Episode Link | YouTube Link

Episode Description:

In our current journalistic environment, complex stories can get reduced to unidimensional character figures, fodder for New York Post headlines.

We scroll our social media feeds and further entrench our belief system, one incentivized by provoking us with fear and anger.

So when we’re in our siloed states and preaching to the choir, are we really affecting anything meaningful?

The 2023 death of Jordan Neely on a New York subway got the same treatment: a flashpoint that contains multitudes, flattened into a choice between hero and vigilante.

Anand Giridharadas found something else, a petri dish for the themes he has spent his career writing about. Anand, a former foreign correspondent and columnist for The New York Times and the bestselling author of Winners Take All and The Persuaders, spent three years reporting his new book, Man in the Mirror: Hope, Struggle, and Belonging in an American City.

The book also marks a return. After a close friend told Anand he had lost his way, he traded punditry for reporting and rediscovered what it means to seek understanding and lead with curiosity.

Change is the fundamental theme of the podcast, usually through the lens of personal change. Anand approaches the same work through institutions and systems, and the two meet in a simple, difficult idea: We have to change ourselves if we want to change the world.

Inside this conversation:

• Choco, a Lost Childhood Photo, and Life on the Sidewalk
• Meeting People Where They Are
• Progress, Backlash, and a Light Dusting of Steven Pinker
• Inside the Epstein Emails: Beliefs vs. Interests
• Somewhere People vs. Nowhere People
• The Aspen Consensus & a Hateful Standing Ovation
• Daniel Penny’s Interrogation Tape & the Prosecution’s Gamble
• A Marine, His Daughter, and a Bridge Back to Connection
• Calibrated Optimism & the American Experiment

Rich's own Finding Ultra came up twice. In the Tommie Runz recovery episode it was the book that "made me feel at home," and William Goodge called it one of the first books he read.

I run Podshelf, a free site that tracks book mentions across hundreds of podcasts by reading the episode transcripts. This is the Rich Roll slice for September.

• Above the Clouds (Kilian Jornet), which Goodge brought up on fasted training: Jornet's mom sending him off as a kid to run a marathon on barely any water.
• The Complete Book of Running (Jim Fixx). In the Jenny Simpson episode, Rich traced the worry about runners and heart risk back to Fixx dying of a heart attack mid-run.
• Atomic Habits, Rich's shorthand for not worrying about the New York City Marathon "when you're in the middle of Ohio."

New from guests: Dolph Lundgren's Fights Worth Fighting and Colin Kaepernick's The Perilous Fight.

Full list with quotes and episodes: https://podshelf.io/podcasts/the-rich-roll-podcast

Episode Link | YouTube Link

Episode Description:

Podcasting began as an obscure, embarrassing hobby for the RadioShack enthusiast.

Then the medium became the most powerful new form of new media. Now there’s a sense of audience saturation, and the pace of it feels like a hundred years compressed into five. We’re at an inflection point.

Set against this cultural backdrop, streaming tells a similar story. Netflix, once a haven for documentary filmmakers, is no longer a hospitable home. Today the platform is algorithmically driven, and what that has produced is the vanilla middle we’re all seeing.

And yet art always finds a way. The creative voice, the storytelling, the transgressiveness. It always ekes out.

Which brings me to two people who’ve felt every bit of that upheaval.

Malcolm Gladwell needs little introduction here: The Tipping Point, Outliers, Revisionist History, and Pushkin. Back for his third appearance (eps. 692 and 1002). Kenya Barris is new here. He created Black-ish, co-created America’s Next Top Model, and co-wrote Girls Trip. But he’s not just a writer and creator. He showruns, produces, makes documentaries, and is now stepping into the creator economy. He’s built an empire. I went to his studio. It’s rare air he occupies.

Together they host The Unusual Suspects, an Audible Original now in its second season, where the two of them sit down with people from each other’s worlds.

What they share is a tremendous amount of curiosity about the world, a curiosity that infuses their creative works. What differentiates them is the lens.

The conversation covers:

• The Journalistic Lens & the Comedic Lens
• Inglewood, Organic Chemistry, and Wanting to Be Spike Lee
• Manifestation, Jinxes, and the Sacredness of a Creative Idea
• Richard Pryor, Tom Bradley, and the Price of Assimilation
• Walking Away from $100 Million & a 7 a.m. Call from Ted Sarandos
• The Vanilla Middle & Why Art Always Finds a Way
• Brands as Patrons & Taylor Sheridan’s Ranch
• Podcasts as the New Magazines & Advice for Young Creatives

Episode Link | YouTube Link

Episode Description:

Ten years ago, Colin Kaepernick took a knee, and the moment became a flashpoint in culture.

It’s uncomfortable to hold a mirror up to America and force people to look at something they’d rather not. The irony is that the essence of patriotism and citizenship is speaking truth to power.

Yet his actions were interpreted as treasonous instead of as his constitutional right.

The Super Bowl quarterback has been relatively quiet over the last ten years. He chose a more boots on the ground impact trajectory, but that choice allowed other people to decide the narrative for him. His new book, The Perilous Fight, is his opportunity to share his perspective on what those years were like.

Now he’s re-entering the town square, clear-eyed about what’s coming. And is he still training every day? Yes.

The conversation covers:

• The Political Climate, Progress, and Regression
• Death Threats, Bomb Scares, and Playing with House Money
• Growing up Black with White Parents & Dual Identity
• Maneuvers & Machinations in the NFL
• Writing down Your Future & the Action-Based Idea of Manifesting
• AI, Offloading, and Literacy
• Malcolm X the Streamer & the Algorithmically Driven Media Landscape
• Principle vs. Consensus-Building
• Colin’s Pitch to NFL GMs

Episode Link | YouTube Link

Episode Description:

We recoil at uncertainty.

We make these rules and assumptions to try to alleviate the suffering that is part and parcel of just the uncertainty of everything. 

The moment is all there is, and yet we live our lives captured, rehashing the past or lost in imagining a future that hasn’t happened.

And then there is death. Our culture has an unhealthy relationship with death, and the whole industrial complex around aging and death reflects an unhealthy relationship or understanding of death and what this signifies.

It doesn’t matter how powerful or prestigious you are. You can’t bend time. Time and your mortality are hanging out there.

When Bryan Johnson first appeared in ep. 810, the conversation centered on a defining question: is death inevitable? He returns now alongside his partner, Kate Tolo, and the two are confronting people with uncertainty in a way that is discomforting. At the center of their work sits a challenge to a presupposition around our mortality. If we’re questioning these things, we’re questioning the very nature of reality as we understand it.

Bryan is the founder of Blueprint and the Don’t Die movement. He and Kate are the couple at the center of the Netflix documentary Don’t Die: The Man Who Wants to Live Forever. 

The public side of Don’t Die draws plenty of attention. The conversation in their home gets at something quieter: two people working through questions about health, mortality, and what’s real.

Topics include:

• Surrendering Your Decisions to AI
• Don’t Die vs. Living Forever
• Psychedelics & the Hard Problem of Consciousness
• Endometriosis & the Legibility of Women
• Autoimmunity & Banking Stem Cells
• Biological Age & Five Rules for Better Sleep
• A Theory of Bryan’s Motivations
• Bryan, His Father, and Sitting in Silence

Episode Link | YouTube Link

Episode Description:

We are bearing witness to some outlandish performances right now, riding a really interesting wave in the ultra running world.

This whole backyard thing brought in all of the hybrid athletes, and a different sort of archetype of individual now that is either ultra curious or kicking ass at the highest level. 

You can’t dictate what the culture is.

Will Goodge is a British ultra-endurance athlete who has run the length of the UK, then across America, then across Australia. 

He’s back for round two (ep. 790). He keeps raising the bar on his challenges, and the latest iteration is very difficult to get my head around: 50 marathons in 50 states in 24 days. A Jenga jigsaw puzzle sort of deal, a Special Forces operation, 100% physical, 100% mental, and 100% logistical. The margin of error is very small.

Topics include:

• 50 Marathons, 50 States, 24 Days
• Fueling 9,000 Calories a Day on the Move
• “Can I Take Another Step?” & Why Now Is the Only Time You Can Act
• Grief, Anger, and Running as the Outlet
• The Burden of Proof & the FKT Verification
• Psilocybin, Forgiveness, and His Mother’s Presence

Episode Link | YouTube Link

Episode Description:

Our unconscious response to trauma becomes our strength.

That strength becomes an Achilles heel. And what saves the boy eventually undoes the man.

Here to talk about all of it, the freezing, the armoring, and the long road home to himself, is Dolph Lundgren.

Dolph is an actor, director, and martial artist with eighty-some films behind him. Before any of that: two-time European karate champion, a master’s in chemical engineering, and a Fulbright to MIT. He showed up to campus on a motorcycle in Versace leather with Grace Jones riding on the back, took a look around, and never enrolled. He grew up outside Stockholm. He was just three the first time his father hit him. There was no calling 911 back then, so he developed a survival strategy. He went still.

Everyone knows fight or flight. There’s another response, less discussed, and it belongs to whoever has nowhere to run. You freeze. You leave your body. Dolph found it early. Stoic to the core.

It got him through Swedish special forces selection on a rolled ankle. It got him the role of Ivan Drago in Rocky IV, standing motionless in an audition room while every other actor shouted, because the power is in the non-reaction.

And then it caught up with him. Escape behavior, forty years of it. Steroids. Stunts. Marriages he could not hold. It took a cancer diagnosis to make him sit still long enough to look at any of it.

Topics include:

• The Freeze Response & Learning to Disappear
• Studio 54, Warhol, and Grace Jones
• The Stillness That Won Him Ivan Drago
• Stallone as Mentor, Rival, and Brother
• Fame as Arrested Development
• Steroids, Stunts, and Escape Behavior
• The Misdiagnosis, the Second Opinion, and the Second Life
• A Message to Young Men in the Manosphere

All of this arrives alongside his new book, Fights Worth Fighting, which does its best to disabuse us of the notion that the man on the poster was ever the whole man.

Episode Link | YouTube Link

Episode Description:

Twenty minutes without a pulse.

A rare inherited disease nobody caught. An identity, built over thirty-nine years, suddenly on the chopping block. How do you rebuild a life when the thing that made you is gone?

Three-time Olympian and Olympic medalist Jenny Simpson says she isn’t starting from zero.

You may know Jenny for the bronze in Rio de Janeiro – the first American woman ever to medal in the 1500 meters, and one of the most decorated American middle-distance runners of her generation.

But if that’s the sum of your relationship with this human, there’s a lot more to her – an unusually rigorous mind for how excellence actually gets built.

A world champion, an American record holder in the steeplechase, and a four-time NCAA champion at Colorado who spent fourteen years as a professional and retired on her own terms.

Then, at a local mile race in June, her heart stopped. What follows is her first account of what happened, recorded eight weeks later, before she had spoken publicly.

Topics include:

• The Lopsided Life & the Cultural Imperative to Be Balanced
• Evidence over Belief & Confidence You Can Physically Hold
• The Shoe That Came off & Separating the Work from the Self
• June 16th & the Twenty Minutes That Saved Her
• The Fight Nobody Else in That Room Remembers
• Courage over Fear & the Intervention More Powerful Than the Ignorance

Episode Link | YouTube Link

Episode Description:

Why does anybody keep drinking alone in the mornings, year after year, knowing exactly what it’s doing to them?

Because for a while, it works – until it doesn’t.

That was Tommie Runz for fifteen years.

He’s sober now. He’s an accomplished runner. A font of positive influence. And a fellow Michigander. Today he shares his experience, strength, and hope.

Tommie is a sobriety advocate and co-host of the PR Project, nine years sober, who ran all six marathon majors in a single calendar year before moving onto the trails and finishing Western States this summer. In early 2025 he ran 340 miles solo from Santa Monica to Las Vegas, and made a film about it called Hero.

But the running is downstream of everything else, and he’ll be the first to tell you so.

So start at seventeen, in a high school hallway. Two weeks later he came-to on a bathroom floor with his mother and his principal standing over him. A ‘normal’ person would be scared straight. It might be the most accelerated case of alcoholism I’ve ever heard. Tommie switched to beer and eased back in, because it made him comfortable in his own skin for the first time. Alcohol is a solution to a problem. It’s not the problem.

The word functional is the wrong word for the fifteen years that followed. He was operating dysfunctionally, just not so much that anyone made him stop. Every failed dry January was another deposit in the hopelessness and desperation piggy bank.

What ended it was telling the truth three times in one week.

He’s owning his past now. And when a man tells you he’s proud of himself, that’s growth. That’s health.

Topics include:

• Two Weeks from First Drink to the Bathroom Floor
• The Ghost of a Father & a Dead Man’s Name
• Fifteen Years of Operating Dysfunctionally
• Three Truths & the First Meeting
• Sobriety First, Running Second, Never the Other Way
• 340 Miles Solo & the Film He Made of It
• Black Skin Looks Good on Trail

Seven episodes and six books that got a proper endorsement, which is a high hit rate for a month. Ryan Holiday came on to talk about the Odyssey, which pulled a lot of the rest along with it.

I run Podshelf, a free site that tracks book mentions across hundreds of podcasts by reading the episode transcripts. This is the Rich Roll slice for August.

The ones actually recommended:

• The Odyssey. Holiday's argument for why you have to know it: "so many of the things that we use to explain the present come from the literature of the past."
• In the Realm of Hungry Ghosts (Gabor Mate). Rich read it, then flew to Vancouver to record with him, and got the table flipped on him. "It was a real epiphany for me."
• Be Here Now (Ram Dass), named as Lee Sung Jin's favourite book, alongside Alan Watts as a touchstone for Beef.
• The Four Agreements, from Hellah Sidibe. "Four Agreements is the best book."
• Finding Ultra and Alcoholics Anonymous, the two Zac Clark says he has read front to back several times, in a very funny exchange where he kept calling the first one Running Ultra.

Around them: Aeschylus's Oresteia, Grant's Personal Memoirs, Tennyson's Ulysses, The Obstacle Is the Way and The Daily Stoic, Chris Hayes on The Sirens' Call, Range (David Epstein) in the Klaebo episode on late specialisation, and Ursula K. Le Guin's line that to oppose something is to maintain it.

Hellah Sidibe also made an unembarrassed case for The Secret, Think and Grow Rich and You Are the Placebo.

Full list with quotes and episodes: https://podshelf.io/podcasts/the-rich-roll-podcast

Episode Link | YouTube Link

Episode Description:

There are very few people whose lives are not touched by addiction, either directly, indirectly, or tangentially.

But unless you’ve sat in a meeting, it’s hard to appreciate what actually happens in those rooms.

What you experience in the rooms of recovery is a tremendous amount of compassion, humility and understanding. You are in a room with people who come from all walks of life. People you probably disagree with on most things that you wouldn’t ordinarily encounter.

These people get up in front of a group and confront their own wreckage. Every weakness, every failure. And none of it holds power over them.

And you realize our darkness can be this lever for growth and transformation. And it’s infectious.

Most of us get to do that work in private. Hunter Biden did not.

Hunter is a writer, a painter, and a lawyer, sober since June of 2019, who describes his total public exposure as the greatest gift an addict can be given, provided the addict survives.

It’s hard to imagine anybody having their covers pulled more completely, or being more nakedly exposed. The fact that he’s alive is remarkable in and of itself. Nothing holds power over him, because he has been stripped down to his core and had to rebuild himself back up again.

Topics include:

• Comity, Consensus, and the Washington That Vanished
• Total Exposure & the Binary Choice of Live or Die
• The Accident, the Brain Injury, and the Thing His Family Never Discussed
• Guilt vs. Shame & a Ten-Year Odyssey of Relapse
• Resentment as an Indulgence the Addict Cannot Afford
• Small-p Purpose & Something to Do with Your Hands
• Continuity of Care & the Chasm in American Recovery

Ciao a tutti! 😊

Sono una studentessa dell’università di Padova e sto raccogliendo risposte per il questionario della mia tesi di laurea sul consumo di podcast e contenuti audio.

La compilazione richiede solo pochi minuti ed è completamente anonima.

Questo è il link al questionario:
https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSc-VQwp5hlce1w9mDObDAb_uqRFYgB9E9UuNkOv2WiQOuIxrQ/viewform?usp=dialog

Vi sarei molto grata se riusciste a darmi il vostro contributo! 🙂‍↔️

Episode Link | YouTube Link

Episode Description:

Some people just seem to inhabit joy.

Not the performed kind. Not the curated-for-the-algorithm kind. The real thing – day after day, mile after mile, no audience required.

Hellah Sidibe lives there. The audience of millions showed up anyway.

The clips started spreading back in the spring of 2021: a former pro soccer player grinning his way through a 3,000-mile run across America. Anyone who watched ended up asking some version of the same thing. Who is this guy? How is he so positive? Can anyone actually be wired this way?

Five years after his first appearance (ep. 612) – and 3,350 straight days of running later – Hellah is back, and the questions still stand. Pressed directly: in nine years, has there ever been a single morning he didn’t want to run?

Never. Not one.

Immigrant. Soccer player. Groundskeeper. Transcontinental runner. Content creator.

Go ahead and hunt for the portal into the darkness in this one. Good luck. It’s all smiles – and underneath the smiles, a fundamentally different way of walking through the world.

Topics include:

• The Tenets of the Run Streak & a Watch That Never Leaves East Coast Time
• Rungry, Running as Medicine, and Never Once Not Wanting to Go
• The Mustang Lesson & Happiness as Moments Created with People
• Mali, a Piece of Stick, and Joy as a Survival Skill
• The Lack Mindset & Rewriting the Stories Your Brain Tells You
• Grifters, the Manosphere, and Modeling an Aspirational Life
• Five GPS Watches, 120 Pairs of Shoes, and a 2:45 Marathon Goal

Episode Link | YouTube Link

Episode Description:

Why is the Western mind so resistant to mindfulness?

What is the source code that makes it so difficult for our culture to cotton on?

We live our lives rehashing what happened in the past or tripping out on what’s going to happen in the future. The present moment is the only thing that’s actually real. It’s also the one thing we’re so rarely available to.

Manoj Dias wasn’t looking for meditation.

He was a decade into marketing in Melbourne when he had an anxiety attack with no framework to understand it. Psychologists, medication, time off. None of it helped. What eventually did was a yoga class, taught by an ex-Buddhist meditation teacher who kept repeating the same sentence. You are not your thoughts.

That was twenty-two years ago. Since then he’s co-founded Open, a mindfulness studio in Venice, written Still Together, joined the faculty at Esalen, and carried this work into the NBA, Nike, Netflix, Google, and the United Nations.

This one was recorded live in New York at Rivian’s Performance House. Halfway through, Manoj stops the conversation and takes the whole room through a practice.

Most of the conversation circles a single problem. Mindfulness arrived here wrapped in this language of optimization, because that’s how you get people to pay attention. And there’s nothing wrong with that. You need those entry points. You need those portals.

The practice is carrying all of this awareness throughout the day. Not something you do and stop doing, and then go live your life.

Topics include:

• Suffering as an Entry Point & Hearing Your Thoughts for the First Time
• Wellness as a Secular Religion & the Return of Communion
• Segmentation vs. Carrying Awareness through the Day
• Mind-Body Integration, Negativity Bias, and the Free Throw
• A Guided Coherent Breathing & Gratitude Practice
• Live Audience Q&A: Peak Performance, Identity, and Parenting

Episode Link | YouTube Link

Episode Description:

We’re all walking around with our masks on, behaving badly, our childhood wounds running everything.

These masks are crafted to help us make sense of who we are and where we fit in.

So why does a stranger cutting you off land like a personal attack? Usually because there’s something about yourself you’re unhappy with that’s being reflected back.

Beef is a show about exactly that.

Lee Sung Jin is the Emmy-winning writer, director, and showrunner of the series, which earned sixteen nominations for season two. He came up through the writers’ room at It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia, and is now co-writing Marvel’s X-Men.

The whole show started with a real road rage incident. What he built on top of it works like a forensic pathologist performing an autopsy on culture, identity, ethnicity, capitalism, and the generational divide. In his writers’ room, they call it Jungian shadow work.

The opening scene of season one came out of the worst year of his life. He was living progressively more and more out of alignment with his true self, and that became an incredible lever for transformation and growth.

Topics include:

• Jungian Shadow Work & the Autopsy of Culture
• Specificity as the Path to Universality
• Rise, Fall, Rise: Why Story and Music Are the Same Thing
• Rock Bottom as a Trampoline
• Samsara & Going around the Mountain
• Self-Optimization as Secular Religion
• Millennials, Gen Z, and the Generation That Got Erased
• The Tone Formula & Running a Room of Hundreds
• From “Sonny” to Lee Sung Jin

Episode Link | YouTube Link

Episode Description:

Elite sport tells a familiar story about how champions are made: identify the prodigy early, specialize young, keep score, and let the strongest survive.

Norway tells a different story. Children’s races go unranked until age ten, results scrambled on purpose. Participation over podiums. Fun over everything. And somehow, this nation of 5.5 million keeps producing the best athletes on Earth.

Nobody embodies that paradox more completely than this week’s guest, who at 14 was the smallest kid in the race, 20th of 40 in his local area, and is today the most decorated Winter Olympian in history.

Johannes Klæbo is a Norwegian cross-country skier, a 13-time Olympic medalist and 11-time gold medalist. At the 2026 Games, he won all six of his events, a sweep no Olympian had ever accomplished, breaking a record Eric Heiden held for 46 years. Only Michael Phelps has more golds.

But the palmarès doesn’t really explain him. Johannes has modernized his sport in real time: weekly YouTube videos, a pro cycling contract, and a viral uphill running technique, born from a wax mishap, that changed how an entire sport races. Behind him, a family operation: granddad coaching at 82, dad managing, mom on finances, brother on the videos.

Topics include:

• A Kid against Men & the Decision to Control the Controllables
• Norway’s Blueprint: Scrambled Results, a Thousand Ski Clubs, and Fun First
• Bad Wax, a Stopwatch, and the Birth of the Viral Uphill Run
• 32-Hour Weeks & the Zone 2 Contrarian
• Hating to Lose & Racing His Own Head across a Frozen 50K
• Granddad, Dad, Mom, and Brother: A Gold Medal Family Business
• The Isolation Trap & the Variable That Transformed His Olympics

Episode Link | YouTube Link

Episode Description:

This is a story about a life that looked charmed from the outside.

About a secret carried since childhood. And about the long, slow, unglamorous road back from rock bottom.

It starts with a kid in South Jersey. Three sports, decent grades, a family that gave him everything. He had his first drink at thirteen on Christmas Eve. And the thing that stuck with him wasn’t the buzz. It was realizing he could lie and get away with it. That one discovery shaped the next fifteen years.

At twenty-four, a brain tumor. The surgery came with painkillers. That’s where the opioids came in. Most people wake up from something like that just grateful to be alive. Zac Clark woke up chasing the warm hug of the Dilaudid in his arm. What came next was OxyContin, then heroin, then crack, and a kind of resourcefulness aimed entirely at his own destruction. 

At one point he actually talked a surgeon into removing a healthy organ, just to keep the pills coming.

Rock bottom didn’t happen in a therapist’s office. It happened at a bank in Camden, where he’d walked in to cash a check he’d forged from his own dad. The teller, a woman named Rhonda Jackson, took one look at him and, instead of calling security, called his father. She’s still in his life today. To Zac, that one choice is the whole story in miniature. Somebody saw him.

He’s nearly fifteen years sober now. He founded Release Recovery, runs every New York City Marathon, and yeah, somewhere along the way he went on TV and won The Bachelorette.

The episode gets into:

• Why addiction begins as a solution, right up until it becomes the problem
• Willingness, and why you can’t just manufacture it
• The gap between not drinking and actually being okay
• How the whole family gets pulled under
• Rethinking relapse, and why keeping score doesn’t help
• Running as recovery, and the trap of trading one high for another

Episode Link | YouTube Link

Episode Description:

For three thousand years, every generation has taken the Odyssey and retold it.

Bards sang it before anyone could write it down. Scribes copied it, translators reshaped it, and each one left fingerprints on a poem nobody can claim to own.

Now Christopher Nolan has rendered it in 70mm, and the whole culture is arguing about it again.

Few people are better company on this subject than Ryan Holiday, a bestselling author and one of the people most responsible for bringing Stoicism to a modern audience. He returns after ep. 854, and he’s been sitting with this poem far longer than Nolan has.

His argument is that we’ve forgotten what art was once for. Greek myth wasn’t entertainment with a moral bolted on. It was how a culture handed down its understanding of hubris, loyalty, and moral injury.

And because no version is the version, interpretation has always been the assignment. Which makes the arguing part of the tradition, not a departure from it.

Here’s what comes up:

• Why Interpretation Is the Assignment
• The Sheep, the Cyclops, and the Hubris Nolan Cut
• Unreliable Narrators & the Story Odysseus Tells Himself
• The Sirens, Confirmation Bias, and the Attention Economy
• Why a Promise Isn’t a Plan
• Perseverance vs. Persistence & Grant’s Final Battle
• Calypso’s Island, Surrender, and the Twelve Steps

A man addicted to striving, celebrated as a great leader while privately certain he’s the worst person alive, numbed on an island by someone whose needs are met by keeping him there. He takes a fearless inventory. He makes his amends. He heads west to honor the dead, which is a living amends, because the people he owes are already gone.

At some point this stops being about a movie.

Six episodes, including episode 1,000 with Julie, and Malcolm Gladwell on why we are selling running wrong.

Short list this month but worth a scan if you are picking summer reading.

What this is: I run Podshelf, a free site that tracks book mentions across hundreds of podcasts by reading the episode transcripts. This is the July slice for the Rich Roll Podcast.

The most interesting one is Rich on his own book:

• Finding Ultra. He was honest about it in a way people rarely are. Despite what people assume, it was not a New York Times bestseller. It has done fine and kept selling, and he described the launch as not really a book tour, just saying yes to anybody who would talk to him.

Guest picks:

• Radical Candor (Kim Scott), from Michelle Khare, on being the only entrepreneur she knew and having no peers to learn management from. The 4-Hour Workweek, which she accidentally stole from a coworker and still has.
• Range (David Epstein), from Gladwell, used for the sorting argument. You can think you are a good swimmer at nine when you should have played volleyball, and early specialisation stops you finding out.
• The War of Art (Steven Pressfield), raised as the question of whether you are a pro who sits down at a set time, or you and your mates getting stoned.

Also The Hero with a Thousand Faces, from the Danny McBride episode, on characters who assume they are the hero and are not, plus McBride's own Thrilling Tales of Modern Men. And Julie's cookbooks, The Plant Power Way and This Cheese Is Nuts.

I track every book mentioned on the Rich Roll Podcast here: https://podshelf.io/podcasts/the-rich-roll-podcast

It is free and there is no signup.

Episode Link | YouTube Link

Episode Description:

Something is happening to the way stories get made, and most people haven’t clocked it yet.

Across generations of film and television, the path was fixed. You wanted to make something at scale, you needed a studio, a green light, and a pile of someone else’s money. The gatekeepers decided what got made and what died in a drawer.

Then the tools got cheap, the gates came off their hinges, and the people who used to wait for permission stopped asking.

Michelle Khare is what that future looks like when it fully arrives.

She’s the creator and host of Challenge Accepted, a show she finances herself, owns outright, and produces at a level indistinguishable from network television. She’s earned a taekwondo black belt in 90 days, survived Navy SEAL hell week, and recreated one of Tom Cruise’s most dangerous stunts by hanging off a moving plane. A Time 100 honoree, recently Emmy shortlisted, and increasingly, a sign of where the industry is heading.

For all the audacity, Michelle will tell you she’s the most fearful person you’ll meet. A worrier, not a warrior, in her own words. Raised to want safety, she turned that fear into the engine of one of the boldest careers on the internet.

Here’s what we get into:

• The Difference between Daring and Reckless
• Fear Setting and the Leap to Independence
• Coach, Mentor, Cheerleader: How to Learn Anything Fast
• Building a Studio from Scratch and Owning Your IP
• Scarcity over Frequency and the Creator Burnout Trap
• The Convergence of Hollywood and the Creator Economy
• Why the Fear Never Goes Away

Episode Link | YouTube Link

Episode Description:

If running is your thing, this one’s for you.

If you’re not, don’t bail. What starts as three guys geeking out about running becomes a conversation about how we decide who’s good at anything, how often we’re wrong, and what it costs the people we write off.

Here to help me sort it out are Malcolm Gladwell and Chris Chavez.

Most of you know Malcolm. A New Yorker staff writer since 1996, the lord of all things overlooked and misunderstood, host of Revisionist History, co-founder of Pushkin Industries, and back for his second time on the show (ep. 692). A journalist, Chris founded CITIUS MAG in 2016 while writing for Sports Illustrated, and hosts its podcast.

We let it run unfettered. No notes, no plan, no idea where it was headed. Which Malcolm would tell you is the only honest way to do this. He’s built a whole philosophy on it. The best moment in any conversation is the one nobody saw coming.

Among the topics:

• The Art of the Interview & Why Over-Preparation Stifles It
• Data Transparency & Running’s Self-Defeating Culture of Secrecy
• Elite Marathoners, the Ultra Pivot, and What Translates
• Perennials, Late Bloomers, and the Rise of the Masters Athlete
• The Teenage Phenoms Rewriting the Record Books
• Scale vs. Exploitation & Why America Keeps Getting It Wrong
• The Relative Age Effect, Sorting, and the Kids We Lose at Twelve
• Body of Work vs. Peak Performance & Who We Wrongly Crown

I logged every book that came up on The Rich Roll Podcast over the first six months of the year, across 39 episodes. The list leans where the show usually goes: endurance, creativity, focus, and food.

The ones that came up most:

• Finding Ultra by Rich Roll, his own book, referenced in five different episodes.
• Atomic Habits by James Clear and Deep Work by Cal Newport, the two productivity books guests kept returning to.
• The Creative Act by Rick Rubin and The Artist's Way by Julia Cameron, both from the creativity conversations.

The rest, roughly grouped:

• Creativity and flow: Big Magic, Creative Confidence, Flow
• Focus and grit: Digital Minimalism, Grit
• Body and food: Born to Run, Breath, Fiber Fueled, In Defense of Food, Healing Back Pain
• Meaning: Man's Search for Meaning, From Strength to Strength
• Tech: American Kingpin and Hatching Twitter, both by Nick Bilton, plus Moneyball
• Literature: Blood Meridian, Heart of Darkness, King Lear, Inferno

Green Eggs and Ham also turned up, which I did not expect.

Full list is here: https://podshelf.io/podcasts/the-rich-roll-podcast. Free, no signup.

Episode Link | YouTube Link

Episode Description:

How do you turn pain into purpose?

How do you quiet the inner critic that insists you’re not enough? And how do you meet the person waiting at the edge of your own capabilities?

To help us contend with these questions, I’m joined by an ultrarunner who has spent years living inside them.

Mark Dowdle answers all three with his feet.

A former football and lacrosse player who came to running late, Mark cuts a very different figure in this world: a team-sport athlete in a sport of solitary mountain purists. But don’t let that fool you. This past spring, he won the BPN Backyard Ultra, covering 306 miles across 73 hours.

He once quit his job and ran 475 miles from Chicago to Windsor, Ontario — racing college athletes along the way — just to reach the starting line of the Beer Mile World Classic. And in the process, he has quietly dismantled the notion that the capacity to endure is reserved for extreme people in extreme situations.

But his story doesn’t begin with a love of the sport. In fact, he’ll tell you he doesn’t even love running. It’s simply the vessel — the way he finds out who he actually is when the rubber hits the road. It begins instead with a college kid chasing acceptance in destructive ways, until a late-night run broke something loose, and running became the way he processed what he otherwise couldn’t face.

Which is the thing to understand about Mark: he’s less an ultrarunner than a change agent who happens to run. The miles are just the platform.

Today:

• Turning Pain into Purpose and the Shared Vulnerability That Connects Us
• The Competing Narratives We Carry and Why Every Step Is Evidence
• Dancing at the Edge, Where the Mask Comes Off and You Meet Your True Self
• The Faith He Resisted for Years and the People Who Keep Him Grounded
• Why He Fuels on Real Food and Refuses to Track a Single Data Point
• Taking the Next Step Forward, No Matter How Stuck You Feel

Episode Link | YouTube Link

Episode Description:

Fourteen years in, and on some level I still can’t account for how it happened.

The things that end up mattering most rarely announce themselves. They tend to show up looking like ruin. The dead end, the foreclosure notice, the morning you wake up sure it’s all coming apart. Only later, looking back, can you make out the strange, quiet pattern they were drawing the whole time.

So for the thousandth episode, there was only one person I wanted to sit across from. The one who was there when we first hit record, back when none of this was anything. My wife, Julie Piatt.

Today we go all the way back. A creative experiment we cooked up in a warehouse on a Kauai mango farm, our family of seven on the edge of foreclosure, hurling ourselves into the unknown with a lot of faith and not much else. But really, this is a conversation about becoming. About how the thing you’d never choose is so often the thing that gives you everything.

Here’s what I know for sure, a thousand episodes in. None of this happens without you. I’m not the architect of any of it. I’m the beneficiary of a staggering amount of grace, luck, and goodwill, yours most of all.

So before anything else, thank you. For showing up, for staying, for making this improbable thing possible.

Today:

• The Yurt, the Mango Farm, and the Creative Experiment That Started It All
• Near-Foreclosure & Jumping without a Net
• Julie’s Mystical Lens & Holding a Vision through Uncertainty
• The Crucible of Hardship & the Gifts It Birthed
• Authenticity over the Algorithm & Staying True to the Work
• Conversation as a Sacred Act & the Lost Art of Connection
• Why Change Remains within Everyone’s Reach

Whether you’ve been here since that warehouse on the farm or you’re pulling up a chair for the first time, thank you for taking this journey with me.