How to find your big idea w/Spanx's Sara Blakely

**Andrés Ruzo** (0:00)
My grandfather in Lima told me this legend of the Spanish conquest of Peru. The few Spaniards that returned from the jungle will come back with these horrible stories, right? They talk about giant snakes that can swallow manhole, spiders as big as your hands that eat birds, and fierce warriors with poison arrows that can kill you in a nick. And one of the details in this legend was a river that boiled.
That's really where our entire story starts. A detail in a childhood legend.

**Reid Hoffman** (0:32)
That's Andrés Ruzo. He's a National Geographic explorer and geothermal scientist. In 2010, he began a personal quest to find the boiling river he'd heard about in a childhood legend.
Did it exist?

**Andrés Ruzo** (0:46)
Every company that I'd work with, every geologist I could get my hands on, I'd ask, hey, have you heard of a boiling river, a large, big thermal river in the middle of the Amazon? Heard about it in a legend. And some people just laughed it off and said, well, whatever. The very last time I asked that question was actually kind of funny. I was at a mining company.
I'd just given this presentation and it went really, really well. You know, there was a much older geologist, you know, very put together. He was sitting back there and I was talking to him about it. And things had gone so well that I kind of loosened up a bit.
And I was like, hey, one random question. And I asked him about the boiling river and I asked him if he had heard about it. And his response was, Andrés, you know, your geothermal work is very interesting, very innovative, but don't ask stupid questions. I walked out of that meeting with my tail between my legs.

**Reid Hoffman** (1:34)
Most people thought he was asking a stupid question. But Andrés had grown up between Peru and Nicaragua. He was fascinated by the Amazon. And he believed, as a scientist, that the boiling river could exist.
Like any explorer, he found help in some unlikely places.

**Andrés Ruzo** (1:51)
I've been asking around for two years, case closed. There's no boiling river in the Amazon. I go to a family dinner and my aunt asked me about my research. And I told her about the boiling river and the legend and how it doesn't exist and how it can't exist. Well, she looks at me very seriously and she says, but no, Andrés, it's real. I've been there. And then my very straight-laced psychoanalyst uncle, you know, kind of chimes in, says no, Andrés, she's not kidding. It's protected by a powerful shaman. Yeah, it's at least as wide as a two-lane road, and it's so hot you can not only not touch the water, but you can't even put your hand on top of it because the vapor will burn you.
My aunt used to do indigenous rights work and had worked in this central Peruvian Amazon and made friends with the wife of this very powerful shaman who protected this sacred thermal river.
She ended up leading me into the jungle, and then that's where I met Maestro Juan Flores, the shaman of the Boiling River, someone who's truly changed my life.

**Reid Hoffman** (2:53)
Andrés found allies in the local shamans who saw his respect for the sacred site and for traditional spiritual practices that had protected it. The shamans offered him guidance.
Still, the road ahead wasn't easy, and it wasn't exactly a road.

**Andrés Ruzo** (3:08)
From Lima, it was a one-hour plane ride, followed by two hours by four-by-four on dirt roads, then another hour on a motorized canoe, and then another hour hiking into the jungle.

**Reid Hoffman** (3:22)
Andrés is quick to tell you that he wasn't trying to discover the Boiling River, which was already known to local cultures. Rather, he was trying to document it from modern science.
There were several starts, but then the fateful moment.

**Andrés Ruzo** (3:39)
I walked out of the jungle, and when you think of jungle, you have to think of shade. It's dark in the jungle. You see these 60-foot walls of green, which are the trees, you know, shooting straight out of the jungle. And then among the treetops, you see a cloud of smoke just going up towards the heavens. You start following that cloud down towards the earth, and you see it's coming from this river, and it's hot. It was like a veil of steam just covering the clear turquoise-colored water, and there were these beautiful, just ivory-colored stones on either side, the bedrock. I mean, I get there, and I was just dumbfounded. I ran down to the edge of the river, and there were these kind of rock steps hewn into the side of this little cliff. And I climbed down, and I remember almost being hugged by the vapors. You take your first breath in, and there's not too many places in the world where you're conscious of your lungs.