Guy Raz on Podcasts and Passion: Audio's Ability to Spark Learning

I’ll admit it. This was a pinch-me moment. Getting to interview Guy Raz—host of the top podcasts “How I Built This” and “Wow in the World” and one of the pioneers of podcasting? Count me in.

This conversation went in a bunch of unexpected directions. And that’s what’s so fun about it. After all, podcasting is all about bringing audio back and turning learning into leisure. And the question Guy and his partner Mindy Thomas asked a while back was: Why not bring kids in on the fun? Guy shared how his studio, Tinkercast, is leveraging the medium to inspire and educate the next generation of problem solvers. 

We discussed the power of audio to capture curiosities and foster imagination, how Tinkercast is doing that in and out of the classroom, and how it can help re-engage students in building needed skills at a critical time. Enjoy!

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Michael Horn:

Welcome to The Future of Education, where we are dedicated to building a world in which all individuals can build their passions, fulfill their human potential, and live a life of purpose. To help us think about those topics today, I'm really thrilled we have Guy Raz, who is widely considered one of the pioneers of podcasting. Many of you are, I'm sure, familiar with his podcasts, whether it's, How I Built This, the kids science podcast, Wow in the World, TED Radio Hour, many more, we're going to get into all of that. Guy's also a bestselling author, and he's the co-founder of two media companies, including Built It Productions and the kids and family studio, Tinkercast, which we're going to talk about today on the show. Guy, just thank you so much for being here. I confess I'm fanboy-ing a little bit at the moment, but I'm just thrilled that you're here.

Guy Raz:

Michael, thank you for having me on and for being a fan. That's why I do what I do because, and we can talk about this a bit later, but every show, whether it's How I Built This, or Wow in the World, or The Great Creators, is I make it in the hopes that people get joy from it and value from it. So, when I meet somebody who says they're a fan, by all means, please. I mean, it means a lot to me, and I really love it and appreciate it, because most of the time, most of the week I am in this studio behind this microphone isolated from the world. I don't actually physically interact with people who are fans very often. So, thank you for saying that. 

Guy’s Journey to Podcasting 

Michael Horn:

You generally get to ask the questions, so this is a little bit of a role reversal. But I want to start there on the personal side, where you just gave us that quick entry into... Because as I said, you host a lot of podcasts. I don't think I can keep count, I don't know if you can. But I'd love you just to tell your story, because I actually don't think a lot of people hear that around how you got your start in podcasting, the shows that you're hosting now, and selfishly how you stay on top of all the work it takes to do these podcasts so well with this level of excellence.

Guy Raz:

Yeah. I started in podcasting when it was a backwater, back in 2011. At the time, I was at NPR, I had been at NPR since the beginning of my career as a reporter at NPR. I was a reporter at CNN. Most of my early career I was a war correspondent. I covered the Iraq War, I covered Israel, Palestine. I was in Gaza, I was in the West Bank, I was in Tel Aviv, I was all over the Middle East. I covered the Iraq War and Macedonia and Pakistan. I mean, that was my life. I was in and out of war zones for most of my career. I covered the military and the Pentagon, which is for many people who know How I Built This and don't know my background would be strange to imagine, but that really was my life. I was living in hotels wearing bulletproof vests, I still have them, dodging bullets and explosions, and that was my life before I had a family.

Eventually, I was a host on All Things Considered at NPR for a few years. I would say around 2011, I started to get a little bit disillusioned with news. It felt to me like the thing that I wanted to do with my life, which was to have an impact in some way, I didn't feel like I was having the right kind of impact. I didn't feel like... By going out in the world and trying to tell stories, the hope is that you will give people information that will help them build a more nuanced view of the world. But what I discovered, and it was a very naive perspective, what I discovered is that we humans generally don't operate that way. So, I wanted to figure out a different way to have an impact.

What I landed on was that news wasn't the thing that I wanted to do anymore. So, around 2011, I started to transition out, and I ended up connecting with people at TED, the TED Talks people, and they were looking to build a podcast, build on a podcast that they had started but didn't really land in the way that they had hoped. So, they asked me to basically build a show, rebuild a show, and it was called the TED Radio Hour, and I launched that in 2012. This was a backwater era in podcasting. I mean, there were relatively few podcasts, comparatively few people listening. I had gone from being in All Things Considered, with an audience of five million people to a show with a few thousand.

Fast-forward, about a year, two years in, there was a podcast called Serial, and that exploded in our culture. All of a sudden, a lot of people started to discover podcasts, including TED Radio Hour, at the time which was a show about big ideas. I would interview TED... People who gave TED talks. The shows were arranged thematically, so we would talk about creativity or curiosity or how we organize our lives or the vastness of outer space. It was this interdisciplinary show where you would have, in one episode, you would literally have Sting, like a rock star, Sting, and then a neuroscientist from Johns Hopkins, and then a former prisoner and an Arctic explorer in the same episode, talking about a broadly connected theme. That show gave me an opportunity to really explore ideas.

What I realized having done that, doing that show, was that it was connecting with people in a different way. So, when I was a news reporter in Iraq or Afghanistan or the West Bank or wherever I was, I didn't get the sense that I was connecting with people in a way that was making their lives better. But all of a sudden making this show, that changed all of that, because the feedback that I was getting from listeners was, "Wow. This has changed my day," or, "It's given me a different perspective on the world." Or, "Now when I look up at the stars, I realize I'm looking at the past in real time." So, that experience really launched my career in podcasting. I eventually started my own production company, called Built It Productions, and started another show called, How I Built This, which I continue to do today, which is about entrepreneurs, founders of companies.

Then around the same time, with a very good friend, Mindy Thomas, started a podcast called, Wow in the World, which we launched in 2017. Along with another friend, Meredith Halpern-Ranzer, we started a kids production company. So, that was really the beginning of my career. Since that time, I continue to do, How I Built This. I no longer do TED Radio Hour. That was an NPR TED show, so eventually I stopped doing that. But it was a wonderful experience. Today I host, How I Built This and Wow in the World. I do a show called The Great Creators, where I interview celebrities, musicians and actors, Tom Hanks, Stephen Colbert, Jason Sudeikis, Jeff Tweedy, Bjork, a long list of people, about their lives, about their creative process, about their failures. I try and create a space for them to show a more relatable side of who they are. Because whether you're an actor or the founder of Starbucks or me or you, we are all characters at certain points of the day or the week or the month.

What I try to do on all of my shows, my interview shows, is to show a more stripped down side of people, the side of people that people might... The part of us that we might see in the mirror. I try and show that to my listeners so they understand that, many of the people they listen to and admire are like them in very many ways. So, my hope is that when somebody hears a founder on How I Built This talk about how they built Instagram or Starbucks or Tate's Cookies or whatever brand that we do, that they can see that there's a possibility there. That if it's something that they want to do, if there's an aspiration they have, they can hear and feel that through the shows that I'm part of, that I make, in the hopes that they walk away from it feeling empowered and inspired and maybe even changed a little bit.

Creating Podcasts for Kids

Michael Horn:

It's fascinating to hear you say that, because inspired is the word that I wrote down as you were talking. It seems like you really help lift people up to believe that they could go chase that dream. In fact, as I said, I first got to know your podcast through, How I Built This. My wife, when she was starting her company, she made all the employees in the kitchen listen to it during food prep and things of that nature. But then obviously you really got into my radar with, Wow in the World, with Mindy. I, for a while was like, "Are you sure it's the same person doing both of these things? Are you really sure?" But I guess that's one thing that you were doing in both cases, which is inspiring and lifting us up to realize what is possible. But how did you see the through line from this podcast world that's largely for adults, entrepreneurs, to kids? Those on the surface feel like very different audiences and very different shticks.

Guy Raz:

Like any business, Mindy and I were trying to solve a problem that we had. I met Mindy in 2014, I was listening to her show on Sirius XM. She continues to have a wonderful morning show on Sirius XM. It's a kids program, that just blew my mind when I first heard it, because I had never heard somebody communicate with kids in such a funny, respectful, quirky way, in the way that she did. I mean, I was completely blown away when I first heard it. I, one day, Tweeted about it and she saw my Tweet and she freaked out. She was a fan of the shows I was doing at the time. Eventually we met and became really good friends, and she would ask me to come on her show to talk about news events with kids. Eventually, after a year or so of doing it, we were on a hike. I said to her, I said, "Mindy," I used to live in Washington DC and we were on a hike together. I said, "Why don't we make a podcast? I make podcasts. Why don't we make our own podcast for kids?"

That was really the genesis of Wow in the World. What it was was we had kids, we both have kids. Now they're teenagers, but at the time they were little. We were really concerned about how much our kids were just staring at screens all the time. We were very careful not to give them access, but the iPad or whatever it was around, they were just like... It was like a magnet. So, we started to think, could we create an alternative, a screen alternative for kids that will be as good as a video, as funny, as compelling, as entertaining as a cartoon, except it lives entirely in that kid's brain?

We knew we could do that, because both of us came from audio. So, that was really the genesis of the show. The through line between How I Built This or The Great Creators, or at the time, the TED Radio Hour and other shows I've done, and Wow in the World, was very simple. It was, if you give me 20 minutes, 30 minutes, an hour of your time, I am going to respect that time so much that I promise you I won't waste it. I will work so hard to give you something in return for your time. Whether it's really great, important information, really compelling entertainment, an inspiring idea, a thought that might change your perspective or trigger your creativity. Now, I don't hit it out of the park every time. I think it's impossible. But that's our North Star. So, whatever show I do, whether it's Wow in the World or How I Built This or Great Creators, that's our goal. That's where we recalibrate all the time.

Are we giving people something to take with them? We're not asking for anything except your time, which is asking a lot. But if I'm asking for your time, I have to give you something additive. I don't want to make extractive content. There's a lot of extractive content out there, especially for kids. Unboxing videos or prank videos that really just needs those eyeballs to click up the advertising revenue. That's not what we wanted to do. We wanted to make something that was so funny and so compelling that kids would ask their parents for it, but wasn't just good enough to win over the kid but it had to win over the parent. We wanted something like Pixar, where you watch a Pixar movie with your kid and you get a bunch of jokes that they don't get. We wanted to make a show that spoke to kids and parents at different levels, and that was the genesis of Wow in the World, which we started in 2016 and then launched in 2017. The rest is history. You listened with your kids, which hopefully, I think, was entertaining for you as well as for your kids.

The Magic of Audio

Michael Horn:

You bet. It kept me awake while I drove. We successfully got to the destinations, as I like to say. But I want to jump to where you picked up on this piece of the magic of audio specifically. I'd love you to just double click on that, because I think honestly, since at least as far as I can tell, since Sesame Street, people have seen video as the way to capture kids' imaginations, tell stories for learning, because Wow in the World is fundamentally about learning at its heart after you get through and learning in the best possible way, through stories, a compelling story that captures imagination. But I think it's fair to say you were one of the first to realize, hey, we can jump away from video into audio for children again. I'd love you just to talk more about the magic of audio. You've already explained how you saw the opportunity there, but just double click on that because I think that's a very important strand.

Guy Raz:

So, the thing about audio is it's like... Imagine, and you'll know this Michael, because when you were a kid there weren't any cell phones and there was no Snapchat, and the only way to communicate with your friends was over a landline. I remember when I was a kid, I'd get a phone call and I would take that phone and we had a long cord, long curly cord, and I'd take that cord down the corridor as far as it would go, and I'd find a closet door and I'd get in there and I'd have a conversation in the dark with another friend, so nobody could hear me. Those were some of the most intimate and powerful. Now, of course, you're a kid, but still memorable conversations. I can still smell the smell of the kitchen, the corridor. I could see the color of that yellowed cord, that curly cord.

The reason why those were so powerful is because voice transmits, human voice transmits an infinite number of cues, emotions, feelings, that we don't normally take in because our brains are so wired to process visual imagery. But if you talk to somebody who cannot see, somebody who is blind, they experience the world sometimes in a richer way because they're focused on sounds and voice, and they hear the nuance of those sounds. Now, jump to Wow in the World. Essentially, what it does and what we wanted to do from the very beginning, was to create in a black box, which is, we'll call it whatever you want, a studio, the ether, a world in which anything could happen. You don't need CGI technology, you don't need multimillion dollar editing equipment. You can create the theater of the mind.

You just need a microphone and some good writing and some good sound effects, and you can build any world you want. You can go in a submarine to the core of the Earth. You can go into distant space, you can go into a black hole, you can go back in time, you can go forward in time. You can ride a giant pigeon, which we do on the show. You can do all of these things because the visual platform is inside of a kid's brain. Every kid experiences Wow in the World differently. We know, I mean, this is not our research, this is published research, that audio, it triggers certain neurological reactions in the brain, essentially builds creativity because every kid's brain is imagining the story differently. Everybody sees me differently, Mindy differently, Reggie, Dennis, the whole world on Wow in the World. Yet every single episode of that podcast is rooted in a peer reviewed scientific journal article.

We go through peer reviewed scientific journal articles, New England Journal of Medicine, science, you name it, and we find stories that we believe we can make accessible to children. We literally take high science peer reviewed science, and turn it into a cartoon for the ear. So, you will learn about why the vertebrae of a thresher shark is so incredibly complex, why it's one of the only sea creatures that can flip its tail entirely over its head to attack its prey. We take this research and we make a cartoon out of it with characters, with funny storylines. So, the hunch we had and what's been proved out, is that kids really learn science when they're taken into the story with humor, with fun, with this fantasy world, and they don't even know that they're learning. They don't even know that it's a lesson in real science. So, that was our theory and our hope. Then eight years later, it's been proved. Not just from the reaction of parents, but from even some of the research we've done with teachers and some of the classroom programs we've done.

Michael Horn:

Very cool. It strikes me that you're building on some of the best known pieces of cognitive science research around the power of storytelling on the one hand, and then frankly from my perspective, not overloading people's sensory. When you absorb information through a visual and auditory channel, they often can work against each other. You're just saying, no. We're going to ride one of these channels to make sure it really penetrates and that it is a much deeper impression and memory, which is really what learning ultimately is, is these building of memories. 

How (and Why) Guy & Co. Built This: TinkerCast

Michael Horn: Then you've taken those insights and you've done it inside of a company Tinkercast, which is where I want to segue to. Tell us about the company and the range of activities it does, because this is then going to transition into some of the work you're actually doing, not just in this informal learning space where we all are learning constantly, but also in the formal learning space of schools and so forth.

Guy Raz:

So, from the very beginning, when Meredith and Mindy and I founded the company, we wanted this to be not just a sustainable company, but a full range kids and family entertainment and educational company brand. We started with podcasts and now we make several different podcasts. Who When Wow, Wow in the World, Two What's and a Wow. We've got other shows that we are working on. We've done, How to Be An Earthling, and several other shows under the Tinkercast banner. But we've also done live events. We create hundreds and hundreds of educational lesson plans every single week, based on every episode of our shows. That's available at our website. We have done partnerships with museums. We had a van that went around the United States, a Wow museum with hands-on activities. One of the things from the very beginning that we wanted to do was a create an educational technology platform that would enable kids to really hone in and really dive into this idea of audio learning, oral learning, in a way that we believed could be really, really beneficial to virtually all kids.

This is a bit of an aside, and it's not... I qualify this because I don't have the peer reviewed data to back it. But anecdotally, from the very beginning when we started Wow in the World, we would hear from parents who would say, and I mean we have heard this now thousands of times, "I have a child who has attention challenges," or, "I have a child who has some learning disabilities," or, "I have a child who will not sit still, except for Wow in the World." There's something about... We would hear this, and we do hear this all the time. At our live shows, we sometimes meet these children, where the parents will say, "My kid won't sit still for anything, but this show captures something. There's something that keeps them listening and attentive." I don't know exactly what that is, but I do know that, and there is research that shows, that when kids learn through audio content and platforms, oftentimes they can comprehend things two to three grade levels above.

Now, that makes a lot of sense to me because Wow in the World essentially is speaking to kids from age three to 12. Now, when Mindy and I started the show, we didn't really exactly know, but I think in our minds we thought we were talking to eight or nine or 10 year olds. But it turns out we're talking to three to 12 year olds, sometimes 13 year olds. So, a three year old might not get all the science, but you'd be really surprised how much they actually pick up, because there is sophisticated science in the show. So, some of these findings that we know about audio learning in the classroom or however, whenever kids listen to storybooks, we know that they have a higher comprehension level than they might if they're watching or reading something. That's really been proved out. I mean, we have seen that in just the range of kids who listen to what we do.

So, as I say, from the beginning of the company, we wanted be where kids are, we wanted to be everywhere where kids are, and we wanted to reach them in every way and create content that was available to every kid, wherever they are, and their parents. We didn't want it to be good for you content, but it is, it actually is additive. It is educational, it is informative, but we didn't want kids to think of us that way. We wanted kids to think of us as something really fun and funny and exciting, and something that fires their imagination. Science was like the secret thing, the secret thing that was hidden inside of it.

Tinkercast in the Classroom

Michael Horn:

Very cool. So, you all have taken these podcasts, or I think what you're calling pod-jects, if I'm not mistaken. So, for those who didn't follow projects but pod-jects, into schools now with the launch of TinkerClass. I'd just love to know, I mean, you have this rich and formal learning world. You have the podcasts, you have all the events that you talked about, the van around the country, this listen, wonder, tinker, make ethos that could fit into design thinking in Silicon Valley, or it can fit in this platform you've created. Now you're going into schools with TinkerClass. I'd love you to tell us what this work is going to look like, and frankly, for interested educators, we get a lot of them tuning into the show, how can they start to connect and work with you all?

Guy Raz:

So, TinkerClass is the result of this journey that we took from the very beginning to build an educational technology platform. It is free for educators, and you mentioned design thinking. I mean, we essentially, inspired by places like Idio, we've created this project based, but pod-ject we say because based on podcasts, learning platform. Essentially what it is is, and you can find it at TinkerClass.com or go to Tinkercast.com and there's links to it. Essentially, it enables kids to listen to an episode of our show. So, you listen and then kids begin to wonder, they work in groups, they're incentivized to work in groups, and they're incentivized to succeed as a group. So, then they begin to talk about their wonders, then they begin to tinker. So, they'll use critical thinking skills to identify questions that they want to explore. Then they'll choose one big wonder to investigate, and then they will make. So, they'll collaborate, they'll investigate, they'll plan, and then they will present their findings on this platform.

An amazing result of this long journey, we got a very wonderful grant from the National Science Foundation a few years ago, to build this platform out. Now, of course, we've got hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of real science-based episodes of Wow in the World and our other programs, to populate these lesson plans with. So, it essentially enables kids to build these 21st century project-based learning skills that are so critical. We've known for a long time that if we can grow kids into adults that know how to collaborate, they are much more likely to be successful adults. Rather than kids who don't know how to work in teams and don't understand the power of success as collaborators. Success in a collaborative form is what we reward in TinkerClass.

So, we've now had several thousand teachers who have signed up. We have spent a few years doing some very intensive research around how kids respond to it. We have found that it has been incredibly impactful, particularly for striving leaders. Going back to something I said earlier, we found that kids can understand things two to three grade levels above when they are using the platform, because it integrates with audio. So, it's been a really, really amazing experiment, and now it's out there in the world available for free to teachers and educators. We hope they'll take advantage of it.

The Power of Podcasts to Re-engage Students

Michael Horn:

It's incredibly cool to watch the evolution of Wow in the World and everything else, from these standalone things to now connective tissue, if you will, into the schools. I'd love to hear you reflect, I'm not a big fan of the phrase, learning loss, but obviously the disengagement of youth since COVID has been a real thing. Whether it's chronic absenteeism, struggling to learn, struggling to get engaged. Interestingly enough, I suspect you probably saw, we certainly saw it in our household and other places, that kids engaged more with these... Whether it was Wow in the World, or for my kids also, Mo Willems doing his drawing during COVID and things of that nature. All these informal things really bubbled, so they were still learning. But I'm curious, as you now plug into schools that are struggling to get that engagement again and to get that learning back up, how do you think that's going to help? How do you see that helping educators and helping students either get back on track or really plug in and get excited again?

Guy Raz:

Look, we are facing a future where we are going to need the greatest scientists, the greatest mathematicians, the greatest thinkers, to solve the biggest challenges that we will face as a species. Probably the biggest challenge we have ever faced as a species, climate change. Our hope and our goal here is to inspire kids to think in a big way. It doesn't mean that every kid's going to become a scientist or a physicist or mathematician, and that's not necessarily our goal. But we want to inspire kids to think critically about problems, how to solve them, how to talk about them in a collaborative way. Is this going to be the magic answer to the question? I don't know. But I think that based on what we've seen in the classroom and what we've observed with kids, we think it's really possible.

We think that there's a real possibility and likelihood that this kind of approach, audio first with images too, we have websites and there are some really cool images on the screen, but an audio first approach that's funny, that's accessible, that doesn't talk down to kids, that gets them excited about science in ways that is mind blowing when you see it in action. I think there's a real possibility that this could have an impact. The question is, will teachers be interested in adopting it? I hope they are. It's free, it's available, it's out there. We're not asking for anything in return except making the promise that we hope... Promise, but trying to promise, that this will inspire kids and will get them engaged around some of the big questions that one day they're going to have to answer.

What’s Next for Guy

Michael Horn:

Driving questions is obviously another great way to get people interested in learning to build solutions. As we just wrap up here, I'm curious. You do so much inspiring of people at different stages of their lives clearly, what's next on your horizon? We've barely scratched the surface of the books, live events, games we could talk about. But as you think about your own journey, what are you excited to do next and how can listeners and viewers stay tuned, so to speak?

Guy Raz:

I'm really excited to grow Wow in the World, and we have some other programs, new shows that we're working on. We've got some really cool toys and games that will be coming out over the next year. We are doing some really exciting things on my grown-up show, How I Built This. One of the things that I have not done and that I will be doing more of is video, is really talking about the lessons that I have learned over many years of interviewing founders of businesses. I have over 600 of these interviews. I think many business school professors would love to have the database and the data set that I'm lucky enough to have. While all of those interviews are available for free for anybody to listen to forever, I think that many of the lessons can be shared in different ways. So, over the next year or so, I hope to really start sharing many of the lessons I've learned as an interviewer, and as somebody who studies businesses, and also kids and even celebrities, to share some of those ideas with my listeners, and hopefully viewers.

Michael Horn:

Love it. We will stay tuned. Guy, thank you for continuing to inspire us all. Really appreciate it.

Guy Raz:

Thank you so much for having me.

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