The Best Of 2023: Part Two

We are here to grow. We are here to transform. This is our birthright. This is our purpose. As the year ends, I want to honor this truth by sharing wisdom gleaned from some of the brightest minds on the podcast this year. I’ve engaged with so many extraordinary changemakers throughout 2023. Reviewing the year in conversation brought powerful new insights—a reminder that these evergreen exchanges continue to inspire and inform. I have so much gratitude for all the guests who shared their wisdom openly, for my incredible team, for the enormous growth of the show over the last 12 months, and for the sponsors who keep this podcast going. But more than anything I am grateful for you, the listener. I don’t take your attention and support for granted. Thank you for taking this journey of growth alongside me. Here’s to an extraordinary 2024. Show notes + MORE Watch on YouTube Newsletter Sign-Up Today’s Sponsors: Squarespace: Squarespace.com/RICHROLL AG1: DrinkAg1.com/RICHROLL Indeed: Indeed.com/RICHROLL Athletic Brewing: AthleticBrewing.com On: On.com/RICHROLL Peace + Plants, Rich Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Rich Roll?

  Eating well rarely falls apart because of one big failure. It's the daily question that wears you down. Like, what am I actually gonna make tonight? What's in the fridge? And it's exactly why we built the Plant Power Meal Planner. It's a personalized, plant-based meal planning program that matches you with recipes based on your taste, your allergies, your cooking skills, and how much time you actually have. You build, through this program, a balanced, nutrient-dense plan for your entire household in a few minutes. Then, it generates a grocery list for you with one click that plugs right into our delivery partners. All the recipes in the program are built by dietitians with culinary training. Plus, you get your own food coach to help you problem-solve along the way.

• 0:44Rich Roll?

  It's kind of an amazing thing. For listeners of the show, all you special people, we're offering an exclusive $20 off an annual subscription right now. To get it, go to meals.richroll.com, take your quick personalization quiz, and enter promo code RICHROLL20 at checkout.

• 1:04Speaker 01

  I remember I was in Italy, I saw a ladybug, and I was like, this ladybug has no idea it's Italian.

• 1:08Speaker 02

  Finding positivity in any situation.

• 1:12Speaker 03

  Every single person watching can get happier.

• 1:15Speaker 04

  The superpower is relaxation.

• 1:21Speaker 05

  The only zen you're gonna find at the top of the mountain is the zen you bring up there with you.

• 1:25Speaker 06

  We stay stable not by resisting change, but by changing.

• 1:28Speaker 07

  To not be Patrick Stewart was such a relief.

• 1:33Speaker 08

  Love is woven into every aspect of our lives.

• 1:39Speaker 09

  We need to get stronger. We need to not be afraid of failure. We have to be willing to go through hardship, through suffering, through pain.

• 1:52Rich Roll?

  Greetings, everybody, and happy holidays from everyone here at the RRP mothership.

• 1:58Rich Roll?

  As it says right here on my beanie, this is a time to pause. It's a time to breathe and perhaps most importantly, a time to reflect. Something we're doing today courtesy of part two of our Best of 2023 anthology, which is essentially a look back at some of the most impactful conversations of the year that we've had here and to do that with gratitude. Gratitude for, of course, all the guests who shared their wisdom openly with all of us. Gratitude for my incredible team. Gratitude for the quite enormous growth of the show over the last 12 months. Gratitude for the sponsors that keep the show going, but most of all gratitude to you, the listener.

• 2:43Rich Roll?

  Truly, I do not take your attention nor your support for granted. And this recap practice is my way of honoring the magic that we make here together as well as a reminder of the power that I think we all have to do and be better. Better for ourselves, better for our loved ones, and better for the world. So let's kick off this Best of 2023, part two, with one of my favorite luminaries. Expert meditation and spiritual teacher, as well as author of many transformative books, Light Watkins, returned in episode 768, where we discussed meditation, we talked about minimalism, but mostly it was a conversation about living a life of purpose.

• 3:31Speaker 05

  You have everything you need to create the life that you ultimately want right now. Is it that you need more than what you have? If anything, it's you need less, less distraction. You need less temptation to, to use coping mechanisms and things like that. You need less stuff to buy in order to be fulfilled or happy. And so if you go inside and you start with cultivating the voice of your inner guidance and you start listening to that voice and you start acting upon that voice, that will take you in the direction of whatever it is that you envisioned for yourself. You're not expected to know how it happens.

• 4:15Speaker 05

  You just make yourself as loyal as possible to those little impulses. Without any expectation or anticipation of a specific result. And eventually, you will live your way into that life of your dreams. Which is gonna come with lots of challenges, gonna come with you being stretched out of your comfort zone and into your potential. And you will look back at those experiences as the highlights of your life. And those challenging times as, again, the good parts of your story. That's what people are gonna wanna talk about. And it's a real-time process. So it's about really being process-oriented as opposed to outcome-oriented.

• 4:58Speaker 05

  And that's the thing, you can have the most sparse, beautiful-looking zen-like external environment, but on the inside, you're still cluttered. You're holding on to toxic relationships. You're maybe holding on to a soul-sucking job or a path in your life. And if you're experiencing all that clutter, it prohibits you from being present with this beautiful zen space that you happen to be in. And it's kind of like what Robert Persick, the guy who wrote Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, said. The only zen you're gonna find at the top of the mountain is the zen you bring up there with you. You know, so it's like that. Every space you enter, every relationship you enter, any accomplishment you have,

• 5:42Speaker 05

  you're gonna bring all the happiness that you're gonna get from that with you to the relationship, to the space, to the accomplishment. Right. And everybody ultimately, no matter what you do in your life, everybody ultimately wants to be fulfilled, right? So what is, how do you get to be fulfilled? Well, that's where people, you know, have different ideas. Some people think it's because it's from accomplishments, or it's from money, or it's from, you know, some other external circumstance. But really... What brings fulfillment is living a purposeful life, right? I was listening to this other podcast interview and this guy was helping people get out of prison.

• 6:25Speaker 05

  And he said, "There's no drug I've ever taken that gives me the same high as helping these inmates who were innocent get freed from prison." And you know, if you're being of service, or if you're raising a family and that's what you've identified with as your purpose, or if you're doing something else that's related to your heart, then you're experiencing some degree of fulfillment that you would not be experiencing otherwise. And really, the only way to know that is to have the experience. So then, how do you lead a purposeful life? Well, a lot of people are confused about, you know, "I don't know what my purpose is." I write about purpose a lot, and I get a lot of replies, I don't, you know,

• 7:08Speaker 05

  I feel like I don't live that purposeful life. And so, I say, "You have to follow curiosity." You know, "Don't worry about trying to find your purpose, just follow curiosity and your purpose will find you." Well, how do you follow your curiosity? Well, your curiosity is going to have you doing things that are gonna make you look foolish, probably. And it's not gonna be practical, and it's not gonna make a lot of sense to the people around you. So you have to be okay with that. And the only way to be okay with that is to feel so called by your purpose, by your curiosity, that you're willing to do it anyway. And what stands in between you being able to do that, follow the curiosity with the FOMO, right, fear of other people's opinions, FOPO, fear of other people's opinions,

• 7:52Speaker 05

  in full play, is you have to get rid of the stuff that keeps you shackled to those opinions, which is some degree of stress, right? Because stress, when you're tired, stress makes you tired, stress makes you anxious, stress makes you...

• 8:12Speaker 05

  Future thinking, or you're focused on a past regret. It's hard to follow your curiosity when you have those things playing out in the back of your awareness.

• 8:23Rich Roll?

  What is the process? Like, how would you, like, if I just said that to you and I was your student, and, you know, your meditation student, like, walk me through how you would untangle that knot and, you know, get me into a place where I could hear the voice of my own innate curiosity?

• 8:41Speaker 05

  So that voice is in there. We usually refer to it as the still small voice. Like, those internal nudgings, those hunches, saying, hey, maybe go left instead of going right on your commute today. Just see what happens. Or, hey, go and compliment that person on their nice shoes. Or, hey, stay at home today and just read a book. You know, these kinds of things. And so that voice is in there. It's a still small voice. And we had it when we were kids. Everybody has it as a kid. You know, you see kids, they can play with a stick for hours, or they can just go out and imagine things and make believe. And there's something that happens once you start getting schooled is

• 9:22Speaker 05

  you get indoctrinated to believe what success is supposed to look like, which is being disciplined, being responsible, achieving things, getting married, you know, having a good job, et cetera, et cetera. And then that becomes the primary focus. And then the voice of curiosity, or the still small voice, gets filed away in the extracurricular activity folder, where if you have enough time, when you're not being responsible and, you know, working on your job or your whatever, then you can play around with that on the weekends. And actually, it's the opposite. We should be prioritizing that voice, because that voice is keeping us on track with whatever it is that our purpose or our passion

• 10:06Speaker 05

  truly is in this lifetime, which no one can tell you what that is. No one can, you can't go to anyone. You can't go to me, you can't go to any psychic or therapist, and they can sit you down and say, your purpose is to... dot, dot, dot. Only you know what that is, but you have to get conversational in the language of that internal voice.

• 10:28Rich Roll?

  Next up is 2021 Facebook whistleblower Frances Haugen, who joined me back in episode 779 to explain the nuanced impact of social media on society, as well as why algorithms prioritize extreme content, and the tools available to us to combat these important and admittedly, at times terrifying issues.

• 10:54Rich Roll?

  As a data scientist, a lot of people, you hear a lot of people saying, "Well, we don't even know how these algorithms work."

• 11:02Speaker 10

  Yeah.

• 11:02Rich Roll?

  Is that true?

• 11:03Speaker 10

  Oh, yeah.

• 11:03Rich Roll?

  What parts of it do you understand and which parts of it elude even someone like yourself?

• 11:09Speaker 10

  So it's one of these things where, you know, this is a very young field. Like, this is one of these things where I talk about in the book. And we can design a system and say, "This is the data we put into it." Like, we can describe that, we can see it. And we can, you know, when Elon published the algorithm, like, he can see what provisions it says. But the problem is that all these things work together in ways that are unexpected. Like, no one at Facebook, when they made the shift from saying, "Can we keep you on the platform as long as possible," to, "Can we get you to react as much as possible?" No one said, "I think this is going to lead to more extreme content." Like, no one set out to do that. And I want to validate the things that Facebook has said. You know, they say, "We don't recognize these allegations. We would never intend to do that."

• 11:54Speaker 10

  I don't think they did. But the problem is that when they learned there were these side effects, and right now, the only people who get to ask questions about, "Could there be side effects?", are the people inside the companies. You know, people who have a vested interest in not knowing. You know, when they learned that there were these consequences, and to be clear, like, the shift was big enough that, like, the CEO of BuzzFeed wrote to Facebook and said, "I think something's broken."

• 12:24Rich Roll?

  Jonah Peretti?

• 12:25Speaker 10

  I don't remember which gener-- it was, would have been in like 2018 or 2019. So I don't know which era that is.

• 12:31Rich Roll?

  Yeah, that's, it's wild.

• 12:34Speaker 10

  Yeah.

• 12:35Rich Roll?

  And it's getting wilder, right? Like, when we think about what went down in terms of election interference in 2016 and 2020, it feels kind of very, you know, kind of...

• 12:49Rich Roll?

  Not that big of a deal in consideration with what we're contending.

• 12:53Speaker 10

  Oh, in the near future.

• 12:54Rich Roll?

  As we, you know, careen.

• 12:56Speaker 10

  Yeah.

• 12:56Rich Roll?

  Towards the 2024 election. Um, everything is now suddenly infinitely more complicated due to the release of these various LLMs.

• 13:06Speaker 10

  Yeah.

• 13:07Rich Roll?

  The rapid growth of generative AI, deep fake technology, like the tools that are now available on the disinformation battlefield are just extraordinarily powerful. So how do you think about how those tools are going to be deployed? And what we can expect as we, you know, move towards November?

• 13:28Speaker 10

  So I think there's, there's two areas that we, we need to really pay attention to. So, so one is, um, you know, when Mark Zuckerberg, excuse me, when Elon Musk fired a lot of his safety teams, it really shifted the information environment. So one of my, um, uh, my husband and I like to watch YouTube together because we're nerdy. And there's a guy named Peter Zeihan who follows a lot of the politics in Russia. And, you know, he was talking about how it used to be his, one of his best data sources was Twitter. And when Elon came in, he ended up blocking a lot of people who were in, in Russia. But he also, um, like, because he fired the teams that were looking for the coordinated

• 14:08Speaker 10

  behavior, you can really obviously tell the trolls on both sides of the conflict now just outweigh the real voices. And so one is we are investing less in catching bad actors. But the second is the way the tools have changed what's even possible with misinformation. So for, for context for people, one of the ways we used to catch those bots or like catch the networks of people who were pushing an information operation was we look for repetition. So, you know, there's always this interesting trade off between. How much distribution can you do? And how much unique content can you do? Right? So if you, you really don't want to get caught, you write a different thing every time. Before the large language models came out, you, you were limited.

• 14:53Speaker 10

  You know, you, you weren't going to reach a ton of people if every single thing you posted was unique. So you could start looking and saying, interesting. You keep sharing the same links or, or this group of people keeps saying very, very similar things, or maybe even the same thing.

• 15:06Rich Roll?

  Right. And it becomes clear that this is a bot farm.

• 15:09Speaker 10

  Yeah.

• 15:09Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 15:10Speaker 10

  Um, or like China was particularly egregious at this because they would do things like, they would have brigades of tens of thousands of people who would just like flood the comment threads on dissidents' posts with like just the Chinese flag. You know, like, like you can tell this is all the same thing. When you start having large language models, it's now possible to go and generate tens of thousands of unique pieces of content that all basically say the same thing, but say it in slightly different ways. Um, and that makes it a lot harder to see that coordination. Or for example, you know, um, part of what makes misinformation so pernicious is consensus reality is like a channel. You know, there's, there's not like a huge continuum of what you can talk about.

• 15:54Speaker 10

  There's like, you know, we can sit and come to a view of like reality if we talk long enough. Um, when it comes to misinformation, it can play in the entire field of ideas. And whatever is like the most seductive or like, uh, most incendiary on the algorithm, that's the thing that gets distributed. In a world with large language models, you can generate 10,000 different variations and send them to lots of different nooks and figure out what meme, like what idea is most seductive. And that, that just supercharges what can be done with a misinformation campaign.

• 16:30Rich Roll?

  It's terrifying.

• 16:31Speaker 10

  It is.

• 16:31Rich Roll?

  And that, that doesn't even get into all the deep fake stuff.

• 16:35Speaker 10

  Yeah.

• 16:36Rich Roll?

  When you can mock somebody's voice or their likeness in a compelling

• 16:39Speaker 10

  Yeah.

• 16:40Rich Roll?

  way that's indistinguishable from reality, then our footing in what is real and what isn't real vanishes.

• 16:47Speaker 10

  Yeah.

• 16:47Rich Roll?

  And things get really scary.

• 16:49Speaker 10

  Um, it's, we are living, and this is part of why we have to start having more transparency. Because we have tools where we can start saying, hey, we got it, we got to move this ball down the field. Um, but there is no economic incentive today to do those things on their own.

• 17:06Rich Roll?

  So what are we going to do, Francis?

• 17:07Speaker 10

  Yeah.

• 17:07Rich Roll?

  Like, what's the solution here? How do we, how do we? Put a better foot forward.

• 17:11Speaker 10

  So part of, I think, the first step is, is, is just, and this is a big part about why I wrote the book. Like, I'm, I think of the things that I regret the most about the rollout of my book is, is no conservative media has, has offered to like, talk to me, right? Like, I haven't been on Fox News, I haven't, we've reached out to a number of, of.

• 17:30Rich Roll?

  It's interesting. I would think they'd be happy to talk to you.

• 17:33Speaker 10

  I would think so too. Because like, I've been saying consistently since the beginning, you know, content moderation is a flawed strategy. But Facebook spent a huge sum of money on a whisper campaign saying, you know, she's a dark horse for censorship. And so I think the place we start from is an idea that people have the right to see how these systems work. Right? Like, I should have the right to know I am not allowed to sell my book on Facebook. Right? We, the public, should be able to see what content gets taken down. Right now, the only avenues that we have are you can appeal to the Facebook Oversight Board, but it disappears into a black hole. Right?

• 18:12Speaker 10

  Things can really change if we have transparency. And, and, and so we need to first work on how do we make that a bipartisan issue? That we cannot have an information environment that is run by a private company in the dark and have a democracy. And the second thing is like, so how might we actually do that? So, um, Face, uh, Europe passed a law called the Digital Services Act, uh, last year. Um, I talk about in the book, um, that basically it, it sounds, it sounds pretty blah. It's like, you know, if you know there's a risk to your platform, you gotta tell us about it. Like, we know you get to operate behind the curtain, but we can't see. We'll never catch up with you unless you tell us what you already know. You have to tell us what your plan is for reducing that risk.

• 18:57Speaker 10

  And you need to give us enough data that we can see that you're making progress. And if we ask you a question, you have to give us an answer.

• 19:03Rich Roll?

  And if we don't comply?

• 19:04Speaker 10

  So it's, I think it's like 10% of global revenues.

• 19:07Rich Roll?

  Oh, wow.

• 19:08Speaker 10

  Is the penalty.

• 19:08Rich Roll?

  That's, that's for real.

• 19:10Speaker 10

  A real one. Though, when you have a 35% profit margin, it's possible Facebook would come out and say, we are now 25%.

• 19:16Rich Roll?

  It's just a business expense.

• 19:18Speaker 10

  Business expense, yeah.

• 19:22Rich Roll?

  Relentless experimenter and master of podcasting and productivity, Tim Ferriss, joined me for a rather vulnerable exchange on how he grapples with anxiety and depression. We talked about how to face difficult emotions and the various modalities that he's explored, from silent meditation to psychotherapy, including some grounded thoughts on his experiences with psychedelics.

• 19:52Rich Roll?

  You know, maybe we can spend a couple of minutes on some of the more helpful resources. Like we talked about, they're all on your blog. But there's a quote that kind of recurs that I've heard you say a couple of times. To me, it almost acts like a talisman or a way into this process. And I believe it's Tara Brach who said it, focusing on like, or thinking about what it is that you're unwilling to feel.

• 20:19Speaker 11

  Yeah.

• 20:20Rich Roll?

  Right? Like as a, that like really kind of like pulls focus on

• 20:25Speaker 11

  Totally.

• 20:26Rich Roll?

  where to begin.

• 20:27Speaker 11

  Yeah, the Tara Brach, and I really recommend, I'm actually rereading it right now, Radical Acceptance, some of you may, may find that a bit nauseating, and title, and I also was sort of repelled by this very generic title, but it was recommended to me by a PhD in neuroscience who's not in the woo camp at all. And I read it many years ago, and I found it so helpful. And I've been recommending it and recommending it and recommending it. And I recommended it to someone a week. I was like, you know what? Maybe it's time for me to reread that. So I dug back into it. And I think it is in Radical Acceptance, Tara Brach, B-R-A-C-H. I think it is in that book, maybe at the head of one

• 21:10Speaker 11

  of the chapters where she says, "A wise sage once said, 'There is only one question that really matters. What is it that you are unwilling to feel?'" And that is a very focusing question. So that is a good place to start. I'm a journaling junkie. I really find that it is difficult to think clearly, or to even learn what you think without trapping it on paper, so you can examine. The thoughts, very difficult to capture or cross-examine without putting them on paper. Morning pages, I find very, very helpful for this. So in terms of tools, and feel free to, to direct me in any way that you'd like, but in terms of just a handful

• 21:53Speaker 11

  of tools, there are ongoing tools and then there are inputs in the form of books. I would say there are a few that have really impacted me. I've already mentioned Radical Acceptance, so I would put that pretty high on the list. Another book which is shorter and easier to complete, but that many people find super abrasive, is a book called Awareness by Anthony DeMello. It's a short book. It's mostly a cleaned up transcript of public lectures that he gave Jesuit priest and psychotherapist who has, who has since passed. He has a very no BS approach to things, which some people find very offensive. I like that kind of

• 22:33Speaker 11

  tough love coach type vibe, so it works for me. The Waking Up App introductory course, I think for people who have never meditated, who have the opinion, which I did for a very long time, it just ain't for me. Sitting still, humma, humma, humma, whatever you do, I don't think I can do that. My mind's all over the place. The Waking Up App introductory course presents a logical sequence of skill development. That is what makes it, I think, unique and very appealing. It's 10 minutes each morning and do it for a month, your

• 23:11Speaker 11

  life, I think, will change. Your awareness of the scripts that are running your life will become more acute. And then I would say focusing on sleep first and foremost, and I've had a number of chats with Matt Walker of UCSF. On my podcast, really focusing on sleep, since I've had lifelong issues with insomnia, onset insomnia specifically, Tim on consistent good sleep for even three days and Tim on mediocre sleep for three days, those are two different Tims. So really making the compromises necessary,

• 23:52Speaker 11

  taking the actions necessary, for instance, like zone two or higher level aerobic training, which historically I hate. I hate it with a passion. I would much rather go into the gym and do sets of five with heavier weights. I hate aerobic exercise generally. However, I've found a few that seem to, A, dramatically improve my mood and really help me sleep, for whatever set of reasons. And then we can talk about perhaps the one that I've been not so deftly, maybe super obviously navigating around, which is psychedelic assisted therapy.

• 24:28Speaker 11

  That is the amplifier, that is the tool that has allowed me most consistently to take an observer seat where I can look at the beliefs and behaviors that I take for granted, that are automatic, that I think are unavoidable, or that I don't think about at all, that are dictating the quality of my life, or the self punishment that I'm inflicting.

• 25:00Rich Roll?

  Author, Shremu Plant-Based Cheese founder, and my in-house oracle and better half, Julie Piatt, joined me on episode 791, dropping wisdom on finding enlightenment, honoring your physical form, and the beauty that comes from embodying self-love.

• 25:21Speaker 04

  I recently heard somebody raving about, oh, you know, there's this enlightened being, and he's made it through the 12 stages of enlightenment, you know, and I just sort of smiled. I mean, you know, I'm sure the being is very amazing and very beautiful, but it's all a system. It's all a perspective. It's just a fractal. It's a perspective of the crystal of which we all make up. We all come from that. And so- So the other thing that I would like to just offer you as your beloved and as someone who cares for you deeply, and I know that we share this. You say this self-love part is so tough for you. Well, it's tough for all of us. I mean, that is the thing. I mean, you can talk to Gisele, who's like the most beautiful supermodel ever, and she'll tell you that she felt ugly, judged.

• 26:06Speaker 04

  I mean, I don't know her, so Gisele, I don't know if you really said that, but I'm gonna wager that that's true. It doesn't matter. It's like, it's part of the human condition. Because we leave the one, and we come into a body, and we feel this immense separation. And with that separation comes this, you know, falling from the unity, basically. So it's by design that it happens that way. But what I would offer to you is that, I'm starting to think that it's not going to be hard at all, actually. I've had a couple experiences in the last few months where I've glimpsed aspects of

• 26:45Speaker 04

  being embodied in, let's say, a more high-vibrating life form, like in my body. And so, you know, as we're, you know, I'm doing Pilates, or, you know, I'm taking care of my skin, or I'm making sure that I hike, and that I meditate, and that, you know, I don't carry stress in my body. You know, I'm thinking, you know, I'm feeling like, you know, I want to take care of my physical form. And I had this moment where this sort of quantum presence came into my body and showed me just a glimpse of the power, the perfection, the beauty that is just there beyond this density.

• 27:30Speaker 04

  And then I started laughing, and I said, "Actually, I don't, maybe it's not going to be hard at all. Maybe when the frequency gets to that point, it's going to be like the wind blows across your cheek, and suddenly you're rejuvenated, you know? Your back is feeling better." Like, we're, you know? So, again, it's like, this idea of hard work is old. In a lot of ways, old paradigm. It shouldn't be hard work. I am not disciplined. I am not working hard at spirituality. I am in a state of being-ness, of connection to the breath, the moment, the presence, the allowing, the surrender. And the greatest secret that I can share on your show today and right now in my life,

• 28:15Speaker 04

  the superpower is relaxation. That is the superpower. So everyone listening to this, just consider how you are when you're working so hard. You're going for things so, you know, committed. You're wanting this so badly. It's like, just observe all the things in your body that are constricting. It's closing off your life force. It's causing a closing down of energy. And what if you knew that the more you could relax, just everybody just let your belly go, let your body just relax, start to connect to your breath?

• 29:00Speaker 04

  And what if you knew that the more you relaxed, the more light could enter you, the more help you can get from the universe, the more you merge with that which is really sourcing you, living you, breathing you? So this whole idea of this work, you know, we gotta work and it's gotta be so hard, doesn't, it's actually not true. It's an illusion. So again, many years ago, when your beloved friend, who was on the cover of Time Magazine, the Olympian, the swimmer, he's a reverend. Byron Davis? Yeah, Byron Davis. He was sitting at our kitchen table and you guys were having this conversation. We were having this conversation.

• 29:43Speaker 04

  And I was like, how about training for the love of it? Like just for the love of it? And he told this story. He was training for qualifying round or something and he woke up with the flu and he was not in his best self and he was swimming and he was getting beat. And then suddenly, he said, something beyond himself came in and he entered this relaxation and he won. And we had that conversation back then. So it's not, it's not foreign to you, I know that. But I'm reminding you, and I'm not saying, so then don't say that, oh, well then, how does anything get done? You know I do 29 things all the time.

• 30:27Speaker 04

  It's, it's the way it's done. It's the intention that it's done in. And so this world is a beautiful world where we get to evolve through experiences. And that's why every single one of your desires, you should experience it. You should do it. You should go for it, go in it, feel it, you know, be it, become it. Because that's evolution. And that's what we're here for.

• 30:57Rich Roll?

  So much more on its way, but first, a quick word from our partners who make the show possible.

• 31:09Rich Roll?

  Director of Nutrition Studies at the Stanford University Prevention Research Center, Dr. Christopher Gardner joined me to share an evidence-based rational model for nutritional health, as well as a discussion about how to distinguish good nutrition science from bad. Here's an excerpt from that conversation.

• 31:33Speaker 12

  The American Heart Association has regularly, for 50 years, updated their dietary guidelines. And the previous, most recent update was 2006. And in 2021, they did it again. Didn't honestly change all that much, but they refined a few things and they spent a ton of time in this paper, looking at all the literature that was available before 2006 and between 2006 and 2021. Here's all the data we have on who has a heart attack, myocardial infarction, stroke, any kind of cardiovascular disease. Here's 10 domains that cover a heart healthy diet.

• 32:08Speaker 12

  And those are sort of individual things about whole grains and veggies and beans and salt and saturated fat. And they said, here's the things to include or avoid. And then the public said, so what does that mean? Should I be vegan? Or should I be Mediterranean? Or should I be paleo? And I said, ah, you know what? We should do another paper on patterns. So instead of individual components, how many of these popular dietary patterns out there could be consistent with this set of domains?

• 32:35Rich Roll?

  In other words, like the overlap in the Venn diagram between all of these different perspectives?

• 32:41Speaker 12

  And so I want to focus on the overlap at first. So the 10 patterns we picked were the DASH diet, that's the dietary approaches to stop hypertension, Mediterranean, three types of vegetarians, we had PESC, we had the Ovo-Lacto-Vegetarian, we had vegan, sort of a higher-fat vegan. We also had a really low-fat vegan diet. We had a low-carb, a low-fat, a paleo, and a keto. I hope that was 10, because we had 10 patterns. And we tried to match them up to the 10 domains. And we scored them from high to low. And DASH and Mediterranean got the best score, and paleo and keto got the worst score, as you were matching these domains. And happy to go into some of those details if you

• 33:25Speaker 12

  want. But one of my takeaways that I thought was great was, across all 10, they all said more vegetables, more whole foods, less added sugar, and less refined grain. Across all 10. Now, this could be a trivial response, if those are things we already did. Those are four of the biggest problems with the US diet. We don't eat many vegetables. We eat a lot of ultra-processed food. We eat a crap-ton of added sugar, and a crap-ton of refined grain. So for me, this is a kumbaya moment. Oh, my God, all the patterns agree on 50% of probably what plagues human health associated with diet. Why don't we all get together and work on that?

• 34:08Rich Roll?

  That's no fun. Ah.

• 34:10Speaker 12

  Yes, it's not as, the clickbait doesn't work, but we really all agree on those. And those are all big issues. The one extra one I'd love to add in there is beans. I actually think eating more beans is probably the biggest thing Americans could do to change their diet in a positive way. And there's so many kinds of beans, culturally appropriate, lots of unapologetically delicious dishes with lentils and chickpeas and kidney beans and refried beans. Oh, my God. But you wouldn't get the paleo and keto in there, right? Because they're, they're super low carb and beans are full of carbs. So if you, after the four things I mentioned first that they all agree on, the next ones I would add would be beans. We kind of all agree on beans.

• 34:56Rich Roll?

  Yeah. I mean, I like that way of looking at it, like this heat map sort of perspective that allows you to transcend all the labels and the tribalism and all of that and really just focus on, you know, this is, I think you've characterized this as being like 50% of the, but it's, it's kind of like 90, 90%, isn't it? I mean, it's really like if you do those four things and then maybe the fifth with the beans, like you're on the five yard line, pretty much, right?

• 35:27Speaker 12

  And, and so, and another way to appreciate, to, yeah, acknowledge that, appreciate it is, I do think there are arguments for some of these low carb, low fat, high protein, individual things.

• 35:39Rich Roll?

  For whom and when?

• 35:39Speaker 12

  At the margins.

• 35:40Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 35:41Speaker 12

  At the margins. After you've got the foundation right. So there'd be a lot less bickering if, yeah, I do all these things and, huh, and I actually prefer avocado to steel cut oats or something. I, I, I prefer this higher protein to this higher carb, whatever. Yeah, I think you could hedge your bets. And at that point, Sort of biohack your own metabolism and come up with something that's a little better for you than the other thing, but can you please fix the first 50 or 90%? Because we all agree on that and you're doing that wrong.

• 36:14Rich Roll?

  Right, so this first tier of the heat map, less added sugar, less refined grains, way more starchy veg, more whole foods, less ultra-processed foods, and then with the footnote around beans, but then there's a tier just below this, right? Okay, we've done that, now how do we get to the next level?

• 36:32Speaker 12

  Now, I flipped that one little thing, you said starchy veg? So the one thing they all agree on is non-starchy veg.

• 36:36Rich Roll?

  That's what I meant to say, sorry about that.

• 36:37Speaker 12

  Broccoli, cauliflower, leafy greens, red bell peppers.

• 36:40Rich Roll?

  But then, then you get to the avocado, the avocados, the nuts, the seeds, the olive oil, fruits, are we gonna eat fish, are we gonna eat eggs? Like, that kind of all falls into that next tier.

• 36:54Speaker 12

  You're talking about this, this core that has a second ring, and my second ring is beans, oh my god, with lectins, fruits, oh my god, they have sugar, nuts, oh my god, they have fat, eggs, oh my god, they have cholesterol, fish, oh my god, they have a face. You know, at that, at that second level, the lectins don't matter, the sugar in fruits is fine, it's in the food matrix, the nuts have unsaturated fat. So that next tier of foods is pretty good. But it's at the margin after you deal with that thing in the middle.

• 37:29Rich Roll?

  And let's assume we've now mastered this tier.

• 37:32Speaker 12

  Okay.

• 37:32Rich Roll?

  What comes next? Where are we gonna, we're gonna go behind the velvet rope and, you know, put the cherry on top of the sundae?

• 37:39Speaker 12

  Yeah, so to be honest, Americans eat too much wheat, they eat too much grain, they even eat too much whole grain bread. So glycemic index is how fast the glucose from the food you're eating ends up in your blood. And a shocking thing for people who read into this and look it up is that white flour bread and whole wheat bread have the same glycemic index. It's like, wait. Very high. High glycemic index is not good. I switched from white flour to whole wheat flour. Why wasn't that better? And the reason it wasn't better is because it was ground to a powder and most of the digestion was done. So the time it takes you to eat it and absorb it is really small.

• 38:22Speaker 12

  If you had used the whole grain, which is the wheat berry, it would have taken much longer for your enzymes to digest it and make the molecules small enough to absorb. So you were saying, go to the next level of these concentric rings. So grains. So a funny thing that I learned from doing some studies related to protein and trying to figure out where our protein comes from is looking at the USDA's fabulous website of all the food we produce and what we eat. And under grains, it said, okay, grains include oats and barley and wheat and this other thing, but because Americans, 90% of the grains that eat are wheat, we're simply using the value for wheat for this thing that we're analyzing. And I stopped for a moment.

• 39:07Speaker 12

  I said, really? There's all these grains out there and 90% of what Americans eat is wheat? And most of that is bread, right? Pizza crust, donuts, you know, some kind of bread like thing. So at that next level, I think is grains. So I've actually, I hosted a debate one time between a paleo person and a Mediterranean person and a middle of the road person. And I tried to force them to say, what do you agree on? I know you guys disagree on some things. What do you agree on? And the first thing I got them all to agree on that people didn't expect was grains.

• 39:46Speaker 12

  Even like the vegan person said, yeah, if I was going to get rid of anything next, it would be grains because so much of it is refined, even the whole grain bread.

• 40:02Rich Roll?

  Your darkest moments will either break you beyond repair, or they're gonna make you stronger. Well, this was a choice faced by Steph Kochudal as her husband, beloved ultra runner Tommy Rives, battled a very rare form of cancer that nearly took his life. Steph joined me in episode 787 to discuss the big things in life: trauma, mortality, love, grief, and meaning, all of which are beautifully explored in her memoir, Everything All at Once.

• 40:35Rich Roll?

  If you cosign to the idea that all of us have capacity and potential that we're walking around with, that we're just not aware of, or we haven't really brought forth in our own lives, do we really need to be in that kind of a tragic event? Or to suffer extreme pain in order to manifest it? It's a choice. It just rarely happens, short of basically being boxed into a corner in that kind of a way.

• 41:05Speaker 08

  Yeah. Well, similarly, Rives and I are, for lack of a better word, happier together than we've ever been. And people are like, "How are you so happy?" I'm like, "Ah, just make him almost die, and then you'll..." You know what I mean? You'll go through together this recognition of how much you love each other and how important you are to each other, and things that we take for granted that are sometimes only shown to us in the depths of despair, sadly. How do you access that feeling of gratitude and awareness when you're not in the depths? And I'm struggling with that now, even.

• 41:42Rich Roll?

  Please tell me how to do that.

• 41:43Speaker 08

  Yeah, right. Oh, you don't know? Because I'm now even, I want to maintain the lessons I learned: be present. There's no better moment than this moment right now. And all the love you ever need is inside of you. All of these truths, I know them, but it's harder to feel them when life is good. What I learned, and what I'm learning, is that memory...

• 42:07Speaker 08

  Our memory is the cursor to things that are always happening. These memories are actually ever-present and we can access them and go back to that time in a moment.

• 42:17Rich Roll?

  Well, they're consciously or unconsciously impacting every decision that we make. So they do live in the present.

• 42:23Speaker 08

  Yeah, they do, absolutely. And I mean, the most, the like, the starkest example of this was when RIVS was at the end of his life. And I went in there to say goodbye, is what they told me to do. And I rested my head on his chest and in a moment, we were dancing together and we were living that moment together in the present. And nobody could tell me that didn't happen, that I was not metaphysically there, because I was. My body was here, but I was there with him and we were dancing together. And that, that memory, I feel, drew us back together into this world and called him back

• 43:07Speaker 08

  to this life. And I think that example was why I wanted to weave the malleability of time into, into my whole book. Because I realized that it was memory that was saving me over and over again, mostly the memory of love. And, and that's what I feel kept me my whole life from going over the edge. These, these ever-present moments of presence that I was called back to. And, and on the other hand, RIVS, he lived lifetimes in his coma. He was, I mean, he has some incredible stories about where he was and where he went and how many different families he had.

• 43:51Speaker 08

  And who's to say that those weren't real, that those weren't really occurring lives? You know? I'm not, I would never say, he says some of those memories of when he was in the coma feel more real than this life memory, you know?

• 44:06Rich Roll?

  Wow.

• 44:07Speaker 08

  So I'm really, really interested in the quantum aspect that I don't, I wish I understood on a physics level.

• 44:16Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 44:18Speaker 08

  But I, all I know is my experience with, with time and um.

• 44:24Rich Roll?

  So what do we take from that? How are we supposed to interpret that? Or how is that meant to, from your perspective, inform our lives?

• 44:34Speaker 08

  I mean, really, it's that love is woven into every aspect of our lives in, in the form of memory.

• 44:44Speaker 08

  And that in the most tragic moments, love or the memory of love is still there. And I like to think of my father, whether he exists in a spiritual realm or just in a memory. I think that the memory of his love is the same as saying that he lives in some spirit world. And that that love is entwined in, in every aspect of my life. And, um, and it's in all of our lives. And if, what, one of the most pivotal moments of, of my life to date was recognizing how that love had been in, in everything, absolutely everything. When I was drunk, crying under a table, when I was hitchhiking through Guatemala, when I was,

• 45:29Speaker 08

  you know, everything that I did, love was there. I just, I just didn't recognize it in myself, so I couldn't recognize it in other people.

• 45:41Rich Roll?

  Up next is serial entrepreneur and the host of the United Kingdom's number one podcast, Diary of a CEO, Stephen Bartlett, who shared some really great wisdom on how to hone discipline and balance ambition with self-care.

• 46:00Speaker 13

  In this moment, how I'm feeling is I feel like I've overextended myself in my life. I feel like 12 months ago or six months ago, I must've said yes to too many things and not have been cognizant of the nature of my, the fact that my time is finite. And this is a constant battle I have in my life, which is my ambition is maybe exceeding my capacity. Um, which I need to put into check because I pay the price for that. I end up having, letting someone down somewhere and also therefore myself in the process. And right now where I'm at, I've definitely taken on too much stuff. Mm hmm. So endurance is great. What we need is consistency and sustainability. We don't need intensity.

• 46:42Speaker 13

  Intensity is maybe useful in spurts, but you can't maintain intensity for a consistent enduring period of time. Nobody can without something falling by the wayside, that matters. And I, the frame I try and apply to the decisions when I see something on my list, a request that comes in, is how would I feel if I had to do that tomorrow? And that's the frame I should be applying, which is how would I feel if I had to do that later on today? Well, tomorrow, because I fall under the same bias, which is I defer it to a future Steve, who I can't yet understand the circumstances of the day that he's currently in. And by bringing it to today's Steve, it kind of helps me filter out things against my values and intentions.

• 47:23Speaker 13

  And that whole frame generally, I was talking about this last night to one of my friends, have really been cognizant that when you wake up every day, after spending eight of your, as I talk about my first book, proverbial chips on sleep. Mm hmm. You have these 16 chips left and how you place those 16 chips on the roulette table of life is the center point of your influence on your own life. The allocation of those 16 chips on this proverbial roulette table of life. And when the wheel spins every day, you find out the returns you've got. So these 16 chips, how do I place them? And what are my values? And you're trying to place them where your values are. And if you, if you land on your values, you get great returns. So placing two against spending time with my girlfriend in the evening, placing four against my podcast,

• 48:06Speaker 13

  four against my businesses, two against DJing, one against gym. That's a, that's time I'll spend. And I might also, it's important to say this, I might place one against binging Netflix. Mm hmm. If it was intentional, it's not wasted time. It's only wasted time in my regard when you, you didn't do it consciously and intentionally. And that framework is so important because if you look at anyone's how we allocate our time, it's so clear. We think we're going to live forever. It's why on all of my desks, on my bookshelf behind me on the diary of a CEO, I have this sand timer because I don't believe humans can imagine in infinity or finality. I don't think we're capable of such a thing. So we allocate our time in trivial, regrettable ways, but our time is

• 48:49Speaker 13

  literally the currency we have. The allocation of my time up until this moment where I'm sat with you today is the thing that has put me in this chair today. It's like well allocated time in my regard because I managed to get, you know, to have a conversation with you. So thinking through that tech, that framework and reminding myself that, you know, time is so, so precious and so finite allows you to hopefully make decisions about what you're doing with your day that are unregrettable, which is my goal at the moment.

• 49:18Rich Roll?

  Yeah, I think it requires or it demands a certain type of discipline that might not be immediately obvious because when we think about discipline, we think about, you know, how hard can we work or how can we make that hard choice to delay gratification. But discipline comes in many forms. I think the chapter in the new book about discipline, you come up with this equation, right? About that, which kind of speaks to, you know, what you just mentioned.

• 49:47Speaker 13

  I actually, the title of that law in my book was about time. It was about time management. I started out to write about time management because everyone wants time management techniques. And as I go down there and as I start doing my research on time management techniques, I discovered there are hundreds, right? And I also, if I'm honest with myself, there's none that I use. So I asked myself, why? And in the same way that there's lots of fad diets out there, the reason why there's so many time management techniques is because none of them fundamentally work. So people keep going in search of new ones and creating new ones because they lack the fundamental skill of discipline. So I asked myself, okay, why does discipline matter? Well, in a world where time is finite, as we've just discussed, you can only do so many things. And so I try and figure out

• 50:32Speaker 13

  why in some areas of my life, I've been disciplined with the gym, six, seven days a week, with DJing, with my businesses, and why in other areas of my life has my discipline lapsed? So I tried to write a simple equation. Which is, and I'd love to you to interrogate this with me because I'm still, you know, trying to refine the equation, but at the start of the equation, you have in simple terms, why does the goal matter to you? Right? Plus, the psychological enjoyment you get in the pursuit of the goal. Minus, let's call it the psychological disengagement or the psychological friction associated with the goal. So with going to the gym, I started going in the, on March 2020,

• 51:15Speaker 13

  and I've been going for over three years now. March 2020, I watched a pandemic sweep the world, and I watched through my TV screen, people dying because of health, their health circumstances, and the correlation between outcomes and your health circumstance. It was so traumatic to me that it increased my why to so much so that the habit stuck. And it was so clear to me now that the foundation of all my goals, my businesses, my girlfriend, my relationship, my dog, my family, was my health. I saw the tectonic plate shake underneath everything I care about. The pursuit itself of going to the gym is psychologically enjoyable, as long as the gym is close and as long as it's private. So I'm not spending a lot of time just talking about the podcast with people.

• 52:01Speaker 13

  Minus the friction associated to it. So reducing the friction means me finding a private gym. I actually stopped going to the gym when my, when people knew who I was, because people came up to me a lot. The friction increased. And Simon Sinek challenged this the other day with me, and he goes, well, you know, like, I get up every morning and I go and empty the bin outside my house, because, and he goes, I don't enjoy that, and it's not meaningful to me. I go, yeah, but it is, Simon. Because what happens if you, so if we examine that through that framework, what happens if you don't empty the bin outside your house, Simon? Well, you're going to get fined, and it's going to overflow for the whole week. So your why is actually pretty high. The psychological enjoyment is low. Sorry, the enjoyment is low, and the friction is high. But the why is higher

• 52:43Speaker 13

  than the friction is. Getting out of bed at 8:00 AM. It matters more to you, the why, the pursuit, you know, achieving that goal, than the friction is unmotivating for you. If at some point, they reduced the why, so you would no longer get fines, and you had a second bin, you wouldn't get out of bed. The friction would win out. And so the reason it's important to think through that framework is you can influence it. If there's something in your life where you're not disciplined, you can focus on that first half of the equation. Remind yourself why this really, really matters to you. And then do everything you can to make the pursuit of the goal as enjoyable and as engaging as you can.

• 53:23Rich Roll?

  What do you do when you have two very different dreams vying for your attention? Well, this is the dilemma faced by five-time world champion professional triathlete and the Oscar-nominated screenwriter of last year's Best Picture winner, All Quiet on the Western Front. Her name is Leslie Patterson, and here she shares some wisdom gold from that exchange.

• 53:49Rich Roll?

  My whole life, like, there's athletes and there's artists.

• 53:52Speaker 02

  Right.

• 53:52Rich Roll?

  And never the twain shall meet. These are people who are configured differently.

• 53:56Speaker 02

  Yep.

• 53:57Rich Roll?

  And it's up to you to figure out which one of those two, if you're interested in both, you kind of have to pick one.

• 54:02Speaker 02

  Totally.

• 54:03Rich Roll?

  And nobody's gonna tell you that it's cool to do both.

• 54:05Speaker 02

  No, absolutely. And you're kind of like an outlier in both, right? So, you know, as an athlete, you're, you know, everyone makes fun of the artists, and they have a completely different time clock. They stay up all night, they smoke, they don't take care of their bodies. They have, they cannot understand the athlete. And then equally, you know, the artist is like, you know, they have no sense of the athlete, what that's like. You know, neither camp can truly understand. And yet, I feel like there's so much similarity and there's so much you can draw down from, from each craft.

• 54:47Rich Roll?

  So what would be some of those things?

• 54:49Speaker 02

  So I think the main thing is the discipline that I learned from sport

• 54:58Speaker 02

  really helped the creativity. Because as ethereal is being creative, and when is that good idea gonna come? If you still give yourself some sense of structure, then you're working towards something. And certainly, when it comes to screenplay writing, right? There's a lot of structure. It's almost like... If you know the structure enough, then you can let it go and it becomes intuitive. And that's the same in sport. If you train enough to push yourself to the limits enough, then in the race you'll find your zone. So it's kind of like the same. And then equally, I think in sport, if you really want to get to the top, you have to be creative.

• 55:40Speaker 02

  You have to think outside the box about how you're going to push your mind and your body to truly achieve greatness. And, you know, I went down a lot of systems in sport, you know, a lot of national bodies, the British national body. And certainly this was back kind of in the nineties and the early two thousands when they weren't as developed as they are now. But it was so, it was like, okay, there's one way to do this. And if you're not good at this one way, then you're never going to be a world champion. And I wasn't good at that one way. And I'm like, well, yeah, but I still think I could be good. Um, so the creativity allowed me to investigate so many other ways. And I love it because my husband Simon says it's, it's, you know, a cargo net, it's not a ladder.

• 56:21Rich Roll?

  Hmm.

• 56:22Speaker 02

  To the top.

• 56:23Rich Roll?

  Explain that. It's a cargo net, not a ladder.

• 56:24Speaker 02

  A cargo net means there's many different ways to the top. A ladder, there's one, there's one.

• 56:30Rich Roll?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 56:31Speaker 02

  Um, yeah, and that's, that's kind of a beautiful analogy because that's how I think I've gotten to the top in both. It's just kind of like really going to the side and up and down and up and to the side and across. And, and being at peace with that, um, is wow, which is taking time.

• 56:49Rich Roll?

  Right, because you are an outlier and you are bucking the system. And as a result, there will be pushback or resistance or criticism for trying to find a different way.

• 57:00Speaker 02

  Oh, yeah.

• 57:01Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 57:01Speaker 02

  All the time.

• 57:02Rich Roll?

  Yeah. And I, I think it, it, it, it puts the lie to the test, this notion that the artist is struck with inspiration after, you know, a pack of cigarettes and a bottle of, you know, bourbon at three AM. And, and, and, you know, helps one to realize, and this is a very kind of Steven Pressfield, Seth Godin kind of thing, that, that creativity is a discipline in the same way, the pursuit of. Excellence in sport is it requires rigor and structure, accountability and all of those things. You have to create those structures in order to make space for the creativity to appear.

• 57:40Speaker 02

  Exactly.

• 57:40Rich Roll?

  In that idea of like, you know, the war of art or turning pro, like, are you a professional? Like, if you're a professional creative, then you show up for it every day in the same way you show up for practice for your sport. You can't say, I have writer's block. That would be like saying, you know, I have, I have sport block today. Like, I'm not going, you know, I'm not gonna show up for practice.

• 58:04Speaker 02

  But equally, it's like, even if you do have some kind of block, or you're not making the forward momentum that you want to, it's saying, how can I get a positive result today? What does that mean? What does that look like? And having, again, that's that cargo net analogy, where, you know, what you deem to be successful on any given day, you know, is different for every individual. But certainly for me in sport, right, I would have many shitty days. I mean, any top athlete will tell you that. Many, many shitty days. I've dealt with Lyme disease, chronic injuries. So how can you find something positive that you can still make a step forward in some capacity, whether that's mentally or physically? And similarly, you know, on the,

• 58:47Speaker 02

  on the art front, on storytelling front, on script writing front, you know, it's understanding how your brain works, what suits you, what doesn't, how to still find some kind of momentum, even when you're having a bad day. And maybe that's, I'm such a positive person. I love to find the positivity in anything. And I don't know if that's because I grew up, you know, my dad's pretty, pretty tough Scottish man, you know, nothing is ever gonna impress him, however it has.

• 59:18Rich Roll?

  Now I'm getting, now I'm getting the truth. This is what I was getting at earlier.

• 59:22Speaker 02

  Yeah, but, you know, nothing really impresses him, right? You know, and that real Scottish, you know, bring people down that are successful. You know, whereas my mom is the opposite, right? Gushing and everything's amazing. And so it's like, you kind of strike the balance between both. But they create your driving force to understand how to find positivity in any situation.

• 59:50Rich Roll?

  Where does happiness come from? And how do we get more of it? If you find yourself grappling with these questions, then my conversation with Arthur Brooks from episode 683 is gonna be your jam. Arthur is a professor at Harvard Business School and the bestselling author of Build the Life You Want. Here is a clip from that conversation.

• 1:00:14Speaker 03

  Most people say, "I want to be happy." To begin with, that's the wrong goal, because you can't be happy. Happiness is not a destination. Happiness is a direction. You can't be... For somebody to be truly happy would mean that you would need to eliminate the parts of your life that are literally keeping you alive, like your negative emotions. You need anger and sadness and disgust, and you need grief, and you need all these things to stay alive and deal with the world. So pure happiness shouldn't be the goal, but getting happier is a legitimate goal for everybody. The biggest mistake that people make is thinking that it's a feeling and chasing a feeling. Happiness is not a feeling. It has feelings associated with it, but feelings of happiness are really evidence of happiness. Sort of the smell of dinner is the evidence of dinner. It's not dinner itself.

• 1:00:59Speaker 03

  It would be a very disappointing dinner if it were just the smell of Thanksgiving, you know, shoot it into the air. And then that's what chasing feelings is really like. It's incredibly ephemeral, and it's a terrible thing to live that way, to live trying, hoping that tomorrow you'll feel a different way. And so the first freeing thing is that, number one, don't worry about being happier. Let's work on getting happier. It's a project. That's number one, very empowering. And number two is that it's not a feeling. It's something that you really can work on. It's something, it's a skill you can really get better at. So that's the prelude to how people see it wrong and how they can be encouraged to see it correctly and start to get better at. Then the whole question becomes, "Okay, it's not a feeling, what is it?"

• 1:01:42Speaker 03

  And that's a big, that's a controversy in the world of social psychology and social science in general, even neuroscience, what is happiness? But as a functional definition, you find that people who have the most well-being in their lives have balance and abundance across three things, sort of macronutrients. So the protein, carbohydrates, and fat of happiness are enjoyment, satisfaction, and purpose. Those are the three things that people actually need. And none of those things is as simple as it sounds. Each one has a literature of science behind it and has protocols and habits that we can all pursue and get better at. So the great news is that every single person watching us can get happier.

• 1:02:25Speaker 03

  And the better news is we know what they can work on to get happier, but they need the knowledge.

• 1:02:30Rich Roll?

  Right. So this idea that happiness, we can, we can have a debate on how we particularly define what it is, but the truth of the matter is that that's less important than this idea that it is evidence or something that comes about as a result of these three macronutrients that we should all pursue.

• 1:02:54Speaker 03

  Getting better at.

• 1:02:55Rich Roll?

  That will, yeah, as, as a kind of way of life. It's not one, something you do once, it's something that you incorporate into the way that you're living your life, correct?

• 1:03:03Speaker 03

  Right.

• 1:03:04Rich Roll?

  That will, time and again, produce that sensation of happiness, however ephemeral or fleeting it may be, but with some regularity, it will build more of that into your life.

• 1:03:17Speaker 03

  Exactly right, exactly right. And these are skills that you can get better at. This is the, you know, the best news of all, but you have to know what they are. And, and it's not straightforward.

• 1:03:25Rich Roll?

  No, it's not. When you say enjoyment as one of these, that, that could create some confusion.

• 1:03:29Speaker 03

  It can. And part of the biggest confusion is especially for people that are really into improving themselves through knowledge that they can get on, you know, the Rich Roll Podcast, for example, is they might make the mistake of thinking that enjoyment is pleasure. And it's absolutely not. Pleasure is, is a limbic phenomenon. It's an ancient phenomenon. It's a signal to you that something is going to be good for your survival or passing on your genes. But the pursuit of pleasure will not bring you happiness, it will bring you addiction. That's as sure as we're sitting here is what it will do. And the reason is because it's a fleeting thing. It's a fleeting sensation. If you hit the lever and hit the lever, you'll change your brain chemistry to get really, really good to bring you that pleasure, and that will give you addiction.

• 1:04:11Speaker 03

  You know, all addictions are based in an excessive and unhealthy stimulation of dopamine, the neuromodulator dopamine in the human brain. So the reason that, for example, that, you know, drinking too much brings pleasure but doesn't bring happiness is because it doesn't actually bring enjoyment. So this is the key thing to understand. Enjoyment has a base in pleasure, but it adds two things. It adds people and memory. So anything that you do that brings pleasure, you do alone, look out. As a rule of thumb, anything that's pleasurable that you do alone is not going to bring you happiness. You need people involved and you need memory, which is part of your prefrontal cortex, is your executive function has to be involved in that.

• 1:04:54Speaker 03

  And a good example of how we understand this intuitively, you know, Anheuser-Busch has a beer commercial. They never have how a lot of people are using Bud Light, which is pounding a 12-pack alone in their apartment. That's... And the reason that they don't advertise it that way, which is that they don't want to advertise their product as a way to get pleasure, but not happiness. They have people drinking Bud Light with their friends or with their family and making a memory. Because it's pleasure, feels good, plus people, plus memory. And then you actually get happiness. And so this is the way to think about gambling, if you're going to gamble. This is the way to think about sexual activity. This is the way to think about any of these things that if it's, you know, alone and compulsive, becomes a problem.

• 1:05:39Speaker 03

  But if it's sociable and it creates memory, it actually can be, enhance your happiness. Everybody who... And I don't drink alcohol. You don't drink alcohol. I don't know how to drink alcohol in a normal way. Why? Because I started drinking alcohol when I was 13, 14 years old, and it was nothing but solitary pleasure. And I never learned how to make it into a source of enjoyment. That's the reason that it became a problem, is because I was never able to use it in a responsible way where it could enhance my happiness.

• 1:06:05Rich Roll?

  We've got a lot more to come, but first...

• 1:06:15Rich Roll?

  All right, people. Enter Brad Stulberg, a writer and a coach specializing in human performance. Brad made his fourth appearance on the podcast this year, delivering a powerful primer on embracing transformation, how to cultivate resilience, and how to adapt to an ever-changing world.

• 1:06:36Speaker 06

  We tend to think of change as something that happens to us, or these singular events, when in reality, we are just always in conversation with change. And because we think of it as these singular events, we often relate to change as something that happens to us, instead of something that we're in conversation with. And the kernel of the idea, I know you said you want to get into it, so I'm sure we will in more detail. Early COVID, just article after article with the headline, "When are things going to get back to normal?" And it struck me that back to normal is probably never going to happen. And then I did what

• 1:07:18Speaker 06

  I do, which is I got really curious and I started looking at the literature on how we think about change and realized these two competing models of homeostasis and allostasis. And we spend a lot of time thinking about homeostasis, and that's kind of the conventional prevailing model, but it's not necessarily the best fit one.

• 1:07:36Rich Roll?

  So explain that difference between homeostasis and allostasis. What is that concept?

• 1:07:43Speaker 06

  So, homeostasis is this notion that living systems crave stability, and any time that they are confronted with change or disruption, they try to get back to that stability as swiftly as possible. So it describes a pattern of order or stability, and some sort of disorder or change, and then back to order.

• 1:08:04Rich Roll?

  Right. And that was sort of the prevailing... I don't know if theology is the right word, but kind of operating system for how things work, how biological systems operate, how ecosystems operate for a long time.

• 1:08:19Speaker 06

  That's right. Since the mid 1800s, a scientist named Walter Cannon coined it. And science was very different in the mid 1800s. I mean, we're talking like pre-vaccines, germ theory of disease. Yeah, it stuck with us for a very long time. And it's really approached upon, not just scientific or biological change, but how we think about so many different changes, including habit change. I mean, if you Google homeostasis and change, you'll see like, this is why losing weight is hard. This is why starting a habit is hard. This is why stopping a bad habit is hard. But then about 20 years ago, researchers reevaluated this model of homeostasis. And they said, actually, when you look at really vital, thriving systems,

• 1:09:04Speaker 06

  they don't follow this path of order, disorder, order. Yes, systems want to be stable, but that stability is achieved somewhere new by changing. And allostasis is a process of order, disorder, reorder. And what's fascinating is if you look at the etymology of these words, homo means same and stasis means standing. So it's having the same standing by being the same. And allo means variable. So allostasis is literally translated into stability through change. And I think that it's this beautiful double meaning where the way that we're stable is by being able to change to some extent. So we stay stable not by resisting change, but by changing.

• 1:09:47Rich Roll?

  Extrapolating on that idea, you can't help but think about evolution. Like if it was order, disorder, order, there would be no evolution. It is only through the reordering that you see the adaptation, really. So what you're saying basically is there's a status quo, there's an intervening set of circumstances. And then there's an adaptation to those circumstances that hopefully creates a new version of that impermanent.

• 1:10:16Rich Roll?

  Homeostasis.

• 1:10:18Speaker 06

  That's it. Yeah. And evolution is, I think, change on the grandest scale that we know of. And you see allostasis playing out at the species level. But then you zoom in on a given individual and you think about personal evolution or how we grow over the course of our life. And it's very much the same. Like, we're constantly somewhere in that cycle of order, disorder, reorder. Even if you lived in like a container that was completely shielded from the elements, you're still aging. So I think it is really helpful to think of your identity like a house. And within that house, you want to have some different rooms.

• 1:10:57Speaker 06

  And you might have the room of parent, of partner, of creative, of athlete, of employee. You name it. It's okay to go spend all your time in one room for a season of your life, maybe even a few, right? I mean, a couple of books ago, right, I co-wrote The Passion Paradox. It's literally in the subtitle, like a guide to going all in. So it's okay. You don't have to balance your time across all five of those rooms or six of those rooms. But I think it is just so important to make sure that those other rooms are available to you so that when shit hits the fan in the room that you're in, you can go step into another room. And this isn't just my hypothesis. In the literature, it's called self-complexity.

• 1:11:41Speaker 06

  And individuals that have higher levels of self-complexity tend to be more resilient to change.

• 1:11:49Rich Roll?

  One of the world's most compelling and iconic public figures, the singular Arnold Schwarzenegger, shared how he reached the pinnacle of success in three very different careers. We also discussed why he believes adversity breeds character, as well as lessons from his book, Be Useful.

• 1:12:10Speaker 09

  I think that one of the things that you learn in sports is that if you just get stuck in your own training routine and not learn from other people, that you will never become a champion. And so, open-mindedness was very important to me. And so I think, like I said in my book, I learned a lot of my lessons from sports. And to me, that kind of like, and having people like Freddie Gerstl, that mentor, that talked about open-mindedness and learning from others. To me, it was always kind of like learning new things and being able to, the more you become a celebrity, to be able to use that celebrity power for something positive, for something good.

• 1:12:55Speaker 09

  And so to me, it was, I learned, the more I opened up my mind, the better it was. There was a guy by the name of Vince Geronda. You maybe have heard of him since you're a fitness fanatic yourself.

• 1:13:11Speaker 09

  He had a gym over in the valley, Vince's Gym. And I saw him doing an exercise, a triceps exercise. And I looked at him, I said, "What are you doing there?" He said, "This is for the outside tricep that splits the one head from the other end." And I said, "This looks like a kind of a Mickey Mouse exercise." Jesus Christ, it doesn't look like some heavy lift of some sort. And he says, "Well, just try it." So I said to myself, "Well, the way you try it, the way I tried it in those days was, I would do an exercise, forty sets of twenty reps." So I was lying there on the bench, on my back, taking this dumbbell and going like this, twenty times, then take it over to this side,

• 1:13:56Speaker 09

  do the same thing over here, same to this arm, back and forth, back and forth, like this. The next day, this muscle here was just jumping all over the place. So I realized... He was absolutely correct. I never ever thought of that. There's actually a specific muscle. We always know about sculpting your body that you add more chest or more serratus muscles or some obliques or some biceps or some more thighs. But then you can actually dissect it to a specific part of the three muscles. That's why it's called triceps. The three muscles there. And one separates the bicep from the tricep and makes it appear. Not that measurement wise it's bigger, but makes it appear much larger. So I was doing that. And that exists from that point on.

• 1:14:42Speaker 09

  And it just, it was, I said to myself, if I wouldn't have listened to him, I would have never learned that exercise. But I listened to him. I first said to myself, brushed it off, I said, Nicky Mouse exercise. And I said, no, no, no. Let's just try it before we kind of like come to a conclusion. And sure enough, so you learn from those kind of experiences. And then apply this rule with everything.

• 1:15:06Rich Roll?

  Mm hmm.

• 1:15:06Speaker 09

  And so that's why I was always uh rather more hungry for more information. More hungry for listening rather than talking.

• 1:15:16Rich Roll?

  You know, how do you think about the way that our culture now uh thinks about mental health? Uh, and and our relationship with this idea of of powerlessness?

• 1:15:31Speaker 09

  I think that in general, I think what the book is trying to do is to say to people, you need to work on yourself. If you just try to be pampered and if you're trying to be soft and if you're trying to be the victim and all, you're not gonna go anywhere. We need to get stronger. We need to get bossier. We need to get tougher. We need to not be afraid of failure. We got to go into the work. We got to face adversity. Adversity breeds character.

• 1:16:14Speaker 09

  The strength and fighting and resistance, it does not only make the muscle grow, but it makes also your head grow, makes you a stronger person. We have to be willing to go through hardship, through suffering, through pain, through crying periods. All of that stuff, don't shy away from any of that because it just makes you stronger. And I think the day a lot of times, our youth is so into kind of, oh, let's make him feel good. Oh, no, let's be more sensitive. Well, I totally agree with you to be sensitive about things, but I mean, there's also a sweet spot. Can we go too far? You know, it's like when someone says, well, today I just need to sleep in.

• 1:16:58Speaker 09

  It's that bullshit. Yeah. You don't need to sleep in. This country was not built on sleeping in. So let's get up in the morning and let's get on that bike and let's do some exercise and don't even think about it. Don't look at your email or anything like this. Let's just get going. Boom, boom, boom. Let's get going. Let's start building. And so that's the idea, is just not to be overly soft and overly kind of like sensitive and everyone is in the victim kind of a thing. I just don't buy into that. But you have to understand that every person has to be approached also differently. It's like the mind is just like the body. I cannot give you exactly the same training routine that I had

• 1:17:42Speaker 09

  because your body is different. You're a much leaner person. You need kind of to do maybe lesser reps and what this, you have to have a different diet if you want to bulk up and all this. So I have to be aware of that, that even within my family, one of my daughters had to be approached differently than my other daughter. One son had to be approached differently than the other son. So you have to be sensitive about those kind of things. But overall, it was discipline in the house. You don't turn out that light, I will unscrew those light bulbs and you will be going into a dark room at the age of three and you will be scared. So you better start learning to turn off those lights. You have someone else make you bed. Okay, I'm gonna take the mattress and throw it down the balcony.

• 1:18:26Speaker 09

  And then you carry it upstairs and you make your own bed again. Resilience. That's the thing. Yeah, I understand. You got to just kind of figure it out. You know, how to do that. And all this, but you know, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's not easy. I'm not a psychologist. I'm not an expert in this, but one thing I know for sure. I can help anyone to go and be a little bit better. Right. And I think that's what we want to ask. We cannot ask everyone to be a genius. Ask everyone to be the world's strongest man and all this stuff, but to be better. Because when you're better, when you get better, then you feel good. When we improve, we feel good. When we have accomplished something, we feel good. And that then rubs off on everything.

• 1:19:12Rich Roll?

  Our nation is lonelier than ever before. And this event is so severe. The US Surgeon General, Vice Admiral Dr. Vivek Murthy, labeled it an epidemic. Dr. Murthy joined me in episode 784 to discuss the physical and psychological effects of loneliness and why it's become such a major public health crisis.

• 1:19:36Rich Roll?

  Loneliness isn't something that's new. But what is new is this epidemic of loneliness that, that currently defines our culture. The statistics, as you lay them out, are quite shocking. Like you say, one out of every two Americans is experiencing measurable levels of loneliness. One in two people.

• 1:19:57Rich Roll?

  That's more people than suffer from diabetes. Like, this is a huge problem, right? So I guess the question I have is, how did we get here? What are the tectonic plates that have led us to this state that we're in?

• 1:20:12Speaker 14

  Yeah, it's, the numbers are quite shocking. And you're right that this is extraordinarily common. And as, as surprising as that one in two number is. The rates of loneliness are even higher among young people, which surprises people who think, hey, aren't they connected by technology? Yet they are saying, whether it's in spite of that, or in some cases because of the use of social media, that the sense of connection people feel has actually diminished. So how did we get here? Well, several things happened, and we didn't get here overnight either. But I think that our sense of disconnection has been building for some time. So here are a few things that started to happen. You know, as, over the last 20, 30 years, we have become more mobile, right?

• 1:20:56Speaker 14

  So we move more often for work, for school. And we often move multiple times, sometimes in a short timeframe. Whereas before that, people would often stay in the areas that they grew up in. They would stay connected to the people they were friends with in high school. They still lived around them. But as you move more, communities become more fragmented. So that's sort of one piece. The second thing that has happened is historically, going back generations, people tended to live in extended family environments. And so, you know, not that that was all simple, or that was all good, you know? But, but those environments, you know, more often than not, ensured that people were connected with others. The shift away from, you know, from extended families has been one more factor. And it's like people that live in smaller and smaller circles.

• 1:21:41Speaker 14

  But the other factors, I think, that are important here is that we've also seen over the last half century a significant decline in participation in the community organizations that used to bring people together, particularly faith organizations, but also service organizations, recreational leagues, youth leagues. These used to bring folks together from different walks of life, to get to know one another, to break bread together, to engage in activities together. But that opportunity has also been lost. Two other factors worth mentioning. One is the rise of what I think of as convenience technology, right? So today, if I, I can sit in my home and get groceries delivered to me. I don't really need to go to a post office. I can get most things I need from Amazon.

• 1:22:25Speaker 14

  I don't need to go to a store. My need to go out and have interaction with other people is dramatically lower, just from a practical standpoint. So we have lost actually a lot of those informal loose ties, if you will. But finally, I think we have to look at the phenomenon of social media itself, which has dramatically transformed how we interact with each other. And also has transformed how many people see themselves and their friendships. And this is particularly true for young people. But while there are some benefits of social media, it can be helpful to get messages out, to share useful information, to share honest reflections with a large group of people. Far off, more often than not, what we're finding is that for many people,

• 1:23:09Speaker 14

  well, I'll just say what young people tell me most commonly. They tell me three things. They say their use of social media often makes them feel worse about themselves as they're constantly comparing themselves to others. Makes them feel worse about their friendships as they're constantly seeing what other people are doing without them and feeling left out. But third, they say that they can't get off it either. Because these platforms are often designed to maximize how much time we spend on them. Not necessarily the quality of time, but the quantity of time. And what is happening, especially to many young people, but frankly, to many older people as well, is that that is taking time away from other critical activities like sleep, like in-person interaction and other activities that are essential for our health and well-being.

• 1:23:51Speaker 14

  So you put all these factors together, Rich, and what you see is that we have become lonelier. We've become more isolated. And I think we've realized, and this is not just an American phenomenon, by the way. This is a broader feature of modernity that the UK, Australia, Japan, and many other countries are experiencing as well. So we've got to recognize that. And it doesn't mean that we should go back to 1920 or 1930 or 1950. But what it does mean is that we have to recognize that if we don't consciously make rebuilding connection a priority in our individual lives and in society more broadly, if we don't do that through individual actions and the building of social infrastructure

• 1:24:34Speaker 14

  in our communities, then we will continue to see an erosion of our relationships. And we'll see not only the health consequences of loneliness, which are profound, mental and physical, but also the economic and the national security implications of loneliness, which make us more prone to division and to polarization. So we've got to make that choice. And right now, it feels like the choice is being made for us. That we're steeped in this information environment that's extraordinarily negative, that's telling us everything is broken about the world, that nobody can be trusted, and that everyone is only out for themselves. We've got to turn that off and tune in to what's actually happening in our communities and choose, again, love. I always say that

• 1:25:18Speaker 01

  Every decision that we make, we can ask ourselves a question, am I making this decision out of love or out of fear? And if we choose love as often as we can, then we'll build a kind of life that feels good for us, that's good for our communities, that our kids can be proud of, and that will help create the world that ultimately future generations need.

• 1:25:43Rich Roll?

  2023 marked the return of comedian and fellow podcast host Pete Holmes. In episode 788, we talked about everything from spirituality to comedy, creativity, consciousness, fatherhood, and the many disorientations of midlife. Here's a glimpse into our equal parts hilarious and thought-provoking exchange.

• 1:26:08Speaker 01

  There are some truths so big they can only be told with lies. That's a cute way of saying metaphor is the only language we have to speak of God. And I say this in the special, it's Richard Rohr as well. Metaphor means always true, sometimes really happened. Because what's interesting about the Bible, one of the weird things about that text, is that it's metaphor overlain with history. You know what I mean? It's like metaphorized history, and we don't know where the line is. You know, opinions vary. But when you're trying to, and if you've taken psychedelics, and that was a huge part of my appreciation of metaphor, but when you're trying to talk about the ineffable,

• 1:26:50Speaker 01

  metaphor isn't just as close as you can get, it's the only way to do it. It stirs you and moves you in a way that it's, the truth of it is it's true in the way that energy moves in the world. It's true in the way the patterns of the universe are reflected in the story. Because you can tell a story and it's bullshit, like you know, but the metaphors and the myths that stick with us, they'll rock you. And you hear it and you, your skin's lit on fire. And we're fucking stuck with numbers and measurements and recipes, like get the fuck out of here. None of that shit helps you when your heart is broken, none of them.

• 1:27:32Speaker 01

  None of that helps when your grandfather is dying, or when a baby is born. Like, poetry is similar.

• 1:27:41Speaker 01

  Get that shit out of here. Until your wife leaves you. Then William Blake gets a lot more important. But we've become interested in, or fascinated or obsessed with the quantifiable and the reproducible and the, and the, and the material. And it's like, okay, but you know, we're leaving a lot in our rearview that, that's essential.

• 1:28:05Rich Roll?

  Yeah, you know, it, it's so emasculated in our culture.

• 1:28:08Speaker 01

  Well, because you can't have sex with it and you can't sell it really. You know what I mean? So like, what are you doing? I'll tell you what you're doing is you're feeling more at home in the universe. This is my whole thing. The fact that it's like cowardly to go to therapy, like, like the people where I'm from. If you say you're in therapy, they're, it's like, huh. I'm like, is there anything more cowardly than not facing your demons? Like, who's the coward? I, I might just be sitting on a couch, but I'm going into the cave where the Vader mask cuts open and it's my face. Like, that's the hero. And, and it's easy to do the same with spirituality. Be like, it's a bunch of lies. Yeah, Santa Claus isn't real.

• 1:28:53Speaker 01

  Great, but what is the story of Santa Claus? What is the point? What is done in secret is rewarded, or whatever it might be. I don't know, man. Literalism is a fucking terrible body to snuggle up to in your bed at night. And, and the warm bosom of myth has kept human beings alive. And by the way, don't get me started. Every video game, every movie, it's all right there.

• 1:29:22Rich Roll?

  Sure.

• 1:29:22Speaker 01

  Every Avenger. Get the fuck out of here.

• 1:29:26Rich Roll?

  And Joseph Campbell is like the gateway drug.

• 1:29:29Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:29:29Rich Roll?

  For a lot of people, especially in this town.

• 1:29:31Speaker 01

  That's right. Well, he changed my life. He said, "God is a metaphor for a mystery that absolutely transcends all categories of human thought, including being and non-being." So that I could get on board with. That's a God, I feel like that's a God anyone could agree on. It's a metaphor, meaning God is not an old man in the sky. An old man in the sky is a metaphor for a metaphor. God itself is a metaphor, and a metaphor for that metaphor is an old man in the sky. Old, he's older than you. He's been around. In the sky, he has a higher perspective than you. On a throne, he's powerful. Sure, these are just ways of understanding a force, right? But that's a metaphor for God, which is itself a metaphor for a mystery. Something unknown is doing something we know not what, right?

• 1:30:12Speaker 01

  That, we, so this is also in my special, Barry Taylor, the road manager for ACDC, says, "God is the name of the blanket. We put over the mystery to give it a shape." God is the name of the blanket. We put over the mystery to give it a shape. And I say, "Shouldn't we have learned this in church? Why am I learning this from the road manager for ACDC?"

• 1:30:30Rich Roll?

  And it's not about solving the mystery. It's about appreciating the fact that it is a mystery.

• 1:30:36Speaker 01

  And we want to talk about it. And more than that, we want to commune with it. And to know that, we have to give it some sort of symbol. Carl Jung says, "We're not transformed by ideas. We're transformed by symbols." This is why the crucified Christ is still a hot thing.

• 1:30:50Rich Roll?

  And stories.

• 1:30:51Speaker 01

  Yes!

• 1:30:52Rich Roll?

  But how do you, like, I'm thinking of the person who's listening to this, who hasn't had their reckoning yet, they haven't hit their pain moment, like, how do you communicate to that person? Or how do you get somebody to, you know, connect with that possibility in their own life?

• 1:31:10Speaker 01

  That's why I'm not putting that question off to Eckhart Tolle, but when people email me, you know, on social or something, and they're like, "I can't, it's nails on a chalkboard." You say, "I'm God's child. It's nails on a chalkboard," or Jesus, or Buddha, or any-

• 1:31:25Rich Roll?

  Right, because of the baggage of, that people are carrying around from whatever experiences they had, yeah.

• 1:31:31Speaker 01

  I relate to that. I had that. And people like, first of all, Joseph Campbell, who's just gonna say, "It's a story, and that's great." But then Eckhart Tolle, who's all just the sacrament of the present moment. And when you start getting- Naked. I was just talking about this today on my own podcast. I was like, why are Adam and Eve naked? It's because they're, they're not clothed in the ego and the story, just pure. And when you drop through practices, through reading that book, whatever it might be, and you start getting familiar with who are you? Like, you're, you're wearing a space suit. You know what I mean?

• 1:32:08Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 1:32:09Speaker 01

  And we start thinking we're the suit. This is Ram Dass. Ram Dass would say, I go, hello, Rich. And you go, hello, Pete. You're a comedian. I go, yes, and we are Americans. I remember I was in Italy. I saw a ladybug and I was like, this ladybug has no idea it's Italian. Has no idea it's Italian. How many fucking things are we carrying around? And who are you when you drop them? And which of those things are undroppable? I don't, I don't think there are any that are undroppable. And Ramana Maharshi has this great thing where he goes, when you're stoking the fire of your own awareness, the last thing, you get the fire going, the last thing you throw in is the stick you were soaking the fire with. You can even drop

• 1:32:49Speaker 01

  your practice. All of it can go. Cause you're zero, you're, you're smallest, most irreducible, undivisible you. That's, that's the part that knows this. Whether or not you vibe with this language, but there's a part of you, and I would also recommend Rupert Spira. If you, if you read Being Aware of Being Aware, which is a very short book and every chapter says the same thing. You can just read the first chapter.

• 1:33:16Rich Roll?

  I know Richard Rohr, but I haven't, I haven't read that book.

• 1:33:19Speaker 01

  Rupert is a beautiful, non-dual teacher, but he will just go like, what is it that's aware of your experience? And he's like, that's, nobody's asking that. He, he says, we're like the screen of a movie.

• 1:33:36Speaker 01

  And everybody gets so caught up in the content of the movie, just like we do when we watch a movie, that you forget you're looking at a screen. But you're the screen. It's not colored or changed in any meaningful way by the light that's on it. Right now, I'm so, oh, I'm on a podcast, I'm a screen. What is the screen? What, what distance is an illusion? Like, this sound is farther than this. It's all happening on the screen of my awareness.

• 1:34:02Rich Roll?

  And the additional delusion to that is that it's all happening in our head.

• 1:34:07Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:34:08Rich Roll?

  But that is also just an appearance in consciousness.

• 1:34:11Speaker 01

  That's what I, so science, I'm a pro-science person. Obviously, I hope I don't have to say that. But science will say, I saw a TED Talk where they're like, "Reality is a agreed-upon group hallucination." And that's really right on with a lot of mystical traditions. This is Maya, or this is play, or whatever you want to say. But they'll say, "It originates in the brain." So that's like you and I are having a dream, and I hold up a ring box and I go, "This dream is coming from this box." Like, why would a part of the dream be a reliable source of the dream? What the fuck do we know about the mind? You know what I'm saying? So we're going, "It originates in the amygdala of the blah, blah, blah."

• 1:34:55Speaker 01

  That's also, you can't remove the observer. It's influencing and part of and drenched in the observed. You are the observed.

• 1:35:04Rich Roll?

  Right, the idea that there is a self that is observing is a further illusion.

• 1:35:10Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:35:11Rich Roll?

  And that that self resides somewhere inside your head.

• 1:35:14Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:35:15Rich Roll?

  And that's hard. Like, it takes practice to disabuse yourself because it's so entrenched in our deep-rooted attachment to what is real.

• 1:35:30Rich Roll?

  As a lifelong Star Trek fan, hosting Sir Patrick Stewart was a dream that did not disappoint in episode 785, when the beloved icon of stage and screen graced the podcast for A Vulnerable Exchange, covering his extraordinary life, as well as his new memoir, Making It So. You've lived just an absolutely extraordinary life, and you did a wonderful job with the book. It's wildly entertaining. It's a very difficult book to put down. The stories are just absolutely legendary. So, well done in that regard. I love it. And I know you're about to embark on quite the book tour, so you're gonna be doing a lot of media stuff.

• 1:36:12Rich Roll?

  I guess, you know, I'm curious about what it is that you want people to take from the book, but also just your life. Like, what is instructive about the experiences that you had and the lessons that you've learned as you reflect back as an 83-year-old man on what's important, what's not, and maybe even a guiding principle or two that we could incorporate into our own lives?

• 1:36:40Speaker 07

  Well, they come down to things that I am still working on. And it's awkward, being a leading actor on television and film. But being brave, being open, being sensitive to other people, tuning into them, becomes more and more and more important to me. And I find that in the close friends that I have, that is their relationship with me too, and it's a wonderful, wonderful experience.

• 1:37:23Speaker 07

  I wish I could go back. There are things I would like to say to my parents, and my brothers, both of them, that I never said. And that makes me very, very sad, that I never told them.

• 1:37:43Speaker 07

  What they gave me.

• 1:37:45Rich Roll?

  But this gives you an opportunity to at least say it publicly.

• 1:37:50Speaker 07

  It kinda does, yes, yeah. I mean, my first draft of this book was over 700 pages. And it's now about 440. So, people are saying, so what are you gonna write next? And I say, no, no, no, no, no, there's no next. This is it. And then the other day, I thought, hmm, well, maybe I could find that draft that's got 350 words in it that are all in my book.

• 1:38:21Rich Roll?

  The director's cut.

• 1:38:22Speaker 07

  The director's cut, yeah, yeah.

• 1:38:25Rich Roll?

  To your point, that was beautifully shared, thank you. There's a section in the book that I found quite moving, which was about your relationship with vulnerability as an actor and how that's a tool and a vehicle for unlocking truth, but also as a way of being in the world, right? The power that comes with allowing yourself to be vulnerable onstage, but also with the people that you care about.

• 1:38:58Speaker 07

  Yes, yes, yes. That's perhaps the primary objective in my life now.

• 1:39:06Rich Roll?

  To be vulnerable with those you care about.

• 1:39:09Speaker 07

  Yes, yes. There are many, for me, great resonances about being an actor. And one of the strongest is the people I encounter. Finding that there were in the world other young people, and some of them significantly older.

• 1:39:35Speaker 07

  Who felt the same kind of isolation that I felt. And yet, in the company of actors, there was an almost intuitive connection that was made between us. And I was 12 years old when I first was dumped into a large group of actors on a course that was run, it was a brand-new course run by the West Riding County Council in Yorkshire. And the minimum age was 14. And it was in my headmaster's office that I met a man called Gerald Tyler. He's in the book.

• 1:40:16Speaker 07

  And he had come to say that the county council were going to run an eight-day theatre course, a residential theatre course. By that, it meant we had camp beds to lie on in school classrooms. But nevertheless, from the moment that I arrived there, I was in the company of people like me. Now, some of them were highly educated. I mean, I got a big crush on a girl who was at grammar school, but it didn't work out.

• 1:40:53Rich Roll?

  It's not having anything to do with you.

• 1:40:55Speaker 07

  No, no. And yet, it was our love of acting, performing, of plays, scripts, texts, being in front of an audience, which never scared me ever at all. And there was a reason for this. One of my first attractions to acting was that I could forget about Patrick Stewart.

• 1:41:25Rich Roll?

  Right. That was my next question. How much of this, aside from finding like-minded people in this tribe of young artists, how much of it was an escape from your own life? Or the opportunity to step outside who you were and just become somebody altogether different as a defence mechanism and not having to deal with whatever pain is kind of lingering in your subconscious?

• 1:41:52Speaker 07

  You...

• 1:41:54Speaker 07

  Explain it perfectly. Yeah. That's exactly how it was. To not be Patrick Stewart, if only for a few hours a week, was such a relief. To explore being someone other than myself with a different background. I mean, the first role that I played, other than this, um, this thing that we'd done about the history of Yorkshire and Merfield, where I grew up, um, was a comedy called The Happiest Days of Your Life. You may have encountered it very occasionally, it crops up in theatre very occasionally.

• 1:42:32Speaker 07

  And, um, it was all set in a private boys' school, a rather exclusive private boys' school. And it was wartime and a private girls' school had been, um, found places in the school. So there were now boys and girls playing there. And I played a character, you see, I remember his name, called Hopcroft Minor. He had an older brother who was Hopcroft. And, um, and it was such a joy to be playing an upper-class child.

• 1:43:11Speaker 07

  Even though I struggled with the accent, I didn't really have, um, a proper received pronunciation accent until I was fifteen or sixteen. But I was learning. I was, and, and sometimes it made people laugh when they heard me speak because it sounded so portentous and, uh, you know. Um, so becoming someone else, that was the main attraction. Yeah. And I could forget who Patrick Stewart was.

• 1:43:46Rich Roll?

  Maintaining mobility and finding meaningful movement practices were hot topics in 2023, ones that I explored not only in a movement masterclass, but also with movement experts and Built to Move authors Kelly and Juliet Starrett. They joined me in episode 764 to give us easy ways to change sedentary habits and integrate more movement into your daily life.

• 1:44:16Rich Roll?

  There's a lot of confusion around what you mean when you talk about mobility. So let's just clarify that. And I kind of want to build on that to get into the various principles that form the framework of this book and your philosophy.

• 1:44:31Speaker 15

  Well, I mean, I'll start and maybe-

• 1:44:33Speaker 16

  Yeah, take a swing at it. Go, girl.

• 1:44:34Speaker 15

  Let's take a swing at this. I think-

• 1:44:35Rich Roll?

  I mean, at this point, you ought to be able to define it, right?

• 1:44:37Speaker 15

  Yes, yes. To us, you know, mobility is really the ability to be able to move freely through your environment and do the things you want to be able to do with your body, whatever those things may be. Now, we offer a lot of tools, which we call mobilizations, which are things you can do to help improve your mobility and range of motion. But, you know, to us, at the highest level, it's the ability to move freely, ideally without pain, or at least minimizing pain, and be able to do the things you love to do.

• 1:45:08Speaker 16

  And if I added a-

• 1:45:09Speaker 15

  How did I do?

• 1:45:09Speaker 16

  Pretty good. For an attorney. You've been in the game for a minute, I can tell. I would add, your body, everyone agrees that your shoulder should be able to do certain things, and that your spine should be able to do certain things, and your hips should be able to do certain things. Every physician, every orthopedic surgeon, every physical therapist, we all agree how much shoulder is normal, how much your ankle should be able to move. The problem is that we don't give people benchmarks for what is normative, or what you should be able to do. And our lives sometimes don't ask us of that. And so suddenly, when we have pain or a problem, that range of motion is never part of the conversation about, hey, I see that your steering wheel doesn't go all the way to the left. Let's

• 1:45:54Speaker 16

  just make sure that you can, you know, the pilots, where they take off, you know, they check to make sure that everything's working right. So we could also define mobility as do you have your native range of motion? And can you control that native range of motion? So are you a skilled person? And what Juliette said is all of that is important. But really, what is it you want to do in your world and environment? And how do you want to express this body? That's the most important thing. And I think that's where we got in the weeds. You know, hip range of motion is important. Yeah, yeah, yeah. But if it prevents you from doing something or you're having pain. And that's also conjoined with the fact that you don't have access to that range. Maybe that's the reason you should care.

• 1:46:34Speaker 15

  Well, I'm like, let me just give you one example. Like if you just asked anyone on the street, like, do you care about your hip range of motion? They're going to be like, no, why would I care about that? But but as an example, we were recently talking to a friend of ours who has a four month old baby and has both sets of parents visiting. And their his parents are like in their mid 60s. So, you know, not that much older than us. And they his mother is able to get up off get up and down off the ground and sit with the baby. But his mother in law can't get down onto the ground or up off of the ground. And so can't sit on the floor and play with the grandchild. And that's one of those things that you don't think about until it's like a use it or lose it kind of thing. But like that right there is hip range of motion.

• 1:47:17Speaker 15

  So you may not care athletically about hip range of motion because you're not trying to run faster or lift more weights or, you know, whatever an athlete might need to care about hip range of motion for. But, you know, most people would say, man, do you know? Do you want to be able to sit on the floor and play with your grandchild when you have one? And they'd be like, yes, I do. And so, you know, that's one of the reasons why people should care about their hip range of motion.

• 1:47:39Speaker 16

  Right. I feel that humans are not very good at casting their gaze that far into the future, though.

• 1:47:46Speaker 15

  So true.

• 1:47:46Speaker 16

  Especially like it's not until

• 1:47:47Speaker 15

  If you're 25.

• 1:47:48Speaker 16

  You have, yeah. Yeah. You're 20 like, yeah, you're just like.

• 1:47:51Rich Roll?

  I'll deal with that one. That's not gonna, or that's not gonna happen to me. Yes. Especially with an elite athlete, like, forget about it, right? So, the barrier to being able to convince somebody that these things are important has to be, it's like a high bar for you, right? To like, communicate with people like, hey, you know, we can talk about longevity. How long do you want to live? What is it that you want to be able to do when you're 80 and 90, etc. But when you're 30, even in your 40s, and you're essentially pain-free, or you don't have some kind of injury, that's, you know, that's a challenge. Yeah. You know? It is. But it is true that, like, whether it's heart disease, diabetes, you know, any kind of brain degeneration, similarly with our physical bodies, like, these things are progressive.

• 1:48:36Rich Roll?

  And if you're not working on this stuff far in advance of those aging years, you're gonna have a problem. But if you do undergo, you know, sort of shoulder the responsibility of doing these things that you guys talk about so much, you're taking out this insurance policy to be able to do all those things in your later years. But it's just that humans are not good. No. At like, you know, evaluating the cost-benefit analysis of these sorts of things.

• 1:49:01Speaker 16

  And our environment gives us a lot of cues or guides us into poor decisions. I just, I think New York Times had an article just recently about how some of our foods hijack our brain chemistry, right? Our sort of modern foods, the umamis, we just think, oh, they're so good. So, here's a story. I was a young physio student, watching the cardiac catheter lab. And I'm watching a really wealthy kid, a wealthy man in San Francisco, and his whole family's outside, and he has three beautiful daughters, which I can start to like, put myself in his shoes. Has this amazing wife, killer law practice, he's rich, in every definition of the term. He's one life, and he's in there having three stents put in his heart, and he's overweight.

• 1:49:43Speaker 16

  And what I thought in that moment was, if this guy has every resource and every reason to live, and it's still that hard to change, and to make these things to keep himself alive with his family, what recourse does an average person, mortal person, without his resources have? And really, that was- Kind of a shocker. And I think if I'd videoed the two women, you know, putting in the catheter like chain smoking, you know, like as a matter of fact, that may have showed him that video. Maybe that would have changed his behavior. But, you know, it's really difficult to sort of untangle what seems like the biggest Gordian knot in your life. Where do I go? Especially since sometimes we don't see the results right away.

• 1:50:22Rich Roll?

  Yeah. So when, when, when talking about mobility and movement, you know, how do you diagnose somebody's mobility? Like everybody, you know, you guys have like this superpower. You could like look at somebody just sitting or standing or walking and be like, oh, I see 10 things wrong with like, what's happening there? Like, most people don't have that ability and don't think about that kind of stuff. You know, the average person, if they're pain free, is going to say, well, this is not, I can walk and I can get up and sit down and all that kind of stuff. So where does one begin to try to self diagnose and understand their own mobility capacity limitations and, and what they should be focused on working on?

• 1:51:06Speaker 15

  Well, in this book, we, we literally identify five areas where we think that if people just kept an eye on it, like just kept an eye on it.

• 1:51:15Speaker 16

  Vital sign.

• 1:51:16Speaker 15

  Just, yeah, we, we call them vital signs because we.

• 1:51:18Rich Roll?

  These 10 things.

• 1:51:19Speaker 15

  Yeah, we have these 10 vital signs, but we specifically chose the word vital sign because it, it started coming up more and more in the pandemic. Actually, everyone was like tracking all these vital signs like their S A O two and you know, obviously, everybody knows that 120 over 80 is like, okay, blood pressure. And if you go over that, it's something you should keep an eye on. And so that's why we, we thought, well, if, if regular people can keep an eye on a vital sign like blood pressure, then why can't there be some movement specific or health specific vital signs? And so, you know, obviously, the human body is the most complicated thing in the known universe. But we really tried to boil it down to a few areas of range of motion. We thought people should keep an eye on, or that we consider to be vital signs. And we do have these simple tests in the book

• 1:52:01Speaker 15

  that people can just do once and sort of say, okay, this is where I'm at. You know, this is something I need to keep an eye on. This is something I'm doing great at. And, and, you know, and then the things we suggest for people to work on them, we think we've suggested, you know, things that they can literally do like while they're watching Netflix at night, or while they're still sitting at their office. Like, we've really tried to make it so that you don't have to go to the one hour mobility balance class and, you know, journal in the morning in order to get it, in order to get these things done.

• 1:52:30Rich Roll?

  One of the most acclaimed filmmakers of his generation, the great Judd Apatow, graced the podcast to discuss his fascinating perspective on filmmaking, on storytelling, on creativity, and just tons more. So here is a slice of that exchange.

• 1:52:49Speaker 17

  The other person that was an important mentor to me was David Milch, who created Deadwood and co-created NYPD Blue with Stephen Bocchow. And he was another one that, you know...

• 1:53:03Rich Roll?

  Everybody talks, I mean reveres him as a genius.

• 1:53:08Speaker 17

  You know, he taught at Yale, but he also, you know, had a lot of issues with addiction and gambling. And, you know, he was one of those people that would, he would lay on the ground, there'd be a microphone on the ground, and he would dictate the show. And people would wait around while he channeled the show. And he believed, he used to say, inspiration comes to prepared souls. And his whole thing was about that connection. Can you open yourself up and be so present and available that the creativity comes? And to trust that. And I learned so much from him about that. Or, you know, one of the

• 1:53:51Speaker 17

  David Milch things is to, you know, to just start writing. You know, he always says, you can't think yourself into writing, but you can write yourself into thinking. So just start, and it'll, it'll just come. And so that was a real lesson for me. There are ways I could be better at this. That's why, when you get back to, you know, self-help, you know, I'm always looking for something that will make me...

• 1:54:24Speaker 17

  You know, open up in some way, heal in some way, learn something that will make me more efficient. And sometimes I'm drowning in self-help because I just read and listen.

• 1:54:33Rich Roll?

  Yeah, that creates its own paralysis.

• 1:54:35Speaker 17

  Yes, yeah, because I'm a hoarder a bit, so I'll listen to too much. But with this, I just said, okay, this is, this is really simple. Just get your ass in a chair.

• 1:54:46Rich Roll?

  And then amazement at it, at it actually working.

• 1:54:50Speaker 17

  Yeah, because you're going, how creative am I? Do I have any jokes left in this brain? And to see it happen was really rewarding and made me think, oh, maybe I could do that three more times this year.

• 1:55:02Rich Roll?

  How do you, how do you balance the collaborative aspect of the, the creation and writing process versus that, like, ass in a chair alone at home?

• 1:55:12Speaker 17

  But once I'm done.

• 1:55:13Rich Roll?

  What is the, you know, what is the daily, you know, do you set it up with a schedule?

• 1:55:18Speaker 17

  Well, once the script is done, then I just send it to everybody and just go, what do you think? What do you think? And then at some point, I'll sit alone and, you know, or with a writer's assistant and just rewrite it. And then I try to read it out loud. And then, then I can watch it like a movie and see if it works for me as a movie and then rewrite it, then read it out loud again. And then at some point, if someone will let me make it, we go into rehearsals. And then it changes a lot. Once the actors bring their stuff.

• 1:55:46Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 1:55:46Speaker 17

  Into it.

• 1:55:48Rich Roll?

  How do you know when you're, when you have an idea? I think I asked you this earlier, but like that, that, you know, it's like, once you commit to an idea, there's a long road ahead, right? Is there like something, does something light up in your brain where you're like, this is it? Or this is the thing? Like, or is that an instinct or?

• 1:56:07Speaker 17

  You have an instinct, but then you just keep like telling it to people. And so you're like.

• 1:56:12Rich Roll?

  If they like it, if it stays with you.

• 1:56:14Speaker 17

  Yeah, it seemed funny. And it's just like a movie about like. Guy gets girl pregnant and he hangs out with those stone friends. He's a nightmare, but she wants to see if maybe he could be a good boyfriend and you know, and then you then you start showing the outline to some friends and you're looking for some reinforcement that you're not in a crazy place. And then at some point you think, am I really going to do this? Okay, maybe I'll write five pages. Let me just see if it comes to life. And then usually you go, oh, yeah, this seems funny.

• 1:56:48Rich Roll?

  Does it start generally with a conceit for you or with a person like a character? Like this, this person, what would this person, what adventure would this guy go on?

• 1:57:00Speaker 17

  I mean, each, each time is different, but I like working from some very passionate idea or truthful idea. You know, when Leslie and I, we were at the hospital having our second, our second child, just everything went wrong, other than she's beautiful and healthy.

• 1:57:21Rich Roll?

  Yeah, the doctor was mean.

• 1:57:22Speaker 17

  The doctor was mean. The other doctor just didn't show up, just left town to go to a bar mitzvah. And I just took notes that night. I was like, this is so crazy how weird this night is. So in the back of my head, I'm like, there's probably a way to tell this story. And then you back into it, you know, eventually, you know, with, with Pete Davidson, with the King of Staten Island, we had worked on a different idea for a while. And then usually it, you just say, what should we really be writing about? And then it just comes out. Like, are you willing to explore what we probably should explore? And Pete was, and so then we started writing that version.

• 1:58:02Rich Roll?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 1:58:05Rich Roll?

  The like knowing when, you know, it's time to pull the thread a little bit further versus moving on.

• 1:58:13Speaker 17

  And it's really hard to start a script for me because I think one of the things I always have to get over is by, by writing, I'm finding out if I'm terrible. So it's very easy to not write because if I don't write, I won't find out if I'm bad.

• 1:58:28Rich Roll?

  Do you still go to war with yourself in that way, though?

• 1:58:30Speaker 17

  I think so. I think it's subtle, but it's just, just because.

• 1:58:36Speaker 17

  There's a little, there's a critical voice that you are always wrestling with that basically says, just don't do it. Just go watch TV. Like, you don't have to suffer through this. And to try to turn it into a pleasurable experience, I'm still almost in hyperventilation or anxiety. Most of the time, I'm actually writing. I'm just, my breath gets short. I'm so nervous and I'm trying to like, open a spigot. And I have to relax to let it come out. But there's just a weird part of me that's just scared, scared it's gonna be bad, scared I'm gonna-

• 1:59:12Rich Roll?

  That like Steven Pressfield resistance more heart kind of thing.

• 1:59:16Speaker 17

  It's totally that. And, and that's what the flow thing helped me with, which is, you know, I can toss it all. I don't have to, I can throw out all, I can throw out all the work today. Just, just trust it might be, there might be something good. Like, if you, I wrote this script kind of fast. And I just said, I'm gonna write straight through to the end. I'm not even gonna reread yesterday's pages till I get to the end. And then I got to the end and then I started reading it and I was like, I don't even remember writing almost anything. Like, I remember the story, but the language and the jokes. And I was really pleasantly surprised by it. But I, I just forced myself to, to just go to, you know, that part of my imagination and just followed wherever it led me. And

• 1:59:59Speaker 17

  that's not how I always wrote. I think I was more methodical. And I just thought, maybe I'll just kind of, you know, go into the trance and see what bubbles up.

• 2:00:10Rich Roll?

  Make it sort of like morning pages, no stakes.

• 2:00:13Speaker 17

  Exactly. And I did those, I mean, the Julie Cameron artist way, you know, I did that in the early 90s.

• 2:00:22Rich Roll?

  Yeah, I think I started that in 90. When did that book come out?

• 2:00:28Rich Roll?

  Ninety seven, ninety eight?

• 2:00:29Speaker 17

  I mean, I could have done that in the

• 2:00:31Rich Roll?

  No, it was early.

• 2:00:32Speaker 17

  No, no, because I did it early nine.

• 2:00:33Rich Roll?

  Yeah, you're right. Yeah.

• 2:00:35Speaker 17

  I could have even done it late eighties, but you know, so that idea of morning pages to just write, don't judge, just whatever comes out, it doesn't matter. Which was also David Milch exercise where he said, so get your creative juices going for two weeks, write for 20 minutes a day, print it and then tear it up.

• 2:00:54Speaker 17

  Just to get used to your brain being creative and

• 2:00:59Rich Roll?

  Like the Zen Buddhist sand mandala.

• 2:01:02Speaker 17

  Exactly. But he said, you'll, you'll open up, you know, that part of your brain and it'll fire up. And I'd never done that, but I understand what he's talking about.

• 2:01:14Rich Roll?

  Precious, not being too attached.

• 2:01:17Speaker 17

  There's, it's like having a baby, like suddenly your body knows how to make a baby. You're right. Like your whole life is not making a baby, then one day like this machine builds itself. And you have a baby. Well, is a part of your brain or your mind that you could turn on and it builds itself to be creative.

• 2:01:36Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 2:01:40Rich Roll?

  There might not be anyone better to close out 2023 than Olympic runner, award winning writer, poet, filmmaker and friend Alexi Pappas, who joined me to discuss evolution, self belief, how to find the courage required to blaze your own path, and the power of finding joy in the journey. Here is a powerful clip from our conversation.

• 2:02:06Speaker 18

  Oh, Glup.

• 2:02:07Rich Roll?

  Can we talk about Glup?

• 2:02:08Speaker 18

  Yeah. So Glup is my favorite chapter in the book. And it represents a knowledge that I gained since writing Bravie, which was a fun thing to like, update what I knew in the world. And Glup is just the idea that scientifically, when caterpillars become butterflies, they go into a chrysalis and they don't just sprout wings, but they are actually reduced down to a liquid form, complete and total liquid, called unscientifically Glup. And then they become a butterfly. And what I identified with so strongly is that when I'm going through change, when any of us are going through change.

• 2:02:51Speaker 18

  We might be reduced down to our lowest glop state. We might not feel great. And that's not a bad thing. And anytime I've felt like I was glop, I usually try to revert back and become a caterpillar again and put myself back together. But to look at science as inspiration, I think is really empowering because you can celebrate glop and decide to move forward and become a butterfly. And humans are unlike caterpillars in that we can choose to stay caterpillar forever. And we do feel the pain of glop-hood. So caterpillars are unconscious in their chrysalis, but we are not. So I think the metaphor and the chapter is important to me

• 2:03:33Speaker 18

  because we should feel that glop is good.

• 2:03:38Rich Roll?

  And if you're feeling like glop, you can celebrate it as a non-negotiable stage that you have to go through to become something else.

• 2:03:50Speaker 18

  Yeah, yeah. And you can print it on a shirt and say, I'm glop, and wear it around like a prideful label.

• 2:03:57Rich Roll?

  Which, if you haven't done already, you probably are doing.

• 2:04:00Speaker 18

  I put it on a sweatshirt when I was glop. But, no, it's fun. Because kids, people should tell kids, you can't predict your life. It will always surprise you. And that change is hard in a way that is actually like normal.

• 2:04:18Rich Roll?

  Yeah, that's really important. I mean, and that goes to your reflex towards like actionable tools to use as opposed to feel better or it'll be fine. But like, no, what can I actually do? I can shake my arms out or I can like, what is behavioral?

• 2:04:34Speaker 18

  Well, and also, there's so much dialogue now that says like, it's okay if you don't feel great today, if you do nothing. And like, I understand that. I think it's important to allow people their like recovery days and mental health days. But like, when you are feeling like glop, the thing that will move you forward is not just patience and time, but also action to become a butterfly.

• 2:04:59Rich Roll?

  Yeah, not just wallowing in the glop.

• 2:05:02Speaker 18

  Yeah, exactly.

• 2:05:04Rich Roll?

  Trying to usher the glop into the butterfly.

• 2:05:07Speaker 18

  Right.

• 2:05:08Rich Roll?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 2:05:08Speaker 18

  I think, first of all, all change happens a lot slower than we think. And that's why when people see people they admire, or they read books about transformation, I think they can often be misleading and make people think that change is like a right turn, when like the right turn is usually happening in a series of very, very, very, very tiny steps. And I think big changes happen very, very slowly. And accepting that is super important, because when I see people whip their life around when they think they want a big change, it usually either spirals them into depression,

• 2:05:51Speaker 18

  or it's not an effective way to actually make the change. Or it leaves them with like a tangible change, but not the time to like emotionally change with it, to evolve as a person. So that, I think, is the first thing. Then as far as what are you doing? So let's say you feel like you need to change. Then it's like, what is the change? Where am I headed? What do I do? Or what is the identity I want to shift? Or whatever it is. There's been two things that have been helpful to me that I'll share. One was an exercise that Deepak Chopra took me through in like this small seminar that I did. And I'm sure he's shared it elsewhere. But basically, we were in this room, and he was asking us to ask ourselves questions

• 2:06:36Speaker 18

  without reaching for the answer. So in order to figure out answers, basically, you simply keep asking the question without reaching for the answer. So the question might be, what is my purpose? Right? And the goal was just to simply keep saying, what is my purpose? What is my purpose? What is my purpose? Without trying to reach for the purpose. Because when we reach, we're often reaching for something like an occupation or something in the tangible world. And... It's too contextualized in the world, but when we just ask and wait, it was so cool because for me, what came to mind was like hugging 21-year-old girls and saying, this is gonna sound weird, and saying, "Everything's gonna be okay."

• 2:07:21Speaker 18

  And like, "Everything's gonna be okay," and "Everything's gonna be okay." And like, that's not a job, but it felt like a purpose to help people feel okay. And it did feel accurate. And that felt like the first step was to pull our evolution out of the material world, or the world as we know it, and to make it more of an idea first. And I think that the next step is to figure out what you actually do. That is something that I've drastically shifted how I approach since being an Olympian. Because, leading up to the Olympics, the steps there were very clear, and they were outlined by coaches, right, as you said?

• 2:08:04Speaker 18

  And they were tiered based on what was most productive toward that goal. And now that the goal is less of a tangible... Like, I don't wanna be an Olympian anymore. I want to have those certain feelings that I shared with you, or I wanna share with the world. And they're not as rooted in a job or tangible result. So how do I pick my actions now? And how do I evolve that? And I think the way I do it now is really different. Monica, who is our shared physio, she was like, "Alexi, every cell in our body, when it's happy or safe, it expands and moves toward."

• 2:08:47Speaker 18

  And that's like the feeling of having a crush on someone. Or when someone's like, "Let's go out to sushi." And you're like, "Yes!" Like, that's a really... It's a known feeling that we have. And she said it's cellular. And it was a feeling I was having roller skating. And she said, "Every cell, when it's unsafe, it contracts and moves away." And that's... What you feel when somebody puts food in front of you that you're allergic to, or have had food poisoning or something, you know that feeling of like, I just won't eat that? And she said, I want you to start thinking about your life in terms of, are these decisions expansive or contractive to me? Or now I think about it as, do I have a crush on this decision?

• 2:09:28Speaker 18

  And once I started doing that, it made decisions a lot easier for me. And I started to actually evolve without overthinking the decisions I was making and doing things that like, were surprising to me, which has been very, very useful.

• 2:09:48Rich Roll?

  I hope you enjoyed this reflection in the rearview and found these two episodes both uplifting and inspiring. I want to thank you again for the love and all the support. This podcast truly has been just an amazing journey and I'm beyond grateful that you're on this journey with me. I look forward to growing and learning together in the new year and many years ahead. Links, as always, to all the full episodes and the social media accounts for all the guests excerpted today can be found in the show notes on the episode page at ritual.com. If you'd like to support the podcast, the easiest and most impactful thing that you

• 2:10:30Rich Roll?

  can do is simply subscribe to the show on Apple Podcasts, on Spotify, and on YouTube. Sharing the show or your favorite episodes with friends or on social media is of course always appreciated. And finally, for podcast updates, special offers on books, the meal planner, and other subjects, subscribe to our newsletter, which you can find on the footer of any page at ritual.com. Today's show was produced and engineered by Jason Camiolo. The video edition of the podcast was created by Dan Drake and Blake Curtis. Portraits by Davy Greenberg and Giselle Peters. Graphic elements courtesy of Daniel Solis. And our theme music was created by Tyler Piatt, Trapper Piatt, and Hari Mathis.

• 2:11:13Rich Roll?

  Appreciate the love and support. See you next year. Peace. Plants. Namaste.