish in one place at a whole new pace. AI agents and humans work together.

• 3:36Guy Raz?

  The agents bring speed and scale and people bring taste, judgment and control. Learn how you can get more out of your site from a Framer specialist or get started building for free today at framer.com/built for 30% off a Framer Pro annual plan. That's framer.com/built. Rules and restrictions may apply. AI isn't just opening new business opportunities. It's changing the way businesses get work done. The questions they ask, the decisions they make, the routine tasks they can hand off. That's the idea behind NetSuite Next, the next generation of NetSuite with AI woven into the tools your business already relies on.

• 4:21Guy Raz?

  NetSuite Next surfaces insights exactly when you need them, puts agents to work on routine tasks and problems, and lets you ask complex questions in plain language, like talking to a knowledgeable colleague. But technology is only part of the story. AI is also reshaping how people and teams work together, and that shift is already underway. That's why NetSuite wants to put a new, expert-created business guide in your hands today. It's called Aligning for the Agentic Era: How AI is Changing Everyday Work. And right now, it's yours, absolutely free. Inside, you'll discover how AI could reshape work across your entire organization, and how to position your business to prosper from it.

• 5:06Guy Raz?

  If your revenues are at least in the seven figures, get NetSuite's free business guide, Aligning for the Agentic Era: How AI is Changing Everyday Work, at netsuite.com/built. The guide is free to you at netsuite.com/built. netsuite.com/built. Hey, everyone, and welcome to How I Built This: Resilience Edition. Now, usually on these episodes, I talk with entrepreneurs and other leaders about how they're navigating these challenging times. But, you know, over the years, a lot of people have asked me, how did you build How I Built This? So we decided to answer that question today with my friend, who is the host of this episode, Stacy Vanek Smith.

• 5:48Speaker 01

  Hello and welcome to How I Built This from NPR. I host Planet Money's Daily Indicator podcast, and I am here for a very special episode of How I Built This. If you have not heard, Guy has a book coming out on September 15. It is called How I Built This: The Unexpected Paths to Success From the World's Most Inspiring Entrepreneurs. And in it, Guy lays out some really fantastic, practical advice for people starting their own businesses. There are, of course, a bunch of very powerful stories from some of the world's most successful entrepreneurs. And my personal favorite part, there is the story of Guy Raz himself and the creation of the show. Guy Raz, welcome to How I Built This.

• 6:29Guy Raz?

  Hello, Stacy. Thank you. Thank you so much for doing this.

• 6:33Speaker 01

  I'm very honored to be here. And I mean, I hope you're not nervous.

• 6:37Guy Raz?

  I am a little bit. Because normally, I get to just sit back and ask questions, and then just stay quiet, and then the pressure's on the other person. So it's, yeah.

• 6:47Speaker 01

  But this is like, this is a very, I mean, in a lot of ways, this is exactly like the kinds of interview that you do with your guests. So I feel like this is particularly exciting for people. Anyway, to the book, the important business at hand. My favorite part is the story of how you built the show. So you started in the book talking about growing up, and your parents were entrepreneurs, actually, which I didn't realize. So talk a little bit about that, because you were not necessarily drawn to entrepreneurship.

• 7:14Guy Raz?

  No. I mean, my dad, he worked for a defense contractor as an engineer, and that was his career. My mom was a teacher. And at the age of 41, my mom and dad decided to start a business. I mean, decided, my dad decided to leave his safe, comfortable job as an engineer. And my mom, you know, stopped teaching, and they started a jewelry store selling pearls in downtown Los Angeles. And I remember, as a kid, watching my mom and dad go through like, lists of people to cold call, and go door to door in downtown LA, trying to sell their pearls. And it was, it was tough going. I mean, they're, you know, at 41, kind of with three children, starting his life again, his professional

• 7:59Guy Raz?

  career again. And it was, was tough. I mean, a lot of late nights, and a lot of struggle. And, you know, I didn't really fully appreciate it as a kid, of course. I just, you know, I noticed my parents coming home really late, or leaving for downtown LA really early. But as I got older and began to reflect on it, I realized how difficult it was to become an entrepreneur. And I think over the course of my early life, it seemed to me that what I wanted to do was the opposite of that. I didn't want to be involved with that. That was, it didn't seem stable. It seemed very uncertain. And I also grew up at a time where I think a lot of what we thought of as like business people or entrepreneurs, which wasn't widely used in the 80s.

• 8:42Guy Raz?

  There were a lot of pitchmen on TV selling products that seemed to be kind of half-baked.

• 8:48Speaker 01

  You mean like those infomercials when it was like, do you have trouble getting lids off of-

• 8:52Guy Raz?

  Yes, exactly.

• 8:52Speaker 01

  -cans of peanuts? And it's like, now you can buy this device with like free scissors and all this stuff, right?

• 8:57Guy Raz?

  Exactly. Like the Norelco blade, as close as, you know, shaves as close as a blade or your money back or the, you know, whatever it was. The Ronco products. There were all of these infomercials on late night TV with pitchmen. So when I was younger, I was very skeptical of what, you know, of people selling products because to me, it seemed, you know, they seemed like a scam.

• 9:19Speaker 01

  Right. And so you become a reporter at NPR, a war reporter, actually. And you're kind of on this track at NPR. Then things kind of go in a direction you don't expect. So tell us a little bit about that.

• 9:30Guy Raz?

  Yeah, I mean, I was really, you know, I was a news reporter and as you say, I covered wars. I mean, a lot of people, when I tell them this, they're sort of surprised because I'm not really an adrenaline junkie. It's not my natural state of being. I kind of fell into it. I mean, I was overseas before 9/11. There were some sort of skirmishes in the Balkans that I covered. And then after 9/11, if you were overseas, you basically were sent to conflict zones. And I was sent to Afghanistan and to Iraq. And then eventually, I worked for CNN covering Israel and Palestine. And then I came back to NPR and covered the Pentagon. So that's what I did for a while, for a long time. And then became a news anchor, of all things considered, on the weekend.

• 10:16Guy Raz?

  But you know, I think at a certain point, I, for a variety of reasons, decided that I wanted to leave the news world. You know, a lot of people go into journalism because they want to make some kind of improvement in the world. You know, I think a lot of journalists are committed to the idea of spreading information and truths with the hope that the more people know those things and understand them, the better the national conversation will be and the more engaged people will be and the more rational our debates will be. And, you know, steadily over the years of doing that, I didn't actually see that happening. I didn't, I didn't feel like I was making that kind of contribution. So I had an opportunity to kind of jump ship, in a sense, and to leave the news world and

• 10:59Guy Raz?

  then eventually to, to begin working on, on what are now, you know, podcasts. This is in 2012, when podcasts were still relatively kind of fringe, in a sense.

• 11:09Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah. I remember when I went into podcasts myself, I was trying to explain to my parents what they were, and my mom said, "So, it's like radio on the internet?"

• 11:17Guy Raz?

  Right.

• 11:18Speaker 01

  And I was like, "What have I done to my career?" I just remember being like, "Yes, it's radio on the internet." So, yeah, they were, it was very new and fringy.

• 11:25Guy Raz?

  Yeah, you were a reporter at Marketplace, and then you went to Planet Money.

• 11:29Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 11:30Guy Raz?

  And I, I sort of left the news world and went and collaborated with TED, and we created this show called The TED Radio Hour, you know, that had been created in the previous summer, and then I joined it and then we kind of relaunched it. And that was an amazing experience. And through that, really how I built this grew up, sort of came up. But the idea for it goes back about 12 years. I was really fortunate, earlier in my career, to take a year out and to do a fellowship. It's called the Nieman Fellowship. And it's at Harvard, and they basically pay your way to go there for a year as an adult. And I took a class at the business school. This was in 2008.

• 12:09Guy Raz?

  And on the first day of the class, we received a handout, and it was the story of how Starbucks was founded.

• 12:17Speaker 01

  It was like a case study.

• 12:18Guy Raz?

  It was a case study. It was part A. And I brought it home and I devoured it. It was so interesting. It was how Howard Schultz kind of navigated all the ups and downs and ended on a cliffhanger. And you had to wait a week to go back to class to get part B. And it was incredible. I had no idea that that is how business school was taught. And it planted a seed in my head. These are stories that can be told in a really deep, meaningful, powerful way, and also for free, because you don't have to pay the Harvard Business School tuition. So that's really where the idea began to germinate. And when I finally had the confidence to pursue it, it was about six or seven years later, I think in 2015, when I started to work on the concept for How I Built This. And we

• 13:03Guy Raz?

  launched it in 2016, almost exactly four years ago.

• 13:06Speaker 01

  That's amazing. One of the things that I loved reading about, too, was when you were in this class, reading these case studies, something struck you about the story of the building of a business, of an entrepreneur. And I wonder if you'll talk a little bit about that?

• 13:20Guy Raz?

  Yeah. I don't know if you ever saw this documentary that Bill Moyers did, I think it was in the 80s, and it's about Joseph Campbell.

• 13:26Speaker 01

  Oh, The Power of Myth. I think I've seen it like 100 times. I love that movie.

• 13:30Guy Raz?

  George Lucas is in it, and he talks about how Joseph Campbell influenced Star Wars. Joseph Campbell was a writer and a philosopher who basically codified this idea that most narratives, most epic stories, trace a certain narrative arc. And there are moments in those stories that are common throughout all stories, whether it's stories in the Bible, or Gilgamesh, or The Odyssey, Harry Potter. It's basically, there's a hero, she's different, or an oddball, and has an idea. And the people in the village think she's crazy, so she has to leave the village, and then go through a series of trials. She finds a mentor, she gets lost,

• 14:14Guy Raz?

  the mentor dies, she falls into an abyss, she fights a dragon, she's almost killed, she slays the dragon, she emerges from the hole. You see these patterns in all of these archetypal stories. And while in building a brand or a business, you're not slaying a dragon, there are extreme ups and downs that are so dramatic, that are so powerful, that they make for incredible stories. And so really- What How I Built This is, it's not a business show. It is a storytelling show told through the prism of business.

• 14:50Speaker 01

  So you have this idea and you have the background of a storyteller and a journalist, and you think these are the stories that people want to hear. And as humans, I feel like we are just drawn to the hero myth. I mean, Joseph Campbell makes the point that this is like, pretty much universal. All cultures have a hero myth. What do you think it is about the hero's myth that we love so much, that like draws us in so much?

• 15:12Guy Raz?

  I mean, I think we're drawn into it because there are elements of it that mirror our own lives. We will all experience grief and hardship and struggle and challenges and moments, maybe not this extreme, but moments where we're on the bathroom floor crying in the fetal position. What I think is so remarkable about the stories on How I Built This is that they're designed to be relatable. I want people to hear the story of Sarah Blakely and imagine Sarah Blakely going door to door selling fax machines. And after the 100th person tells her, please leave our premises, no soliciting, you can picture her in her car, just crying and saying, this is not what I want to do.

• 15:56Guy Raz?

  This is not how I want to live my life. And I think anybody listening to that story can relate to it. Sarah Blakely, of course, started Spanx and became the youngest self-made billionaire in American history.

• 16:07Speaker 01

  And was your first interview on How I Built This?

• 16:10Guy Raz?

  And it was our first interview. And we did that very deliberately because we wanted to signal that this show was going to be different. It wasn't going to be a show about fourth quarter profits or the latest earnings report or P and L, which are fine. I mean, there's a place for those kinds of shows.

• 16:29Speaker 01

  There's a whole channel that does that all the time. Yeah, it's very popular.

• 16:32Guy Raz?

  You know, it was going to be a show about story, a narrative-driven show, full of wisdom, ideas, and practical advice for people who don't have access to the many people we do. And because we have that access, we also feel great responsibility to open that person up. To just kind of unpack their experiences so we can deliver it to our listeners and our audiences who don't get to spend three or four hours with Sarah Blakely, you know, interrogating them about their lives.

• 17:02Speaker 01

  So you said something very interesting in your book, which I, which captivated me, and maybe this is too insider baseball-y, but you said when you started the show, you'd done thousands of interviews with all kinds of different people in all sorts of circumstances, but that you were actually quite nervous for your first How I Built This interview, which very much captivated my mind because I wonder like, what was that first interview like for you and why were you nervous?

• 17:28Guy Raz?

  Yeah, I mean, the way I think I express nerves is a little bit different. I mean, I get nervous, aversion, I experience aversion of nervousness before every interview I do. And it's not nervous about the, you know, meeting the person or being in a room with them or whatever it might be. I want it to be so powerful. I want the story to be so, you know, so resonant. I want it to be worth our listeners' time. If you, as a listener, are going to give me an hour of your time, I have to make it worth your time. I have to, I mean, an hour of your time is extremely valuable. You know, we have maybe three or

• 18:09Guy Raz?

  four hours at most of free time to ourselves every day and fewer if you've got people that you take care of. And I'm asking somebody to give me an hour of their time on a certain day to listen to How I Built This, I better be giving you something worth your time. And so that's really where the nervousness comes from. And with Sarah Blakely, I wanted that first episode to be so powerful. I wanted us to send a signal that we were doing something different, that we were going to create a show about business that was going to sound different, that wasn't going to include the usual suspects, that was going to be full of diverse voices. And I want every episode we do to be excellent. I want people listening to it to come out of that feeling inspired and energized and really motivated to power

• 18:54Guy Raz?

  through their day or their week or their business or whatever it is that is making their life challenging at that moment.

• 19:00Speaker 01

  I'm wondering if there's like a Moment from that interview that stands out in your mind where you thought, I mean, because this is like, you were risking a lot here. You had pitched this to NPR. This was your venture. This was your, you'd gotten this big get as far as an interview. This was a moment kind of to see if this was going to work. This was where the rubber met the road. And I'm wondering if there was a moment during the interview where you thought like, yes, this is, this is going to happen.

• 19:22Guy Raz?

  You know, probably from the first 30 seconds.

• 19:24Speaker 01

  Really?

• 19:25Guy Raz?

  Because she is so charismatic and wonderful and funny and dynamic and a wonderful storyteller and open. I mean, she has nothing to hide. We have one precondition for everybody who comes on the show, and it's very simple. It's, we don't accept any preconditions.

• 19:43Speaker 01

  Your precondition is that you don't accept preconditions?

• 19:45Guy Raz?

  Right. We don't say that to be difficult or to embarrass people, but a lot of, you know, a lot of famous people are used to doing interviews where there are, there's kind of a give and take. Like, I won't talk about this. They won't talk about that. They won't talk about that. And I totally respect that. That's fair enough, especially when it comes to celebrities who want to protect their privacy. On our show, we can't do that because we are avatars for our listeners, for our audience. Our audience expects us to ask the questions that they want answers to. So what I always say to our guests is, this is a 360 degree view of who you are. There's nobody on planet Earth who is perfect. Every single person has flaws. Everybody's made mistakes. Everybody's done stupid things.

• 20:29Guy Raz?

  That's the point of the show. It's to show your entire journey, you know, this full contextualized story of who you are, what you did, the mistakes you made, why you did them, what you learned from them along the way. And I think that's been really, you know, that's been a really important part of why the show connects with people because I'm actually much less interested in success than I am in failure. We learn so much more from people's failures than we do from their successes. If you heard our recent episode we did on Ring doorbells with Jamie Simonoff, 80% of that episode is about his failures and his struggles and his crises. Just a tiny part of it is when Ring really made it.

• 21:14Guy Raz?

  But it was such a powerful episode because here's this guy who sold his company for $1 billion to Amazon, but who, up until the very last second, was actually really struggling. And that's when we grow, when you, as a listener, grow as an entrepreneur and when I also, when I grow as a storyteller, when I learn from the hardships and the struggles and how people got through them, because I also internalize those. And I also, they also help me think about how to break through challenging moments and times when I'm going through them.

• 21:48Speaker 01

  Yeah, I also think the hero's myth can give a meaning to difficult times, which I feel like is especially important in difficult times, like we're all kind of going through right now as a country. And I do feel like one of the things that's so powerful about the hero's myth is when you hear it, you can see how the failure ultimately was part of the success. And I feel like that's a very powerful and important thing to hear over and over and over again. Like, I feel like it's one of those things you can't necessarily hear enough times.

• 22:18Guy Raz?

  Right. It's sort of why I structured the book that way. There are a lot of people out there who either are starting a business or want to start a business or just want to be inspired by the people who do these things, because a lot of us, most of us, many people, will work for big organizations, will work for companies. And I don't believe that being an entrepreneur just means that you're doing it on your own. Being entrepreneurial, I think, is a mindset. There are a lot of entrepreneurial people who work inside big organizations. There are a lot of entrepreneurial people at NPR. There are a lot of entrepreneurial people at Apple. I mean, the iPhone was invented by employees of Apple. Johnny Ive designed it. He was an internal entrepreneur.

• 23:00Guy Raz?

  And I think that that way of thinking is a mindset that is very powerful. And so the idea behind the book is to say, here is how other people have done. And by the way, they're no different than you. You know, they're not superheroes. All they did was walk into the phone booth and put on the cape. Here is your guidebook and your map to get to the phone booth and put on the cape.

• 23:21Speaker 01

  And so I feel like I have to ask you, what was the biggest moment of struggle for you in starting the show? Was there a moment when, I don't know, you felt like it wasn't going to work or you didn't want to do it or when you hit a wall yourself?

• 23:33Guy Raz?

  Yeah, I mean, there were certainly moments where it was certainly not clear whether it was going to happen. But, you know, I think what's important, and one of the reasons why I focus so much on crisis and struggle, is that implicitly in how I built this, right? The people who come on the show, we know they're successful. We know they have achieved some level of success. Not always financial, but they've built something that's out in the world, that has had some kind of cultural impact. And I think we often default into thinking that these people are superheroes. And that's why I focus so much on those moments of failure, the moments of crisis. You know, when Jamie Simonoff is wondering whether they should take a line of credit against their mortgage and worrying that they're going to lose their house.

• 24:15Guy Raz?

  Or James Dyson, pretty much broke at the age of 42 because he spent seven years trying to perfect this vacuum cleaner and everyone thinks he's crazy. Or Gary Hirschberg, spending eight or nine years losing money while building Stonyfield Yogurt and not really sure whether it's going to work. Throughout my career, I've had so many failures that were so pivotal and so challenging and so difficult at the moment, but were so important in hindsight. You know, now that I can reflect on them and can think about those moments of failure, I really understand that they were so necessary and so important. You know, the directions I didn't take, the jobs I didn't get, the positions I really

• 24:59Guy Raz?

  wanted, that never happened. And even moments where I thought, you know, I'm sort of, maybe I wasn't meant to be a broadcaster. Maybe I wasn't meant to be an interviewer or a host or a journalist or whatever it might be. And I went through that so many times in my career, but they were so important because each time, they pushed me to explore a different direction. And I think it's the same with all the founders in the show.

• 25:21Speaker 01

  I'm wondering if there's like a specific example that you could give us of just a moment where, at the time, it seemed like very bad news, but you changed direction in a way that in retrospect was was quite important.

• 25:31Guy Raz?

  Well, you know, for me, I think one of the hardest moments for me professionally was I had always thought, early in my, this is about 10 years ago, I had always thought that I wanted to be one of the main news anchors on NPR. That, to me, was a really important job, a prestigious job, and it is. And, you know, for a variety of reasons, it wasn't going to happen. It wasn't going to be me. I wasn't going to be one of the main anchors. And that was hard because I had sort of thought that that was what I wanted to do. But in fact, it kind of was one of the reasons that I got out of the news side of things entirely, because I felt like my future wasn't in that part of my profession, that the news wasn't probably what I should be doing.

• 26:15Guy Raz?

  And had that not happened, you know, I wouldn't have gone on to collaborate with TED, to do the TED Radio Hour, and then create How I Built This and Wow in the World, co-create Wow in the World. And, you know, again, very difficult at the time, 10 years ago, but incredibly important for me on reflection. And I think had those things not happened, I wouldn't have had the opportunity to pivot into a totally different direction.

• 26:38Speaker 01

  So I definitely have to ask you, there is a word that is very associated with you.

• 26:44Guy Raz?

  Okay.

• 26:44Speaker 01

  That you say quite a bit. The word is wow. You're very known for it. It's like your signature. I'm wondering if you can talk to me about wow. Why does this come up so much in your interviews?

• 26:55Guy Raz?

  You know, before I do an interview with somebody, we spend a lot of time digging into their life. So I know a lot about the person. What I then do when I go into the interview is try and forget all of it and go inside of that person's head. Because we are all living in our own movie, right? We're all, our consciousness is basically our movie. Everyone's life is from their own perspective. And it's almost impossible, pretty much impossible, to get inside somebody's head and to see the world through somebody's perspective. When what I'm trying to do is to get inside somebody's, you know, into the cockpit of their brain and to sit there, you know, next to them with the steering wheel and relive that journey with them.

• 27:36Guy Raz?

  What happens is, is that I am swept up in that story so intensely because I'm with them on that journey. I'm with that person. I'm with, you know, Kate Spade. I'm with her as she's, she comes to New York City from Arizona to start her job at, you know, is it a low-level editorial assistant at Cosmo? And, and the day, you know, her husband, Andy, arrives and, and she can't find her keys and he has to climb the, the fire escape ladder to get to their studio apartment in New York in the eighties, you know? I'm with her. I'm with her as she's telling me that story. And it's mind-blowing. It's just so exciting. And so, the wow is not a conscious thing that I do. I'm, I'm just in awe. I'm, I'm like right there, back in New York in the eighties, or, or back in San Francisco

• 28:20Guy Raz?

  in the nineties with somebody in their apartment. I'm so riveted and excited about the story. And I think that's how it, that's, that's just what happens. I just, I just say, wow. I get, I, you know, I just express it that way.

• 28:31Speaker 01

  It's a genuine reaction. One thing about the word wow is that there's like, there's nothing like cynical about it. You know, often, as a reporter, and I'm 1,000% guilty of this, you'll be like, oh, yes, of course, when someone, you know what I mean? There's always this temptation to be like, oh, yeah, I knew that, I knew that, I knew that. But this is almost the opposite of that, which I find, which is really interesting and I think rare in an interview.

• 28:51Guy Raz?

  I'm, I feel like my job is to trigger memories. And what I'm trying to do is to trigger recollections and details of things through the questions I ask and how I ask them. Oftentimes, we don't, we don't remember things until we're prompted to. And so, yeah, I mean, I'm on that journey and, and I'm experiencing the emotional highs and lows with that person. So, at a certain point, you are rooting for them because you are, you're in the movie with them.

• 29:20Speaker 01

  Right. Because you're like, if you're, if you're really in that moment with them, you don't know that everything's going to be okay and Amazon's going to buy their company for a billion dollars.

• 29:27Guy Raz?

  Right.

• 29:28Speaker 01

  And at the time, they didn't either. I mean, now they know the story ends well, but at the time, you're on your last credit card, you don't know that the story's going to end well. And in the process of writing the book, because that is a little bit of a different process, although the book is very, very related and intertwined with the show. Did you learn anything either about the show? Or I'm just wondering what that process kind of taught you.

• 29:48Guy Raz?

  Yeah, I mean, so much. Ultimately, what is really remarkable about when you sort of begin to see this in context is that every single person who has been on the show starts out more or less at the exact same place, not in terms of the resources they might have or maybe connections, but at the same exact place, which is they haven't proven anything. They haven't gained the confidence of anybody yet. Airbnb, the guys who created Airbnb in 2008, they went to 20 investors. Not a single investor invested. And so what really strikes me is that we are all at a certain point, starting out more or less in the same spot. There's a great line that Bob Dylan sang once, you know, "Sometimes even the president

• 30:32Guy Raz?

  of the United States must have to stand naked." And it's a reminder that we are all in this vulnerable spot at a certain point in our lives. And all it really takes is a slight nudge, pivot, twist, turn, luck, hard work, call it whatever you want, but something that then gets you out of that moment of vulnerability. And that's what's really incredible to me about all these stories.

• 30:59Speaker 01

  That's very generous, Guy. All right. This is a question from Heather from Facebook, and she asks, "How much of Guy's success does he attribute to luck versus hard work?"

• 31:08Guy Raz?

  Yeah. I don't ask that question. I don't think of it as a binary question. I don't think of it as, is it luck or is it skill? I really ask that question more, it's more of a device to give somebody an opportunity to reflect on everything we've talked about. Because by the time we get to that question, you've heard an hour, an hour 15 minute interview, and we've really gone through their life. And here is a moment for the person to reflect on everything that we've talked about. How often do you reflect on your own life? How often do we get a chance to sit back and really take stock of our life? This is a very rare moment for most of these founders to do that. And It's hard to do it. So I'm not looking for a specific answer to that question.

• 31:52Guy Raz?

  I'm really looking just to hear their thoughts. There's no right or wrong answer. There's so many factors that play into success or perceived success. Those things can be access. It can be your background, certain inherited and often unearned privileges that some people have based on where they were born, or their gender, or their race, or their economic situation. All of these are factors that contribute to outcomes that I think we are having a deeper conversation about in our country. In my case, I think like most people, of course, I work hard. I love what I do. But I always say that somebody working on a construction site works harder than anybody

• 32:37Guy Raz?

  in Silicon Valley. Somebody waiting tables works harder than any billionaire because it's a really hard job. So hard work alone isn't enough, but it is important and it is a factor. And I think the element of luck, or chance, or whatever word you might want to use, I think it passes all of us by in some forms, once or twice, or maybe more than that, in our lifetime. When I think about luck, for me, it was the luck of people that I met, the chance encounters that I had, that led me to be able to do what I do today. Sometimes those encounters were so random. The way I met my wife, it was random.

• 33:19Guy Raz?

  We've been together for 20 years, and without her in my life, I don't think I would have done how I built this, or Wow in the World, or the other programs that I do, because she is the person I talk to about my ideas and go to for advice. So I think that there is an element of chance, and luck, and fate, and fortune in some of the successes that I talk about on the show, and some of mine own. But it's part of a more complex series of things that help to explain outcomes.

• 33:50Speaker 01

  Well, another sort of interesting thing is as you're talking with these entrepreneurs about failure, and you know, you made the point that sometimes something that seems like a huge setback is actually the thing that turns someone on to a new path. So it's hard to know sometimes if something that happens, even that feels like bad luck, is bad luck or might be good luck. It gets a little tricky in there sometimes with these journeys.

• 34:12Guy Raz?

  No, for sure. It really does. And it's why, you know, it's why I asked that question. It's sort of like, you know, when you go to a museum, you go in, you look at the art, and then you come out into the atrium, and you're looking at this soaring atrium. Oftentimes, there's a soaring atrium, and they were designed deliberately for that reason, to kind of reflect on what you've just experienced. And that's sort of how the question is designed.

• 34:34Speaker 01

  I think it's time for us to wrap up. Thank you, everybody, for submitting your questions. Those were awesome. And of course, do not forget Guy's book, How I Built This: The Unexpected Paths to Success from the World's Most Inspiring Entrepreneurs. It is available for preorder. And Guy, thank you so much. This was such a

• 34:49Guy Raz?

  Thank you.

• 34:50Speaker 01

  A privilege for me.

• 34:51Guy Raz?

  And thank you again to Stacy Vanek Smith for guest hosting this special episode of How I Built This: Resilience Series. You can hear Stacy on the Indicator podcast from Planet Money. And of course, you can find my new book, How I Built This, wherever books are sold. To see our full interview, you can go to facebook.com/HowIBuiltThis. And if you want to see all of our past live interviews, you can find them there or at youtube.com/NPR. This episode was produced by Candace Lim, with help from Will Mitchell, Matt Adams, Al Mannion, Gianna Cappadona, John Isabella, Neva Grant, and Jeff Rogers. Thanks for listening. Stay safe, and I'll see you back here in a few days. I'm Guy Raz, and you've been listening to How I Built This.