Choose the Hard Way

The relationship between humans, bikes, cars and streets is polarizing, but it shouldn't be. Humans are the original autonomous vehicles. UK-based Adam Tranter is working to build a world where people can get around safely and efficiently without fear of a vehicle running them over.  Adam is the West Midlands' first Cycling & Walking Commissioner. Appointed by the Mayor of the West Midlands, Adam...

Matt DeCoursey is a serial entrepreneur, podcaster, author and Forbes Next 1000 recipient. He's the CEO and founder at Full Scale and the Startup Hustle podcast and the author of three books including Million Dollar Bedroom, Balance Me and The Realist's Guide to a Successful Music Career which he wrote with Umphrey's McGee member Joel Cummins.  Full Scale enables companies to quickly and affordabl...

Dr. Gil Blander is the founder and Chief Scientific Officer of Inside Tracker. Inside Tracker brings together blood biometric data, DNA insights and fitness tracker data to create science-backed action plans for people to manage their health and performance. Dr. Blander has a PhD in biology from the Weizmann Institute of Science and completed his postdoctoral fellowship at MIT. He's an expert in n...

In a land before YouTube and TikTok, a producer I knew introduced me to award-winning filmmaker Eric Matthies who shared my passion for cycling. Together, we created a TV pilot about cycling subcultures in Los Angeles. The show didn't get picked up, but the experience paid dividends we couldn't have imagined at the time. You can view the full pilot episode here . To see The Warriors alleycat film...

In the early 2000s one of the freelance journalism gigs I enjoyed the most was writing Tour de France commentary for Fox Sports during the Lance and Floyd Landis eras. I love cycling and cycling journalism, and today my guest is Spencer Martin who is one of the hottest creative and business talents in cycling journalism today. Spencer is the founder of Beyond the Peloton, a freemium substack and p...

Neil Tolaney is a General Partner at TCV, the storied Silicon Valley investment firm that focuses on private and public high-growth technology companies. Notably, Neil balances his career with being the dad of four young children.  With over $24 billion of assets under management, some of TCV's investments have included NetFlix, Spotify, Zillow, LegalZoom, and Strava.  In this conversation, we dis...

Hector Guadalupe is a serial entrepreneur who builds businesses at the intersection of wellness and social justice. Hector is the founder of Unibody Fitness NYC , a fitness and training company that uses wellness to achieve physical transformation, provide second chances and bridge communities. Hector is also the founder of A Second U Foundation , a nonprofit that educates and trains formerly inca...

Neil D'Souza is an entrepreneur at the intersection of tech, education and human potential. Neil has lived, traveled and worked in 40 countries and is an Ironman Triathlete. Originally from Mumbai, India, at an early age Neil set an unbelievable swimming record that involved spending 79 hours in a pool and landed him on MTV. Neil started his career in tech at Cisco where he was part of a team that...

As a journalist, Tom Taylor has covered the intersection of science, technology and sports at Sports Illustrated and SportTechie. He has a Ph. D. in Aeronautics and Astronautics from Stanford University and an M.S. in Journalism from Columbia University. Growing up, he dreamed of being an astronaut before discovering a passion for storytelling that took his life and career in a different direction...

Michele Wucker  founded Gray Rhino & Company to help leaders, organizations, and communities to identify and strategize responses to "gray rhino" risks: the term she coined to urge people to face up to challenges that are obvious and probable yet which we are all too likely –but not condemned– to neglect despite, and often  because of , their size. The gray rhino metaphor has  moved markets ,  sha...

Breath, Sleep, Stress, Recovery and High Performance. Does mouth taping during sleep improve recovery? How can you use breath to down-regulate stress throughout the day? What is HRV and why does it matter? Kristen Holmes is the Vice President of Performance Science at WHOOP. She works with top researchers and hundreds of the best tactical, pro and collegiate athletes and teams in the world to opti...

Dr. Samir Puri is a defense policy and counterterrorism expert. He has worked in government and in academia, including as assistant head of research at the British Ministry of Defense's think tank. Samir was raised in 1980s London in a family that had traversed three continents in three generations, from Asia to Africa to Europe. He later completed a PhD at Cambridge University in International Re...

National Geographic Explorer Grace C. Young is an aquanaut, sailor, diver and ocean engineer. Currently, she's a lead scientist at X, Alphabet's Moonshot Factory where her team is creating radical new technologies to protect the ocean while feeding humanity sustainably.   Grace is a former ballerina and studied Mechanical & Ocean Engineering at MIT and did her PhD at Oxford as a Marshal Scholar. I...

How do you cultivate stress inoculation, resilience and an internal locus of control? Are they learnable skills? Are they situationally dependent? I explore these questions and more on this episode with Craig Weller. Craig made many mistakes on a bumpy path into the special operations community, but he made it and worked as a SWCC and in high-threat protection and diplomatic security. Since then,...

David Brinton is an Olympian, World Champion, Hollywood stuntman, black belt, former pro cyclist, cycling coach and expert witness. The bicycle has taken David to some amazing and unlikely places as a human and professional. He has stunt doubled Mario Lopez, won national and world championships as a masters cyclist and could probably break an oak tree in half with a roundhouse kick. We talk about...

You may have caught Randy on How I Built This with Guy Raz. In this interview, we take a different direction and dig into the early experiences that laid the foundation for Randy's future success. Randy is the founder and CEO of TRX, the human performance and training company. After rowing at USC where he studied history and martial arts, he had a 14-year career in the Navy as an officer, SEAL Ope...

Dean Kuipers' latest book is Deer Camp: a Memoir of a Father, a Family and the Land that Healed Them. It's the story of how he and his brothers reconnected with their estranged father through a plot of land in rural Michigan where Dean grew up.  Dean is a journalist, author and editor who has had a long and interesting career writing about three big areas: ecology, politics and the arts.  As a for...

Tony Blauer is an entrepreneur and world-renowned personal defense and combatives expert. He's started hugely successful businesses--but he's also had the unfortunate experience of trusting the wrong people and having one of his businesses implode at its peak. He has created truly world-changing technologies and ideas, but his inventions have had challenging births and the world didn't always unde...

What is the link between heavy metal and heavy innovation? How far-out is too far? How do you go from idea to market at scale? Let's find out. You read the CV's of some people and you think, is this a human being? Could one person really do this much in one life? My guest today is Krisztina Z Holly. She is one of those people and I can confirm that while she has done an inhuman amount of cool thin...

Sign up for The Hard Way newsletter for updates on new episodes + a curated selection of things worth watching, listening to and reading, all with a Hard Way twist. What is a hazy IPA? How does a hops volcano happen? And what makes it so hard to start a small business outside of tech in the Bay Area? In this episode, I put my almost total lack of beer knowledge on full display in a conversation wi...

Sign up for The Hard Way newsletter for updates on new episodes + a curated selection of things worth watching, listening to and reading, all with a Hard Way twist. What is a hazy IPA? How does a hops volcano happen? And what makes it so hard to start a small business outside of tech in the Bay Area? In this episode, I put my almost total lack of beer knowledge on full display in a conversation wi...

Sign up for The Hard Way newsletter for updates on new episodes + a curated selection of things worth watching, listening to and reading, all with a Hard Way twist. What is a hazy IPA? How does a hops volcano happen? And what makes it so hard to start a small business outside of tech in the Bay Area? In this episode, I put my almost total lack of beer knowledge on full display in a conversation wi...

Sign up for The Hard Way newsletter for updates on new episodes + a curated selection of things worth watching, listening to and reading, all with a Hard Way twist. What is a hazy IPA? How does a hops volcano happen? And what makes it so hard to start a small business outside of tech in the Bay Area? In this episode, I put my almost total lack of beer knowledge on full display in a conversation wi...

Ethan Gold is a prolific songwriter, producer, composer and performer. Pitbull's tagline is "Don't stop the party." Ethan Gold's tagline is "Making sensitivity cool again." His dad is the Beat-adjunct writer and novelist Herbert Gold . his mother Melissa was killed in a helicopter crash along with legendary rock promoter Bill Graham. As he tells it, he grew up in San Francisco during the harsh per...

Known as the Queen of Pain, Rebecca Rusch is a 7x World Champion in sports ranging from adventure racing to whitewater rafting to 24-hour solo mountain biking. She has won the biggest monuments in off-road bike racing including four Leadville 100 mountain bike titles and five total wins at the Dirty Kanza in the 100-mile, 200-mile and 350-mile XL races. She holds the fastest known time for mountai...