The Skinny Confidential Him & Her Podcast - How Guy Raz Built This - Tactics, Tips, & Tools The World's Highest Achievers Use For Success

Episode Date: January 5, 2021

#319: On this episode we are joined by Guy Raz. Guy is a journalist, correspondent and radio host, currently working at National Public Radio. He has been described by The New York Times as "one of the most popular podcasters in history". Many listeners may know Guy from his show "How I Built This". On today's episode we discuss the tactics, tips, and tool that some of the world's highest achievers have used to achieve success.  To check out Guy Raz's new book click HERE To connect with Lauryn Evarts click HERE To connect with Michael Bosstick click HERE Read More on The Skinny Confidential HERE For Detailed Show Notes visit TSCPODCAST.COM To Call the Him & Her Hotline call: 1-833-SKINNYS (754-6697) This episode is brought to you by Just Thrive During a time when boosting our immune health needs to be at the forefront of our minds Just Thrive has the answer for you. The Just Thrive probiotic can help boost your immune system and heal your gut. 80-90% of Americans suffer from gut issues and these issues can track to many of the diseases that humans face. With Just Thrive probiotics we can help combat these gut issues. Use promo code SKINNY at www.justthrivehealth.com/skinny to try today!  This episode is brought to you by Phexxi Phexxi® (lactic acid, citric acid, and potassium bitartrate) Vaginal Gel 1.8%, 1%, 0.4% is a hormone-free, prescription birth control used only before sex. Phexxi works to maintain the vaginal pH level to prevent pregnancy and you only use it when you need it! Be sure to tell your healthcare provider if you have a recent history of 3 or more UTIs per year. Learn more, including all risks at Phexxi.com This episode is brought to you by Palmers Palmer’s has been caring for your skin since 1840 and is America’s #1 Cocoa Butter Brand. Cocoa Butter Formula Original Solid Jar delivers 24 Hour deep hydration all over; heals and softens, leaving skin smooth & moisturized.You can find Palmer’s Original Solid In Store and online at Walmart, Target, Walgreens, CVS or Amazon Produced by Dear Media   

The following podcast is a Dear Media production. She's a lifestyle blogger extraordinaire. Fantastic. And he's a serial entrepreneur. A very smart cookie. And now Lauren Everts and Michael Bostic are bringing you along for the ride. Get ready for some major realness. Welcome to The Skinny Confidential, him and her.

Aha! Him and her. To me, it's inspiring as a listener to my show, a researcher of entrepreneurs and an entrepreneur myself. And I'm trying to channel those moments of failure for the people who listen to the show and who can really benefit from it. Because I think what all entrepreneurs know is it's a very lonely experience and it can be scary. And so it's important to understand that the people you admire and you think are these titans, they've had moments where they've been lying on the bathroom floor crying, worried about making payroll or whether their business is going to survive or whether they're a failure. And I want people to understand that's very real. It's part of the journey. Hello, hello, hello. Happy New Year. What an episode we have for you. I feel like this is the perfect episode to start the year off with. I think I'm going to re-listen to it.

Yes, that clip was from our guest of the show today, Guy Raz. Many of you guys may know him from that little show on the internet, that one small podcast, How I Built This. Just kidding. I think that does about 20 million uniques a month in terms of listens. So many of you have heard his voice before. And on this show, we're actually putting him in the hot seat and asking him how he built this. Yeah. And he has had so many insane guests on. He's talked to Sarah Blakely from Spank. He's talked to the owner of Airbnb. He's talked to the owner of Vice, Samuel Adams, Southwest Airlines, Angie's List, Warby Parker, Drybar, Honest Tea, Zappos, and Lyft. I mean, the way he, and he talks about this in the episode, he gauges his guests is insane. The interview process to have someone

on his show is wild. Yeah. I mean, Lauren and I thought we prep for interviews and then we talked to him and we realized we don't do nearly enough prep. I think they do about a month of prep work for each episode, which is crazy. I mean, that's just crazy. If you know anything about podcasting, that is a shitload of prep. And obviously that's why he has the show that he has. You know, and if you've been listening to this show for a while, one of Lauren and I's favorite things to do is to talk to successful people and ask them how they did what they did and how they do what they do. So Guy is a perfect guy to talk to because he's literally talked to some of the highest performers in the world on how they built this. And so we had a very well-rounded

conversation talking about what were the most common themes he's seen with successful people? What are the most common themes and traits that those people have as individuals? What have they done right? What have they done wrong? And hopefully this episode brings a ton of value to you to start the new year. Speaking of the new year, Michael, what is your resolution? My resolution this year, Lauren. Yes, Michael. I hope it's about being a husband. Is to take care of my wife even more in the bedroom than I do normally. Before you do that though,

you're going to have to get the black pepper out of your tooth. It's been lodged there for three days. I'm off to a terrible start. I've had to stare at this black pepper for the last week. Like remove it from the tooth, Michael. I'm not even joking. You're smiling from ear to ear. It is popping out in my eye.

So I'm getting laid or I'm not? Not with that pepper. So Michael and I just had, and I talked about this on Instagram, a think week. Our friend Weston inspired this. He told us about Bill Gates think week. And we went up and did that. We got into nature. We brought a lot of books, a lot of hardcover books. I even have a fucking book light. It's pink. You were stealing that from me. And we brought our journals and our favorite pens. I know that sounds crazy. And we brought our journals and our favorite pens.

I know that sounds crazy. And we really just sat with a lot of stillness and read and reflected and thought. And then the baby woke up a few times. And then the baby woke up a few times. And disrupted all of it. No, I'm just kidding. But we did do that. But as you guys know, with young kids, it's not always that easy to think when they're

bouncing off the wall. She was pretty good, though, this time. I would give her a B. Yes. All right, guys. We've got an exciting episode before we do. I want to give a quick update. As you, as many of you guys know, Lauren and I do this show six times a month. Typically we do Tuesday releases followed by the next week would be a Tuesday and Friday. Then next week after that would be a Tuesday, then a Tuesday, Friday, and so on. We are switching our schedule up to deliver a few more episodes each month to do it.

Basically, instead of confusing everybody and going back and forth, we're going to make it simple and just do twice a week, Mondays and Thursdays. And the reason being is as the show's grown over the years, we've had so many requests to do more and more interviews, which is great. We love interviewing people. But as many longtime listeners know, this show started as a show with Lauren and I answering questions from listeners, you know, doing solo stuff, talking, you know, more between each other about things that the audience is interested in knowing about. And hopefully they love the interviews or you guys love the interviews, but we also wanted to get back to doing some solo stuff. So we're going to get back doing that by adding, you know, two more episodes a month, expect to hear a lot

more solo stuff. We're definitely going to start taking audience requests and questions and getting back to kind of how this show started, as well as continuing to do the interview. So moving forward after this week, look for the show every Monday and Thursday. So a little a day earlier and a little bit more. I personally am so excited to get more into solos and to doing episodes with Michael, but also sprinkling in the interviews. So it's going to be a real medley. I always say it's like a bag of Chex Mix. You never know what you're going to get. With that, let's welcome Guy Raz to the show. He's a podcaster, an author, an entrepreneur, and an innovator. He has the podcast, How I Built This. It is a huge podcast, you guys. If you haven't listened, you have to. It's an American podcast about innovators, entrepreneurs, idealists, and stories behind the

movements they built. It's also produced by NPR. With that, let's welcome Guy to the Skinny Confidential Him and Her Show. This is the Skinny Confidential Him and Her. Guy Raz, welcome to the show. Legend in the Podcast Space. I have so many questions for you. Thank you so much for taking the time to do this. To get right in for the three people that don't know who you are on this podcast, maybe give us a little background and we're going to get into your story. I'm the host and creator of a bunch of different podcasts, probably best known for How I Built This, which is a book too, but a show about entrepreneurs and their journeys and how they started their brands. We focus mainly on big consumer-facing brands and services. And

I'm also the co-creator of a kids' science show called Wow in the World. Most of what I do is with NPR, although I do work with, have worked with Spotify and Luminary and Apple and other folks in the past. So that's a little about me. How did you become so obsessed with successful people and how they built things? Like walk us back and tell us when there was an epiphany or something that happened where you just became enchanted by it. It's funny. I'm actually obsessed with the less successful parts of successful people. I'm actually obsessed with the failings of successful people. The idea for how I built this is began more than 10 years ago. I used to be journalist. I was a reporter. I lived overseas. I covered the Iraq war and the Afghanistan wars. That was my life from 2000 to 2006. That's what I did. I covered Israel, Palestine. But you know, what I was always really interested in was human stories, the stories of ordinary people. I was never attracted to

covering wars for the adrenaline of it. It wasn't my thing. That was not, in fact, that's the part that I hated. But what I loved was going to villages and meeting people and hearing about their lives and their stories. And I often felt like those stories told you so much more about a conflict than the day-to-day, you know, this happened today, or that happened today, or this person was shot, or that person was this, these factions exchanged gunfire. I always felt like the story of like a family and their farm or the tragedies that they may have suffered really told you the story. And about 10 years ago, I had a chance to kind of step back and take a year out. This is about 12 years ago from journalism. And I took a business class at a business school.

And there I was introduced to the case study method. And I didn't know that's how business schools were taught. It was a story of Starbucks. And I was totally blown away. It was like a great narrative. And I love narratives. I love storytelling. And I read this case study of Howard Schultz and how he started Starbucks. And I thought, this is a hero's journey. This is like the kind of hero's journeys that I learned about in college and read about the Odyssey or whatever it might be, it kind of planted a seed in my head that one day I wanted to figure out how to tell these stories because what fascinated me about the stories were how ordinary all these people were, how much like us they are, and how much we don't know that. We think of their stories as these seamless journeys fleeting from one

success to the next. But in fact, it's more like fleeting from one failure and failing to the next until they actually came upon success. And that was the genesis of what became How I Built This. Just for anyone that's unfamiliar, can you kind of dive into what the case study, I think you called it theory or narrative is? The case, so the case study method. Yeah, no, and I didn't know what it was either, right? This is essentially how business schools teach business today. So I'm thinking you're going to get, I'm going to go to this business school class and there's going to be charts and abstract theories. No, they are, we got a packet, which was basically a story.

It was like a magazine article called The Case Study. It was the case study of Starbucks and how Howard Schultz had to make certain pivotal decisions in building the business. And it was designed to spur discussion among the students. And I learned then that that is how business schools now teach business to their students through stories, through what are called case studies. And the top business schools have them. They are proprietary. They're protected. You can't send them out. But to hear these case studies, business school students have to pay $100,000 a year. So in my mind, I thought, could we tell these stories in a deep, meaningful,

rich way, essentially case studies on a radio program or an audio program or a podcast, but make it for free, make it available to anybody who wanted to hear it. And that's what we do. I love that. And I agree so much in stories being the best connection point for people to be able to learn because it's like we can all relate to it. I want to go back a little bit further. What kind of mindset do you have to be in? And did you think about this as a kid to go and be a war correspondent? Because that doesn't sound like an easy thing to do. I was always attracted to being overseas. I loved the idea of an adventure overseas and of living in a different country and learning about a different culture. It just, there was something about it that attracted me. I just thought it was so fascinating. I never intended to be a war reporter. I was very fortunate early in my career. I got to go cover Eastern Europe. I was a reporter based in Berlin. I was 25. I didn't know what I was doing. But pretty soon after I got there, 9-11 happened. And that really shifted everything for me and my

colleagues who were based overseas. All of a sudden, many of us by default became war reporters. We were sent to Afghanistan and to Iraq and all over the Middle East because they needed, that was the biggest story in the world. As I say, it was never my intention. I was never attracted to the idea of conflict or getting embedded with military units and dodging bullets, but that's what happened. And you kind of adapt to that.

You kind of very quickly learn how to do it. Not to say it wasn't frightening or scary. There were many times in my career, whether it was in Iraq or even in Palestine and West Bank or Gaza or in Afghanistan, where there were scary things that happened. And it's not to say it's something I would do today because I'm a dad with two kids. But back then, now we're talking 15 years ago, it was really one of the most interesting and fulfilling experiences of my life because you really see humans at the extremes, humans at their most evil, at their most kind and generous and compassionate, even in situations where you can't imagine how people can be like

that. I mean, I remember showing up in a village in Afghanistan, such an impoverished village. People there had never seen a Western reporter. It was a very remote mountainous village. And they gave me everything. I mean, they demanded I stay for a meal and they slaughtered a goat and we ate it and people had nothing and they gave you everything. And that's what I saw in addition to some really difficult things as well. When I think about it though, just to kind of contextualize it in my own head, we all get up, we go to work.

You never think like, hey, I'm going to work today unless you're maybe an active military or soldier, police officer or something. And my life is potentially at risk. What was going through your mind? Because I imagine there had to be some type of fear element that you had to overcome. Yeah, there was. I mean, it's strange now to reflect on it because I wouldn't do it today in large part because the risk wouldn't be worth it as a dad. Then it felt, I always felt like fear was a very real thing. And I always had a healthy amount of fear. I'm not a kamikaze, but I think what mitigated that fear was a sense of mission. Remember 15 years ago,

this is pre-Twitter. This is really pre-Facebook. This is, I mean, this is internet 1.0. So people still got their news from the radio and television and newspapers. And I felt like it was my job to deliver that information. I was there operating under the auspices of a bigger mission, a mission to the organization I worked for, which was NPR at the time, and also to the listeners who depended on me getting out there and bearing witness to what was going on in order to tell them what was happening. It's a new year. And one of the things that I'm personally focused on is improving my gut while also encouraging a strong immune system, of course. So recently we had the founder Tina of Just Thrive Probiotics on the podcast, and we talked all about

getting ahead of bloat and getting your digestion back on track, especially for the new year. I think out of all the questions that I get, one of the most asked questions is how do I fight bloat? And number one by far is gut health. Okay, so bloat is something I feel like we all struggle with and a lot of it has to do with the gut, which is exactly what Tina Anderson said on the podcast. So just to get sciencey with you, you have tons of bacteria in your body.

There's the good ones, the probiotics, and this positively impacts everything, your digestion, your immune system, your mood. And then you have the bad bacteria. And this is the pathogens. And this is what Tina was talking about on the podcast. They do all kinds of nasty things. They colonize your gut.

They trap gas, which causes bloat. And there's a lot of waste in the intestines from this. So this puts a lot of painful pressure on your abs. And then your gut has no choice to expand. So that's sort of how bloat comes about, which is why I'm all about a probiotic. So if you want to fight bloat, definitely check out Just Thrive Probiotic. They're a game changer, you guys. I take two every single morning. Tina even said I could put some on my finger and give some to Zaza. That's

how amazing they are. Of course, extremely vetted. These are vegan, non-GMO, gluten-free, dairy-free, and free of anything artificial. Just Thrive Probiotic can even support easier weight management, beautiful skin, and better sleep. We all love this. So if you're looking for an easy way to banish bloat, improve digestion, and support optimum immunity, you need Just Thrive Probiotic. You can save 15% site-wide with our code. That's justthrivehealth.com slash skinny. Use promo code skinny. I think you're going to love this. And of course, get some for your significant other too. You could all use the better gut. You mentioned earlier that you're interested in the ugly sides of success.

What are some ugly sides that you've experienced throughout your success? Yeah, I mean, I don't even know if it's ugly. I think failure can always feel ugly, and it's usually very, very difficult for any of us to withstand failure. What I have found in my own life and career is that when I have experienced moments of failure, things that have felt catastrophic at the time, jobs that I didn't get, career moments that felt career derailing, executives who told me I didn't have what it takes to be a radio host, which happened 15 years ago in my career. Moments where you feel like you're finished. Those moments are so important. They are the

moments where you actually learn the most about how to find a path towards success. And I have found that in my career and in my businesses, I'm an entrepreneur as well and run two production companies, but I've mostly found it in the stories of the people I tell. Imagine somebody like Jamie Siminoff, who started three or four different companies, none of which were particularly hugely successful. And then he's trying to figure out a new idea and he starts to tinker and he's a tinkerer. And so he builds a doorbell, a video doorbell outside of his garage and it's going nowhere. He gets a little bit of funding to start it, but it's really going nowhere. He can't get it off the ground. He's like two months away from the company cratering.

But by chance, he happens to meet somebody who knows somebody who works on Shark Tank. And Jamie Siminoff takes his idea to Shark Tank. He doesn't accept the investment from the Sharks. But what that product eventually became known as is Ring, the Ring doorbell, which he would go on to sell for more than a billion dollars to Amazon. I mean, his story is filled with ups and downs and moments of real failure and moments where he really didn't believe it would work. Some of the best stories we've told on how I built this and in this book are stories of essentially failure after failure after failure.

I mean, we told the story of Joel Clark, who founded Kodiak Cakes, a pancake mix company. Joel started the business 15 years ago. He could never get it off the ground. People were like, pancake mix? What's so great about your pancake mix? I mean, to save his company or to keep it going, because he really believed in whole grain pancake mix, he started a second business, which was a chocolate chip cookie store. That business not only didn't work, it failed and almost dragged Kodiak Cakes down with it. Joel then went and got a job managing a healthcare business in Salt Lake just to continue to have enough money to fund Kodiak Cakes, which still didn't work. He eventually had to borrow from everybody he could, including his dad, who took out a second mortgage on his home. And one day, Joel hired a graduate from the University of Utah

to come work for him. And this young guy says, hey, why don't we add protein powder to the pancake mix? I like to work out and a lot of my friends like protein. That was a game changer. That was like 45, five years ago. That took Kodiak Cakes from basically a non-entity to the third best-selling pancake mix in the United States. The story of that company is just a litany of failures until it became successful. And that's really, to me, it's inspiring as a listener to my show and a researcher of entrepreneurs and an entrepreneur myself. And I'm trying to channel those moments of failure for the people who listen to the show and who can really benefit from it. Because I think what all entrepreneurs know is it's a very lonely experience. And it can be scary. And so it's important to understand that the people you admire and you think are these titans,

they've had moments where they've been lying on the bathroom floor crying, worried about making payroll or whether their business is gonna survive or whether they're a failure. And I want people to understand that's very real. It's part of the journey. That's why we love what you do so much

because I think you humanize a lot of this. And we grow up, especially in this country, you go through school and you're judged like A to F, like, did you pass or did you fail? And there's very little emphasis put on the failures actually being the pathway to success. And I think that's why so many people are scared is we don't want to fail in front of our family, our friends, our loved ones. We think it's like a badge of shame. And because of that, we're so held back. And I think what you do highlighting these failures that point to massive successes is such a service to everyone that listens to your show because it gives everyday people the inspiration and potentially the tools they need to realize like, hey, you're going to fail. That's okay. It's actually part of

what gets you to be extremely successful. And it makes the failures comfortable in a way because we are so uncomfortable as a society with failure. And we think everyone's going to judge us and jump down our throat and ridicule us and basically talk behind our back saying that we're not going to amount to anything. And when Lauren and I, what we try to do with this show is point out to young people and anyone listening that it's all of these kind of setbacks that ultimately get you where you want to go it's so true no i actually agree with everything michael was just saying i was just going to say

to add to that is you really focus on value so i think with your audience you're always whenever i listen to your podcast, I always get so many gems. Is that something that came natural to you or is it something that was more of a strategy? I am really trying to, I mean, the show evolves, right? I mean, I've been in broadcasting for 25 years, so I'm an old guy, right? Compared to a lot of podcasters. You're looking good. But I'm trying to, I'm always evolving. I'm always trying to get better at what I do, right? And one of the ways that I think I've evolved as an interviewer on the show is to focus on those exact things you're talking about. I'm trying to be an avatar for the listener. Like I'm trying to imagine somebody who has an Etsy store and makes things and sells

it on Etsy, or who's got a brick and mortar and maybe has one or two employees and is trying to make a go at it. I'm trying to channel them and to imagine what are the things and the tools they need. And what they need is they need to hear from Caitlin Smith, who started Simple Mills, about how she cold called buyers for Whole Foods and how she found their numbers. They need to hear from people like Melissa Butler, who founded the Lip Bar, which is an incredibly strong lipstick brand out of Detroit, how she trolled LinkedIn to identify the right people at Target to start to pitch. And I really go granular because I want people to walk away from the shows with real strategies and ideas for how to think about their own situation.

Business stories are all different, right? And we do a lot of different industries in the book and on the show. We do cosmetics, we do food, we do tech, we do consumer packaged goods, huge variety of things. All of the stories are unique, but they're also universal things about starting a business. There's the struggle, there's the doubt, there's the fear, there's the need to be perseverant and the rejection that you will face. And as Michael mentioned, the fear of that rejection, because we are, as a species, we homo sapiens are wired to fear rejection. We're afraid of failure because that's why we exist.

That's why we've survived. We ran away from the saber-toothed tiger, which is like, imagine this kind of monster of failure, because if it eats you, you're dead. So we ran away from it. Now, we have to re-examine that and understand that very often that failure is what allows us to grow. It's like when you're exercising and you're trying to build a muscle, you have to tear a muscle in order for that muscle to grow. It's the same thing with failure and learning how to be an entrepreneur, learning how to run a business, learning how to persevere. It's all about that word learning. You have to learn how to do it. What I've come away with after interviewing more than 300 of, these are world famous entrepreneurs, Richard Branson and Sarah Blakely and Howard Schultz and the late

Tony Hsieh, who tragically passed away recently. What I've come away with is virtually all of them learned how to do this. There's no natural entrepreneurial archetype. I mean, yes, some people may have some advantages naturally, charisma or confidence, but the reality is being entrepreneurial is a mindset. It's a way of thinking. And anybody, I believe anybody who wants to do it can learn how to do it. These are learnable skills. Hold up. We are going to talk about Palmer's. I know you guys have seen Palmer's. I mean, it's in so many different grocery stores. You can find it online, Walmart, Target, Walgreens,

CVS, or Amazon. You've seen it everywhere. It's been around since 1840 and it's America's number one cocoa butter brand. And here's the deal. I use this and mixed it with oil every single night when I was pregnant. And I'm telling you, I didn't get a stretch mark. I would mix cocoa butter and then I would mix oil with it. So I would just be so hydrated. Okay. Like dripping in hydration every night when I got in bed with Michael, sorry, Michael, uh, what you can expect from this cocoa butter formula is it's deep hydration all over. It heals, it softens. If you have cracked heels, use it. I'm telling you. And it leaves your skin super smooth and moisturized. It's this special formula that they have. And what it does is it locks in moisture into the skin. And of course the ingredients are natural. They're cocoa butter and vitamin E,

such a good mixture. And if you're prone to eczema or you have super dry skin, this is for you too. It's for all skin types. It's multipurpose. I like to use this, like I said, for stretch marks, but I also use it for cracked heels. You can protect your tattoos. I know Michael uses it all over his arms because he wants to preserve the integrity of the tattoo. You can also remove makeup with it. If you're in a bind and it soothes dry lips. I mean, there's a million things that it can do. They have a full list for you on all the different uses. There's like 101 uses and you can find it at palmers.com slash jar 101. Like I said, you can find Palmer's original solid in stores and online at Walmart, Target, Walgreens, CVS, or Amazon. Try this on anything that is cracked on your skin, okay?

From Palmer's, choose what's real. When it comes to the audience, do you just always put them first? Do you think that's one of the reasons that you have one of the most popular podcasts? You know, I always think of what I do as a one-to-one relationship with my audience. So it's impossible for me to think of 3 million people. It's impossible to imagine that number of people, right? You can't imagine speaking to that number of people because I think the most people I've ever seen in my life was at the big house in Ann Arbor, Michigan, where University of Michigan football team plays, right? That's 100,000 people. And you're looking around.

I mean, I can't even imagine speaking to that many people, right? Now, because I can imagine that, I'm always thinking about one person. And the beauty and the intimacy of a microphone is you do have that one-way relationship. Most people I imagine are listening to me through their ears on a run or on a walk or maybe cooking or whatever it might be. And so there is that intimacy and that direct connection that you get from audio. And that I really do think about, you know, I really do think about talking to you, the person listening to me. I may not exactly know your name, but I think I know what the show talking to you, the person listening to me. I may not exactly know your name,

but I think I know what the show means to you. And so there's no question the audience comes before anything else, before the guest, before me, before the content. It's all about serving the audience. I think that's why you've built what you've built. I wanted to ask you, because we're talking about the human element here and you've interviewed so many successful entrepreneurs and just people in general. Is there a common theme or a trait that you identified among all those people that you see that they have in common to make them who they are? Yeah. I mean, look, all entrepreneurs have to be perseverant. They have to have unshakable optimism and belief that their product will work or their service will work or a willingness to pivot when it doesn't work.

But how do you get that? How do you build that perseverance? What I found is that they all have the ability to withstand rejection, to hear the word no. When we have, most of us are afraid of rejection and are afraid of the word no because when we have an idea, we want to be validated. I want to say, hey, Michael, Lauren, I've got this great idea and I want to show it to you and I want to hear you guys say, that's awesome. Oh my God. But inevitably you're going to run into, if you're going to put an idea into the world, which is a business, right? Inevitably you're going to put an idea into the world, which is a business, right?

Inevitably, you're going to hear from people who say, that's so great. Why hasn't somebody else done it? Or why are you sure this is going to work? Or isn't that trend past or whatever? You're going to face pushback and doubters. And most of us don't want to hear that. It's hard for us to hear that. But in order to make it happen, in order to bring a business idea to life, you have to be able to withstand those no's. You have to be able to pitch an idea to a thousand investors, the same thing, hear the same irritating questions, the same pushback. And you're going to get knocked down, but you got to get back up. How do you do that? You have to build an immunity to rejection. So what I have found is that in many cases, many of the most successful entrepreneurs

that I've interviewed has started out in sales. They started out going around, pounding the pavement, trying to sell a product to people. I mean, Sarah Blakely of Spanx is a great example. She sold fax machines for seven years, door to door, to office park to office park. Imagine how many people said to her, not interested, please leave, no soliciting, get off the premises.

After hearing that for seven years, you build up an immunity to it. It's like getting a vaccination. And so when it came time for her to have the courage to try and convince a textile manufacturer to make a prototype of her Spanx underwear, undergarments, she heard 50 no's, but she was okay with that because she knew that eventually she would get to a yes. And of course she did. And the rest is history. What's your process like when you choose the founders or

the creators or the business leaders? Do you choose them yourself? Is it your team? Tell us like on a very micro level what that process is like. We have a team. I mean, we're a small team and we work really hard. We're just eight of us, but we produce and it takes us about three months to produce one episode.

We do a lot of research. We spend a lot of time reading everything we can and searching in every way we can for potential guests. Look, the main thing we look for is integrity. Our show reaches so many people now and represents entrepreneurship to those listeners that we have a responsibility. We want to represent the best of entrepreneurship. So we want entrepreneurs who operate with integrity, have strong ethical values, treat their employees and their people well, are good corporate citizens. So that's primary. It's really important. We look for people who are kind. And we also tend to focus mainly on consumer

facing products and services. So something you could buy at Target or Walmart or the supermarket or a service that is pretty common. So we don't do that much tech, but we will do like Airbnb because that's obviously a consumer facing product or Slack or Instagram. But generally, we tend to focus on things that people make. And then we focus on companies that are a bit more mature, that have been around a bit longer, just because there's more story to tell. So we do, of course, get a lot of pitches. And we're not opposed to pitches. We generally focus on our own research. But from time to time, there's a pitch that comes in that does work. But we really take it seriously. We do a lot of research on the people we interview.

I do a lot of reading about them. Sometimes I know the details of their life. They are so fresh in my mind that I know them better than they do. I mean, there are interviews that I do where I'm interviewing somebody and they'll say, and then in 2012, we did our series A round and I'll say, actually, in my notes, I think it's 2011 that you guys did that. Can you go back? And they'll say, oh, was it 2011? I'll say, yeah, it was. We fact check. We have a really rigorous editing process. Each episode goes through three or four edits. We add music, original music. My interviews are about three hours long and we edit them down to about an hour and 15 hour and a half. So it's a long process. We take it really seriously because we, for better or worse,

we have this responsibility having a large audience that comes to us to learn about business and about creativity. Quick break because I need to discuss birth control. I've recently had so many DMs from women all over the world asking for more resources and information and discussion around birth control. So I learned recently that there are more than 21 million women who are not using hormonal birth control, and I'm one of them. But now the FDA recently approved a birth control option that's completely hormone-free. You guys may have seen me talk about this on Instagram already. So it's called Fexi and it's this combination of lactic acid, 1.8%, citric acid, 1%, potassium bitotrate, 0.4%. It's this vaginal birth control gel that comes in a small applicator like a tampon and it works immediately and can be used up to an hour before sex. So basically you apply the gel before you have sex and only use

it when you need it, but you have to apply it again before each act of vaginal sex. So when you try it, remember one dose, one hour, one act. And I have to tell you guys how it works because it's insane really. Like I kind of geeked out when I learned this and you know me, I had to overshare. We're going to go there. Normally, without fexy, when a guy comes and semen enters the vagina, it causes the pH of your vagina to increase, which allows sperm to keep swimming and make their way up there to fertilize your egg. Are you listening, Michael and Taylor? So fexy works by maintaining the vaginal pH to a level that reduces the mobility of the sperm, reducing the chance of the sperm reaching the egg. How awesome is that?

While Fexi could be a great option for many women like me who are seeking hormone-free birth control, it isn't right for everyone. So be sure to tell your healthcare provider if you have a recent history of three or more urinary tract infections per year. And obviously, as with any new birth control, be sure to check for any ingredients in Fexi

you or your partner may be allergic to. The most common side effects reported by clinical trial participants are vaginal burning, itching, and yeast infection. Some male partners also reported local discomfort. And remember, Phexie only works when used before sex, and it doesn't protect against STIs, including HIV. To learn more about Phexxi, ask your healthcare provider and visit phexxi.com for complete product information. That is P-H-E-X-X-I.com. And Michael, don't pop a boner. I love that you talk about the process because I think people look at end products. I could look at how I built this and a guy arrives and be like, oh, he talks on a mic to founders. I could do that. I'm kind of do-do. We talk to people. But at the level you've done it at, hearing the background and how much prep

you guys do and how much time it takes, something that looks very simple and is a very polished product, it's so time consuming and so much work. And I love that you talk about it because I think more entrepreneurs should talk about it because I think more entrepreneurs should talk about what the difficulties are in producing the end product, because this has obviously not been easy to get here. And you can see why you've had such success if you're doing that kind of research. I just did an interview with a founder of Simple Mills. They make grain-free baking products. And some people might think, what's so hard about just taking almond flour and coconut sugar and tapioca starch and putting it in a bag? It's actually incredibly complex.

Or we did an episode on Spindrift. My wife loves that stuff. Right? Spindrift is an amazing product. At the time, it was the only, and I think it's still one of the only soda waters that has real juice in it. The others all say naturally flavored. Spindrift actually has squeezed pressed fruit juice in it. And now you might think, what's the big deal? I've had a glass of soda water and squirted lemon in it, lemon juice in it, and that's great. To make that shelf stable is so complex, which I didn't know until I interviewed Bill Creelman, the founder of Spindrift, for the show. So many things that we use every day, whether it's Tate's chocolate chip cookies or Stacy's peanut chips or something very complex like Slack, they are really hard. They take a lot of work.

But they were all started by people who are not exceptional. They are not superheroes. They learned how to hear no, and they kept pushing forward. For my own knowledge, I mean, we speak to a very millennial audience, millennial, maybe some Gen Z. And I think what we talk about a lot here is patience. And you've interviewed a lot of really successful people that are, like you said, maybe more mature in their career. Have you identified a typical timeframe to get to that level of success? Because we talk about all the back work and all the failures it needs to, but I also think it's important to contextualize with this audience, the amount of time it takes for most of these people you've interviewed to get to the levels they've gotten to. And it's one of the reasons why I love

interviewing founders in their 60s and 70s. I just did a call with Norma Kamali, the fashion designer. She's 75. She's going to be on the show. She's an amazing person. I just did an interview with Judy Shepard-Missette. She's 76 years old. She's the founder of Jazzercise. Now, not only Jazzercise, she's the founder of Aerobics. She invented step aerobics. And she built Jazzercise from a volunteer class that she started out in Chicago for free to an $80 million business. It's still going strong. It's still one of the biggest fitness brands in the country. They're mainly in church basements and in VFW halls, but it's extremely inexpensive. It's very diverse. So I mean, this stuff takes time. And I don't think it's unique to any specific generation. I think

we humans are always in a hurry. And I bet you can go back to any generation and you will find young people in a hurry. I was in a hurry. I was 25 when I started out as a reporter and I was in a hurry. I wanted to be on the air and all these things. But what I've realized over time is that many of the most successful founders really only got going in their 40s and 50s. That's really when they started to hit their stride. Most first-time business founders are 40 years old. It's the average age. That means that half first-time entrepreneurs are under 40 and half are over 40. I mean, I think about someone like James Dyson. At age 42, he was broke. I talk about it in the book a little bit. He had spent eight years of his life tinkering with

a vacuum cleaner that would not require a bag, but that could still suck up everything in its path. Everybody told him he was nuts. He was broke. His wife was an art teacher at the local elementary school in England where they lived. They took a mortgage out on their home. I mean, their kids were not getting new clothes. He finally comes up with the Dyson vacuum cleaner. Nobody would sell it. Nobody was interested in it. But by a stroke of luck, the Prince Philip of England, Prince of Wales, Prince Philip,

was interested in highlighting British-made products. And he heard about this vacuum cleaner guy. And that led a small retail chain in Britain to start carrying the Dyson vacuum cleaners. By 1995, it was the best-selling vacuum cleaner in the UK. And today, James Dyson is the 11th richest person in Britain and the biggest, I think the third biggest landowner. He was broke at 43. It's really important to remember that things happen over time and that getting older and learning about with that benefit comes wisdom and knowing the mistakes that you made before that will lead you to the success that you will eventually find. You talk to so many people that

disrupt the space. Dyson is such a good example of someone who came in and just completely disrupted the whole entire category. How do you think your podcast has disrupted the space? I haven't really thought about that. I mean, we started the show more than four years ago, which is not that long ago. But in the podcast timeline, it's like, right, the Stone Ages, when they were just a fraction of the number of podcasts out there. I'm not sure that we disrupted the podcast space. I think that what we did was we showed other people that you can really create a compelling program around a long conversation. I mean, it's not like we were the first ones to do it.

Marc Amarin was doing it and Terry Gross and NPR has been doing it for years and years and decades. But to really hone in on granular things, I'll ask people, where did you source the ingredients for your soap? And what proportions did you mix the glycerin and the essential oils? Really grind into these things because even if I'm personally not that interested in, I don't know, a category, I'm always interested in the story of how somebody created it. So I think what we did on How I Built This was to show that you can really go deep. You can take a microscope and really look closely at something in a very granular way and that it can still be interesting. It doesn't have to be 30 seconds. It doesn't have to be something fle get the notoriety that it has, is getting people back into long form conversations and listening to stories and understanding other people's perspectives. And I wonder with that, with your background in journalism, how you feel or think journalism has changed over the years?

Because obviously, especially we just got done with election season, you've seen multiple iterations of this from your career. And I would just love to get your take on that. I know it's kind of taken a pivot here from businesses, but just the current state of journalism, how you see it. It's both an incredibly triumphant story and a tragic story. Because on the one hand, you've got some of the best journalism ever happening is happening now. But that's been not at the expense of, but we've seen a dramatic decline in local reporting and Washington, D.C. And at the expense of, I think, other parts of the country where local reporting is not as well funded.

Public radio still does a pretty great job locally, but it's not enough. You need a lot of reporters out there. The other thing that's happened, of course, over the last 15 years is a proliferation of what it means of media companies and what it means to be a reporter or a journalist. There was a time where it meant a pretty specific thing. It was somebody who worked for a big organization who had a notepad or a microphone and gathered information and then sent it off to that big organization, whether it was the New York Times or CNN or NPR. And now anybody can be a reporter. Anybody can have a website and call themselves a journalist. And while that's been great and that's allowed for the creation of people who might be underrepresented or may not have had the same connections or credentials or whatever it

might be to get into a place like the New York Times, it's also meant that there are bad actors too who have put out content that's not true or that's misleading. And so it's hard to say it's all good or it's all bad or this is where it is or this is where it's going. What I would say is that it's constantly evolving. Journalism, like any other industry, is constantly evolving.

And I think ultimately where it will succeed and hopefully where it will triumph is from the truth tellers, from people who can be trusted with delivering reliable information and content. How do you feel about the debate between the truth tellers you're discussing and the need to be first? Because I think obviously, I've caught some flack on the show for talking about media companies and I run a media company, having the need to get that piece out there first, get the notoriety and that it's ultimately a business at the same time you're trying to deliver news to the masses and into the world. How do you feel about that debate and what do you think we can do to maybe get people to trust the media a little bit more? Yeah. I mean, it's very hard. I think for me,

it's about winning over one listener at a time. I'm not a reporter anymore and I don't cover the news. It's never been important to me to be first. I've never understood why that was important to news organizations. In fact, we're constantly pitched companies or founders from PR folks who are like, you're going to get this exclusive interview or be the first. And that's never been appealing to me. I don't care about being the first or being exclusive because I'm looking for a different conversation. I'm looking for a different interaction. So it doesn't matter to me if that person has been on five shows before or has been on no shows before. And I think the same goes with breaking news.

To me, it's less interesting or important who breaks it first. What's more interesting to me is who has the context, who has the information I need that can equip me and arm me to be a better informed person. So, but I think, look, it's a challenge. It's a, it's a challenge. When you ask the question, how do we get people to trust the media more? It's a challenge because the media is so disaggregated. It's so big. It's not, if the media were the New York times and CNN, the Washington post and NPR, those are pretty trustworthy organizations. I know there's some people who would disagree with me, but they are, I mean, they have fact-checkers. They've got editors.

They've got really rigorous standards, despite what people might think they really do. I mean, NPR, to pass mustard, to get something on the air is really hard, but has to be fact-checked and re-fact-checked. So those, to me me are trustworthy sources of news, but the media isn't just those organizations. The media is this vast ocean of different information providers from 8chan and 4chan, which are peddling conspiracy theories to legitimate news organizations. So it's very hard. I mean, as long as we identify and define the media as this kind of huge blob of disaggregated organizations, I don't know how we're going to get people to trust it more. I don't know. What I hope is, is that people take the time to identify trustworthy sources and

support those sources of news. Great advice. I want to take a little plot twist here. So I just finished my second book and I had such a problem scheduling time on how, like structuring time, I should say, on when to write it. Do you have any advice? Obviously your book, it looks beautiful. It's thick. You can tell you really put a lot of work into it. How did you write it from a micro perspective? So hard. And if you asked me about writing a second book, I would say, oh my God, there is an element of torture to writing a book. A hundred percent. It's a very vulnerable experience. I actually just read an article about Joan Didion, the famous writer who described being a writer as so terrifying because you're putting out your words and your

thoughts and ideas on paper and then everybody can read it and you're exposing yourself to the world. And so there's that terrifying element to it that it's there, then it's fixed and permanent and out there. For me, it was really my process was speaking into my microphone and recording my thoughts first, and then getting those just transcribed by a cheap transcription service, which they're very cheap now. And I, I worked with an incredible collaborator who was like a project manager who could really keep this in line. His name is Niels Parker. And without Niels, I wouldn't be able to do it because I, I have all the content of this book comes from my interviews and my reporting, but it's one, it's, it's one, it's one thing to gather all that. It's another thing to just organize it and to keep things organized and to keep things running. So it was very challenging. I mean, it took about two years to write the book and then go through editing. And then you have to face the terror of the editing process and the rewrites. But I don't think there's any other way.

I think I've yet to meet somebody who's written a book and I said, oh, it was a breeze. This was no, it was just super easy. In fact, virtually everybody I know who's written a book has described it in pretty much the same way, that it was essentially a form of torture. Total form of torture. Do you have a dream guest that you want to have on the podcast? I mean, there are people who I think would be really interesting if they would be willing to be open and transparent

and show some vulnerability. I think Jeff Bezos would be really interesting. He doesn't really do interviews. We've asked, but we don't ever push too hard. If people want to do it, we are happy to do it. I think there are people like Oprah is just such a fascinating person. I think somebody who I'd love to have on her story has been told many times. So we'd have to figure out a way to tell it in a new,

fresher way. And Barack Obama, same thing. I mean, I think he built a movement, right? He built, he was not a well-known, he was a Senator from Illinois, a brand new Senator, and he became president. I mean, he built an entire movement from scratch. And I think that would be a really interesting deep dive to go into with him. And correct me if I'm wrong here. I think I've heard you discuss or say that you've either passed on guests or cut shows that you've done where people are not willing to tell stories and get vulnerable. And maybe you could talk about a little bit, because I think it's really important to what you do, but also for anybody that's interested in getting in this medium of podcasts and audio in order to keep attention. Yeah. I mean, we have a pretty,

we're pretty kind of militant about this, which is we need people to be willing to open up. Otherwise it's just another PR conversation. It's just another, oh, here they are on their book tour, whatever it might be. And that's okay. It's just, we're not the right show for you. And we're definitely not the right show

to pitch or promote your product. I mean, obviously, we're going to talk about your business a lot. And so implicitly, what you do will be promoted. But that's not what we do. We're here to serve our audience and our listeners by asking you to be generous with your memories and your personal journey. And by being generous, it means you've got to be vulnerable. You've got to take us inside your head. And it's

hard. This is really hard for some people to do. And so occasionally we've had to, yeah, we've had to kill interviews where it doesn't work. It doesn't happen very often. We do a lot of research beforehand to prevent that possibility. Because when you ask somebody to come into a studio for three hours and then you have to kill it, it's kind of, it's just really horrible. It's one of the hardest things we have to do. And thankfully, it hasn't happened very often. As a listener, though, I feel like it's more strategic and it's more seamless to have someone on to tell their journey rather than pitching their product. I think that people end up buying when you're content marketing and just talking about your story in a very casual way as opposed to coming on like you're checking it off your to-do list. A thousand percent. No, but people don't get that. They don't get that.

Which is so interesting to me. They don't get that, Lauren. They don't get it. It's a thousand percent true. You know what I think it is? We always joke in our show, when we're in studio, we say, you bring any PR or press person you want, we're still going to ask the questions that the audience wants to hear. And if you have to jump across the table and smack me, so be it. But what I always try to point out to press is that these audiences are extremely smart. They're savvy. They do their own research. If they fall in love with an individual's story, you almost don't need to press what they're doing because they're going to do the research on their own and go and buy the product. When you get really selly and really pushy, we all know what that

looks like and feels like these days, and nobody really wants to be sold to anymore. We want to, we just want to connect. Yeah. You know, I did an interview with Dave Anderson. Dave Anderson is the founder of Famous Dave's Barbecue. It's a barbecue chain all across the country. And he's, I think he's in his late sixties. And it was the first third of the first half of the interview. He was getting really frustrated with me because I kept asking him about his failures. And he was, because I had done, we've done a lot of research about his life. I mean, he had a lot of failures and he was getting so frustrated and he couldn't understand why I was so fixated on his failures because he really wanted to talk about, and then I did this and then this. And I had to basically say to him, Dave, I need you to trust me. I know it's going to sound in a much better way if you just surrender to the process.

Just surrender to me and trust me. And he did it. And we had a good interview. And that was it. And we went our separate ways. And the interview aired. It aired a couple weeks ago. And I received the most beautiful letter from Dave Anderson.

And he wrote to me that after our interview, he was so filled with anxiety and fear that he actually went to the corporate folks at Dave's Famous Barbecue. And he said, I'm worried I've embarrassed the company. He asked me about our failures as a company. And he asked me about bankruptcies and mistakes I made. And I'm just so worried that I've let you guys down. And they were like, don't worry, it's going to be fine. And he was just so nervous. And the episode came out and he was overwhelmed, overwhelmed at the number of people who reached out to him.

Thousands of people, people that he hadn't talked to in 40 years. And then of course, mostly people he didn't know who were so blown away by his story and his vulnerability and were so inspired by it. He wrote me this beautiful letter apologizing to me. I said, no apologies necessary, but just apologizing and thanking us for helping to force him to tell his story in an open and transparent way. He couldn't believe how many people wrote to him and said that they were so inspired by his story and what he talked about in his openness. And I mean, that it's not our intention, but like when an episode runs, people just send me, tweet at me photos of the product.

Like I can't tell you how many Instagram messages and tweets I got of just like Dave's famous barbecue sauces because people do feel a connection when they hear the story. They do feel a connection to the product and they oftentimes want to support it. You always ask if it's luck or skill that leads to success. What do you think it is mostly? I'm a big believer in luck. Now, of course, it requires a lot of hard work and a lot of dedication and a lot of perseverance. But when I think about the people who work really hard, it's not the billionaire in Silicon Valley. It's a person waiting tables. It's not the billionaire in Silicon Valley. It's a

person waiting tables. It's a person working a construction job. It's a gardener. There's no billionaire who works as hard as a gardener. So hard work alone is not enough to explain why somebody is successful. And luck is not enough either. I mean, luck passes all of us by at a certain point. It is an important factor. There are many, many, many factors that go into why somebody is successful. And it's not just, and when I ask that question, it's not designed for somebody to say, oh, it's luck or success is one or the other. It's really just a chance for them to reflect in any way they want. And in many cases, the way our society is structured means that some people have had an easier time finding success because of where they were born or their race or their background or the privileges that they had simply work hard or they didn't create something important, but what it is designed

to do is to give people a chance to reflect on their story and all of the things that had to come together to enable them to become the person they became. And that's really why I asked that question. Well, Guy, thank you so much for doing this. It's been a really challenging year for so many but within that i think there's also a ton of opportunity and hopefully for people that are listening to your show and ours that maybe they're on your show in the next four or five years and giving you a ton of years of content to talk about before we go where can everybody find you where can they listen where can they find the book yep so you can find the book wherever books are sold around the world it's available in most countries you can find the book wherever books are sold around the world. It's available in most countries.

You can find me on Instagram. I'm guy.raz. That's R-A-Z. You can find me on Twitter. That's at Guy Raz. And I'm on the other social media channels. I don't use them that much, but that's where you can find me. And of course, you can find How I Built This wherever you get podcasts.

And just if anyone's wondering, can you give a little pitch on the book of exactly what they can expect when they order it? This book is designed to teach you that entrepreneurship and entrepreneurialism is a mindset. And it's designed, it's basically a phone booth, right? It's a phone booth that you can walk into and find a cape in there and then walk out and then say, you know what, maybe I can fly. Maybe I'm a superhero. That's what it's for. It's the book I wish I had

when I was thinking about starting a business and I was too scared to do it. Well, again, man, thank you so much for doing this. I think you've been a big inspiration to Lauren and I. I love what you're doing. Everybody check out the book and open invite anytime, man. Thank you so much. Come back on. And for our audience, if you want to start his podcast, a lot of you probably have already listened, but I would definitely start with the Sarah Blakely. That's how you say her last name?

Of Spanx. That is how I got introduced to your podcast. It's a great episode and just such a great starting point. And definitely check out his book on Amazon. Thank you so much for coming on, Guy. Thanks, Lauren. Thank you, Michael. Thank you.

Wait, don't go. To win a copy of Guy's book, let us know who you want to see next on The Skinny Confidential, him and her show on my latest Instagram. So easy, at The Skinny Confidential. And then as always, make sure if this show has brought you any kind of value to rate and review the show on iTunes. Seriously, it takes two seconds and it helps support and grow the show.