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Kind: captions Language: en it was really rough for quite quite an extended period of time we couldn’t pay our mortgage we had cars repossessed i’ve told this story before but it was so bad at one point that you know we didn’t have enough money to pay for our our garbage collection so they took away our bins we had to put our our garbage bags in the back of this beat up minivan that we had and look for you know kind of uh bins like behind the grocery stores and stuff to like throw our garbage i mean it was pretty humiliating and quite frankly pretty emasculating as somebody who’s supposed to be you know head of household and taking care of [ ] like i was unable to make sure that my house was in order and so we went through a really rough period of time and it was not clear that we were going to be able to kind of persevere [Music] okay so let’s give you a little intro here so we got uh rich roll which is um an amazing name first of all i’m sure you get that a bunch i feel like the rick roll kind of stepped down your corner a little bit do you get is that a problem for you a little bit man not a day goes by where you know i’m not on the receiving end of some kind of bs about that yeah exactly um and but that is your real name rich roll that is like not like a stage name god-given name okay wow my parents are are uh you know behind here so uh and you have a very very interesting story so i’m gonna give the like very laymen version of the story um and then we what i wanna do is two things i want to dive in and actually hear from you a little bit more about the interesting bits of that story as well as you know it’s we are kind of like a we’re a business podcast and so what we’d like to talk about in general is um business opportunities sure sounds good all right cool um so your story is as far as i know is as follows you you’re coming up all you were coming up on 40 years old you were not in great shape you’re i think 50 pounds overweight is what you what you say and you were you know decided to sort of make a change in your life and now you are very very well known as a endurance athlete who has a plant-powered or vegan diet and you have done some kind of amazing things in the endurance uh you know competitive endurance field i think you were named one of the 25 fittest men on the planet by men’s fitness which is a pretty dope honor um and so that is your kind of that’s your claim to fame did i did i get that right yeah i think that’s that’s fairly accurate that’s probably how i’m best known although i haven’t raced in a number of years and i’ve sort of graduated or i’m attempting to kind of graduate from the limiting parameters of being known as like a vegan endurance athlete and the podcast is a big piece of that which we can get into but i would say that’s a fair assessment of how kind of most people think of me and and my association and what would be the shift so if you were known as like this guy who went from i guess the full story is entertainment lawyer uh you know struggle with sort of drugs alcohol get sober then you’re but then you’re overcompensating by eating not so great and then you have this kind of moment you’re you know you’re sort of uh your you know come to jesus moment or whatever where you’re like okay i’m gonna make a change you make this lifestyle change you become this well-known uh endurance athlete who’s doing it in a way that’s atypical so i think you’re the first vegan to complete a ultra endurance event which is like some crazy 300 mile uh 300 mile type of event uh where you’re running you’re biking you’re swimming you’re doing all that good stuff and now you have businesses that are around this right so you have a meal planning business you have um there’s kind of like a whole lifestyle uh and brand and business around this stuff and so from going from i’m known for competing in this what do you think you’re what do you want to be known for now what do you think is that transition yeah it’s a great question i mean i think that uh you know just kind of fill in the gaps on the story i do have a history of you know alcoholism that’s a big part of my story alcoholism and recovery that predated the kind of next chapter which was uh sort of middle age malaise and reaching another kind of rubicon with how i was living my life and making a secondary transition into a healthy lifestyle and that led me into the ultra endurance world and i was able to distinguish myself in that world as a middle-aged athlete but also as somebody who was doing it plant-based and that garnered a fair amount of media attention and put me in a position to do something with it and the first thing that i did was write a book uh it came out it came out almost exactly ten years ago it was called finding ultra and it’s essentially a memoir but it also has aspects of being a bit of a lifestyle guide and that kind of put me on the map in a public way and in the wake of that book coming out it became about like okay that was great i got you know an okay advance for that but i’ve got four kids how am i gonna make a living um sort of propagating these ideas or continuing the conversation that that book began because up to that point i was still a practicing attorney and so the transition out of the legal world into doing what i do today i would say has been a very inelegant and protracted process i’m not a naturally uh inclined entrepreneur i was reared in a in a in a much more kind of traditional conservative environment education first get the good job get into the good grad school the whole bit and hence you know became a lawyer which is you know very much a safety seeking type of career so my mindset and my thinking has never been oriented around entrepreneurship whatsoever but i suddenly found myself in the position where being a lawyer felt uh untenable given all these experiences that i had and i was given this gift this opportunity to do something different and it really challenged me to uh upend uh all of my kind of built-in proclivities around safety seeking and kind of doing uh kind of following this you know path that society smiles upon like even though i went to stanford and was surrounded by entrepreneurship and the explosion of silicon valley for some reason that never rubbed off on me and i and and and now i was in a position of like okay i need to kind of shed the limitations of how i’d lived my life to date and really start to think about how to do this differently and because it’s not my natural state i sought out mentors and i found one mentor in particular who’s been absolutely instrumental in helping me forge this new path his name is greg anzalone and he’s ceo of a company out here near where i live called sideshow and sideshow a pop culture collectibles company they create uh figurines like limited edition uh very uh finely crafted um figures from pop culture so from the marvel movies and star wars etc everything from life-sized uh c-3 c c-3pos to darth vader’s and thor and the like and he grew that company from a couple artisans in a garage to now a very large enterprise that employs hundreds and hundreds of people and if you’re to go to comic-con they have the second biggest booth at comic-con second only to marvel and there’s a whole subculture of people who are fanatic collectors of what sideshow produces my point being that greg is a natural entrepreneur he’s been very successful in a number of businesses and he began to mentor me and retrain the way that i was thinking about my life and really helped me create structures around what i was doing and strategies in order to build a foundation upon which we could create a sustainable business that would provide for my family the book was the first piece in that in the wake of the book coming out and in an effort to continue the conversation that that book began i launched the podcast almost 10 years ago so i wasn’t a first mover in the podcast space but i definitely was an early adopter and it was a medium that i had fallen in love with as an athlete i’d spent so many hours so much time alone on the bike and running listening to podcasts when it was very difficult to even acquire an episode it was pre iphone so you had to go to your desktop or your laptop and download a series of mp3s and then bounce those mp3s to your ipod and create playlists and i was doing this before anyone else i knew was listening to podcasts and was discovering as we’re all discovering now how much value there is in this medium and so with that love and i think a lot of not practice but i was very acclimated to what a good podcast could be because as a listener i’d consume so much of this media that when i started mine i felt like i was in a situation where i had something to say i knew some interesting people in my life and importantly there wasn’t any competition at the time like people were not clamoring to start podcasting in 2012. i think you know aside from uh adam carolla and kevin smith and and maybe joe rogan nobody was even monetizing these things so it was less about it being a business proposition uh and more about uh an opportunity to continue to build a platform with the trust that at some point something could come out of this that could sustain my family financially and so i started the podcast i immediately was able to rise to the top of the itunes rankings because as i mentioned earlier there was no competition at the time and in the health and fitness and wellness space there really wasn’t very much good content at the time so from that i was able to build an audience slowly and gradually over time and did the podcast for a number of years before monetization was even anything to to consider um and now of course it’s it’s you know it’s doing incredibly well but again that wasn’t really the plan but because the podcast has become and continues to this day to be the tip of the spear uh in terms of all the things that i do it’s been the most profitable not just financially but also in terms of engaging the most number of people around the ideas that that i care about and this has been a very long-winded way of getting to the point of answering your question which is how do you want to be seen today very early on i i made a decision from actually from the outset of the podcast that i didn’t want it to be a podcast about specifically just being plant-based or being an athlete i didn’t want it to be a triathlon podcast i wanted to cast a wide net which is why i named the podcast after my name because i wasn’t sure if i was going to continue to do it where my interests might find me but i knew that i probably wasn’t going to change my name so i just did the easy thing and named it after myself and it’s allowed me the flexibility to move in whatever direction inspires me and so although i would say that the core kind of themes of the podcast are around personal transformation healthy lifestyle eating and of course fitness running you know the sports that that i care about it’s also allowed me host conversations with just a wide diversity of people who i can continue to grow from um in other ways beyond like how i’ve been traditionally known because for me this is my growth accelerator and i think we’re all here on the planet to grow in our various ways and overcome our challenges and so it’s given me the opportunity to sit down with people who can help me grow and work through my you know kind of limiters in in all areas of life and so as a result it’s allowed the audience um to be very diverse although there are plenty of kind of you know vegans and runners and stuff like that it’s really brought in all walks of life and i think has been um a big reason why the podcast has continued to grow and flourish because it’s not limited to one specific theme topic or kind of uh heading and how big is it today so i see on youtube maybe like 700 000 subscribers there uh podcast i’m not sure what that would be is that i don’t know if it’s bigger or smaller than the youtube stuff and then the top videos like you know david goggins hubermann those who get like five to ten million views on youtube which are great kind of like the you know the perfect storm of like overlap of interest the right guest who already has their own audience people search for their name in youtube that sort of thing so how big is the give us a sense of how big the the kind of the the content side has gotten to now yeah so youtube has been something that that we’re relatively new to i think we started uh filming the podcast in earnest maybe two and a half three years ago at this point um and like you said we have outlier videos like the hubermann initial huberman podcast i did i think has like 11 million views some of the goggins interviews have a lot of views but a lot of them don’t have that many views so it’s very hit or miss and as you know uh youtube is all about the algorithm and what’s great about youtube is that it’s amazing at discovery so it allows people who are not subscribers or people who are not familiar with what you’re doing to kind of ha by happenstance stumble onto your content and and it allows you to then bring them into your universe but youtube is still a very small piece in our content engine the vast majority of our audience is audio only so through apple podcasts spotify is a very small very tiny slice of our audience so the vast majority are people who are listening on apple devices or on platforms that are outside of spotify and youtube but i believe in youtube because even if somebody doesn’t watch our video that thumbnail might come across their screen and it almost works as a billboard to enhance visibility um of of what we’re doing and so we continue to invest and double down in youtube although the core of what we’re doing really is um audio first at least now i’d probably i’d say it’s probably anywhere from 90 to 95 of our audience oh wow okay so this podcast is probably very huge then so like you know probably getting i don’t know half a million you know listeners per per thing then something like that yeah it’s it’s in that range i mean as you know like on in audio it’s fairly predictable uh how large the audience is going to be and how many people are going to listen um you know there’s going to be some variation there but it falls within a tight range whereas in youtube it’s just all over the map because the algorithm gods can smile on you as they did with hubermann and it goes wild that doesn’t happen in audio uh so yeah i mean you’re correct it’s about in that range on average and so um so i have this theory with content which is that uh people will ask me a lot like okay you know how do i do better how do i do a good podcast how do i grow my content how do i grow my audience and i say well there’s some like you know they’re kind of looking for the what do i write in my title or thumbnail or like you know something there and there’s definitely things that are better or worse but i would say you’re an example of the core fundamental of what works so let me say three i’m just gonna point out three things of what you gave a kind of good story i’m gonna point out three highlights that that of why this worked number one you were early to a platform that ended up being big um if you’re late to a big platform it’s tough if you’re early to a platform that never gets big also no bueno you gotta have early to a platform that’s big that is one of the best things you could do to increase your odds of success you were basically listening to podcasts just when it was rss you know only or whatever maybe even you know there’s no players or whatever um okay so the second thing is you um you have a you had a niche where you built authority um so like let’s say initially it might have been vegan lifestyle or endurance training as a vegan something like that right like the overlap between two hyper passionate niches which is like you know plant-based lifestyle and you know performance uh you know athletic performance and so that overlap was like a niche that you could kind of dominate and become the authority there because there just weren’t that many people who are doing it you know in general forget even about podcasting now on topic in addition to the kind of addiction recovery piece is also a cool aspect of that as well and so that’s that’s what’s gonna go next which is i think you have an innate understanding that story is what gets people hooked uh like for example when you came on i was kind of describing you with just like some labels like there’s some descriptors you’ve accomplished this you’re known for this and you were like uh you brought it back to story what’s a story a story is some transformation or change uh you know the protagonist the hero goes through something uh and they started one way and they change into another way they started thinking one thing and then they realized another you know they started single they ended up happy in love right that’s the basis of all stories some change some transformation and i think as i heard you talk about like whether it was from risk-averse lawyer to reluctant entrepreneur who learned to shed that limitation that’s change uh you know meat eater to plant eater change uh overweight to you know endurance athlete change and so i think you’re really good at framing change because the fundamental thing people want more than learning how to you know whatever swim 100 miles is like everybody a broader thing is everybody wants to remove some of their limitations and hit that transformation that they crave whatever that is and they could take inspiration and and knowledge from your story so i think that’s another one the last little element i like that you said is i think you have what i call the red pill which is uh you have uh opinions or beliefs that might be might run counter to like the consensus opinion right uh i think in general uh vegans have a belief about diet and lifestyle that is counter to the mainstream behavior and so when you have that like you know that point of view that is a different thing uh it grabs people’s attention and it gets them hooked and the people who for whom that resonates uh it kind of like you know they become attracted to that so i don’t know i’m not saying you intentionally architected these things but just out of your story about how you built this pretty remarkable kind of content franchise i just wanted to point out some of those elements that i’ve seen be common elements for people what do you think of some of those yeah i mean i think that’s fairly accurate in astute the only the only one that i would bristle out a little bit is the red bull red pill thing i think it is of course like to be vegan and to be an athlete there is something contrarian about that um the only kind of nuance that i would add to that is that i i’m not somebody who’s out there seeking to kind of game the system by being controversial i’m not yeah i’m not inviting controversy or trying to get into debates with people i share my experience and i’m always very careful and this is something that i’ve learned in recovery to not be overtly telling people what to do or how to live their lives it’s always back to story as you point out because i think that people learn through stories you could tell people here are the five things you need to do or you can have a guest on who says here’s the roadmap to achieving xyz and i’ve just learned for myself and in terms of you know how i’ve conducted this podcast over the years that although we can intellectualize those answers or those principles we’re very remiss in putting them into action unless we can emotionally attach with them and that’s where story comes in and i think as content creators we’re all storytellers and it is our job to refine our ability to tell a story well and if we can do that and do it in a way that allows us to be relatable and also make the guest relatable such that an emotional attachment not just to the outcome of the story but to the individuals who are participating in that story that creates a level of engagement that actually does that does result in powerful and sustainable change because the mission of the show really is to help activate transformation in the audience members so whether it’s going from addiction to recovery or changing your diet or lifestyle habits to go from unfit to fit or to accomplish a hard task all of these are just metaphors analogies or examples of transformation i think everybody’s looking for some kind of transformation in their life so it’s not about like how do you go out and and do an ultra endurance race that’s just one vehicle for transformation it’s my personal story and i’m happy to tell it but i’m really about getting to the core tenets of why some people change and others don’t and trying to find a means by which i can communicate a path for people to rethink the ceilings on their own limitations and invite a little bit of challenge discipline and uh and you know kind of goal setting into their own lives so that they can experience some version of the transformation that i’ve been lucky enough to experience in in my own life and then the final thing um that i would point out you kind of uh launched into this question with uh a little treatise about you know titles and how you you know kind of position your content on the internet to try to game it for success and of course you know there are kind of tenets and rules around like here’s if you want you know a lot of people to click you say it this way or you have this crazy thumbnail and i’m not saying we’re immune from experimenting with that but i think the core principle that i would like to communicate to you and your audience is that you know in my opinion over the kind of long arc of of time quality is what wins and so i try to uh opt out of a lot of these trends of the moment and just focus on creating the most powerful the best content with the best guests that i can find and and and kind of put it out there and trust that um that it will find the audience that it needs to find now that’s perhaps a little bit of a luddite you know kind of approach to this and it certainly isn’t going to um you know create viral moments but as somebody has been doing this for a very long time and has kind of seen and weathered all the changes in media that that seemed to take place with even greater a greater increase in in rapidity like what are the things that you can control and the really you know you can play around with titles and all of that but honestly it’s like how good are you at what you’re doing and i think when you place your focus on just creating the best content possible that’s the long-term strategy that you know i’ve i’ve sort of adhered to and believe in and as a result it’s taken me a long time i i didn’t come out of the gate swinging i didn’t have a new york times bestseller you know it’s been kind of a very plotting path of just slowly brick by brick like building something that is sustainable over time and and meaningful you said you talked about storytelling and i get this question a lot because we tell a lot of stories and i think now we’re pretty good at it but i definitely was not a storyteller growing up i was the quiet kid and my group of friends in my house my sister was the if something happened to me and we wanted at a party we wanted to tell the story it’d be like let your sister like basically sister tell it it’ll be it’ll be that’s when it’ll be good and so i was definitely not a storyteller kind of like naturally um but have tried to get better at it because i think it’s a really powerful tool you talked about the same thing like you know um if you’d like to convey information if you’d like to inspire people if you’d like to educate people like you’re going to want this tool in your tool belt called storytelling and you know work on that craft because it will help you um can you teach me a little bit about storytelling so tell me some things that you’ve learned either how you learned it what you learned help us be a better storyteller in a couple minutes here what what are some things that uh that come to mind yeah that’s a great that’s a great question i mean i i think storytelling is a skill like i’m a naturally uh you know quiet person myself i didn’t grow up telling crazy stories around the campfire you know and regaling my friends or anything like that i really learned i i think my kind of um education around storytelling began as somebody who who has attended thousands if not tens of thousands of aaa meetings and being somebody who who had the privilege to bear witness to people get up in front of groups large and small and really bear their soul and and tell their personal story warts and all of you know the hardships that they’ve endured and how they got better and kind of arrived at the life that that they enjoy today and that requires courage and it requires most importantly vulnerability like if you’ve been to nea meetings and you see people up and they get up and they tell the most horrific stories about the things that they have done things that would provoke a shame response in any normal human being and they laugh it off and you realize like how powerful that is to be so um confident in yourself that you can share this tale of something that you did and it holds no power over you i think that is a powerful kernel of transformation for other people when they hear that but to the vulnerability piece what it taught me was the courage to be vulnerable myself so that i could get up in front of groups and tell my story with that level of of honesty and vulnerability and also to notice that when you do that you create trust and connectivity in the person that you’re speaking to like if you’re willing to get up and tell them this crazy thing that you did uh as an opener it gives the other person permission to do the same and that exchange then becomes uh one that is much more intimate than the typical conversation that we’re going to have so that’s a key piece like i always try to lead with vulnerability and the second thing being that that um you know everybody has their version of joseph campbell’s uh hero’s journey like we’re all on our own hero’s journey of some sort and to really kind of study and understand the principles of what makes a great story helps you extract it out of the person that you’re speaking with and also helps you learn how to figure out what that is in your own story and that just comes with practice so listen if i’m sitting across from you know a doctor and they want to talk to me about the microbiome maybe that’s not a hero’s journey story but maybe how they got interested in that is you know i’m always trying to find some version mini or macro that i can tell that will you know create engagement and for myself and and also for the person that’s listening but i’ve also had the privilege of and these are some of my favorite episodes where i’m sitting down with somebody who you know was really broken in a certain way and then rebuilt their life and became something else entirely and that’s a great kind of template for doing a full-blown joseph campbell you know arc of the hero and i think those stories are powerful when somebody can see that type of transformation and somebody who had it way worse than they have it it raises the you know their their own belief in in themselves and i think you know to really specifically answer your question it’s just a practice like i’ve been doing this for 10 years like i i would be horrified to go back and listen to some of my first episodes so you know i’ve learned in real time in a public sphere but just like anything else like you have to practice it and figure out also what works for you it’s not oh i’m going to follow this person did it and they were successful so i’m going to do it that way it’s like what speaks to you what is natural and authentic to who you are and i think the more that you can bring your own intuition and sensibility and honesty into whatever it is that you’re trying to share with the world that’s going to be the the demarcation that will distinguish you from others i can’t find this client info have you heard of hubspot hubspot is a crm platform so it shares its data across every application every team can stay aligned no out of sync spreadsheets or dueling databases hubspot grow better who do you think are great storytellers like uh are there any people or books that you learn from where you you look at it and you sort of have picked up things from from them sure i mean i think malcolm gladwell is a master storyteller uh we we we had the privilege of just having him in here a couple weeks ago and i mean nobody can tell a story like that guy i mean he can take people off the street and in five minutes you know figure out something absolutely fascinating about them that will become an episode of revisionist history you know and it’s a i mean i think he has a talent uh that you know we can all aspire to that probably we can’t reach but i think he’s fantastic at it i think um adam grant is a phenomenal storyteller i mean some of the authors that are you know working in social psychology right now are are pretty good great at storytelling but those would be the two that that come to mind and you i’m gonna read a quote from your story um and i want you to basically uh take me there and then uh where you came so here’s the quote we had four kids we were so broke at one point not long after my book came out we had nothing to go on we ended up going to kauai and living in yurts thinking we may never come back to la and we were going to lose our house so what was that and then how did you get from there to here yeah man that was uh that was rough so it was very disorienting because i had the opportunity to write this book and i got like i mentioned earlier like a decent advance for a first-time author for kids and the way that publishing advances work they dole it out in increments over you know a good deal of time and then taxes and agent cuts and all of that it turns out to not be that much the book comes out we’re you know shoestringing to be able to pay our bills and a big theme in the book is this idea that when you know and it’s my story of transformation that when your heart is true the universe will conspire to support you it’s something i i believe it’s it’s a it’s a principle i’ve seen um uh you know come to play in many people that i know and it’s something that i believed was happening in my own life and would continue to happen and when the book came out i decided i’m not renewing my bar membership i’m going to step into this new thing and i don’t know what it’s going to what kind of opportunities are going to come but i need to be 100 available for them and i was trusting i was like my heart is true something is going to happen we’re going to figure this out um but you know i was running a household with a relatively high overhead at the time four kids a mortgage and you know the the problem with that equation is there’s no timeline on it and you know my edict has has has borne out to be true over time ten years later but uh it was really rough for quite quite an extended period of time we couldn’t pay our mortgage we had cars repossessed i’ve told this story before um that you know we didn’t have enough money to pay for our our garbage collection so they took away our bins we had to put our our garbage bags in the back of this beat up minivan that we had and look for you know kind of uh bins like behind the grocery stores and stuff to like throw our garbage i mean it was pretty humiliating and quite frankly pretty emasculating as somebody who’s supposed to be we did get an opportunity a friend of mine who’s a high net worth individual had a property on the north shore of kauai he was trying to figure out how to turn it into some kind of community space and he had read my book and had been inspired he said why don’t you come out and help me figure out like what i can do to transform this property into something more meaningful than where i live and i don’t know why he thought that i would be somebody well suited for that job it’s not like i have any kind of experience in that but essentially you know in retrospect looking back like he threw my family a lifeline and so yes we moved to the north shore of kauai it was a operating uh mango farm at the at the at the time and the the kind of um woofers who were working the farm were living in these yurts behind the main um sort of dwelling at the on the property and we moved into these yurts with these young kids who were working the land and spent a couple months where i was trying to help this individual figure out what to do with his property but mainly he was paying me such that we could pay her bills and when we went to kauai we thought there’s no way we’re going to save our house we haven’t been able to pay our mortgage in so long like it’s just not possible we may just be here and this is where we’re going to live and after a couple of months uh you know of living out there i started to get a creative itch like i had written this book and i was trying to get some energy going around like these ideas that were important to me and i was feeling a little bit of ivan island fever and disconnected and stuff so that’s when the impetus to start the podcast happen like i needed to do something creative for myself and and you know i’ll always look back on that experience quite romantically because it was it created the perfect storm of events to create this thing that has now you know been successful beyond my wildest imagination and so let’s break down the business side of things so you have the content which is like you said the tip of the spear the top of the funnel where people they sort of they discover you they start to like you they start to trust you love you and say oh wow this is content that can really help me but then you have these like really interesting businesses right so you have um you know you have the meal planning business so like i don’t know meals.ritual.com or something like that and so you have you have a meal planning business you charge you know i don’t know 100 bucks a year or something like that you help people you know go sort of plant-based in a way that’s gonna that’s gonna work for them uh you have this thing called the epic five challenge which is uh five i don’t know what it is five iron man triathlons or something like that in in five like in five days what is it what is the exact thing for epic five yeah so just to be clear i don’t have any financial involvement in in that race but yes so one of the things i did as an athlete was this thing called epic five where jason lester and i did five uh iron distance triathlons on five hawaiian islands the idea was to do it in five days it took us a little bit longer but in the wake of that experience um it’s become an annual event that i’m not affiliated with professionally but okay all right so basically it’s like mostly the media company um and then it’s the meal planning business talk to us about like how you kind of like you mentioned your mentor friend who helped you kind of structure this and set this up and figure out how to actually build a like a like a full like you know thriving lifestyle going from living in the yurt on the mango farm to like you know you know actualizing this idea um what is that business what’s the business brain part of you you know how would you explain that to the next person who maybe they don’t have that mentor maybe they they see what you do but can you explain it here and maybe there’s out of our audience some people out there who can take that blueprint or that idea and say okay i’m in a totally different vertical or i’m you know i have some differences but i can learn from how he’s architected this business sure so first of all that mentor then became my business partner and that’s a key piece in all of this because without him i probably would have never gotten out of the gate and he’s been my business partner ever since and it’s an amazing relationship and what he brought to the equation was not only a sense of possibility but like i said earlier like structure and that structure has always been grounded in real business fundamentals and being patient and and and and growing only incrementally and not getting too excited about new stuff and taking on too much so it’s been a slow growth curve but in retrospect we’ve we i think we’ve made really good decisions about how we’ve invested our time and our energy and yes it’s now a very diversified business that is fundamentally media oriented but we have a lot of different verticals so yes the podcast is the tip of the spear as i mentioned earlier it’s the thing that that drives everything else and it’s also the thing that generates the most uh the most income the meal planner does very well for us i love that it’s a low-cost entry to something i think can be really transformational in terms of people changing their habits around food so that’s a a you know an integral piece in all of this and then there’s the books i mentioned finding ultra but we also have three cookbooks the plant power way the plant power away italia and then my wife wrote a book called this cheese is nuts which is about how to make plant-based cheese so we have the publishing end and uh and she’s gone off a good i feel like i’ve heard that cookbooks could be a bit like books may not books in general may not be but cookbooks specifically might actually be a good business what teach us about that because you know you don’t run into too many people you’ve done this cookbooks are a very good business uh it’s it’s hit or miss but if you hit they can be massive um they’re difficult to put together because beyond just the written words on the page there’s photography and there’s recipe testing and all of that so there’s a lot that goes into creating a great cookbook but they’re great businesses and a big reason for that is that if you do hit it they’re perennial sellers so they’ll sell year after year after year and how does that work so a hit means what you get picked up with like a good brick and mortar distribution or is it mostly direct to consumer like what is a hit what does it look like when you get a hit i think it depends on what your goals and motivations are so our cookbooks we’ve done with a major publisher avery which is part of random house and we got really nice advances for those books and those books continue to sell and and do well for us um they weren’t they’re not they weren’t neither of them were were new york times bestsellers or anything like that but the real mark of success i think in publishing is whether or not you create something that is perennial so finding ultra for example we just hit the decade mark on that and it continues to sell more and more every single year so even though it wasn’t huge out of the gate it continues to find audiences and then it becomes um you know just a revenue stream for you for you quarter after quarter so those are those books but now we have we have two other books that we’ve self-published called voicing change which are uh coffee table versions of the podcast with excerpts from our favorite guests with amazing photography and essays contributed by myself and some of the guests that really act like keepsakes or marketing tools for the podcast like it’s a it’s a it’s a collectible item these books uh our motivation or our definition of success for these books is very different from the other books because they’re not intended to go out and sell to make the new york times best seller list they have a very specific audience in mind and the fact that we created them in-house means that it’s a different revenue model as well so we don’t need to sell as many of them to do well and i’m really proud of those books we’re going to do another one this year and create a box set and also when we work with brands which is a big piece of of our business as well it’s great to be able to send them the book and show them that we’re executing on a quality level that i think no one else is doing in the podcast space which helps distinguish us from you know the zillions of other podcasts that are out there because it’s very crowded right now and sends the message that you know we’re we’re trying to elevate a certain you know we’re all of our content is very elevated and that you know we’re operating from a very professional perspective in everything that we’re doing so that’s the books and then we have sorry go ahead on the books one second so uh i’m fascinated by the books thing i think it’s uh really cool i think it’s a really cool art my wife is vegan also she has we have maybe i don’t know 10 15 really hi and she you know she loves the it’s like a coffee table book and a cookbook at the same time like it’s gotta have the like premium sort of finish and uh photography it’s very aspirational and has a guy who barely you know knows how to use a frying pan and like you know i don’t know i eat like i eat like a college kid sometimes it’s like i see this it was so different for me so i started getting curious about this cookbook she was buying and this who are these people behind this now are those perennials just because you have a growing audience and so like your audience grows every year and it’s like one percent of your audience buys your stuff and you are that’s you are the sales as well as the and so that’s why they keep climbing or is it kind of like independent in a way like obviously that contributes but like is there a separate engine that lets those continue to grow or is it just your main engine of like my podcast grows therefore one percent of people will go buy the cookbook every year yeah i think it’s a little bit of both i mean with finding ultra which is a memoir i think the continued sales of that book are are are really uh due to the growing platform that we’ve created here the cookbooks are a little bit different um it’s of course you know in part because of the platform and we use the platform to you know sort of occasionally uh you know promote the books but i think in tandem with that we’ve seen um a real mainstreaming of plant-based lifestyle in a way that didn’t exist back in 2012 2014 more and more people are interested in this lifestyle and diet which means that those those cookbooks retain relevancy and have you um like have you done have you launched any businesses or products like this that have just flopped like you know the version of the the cookbook that like you were excited about you even maybe liked the product it just didn’t work or have you been pretty uh high hit rate with with what you guys have launched outside like you know like in additional products yeah i mean i think you know early on in this process we launched uh uh a couple supplements like a protein powder and i thought maybe like nutraceuticals might be something that i would be interested in doing and i quickly lost interest in that um it was modestly successful but i realized that it was a very crowded marketplace and there were people who were doing really good work in that area and i was more interested in the media and if i was not at the um at the plants like at the manufacturing location overseeing all of this and really being detail oriented around it uh there was too much risk of shenanigans because i was not in control of the manufacturing process and there’s a lot of weird stuff that goes on in that world when you’re licensing these labs to create something for you and it felt like my risk exposure was too high and i just realized i didn’t want to unless i was going to go all in on that it didn’t make sense and so we abandoned we have other you know we sell some swag and some t-shirts and things like that on the website they don’t do fantastic but it’s nice to have them there so you not everything is a huge smash success but sometimes some of these smaller verticals still make sense nonetheless right and you’re if you were doing a pie chart is it like these the meal planning and the cookbooks and all that stuff that’s cool but like in reality if we drew the pie podcasts or you know the media side is with the sponsors is ninety percent of it anyways or is it fairly like uh diversity beyond that um i would say the podcast is maybe i don’t know i should do a pie chart so i know this better but it’s probably you know around 80 to 85 percent of it but the other the other revenue generators are public speaking which is growing a lot so we do quite well there and and you know the the the podcast model is an advertising model so that money comes from sponsors but i also have relationships with a handful of sponsors outside of the podcast context where i’m represented as as an athlete for example like with solomon um so that’s another kind of way that we um you know grow the business that isn’t necessarily directly related to the podcast itself and then we have retreats so we do these covid really sidelined this part of our business but we’re getting back to it next spring where my wife and i take groups of people uh to a location in italy and have a week-long experience with food and meditation and running and the su and such stuff like that when we have guests on the pod i find that they typically fall into two buckets and both i um admire there’s what i’ll call the kind of like expected bucket like on a business oriented podcast which is a person comes on they have a product or a story so far that’s like exciting and momentum and you know what’s admirable about them is their you know ambition they basically they never stop dreaming bigger and um they see you know no limit and they are chasing that that sort of limitless uh vision where you you walk away from the podcast and you feel like oh man i’ve been thinking small right and that’s a great feeling it’s not a negative feeling it’s oh wow the the the pie is even bigger than i could have imagined the possibilities are different than what i had been kind of come to accept an example would be a buddies with the founder of uh calm and i remember even very early on when that app it’s a meditation app and now it’s very very big it’s probably a you know one to three billion dollar company but they early on when they could they could barely get an investor to give them a check uh it was like just a couple guys in their apartment there was there really wasn’t much to going for it even back then i remember um michael talking about like we’re gonna have an island someday like a calm island like you know like coachella like festivals right but instead of craziness like instead of rowdy we’re gonna be selling calm as a festival and we’re gonna do it on our own island and it’s gonna be like disney world for com and like we’re gonna build a nike level brand and he was talking about that back then and you know when he said it back then he seemed a little nuts and now you know he says it now and he’s a visionary but he’s been saying the same thing for like 10 years and so that’s an example of the high ambition path uh that i admire and the other one is the person who’s like high contentedness and they’re like well um i really love what we’re doing i don’t know if we’ll do more haven’t really thought about it um maybe we will but you know here are my principles and you know they’re they’re admirable and how grounded they are and that they have found you know some version of enough for them and they are not like you know trying to take over the world which part of that spectrum do you lean more towards when it comes to business yeah that’s a great question i i i lean more towards the latter um but maybe not all the way on that side i mean i’m certainly not the guy who’s dreaming about islands and private jets and things like that people ask me all the time like what’s the vision like what you know where do you see yourself in five years and i always feel weird or guilty because i don’t have a good answer for that and i and i realized like oh it’s just because i don’t i don’t really think that way like i’m focused on how i can be better today than i was yesterday i’m focused on how to enhance the quality of what i’m sharing with the world and i’m focused on trying to be grateful and content with what i have and not be jealous or envious of what other people who have more than me have because that’s just a dangerous place for me as a recovering alcoholic and just as a human being so i am competitive like i’m not averse to looking at the rankings on apple podcast and getting you know frustrated because somebody’s ahead of me who i don’t think is deserving of it like you know i can be incredibly petty that way but but honestly like for the most part like i’m i’m just so grateful to be in the position that i’m in and i’m not doing this to get to another place like if this is all that it is like it’s been a pretty [ ] good ride and i’m stoked to be able to wake up every day and come in and talk to amazing people and if i can continue to do this and that’s again like all that it is like that’s a damn good run right now there are you know creative things that i want to express and they’re not about chasing money they’re more like uh you know just inspirations that i have like oh it would be cool to do this or can i carve out enough bandwidth so i can explore this other thing that that is interesting to me right now so it’s much more of kind of an artist path of of of following my gut and what gets me excited rather than here’s a new business because i i think we could ease we could have easily complicated what we’re doing right now and created a network and you know started you know having other people create podcasts and and you know building an entity that we could sell to spotify or something like that but that’s not really where my heart is or or where my head is um i don’t know if that answers your question but yeah think about it you know um one thing that i always like to talk to different guests that come on about is like you know you live in a different world than me therefore you see different things and you see different problems and opportunities and trends that uh me over here i’m not seeing because i’m just focused on other things and so um i’m curious either you can take it in either direction you can either take it in a trend so like let’s say maybe 2012 uh maybe you might have said you know what there’s a really passionate community of plant-based uh you know around this plant-based lifestyle and i think this is gonna get bigger i think people are gonna more people are gonna i think this might catch on and more people are going to you know uh wander this way um so it’s either a trend you notice that like oh there’s a group of people who really care about this or there’s a movement happening that i find very interesting but ultra marathons whatever it is um the second option the second thing uh direction is just here’s a gap i see so whereas our audience is heavily entrepreneurs and entrepreneurs people who they live to solve problems and you know i like to bring their attention to problems worth solving or you know things that are missing from different parts of the world rather than uh maybe you know the 10 000 to do to-do list app or whatever you could you could go build and so taking it either direction what comes to mind when i either say what trends and movements have you been noticing uh or what gaps um or opportunities do you see in your in your world yeah i mean i think i to answer that question um my head naturally goes to um two polarities young people and people that are getting older so i’m a little bit older than you so my interest is going to be around areas of of longevity and meaning in a way that maybe you know you you’re not in a position to really have to entertain in a meaningful way yet um and then with young people it’s equally about meaning so what i see happening right now on a macro level is a whole generation of young people who are coming up um into a world and thinking about their professional trajectory in the context of meaning in a way that was not really part of the thought process of my generation being gen x they don’t want to just find the best job that’s going to pay them the most they want to plug in to the thing that uh feels like it’s making a difference in the world in a positive way and i think that’s really cool it’s easy to make fun of gen z and uh you know a lot of the kind of tropes around you know where young people are at right now but i’m very inspired by that sensibility because it was lacking in you know kind of my my um you know the the on you of the gen x which was to not what was cool was to not care about anything and to be cynical and so you know i’m very refreshed by that um focus that i see in so many young people and i and i think on the other extreme with people that are you know more in my age bracket who have kind of been in the professional world done whatever they’re gonna do and are are realizing to some degree or or not like how happy am i how much meaning has this path that i chose for myself given me and whether or not i stay in this path or find something new how can i bring more meaning into my lived experience both professionally and and and socially for the decades to follow and i see shared dna between that young cohort and that older cohort and what i make of that is this um groundswell of interest in happiness contentment and the um the pillars of what it means to pursue a life that will um not just sustain you but really allow you to feel authentically expressed in in who you are i like that uh and if you were kind of like not if not the so it’s not the sort of question like if you were 21 again today what would you go do but sort of like um how would you act on that so you observed this behavioral mindset shift in both let’s say the older generation and the younger generation um what do you do with that how would what is the rich role approach to acting on that insight as a young person yeah if you just as a person with time on there yeah it doesn’t matter how old you are just as a person who yeah if you didn’t have like a thousand things to do and you weren’t already committed to xyz job or project you so you had some freedom and you were interested in that you saw that at that observation what would you do to act on it how would you approach it yeah i mean i think with with young people one thing i always tell young people is to invest in experience and and opt out of the pressures of the rat race to plug right into some kind of career trajectory because there’s an undue expectation with young people that they’re supposed to know who they are and what they want to do with their lives at an age when their brains are are barely formed and you know i think it’s important for young people to go out and have as many experiences as possible before they make a certain particular choice about how they want to live their life because how can you make that choice until you’ve been exposed to a lot of different things until you’ve traveled and spent time with all different kinds of people for the older people i think it’s about reprogramming you like if you’ve been on a certain path and trajectory for a very long time we become very calcified around who we think we are and we have to free ourselves from that narrative or that story and begin to build the muscle of connecting with our intuition and starting to bring expression to the things that um that i think innately bring us joy that perhaps we’ve we’ve kind of repressed or or put in the rear view mirror because we haven’t had the time or the energy or the money or whatever to indulge them and on the subject of indulgence to disabuse people of the idea that it is an indulgence or that it is selfish so you know the the the the path i think for that person is to really start paying attention um to themselves to what gets them excited to things that you know they just find themselves naturally inclined towards and to start to you know water that garden or feed that energy because i think in doing that it kind of leads you on a path towards some form of expression that will ultimately you know bring meaning and and greater fulfillment into your life well i think that’s a good place to to close it rich thanks for coming on man i i really appreciate it um give people a shout out where they should find you or subscribe to the podcast where do you want to direct people if they want more yeah sure thanks for having me the it’s just richroll.com r-i-c-h-r-o-l-l dot com is my website where you can find everything the rich world podcast uh which is available wherever you listen to podcasts and the youtube channel richroll.com uh those are those would be the places and uh you can learn all about me there awesome thanks so much cool thank you really appreciate talking to you that was super fun