The Knowledge Project

This is the story of K.C. Irving, the man who refused to be stopped. When a railway raised his shipping costs, he bought a ship. When oil suppliers tried to squeeze him, he built a refinery. Whenever someone told him no, he found a way. From his father’s general store in a small New Brunswick town, he built an empire of roughly 300 companies. How do you beat competitors with more money, more peopl...

Steven Kotler is a bestselling author and the executive director of the Flow Research Collective, where he studies the science of peak performance. Most of us have felt it. Hours disappear, everything else fades away, and the work seems to do itself. But what’s actually happening in those moments, and can you make them happen on purpose? Kotler has spent decades studying flow, and he makes the cas...

Ryan Serhant is a real estate broker, founder of SERHANT., and star of Bravo’s Million Dollar Listing New York and Netflix’s Owning Manhattan. He explains how to sell without making people feel sold to: build a connection, help first, and earn the right to ask. He also breaks down the psychology of attention and persuasion, showing how to get people's attention, hold it, and turn it into business....

I'm excited to share this previously unreleased 2022 conversation between Charlie Munger and Todd Combs. As with any Munger talk, the subjects are both deep and wide. I've pulled out the ideas that most resonated with me. You'll learn how Munger recognized people worth betting on, chose problems worth solving, and turned a long attention span into an unfair advantage. I also unpack one of Berkshir...

Bill Ackman is the founder and CEO of Pershing Square Capital Management, one of the most closely watched investment firms in the world. In this conversation, he breaks down how he tells the difference between real innovation from hype, what he looks for before making a billion-dollar investment, and why he sold Netflix—and later bought it back. He also shares the mistakes that reshaped his invest...

Shopify founder and CEO Tobi Lütke joins Shane Parrish to discuss AI agents, better decision-making, and the future of work. He explains how he uses an AI council to examine his hardest decisions and why taste, judgment, and responsibility become more valuable as AI becomes more capable. They go inside Shopify’s work with River, an AI colleague with memory, personality, and permission to challenge...

We all know the Steve Jobs who came back in the late 1990s and saved Apple from becoming a footnote. And we've all heard the story of how, in 1985, he was pushed out of the company he'd created. What we don't know is what happened in between. Geoffrey Cain spent years reconstructing the decade Jobs spent outside Apple. NeXT spent years losing money. His co-founders left. His investors lost faith....

David Baszucki is the co-founder and CEO of Roblox, a platform built around a simple idea: give people the tools and incentives to create together. In this short conversation we discuss how a health decision saved his son's life and how it changed how he eats, why bureaucracy compounds unless you actively destroy it, monitoring your mind before making decisions, and why the best products often imp...

This summer, I’m revisiting one of my favorite episodes. If you haven’t heard it, now is the time. If you have, it’s a classic and worth listening to again. Brad Jacobs has built eight billion-dollar companies, completed more than 500 acquisitions, and created extraordinary returns for shareholders over four decades. Few people understand how great businesses are built better than he does. This co...

John D. Rockefeller became the richest man the world had ever known by thinking differently about business, competition, and family.  This episode isn’t just the story of Standard Oil. It’s about the principles that built one of history’s greatest business empires and what they can teach us today.  Along the way, you’ll see the rise of Standard Oil, the public backlash that made Rockefel...

No company decides to fail. It drifts there one comfortable lie at a time. Kaz Nejatian took over Opendoor when it was just months away from bankruptcy and set out to rebuild it from the ground up. What happened next shocked everyone. Most turnaround stories are told years later, by the winner, after the ending is already known. That’s why they always sound clean and polished. This one doesn’t hav...

Steve Cohen and Jack Nicklaus shared the same performance coach. For the next hour, he’s yours too. Dr. Gio Valiante is the world’s leading performance psychologist. We discuss why most people never reach their potential, how confidence and fear shape performance, and what separates those who consistently excel from those who stay stuck. He shares practical strategies for building better habits, o...

Dr. Giulia Enders has changed the way millions of people think about the human body. As a physician, microbiome researcher, and bestselling author, she has spent years studying the surprising role the gut plays in everything from digestion and immunity to mood, sleep, metabolism, and long-term health. In this conversation, Giulia explains how your gut shapes your health, how stress quietly damages...

Bill Gurley spent years on Wall Street, built his career as a partner at Benchmark, worked through Uber’s hypergrowth era, and now serves on the board of the Santa Fe Institute, where he studies complexity and systems thinking. In this episode, Bill shares the mental models he returns to most, including systems thinking, second- and third-order effects, and the importance of understanding both the...

Mark Pincus is the creator behind Farmville and Words with Friends. He built Zynga into one of the biggest gaming companies in the world and helped shape the early era of social products on the internet. In this conversation, he breaks down how great founders spot winning ideas early, why most startups build the wrong thing, and how products become part of people’s daily lives. He shares lessons f...

Chung Ju-yung built Hyundai because he refused to be stopped. He is known for turning Hyundai into an industrial force that helped transform South Korea. The company built highways, ships, cars, and entire industries. At its peak, Hyundai accounted for 16% of South Korea’s economic output. This episode explores how Chung built Hyundai, how he helped power South Korea’s rise, and how hunger, guilt,...

Winston Weinberg is the CEO and co-founder of Harvey, the AI platform built for the legal industry. In this episode, Winston explains how AI is reshaping legal work, why judgment becomes more valuable as routine work gets automated, and how to build the prioritization muscle required to move faster, stay focused, and make better decisions when everything is changing. He also shares the operating p...

The AI race, the future of AGI, and the inside story of OpenAI. Greg Brockman is the co-founder of OpenAI. This is the most detailed first-person account he has given of the 72 hours after Sam Altman was fired, how OpenAI started, and the future. Greg explains how the original Napa offsite produced the three-step technical plan OpenAI has followed for a decade and the real reason OpenAI had to aba...

Mario Harik is the CEO of XPO, one of the largest trucking companies in the world, and leads a team of 40,000 people across a multi‑billion‑dollar operation. He started as employee #3, trained under Brad Jacobs (who’s built eight multibillion‑dollar companies from scratch), and has spent the last two decades turning engineering discipline, frontline feedback, and a deep belief in human potential i...

Joe Liemandt quietly built one of the most successful software empires you’ve never heard of—then reappeared with a $1 billion bet that AI can make kids learn ten times faster and love school more than vacation. At Alpha School, students spend just two hours a day on AI‑driven academics, consistently score in the top 1% on standardized tests, and use the rest of their time to build real‑world life...

Harrison McCain learned salesmanship by talking his way into a pharmaceutical job at 22, then spent five formative years under K.C. Irving, absorbing lessons in vertical integration, relentless deal-capture, and "management by suggestion." He quit with no plan, two newborn kids, and no income. His brother Bob noticed that New Brunswick potato farmers were shipping raw potatoes to Maine for process...

Connor Teskey is the CEO of Brookfield Asset Management, one of the world’s largest investors, managing about a trillion dollars across infrastructure, power, real estate, private equity, and credit.  In this exclusive interview, his first as CEO, we explore his approach to capital allocation, isolating variables, and building a business designed for long-term growth. Discover why effective invest...

The world's largest hotel company spent its first 30 years without a hotel. It started as a root beer stand in 1927. The first room didn't open until 1957. The man behind it was J. Willard Marriott. In this episode of Outliers, we explore how Marriott turned one root beer stand into a hotel empire, without a master plan. Oh, and along the way, he invented the airline catering business. This is the...

In January 2021, Vlad Tenev made a decision that nearly destroyed Robinhood. Wall Street called it betrayal. Customers called it cowardice. He has never fully explained what happened — until now. Vlad Tenev built Robinhood into a financial titan, navigated the unprecedented GameStop crisis, and completely re-engineered the company to thrive after losing the vast majority of its market value. He br...

Phil Knight is the founder of Nike, the brand that reshaped sports and became one of the most powerful companies in the world. What would you do if your bank, your supplier, and your government all turned against you at the same time? Phil Knight didn’t have to imagine it. He lived on the edge of insolvency for nearly two decades. This Outliers episode explores belief, trust, fear, and the price o...