The Optimize Podcast

Every company that runs well runs well for reasons that are almost never discussed publicly, because they are too specific and too dull to make a good story. Someone decided that all project decisions get written in one place. Someone killed a recurring meeting and absorbed the political cost of killing it. Someone spent three months migrating a team off a tool everyone was fond of. None of that ends up in a conference talk, and all of it is the actual answer.

So the guests are operators rather than figureheads: the people who hold the systems together, who can describe the specific mechanism and the specific resistance they met. The questions are correspondingly narrow. Not what is your philosophy on productivity, but what did you change, what broke when you changed it, and what would you do differently.

The bet behind the show is that operational competence is far more transferable than strategy. Two companies in unrelated markets can rarely borrow each other's strategy and can almost always borrow each other's handoffs.

Conversational and unhurried, with a strong bias toward the concrete. When a guest reaches for an abstraction, the follow-up question asks for the example underneath it, which is where the useful material generally is.

Episodes are self-contained. There is no running narrative and no required order, so starting with whichever guest is closest to your own situation is the sensible way in.

It shares a worldview with Come Up For Air but is not an adaptation of it. Guests disagree with parts of the method, and those exchanges tend to be the more interesting episodes.

The show is The Optimize Podcast, co-hosted with Jay Abraham, and runs to 25 episodes. It has its own site at theoptimizepodcast.com and is carried on Apple Podcasts and Spotify.

The show is on pause and will be picked back up. The back catalogue stays where it is and stays worth listening to: the episodes are self-contained, so a pause costs a new listener nothing.

The show is looking for operators with a specific change they can describe in detail, including the parts that did not work. Seniority matters much less than proximity to the actual mechanism.

Pitches are open. The show asks for people running successful businesses who are stuck on one specific thing, and takes applications at theoptimizepodcast.com/apply.