How I Built This with Guy Raz

Tony did recently score a gig writing a chapter for a new Lonely Planet book. It's called Epic Drives of the World.

by the way at its height the company was valued at a quarter of a billion dollars the wheelers are no longer formally involved with the company they sold all their shares but Tony did recently score a gig writing a chapter for a new Lonnie Planet book it's called Epic Drives of the World

He listened to my spiel and then I looked at my dummy of the book. I saw him writing Southeast Asia on a shoestring on the order form and then write some number down and he spun the order around and pushed it across the desk to me and he bought a thousand copies.

I was reading through your first guidebook, The Pamphlet And there are some pretty different things in there It tells you where you can find marijuana Isn't it not hard to find it?

It was 96 pages It sold for $1.80 And it covered all the countries you went through? All of Asia in 96 pages Very brief

We had it printed but it was a very basic little book It was actually done it really was done on our kitchen table because actually we only had a kitchen kitchen and a bedroom

And then you took it to a printer and you ran off a bunch of copies of it We found a little... I mean, we didn't go to a big commercial printer it was a guy who had this printing in the basement under his apartment and he printed them for us but we just printed the pages we actually folded them and put them together and as Maureen said, stapled them and trimmed the edges of the guillotine So it was really a home produced book

And then this, I picked this book up for whatever reason and I'm reading it.

And the essence of the philosophy is you can do the thing that everybody else does or you can carve your own path.

And by the way, that's where a lot of the most interesting things can happen and it's unique to you in your footprint.

And it really opened this pathway to me like, oh, I guess I can just go be an entrepreneur and I can create a product. It's perfect.

I think that was the whole goal of the book to inspire people to do that.

the essence of the philosophy is you can do the thing that everybody else does or you can carve your own path.

And by the way, that's where a lot of the most interesting things can happen and it's unique to you in your footprint.

And it really opened this pathway to me like, oh, I guess I can just go be an entrepreneur and I can create a product. It's perfect.

I'm reminded there's an amazing book by an author named Zoe, I think Frey Blaner is how you say her name. And the book is called Super Fandom, and it's about turning fans into super fans.

And how do you sort of cultivate that sense of identity and belonging and community amongst those super fans? And she offers a number of ways to do that, that I found just very helpful as I think about building Patreon, building Pomplamoose, my endeavors.

I'm reminded there's an amazing book by an author named Zoe, I think Frey Blaner is how you say her name. And the book is called Super Fandom, and it's about turning fans into super fans.

She offers a number of ways to do that, like pilgrimages, content creation, and collections; for example, the How I Built This Summit works as a pilgrimage that turns attendees into superfans.

I met you. I met you. You came to one of my book signings for my kid's book, Wow in the World, and I'm so psyched to have you on the show.

You came to one of my book signings for my kid's book, Wow in the World, and I'm so psyched to have you on the show.

I saw Dune and I was like, oh, there's my favorite book.

And I said, I've never heard of this book. What is this book?

And he got very agitated and said, what do you mean you've never read Dune?

And I said, OK, how about this? I'll read that if you read Pride and Prejudice.

And then I wrote this review in Goodreads about how Dune was not my kind of book. And I gave it one star.

I read a book called The Gift and it's really about how to use money. The purpose of money is to keep it in circulation, not to stow it away.

I'm sure a lot of folks here have read Thinking Fast and Slow, and Danny is, I think, one of the great social scientists in history.

There's a word that I use, and I've written about this in my book, when thinking about story and it's why. Why did I make this? Why does the world need to hear about it? Why does it add value to your life? You know, and those are questions, right? You have to answer when you're starting to think about the product, the brand that you're putting out into the world.

But he said alongside that vision, there's this other dystopian vision, the technology, which is the eldest Huxley vision of Brave New World in which control is not established by banning books but by creating a world of so much amusing ourselves to death and the world.

Yeah, exactly. So in an effort to give myself an entirely new domain in which I could explore my personal and professional life, I decided to sell the four-hour body, which was a huge reach.

Yeah, famous Harvard Business School professor who's no longer alive, but wrote The Innovator's Dilemma, right?

Yes. Dilemma and Innovator's Solution.

And I mean, I didn't make that up. That's Angela Duckworth and her book Grit. A very good book.

So it was about all things physical improvement-related, modification-related, everything from breath-holding to vertical jump to ultra endurance to fat loss, you name it, right? All these mini chapters.

In Yuval Noah Harari's book, Sapiens, he argues that our societies are almost entirely constructed around stories.

As I get farther into the journey, I keep going back to, you know, the book The Alchemist.

And I was obsessed with this book, The Alchemist, during my entrepreneurial journey.

There's a book that came out in 2009 called Nudge.

One of the central arguments the writers make is that it's possible to Nudge people into making better decisions about their finances, their health and even their happiness.

And you can do this, the book argues, by making very simple tweaks in how you present information and options to people.