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

**SPEAKER_1** (0:00)
All right, there's this amazing book called Getting Everything You Can Out Of All You've Got. I read it a few years ago and it changed my life.
And the reason I loved it was because it basically talks about how to get and make more money using things that you already have.
Coincidentally, today's podcast is brought to you by Business Made Simple. It's a podcast by Donald Miller, who I'm gonna tell you about in a second, but he has this amazing episode that's all related to this book and the things that I learned in this book. It's called How To Make Money With What You Already Have. It's an incredible episode. It talks about all the stuff that I learned in this book. The host is Donald Miller. I didn't know who Donald Miller was up until recently, but over the last 12 months, this is totally by coincidence. It was all separate people. They said, you have to check out Donald Miller. He's amazing. So I'm happy that he's part of HubSpot's podcast network. You can check it out, Business Made Simple Podcast. It's where he coaches you on how to build your business like an airplane, where the cockpit is your leadership, the body is your overhead, the right engine is your marketing, the left engine is your sales.
You have to check it out. This guy's amazing. It's called Business Made Simple with Donald Miller.

**Rich Roll** (1:02)
It was really rough for quite an extended period of time. We couldn't pay our mortgage. We had cars repossessed. I've told this story before, but it was so bad at one point that we didn't have enough money to pay for our garbage collection, so they took away our bins.
We had to put our garbage bags in the back of this beat up minivan that we had and look for bins behind the grocery stores and stuff to throw our garbage. I mean, it was pretty humiliating and quite frankly, pretty emasculating as somebody who's supposed to be head of household and taking care of shit. I was unable to make sure that my house was in order, and so we went through a really rough period of time and it was not clear that we were gonna be able to kind of persevere.

**Shaan Puri** (1:57)
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 on your corner a little bit. Do you get, is that a problem for you?

**Rich Roll** (2:12)
A little bit, man. Not a day goes by where I'm not on the receiving end of some kind of BS about that.

**Shaan Puri** (2:18)
Yeah, exactly.
But that is your real name, Rich Roll. That is not like a stage name.

**Rich Roll** (2:26)
God-given name.

**Shaan Puri** (2:28)
Okay, wow. My parents are behind here. So, and you have a very, very interesting story. So I'm gonna give the very layman version of the story.
And then what I wanna do is two things. I wanna dive in and actually hear from you a little bit more about the interesting bits of that story, as well as, we are kind of like a, we're a business podcast. And so what we'd like to talk about in general is business opportunities.

**Rich Roll** (2:56)
Sure, sounds good.

**Shaan Puri** (2:57)
All right, cool. So your story is, as far as I know, is as follows. You were coming up on 40 years old.
You were not in great shape. You were, I think 50 pounds overweight is what you say. And you decided to sort of make a change in your life. And now you are very, very well known as a endurance athlete who has a plant powered or vegan diet. And you have done some kind of amazing things in the endurance, competitive endurance field. I think you were named one of the 25 fittest men on the planet by Men's Fitness, which is a pretty dope honor.
And so that is your kind of, that's your claim to fame. Did I get that right?

**Rich Roll** (3:43)
Yeah, I think 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 my association.