There's a version of this episode where we just talk about a Joseph Moore clip. Because it’s a great clip. It’s all about how “failure is just feedback” and that’s such a poetic sentiment.

The failure idea comes out of Joseph Moore’s book writing journey. It took him somewhere north of a decade and fifteen-plus rejections to get it published. On his Just Press Record, I paired him with Simon Egan. Simon found the King's Speech script, knew it was the one, and then spent years watching everyone pass on it until he finally brought it to fruition.

A best-selling book and a top-grossing film. With a whole mess on the way up. I love those stories.

My idea to bring Bogumil Baranowski back on Just Press Record was to get him to react to a clip about that kind of compelled, wave-after-wave-of-failure persistence - because I'd watched him do the same thing across his books and podcasts and writing.

And, as Bogumil so often does, he turned it into something richer than I expected.

The real story he tells is about earning his citizenship. The lawyer puts a typo in the application. In hindsight, there’s also that whole financial crisis happening which created a backlog nobody could have told him about in real time. Eventually, the rejection letter arrives, but he's working, and - in fact, he’s already been made partner at the firm, so now what? He’s rejected AND he now has a life in New York City that he very much wants to keep, except now he’s also got this letter saying it might all be over, for a reason that had nothing to do with him.

There are sadder endings to this story we’ll never tell. I’m happy to tell you this doesn’t end with a plane back to Poland.

He starts over. Gets a new lawyer. Files again. It moves fast this time. The little card arrives in the mail, and that night he goes to the movies. To take a deep breath. The movie is The King's Speech.

He didn't know that was Simon's story! I hadn't told him why I was really showing him the clip. He can’t watch every podcast, he only saw this clip. You can watch his eyes light up when he hears me tell the story. You can watch my eyes light up when he shares this detail with me.

There's something in the combination of what we're compelled to do, the adversity that shows up sideways, and how our own weirdness is actually the thing that carries us through both.

Bogumil pitching a stock in his second language to a room full of Americans who grew up on the brand - and realizing that his outsider lens was the whole point - is the same muscle. The impediment becomes the advantage. The difference determines the value.

We have to be weirdly compelled enough to not quit.

We have to be weirdly equipped to absorb the adversity that would snap anyone slightly less weird.

By the end you'll understand why I call him my little Polish bumblebee cross-pollinating ideas across all the flowers.

Out now on Cultish Creative + Epsilon Theory + Panoptica: