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.

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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.

Cool to see this clip from the pod on the NBA subreddit

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Episode Description:

From an early age, we each inherit a story about the life we’re going to lead.

We spend years reaching for it. Then reality intervenes.

And perhaps you come to see the story was never quite about you. It’s humbling. But there’s a strange grace on the other side of it, an unexpected liberation, if you’re willing to let it go.

That collision – between the self we conceive and the reality that eventually arrives – is the ground Danny McBride has been excavating for 30 years.

Danny’s the writer, actor, and producer behind Eastbound & Down, Vice Principals, and The Righteous Gemstones. He co-founded Rough House Pictures and built a creative home in Charleston, far from the gravity of the studio system. Thrilling Tales of Modern Men is his first collection of short stories.

The timing is uncanny. The book arrives amid our current reckoning with the crisis of masculinity – the epidemic of loneliness, the erosion of meaning, the men acting out over something they’re sure was taken from them.

But Danny isn’t chasing the moment. He’s been writing this man since long before the culture caught up and gave it a name. To him it was never news. It was always just the human condition.

His men are all convinced they’re the hero of the journey. The last thing any of them sees coming is himself.

On deck:

• The Myth of Being Special & the Liberation of Letting It Go
• The Rambo-to-Geico Generation & the Inflated Self
• Why the Only Real Antagonist Is the Man Himself
• The Manosphere & the Old Lie That the Answers Live Outside You
• Film School, Charleston & Building Outside the System
• Horror, Comedy & Reading as an Antidote to the Screen

The particulars differ for each of us. But that gap – between who you imagined you’d become and who you turned out to be – I know it well. I suspect you do too. That’s what makes this more than comedy. Enjoy.

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Episode Description:

We’ve been sold a story about performance that says greatness is a matter of force – more volume, more intensity, more suffering.

Break enough eggs, the logic goes, and what’s left standing is excellence. I believed that story for most of my life. Turns out it’s mostly wrong.

What the best in the world understand is quieter, and for someone who spent decades equating training with suffering, a little disarming: the body isn’t a machine to optimize. It’s a biology to respect.

The brain isn’t really built for greatness – it’s built for safety. And until some part of it decides you’re okay, it holds a little back, quietly rationing what it’ll let you do. Feed it, rest it, take away the fear, and it gives you far more than you’d think.

Here to talk about the science – and the lost art – of building a durable human is Dr. Kelly Starrett.

Kelly’s a Doctor of Physical Therapy and the co-founder of The Ready State, and he’s spent decades working with pro athletes, Olympians, and special forces. He’s also written a stack of New York Times bestsellers, the latest being Built to Move, which runs through a lot of what we get into today.

We get into:

• The Carbohydrate Revolution & the Concept of “Session Cost”
• Why the Brain Chooses Safety over Performance
• Youth Sports, NIL, and the Myth of Early Specialization
• Wellness as Secularized Religion & the Limits of Optimization
• The Enhanced Games, PEDs, and Why You Can’t Cheat Your Biology
• The Power of Starting Again
• Play as the Most Underrated Performance Enhancer

Ultimately, this is a conversation about how to build a body – and a life – robust and resilient enough to roll with whatever it’s asked to do.

Tracked June's episodes. A good mix of focus, wellness, and some heavy literary picks.

Top picks, all one plug:

• Cal Newport's Deep Work, Digital Minimalism, and Slow Productivity. A guest said if you read nothing else, read those three.

The wellness thread: In Defense of Food (Pollan), When the Body Says No (Gabor Mate), The Anxious Generation (Haidt) alongside iGen (Twenge).

Some real literary weight in there too: Blood Meridian, Heart of Darkness, Dante's Inferno, and Walden. Paul Rosolie's Mother of God (the Amazon one) also came up.

https://podshelf.io/podcasts/the-rich-roll-podcast/2026/06 keeps the running list, free to use.

Which of the Cal Newport three actually changed how you work?

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Episode Description:

For a time, veganism wasn’t a niche choice.

It was everywhere. And then, somewhere along the way, the momentum just faded. So what happened?

Today we peer into the rearview and do an honest autopsy on the plant-based movement. Why a way of eating that not long ago felt damn near inevitable lost its grip, and how anyone curious about eating this way can find their way in, without the dogma, the sanctimony, or the confusion.

My guide for this one is nutrition scientist Simon Hill, author of The Proof Is in the Plants and host of The Proof podcast, back to help us navigate these waters (his last visit, ep. 976). Simon has spent years in the trenches with the data, and he brings a scientist’s respect for nuance to a conversation that has been sorely lacking it.

Here’s the thing nobody wants to say out loud: the science never really changed. The culture did. And in that churn, a lot of trust got broken, and a lot of that breakage was self-inflicted.

Consider this less a defense of the movement than a reckoning with it.

I’ve been reductive in how I’ve carried this message. I’ve evangelized from my own experience. I’ve platformed people whose health pitch was really a Trojan horse for an ethical one. I own my part in it.

Here’s some of what we get into:

• Why Plant-Based Meat Boomed and Then Busted
• Transition Foods Versus Actual Health Foods
• Getting Honest about Protein and Supplementation
• The Three On-Ramps: Ethics, Environment, and Health
• Why the Most Confident Health Advice Is the Least Trustworthy
• Attraction over Promotion as an Advocacy Ethic
• Meat, Masculinity, and Modern Insecurity
• A Stoic Approach to Manhood and Diet
• A Practical, Shame-Free Way to Start Eating More Plants

Break out a pen and paper, because this one is candid, in-depth, and a little uncomfortable.

Episode Link | YouTube Link

Episode Description:

There’s a butterfly called the blue morpho.

The caterpillar enters the dark, dissolves almost entirely, and emerges with wings. It’s one of nature’s oldest metaphors for transformation.

Ed O’Brien named his new solo album after it. Once you understand why, you understand everything about where he’s been.

You know Ed as a member of Radiohead. For three decades, he’s conjured the textures of a sound so distinct it borders on the sacred, mostly from the background, rarely in the front. His album is the sound of a man finally stepping into the light.

It did not come easily. It emerged from a prolonged depression, the kind that no measure of success, acclaim, or creative fulfillment can insulate you from.

Ed tried all the usual remedies. Nothing moved. What finally shifted wasn’t another fix. It was surrender.

His wife told him to stop running and sit in the fire. And slowly, the dark night of the soul stopped registering as proof that something was wrong with him, and began to reveal itself as something else entirely, the well-worn passage every one of us eventually walks.

Topics include:

• The Dark Night of the Soul and the Hero’s Journey
• The Body’s Intelligence and the Signal Beneath Depression
• Naming Childhood Trauma and the Work of Gabor Maté
• Uncertainty as the Ground of Creativity
• The Making of Blue Morpho and the Return to Flow
• Music, Soul, and the Limits of AI

Episode Link | YouTube Link

Episode Description:

We seem to be suffering from a fatal case of self-obsession.

You see it everywhere. The Enhanced Games. The looksmaxxing craze. The endless menu of protocols we’ve convinced ourselves will finally fill the hole. We have every comfort and convenience at our fingertips. And yet nearly half of us feel emotionally disconnected, lonelier than ever. Somehow, with all of it, we feel worse.

So I want to talk through a reframe I’ve been sitting with. If the whole culture insists on optimizing everything, then fine – let’s optimize for the thing that actually matters. Call it fulfillment maxxing. The opposite of looksmaxxing. Less me, me, me. A little more meaning.

Underneath all of it is this: your attention is just about all you’ve got. Where you put it shapes your present and your future – and even how you see your past. Wherever you are right now, my hope is this gives you somewhere to start. Today. With one small thing.

In this one:

• The Comfort Crisis & the Hedonic Treadmill
• Looksmaxxing, the Enhanced Games, and the Self-Obsession Underneath
• The Three P’s vs. the Three Macronutrients of Happiness
• Contrary Action & the Quiet Magic of Momentum
• Discomfort as the Price of a Meaningful Life
• Faith, Family, Friends, and Meaningful Work
• Why the Path of Least Resistance Is Volunteering for the Most
• Your Attention as the Only Currency That Really Counts

Episode Link | YouTube Link

Episode Description:

We’ve all bought into this idea that you have to suffer for anything worth having.

That the people who do extraordinary things are just built different. Wired for it in some way the rest of us aren’t. And we run a quieter version of that story in our own heads every day: if you want to do something remarkable, you’d better be ready to hurt for it.

But what if we’ve got it backwards? What if the joy isn’t the prize you get for winning. What if it’s the whole reason you win in the first place.

My guest today is Rachel Entrekin, and she just did something the sport is still trying to make sense of. At this year’s Cocodona 250, she didn’t just win the women’s race for the third year running. She won the whole thing. Beat every man out there, broke the course record by over an hour, and did it on 19 minutes of sleep across 56 hours. The clip of her coming into the finish, fresh-faced and grinning like she’d barely started, went everywhere.

But ask Rachel and she’ll tell you the win isn’t the interesting part.

A few years back she crossed that same line flat and sad, negative, with nothing left in the tank. Then she watched the second-place woman come in glowing and grateful, everything Rachel wanted to be – that wasn’t who she’d been when things got hard. So she changed the whole goal. No placement, no time. Just find the joy.

That little reframe, from “I have to win” to “why not me,” is the heart of this one.

Here’s what we get into:

• The Shift from Chasing Outcomes to Chasing Joy
• Why Not Me? & the Power of Delusional Self-Belief
• Mindset & Response: The Only Things We Control
• Surviving 56 Hours on 19 Minutes of Sleep
• The Hopi Woman’s Blessing on the Final Climb
• Vibes-Based Training & Running on Feel
• Running as a Path through Recovery

Tracked the books from the last month of episodes. A good mix of performance, creativity, and a couple of classics.

The most mentioned:

• Inside the Box by David Epstein (twice), on constraints and how limits make you better. The whole Epstein back catalogue showed up too: Range and The Sports Gene.
• The Artist's Way by Julia Cameron (twice), the creativity classic.

The rest of the month: Atomic Habits (Clear), Deep Work (Newport), Flow (Csikszentmihalyi), Grit (Duckworth), Moneyball (Lewis), Sapiens (Harari), The Anxious Generation (Haidt), and Descartes' Error (Damasio).

A few literary ones in there too: Blood Meridian (McCarthy), Heart of Darkness (Conrad), and King Lear.

I keep a running list of every book from the show at https://podshelf.io. It is free to use.

Has the constraints idea from Inside the Box actually changed how you train or work?

Episode Link | YouTube Link

Episode Description:

How do you take your life back from the rectangle in your pocket?

It’s the doomscroll that consumed your evening. The phone-in-hand at every meal you swore you wouldn’t bring it to. We all feel the pull, but we mostly don’t want to talk about it.

Andrew Yang has been thinking about it for years, and quietly evolving a way out.

The last time Andrew was on (episode 640), we talked about democracy. This time, it’s our phones. He’s been building Noble Mobile, a cell carrier that rewards you for using your phone less. Which sounds insane until you hear him explain it.

This isn’t really a conversation about phones. It’s a conversation about agency.

It’s about the design decisions engineered to take what’s left of your attention. About what we’re doing to our kids, whose brains were formed by these things rather than interrupted by them. And about why none of us, no matter how disciplined, are going to willpower our way out of this.

Specifics include:

• Stone Age brains, godlike technology
• The cognitive cost of leaning on AI
• The trillion-dollar attention economy
• Why willpower won’t save you
• Phone addiction through the lens of recovery
• Parenting Gen Z and Gen Alpha
• Noble Mobile and flipping the incentive
• Phone-free events and the power of being the only one without it
• The one thing you can do tonight

Episode Link | YouTube Link

Episode Description:

There was a sporting event in Las Vegas recently where doping wasn’t the scandal.

It was the point. Privately funded, zero oversight, staged in a parking lot behind a casino, with Bryan Johnson calling the action from under a UV umbrella, his sort of vampiric persona and ethos on full display.

I couldn’t look away. So Adam Skolnick came over and we pulled the whole thing apart.

You know Adam by now. Novelist behind American Tiger, the ghostwriter behind David Goggins’ Can’t Hurt Me and Never Finished, author of One Breath, and a journalist who’s written for The New York Times, Outside, and ESPN. He watched every event. I watched my feed turn 90% Enhanced Games. He figured it was a passing curiosity. I figured it was the start of something. Either way, this thing isn’t done unfolding.

And for all the superhuman hype? It was kind of a nothingburger. Clean guys won the sprints. The one world record came in the 50 free, and honestly that came down to the banned swimsuit more than any drug. The ones who really benefited were the older athletes, clawing back a bit of what they used to have. Which tells you something.

We get into:

• What the Enhanced Games Actually Are & What Went down in Vegas
• The Nothingburger: Why the Clean Guys Won
• Looksmaxxing, the Manosphere, and the Discourse Economy
• The Spectacle, the Sales Pitch, and the Ethics of It All
• Why Performance & Longevity Are Orthogonal
• Self-Optimization as Permission for Narcissism
• Why We Train at All

Episode Link | YouTube Link

Episode Description:

At odds with conventional life seemingly since birth, the future wasn’t looking so bright for Paul Rosolie.

A dyslexic kid from Brooklyn who could barely read, Paul was wired for one thing school couldn’t measure: a complete obsession with the natural world. At 16, he dropped out of high school. At 19, he walked into the Amazon barefoot. And he never really came back.

What followed was two decades of fumbling, failing, and figuring out how to turn that calling into a mission. A partnership with an indigenous mentor named JJ. A Discovery Channel disaster that nearly ended his career. Years of quiet work nobody was paying attention to.

Then the 2019 Amazon fires hit, his footage went viral, and the rest is history.

Today, Paul is the founder of Junglekeepers — an organization that has protected 150,000 acres of the wildest part of the Amazon and is halfway to creating a new national park. He’s also on a narco trafficking hit list. Such is the job.

His book, Junglekeeper: What It Takes to Change the World, is a New York Times bestseller and the chronicle of how a teenager’s passion became a movement.

Specific topics explored include:

• The Race against Time in the Amazon
• Dropping out & Meeting JJ
• Befriending Dharma the Elephant
• The Discovery Channel Disaster
• Encountering the Uncontacted Nomolé Tribe
• The Narco Threat & the Hit List
• Peter Beard & the New York Explorer Tradition
• Hopelessness as a Poison, Hope as a Discipline
• Meaning through Responsibility

Episode Link | YouTube Link

Episode Description:

Many of us have patterns we can’t seem to shake.

The self-sabotage. The drink. The people pleasing. The behavioral coping mechanisms that don’t serve us.

More often than not, those behaviors trace back to a single source. Not a character flaw. Not a lack of discipline. An emotion we’re trying to avoid. A refusal to withstand discomfort that tends to lead to more. Different for everyone, but the mechanism is always the same.

Avoidance doesn’t protect you from the feeling. It’s your resistance to it that makes it painful.

My guest today is Joe Hudson, the creator of the Art of Accomplishment and an executive coach whose clients include people at SpaceX, OpenAI, Google, and Apple. He came to this work the long way. An alcoholic father. A hypercritical mother. A decade of seven-hours-a-day meditation practice. Then an early stint in venture capital, where he encountered brilliant, thoroughly capable people who were outperforming most benchmarks except the one that actually matters: their own inner lives.

Here’s what we get into:

• The Golden Algorithm: The Psychological Pattern Keeping You Stuck
• Dirty Fuel: The Critical Inner Voice and Why It Doesn’t Work
• Joy Is the Matriarch: Why You Can’t Selectively Numb Your Emotions
• Why Self-Understanding Beats Self-Improvement
• Coaching the Architects of AGI: Ethics, Responsibility, and What He Worries About

Episode Link | YouTube Link

Episode Description:

I’ve been public about a lot of my transformation.

What I haven’t talked about are the patterns that survived all of it.

The recursive patterns no one else can see. The resentments that outlast every therapy modality, every men’s group, every intellectual understanding of what’s wrong and how to fix it. I’ve known about my particular malfunction for a long time. Gabor Maté identified it over a decade ago. Arthur Brooks has named it three times. And I kept running into the same wall.

Which is what led me to iboga, a Bwiti root bark medicine from Gabon, thousands of years old.

Had I done more research before I boarded the plane, I probably wouldn’t have gone. What followed was relentless confrontation — complete derangement, the inability to stand without assistance, and no sleep. No ego dissolution. No sense of oneness. Just iboga rooting out my defenses and refusing to let me intellectualize my way out of the room.

And then, on the second night, something shifted.

This conversation was recorded five weeks out from the experience. My wife Julie Piatt sits with me as I try to put words to what happened, and what hasn’t been the same since.

I won’t claim to be a different person. But I’ve set the backpack down. And I’m getting a little better at noticing when I’ve picked it back up again.

Among other things, we discuss:

• Recovery, Resistance, and Why I Finally Said Yes to Psychedelics
• Iboga vs. Ibogaine: What I Didn’t Know I Was Getting Into
• The First Night: Sensory Overload, Confrontation, and Feeling Tortured
• Rebirth, the Inner Child, and the Cacao Ceremony
• What’s Actually Changed in the Aftermath
• Julie’s Witness: Presence, Intimacy, and 25 Years Together
• The Only Thing That Actually Matters

Episode Link | YouTube Link

Episode Description:

If you’ve spent any time scrolling through running social media, you’ve probably seen him.

The smiling ultrarunner. The one logging 100 miles a week for over 320 weeks straight. The viral “come run 100 miles with me” videos. The relentless positivity.

But the smile is not the story.

The story is the 13-year-old kid in Redlands doing crystal meth pulled from a Hells Angels supply. The Utah wilderness program at 16. The boarding school in a Berkshire castle, where he was groomed by a teacher he never reported. The slow fade back into using as a high-functioning adult.

And then the cascade that broke everything open: a hit-and-run, a wife leaving, a grandfather’s funeral.

Andy Glaze is an ultrarunner, firefighter paramedic, battalion chief, and the author of Smile, or You’re Doing It Wrong: A Journey from Rock Bottom to Redemption. What makes this conversation resonate is his refusal to flatten any of it, including the recent humbling of realizing that running, his medicine for so long, has stopped quieting the PTSD the way it used to.

The magic, as he puts it, lives in the space between “I can’t” and “I did.”

Today, we discuss:

• Crystal Meth, the Hells Angels, and a 13-Year-Old Boy
• The Cascade That Broke Everything Open
• Movement as Medicine, and the Day the Medicine Stopped Working
• The Pernicious Nature of High-Functioning Addiction
• Choosing Joy as a Discipline
• Why Wisdom Often Looks Like Quitting
• The 30-Minute Rule
• Personal Change as an Act of Service

Episode Link | YouTube Link

Episode Description:

For centuries, philosophers, theologians, and physicians have all tried to answer the same question: what does it mean to live a good life?

Modern psychiatry took up that question and proceeded to narrow it. Instead of asking what’s working in a person, it asked what was wrong. Symptoms catalogued. Diagnoses multiplied. The result is a field fluent in pathology, and far less fluent in flourishing.

My guest today is Dr. Paul Conti, a Stanford and Harvard-trained psychiatrist and author. Back for his second appearance (ep. 705), Paul is here to flip the script on a field he says has spent the last century polishing the hood instead of looking at the engine. Instead of focusing on what’s wrong with us, he’s asking the more generative question: what’s going right?

I’ve known Paul not just as a guest but as a patient. A few years back, I sat in a room at his clinic in Portland and confronted some of the narratives I’d been carrying about my childhood. That experience didn’t fix me. But it gave me something more useful, a way of understanding myself that moved me from blame into agency.

That same approach sits at the heart of his new book, What’s Going Right: A Powerful New Method for Optimizing Your Mental Health. It’s less a self-help manual than a blueprint for becoming a friend to yourself.

Today, we discuss:

• The Three Human Drives & Why Modern Psychiatry Missed One
• The Structure of Self: Function & the “I”
• Compassionate Curiosity & Piercing the Veil of Denial
• Self-Sabotage, People-Pleasing, and Chameleonic Adaptation
• When Self-Awareness Becomes Its Own Prison
• The Hamster Wheel of Never Enough

Episode Link | YouTube Link

Episode Description:

We are conditioned to believe that transformation arrives in lightning bolts.

That success is a sprint. That if we just hustle harder and find the right hack, the life we want will materialize on a calendar we can control.

The truth is far less sexy. And far more liberating.

Today’s episode is a solo riff—no guest, a meditation on a framework I’ve been quietly building my life around for decades, and the mindset that has carried me from 50 lbs overweight, fast-food addicted, and existentially lost in my late 30s to where I sit today.

It begins with a question I keep getting: What’s the deal with the 4 AM photos from my home gym? The short answer is accountability. The longer answer is something else entirely. What started as an insurance policy on consistency has become an unexpected creative practice—a daily exercise in constraint, a page out of Julia Cameron’s The Artist’s Way by way of David Epstein’s case for limitations as the engine of innovation. It turns out that constraints don’t shrink us. They liberate us.

But the real heart of this conversation is what I’ve come to understand as my spirit animal. Not the bottlenose porpoise, though they clearly have life figured out. The tortoise. The slow-moving, seemingly aloof, dinosaur-esque creature that, by Aesop’s own decree, wins.

Today:

• The 4 AM Routine & the Sacred Energy of Momentum
• Constraints as the Catalyst for Creativity
• Intentional Living vs. Reactive Living in Late-Stage Capitalism
• Why the Little Things Are Actually the Only Things
• Mood Follows Action & the Reflex toward Movement
• Pairing Therapy with Estimable Acts
• The Tortoise Mindset & Playing the Long Game
• Hank Wise, “Pay Now, Love It Later,” and a Record 30 Years in the Making

Episode Link | YouTube Link

Episode Description:

There’s something almost tragic about the moment we’re living in.

We have access to everything. Every option, every tool, every door left open indefinitely. And the research shows we’ve become more bored, more paralyzed, and more creatively inert than at any point in recent memory.

We’ve mistaken optionality for freedom. And it’s costing us.

David Epstein has built a career doing something rare: going where the evidence leads, even when it contradicts his own previous conclusions. His last visit upended conventional wisdom around early specialization and made the case for the generalist. Now he’s back with Inside the Box: How Constraints Make Us Better, challenging the modern obsession with infinite choice.

He argues that limits and boundaries don’t hinder creativity and productivity — they drive it. Give your brain total freedom, and it defaults to the familiar. Take away the usual option, and you’re forced to find a better one.

Today, we discuss:

• Why your brain is designed to avoid thinking and what to do about it
• The sharpshooter problem and the bad science hiding in your social feed
• Satisficing: the framework that separates the happy from the miserable
• The Green Eggs and Ham effect and what Dr. Seuss understood about creative limits
• Attention, algorithms, and who’s structuring your focus right now
• The slow erosion of social trust and what it’s doing to all of us
• Goals versus opportunistic pivots
• Why joining something might be the most important decision you make this year

David could peddle a lot of nonsense. He doesn’t. And this conversation is proof.

Episode Link | YouTube Link

Episode Description:

There is a particular kind of frustration that arrives in a woman’s forties.

The workout that used to work doesn’t. The diet that used to keep weight in check stops doing so. Sleep fragments. The body starts storing weight in places it never did.

And the instinct – trained into women for decades – is to do more. More cardio. Less food. A tighter fasting window.

The problem isn’t the effort. The problem is the instructions.

My guest today is Dr. Stacy Sims, an exercise physiologist and nutrition scientist who has spent her career arguing that the playbook most women have been handed was built on male physiology and quietly falls apart when applied to female bodies, especially in midlife. Her voice has been part of a long-overdue course correction in how women are taught to train, fuel, and age.

This conversation was recorded live in front of a studio audience, which sharpens everything. Real people in the room. Real questions. Real-time pushback.

Here’s a roadmap:

• Why “women are not small men” is more than a mantra
• Circadian eating & why fasted training backfires for most women
• Perimenopause, the estrobolome, and visceral fat
• Heavy lifting, neuromuscular adaptation, and brain health
• Polarized training, the gray zone, and what most “high-intensity” classes actually are
• Protein timing & the myth of bulking
• Creatine, vitamin D, and supplementation that actually matters
• Sauna, cold plunge, and the sex differences in thermoregulation
• What men need to know to support the women in their lives

For me, this is a mystery box. I am not the target audience. But I walked away with a clearer understanding of the biology the women in my life are navigating – and why the advice most of them have been following is quietly working against them.

Episode Link | YouTube Link

Episode Description:

Roll On, open air edition.

Adam Skolnick came over. The studio stayed inside. We did not. We drag the mics into the backyard, point them at each other, and just let it go. No agenda. Just two friends, some birds, and an unscripted hang that reminds you why conversation is worth recording in the first place.

Adam is the novelist behind American Tiger, the ghostwriter behind David Goggins’ Can’t Hurt Me and Never Finished, and the author of One Breath. He’s also a veteran journalist and activist, with his work appearing in The New York Times, Outside, ESPN, and Men’s Health.

We roam into:

• Podcasting, Beginner’s Mind, and Why Authenticity Beats Optimization
• The Personal Development Trap: Self-Obsession as the Enemy of Growth
• Music Deep Dive: Geese, Turnstile, Cameron Winter, Mike D, and Manger’s Debut
• SXSW: Ed O’Brien, Tom Sachs, and the Rivian R2
• The Dark Wizard: Dean Potter, Alex Honnold, and the Art of the Outlaw Athlete
• Artemis II, the Overview Effect, and What We Get Wrong about the Moon

Episode Link | YouTube Link

Episode Description:

We have a very specific idea of what war costs.

We count the combat deaths. We build the memorials. We thank them for their service.

What we don’t count is the 150,000 veterans who came home and then didn’t make it. The ones whose families watched them disappear, one deployment at a time, until the people who came back bore no resemblance to the ones who left.

Marcus and Amber Capone know that story from the inside. They’re the subjects of the Netflix documentary In Waves and War.

Marcus spent 13 years in Naval Special Operations, six combat deployments, and came home a stranger to his own family. What followed was a traumatic brain injury, depression, and a suicidal logic that terrified everyone around him.

It was ibogaine that broke the cycle. A plant medicine from Africa that Marcus went to Mexico skeptical about and came back from saying, “This is exactly what the guys need.”

Eight years later, they’ve treated over 1,300 veterans, produced Stanford research showing 86–93% improvement in PTSD, depression, and anxiety effect sizes, and helped unlock $130 million in research funding. The standard of care for veteran mental health hasn’t meaningfully changed in decades.

I sat down with them nineteen days after my own first iboga ceremony, which I’m sharing publicly here for the first time.

Here’s what we get into:

• The Hidden Cost of War on Marriage & Family
• TBI, Depression, and the Failure of Conventional Treatment
• The Suicidal Logic of a Trained Warfighter
• What Ibogaine Is and What Marcus Experienced
• The Stanford Study & the Neuroscience of Healing
• VETS: The Nonprofit Bringing This Treatment to Thousands
• My Own Iboga Experience, Shared Publicly for the First Time

This one isn’t just for veterans. It’s for anyone who has ever watched someone they love disappear — and refused to stop fighting for them.

Note: This conversation includes a discussion of suicide, suicidal ideation, and veteran mental health. If you or someone you know is struggling, please call or text 988.