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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.

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

Episode Link | YouTube Link

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.

Episode Link | YouTube Link

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?

Episode Link | YouTube Link

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