The Knowledge Project
Deep conversations with the best founders and business leaders that go beyond the usual advice to uncover the timeless principles that drive success. Master the best of what other people have already figured out. If you enjoy the show, please hit the follow button.
Episodes
October 7, 2025 • 46 mins
Hetty Green was the richest woman you've never heard of.
In the late 1800s, she built a fortune worth billions today in a world designed to stop her. Women couldn't vote, couldn't own property in most states, and were banned from the New York Stock Exchange floor entirely.
She was a force that couldn't be stopped. She bought entire towns, crushed railroad barons, and became the lender of last resort during financial panics. Her s...
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September 30, 2025 • 60 mins
My guest this week is Barry Diller, one of America's most successful businessmen. At 83, he chose to publish a deeply personal book and open up about his successes and failures.
With surprising candor he details the rules he's lived by: trust first, confront directly, and make the call when the clock starts. In our conversation, he shares why success teaches you nothing, why failure is essential, and why instinct still beats algor...
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September 23, 2025 • 80 mins
Ed Stack built Dick’s Sporting Goods from a struggling family store into an empire of more than 800 stores and billions in sales.
Along the way he nearly lost everything. Multiple times. This episode is the story of what he did, how he did it, and the lessons you can learn.
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Chapters:
(00:00) Introduction
(02:48) Part 1: A Cookie Jar and a Cage
(20:56) Part 2: Battle for Control
(37:09) Part 3: The Race to Survive...
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September 16, 2025 • 109 mins
Lulu Cheng Meservey is one of the sharpest minds in communications and strategy. She has helped some of the best leaders through their hardest moments.
We talk about why trust and conviction are contagious, how to win attention in a noisy world, and how to handle attacks without losing ground.
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About Lulu:
Having been CCO and EVP of Corporate Affairs at Activision Blizzard and VP of Comms at Substack, she is now the creator o...
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September 9, 2025 • 52 mins
Fred Smith founded FedEx on an idea everyone told him would fail and built it into an $88 billion empire that changed how the world moves.
In this episode, we dive into how he built FedEx and the lessons he learned along the way.
This story proves that impossible is just another word for opportunity.
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Timestamps:
(00:00) Introduction
(03:36) Part 1: The Boy Who Wouldn't Stay Down
(15:52) Part 2: The Impossible Company
...
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September 2, 2025 • 73 mins
Benedict Evans has been calling tech shifts for decades. Now he says forget the hype: AI isn't the new electricity. It's the biggest change since the iPhone, and that's plenty big enough.
We talk about why everyone gets platform shifts wrong, where Google's actually vulnerable, and what real people do with AI when nobody's watching.
Evans sees patterns others don't. This conversation will change how you think about what's actuall...
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August 26, 2025 • 68 mins
One man controls half the world's wild blueberries, built North America's largest private telecom, and did it all without ever leaving his hometown of 1,100 people.
In this episode, we decode the counterintuitive playbook of patient capital, rural advantage, and why Bragg's refusal to sell a single share made him unstoppable.
My interview with John (#204) was the class. This is the homework.
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Approximate Timestamps:
(00...
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August 19, 2025 • 130 mins
This conversation will change how you handle your relationship starting tonight. The late Dr. Sue Johnson basically gave me a cheat code for relationships that not only last but amplify.
She breaks down the real signals to look for in a partner. Why people actually cheat (not what you think) and how to spot it coming a mile away. Plus she offers a simple framework that can turn fights from something that pushes you away to someth...
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August 12, 2025 • 58 mins
The most influential retailer you’ve never heard of. How Sol Price invented the warehouse club and a philosophy that still runs Costco and Amazon.
Have you ever wondered why you can still buy a hot dog and soda for $1.50 today at Costco? We can thank Sol Price for that. To him, keeping promises to customers mattered more than profit margins.
Sam Walton said he borrowed more ideas from Sol Price than anyone else. Jim Sinegal of C...
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August 5, 2025 • 100 mins
Build the system behind the system. Flexport founder Ryan Petersen shows how to turn messy, multi‑party operations into a simple, scalable system that compounds growth without sacrificing trust.
He explains:
The iPhone clue: using public shipping data to predict launches—and create pull from zero
Retention is destiny: the equilibrium math that caps growth (and how to bend it)
Full‑stack or bust: customers buy outcomes,...
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July 29, 2025 • 57 mins
When Katharine Graham took over the Washington Post in 1963, she was a shy socialite who'd never run anything. By retirement, she'd taken down a president, ended the most violent strike in a generation, and built one of the best-performing companies in American history.
Graham had no training, no experience, not even confidence. Just a newspaper bleeding money and a government that expected her to fall in line.
When her editors b...
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July 22, 2025 • 72 mins
Daniel Kahneman won the Nobel Prize for proving we're not as rational as we think. In this timeless conversation we discuss how to think clearly in a world full of noise, the invisible forces that cloud our judgement, and why more information doesn't equal better thinking. Kahneman also reveals the mental model he discovered at 22 that still guides elite teams today.
Approximate timestamps:
(00:36) – Episode Introduction
(05...
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July 15, 2025 • 58 mins
They weren’t employees. They were partners. Les Schwab didn’t build a company. He built a culture.
This episode reveals how one small-town tire dealer scaled to $3 billion by turning customers into evangelists and employees into owners. Somewhere between changing his first flat tire and opening his 410th Les Schwab Tire Center, Les discovered something profound: his people weren't just working for him, they were working with him....
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July 8, 2025 • 107 mins
Shopify’s Harley Finkelstein reveals the one standard that actually scales your career and your family.
Harley shares why stepping down as COO was his hardest choice, the family motto that guides his daughters, and what makes someone good at storytelling. They discuss AI's real advantage, the calendar system that keeps him accountable, and how he maintains high standards.
If this gives you one standard to raise your team—or your...
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Jimmy Pattison still runs his $16 billion empire personally at 96 years old.
He’s built The Pattison Group over the last 63 years without outside capital or a college degree. He owns 100% of car dealerships, grocery stores, billboards, radio stations and even Ripley’s Believe It or Not—with a philosophy of: "No partners, no shareholders, no relatives."
This episode reveals the principles behind one of North America’s great priv...
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June 24, 2025 • 94 mins
On her first day as CEO of PepsiCo, Indra Nooyi fired her general counsel. Then rehired him before dinner. It wasn’t a stunt. It was a signal.
She ran a $200 billion empire the same way she ran her life: with surgical precision, uncompromising standards, and an allergy to corporate theater. But here's what separates this conversation from every other CEO interview: she tells you what her massive ambition cost her and her family. ...
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June 17, 2025 • 70 mins
The job was editor-in-chief. The goal was to become the platform. And she did.
Once she made it to the top, she didn’t just edit Vogue. She reinvented the power structures beneath it. This episode unpacks how a British girl who couldn’t type built the most bulletproof career in media, survived five decades of disruption, and made herself indispensable to fashion, politics, and culture.
You’ll hear how she weaponized speed over...
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June 10, 2025 • 70 mins
How do you build a high-performance culture without turning your company into the Hunger Games? Reed Hastings, co-founder and former CEO of Netflix, shares lessons from a career spent rewriting the rules—from severance as a management tool to “big-hearted champions who pick up the trash.” In this episode, he reveals how Netflix scaled trust, made bold bets before the data was in, and kept its edge by treating employees like adults—...
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June 3, 2025 • 82 mins
Harvey Firestone built one of America’s great industrial empires from scratch, transforming from a farm boy to Henry Ford’s key partner. This episode reveals timeless principles about building businesses through booms, busts, and technological disruptions.
This episode is based on the biography Men and Rubber: The Story of Business.
Check out The Firestone Principles: 12 Timeless Lessons from an Industrial Pioneer: https://fs....
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May 27, 2025 • 73 mins
Eight Super Bowl rings. Six with the Patriots. And a mindset that goes far deeper than football. In this rare, wide-ranging conversation, Bill Belichick breaks down the invisible factors behind sustained excellence: discipline, preparation, and the mental edge that separates contenders from champions. He shares the surprising reason he kept Tom Brady as a fourth-string rookie, why talent alone is never enough at the highest level, ...
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