Guy Raz

Guy Raz is the creator and host of NPR's How I Built This, and founder of Built-It Productions and Tinkercast Media. He is a two-time New York Times bestselling author whose podcasts have simultaneously held three spots in Apple's top 20 programs — a feat no one else has achieved.

Born in West Covina, California in 1975, Raz graduated from Brandeis University in 1996 and earned a master's degree in history from Cambridge University. He joined NPR as an intern in 1997 at age 22, quickly rising through the ranks to serve as personal research assistant to senior news analyst Daniel Schorr.

Raz became NPR's youngest ever overseas bureau chief at age 25 when he was appointed to Berlin in 2000, covering the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and the conflict in Kosovo. He became London bureau chief in 2002, then served as CNN's Jerusalem correspondent from 2004 to 2006, covering the death of Yasser Arafat and the rise of Hamas. He returned to NPR in 2006 as Pentagon correspondent.

In 2008, Raz spent a year as a Nieman journalism fellow at Harvard University studying classical history. That same year, he received the Edward R. Murrow Award and the Daniel Schorr Journalism Prize for his reporting on military medical evacuations from Iraq. He hosted NPR's Weekend All Things Considered from 2009 to 2012, then TED Radio Hour from 2012 to 2019.

In 2016, Raz launched How I Built This, which by 2017 had become one of the 20 most-downloaded podcasts in the United States. He founded Built-It Productions to support the show, and in 2017 co-created the children's podcast Wow in the World with Mindy Thomas through their joint company Tinkercast. He launched Wisdom from the Top in 2019 and The Great Creators in 2022, the latter produced by Built-It Productions and distributed by Amazon Music and Wondery. NPR and The New York Times have noted that Raz was, as of 2018, the only person to have ever had three podcasts simultaneously among Apple's top 20 programs.