Guy Raz on Building ‘How I Built This,’ Managing Depression, and Podcasts | The Tim Ferriss Show

Guy Raz walks Tim Ferriss through how he prepares for and conducts the deeply vulnerable interviews behind How I Built This, including pre-interviews, deep background research, and his insistence on telling 360-degree life stories. He traces his own arc from war correspondent disillusioned by news after the Newtown shooting, through a transformational Nieman Fellowship at Harvard where the case-study method seeded the idea for the show. Raz speaks openly about his decades-long struggle with depression, his five years on antidepressants, and how the condition has become more manageable with age. He shares patterns he's observed across 300-plus entrepreneur interviews, especially unshakable belief, resilience to rejection, and the strategy of servicing big industries rather than competing with them. The conversation closes on the future of podcasting moving toward walled-garden streaming models, his love of fatherhood, and his billboard message: be kind.

• Raz holds a months-ahead pre-interview with every guest and tells them everything is on the table because a human story is a 360-degree story, not a Facebook highlight reel.
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• He once discovered through non-public background research that an entrepreneur had served jail time for 1980s securities fraud; when the guest refused to discuss it, Raz dropped the episode rather than hide it.
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• How I Built This was almost called 'The Hustle' but a legal check killed the name, so Raz fell back on a title he'd thought boring that turned out to be perfect.
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• The 2012 Newtown shooting, which he was asked to anchor live, was the breaking point that ended his career in news despite having covered five wars.
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• At around age 24 Raz hit a desperate low, wanting to not wake up, until a mentor who is now his closest friend intervened and got him to a psychiatrist.
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• The Nieman Fellowship at Harvard exposed him to the business-school case-study method, which planted the seed for How I Built This.
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• Raz predicts podcasting will move toward a premium-television, walled-garden model where shows live exclusively on platforms like Spotify, Amazon, or Apple.
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• His core entrepreneurial insight: the people who got rich in the Gold Rush (Levi Strauss, Wells Fargo, Ghirardelli) serviced the miners rather than mining gold, so service big industries instead of competing with them.
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• Shoemaker Steve Madden, who went to prison two years for securities fraud while high on cocaine, openly discussed it on the show and became a prison-reform activist.
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• Ted Radio Hour launched in 2013 and rode the podcast wave that exploded with Serial; How I Built This started as a low-stakes side project.
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• The How I Built This theme song was written by Ramtin Arablouei to sound propulsive like the first track off Beck's 'Sea Change,' deliberately unlike NPR's dulcet tones.
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• Raz spent about five years on antidepressants but says the jury is genuinely out on whether SSRIs are effective; regaining a sense of control mattered most.
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• La Colombe co-founder Todd Carmichael fled to a remote South Pacific island with no electricity for three months, fishing and writing an unpublished novel to recover.
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• During a bout of insomnia and anxiety, Raz's wife transcribed everything worrying him into a journal; three months later not a single item on the list mattered.
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• Bevel founder Tristan Walker (now owned by Procter & Gamble) persisted because he believed no one else would solve razor bumps for Black and brown men.
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• Ring/DoorBot founder Jamie Siminoff nearly went bankrupt and almost took a line of credit on his home before a chance lunch led to a Shark Tank connection that saved the company.
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• Belkin founder Chet Pipkin started with only a soldering iron, hand-building cables to connect IBM PCs to Epson printers, growing it into a billion-dollar peripherals business.
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• Asked for a billboard message, Raz chose Obama's two-word farewell sentiment: 'be kind.'
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