How I Built This with Guy Raz

I think a lot of people have read Malcolm Gladwell's book where he talks about the 10,000 hours.

And one time when his book came out, I said, yeah, I did that and more.

Like reading, um, slaughterhouse five helped me write the visit. I don't know why, you know, it just, it just, it evokes something in me.

Like reading, um, slaughterhouse five helped me write the visit. I don't know why, you know, it just, it just, it evokes something in me.

And I had just read Shoe Dog by Phil Knight and had all this on my mind about like the legacy and like my newborn son and like what were we doing? And, and you know, what would Unilever be able to offer us?

And I had just read "Shoe Dog" by Phil Knight and had all this on my mind about like the legacy and like my newborn son and like what were we doing? And, and you know, what would Unilever be able to offer us?

I was raised on the works of science fiction of the likes of Jules Verne and Arthur Clark and Isaac Asimov.

I was super inspired when I was young. In seventh grade, I read the Foundation series, Isaac Asimov. The protagonist is someone named Harry Seldon, who's kind of a new form of academic that's a combination of mathematics, economics, history, psychology. And he's able to predict largescale historical movements. ... It feels so inspiring and epic to think on that scale well beyond ourselves. The other aha from that book was that the way to preserve civilization is really through knowledge.

I wanted meaning and I wanted to live deeply. I was very influenced by Thoreau, who wrote about it quite beautifully. I was looking for transcendence.

This is in reference to a book that Simon wrote, Start with Why. How do you connect and motivate team members with their why in the absence of being physically present, of being together?

And on Friday, April 17th, I'll have acclaimed thinker Simon Sinek, author of Start with Why on the show.

If you read Crush It today, 13 years after I wrote it, you know, I'm talking about influencer marketing. I'm talking about podcasts. I'm talking about everything that ended up happening.

Your first book was called Crush It! Why Now Is the Time to Cash In on Your Passion.

And I give this talk and the talk was basically crush it which is does everybody understand what's happening here in 2007. Like this is it. We can do stuff. You could do a blog about Smurfs and make a hundred thousand dollars like that's literally what I said.

If you read Crush It today I basically laid out 14 years ago influencer marketing and it landed.

book writing was my most lucrative part of my life. Lucrative yeah. In 2009, 10, 11, 12.

That's where I made most of my money.

And that book completely blew my mind because it was full of recipes I could cook for my whole family and eat a grain-free, dairy-free, sugar-free diet.

And she found that changing her diet in a pretty dramatic way allowed her to control the symptoms.

The book's author, Danielle Walker, wrote the book because she struggled with an autoimmune condition called ulcerative colitis.

Back in 2014, when I was trying to eat a strictly paleo diet, I came across a cookbook called Against All Grain.

The book's author, Daniel Walker, wrote the book because she struggled with an autoimmune condition called ulcerative colitis, and she found that changing her diet in a pretty dramatic way allowed her to control the symptoms.

And I also, you know, I had to photograph the whole thing myself as well and learn how to write a recipe.

I wanted to sell a thousand copies of Against All Grain in 2013.

But the book becomes a bestseller. Can you I mean, this was 2013 now it's 2022. How many copies has Against All Grains sold?

Her newest cookbook is called Healthy in a Hurry, and a lot of the recipes are inspired by her grandma's recipes.

You know, I grew up in a family that used food to gather. My grandmother, my dad's mom, is Italian.

So I started to look at some of them and think, okay, well, I can't have, you know, the pasta for instance, or I can't put flour in this to make a roux. What ingredients am I allowed to have, you know, coconut flour, almond flour, things like that.

I'm like, oh well I can make a little bit of money by recommending the products that I use you know and then we started doing a few sidebar ads through Google and to me that felt good because I'm like I'm not asking them to pay me anything but you know if they're viewing it or they're clicking it then I will at least get a little bit of income.

And you know it says that they're grain free and dairy free and gluten free on there but I've just found from listening to my audience I just heard from so many people that they don't have to all the time they may not have something as as severe as I have but they feel better eating that way and they're looking to you know know what they're putting in their kids bodies and they're looking to make one meal that is healthy but you know they're not having to make multiple different meals depending on people's dietary needs and so I'm you know always just kind of trying to get out of the smaller paleo niche because I think that my recipes are good enough to withstand any sort of you know diet that you need to or even if you eat a standard diet I think the next biggest hurdle is going to try to make that more affordable and accessible for everybody which is you know one of the biggest problems with with our country but even just the amount of ingredients like we've mentioned you know I mean the fact that you can buy cassava pasta or chickpea pasta and you could not buy anything like that back in the day it's encouraging to me to see that you know there's big brands that are that are acquiring smaller health food brands that kind of started in infancy when I started writing my cookbooks and just to really see that there is an emphasis on it and that people are wanting to at least look to food as as a tool in their healing toolbox I feel you know for myself and my business I just feel like there's only room to grow and there's so many more people you know that can continue to be reached.

Her newest cookbook is called Healthy in a Hurry, and a lot of the recipes are inspired by her grandma's recipes.

Daniel Walker's new book is called Healthy in a Hurry.

And I kind of left Against All Grain a little behind even in the last five or six years as well.

I purposely named my seasoning blends and, you know, my name is on there. But I named them Healthy in a Hurry because I really see so much coming from this book and the title and the ethos of the book of wanting to eat healthy but not always having the time.

And then I, but then I thought, well, wait a minute, I've already written the book by giving this talk over and over and over. And I just sat down and gave my lecture to the paper.

And there it was the first edition of Europe Through the Back Door.

I think I even hand wrote it or something, but it was just my lecture.

It was a very simple thing.

And it was a lovingly put together pile of 180 pages.

I've already written the book by giving this talk over and over and over. And I just sat down and gave my lecture to the paper. And there it was, the first edition of Europe Through the Back Door.

In the beginning, the book was two halves. The first half was all the skills, packing, hotels, eating, transportation, communication, you name it. And then the last half were individual chapters on my 20 favorite discoveries.

It was selfpublished, I didn't know what an ISBN was, so it didn't have an ISBN, which was stupid. I Xeroxed the pages and stapled them together.

I think it was $4.95.

I would have the books in the back of my car. I'd say, if you want to buy the book, I'll be out in my car. And it's just $5, you know? And then it's just bam, bam, bam, selling like hotcakes.

Something that I loved that you wrote about in your book and in your in your latest book, and I relate to it so much because I released a book last fall, was that it can take two years to work on the book and write the book. And somebody could take somebody two hours to consume all of your ideas.

And I felt like there was a story that like I wanted to preserve. I wanted to preserve in like some tiny way this way of life.

And I didn't really think there was anything necessarily innovative about it. I was really focused on this, the preservation aspect.

But you know, it really is, it was one of the earlier cookbooks that celebrated seasonal cooking and kind of made a point to say that it matters and that it's a better way of approaching cooking.

It was $10,000, I believe.

I've been reflecting a lot on it. And I realized, you know what's something that no founder has ever said? No founder has ever said this. You know, I've been building my own company, I've been running it as the CEO. What I really need to do next is be an employee again. I really need to work for someone else and not actually be the CEO anymore.

And I think the selfish part of it was to kind of experience a reintegration on my side because I'd had to hide this from everyone. It was kind of like, no, screw that. Like I don't, it wasn't my fault. Like I don't need to hide it. Number one. And number two, I know other people deal with this. And so by sharing it, hopefully there's some measure of support offer that this story is out there.

It's easy to explain away the mood swings you might experience as a person with bipolar disorder if you're also an entrepreneur as being due to the fact that you're an entrepreneur when there's something else that you need to be dealing with as well that is contributing or amplifying those highs and lows.

And I think what I'm encouraging leaders to think about now is proactively disclosing issues before there's a crisis to create a norm that it's safe to share what you're dealing with, because even if you don't have a diagnosis, life is hard and you're dealing at some point with a mental health challenge.

And so I hope, Guy, that we're sitting down to have a conversation in 20 years. I'll still be able to tell you about my latest daily mixture of medications. I'll still be seeing a doctor twice a week and twice a week is a lot, right? Seeing a doctor twice a week is a lot, but I do it because I don't want more than 72 hours or so to pass without him having a read on how I'm doing.

Got to detail a lot of that in my memoir, Burn Rate.

This was a book by Frances Moore Lappe and she was the first person to point out to the American public and to me personally that there was no sense of feeding all of these grains through animals.

You take 15 pounds of grains and put it into an animal and you get maybe 8 ounce or a pound of meat as opposed to if you feed grain directly to people, boom, you've saved so much grain and resources and land and everything.

Around this time, you're in your early 20s, you come across this book, Diet for a Small Planet, which has this huge effect on you. What is the book for people who don't know it? And what did you learn from that book?

Well, this was a book by Frances Moore Lappe. And she was the first person to point out to the American public and to me personally, that there was no sense of feeding all of these grains through animals.

And my favorite cookbook at the time is still Today is the Joy of Cooking. It's like equal parts dorky and historical.

My favorite cookbook at the time is still today is the Joy of Cooking. It's like equal parts dorky and historical, and there's like not really pictures. So you have to really be into the words.

There's a book by David Epstein called The Sports Gene. And he makes an analogy between a player and a coach. And the analogy is just because you're a bird, it doesn't mean you can be an ornithologist.

We got the big college textbook called Ice Cream by William S. Arbuckle.

Wendell S. Arbuckle. Thank you. The father of modern American ice cream.

And she actually managed to get a bidding war from multiple publishers on a three book deal for The Knot.

And that money actually, that infusion of cash saved The Knot at that time?

We lived off of that advance for probably a year.

What was the advance? About $350,000. For three books? Yeah.

And so you put that back into the company, but then you had to write books. You had to write three damn books.

And that money actually, that infusion of cash saved The Knot at that time?

We lived off of that advance for probably a year and a half.

What was the advance? $350,000.

For three books?

Yeah.