Atticus is the anonymous poet and New York Times Bestselling author of Love Her Wild, The Dark Between Stars and The Truth About Magic . Dubbed “The World’s Most Tattoo-able Poet” by Galore Magazine, he has been featured in Time Magazine, Elle, The Guardian, Fast Company, Publisher’s Weekly, The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal, worked with Kygo, Maroon 5, Coach, Absolute Vodka, Stance Socks, Target, Urban Outfitters and Refinery 29, all while wearing a mask and keeping his identity a ...
Dec 06, 2021•32 min
Brian Kelly aka The Points Guy has become one of the top influencers and experts in the travel and hospitality space. Anyone in my close circle knows how passionate I am about travel, my first true love, and my borderline obsession w points. I think I’ve visited 21 countries now and wouldn’t be surprised if guy’s been to the remaining 175. Brian’s quickly become the go-to-guy when it comes to the Points Game - using lucrative credit card signup bonuses and strategic travel to accrue rewards poin...
Oct 25, 2021•42 min
Grandma Joy (of “Grandma Joy’s Road Trip” fame) is a spunky 91-year-old adventurer who’s been traveling the country with her grandson, Brad for the last chunk of years. Their goal has been to try and visit all 63 U.S. National Parks and they’ve only got one to go now! After you hear some of Grandma Joy’s pearls of wisdom, you’ll see why she’s become something of a celeb in her small Ohio town after being on the Rachel Ray show and recently being profiled in People Magazine. She’s living like the...
Oct 11, 2021•39 min
Writer Gretchen Rubin is widely known as an expert on Happiness and Good Habits. Few know that she actually started her career in law, as Editor of the Yale Law Review and clerking for Justice Sandra Day O’Connor on the Supreme Court. One day Gretchen came to an important conclusion about her life: It was time to move off this path because she realized she would rather fail as a writer than succeed as a lawyer. Except she didn’t fail. Gretchen wrote five NYT Bestsellers including “The Happiness ...
Oct 04, 2021•34 min
Kate Bowler is a religious historian and Professor at the Duke Divinity School. She’s also a witty, warm, wildly successful author, wife and mom living with Stage IV Cancer. Much of Kate’s early work was focused on the Prosperity Gospel - the belief that if you had the right faith, and prayed the right prayers, God would reward you with health, wealth and happiness. Soon after writing “Blessed: A History of the American Prosperity Gospel” Kate got diagnosed with Stage IV Colon Cancer at the age ...
Sep 27, 2021•46 min
Sunita Puri is the Medical Director of Palliative Medicine at the Keck Hospital and Norris Cancer Center of the University of Southern California. She’s also the author of 2019 bestseller That Good Night: Life and Medicine in the Eleventh Hour. Not since Suleika Jaouad’s Between Two Kingdoms have I experienced such poignant and elegant writing that captures the essence of the author’s experience so expertly. Sunita documents the life events that led her to the palliative path, the challenges tha...
Aug 30, 2021•44 min
Sister Aletheia was profiled by the NY Times in “Meet the Nun Who Wants You to Remember You Will Die” reviving the Memento Mori movement. Memento Mori is the practice of intentionally thinking about our own death as a means of appreciating the present and living a better life now. Sister Aletheia’s path to the convent was anything but conventional. She was a rebellious atheist who loved punk rock and spent her 20s volunteering, then working in Bay Area tech before finding her way back to the chu...
Aug 16, 2021•39 min
BJ Miller is a Hospice & Palliative Care Doctor with a unique path that brought him to this work. As a sophomore at Princeton, while goofing around one night with his buddies, BJ climbed on top of a sleeping commuter train and was immediately electrocuted by 11,000 volts. As a result, BJ lost both his legs at the knee and one arm making him a triple amputee. BJ and I talked not about his accident or the fact that he now has two futuristic metal blades for legs, but about his deep care for hi...
Aug 09, 2021•43 min
Writer and Comedic Actress Annabelle Gurwitch has a story I first read about in the New York Times in November that caused my own jaw to drop. Last summer, Annabelle walked into an Urgent Care Clinic in a mini mall for a COVID test...and walked out with a Stage IV lung cancer diagnosis. She shared her story along with how she’s managing life her now with this chronic, terminal illness that thankfully hasn’t robbed her of her humor. NYT Op-Ed: The Coronavirus Saved My Life You’re Leaving When? Ad...
Jul 26, 2021•34 min
Greg McKeown is a bestselling author and the host of the popular podcast What’s Essential where he talks to a wide range of guests about prioritizing what matters most in life. Yes, we hit on his new book Effortless: Make It Easier to Do What Matters Most a follow up to his first NYT bestseller, Essentialism: The Disciplined Pursuit of Less but the bulk of our conversation was SO not the heady academic one I expected. Instead Greg was courageously vulnerable in sharing his own family struggles o...
Jul 18, 2021•42 min
Sheryl Sandberg’s professional career is nothing short of legendary. In the early days at Google, she scaled ad sales from 4 to 4,000 people. Then she was handpicked by Mark Zuckerberg to become the COO at Facebook - a title she still holds. In 2013, Sheryl published her first book Lean In: Women, Work and the Will to Lead which sparked a global movement empowering women to take their seat at the table, and she is regarded as one of top business leaders in the world when it comes to power, influ...
Jul 11, 2021•21 min
Meet my personal palliative care nurse, Cecilia Benns. If you don’t know what that is job is, or you associate it with hospice care for people who are like days out from dying, you’re not alone, and we’re here to help. Hoping people walk away with some new knowledge - I myself had no idea about these kinds of resources for people in my situation - because the more I learn, the more comfortable and confident I feel when the fear creeps in about my eventual demise. Another reminder that bringing t...
Jun 27, 2021•51 min
Dr. Martin Inderbitzin is a world-renowned Swiss-German Neuroscientist and Mindset Specialist whose previous research focused on stress, emotions and understanding how the brain and the body processes it all. Then 9 years ago, he received a gut-wrenching pancreatic cancer diagnosis which forced him to take his life’s work and put it into practice for himself as a patient now grappling with his mortality. Not to mention deciding to train for a triathlon - with zero experience in the sport - and t...
Jun 21, 2021•49 min
Brad Ludden was a young professional whitewater kayaker whose life was first touched by cancer at 12 years old when his aunt was diagnosed with breast cancer. By 18, he was sharing his passion for kayaking with pediatric oncology patients and soon after, founded First Descents to help young adults in the cancer community experience the adventure and community of the outdoors free of charge. 20 years later, the organization is still thriving, offering more than 70 programs across the county in 20...
Jun 14, 2021•41 min
I’m sure you know Matthew McConaughey. He’s an Academy Award-Winning actor, a proud Texan, a Philanthropist, a new owner of Austin’s MLS team and most recently, a NYT bestselling author for his memoir, Greenlights. What Matthew and I talked about in our conversation hit deep. We talked about my current cancer situation and how I’m doing what I can to make the most of it. We debated over how much fight to bring to life vs how much flow and how to know what’s needed when. And we agreed that the on...
Jun 06, 2021•48 min
Oceana Sawyer is a former corporate trainer at companies like HP and Levi Strauss now turned death doula. Just like birth doulas who help bring babies into this world at the beginning of life, a death doula helps actualize the emotional and spiritual wishes of the dying at the end of life. For anyone who’s ever wanted to know what dying’s like, in this conversation Oceana details every single step of her father’s passing and the experience was far more beautiful than I ever would have expected. ...
May 31, 2021•50 min
There’s so much behind the 10,000 kilowatt smile of media mogul Katie Couric. More than just sunshine, Katie’s known tragedy and loss in her personal life and gained wisdom in hindsight from those experiences. After her first husband passed away from colorectal cancer, Katie founded Stand Up to Cancer which has since raised over $600M for cancer research. We talked about the need for us to bring honest conversation about mortality into the light, and the comfort it could bring to people if we di...
May 18, 2021•49 min
We’re going to take a little hiatus from the weekly podcast production machine which has been churning and burning for 6 months now. I don’t imagine it will be too long because #notimetowaste but follow @notimetowasteproject on IG for updates. I shared a personal update and then announced an exciting new partnership with AKTIV Against Cancer led by previous pod guest Ethan Zohn! After we return from the break, at the end of select No Time to Waste episodes, Ethan will share stories of cancer sur...
Apr 13, 2021•17 min
I only recently got introduced to Maggie Smith - the poet, not the actress - when I stumbled upon her book Keep Moving that I really loved. Whereas most books about navigating grief and loss have a somber, self-reflective tone, hers included short motivational quotes with more of a Ted Lasso vibe. Maggie was not the tortured creative soul I expected from a poet. Thanks to her big energy, high wattage smile and sense of humor, we had a blast in our convo and now I’m thinking about getting into po...
Apr 05, 2021•34 min
I genuinely believe my dad embodies much of what No Time to Waste is all about. I’ve witnessed first-hand his zest for life, his sense of adventure, his desire to help people and his evolution as a self-aware human. And I’ve realized only in recent years how proud I am to be my father’s daughter. We talk about his non-linear career path from flower delivery truck driver to park ranger to attorney to therapist, how for a few short years we became a horse family (but not in the traditional sense),...
Mar 29, 2021•37 min
Chelsea Handler is a Comedian, television host, best-selling author and activist whose humor and candor have established her as one of the most celebrated voices in pop culture today. She hosted E!’s top rated Chelsea Lately for seven years, launched docuseries Chelsea Does and talk show Chelsea on Netflix, and penned five #1 NYT bestsellers including 2019’s Life Will Be the Death of Me . Most recently, she released acclaimed stand up special Chelsea Handler: Evolution on HBO Max which touched o...
Mar 22, 2021•30 min
Rabbi Steve Leder heads up one of the largest Jewish congregations in the country at the Wilshire Blvd Temple in LA. In his most recent book “The Beauty of What Remains”, he shares his thoughts on navigating grief and loss through the lens of not only a Rabbi who’s shepherded thousands of families through loss of their loved ones, but also as a son who recently lost his father after a 10 yr battle with Alzheimer’s. We had a really intimate conversation in which he answered a lot of my burning qu...
Mar 15, 2021•41 min
Rich was once an overweight, hard-drinking corporate attorney who lost touch with the star swimmer he was at Stanford. Fast forward 20 years and now he’s a sober, plant-powered ultra endurance legend, a devoted family man who lives on a farm and meditates, and the host of one of the most popular podcasts in the world. Hear us talk about how this transformation came about, what fills up his cup today, and how curiosity - about himself, his podcast guests, the world around us, and the world beyond...
Mar 08, 2021•38 min
Thas is the CEO of Omelet, an LA-based advertising agency, after working her way up the ranks as a brilliant strategist. We met years ago when I was her client and we both recognized quickly that we were each others’ people. Thas was forced to confront mortality when her dad was diagnosed with Stage IV cancer a few years back. And since losing a close friend to cancer last year, she’s developed a healthier relationship to death and dying than most, along with a deep-rooted appreciation for all t...
Mar 02, 2021•34 min
Erin Foster might have been born into a famous family (her dad is music mogul David Foster) but she didn’t have the charmed upbringing you might expect. Far from the shallow, superficial Hollywood celeb focused on all the wrong things, Erin’s got a hell of a work ethic and a desire to give back. Comedian, writer, actress, entrepreneur, and investor with a Midas touch, she and her sister Sara hitched their ponies to both Mirror and Bumble and started the Favorite Daughter clothing brand during th...
Feb 23, 2021•35 min
Megan Taylor is a kickass DJ who gets that music is the soundtrack to our lives. In fact, we met when she was hired to play the afterparty for my company’s event years ago. Her beats were solid, her sneaker game on point, and once we got to talking, I realized I was talking to someone who knew they were a spiritual being having a human experience. We got to talk about what we think is really going on here, finding our purpose, death and dying, the spiritual world, crystals, mediums - you name it...
Feb 16, 2021•32 min
Adrian is a Peloton tread instructor with a fanatical following called the Thunder Squad that I am personally proud to be a part of. Intensely fit with a beaming smile and a heart of gold, he has the ability to motivate and inspire those who take his classes. But it was Adrian’s strength in vulnerability that was on display during our conversation as we talked about an experience that changed the course of his life forever and explored how regret can serve as a transformative teacher. @adrianwil...
Feb 09, 2021•36 min
Tope Awotona is the founder of tech unicorn Calendly which makes scheduling calls + meetings so delightfully simple. I’ll never waste any more of my precious time with the old-school back and forth! To get the company off the ground, Tope maxed out credit cards and high interest loans in lieu of taking outside funding, essentially pushing in all his chips on the bet. Hear us talk about how his mom’s cancer battle and her innate sense of urgency compelled Tope to take the risk and go all in on th...
Feb 02, 2021•25 min
Ethan Zohn won Survivor: Africa back in 2002 but he’s also survived cancer - twice. We talked about his life before Survivor (playing pro soccer in Africa), life after (living the dream at 27), and then the impacts - mental, physical, emotional - of getting diagnosed with a rare form of lymphoma (pretty terrible), beating it, only to have it come back years later to fend it off again. Later in the episode, we both share exactly what WE do to tackle the fear and anxiety that comes with uncertaint...
Jan 25, 2021•32 min
In 2017, prominent ultrarunner and North Face athlete Hillary Allen fell 150ft off a ridgeline during a skyrace in Norway. She was presumed dead, broke 14 bones in the fall, and had to relearn how to walk again. Shockingly, Hillary was back to winning races less than a year later. But more recently, she learned the hard way that recovering from that kind of near-death trauma requires a lot more than just the physical rehab. Hear her share her journey of mental and emotional health in her evoluti...
Jan 18, 2021•38 min
