WHOOP Podcast - Rich Roll on the power of change, leaps of faith, and finding your path in life.

Episode Date: October 27, 2021

Podcaster and author Rich Roll joins the WHOOP Podcast for an in-depth discussion on the power of change, leaps of faith, and finding your path in life. Rich shares how he battled alcoholism and health challenges in his 20s and 30s, before transforming his life after turning 40. Through this transformation he has become an elite endurance athlete and a leading name in veganism. He discusses his battle with alcoholism (5:32), why it's critical to become teachable (9:15), how mood follows action (15:09), starting his health journey (18:36), practicing patience (21:27), the importance of diet (22:28), taking leaps of faith (27:34), learning honesty and vulnerability (29:40), training, intuition, and technology (37:12), sleep and recovery (40:37), diet and recovery (44:37), being present (46:33), and finding gratitude (48:07). Support the showFollow WHOOP: www.whoop.com Trial WHOOP for Free Instagram TikTok YouTube X Facebook LinkedIn Follow Will Ahmed: Instagram X LinkedIn Follow Kristen Holmes: Instagram LinkedIn Follow Emily Capodilupo: LinkedIn

What's up, folks? Welcome back to the WOOP podcast, where we sit down with top athletes, scientists, experts, and more to learn what the best in the world they're doing to perform at their peak. And what you can do to perform at yours. I'm your host, Will Ahmed, founder and CEO of Woop, and we are on a mission to unlock human performance. This week, we've got an amazing guest, one of the biggest names in podcasting, in fact. Endurance, sports, athlete, vegan, aficionado, Rich Roll. You may know him from the Rich Roll podcast, which is often at the top of the charts, or from his best-selling book, Finding Ultra.

Rich's story is an inspiring one. He was a swimmer at Stanford University and wanted to become a corporate lawyer, and despite that outward success, he was battling alcoholism, and he ended up in rehab at 31. Rich was very forthcoming about his struggles with addiction. and really what it took for him to overcome those struggles. And by the time of his 40th birthday, he decided it was time to prioritize his health. We talked about his health transformation, why he went vegan, signed up for an Ultraman.

So he's competed in all these amazing endurance events. He actually finished in the top 10 of a 320-mile double Ironman distance triathlon, not long after making this transition. It's pretty fascinating. He talked to Rich about some of the crazy things he does for, recovery. We also talk about how he thinks about personal growth. This is someone who's obviously had a life transformation. Why being teachable and open to new ideas is one of the keys to a successful life. And Rich explains why he sleeps outside in a tent every night. He's found it's the

best way to help him optimize his sleep. A reminder, you can get 15% off a W-W-M membership, which now includes the W-W-4.0. That is using the code Will W-I-L. Okay, without further ado, here is Rich Roll. Rich, welcome to the Woof podcast. Super nice to be here. Good to see you, Will. Excited to break things down with you. Thanks for having me. You've been a real inspiration, I think, to so many people out there, and certainly to me, I love your story. I want to go back a little bit and focus on Rich, the 20-year-old athlete

who was dealing with maybe some inner demons and balancing what it was like. to be a young person and hard-charging. Yeah, so I grew up as a swimmer, swam my whole life. By the time I was a senior in high school, I was one of the top swimmers in my area in the Washington, D.C. area, and ended up going to Stanford, which at the time was the number one NC2A swimming program in the country. And that was the situation in which I was going to be a small fish in a very big pond

because I would be training with world record holders and Olympic champions and the like. And I was good, but I wasn't that good, but I was willing to kind of shoulder that challenge and excited to see what I was capable of if I put myself in a situation to train with the best. Unfortunately, that's around the same time that I discovered alcohol and partying. And my focus got a little bit distracted, to say the least. that was kind of the beginning of a 10 to 15 year career, you know, with alcohol that took me to some pretty dark places. So I continued to compete in college. After my freshman year, it was diminishing returns, however.

And so I never really achieved my potential as an athlete as I kind of struggled with trying to figure out, you know, who I was and what I wanted to be. And, you know, it took me a very long time to kind of sort out all of my. my demons and my problems to kind of, you know, be able to do what I do today. And during, during that period, did you feel like, you know, did a lot of this come from reflection years later or in the moment, did you kind of know things were a little bit upside down? I knew very early on that my relationship with alcohol was different from that of my friends or my peers, but, you know, I was undaunted by that for a very long time. And that's really the way that denial functions. Like, it's a low-grade thing.

Like, I had a self-awareness that perhaps I had a problem. And despite racking up quite a bit of evidence to support that, I was unwilling to really contend with it or deal with it in any meaningful manner until my life had really kind of caved in on top of me. And I had to, you know, suffer a lot and go through a lot of pain before I was willing to part ways with what I would consider to be my best friend at the time. When you say you had to suffer a lot or go through pain, what sorts of things come to mind? My alcoholism is relatively pedestrian, like I have my war stories like everybody else, but

essentially I was a run-of-the-mill alcoholic, and there really wasn't anything very rock and roll or romantic about it. And, you know, it's a long story, but the short of it is that at the end of my drinking career, I was drinking round the clock, vodka tonic in the shower in the morning, hiding drinks throughout the day, and just trying to get away from people so I could indulge my addiction. And it took me to a place where I was alienated from my friends and my family. Everything aspirational in my life had kind of evaporated. I was sleeping on a bare mattress on the floor of a crappy apartment in Los Angeles on the precipice of losing my job and facing potential jail time for multiple DUIs.

It was really the culmination of, you know, it's sort of like death by a thousand cuts to get to a point where I finally, you know, couldn't take it anymore. I was so broken and so alone and so desperate that I knew that I had to make some changes. And the fear of that unknown, the fear of that path yet to be taken was exceeded by the pain of my kind of daily existence of just trying to perpetuate this. addiction that very nearly killed me. And during all this, you're, you are a functioning corporate lawyer, if I'm not mistaken, right? I mean, what was that point like for you and sort of being able to do that job while also sounds like being a functioning alcoholic? Yeah, alcoholics can be very crafty. It's like a shell game. You're always moving pieces around and trying to, trying to convince people that you're fine. And I was pretty high functioning for a while. I mean, I got

through law school. I got a job at a corporate law firm. I was working in San Francisco and then Los Angeles at a pretty prestigious firm. And you you kind of move forward under this delusion that people don't know what's really going on with you. It's not until later that you come into the awareness that people kind of knew that you were sideways. But yeah, I was able to show up for work for the most part and get the job done. Not always so well, but there were a lot of cracks in that firmament. And at the end, like, it was pretty apparent that I really was in no shape to be to even be able to kind of perform my job. My boss knew it. Everybody knew it. And, you know, short of seeking out help, I was going to lose that job and, you know, be faced with the prospect

of being, you know, completely unemployed. Well, it's interesting. I mean, in many ways, you had a very high floor. You were at Stanford and then you're, you know, rising the ranks within the legal world. I mean, I wonder in some ways if that added a few years or you could even argue a decade to your path towards enlightenment or your transformation, if you will. Yeah. I mean, I think my particular story is pretty privileged and I was very high functioning and my bottom wasn't nearly as low as so many others out there and so many friends of mine. But pain is relative. You know, everybody experiences pain in their own way. And the pain that I was experiencing was significant enough for me, you know, to sort of embrace a new way of living

as difficult as that was at the time. So you decided to go to rehab age 31, right? And how quickly does it take for you, for that to sort of set in and for you to find a new path? Yeah. So at 31, I made the decision to check myself into a treatment center, which is a very humbling experience. And And that was a place that I made my home for a hundred days, which, you know, is a fairly extended period of time to be in what is ostensibly a mental institution. And as somebody who prided themselves on being an intelligent, smart guy, got into all these great colleges, and I was this athlete, it really right-sized me and put me in a position to be teachable, like the humbling nature of that situation was not lost on me in the sense that

You know, I never wanted to be back in a place like that again. And I realized that all of my best thinking had led to that point. And if I wanted to find a way out, I was going to really have to reprogram my mind. And I made myself open to new ideas. I became teachable in a way that I was resistant to prior. And that willingness to take direction from other people is, in truth, what saved my life. And it's a lesson that I try to carry into my life on a daily basis, to remain teachable, to remain open to new ideas, to understand that, you know, I don't have all the answers. And that humility, when channeled properly, you know, can be a real superpower. And it's taught me that change is always possible. And, you know, people say people don't change.

I certainly have changed. I see change in people all the time. I think change. is always available to us. Pain is generally the greatest lever for making positive change in your life, but that decision to try something new, to open yourself up to new ideas and possibilities is always available to all of us in every given moment. Wow, there's a lot of wisdom there. So someone listening to this, what's a good way to tell if you are teachable? I think it's quickly revealed when you find yourself in conversation with somebody who has different ideas about things than you have. And I don't have to tell you that we live in a pretty divisive moment right now where tempers seem to flare and people, you know, appear to be very calcified in their

worldviews, whether they're political, religious, or health-oriented. And I always try to engage in conversations with people who have different worlds. worldviews because it's a good stress test on my own perspectives, but also the teachable aspect of it is how open you can be to other ideas. Like, what do you experience internally when you're being confronted with an idea that you disagree with? Are you able to comport yourself in a way such that you can remain curious and refrain from snap judgments? And I find that to be a challenge, but also the opportunity to grow, right? And I think it's instructive for all of us as we're having this kind of public dialogue and discourse about things that really

matter right now, that if we want to find a way forward to grow as individuals, but also as a society, that that kind of approach to conversation I found to be personally helpful. what were some of the ideas that we're flooding in or the perspectives that were flooding in at that time and how did you find yourself cycling through them you mean an early sobriety yeah so you're talking 31 32 you're just right you just gone through rehab and now all of a sudden you feel teachable yeah I mean so many things you know I would say that a misconception about sobriety is that the problem is the drugs and the alcohol and when you remove the drugs drugs and the alcohol, then you're fine. But in truth, the drugs and the alcohol are the solution to the problem. And when you remove them, the problem remains. So the real work begins. Abstinence is really only the first step. So early sobriety was all about reckoning with those demons, trying to understand what makes me tick, what led me down these, you know, dark paths, and trying to make peace with myself because I was so uncomfortable with who I was.

like the drugs and the alcohol were a way of salving this deep discontentment inside of me. And my sober journey has been about trying to, you know, heal those past wounds and essentially, you know, become a whole person. And part of that was asking myself really for the first time, like, you know, who am I? Like, what am I here to do? Like, what makes me happy? Do I have a purpose? What am I passionate about? And these are questions that I never really indulged because as far back as I could remember, I was a very achievement-focused individual

who was on a certain track towards excellence, academically, athletically, and I didn't spend a lot of time questioning this sort of habit trail that I was on. I was solely focused on, how can I get to the next step, what is the next thing that I can do to be the best. And that came, in my case, at great cost because the path that I had selected, which was driven in large part by environmental factors and, you know, kind of parental aspirations and the like, had put me on a trajectory that in certain ways was antithetical to like my nature.

And so deconstructing that and then trying to figure out what a better, healthier path for me, one that would be paved with more fulfillment and purpose and all of these things that we aspire to have in our life has been a multiple decade journey that I'm still on. And in those early days, when your emotions are like a raw nerve and you don't know how to how to kind of manage all of them, there was plenty of mantras that I still to this day use, not the least of which is one that goes by that goes like this mood follows action so when i feel discontented or i feel emotionally raw or i don't want to do something it's a it's a a reminder that the actions that you take dictate the emotional state that you are seeking so rather than waiting until you feel

like doing something it's all about developing this this um inclination towards action first and understanding that mood follows that. And I find that to be so applicable in almost every aspect of my life. The simple way to think about that from an exercise standpoint, or if you meet someone who's having trouble convincing themselves to build an exercise routine

or doesn't feel like they have the right attitude towards it would be, okay, well, as a first action, why don't you just put on your gym shorts and your t-shirt and your sneakers and see how you feel that, and then maybe start going for a walk outside or, right? like that's the that's a very simple way to to talk about your your perspective yeah 100%

100% rather than uh indulging that idea like well i don't feel great today you know i'll i'll do it tomorrow or whether it's picking up the phone to call somebody you don't feel like calling or going out for a run or whatever the case may be just taking the action first and then noting the emotional experience of it after and you know it's it's kind of a trope but no one comes back from a run or a workout and says i wish i hadn't done that you know like you always feel better afterwards it's all the angst and you know anxiety that we indulge you know in the in the in the before period we realize only in its aftermath is just is wasted energy do you feel like society it all is going through a period of fragility from that standpoint where it's it can be this sort

of emotions first actions later i mean what you just said i think is very powerful which is like you have to take the first step in some ways to counteract that emotional state yeah i i think there's a lot of fragility out in the world right now and a lot of coddling a coddling of the mind a coddling of the body, we're so concerned about everybody's emotional state all the time that we're very resistant to, you know, pushing people in any way. And look, you know, we're having a referendum on mental health, and there's so much that's great about that, so I'm not disparaging that conversation. But I think at the same time, it's important to, you know, try to encourage people to get out of their comfort zone, to try new things, to, you know,

take the action before the mood. Because in my own experience, that's the, you know, only engine by which I've ever achieved anything. So at what stage in your life did you start getting obsessed with running? So that came much later. You know, I spent, after I got out of treatment, it was really all about sobriety. And I spent the next 10 years trying to repair all the wreckage that I had created as a result of my drinking and using. And that kind of manifested in workaholism and a lot of unhealthy lifestyle habits with food, lack of exercise, until I was on the precipice of turning 40 and found myself 50 pounds overweight and just really lethargic, unhappy with this career that I had chosen that I was so adamant about being successful at.

and I had a bit of a health scare shortly before my 40th birthday that really impressed upon me that I needed to change how I was living. And it was a profound experience not dissimilar from that decision that I made to go to rehab to address my drug and alcohol problem, but I needed it now for diet and lifestyle. And it wasn't an overnight thing, but I ended up really reformulating my relationship with food. I went on a plant-based diet. And with that, I experienced this resurgence of vitality and an increase in my energy levels

that I hadn't experienced in many, many years. And that's really what prompted me to get back into fitness. First, because I needed to burn off all this extra energy that I had, and then through losing the weight and really re-engaging with my body and finding a great deal of joy in that, realizing that endurance sports was sort of a teacher that I was missing that would help me solve this existential crisis about what I was doing with my life. And I fell in love with it.

And it's almost just a byproduct that I excelled at it because I would have done it anyway because I was getting so much benefit out of it. Yeah, it's interesting. There's like a few layers there of benefits that you described. I mean, first it's this idea. that just finding the right diet gave you then all of a sudden this newfound energy and then with that energy started to exercise and then with that exercise you lost weight and then with that lack of weight loss now you're even fitter and it's sort of self-perituates and builds on itself where

I imagine a year or two into that you started to feel superhuman relative to where you were at age 39. I mean it was it was a night and day experience and it was very incremental like I don't want to make it sound like it all happened really quickly and it involved a lot of hard work. But it goes back to that mantra of mood follows action because by dint of taking tiny little actions every single day, I would make these microscopic improvements. But each little improvement really deepened my emotional engagement and attachment to what I was doing. And that, of course, brought more satisfaction and more joy, which then deepens the commitment. commitment even further. And before you know it, your life trajectory is completely altered and

you're on a whole new path altogether. So what I take from that really is the importance of patience and tiny actions. You know, we all like to hear these stories of overnight successes or these breakthrough moments. But in truth, anybody that I've ever met who's achieved great things is really focused on process and the tiny little things that they're doing every single day anonymously when no one's looking that are really the needle movers yeah it's so true it's you know high performance is is exceptional output but with consistency over time right and just doing the same thing over and over again and building that into a routine and then having that routine feels so natural that you're not even thinking about it and then you're building new things on

top of it. Now, for you, in the process that you described, what were two or three things that you found really enabled you to make those little adjustments? What were those sort of few things that you were very focused on? Okay, I got to do this every day. This needs to be built into my new lifestyle. That's a great question. I guess first of all, I would say the big kind of breakthrough, at least with respect to diet, was this epiphany that diet actually matters. Like, either You either you believe what you're eating has an impact on your health and on your performance, et cetera, or you don't. But if you do, then suddenly, you know, the watershed moment for me, and I'd never really thought about it before, but the watershed moment being that, okay, well, if it does make a difference, now it's incumbent upon me to eat with that in mind, to choose foods with that in mind, to approach my plate every single day with a little bit more mindfulness, refining it, refining it, experimenting, what works, what doesn't. So that was a big piece.

And I think with those incremental gains that I was making in fitness, then it became about how do I approach this methodologically. So when I wanted to compete in these big races on the subject of being teachable, I hired a coach who knew a lot more about this than I did because I didn't know anything. And I was willing to take direction from that person. So when he said, this is your plan and this is what we're doing, I would say, okay, did that like what's next. And I learned a lot by just allowing myself to be teachable in that way. And then it's about what are you doing? It's back to the consistency thing. It's not about the huge

workout or the big long bike day or long run day. It's about day in, day out, showing up no matter what and trying to move the needle forward in, you know, respective ways. And when I would have a day where I was really tired and I had a subpar workout. Okay, that's fine. That happens. But what other things am I doing with my recovery or my nutrition or my sleep that I can tweak and hone so that I can find that little extra edge? And it's just been, you know, a constant learning curve of trying to do this that, you know, that's a learning curve that will never end. Amazing. And if you think back on, again, that time period, like at what point were you transition, you know, because you're, your health was obviously in transition, your lifestyle was in transition, but it also seems like

you made a meaningful professional pivot along the way here too. At what point did you make that professional pivot and where were you from a health standpoint then? I ended up walking away from big law firm life, but I continued to be a lawyer for a number of years, but I did it from a self-employed perspective. So as my time investment increased with the ultra endurance and endeavors that I was doing, I was able to, I had the privilege of being able to kind of configure my work schedule around that so that I could still get the training in that I wanted to do and kind of be a responsible lawyer. I didn't end up completely walking away from being a lawyer until the day that my first book came out, which was in 2012. But I was really, you know,

I had one foot out the door. And, you know, it basically was a slow kind of of exit out of that, such that, you know, when I was writing my book and the kind of, you know, months leading up to the publication of my book, I was doing almost no law work at all. So it was a slow pivot out of it. And then kind of a ceremonial, okay, I'm not renewing my bar, my bar membership. And so I'm completely shutting the door. So if someone calls me and says, can you, can you help negotiate this thing? I have to say, no, I can't. So I wouldn't be tempted by that. But it wasn't an overnight thing of like I'm slamming the door and walking away and trying something new. It was really a much more, you know, gradual segue into new things. And

those new things really didn't show up in a concrete way for a long time. Like it took a long time to figure out how to craft a career out of these things that I care about. I imagine it took you quite some time to unpack, okay, you want to leave this world behind of being a lawyer, but now who is the new rich role? And so many people tie their identity up in the career that they've built. And I would say the more years you spend building that career, my hunch is the more it starts to feel ingrained as part of who you are. So for other people thinking about a transition like that, what are a few of the, what are a few of the gut checks? you had along the way to know that you were making the right transition. Yeah, I think it's important

to not be impulsive about this decision. You know, we're in this kind of culture in which it's very romantic to like quit your job and like, you know, go to Tahiti or whatever. And for most people, that's not realistic. And I rarely, you know, suggest that as an option to people. I think you need to be rational and smart about it so that you don't incur all kinds of problems and financial burdens down the line. So it's a balance of, on the one hand, this idea that you're not allowing anything new to come into your life if you're holding on too tightly to the thing that's not working. So on some level, you have to have, you have to be ready to take a leap of faith into the unknown because you're not going to know how it's going to play out. And if you're

waiting until that roadmap is completely laid out in front of you, you're never going to take the leap. So at some point, you have to understand that that leap is necessary. At the same time, that has to be buffered by that sense of responsibility. And what that looks like is going to be different for every single person based on your circumstances. And the other thing I would add to that is that I think it's really important that you've done a lot of internal work to resolve your inner demons or, you know, really gain clarity over what makes you tick and what it is that you want out of your life before you start making, you know, rash or semi-rash decisions about your career path. Because if you have a lot of unresolved inner emotional turmoil or past

traumas or whatever it is, we all have our complicated psychological makeups. If you haven't reckoned with that, then you're probably not in the best position to trust your instinctual impulses. And so I had to do, you know, at least 12 years of work on that before I felt confident trusting those impulses and those instincts and believing that they would not lead me down the wrong path. So that's a really important piece that I feel like doesn't get enough attention. Yeah, I bet. And when you say you did really deep work on yourself for 12 years, what does that take the form as? Is that writing? Is that therapy? Is that going out and meeting other people? Is that meditating? Is that reading? Like, when you say work on yourself, how do you

think about that? Yeah. I mean, in my case, it was sobriety first and the secret 12-step society, which is really my number one priority. So I spent thousands and thousands of hours in meetings learning how to be open, honest, and vulnerable and being teachable and taking feedback and running my big decisions by people whose judgment I trust. That's a big piece of it. Therapy, yes, meditation, yes, yoga, fitness, like all these other self-care habits, journaling. Like when I was newly sober, I was gifted the book The Artist's Way by Julia Cameron and did that program and a big piece of that is the morning pages, which is something I go in and out of phases of doing it. I'm not doing it right now, but I found that practice to be super helpful in allowing your unconscious to flag like

the things that are going on inside of you, which then puts you in a position to deal with them in therapy or run them by your sort of counsel of advisors. And so it's, you know, it's been a smattering of a lot of different modalities for me. And, and, you know, I'm not wed to one over the other. Everybody's different with that. But I think some form of that is, is really important in terms of being an individual who is connecting heart and head and, you know, being whole enough to make sound decisions for yourself. Amazing. When you think about, you know, endurance running, at what stage, like, do you remember the first time that all of a sudden you went from, you know, running 10 miles to running 25 miles to running 50 miles? Like, like, do you remember those

first leaps that you made and thinking to yourself, is this another form of addiction or is this just me, you know, excelling at something? Yeah. Yeah, it's a conversation I still have with myself. I think, you know, in my case, I had a pretty significant breakthrough pretty early on. in my journey where I had changed my diet, I had lost the weight, and I was going out and just having a good time running on trails around my house for maybe an hour at most. And one day, maybe five or six months into this experiment, I went out for a morning trail run on a weekday and just dropped into a crazy flow state that, you know, long distance runners are familiar with where everything's clicking, you feel bulletproof, you feel like you can run all day, and

and I ended up running 24 miles that day, which was far in excess of anything I'd ever done. And it was a moment in which I realized, like, wow, that felt great. And being an athlete who had never reached his potential, it kind of lit something up inside of me. It was almost as if I felt like I had discovered this dormant gene that I didn't know that I had that was suddenly being expressed. and I think that was great encouragement for me to continue on this journey.

But yes, to your question, certainly you can have an addictive relationship with anything. And endurance sports is a receiver for a lot of people who are looking to either run away for their problems or people in recovery who are finding some kind of healing or outlet for that addictive energy. And I've definitely gone through phases where I have been addictive about it, but overall, it's been a great benefit to my life, as long as I make sure that all of the other areas of my life that are important are being attended to and are in check. It's only when it gets out of whack that I have to really take a look at my relationship to sport and, you know, make some changes. Have you gone through periods of meaningful overtraining? I have. Yeah, I overtrained in 2011 and I got way too skinny and, you know, I definitely had a very obsessive relationship with my training such that I stopped going to 12-step meetings. I kind of made endurance sports my higher power. And it came to ahead at the Ultraman race in 2000. where I DNFed. I was coughing up blood. I was too lean. My immune system was shot. I had to

pull out of the race. And a day later, I had a relapse on alcohol. I had been sober for 13 years at that point. Never in a million years did I think that I would ever relapse. And I found myself, you know, at a bar drinking out of the blue, like without any forethought after thousands and thousands of A.A. meetings. Luckily, I was at an A.A. meeting that night, and it was just a minor little slip, but it was a really powerful reminder of how pernicious the disease of alcoholism is and how important it is for me to ensure that my spiritual health is being attended to in the fashion to which, you know, I needed to be. So that would be a great example of overtraining meets imbalance in my life. And I think anybody who is training to be as elite as possible

has either crossed that line in their own way or brushed up against it, because pushing up against those boundaries is the only way that you discover where those boundaries exist. I'm curious for you as someone who seems like, you know, can enter into these flow states, maybe on certain days is able to run 10 miles more than you had previously thought you were going to. How are you someone who measures your body and, you know, measures performance? I mean, you've been on whoop recently. I'm curious how that's, you know, go back to 2011 versus today. How do you think about your body differently? Yeah, it's a, it's a really good question. I think to answer that properly and on the subject of overtraining, I mean, the real

over training that I did was as a swimmer back in the mid to late 80s. And I grew up in a period of time where volume was king. And in high school, we're throwing down, you know, upwards of 20,000 yards a day in the pool. I got up every single day from age 15 to 18 in high school at 4.45 in the morning, went to the pool, trained an hour and a half, went to school, went back to the pool, two hours in the pool, then dry lands, then home, then dinner, then homework, then passed out at nine o'clock, and then up again. And I did that. I was so exhausted. I sleptwalk through my entire high school experience. And everything in swimming hinges on that two-week taper at the end of the season where you finally take your pedal off the gas a little bit and you hope your body

repairs itself and you're fresh enough to compete at your best. And sometimes it worked and sometimes it didn't, and we didn't have any metrics or tools of any advanced nature to gauge what was going on internally with our bodies. We just went purely on feel. And I think there's good things and not so good things about that. I think, you know, in the positive category, as any athlete will tell you, and as I'm sure you know and have experienced yourself, when you're training to be your best, you become very connected to your body, very intuitive about what your body is telling you. And part of being an elite athlete is honing that intuition. And the best athletes are completely sympathetico with their bodies.

They're deeply connected and attuned to all its nuances and signals. And I remember, you know, when I was swimming, if we were doing a set of a hundreds, I could tell you without looking at the pace clock when I came in and touched the wall exactly what my time was and what my heart rate was. Because you're so connected, you know exactly what your body's doing. But if I was tired, I was tired. And if I felt good, I felt good. And that was kind of the end of that. Now, we're in a situation in which we have all this technology. We've got whoop on the bike. We've got power meters and all this kind of stuff, right? Sleep trackers, et cetera. And I think they have been crucial in honing that into

intuition in a much more scientific way. When you can have all that data, then we're so much more educated about what's actually happening with our bodies because so much of that data is detached from that intuition. And I've just noticed it in using whoop. I mean, a perfect example would be today. So every time there's a full moon, I don't sleep very well. I don't know about you, but I actually had a terrible night to sleep last night. and I woke up kind of dragging today and I checked my whoop and sure enough, yeah, my sleep

score is not great, but my heart rate variability was much better than I would have anticipated. In other words, my body was in a better position to train today than I would have anticipated otherwise. So I think what's great about the tools is when they can fill those gaps where intuition fails us. And then I think as an athlete, it's important. to calibrate your relationship with these tools such that they remain tools and not crutches. Because I think when you rely on them too, like if you let the data be predictive. Well, you create a self-fulfilling process. Exactly. Yeah. Like we're not robots, right? So, so, oh, let's say you have a big race and

your, your whooped out is off. Like, you can't let that be predictive of your day. So I think it's important to keep like a healthy boundary between the data and the data and and how you either leverage that data or allow it to kind of impact what you're going to do in a negative way, if that makes sense. Yeah, absolutely. I mean, it's a critical theme that we think about a lot, too, especially with high-performing athletes. Some of the world's best athletes will say,

I don't want to know my recovery before the big game or the big event. Some will say, you know, I want to know it to the point where it's going to change exactly what my pregame routine is. That doesn't mean I don't think I'm going to want. win the game. It just means, okay, if I'm a little more run down, maybe I'm going to spend less time warming up, or, you know, maybe I'm going to take like a more thoughtful period of time, you know, getting there and preparing. So it's interesting just, but I think your point's totally right. It's all about how you use the data and you want to use it as a tool and not a crutch to use

your words. Now, for you, what are some things that you've seen have improved your recovery or rate of recovery? Well, there's nothing better than sleep. I mean, sleep is in, you know, know, in my opinion, is the best recovery tool available, and it's totally free, which is awesome. So I go to great lengths to do everything in my power to ensure a good night of sleep, even though it didn't happen last night. I sleep outside in a tent. I've been sleeping outside for, it's about over two years at this point. And I live in Los Angeles. I'm not in Boston. So, you know, I can afford to do this. But the cold air, the outdoor air really helps benefit my sleep. I have like a weighted gravity blanket and a sleep mask. And I do all kinds of

crazy stuff to ensure that I get the best night of sleep possible. So that's one thing. I've been doing a crazy, we have a crazy audience. So I'm going to, I'm going to let you keep going with that for a second. What else are you doing related to sleep? We can't, we can't quite jump off that. What got you into sleeping in a tent? Well, it began with this kind of ongoing debate with my wife because my wife likes the bedroom warm and I like it cold. And so I'm sleeping on top of the cover sweating and she's bundled up underneath the covers freezing and we could never find a temperature point that worked for both of us. And we have a flat roof at our house. And one summer night we did we there's also like a wall where we can project movies so just with the kids

we were up on the roof projecting a movie and we had like sleeping bags out there and we all just slept on the roof that night it was a summer night under the stars and i woke up feeling so refreshed and so good that i thought this is great i should sleep outdoors more often and that way Julie will be happy, my wife. And that's how it began. And then I got a tent because I would wake up on the roof in my sleeping bag covered in condensation. So I was like, well, I need something to cover me. So it just kind of happened eventually, you know, slowly from that first experience. And now I'm just totally accustomed to it. And, you know, yes, I'm in Southern California. But even the summer months, the temperature, you know, in the high desert air goes down to. mid to low 40s and in the winter months into the mid 30s and I yeah I love it I love it that way now you're a big proponent of veganism so give the the pitch for why we should all be vegan if you believe we should all be vegan or if you think everyone should experiment with it well the first thing I would say is you know it's not for me to tell people how they should live their life or how they should

eat like one of the things that I've learned in sobriety is to refrain from giving advice and only share my experience. So all I have to go on is my experience. And my experience is that a plant-based diet works for me. I've been doing it now for 15 years. And I'm, I turn 55 this week. I feel great. I'm still able to go out and kill it and build lean muscle mass and recover more quickly, recover quickly between workouts. And I think from an athletic perspective, I mean, there's so many on-ramps to this whole thing. But from an athletic perspective, I'm eating foods that are very nutrient dense, but not necessarily calorically dense.

They're high in all the phytonutrients and the micronutrients that you need. And it tends, like if you're eating an entirely or a predominantly plant-based diet, even without getting into the details of it, it's going to be a predominantly anti-inflammatory diet. And as you know, as an athlete, it's all about mitigating. that inflammation. Because if you can reduce that inflammation and provide your body with the actual nutrients that it needs, it's going to repair itself much more efficaciously. And recovery is the holy grail of athletic performance. You get better not in the workout. You get better in the

moments in between the workout. So to the extent that you can expedite that recovery process and reduce the amount of time it takes for your body to heal in between workouts, then you can train harder, you can train longer, you can train more frequently, and that over an extended period of time is going to translate into performance gains. And that's been my experience. There's also the environmental implications of the foods that we're eating. And although that was not an initial trigger for me making that switch, it's become a much more important piece in terms of the advocacy and kind of what I think about when I talk about a plant-based diet. Because if you're eating if you're if you're if you're opting out of animal agriculture you're you're basically uh you know

eating eating foods lower down the food chain is going to have a lower carbon footprint you know if you're doing it appropriately then um then purchasing your foods from from the kind of animal agriculture behemists that are out there that are responsible for a significant portion of of climate change you know just listening to you strike me as as someone who's simile simultaneously very hard driving and motivated while also seeming to have this, you know, spirituality towards just being. And I'm curious if you think that's a fair summary. And also how do you actually balance those two things? Because at times they can be at odds. The nature of being hard driving is creating aspirations for yourself and working towards those. The nature of being present

is just that. Yeah, that's a good and very insightful question. You know, it's a lot easier for me to go, go, go than to just be. And I realize that the growth for me resides in the striving to be okay with where I'm at with who I am. And it's a spiritual practice that requires, again, back to patience, like being patient with yourself, like trying to find the simple joy in things. rather than being outcome or performance oriented,

whether it's in athletics or in career, to just be more in the allowing and the surrendering of yourself to the thing for the joy of it. And these are principles that I learned in sobriety that I struggle with today, like the idea of surrender. Like when I was first introduced to the idea of surrender, like, give up. Like I'm trying to get, you know, from,

A to Z over here, like I'm, I'm not surrendering, but what I've learned over time is that there are so few things that we actually have control over and letting go of those many, many things to which we have no agency over, provides you with a sense of calm and a sense of peace that actually makes you more capable at executing on the very few things that you do have control over. another piece in that is is gratitude and you know i'm not a i'm not i'm not i'm not naturally inclined to be a grateful person you know i'm generally you know annoyed and irritable and you know and combative and all these sorts of things but by diligently practicing gratitude i'm able to find that joy i'm able to be more comfortable with myself and that allows me to just be and when i can

be in that state of presence, like just present in the moment that I find myself in, then that allows for the best version of who I am and what I have to offer others in service, which is another piece of this, to come out. It's a beautiful answer. For me, trying to introduce more gratitude to my life made me both a happier person and a more successful entrepreneur. I think a lot of entrepreneurs who are hard driving, we operate on this sort of dopamine system of what's next, what's next, what's next, you get to the milestone and you've immediately created a new one. How big can the business be? How many can we sell? How many employees can we hire? How much money can we raise? It's you're just constantly moving the goalposts.

And there's, I think, a fear if you're on that track, that if you get too grateful for what you've created along the way, it'll somehow slow you down. But in fact, there's sort of different operating systems. And so for me introducing gratitude, and I think I'm much like you, sort of less inclined to sort of naturally recognize all the things that we need to be grateful for. It's been such an important piece of my life. Yeah, that's beautiful, man. And I think a close cousin to that is this service piece, like this idea that when you go into a situation, rather than looking to see what you can extract from it, instead looking to see how you can contribute, which is antithetical to my default setting. But when I'm in that headspace and in that

kind of mode, everybody's happier. And actually, the goals that you're seeking become more accessible. Like, it's a crazy inverse spiritual relationship. But when you are in the giving mode, and always looking to give, especially you running this company with all these employees, it actually ends up being like the secret to all the success that you seek. No, so well said. I mean, it's a fascinating phenomenon where when you make it all about service and giving and certainly less about yourself, but more about the collective goal or mission, how many things go your way as a consequence?

And that was another phenomenon that took me a couple of years to figure out on this journey. You figured it out a lot earlier than I did. Well, you know, it's not a race necessarily. I know, see. That's the way I see things. I know. It's so bad. What's next for you?

And what are you focused on on a daily basis? So right now, the main focus is the podcast. You know, I started my podcast, a Rich Roll podcast, in late 2012. We've been doing it for nine years, and I love it. You know, it's what I'm most passionate about. So really just always trying to get better at that and find the most inspiring guests. So that's a huge focus. We're about to relieve it.

Well, congratulations on your podcast. Yeah, thank you. It's been an amazing success, and I've certainly enjoyed it. Thank you. Last year we put a book out called Voicing Change, which was sort of a coffee table compendium of some of my favorite podcast guests with excerpts from many conversations. We're doing a second volume of that, which is going to be coming out this winter. So focused on getting that out into the world. And, you know, I got a bunch of kids, so I'm raising teenagers.

So that's a big focus of mine is just trying to, you know, parent these kids into adulthood responsibly, which is no easy task. And where can people find you, Rich, if they want to learn more? Richroll.com is the best place to go. you'll find all my stuff there. You can find the podcast, the Rich Roll Podcasts, on all the podcast platforms. We're also on YouTube. And my books, Finding Ultra, which was my memoir,

and then we have some cookbooks, The Plant Power Way and the Plant Power Way Italia. You can find on Amazon or wherever you buy books. Awesome, man. Well, look, this has been a real pleasure. Thanks for coming on the Wood Podcast. Thanks for being on Woop and wishing you the best of luck. Yeah, thanks, man.

It's great to talk to you. And again, I just, I can't overstate how much I love wearing the whoop and I love being partners with you guys. And I'm really excited about all the developments and iterations that you guys are making and wish you the best. Thank you to Rich for coming on the Whoop podcast. If you enjoyed this episode, please leave us a rating or review. Don't forget to subscribe to the Whoop podcast. You can check us out on social at Whoop at Will Ahmed. And a reminder you can get 15% off a Whoop membership if you use the code.

Will, W-I-L-L. All right, that's all for now, folks. Thank you. Stay healthy and stay in the green.