Rich Roll: How A Vegan Ultra-endurance Athlete Created A Business On Personal Transformation

it was really rough for quite quite an extended period of time we couldn't pay our mortgage we had cars repo i've told the story before but it was so bad at one point that you know we didn't have enough money to pay for our 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 bins like behind the grocery stores and stuff to like throw our garbage i mean it was pretty humiliating and and quite frankly pretty and somebody who's supposed to be you know head of household and taking care of shit like i was unable to make sure that my house was an order and so we went through a really rough period of time and it was not clear that we were gonna be able to kind of persevere okay so let's give you a little intro here so we got rich roll which is 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 ce end of some kind of bs s about that that yeah yeah exactly and but that is your real name rich role that is like not like a stage name god given name okay wow my my parents are are you know behind here so and you have a very very interesting story so i'm gonna give the like very lay version of the story and then we i what i wanna do is two things i wanna dive in and actually hear from me 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 because business opportunities sure sounds good alright cool so your story is as far as i know is as follows you you're coming up all you were coming up on forty years old you were not in great shape you're you i think fifty 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 were 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 you know competitive endurance field i think you were named one of the twenty five fit men on the planet by men's fitness which is a pretty dope honor 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 you know struggle with sort of drugs alcohol gets sober then you're but then you're over by eating not so great and then you have this kind of moment you're you know your sort of your you know come to jesus moment or whenever where you're like i'm gonna make a change you make this lifestyle change you become this well known endurance athlete who's doing it in a way that's atypical i think you're the first vegan to complete a ultra endurance event which like some crazy three hundred mile three hundred mile type of event where you're running you're biking you're swimming you're doing all that good stuff and now you have businesses that around this right so you have a a meal planning business you have it's kind of like whole lifestyle 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 wanna be known for now what what do you think it's is that transition yeah it's a great question i mean i think that 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 pre dated the kind of next chapter which was sort of middle aged m and reaching another kind of rub with how i was living my life and making a secondary transition into 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 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 sort of prop 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 it's been a very in elegant and protracted process i'm not a naturally inclined entrepreneur i was reared in a in 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 was suddenly found myself in the position where being a lawyer felt un 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 up end all of my kind of built in pro cl around safety seeking and kind of doing kind of following this yeah 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 live 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 alone and he's ceo of a company out here near where i live called sides and sides is a pop culture collectible company they create figurines like limited edition very finely crafted figures from pop culture so from the marvel movies and star wars etcetera everything from life sized c three see c three to darth fade 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 were to go to comic con they have the second biggest booth at comic con second only to marvel and there's a whole sub culture of people who are fan collectors of what sides show produces my point being that greg is a a natural entrepreneur has 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 ten 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 had spent so many hours so much time alone on the bike and running listening to podcast 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 m p threes and then bounced those m p threes to your ipod and create playlist and i was doing this before anyone else i knew was listening to podcast 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 podcast podcasts in into in two thousand twelve i think you know aside from adam corolla and kevin smith and and maybe joe rogan nobody was even monetizing these things so it was less about it being a business proposition and more about 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 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 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 wanna be seen today very early on i i made a decision front 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 on podcast i wanted to cast a wide net which is why named the podcast after my name because i wasn't sure if i was gonna continue to do it where my interest might find me but i knew that i probably wasn't gonna 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 that i care about it's also allowed me to host conversations with just a wide diversity of people who i can continue to grow from in other ways beyond like how i've been traditionally known because for me this is by 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 limit in in in all areas of life and so as a result it's allowed the audience 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 a 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 heading and how big is it today so i see on youtube maybe like seven hundred thousand subscribers there podcast i'm not sure what that would be is that i don't know if it's bigger or smaller than the the youtube stuff and then the top videos like you know david go hub those will get like five the ten million views on youtube which are great kinda 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 filming the podcast in earnest maybe two and a half three years ago at this point and like you said we have outlier videos like the hub initial lieberman podcast i did i think has like eleven million views some of the go 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 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 hap by happens 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 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 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 audio first at least now i'd probably say i'd say it's probably anywhere from ninety to ninety five percent of our audience oh wow okay so the 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 yes it's it's it's in that range i mean as you know like on in audio it's fairly predictable how large the audience is gonna be and how many people are gonna listen you know there's gonna be some variation there but it falls within a tight range whereas in youtube it's just the all over the map because the algorithm gods can smile on you as they did with hub man and it goes wild that doesn't happen in audio so yeah i mean you're correct it's a it's about in that range on average and so so i have this theory with content which is that people will ask me a lot like okay you know how do i do a better how 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 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 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 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 test you were basically listening to podcast just when it was rs you know only or whatever maybe even you know there's no players or whatever okay so the second thing is you you have a you had a niche where you built authority 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 you know i athletic performance and so that overlap was like a niche initiative that you could kind of dominate and known 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 top of in addition to the kind of addiction recovery piece is also a cool yeah aspect of that is well and so that's that's was gonna go next which is i think you have a innate understanding that story is what gets people hooked like for example when you came on i was kinda describing you with just like some labels like series are some descriptors you've accomplished this you're known for this and you were like you brought it back to story and what's the story a story is some transformation or change you know the protagonist the hero goes through something and they started one way they changed into another way they they started thinking one thing and then they realized another you know they started single they ended up have a happy and love right that's the basis of all story is some change some transformation and i think as i heard you talk about like whether it was from risk ave verse lawyer to reluctant entrepreneur who learned to shed that limitation that's change you know weed eater to plant eater change 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 a hundred 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 stories i think that's another one the last little element i like that you said is i i think you have what i call the red pill which is you have opinions or beliefs that might be might run counter to like the consensus opinion right i think in general vegans have a 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 a different thing it grabs people's attention and it gets them hooked and the people who for whom that resonates it kind of like you know they become attracted to that so i don't know i'm not saying you can intentionally architect to 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 a astute the only the only one that i would b out a little bit is the red pull red pill thing i think it is of course like to be vegan and to be an athlete there is something contra about that 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 i'm not in 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 overt telling people what to do or how to live their lives and 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 road roadmap to achieving x y z 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 intellectual 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 storyteller 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 member 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 analog 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 tenants 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 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 that i would point out you kind of launched into this question with a little treat 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 tenants 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 in 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 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 guess that i can find and and and kind of put it out there and trust that that it will find the audience that it needs to find now that's perhaps a little bit of a a lot you know kind of approach to this and it certainly isn't gonna you know create viral moments but as somebody been doing this for a very long time and it's kind of seen and weather all the changes in media that that seem to take place with even greater a greater increase in in rapid repetitive like what are the things that you can control and 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 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 new york times best seller 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 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 at my group of friends in my house my sister was the if something happened to me and we wanted to 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 but i've tried to get better at it because i think it's a really powerful tool you talked about the same thing like you know if you'd like to convey information if you'd like to inspire people if you'd like to educate people like you're gonna want this tool in your tool belt called storytelling and you know work on that craft because it will help you 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 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 you know quiet person myself i didn't grow up telling crazy stories around the campfire you know and and regal revealing my friends or anything like that i really learned i i think my kind of education around storytelling began as somebody who who has attended thousands if not tens of thousands of aa 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 war 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 bend to 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 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 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 as an opener it gives the other person permission to do the same and that exchange then becomes one that is much more intimate than the typical conversation that we're going to have that's a key piece like i always try to lead with vulnerability and the second thing being that that you know everybody has their version of joseph campbell hero's journey like we're all on our own hero's journey of some sort so 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 wanna 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 in 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 because when somebody can see that type of transformation and somebody who had it way worse than they have it it raises the the you know their their own belief in 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 ten 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 gonna follow this person did it and they were successful so i'm gonna 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 sen ability and honesty into whatever it is that you're trying to share with the world that's gonna be the the d that will distinguish you from others i can find this client in full have you heard of hubspot hubspot is a crm platform so it shares its data every application every team can stay aligned no out of sync spreadsheets or doing databases hubspot grow better who do you think are great storyteller like are there any people or books that you learn from or were you you look at it and you you sort of have picked up things from from them sure i mean i think malcolm glad is a master storyteller we we we have the privilege of just having him in here a couple weeks ago and i mean nobody can tell a story like that 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 revision his history you know and it's a i mean i think he has i a talent that you know we can all aspire to that probably we can't reach but i think he's fantastic at it i think 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 great great at at storytelling but those would be the two that that come to mind and you i'm gonna read a quote for your story and i want you to basically take me there and then 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 into kauai and living in your thinking we may ever come back to la and we were gonna lose our house so what was that and then how did you get from there to here yeah man that was that was rough so it it was very 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 but four kids in the way that publishing advances work they dole let 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 so the book comes out we're you know shoe 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 conspired to support you it's something i i believe i it's it's a it's a principle i've seen you know come to play in 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 gonna step into this new thing and i don't know what it's gonna what kind of opportunities are gonna come but i need to be a hundred percent available for them and i was trusting i was like my heart is true something is gonna happen we're gonna figure this out but you know i was running a household with a relatively high overhead at the time four kids of mortgage and you know the the problem with that equation is there's no timeline on it and you know my edi has has has borne out to be true over time ten years later but it was really rough for quite quite an extended period of time we couldn't pay our mortgage we had cars repo i've told the story before but it was so bad at one point that you know we didn't have enough money to pay for our our 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 bins like behind the grocery stores and stuff to like throw our garbage i mean it was pretty humiliating and and quite frankly pretty ema and somebody who's supposed to be you know head of household and taking care of shit like i was unable to make sure that my house was an order and so we went through a really rough period of time and it was not clear that we were gonna be able to kind of persevere 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 and 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 move to north shore of kauai it was a operating mango farm at the at the at the time and the the kind of wolfe who were working the farm we're living in these units behind the main the sort of dwelling at the on the property and we moved into these earth with these young kids who were working the land and span 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 pair our bills and when we went to kauai we thought there's no way we're gonna 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 gonna live and after a couple months you know of living out there i started to get a creative itch like i'd 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 up and like i needed to do something creative for myself and and you know i'll always look back on that experience quite dramatically 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 or the top of the funnel where people they sort of they discover you they start to like you they stuff don't trust you and 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 you know you have the meal planning business so like i don't know meals dot dot com or something like that and so you have mh you have a meal planning business you charge you know i don't know hundred bucks a year or something like that you help people you you know go sort of plant base in a way that's gonna that's gonna work for them you have this thing called the epic five challenge which is five i don't know what it is five iron ironman triathlon or something like that in in five like in five days what is 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 yeah so one of the things i did as an athlete was this thing called epic five where jason lester and i did five iron distance triathlon 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 it's become an annual event that i'm not affiliated with professionally professionally but might partner yeah alright basically it's like mostly the media company and then it's the meal planning business talk to us about like how you kind of like you you mentioned your mentor friend who helped you kind of structure this and set this up and figure out how to actually build a so like a like a fools like you know thriving life's going from living in the ur on the mango farm to like you know you know actual this idea what is that biz what's the business brain part of you you know how would you explain that just to the next person who maybe they don't have that mentor maybe they they see what you do back can you explain it here and maybe there's out of our audience and 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 architect 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 it 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 the most income the meal planner does very well for us i love that it's a 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 you know integral piece and all of this and then there's the book so i mentioned finding ultra but we also have three cookbook the plant power away the plant power way italia and then my wife wrote a book called this cheese nuts which is about how to make plant based cheese so we have the publishing and and and she's gone off good business i feel like i've heard that cookbook could be a biz like books may not books in general may not be but cookbook specifically might actually be a good business what teach us about that because you know you don't run into too people done this cookbook are a very good business it's it's hit or miss but if you hit they can be massive 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 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 good brick and mortar distribution or is it mostly direct to consumer like what what is a hit does it look like would you get hit i think it it depends on what your goals and motivations are so our cookbook 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 they weren't they're not they weren't neither of them were were new york times best sellers 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 you know just a a revenue stream for you for you quarter after quarter so those of those those books but now we have we have two other books that we've self published called voicing change which are 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 keeps or market tools for the podcast like it's a it's a it's a collectible item these books are 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 gonna 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 zillion 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 we're all of our content is very elevated and that you know we're we're operating from a very professional perspective and everything that we're doing so that's the books and then we have sorry go ahead the books one second so you i'm fascinated by the books thing i think it's really cool i think it's a really cool our my wife is vegan also she has we have maybe at our ten fifteen really and she you know she loves the cut 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 photo photography it's very aspirational and as 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 i eat like a college kid sometimes it's like i see this to do 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 perennial 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 a you that's you are the sales as well as the and 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 by 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 due to the growing platform that we've created here the cookbook are a little bit different it's of course you know in part because of the platform and we use the platform to you know sort of occasionally you know promote the books but i think in tandem with that we've seen a real mainstream streaming of plant based lifestyle in a way that didn't exist back in two thousand twelve two thousand fourteen more and more people are interested in this lifestyle and diet which means that those those cookbook retain relevancy and have you like have you done have you launched any businesses or products like this that have just flopped like you know the the version of the the cookbook that like you were excited about you even maybe like the product and it just didn't work or have you been pretty high hit rate with with what you guys have launched outside like you know like in in additional products yeah i mean i think you know early on in this process we launched a couple supplements like a protein powder and i thought maybe like nut might be something that i would be interested in doing and i quickly lost interest in that 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 at the plant like at the manufacturing location overseeing all of this and really being detail oriented around it 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 i just realized i didn't wanna and unless i was gonna go all in on that it it didn't make sense and so we abandoned that 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 know not everything is a huge smash success but sometimes some of these smaller verticals still makes sense nonetheless the right in your if you were doing a pie chart is it like these the meal planning and the quickbooks and all that stuff that's cool but like in reality if we if we drew the pie chart is it like podcast podcasts is or you know the media side is in with the sponsors as ninety percent of it anyways or is it fairly like i'd beyond that i would say the podcast is maybe i don't know i i should do a pie chart so i know this better but it's probably you know around eighty to eighty five 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 the podcast models and advertising models 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 so that's another kind of way that we 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 to a location in italy and have a week long experience with food and meditation and running in the and such stuff like that when we have guests on the pod i find that they typically fall into two buckets and both i admire there's what i'll call the kind of like expected bucket like on a business oriented podcast which is person comes on they have a 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 they never stop dreaming bigger and they see you know no limits and they are chasing that that sort of limitless 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 the pie is even bigger than i could have imagined the possibilities are different than than what i had been kind of come to accept an example would be buddies with the founder of calm and i remember even very early on when that app it's a meditation app and it's 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 to give him a check it was like just a couple guys in the apartment there was there really wasn't much to to going for it even back then i remember michael talking about like 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 calm we're 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 ten years and so that's an example of the high ambition path that admire and the other one is the person who's you know like high content and they're like well i really love what we're doing i don't know if we'll do more haven't really thought about it 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 ladder 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 in content with what i have and not be jealous or en 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 ave ave to looking at the rankings on apple podcasts and getting you know frustrated because somebody is 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 frustrated 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 fucking 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 you know just inspiration 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 i 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 podcast 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 so i don't know if that answers your question but so i think about it you know pop one thing that i always like to talk to different guests that come on about is like you know you live in a in a different world than me therefore you see different things and you see different problems and opportunities and trends that me over here i'm not seeing because i'm just focused on other things and so i'm curious either and you can take it in either direction you can either take it in a trend so like let's say maybe two thousand twelve maybe you might have said you know what there's a really passionate community of plant based 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 wander this way so it's either a trend you noticed that like oh there's a group of people who really care about this or there's a a movement happening that i find very interesting with ultra marathons whatever it is the second option the second thing a 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 maybe you know the ten thousand to do to do a list app or whatever you could you could go build and so take it either direction what comes to mind when i either say what trends and movements have you been noticing or what gaps or opportunities do you see in your in your world yeah i mean i think i to answer that question my head naturally goes to two young people and people that are getting older so i'm a little bit older than you so my interest is gonna 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 and then with young people it's equally about meaning so what i see happening right now in a macro level is a whole generation of young people who are coming up 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 wanna just find the best job that's gonna pay them the most they wanna plug in to the thing that 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 you know a lot of the kind of tropes around you know the where young people are at right now but i'm very inspired by that sen because it was lacking in you know kind of my my you know the the on of the gen x which was to not what was cool it was to not care about anything and to be cynical and so you know i'm very refreshed by that 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 share dna between that young cohort and that older cohort and what i make of that is this grounds swell of interest in happiness contentment and the the pillars of what it means to pursue a life that will not just sustain you but really allow you to feel authentically expressed in in who you are mh i like that and if you were kind of like not if not the it's not the sort of question like if you were twenty one again today what would you go do but sort of like how would you act on that so you observe this behavioral mindset shift in both let's say the older generation then and the younger generation mh what do you do with that how would you what is the rich role approach to acting on that insight as a young person yeah if you as a person with time on let's say it doesn't matter hall george it's just as a person who yeah if you didn't have like a thousand things to do and you weren't already committed to x y z job or project you so you had some freedom and you were interested in that you saw that 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 undo expectation with young people that they're supposed to know who they are and what they wanna do with their lives at an age when their brains are 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 wanna 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 reprogram you like if you've been on a certain path and trajectory for a very long time we'd become very cal 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 that i think innate bring us joy that perhaps we've we've kind of repressed or or put in the rear mirror because we haven't had the time or the energy or the money or whatever to indulge them and on the subject of indulge to abuse people of the idea that it is an indulge or that it is selfish so you know the the the the path i think for that person is to really start paying attention to themselves to what gets them excited to things that you know they just find themselves naturally incline towards and just 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 i think that's a good place to to close it rich thanks for coming on man i i i really appreciate it give people a a shout out where they should find you or subscribe to the podcast what where do you wanna direct people if they want more well yeah sure thanks for having me the it's just rich roll dot com r i c h r o l l dot com is my website where you can find everything the roll podcast which is available wherever you listen to podcast and the youtube channel rich roll dot com those are those would be the places and you can learn all about me there awesome thanks so much cool thank you i really appreciate talking to you that was super fun