Finding Founders

Today we talk to Cory Allen, meditation teacher, author, podcast host, musician, and today’s featured Founder. Cory’s story begins in Austin, TX, with a choice to live a markedly different life from that of his gun-toting, Republican, cynical, and distrustful father. He tells me about his moment of awakening, and teaches me that enlightenment can happen anywhere, even in a urinal. He speaks about his relationships with his mom, with organized religion, with drugs and Nietzsche and death metal. He talks about his audio mastering company, AlteredEar, and his universal-truth-giving podcast, The Astral Hustle. Telling Cory’s story is hard, because I feel like I’m trying to cram the weight of the universe, all its intricacies and wisdom, into peanut... but let’s delve into it anyway and start a few in Austin. --- Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/finding-founders/support Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Why can't you lie in a podcast? Today we talk about authenticity, otherizing, presidential debates, and why podcasts are better lie detectors than videos. --- Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/finding-founders/support Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Today we are talking to James Altucher and we start just after James went broke. This wouldn’t be the last time he lost money, and we’ll learn that James has an interesting relationship with risk, in fact we’ll talk a lot about risk in this episode. Regardless, James has been incredibly successful. He’s published 25 books and founded over 20 companies, many of which failed. But it seems that failure is something that has defined James.  His entire career, and for that matter his personality, is incredibly erratic. One year he’ll have 10s of millions of the dollars in the bank, the next close to nothing. And he oscillates between these two extremes frequently. Yet every failure, every challenge is met with resiliency. Every challenge presents an opportunity to learn. From training with the homeless to become a chess-master, to an obsession with computer science, to getting sucked into poker, to making large bets in angel investing, each of these experiences forced James to learn and grow. Some of the lessons took years to integrate, but some were learned in 1970s suburban New York. --- Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/finding-founders/support Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

How can great work be a curse? Today we look at exceptional work, how to deal with it, how to avoid the Sports Illustrated jinx, and how statistical regression can help us make sense of it all. --- Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/finding-founders/support Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

We start with Dan Pashman's his live event to promote his food podcast, Sporkful. After seemingly endless hard work and sacrifice, Dan finally felt the excitement, the palpable energy his audience invested into his work. He’s been able to create such an enlivened community around his podcast due to the passion he has for food and high-quality audio storytelling. Today, Sporkful has evolved into something deeper than food; food is just a vehicle Dan uses to explore science, history, culture, and economics. But if we go wayyy back, the podcast started out as a humorous outlet for Dan to ramble on about any given food for 30 minutes. And if we go even further back, to the origin of Dan's love for food, we arrive at his Jewish upbringing, in a family culture centered around eating. --- Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/finding-founders/support Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Does success breed success and does failure breed failure?  We asked Barry Ritholtz what book he recommends to understand the stock market and he recommended the book 'How We Know What Isn't So' by Thomas Gilovich.  We talk about the clustering illusion, coin tosses, basketball, hot hands, and attaching emotion to success and failure. --- Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/finding-founders/support Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Today we talk to  Travis Chappell who starts by describing to us just one of the many rules he was taught to abide by in the small, religious town of Lancaster. Growing up in a structured environment where your appearance, your music, your profession are monitored, it seemed that Travis was destined for a life of rigidity and conformity. However, Travis didn’t follow the path his community paved for him, he forged his own and became the host of Build Your Network and the founder of Guestio. And that entrepreneurial spirit was uncovered at a young age. As soon as Travis could walk, he was shadowing his father in the world of real estate. --- Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/finding-founders/support Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

David Rogier, Founder of a company, discusses persuasiveness, which is the combination of expertise and trustworthiness. He explores how to establish expertise within a team, the power of framing requests with a reason, and framing assignments as requests to build trust.

Today we are talking to John Lee Dumas, and much of John’s life, centers around impact. From joining ROTC, to serving in the military, to going to law school, and ultimately to pursuing podcasting, impact is something that John has successfully curated. Now, with the Entrepreneurs on Fire Podcast, John releases interviews with inspirational entrepreneurs and impacts the lives of millions of his listeners. It’s not just his listeners that are rewarded, since 2012, the podcast has brought in a gross income of almost 20 Million dollars. --- Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/finding-founders/support Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

How can we easily categorize people’s personality? This is the Founder Wisdom. Where we’ll answer that question by distilling advice from our founders and the books they recommend. Then we’ll show you how we are applying that knowledge ourselves! Last week we talked about how we could categorize emotions into four categories. Interestingly enough we can also do the same thing with personalities. --- Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/finding-founders/support Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices