The Knowledge Project

Connor Teskey — CEO of Brookfield Asset Management. How Brookfield builds competitive advantage through culture, capital allocation, and long-term thinking. AI infrastructure and data centers as an investment thesis.

Vlad Tenev — Robinhood co-founder. Surviving the GameStop crisis, an 80% stock crash, and rebuilding from $32B to 11 business lines over $100M each. Key insight: a juicy falsehood is more powerful than a boring truth — once a narrative gets traction, facts don't refute it.

Nicolai Tangen — CEO of the world's largest sovereign wealth fund ($2.1 trillion, 1.7% of every listed company on earth). Speed in decision-making, the trap of overanalysis, and why high ambitions produce great results even in failure.

Michael Ovitz — co-founder of CAA, once the most powerful man in Hollywood. How he built CAA into the dominant talent agency through radical honesty, a no-badmouthing culture, and the multi-agent model. Power as a lease, not an asset.

Morgan Housel with Shane Parrish — wealth, contentment, and the psychology of money. Core thesis: wealth isn't about accumulation, it's about the gap between what you have and what you want. Luxury quickly becomes necessity. Contrast drives happiness, not absolute levels. Saving money is buying freedom. Second appearance on the show after Ferriss #857.

James Clear — author of Atomic Habits — with Shane Parrish. Clear synthesized Duhigg (The Power of Habit), BJ Fogg (Tiny Habits), Kahneman, and Thaler's nudge theory into one extremely well-packaged book. Not the originator of these ideas but the most successful popularizer. Also covers investment philosophy, reputation, and playing to win vs. playing not to lose.

Rory Sutherland — Vice Chairman of Ogilvy, founder of their behavioral insights team. Applies behavioral economics and evolutionary psychology to marketing. Core thesis: perception matters more than reality. The circumstances of your life may matter less than how you see them. Reframing is the cheapest intervention in the world.

Jim Murphy — performance coach, author of Inner Excellence (went from obscurity to #1 NYT bestseller when A.J. Brown was caught reading it during an NFL playoff game). His framework: love, wisdom, and courage as the foundation of extraordinary performance. Selflessness is fearless. The problem is never the problem — it's how you're thinking about it.

Anthony Scilipoti — President and CEO of Veritas Group. Called the collapses of Valeant and Nortel before they happened. His edge: asking better questions, reading the fine print, and short selling as a public service. Now has thoughts on AI as a potential bubble.

Tracy Britt Cool — Warren Buffett's former 'fireman' at Berkshire Hathaway, now co-founder of Kanbrick. Buffett sent her to turn around struggling businesses. Now applies those lessons to the middle market.

Dr. Sue Johnson — creator of Emotionally Focused Therapy (EFT), the most empirically validated couples therapy approach. The science of why relationships fail, what signals to look for in a partner, and why people cheat. Attachment theory applied to adult relationships. The late Dr. Johnson's work connects directly to Gottman and the Harvard Grant Study.

Barry Diller — built IAC, Expedia, and reshaped Hollywood (ABC, Fox, Paramount). A career spanning five decades of media and technology. How he spots opportunities, builds companies, and thinks about the next wave.

Lulu Cheng Meservey — VP Communications at Substack. How to grab attention in a world flooded with AI content, build trust through direct communication, and engineer loyalty. The cult-building framework: hooks get sharper, stories beat statistics, and the leader must speak directly.

Benedict Evans — tech analyst, former a16z partner. Why most people's mental model of AI is wrong. AI isn't a single technology — it's a set of capabilities being embedded into everything. The real question isn't 'what can AI do?' but 'what changes when AI is everywhere?'

Reed Hastings — Netflix founder. How Netflix scaled trust and made bold bets before the data was in. The Keeper Test, trust-based expense policies, and betting $100M on House of Cards without seeing a pilot. Treating employees like adults, not assets.

Bill Belichick — 8x Super Bowl champion, the most successful coach in NFL history. Four principles: do your job, work hard, be attentive, put the team first. 'You cannot win until you keep from losing.' Games are lost more than won. Discipline, preparation, and ignoring noise.

Elad Gil — serial entrepreneur, investor, author of High Growth Handbook. How he advises companies scaling from Series A to IPO. Market timing, fundraising, and the patterns that separate companies that scale from those that stall.

Garry Tan — CEO of Y Combinator, co-founder of Initialized Capital. How YC selects founders, what separates companies that make it from those that don't, and the evolution of early-stage investing.

Bret Taylor — former Salesforce co-CEO, co-creator of Google Maps, Chairman of OpenAI board. How AI will reshape enterprise software, the difference between AI hype and AI reality, and building products that define categories.

Bruce Flatt — CEO of Brookfield Corporation, one of the world's largest alternative asset managers. How Brookfield grew to $1T+ by investing in real assets (infrastructure, real estate, renewables) with a multi-decade time horizon. Value, discipline, and durability.

Logan Ury — behavioral scientist, Director of Relationship Science at Hinge, author of How to Not Die Alone. Why chasing 'the spark' is bad advice, the three dating tendencies that sabotage relationships, and why great relationships are built, not discovered.

Josh Wolfe — co-founder of Lux Capital, deep tech investor. What humans still do better than AI, where the real investment opportunities are in an AI world, and why the future is built at the intersection of science and entrepreneurship.

David Heacock — built and manages a $250M+ business. Operations, marketing, and the unsexy work of managing a large-scale business day to day.

Mickey Drexler — former CEO of J.Crew and Gap. The merchant prince of retail. How he built his intuition for what consumers want, why data can't replace taste, and the decline of American retail quality.

Alfred Lin — partner at Sequoia Capital, former COO of Zappos. What separates great founders from good ones, lessons from Tony Hsieh, and pattern recognition in venture capital.

Codie Sanchez — founder of Contrarian Thinking, acquires 'boring businesses' (laundromats, car washes, plumbing companies). Her thesis: buying small businesses is more accessible and less risky than starting from scratch.

Charlie Hoehn — author and marketing strategist who worked with Ferriss, Ramit Sethi, and other bestselling authors. How to write content people actually want to read, overcome creative blocks, and market non-fiction books.

Ryan Holiday — bestselling author of The Daily Stoic, Ego Is the Enemy, The Obstacle Is the Way. The modern Stoicism source. How to apply Stoic principles to daily life: discipline, self-awareness, listening to life's signals, and the war within.

Adam Karr — long-term concentrated value investor. How to build conviction in a few ideas, manage risk through position sizing, and maintain temperament when markets panic.

John Mackey — co-founder of Whole Foods Market, advocate for conscious capitalism. Built Whole Foods from a single store into a global brand, then sold to Amazon. Purpose-driven business, stakeholder capitalism, and the difference between doing well and doing good.

Rob Fraser — military leader focused on leadership and elite team building. Mission-driven leadership, building mental toughness, and mastery through deliberate discipline.

John Bragg — Canadian billionaire who built Oxford Frozen Foods, the world's largest wild blueberry company, from rural Nova Scotia. Long-term compounding, community-oriented business, and building in unconventional locations.

Matthew Dicks — 59-time Moth StorySLAM champion, elementary school teacher, storytelling coach. Every great story is about a single five-second moment of transformation. 'Homework for Life' — the daily practice of noticing story-worthy moments.

Erin Wade — Stanford/Harvard-educated lawyer who left law to open Homeroom, a mac-and-cheese restaurant in Oakland. Developed the 'color system' for handling workplace harassment. Scaling a niche concept.

Brian Halligan — co-founder and former CEO of HubSpot. How to build and scale company culture from startup to public company. Culture as a product that needs deliberate management.

Maya Shankar — cognitive scientist, former Senior Advisor in the Obama White House (founded the Social and Behavioral Sciences Team), host of A Slight Change of Plans. How identity shapes decisions, why identity foreclosure is dangerous, and how to build an identity resilient to change. Her personal story: a career-ending hand injury redirected her from violin to cognitive science.

Michaeleen Doucleff — NPR science correspondent who studied parenting among Maya, Inuit, and Hadzabe communities. Her TEAM framework: Western parenting overcomplicates everything. Children are naturally motivated to contribute. Include them in real work instead of creating separate kid activities.

Brent Beshore — CEO of Permanent Equity, acquires and operates small businesses for the long term. No exit strategy. Integrating work and family, decision-making under uncertainty, and the value of boring businesses.

Dr. Jim Loehr — performance psychologist who co-founded the Human Performance Institute. Worked with elite athletes, Fortune 500 CEOs, and military special forces. Your personal narrative drives your behavior. Energy management, not time management, is the key to performance.

David Segal — co-founder of DAVIDsTEA. Annual planning frameworks, bridging the gap between big goals and daily execution, and why simplicity in planning beats complexity every time.