#462: Guy Raz on Building 'How I Built This,' Managing Depression, and Podcast Ecosystem Predictions

Podcasting, right now, is a little bit like community radio in the 70s ... Anybody can start one. There are a million podcasts in the English language. Only a tiny, tiny top of a pinhead number of those podcasts have over 50,000 listeners a week ... And even a smaller, atomic, molecule fraction of that have a million or more listeners a week. It doesn't mean that it's impossible to gain that audience. The beauty of podcasting is that the barrier to entry is very low. Anybody can start recording themselves and upload it to these platforms.

As a reporter, as an interviewer, as a person, I'm always looking to have my views changed. I'm always open to it. I want to learn from people. That's why you do what you do. We do this because, for free, we get to learn from other people, and what a gift that is—to know that on any given day, my whole world can be blown apart, and how exciting is that?

Before enlightenment, I was depressed. After enlightenment, I'm still depressed, but the way that I relate to the depression is different, and that makes all the difference.

How is it that in our minds, we amplify things? We think that these challenges in front of our eyes, these anxieties we have, are so big, and so often, they're not. So often, they pass with time, or they are resolved, or they're less important than you think they are.

When you are building any idea, whether it's in your company... or you're trying to create something disruptive out in the world, you will always find people who will push back against it. There are always going to be people who will reject your idea, and it's why, I think, a lot of successful entrepreneurs started out as salespeople.

This, to me, is the most important skill that an entrepreneur has to develop—the ability to withstand rejection.

Don't try to replicate what Uber's doing; try to figure out how you can service Uber. Don't try to build the next Airbnb; build a company that actually services things around Airbnb. That is really where the opportunities are.

Herb Kelleher—just a wonderful man. He started Southwest Airlines. His motto was, 'Think small, act small, and that's how you get big.'

We are all going to be unkind multiple times in our lives [or] in a day, but if you can make that your north star and just try to sear that into your memory, or tattoo [it] on your arm, or put it on a billboard... it's going to make the whole world just a little bit better.

I'm open to having my views changed. I welcome that. I'm constantly interrogating how I feel about the world and the things I think about the world.

I wanted to be a journalist because I probably naively believe—and still believe—that the more knowledge people have about other people, the more people know about other people's stories, it's more likely that will make that person more empathetic.

It's ['Homage to Catalonia' by George Orwell] just a story about purity and the false promises of purity, and that the world is full of nuance, and it's full of contradictions. And, to me, that is what it means to be human.

Writing things down can be incredibly, incredibly important, especially when you're experiencing anxiety.

A small business can be much more successful than a big business. A corner grocery store that's profitable is doing better than Uber, which is not yet profitable.