How I Built This with Guy Raz

And there's some episode on with a guy named Robert Kiyosaki. And he's and he has this book called Rich Dad, Poor Dad.

And somebody had left a book on my desk. It was by Chris Anderson. It was called Freemium.

I'll change the title. I won't call it MailChimp's free plan. I'll call it MailChimp Goes Freemium.

So he took the job and then he bought HTML for Dummies.

And I asked my mom to buy it.

And then I came home and I was like, Dad, I'm going to cure you of cancer. I'm going to cook.

And my mom, she read this book called Driven to Distraction by Dr. Hallowell.

When I was in middle school, I started reading books. In seventh grade, I started reading books on derivatives.

I would literally read books on derivatives, any book I can get.

In the late nineties, one of my favorite books, which is when I reread it now, rethink about it now, it's a little bit dated just because of the content, but it was at the time I was a younger man, it was High Fidelity. I love that book by Nick Hornby.

That was a time where one of the most famous guidebooks for Americans was Arthur Frommer's Europe on $5 a day.

He was the granddad of all this. He's the guy that inspired the democratization of international travel.

His classic book.

You wrote a book called Travel is a Political Act in 2009.

The book is called I Am Invincible. And what I do is I share my life experiences through the decades.

And aging with power is sort of the the headline of the book in that you can get better with age.

And that at 75, I love the fact that I'm so much smarter now than I ever was and that I do things now to serve my purpose in this lifetime, which is a very freeing experience.

I read an amazing book by Ivan Illich, who's an educational philosopher called Deschooling Society.

And Ivan Illich's philosophy was that formal education in universities constrain the flow of knowledge more than facilitate it.

You decide to write a book called How to Make the World a Better Place, which is great.

You want to kind of make amends for How to Marry Money and those kinds of lectures.

Well, as you said, I needed to redeem myself somehow.

But it was just as much an exploration of all the ways in which you could do good stuff in the world.

The book was really a compendium of all the good things one could do on a full time or a part time basis to help make the world a better place.

And then of course, there was the Air Force Exercise Book.

I had written a book in the late 70s with another woman who happened to be in my class. So we wrote this book with pictures of how to do different exercises and, you know, a little history of dance and all of that.

And the book sold over 400,000 copies.

What's interesting is that Jim Collins is, I'm trying to remember the name of his latest book, Great by Choice, I think.

I had read this book Crossing the Chasm, which talks about how technology's adopted.

Well, to answer those questions, I've written a book. It's called What Else? How I Built This, and it's full of inspiring stories from some of the greatest leaders and entrepreneurs in the world who've been through the trenches, made big mistakes, and lived to tell the tale.

If you're looking to start something or just want to be inspired by those who have built incredible things, pick up How I Built This now, wherever you buy your books, or by visiting guyraz.com.

In seventh grade, I read the foundation series, Isaac Asimov, and 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 large scale historical movements.

And he sees through his science that the galactic empire is about to enter into a 10,000 year dark ages. And he decides to do something about it. He can't stop it from happening, but he can shorten it to a thousand years.

And the way he does that is by taking the galaxy's knowledge and putting it into a foundation at the periphery of the galaxy.

And I remember when I was seventh grade and I read that, I thought two things. One, why don't more people think on those scales? It feels so inspiring and epic to think on that scale well beyond ourselves.

And then the other aha from that book in seventh grade was like, yeah, Harry Seldon's right. Like the way to preserve civilization is really through knowledge. That is what defines a civilization and that is what defines human potential.

In seventh grade, I read the foundation series, Isaac Asimov, and 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 large scale historical movements.