The Rich Roll Podcast

Bill Burnett and Dave Evans created perhaps the most popular course at Stanford, "Designing Your Life," and co-authored the book "How to Live a Meaningful Life." This conversation explores the intersection of product design and personal development. We discuss the loneliness epidemic, why there is no best self, curiosity as the gateway drug to wonder, the transactional world versus the flow world,...

This is my first solo episode — and honestly, out of my comfort zone. Which is exactly why I needed to do it. The recent Channel 5 interview between Shia LaBeouf and Andrew Callaghan went wildly viral. Most of the discourse has been voyeuristic or vilifying. I wanted to do something different and use it as a lens to examine what addiction actually looks like in real time. As a recovering alcoholic...

Ken Rideout is a masters world champion marathon runner, recovering opioid addict, and the author of the new memoir, “Everything You Want Is on the Other Side of Hard.” This conversation explores the childhood trauma Ken spent decades outpacing, the addiction that nearly destroyed him, his wife Shelby's cancer battle, and the paradox that the very things that propelled him to extraordinary heights...

Tom Sachs is a contemporary artist and cultural provocateur known for turning branded consumer objects into high art. This conversation explores the paradoxes that define Tom's art and his iconoclastic philosophy of living; why creativity is the enemy, the power of sympathetic magic, consumerism as secular religion, the infamous Barney's nativity scene that launched his career, and why persistence...

Bone smashing. Steroids. Crystal meth. 13-year-olds letting AI judge their faces. It's called looksmaxxing – and it presents as self-improvement. Underneath, it's a deftly weaponized pipeline to nihilism, misogyny, and self-destruction, consuming millions of young men right now. Adam Skolnick and I sit with all of it this week – what it is, why it's spreading, and what the real antidote looks like...

Michael Easter is a New York Times bestselling author, UNLV professor, and the mind behind “Walk With Weight.” This conversation explores rucking, the evolutionary movement pattern humans are built for that modern fitness has largely overlooked. We discuss why it affects body composition differently, how GPS navigation impacts cognition, and why optimization culture can undermine resilience. Plus,...

Dr. Dawn Mussallem is a Mayo Clinic oncologist who survived stage 4 cancer at 26, heart failure, and a heart transplant—then became the first person to run a marathon within a year of receiving a new heart. This conversation explores the integrative approach to cancer treatment, why exercise might be as powerful as chemotherapy, the self-flagellation patients feel despite doing everything right, a...

Roll On is here—and this one has teeth. Adam and I unpack the tale of two Alexes—Honnold and Pretti—and what that juxtaposition reveals about the best and worst of human nature. From there: a 9-month surgery milestone (30 lbs down, joy levels up), the Attia-Epstein fallout and the allure of proximity to power, and ICE's authoritarian overreach. Listener questions round us out: finding hope, perfec...

Alex Honnold, the world's most accomplished free solo climber and subject of Oscar-winning Free Solo, just climbed Taipei 101 live on Netflix. In this special live podcast event—our first with a studio audience—we go behind the spectacle to explore what really happened on that building: the unexpected challenges and the mental shift that transformed pressure into joy. We discuss his training philo...

James Nestor is an acclaimed science journalist and author of the international bestseller "Breath: The New Science of a Lost Art." This conversation explores why so many of us breathe dysfunctionally—and how it may be connected to chronic ailments. We discuss breathing biomechanics, CO2 tolerance, the link between sleep-disordered breathing and ADHD in children, and practical techniques to optimi...

Bruce Wagner is a novelist, former student of Carlos Castaneda, and author of fifteen books, including his latest, "Amputation." This conversation explores his use of Hollywood as a laboratory for human behavior, crafting transgressive fiction that skewers the desperate while searching for transcendence. We discuss his decade with Castaneda, writing "Amputation" after the LA fires, the relationshi...

Dr. Elizabeth Poynor is a gynecologic oncologist, Chair of Women's Health at Atria Health Institute, and host of the podcast “Decoding Women's Health.” This conversation explores why women's health has been siloed for centuries, modern hormone therapy, the estrogen-brain connection, metabolic shifts, GLP-1s, and what partners need to understand about this transition. Underneath it all: generations...

Brad Stulberg is a bestselling author, executive coach, and one of my favorite thinkers on sustainable high performance. This conversation explores the dualities in personal development, discipline and self-compassion, striving and surrender, intensity and joy. We discuss the "humble badass" archetype, building resilient identities, why curiosity is the skeleton key, and excellence as an antidote...

Dr. Maya Shankar is a cognitive scientist, host of the podcast “A Slight Change of Plans,” and author of “The Other Side of Change.” This conversation explores the challenge of navigating involuntary change, whether it's injury, loss, or a future that suddenly collapses. We discuss identity and attachment, the illusion of control, why our brains resist uncertainty, the end of history illusion, rum...

Dr. Will Bulsiewicz is a gastroenterologist, one of the world's foremost authorities on the gut microbiome, and author of “Plant Powered Plus.” This conversation explores the gut-immune connection as the root determinant of chronic inflammation—the silent driver behind three out of five deaths. We discuss the four nutritional workhorses, why your microbiome is nocturnal, and what happens when you...

Mark Manson is the author of The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck and host of the Solved podcast. Back for his third appearance (eps. 476, 882), we skip the backstory and pull questions from a fishbowl. We discuss vanity goals versus values-aligned goals, why procrastination is really about emotional avoidance, the trap of people-pleasing, how to distinguish intuition from impulse, and the delusion...

The finale is here. Let's close this thing out. Part 2 explores courage, honesty, creativity, relationships, and balance. Bravery. Addiction. Love. Mastery. And why fulfillment doesn't require sacrifice. It's been fun putting this auditory yearbook together. I hope you found these two episodes uplifting and inspiring. Thanks for the love and support. This podcast has been an amazing journey. I'm g...

Happy holidays from the RRP mothership. Another year in the rearview. Time for what's become one of my favorite traditions, our annual “Best Of.” 12 years running now. This year was packed with an astonishing array of guests—too many to feature here. Part 1 revisits the year's most powerful moments: longevity science, neuroplasticity, happiness research, emotional regulation, consciousness, and wh...

Kevin Hall, Ph. D., is a physicist-turned-nutrition scientist and author of "Food Intelligence: The Science of How Food Both Nourishes and Harms Us. "This conversation explores why diets fail, the truth behind the "slow metabolism" myth, how ultra-processed foods hijack our biology, and why the 800-pound gorilla driving the obesity epidemic isn't willpower—it's our toxic food environment. He also...

Rutger Bregman is a Dutch historian, bestselling author, and the guy who went viral telling Davos billionaires to pay their taxes. This conversation is a salve for the crisis of meaning percolating through modern life. We explore Rutger's pragmatic antidote—moral ambition—and discuss why a quarter of workers believe their jobs are socially useless, what the abolitionists teach us about coalition-b...

Gregg Renfrew is the founder of Beautycounter and now Counter—a pioneer in the clean beauty movement. Five years after our first exchange, Gregg returns with her story about navigating imposed change. After losing her company, she bought it back out of foreclosure in 48 hours—then let it die to save it. Today, we explore identity collapse, decoupling self-worth from success, why selling control me...

Roll On returns! Just in time for the holiday gauntlet. Adam Skolnick and I unpack three questions the season demands: how to navigate family gatherings when the same dynamics play out like clockwork, what rock bottom actually means (hint: it's a launchpad for transformation, not a life sentence), and why I've traded rigid goals for something more like trajectory. We get into the superpower of ext...

Todd Marinovich is a former NFL quarterback, USC Rose Bowl champion, and the subject of the ESPN 30 for 30 documentary "The Marinovich Project." This conversation explores the duality of engineered perfection and performance-based love. We discuss his father's authoritarian methods, the identity crisis of living someone else's dream, his harrowing addiction, the moment his father's approval parado...

Oliver Burkeman is a bestselling author, journalist, and the mind behind “Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals” and “Meditations for Mortals.” We explore our broken relationship with time and Oliver's philosophy of imperfectionism, which dismantles the delusion that productivity is a moral imperative. Oliver explains why we're all chasing an infinite backlog, how perfectionism keeps us...

This Fasting Compilation features Dr. Alan Goldhamer, Dr. Valter Longo, and Dr. Michael Greger to discuss the science of strategic deprivation. We explore why visceral fat behaves like a tumor secreting inflammatory molecules that drive chronic disease. How many health conditions stem from dietary patterns rather than requiring medication alone. The evolutionary mechanism of insulin resistance and...