How I Built This with Guy Raz

And so how productive I was going to be later on, or I can put in P&L statements and listen to Tony Robbins and listen to Jay Abraham and Think and Grow Rich and Seven Highly Effective Habits of whatever people.

You wish you read more Dale Carnegie, you know, than, than listening to Rodney Dangerfield albums because I probably could have learned some more.

Still a really useful book.

How to Win Friends and Influence People is an amazingly useful book.

And so I remember the first two autobiographies I read by my own choice were David Beckham's autobiography...I remember reading the autobiography of Dwayne The Rock Johnson.

And I talk a lot about him in Think Like a Monk.

I'm not perfect and I make mistakes all the time. And that's why I wrote the book called Think Like a Monk, Not Live Like a Monk, because I don't live like a monk anymore.

And the first download, when it finally happened, was in October 31st of 97. It was Men Are From Mars and Women Are From Venus, the self-help book.

Like a few years back, Logic published a novel, a psychological thriller called Supermarket.

Your books, Give and Take and originals. I mean, they are so innovative and so interesting. And that requires a lot of thinking.

But, you know, it's we receive these books, Give and Take or originals or whatever. You know, think again. And they're elegant and they're very useful and very interesting and full of innovative ideas.

That book 15 years ago of Who Moved My Cheese? If you get anxious when someone moves your cheese, you're probably not going to be a good entrepreneur.

It's probably only one business book that really helped me think about how to be a better just CEO day to day. And it's High Output Management by Andy Grove.

I think you're probably right. I remember reading the book about Sam Walton and Made in America and how he went to the outskirts of Walmart. It's almost like the Walmart strategy and where you go to all these smaller towns, you know, populations of 60,000, 100,000.

If you, you know, Four Quartets, the T.S. Eliot poem, there's a line in there, "the children in the apple tree," an image of complete simplicity.

And one of the things that I read was Bill Gates, How to Avoid a Climate Disaster.

And what struck me was this scientific consensus that if we don't address the amount of greenhouse gases we're emitting and bring them down to zero by 2050, that we go over the tipping point.

But I have to assume that, I mean, you were working on it. Tell me how you got the confidence to start writing your own book?

I think what gave me that confidence was working at a magazine that reviewed 400 books every two weeks.

And I said, I'd really like to write a book about a kid at a boarding school who's grappling with guilt and grief. And she said, that sounds great, but you have to write it.

And to her immense credit, she read it. And she said, you know, there's something here.

Of the 40 single-spaced pages Eileen read, I think probably, I don't know, six or seven sentences from that are in Looking For Alaska.

I had just read Infinite Jest and I was like super obsessed, which is a bit of a stereotype, I think, for a guy at that age.

I was like sort of proselytizing this at the bar. I was like, oh, you know, everyone needs to go read Infinite Jest. There's this guy, David Foster Wallace, he's incredible.

Oh really, Greg? So you've been studying literature, right, Greg?

Yeah, exactly. I was studying comparative literature. I was doing a minor in creative writing.

You know, we both had designs of being writers and spent all of our weekends and free time like writing short stories and poems and stuff.

And in March of 2024, a book came out called American Flannel by a guy named Stephen Kuritz.

And a lot of this book is about you and about, it's about basically about entrepreneurs who are trying to make clothing in the United States and how hard that is.

And part of it talks about this saga that you went through to create a flannel shirt, which I think initially when you launched American Giant in 2011, this was like in your vision, you wanted to make a flannel shirt.

But it wouldn't, it would take like seven years to figure out how to make a flannel shirt in the United States.

I think Stephen King said it was without question was going to be one of his favorite books of 2024.

I'm a lawyer. I wrote a thriller in the kind of John Grisham vein called American Giant.

It's like a legal thriller. And I've always thought that I might one day become a New York Times bestseller and people buy t-shirts or something with the name of the novel on it.

But that's a pipe dream. And if you write me a $5,000 check, you can have it.

My dad got me Subway Art, which I think is like one of the Bibles of

This is a book. This is a coffee table book. Basically graffiti art. I remember that book. Yeah.

Very important book. And I think it should, you know, everybody should own it to appreciate because it was a very, very catalytic culturally.

It came from a book called Breaking the Vicious Cycle.

I actually became convinced, particularly after reading The Age of Spiritual Machines by Ray Kurzweil, that artificial, very powerful and general AI systems were going to come but some a few decades into the future.

We said in the first book we ever wrote the book of mythicality our philosophy has always been pick a direction and go make the best decision that you can but just know that all you're really doing is setting yourself up for another decision to be made in the future and the outcome isn't going to be what you envisioned.

And as they describe it, if you can find the blue ocean, an untapped market, then your company will leap in value and unlock new demand.

And that resulted in our first article, Value Innovation. And that eventually led to this grand theory, which again is one of the most influential business theories of the past 50 years called Blue Ocean Strategy, which essentially--and I'm going to paraphrase it, but you'll do a better job at giving a better explanation--is that there are essentially two oceans in business.

And that became what we called the Blue Ocean Strategy.

So we saw there was those two universes, but most companies' effort and energy was all in the competing. And we asked the question, why?

We Reinvent the Circus.