How Chef Seamus Mullen Leveraged Holistic Lifestyle Medicine To Heal Himself

Imagine yourself so debilitated by a battery of chronic ailments you can barely get out of bed. Merely walking down a simple flight of stairs or lifting a a book is excruciating. Knife-like pains cause you to scream so loudly, your neighbor calls 911. Then one day you collapse at work and awake in the hospital to discover you have suffered 36 embolisms that are filling your lungs with blood so quickly, drowning is a very real possibility. Now imagine yourself a couple years later in a tropical jungle competing in La Ruta Del Conquistadores. Widely considered one of the toughest endurance challenges on the planet, La Ruta is a 3-day, 161-mile mountain bike race with over 29,000 feet of climbing that traverses Costa Rica from the Pacific Ocean to the Caribbean Sea. This is the incredible arc of today's guest, Seamus Mullen. An award-winning New York City chef, restaurateur and cookbook author known for his inventive yet approachable Spanish cuisine, Seamus is the proprietor of several restaurants, including Tertulia (a finalist for the James Beard Foundation Award for “Best New Restaurant”), El Colmado, a Spanish tapas and wine bar at Gotham West Market, and Sea Containers at Mondrian London. A semi-finalist for Best Chef NYC by the James Beard Foundation 3 years in a row, Seamus was also one of 3 finalists on the Food Network’s The Next Iron Chef. He frequents the popular Food Network series Chopped and Beat Bobby Flay as a featured judge and is a recurring guest on programs such as The Today Show, The Martha Stewart Show, and CBS This Morning. But the important things in life snapped into focus for Seamus in 2007 when he was diagnosed with rheumatoid arthritis, an autoimmune disease that precipitated a near death experience and quite literally brought him to his knees. A once avid cyclist who raced competitively in his twenties, Seamus suddenly found himself unable to properly function. Pedal a bike? A pipe dream. Seamus was faced with a choice. Either live out the remainder of his days with unbearable suffering, or take matters into his own hands. He chose the latter. It wasn't easy. And it wasn't overnight. But by making a decision to make wellness his number one priority; by harnessing the power of holistic, functional medicine; and by rebooting his lifestyle wholesale, Seamus Mullen ultimately healed himself. By virtue of working with people like lifestyle architect Ari Meisel and functional medicine doctor and RRP alumnus Frank Lipman (click here to listen to my podcast with Frank), Seamus can now add wellness advocate and authority to his already impressive resume. And when he's not racing his bike across Costa Rica, he's pedaling for charity or lost on one of his many cycling and motorcycle adventures exploring remote parts of the planet. Seamus has shared his amazing story of renewal with major publications like The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times and through his bi-monthly column in Men’s Journal. He is currently making a documentary about his journey called Back on the Bike. Seamus is a great guy and we had a fantastic conversation that explores all the aforementioned topics and then some, including: * the importance of healthy school lunch programs * the story behind his Rheumatoid Arthritis * the failure of traditional RA treatment protocols * symptomatic treatment vs. true healing methodology * his vivid near-death experience 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?

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• 0:44Rich Roll?

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• 1:05Speaker 01

  If you just try to deal with the symptoms, you're never going to get better. If you kind of re... You give birth to yourself in a new way. You bring your body back to where it's meant to be, and you really care for your body. That then you set yourself up for success, and you stack the cards in your favor.

• 1:22Rich Roll?

  That's award-winning chef, restaurateur, wellness advocate, and adventure cyclist, Seamus Mullin, this week on the Rich Roll Podcast.

• 1:45Rich Roll?

  Hey, everybody. How you doing? What's going on? It's Rich here. It's the podcast. I'm the host. Thanks for tuning into the show, where I do my best, I really do, to engage the most compelling, intriguing...

• 1:58Rich Roll?

  Paradigm breaking minds and personalities across all categories of positive culture change. The idea, well, the idea is to help all of us unlock and unleash our best, most authentic selves so we can simply live and be better. So, thanks for subscribing to the show. If you want to support the show, please take a quick moment to give us a review on iTunes. That helps us out so much. And you can also support the show by clicking on the Amazon banner ad at richroll.com for all your Amazon purchases. It won't cost you anything extra on your purchases, and it's a really great free way to support the mission. And you can make it easy by just bookmarking the link from the banner ad on my site to your browser.

• 2:42Rich Roll?

  That way, you don't have to keep going back to my site, and everybody wins. All right, so what's going on? Well, I'm in Utah today for the second time in a week, actually. Why am I in Utah? Well, the Iron Cowboy, that's why. As you might know, I came out a couple of days ago to support the Iron Cowboy on the final day of his extraordinary 50-50-50, where he completed 50 Ironmans in 50 states in 50 days. I had the great privilege of running the final marathon with him that day and getting to witness him achieving something that I think will go down in the annals of endurance history as one of the most epic accomplishments of all time.

• 3:26Rich Roll?

  And I wanted to do the podcast with him the morning after he completed the event, but unfortunately, he lost his voice because he stayed super late and talked to everybody. There were like 3,500 people there, I just found out. I thought it was like 1,500 or something, but it turns out there were like well over 3,000 people there. And the guy literally was there until almost 1:00 in the morning, talking to everybody who wanted to talk to him. Woke up the next morning, lost his voice, couldn't do the podcast. I wanted to get it while it was hot, so I flew out Friday morning to get it done, and we just wrapped it. It lives up to all the hype. It's an extraordinary conversation with James. I get the full story of the whole thing and his wife Sunny was on the podcast as well as

• 4:09Rich Roll?

  his wingmen, Casey and Aaron, and a special appearance by his daughter Lucy. It's a really incredible conversation. I actually got emotional at the end, which is a first on the podcast. I was tearing up at the end. I plan on putting that out in the next two weeks. I'm not sure exactly when, but of course I'll let you know and keep you posted on all of that. But today, today it's all about my friend Seamus Mullen, who is quite inspirational in his own right. More on Seamus in a minute, but first. So this week's guest on the show is my friend Seamus Mullen, who is a New York City-based,

• 4:54Rich Roll?

  award-winning chef. You might have caught him on the Food Network's The Next Iron Chef, or on the Today Show, or Chopped, or CBS This Morning, or Martha Stewart. He is the proprietor of four restaurants, which include Tortulia, which was a finalist for the James Beard Foundation Award for Best New Restaurant, as well as El Colmato, both in New York City, and Sea Containers at the Mondrian Hotel in London. He's a cookbook author, and he's become a leading authority in the conversation on food, health, and wellness. And this is where things get interesting, because Seamus was an avid cyclist who raced competitively in his twenties, but in 2007, he was diagnosed with rheumatoid arthritis, which is an autoimmune

• 5:37Rich Roll?

  disease that truly debilitated him. It really brought him to his knees and forced him to rethink his relationship with food. And through a holistic approach to food, exercise, and lifestyle change, Seamus was quite miraculously able to successfully turn his health around. So much so, that he's gone on to do amazing things, including conquering the incredible La Ruta de los Conquistadores, one of the most challenging mountain bike races in the world. And he spends most of his free time these days on crazy cycling adventures with pro cyclists like cyclocross king Tim Johnson, and Cannondale Tour de France rider Ted King.

• 6:19Rich Roll?

  It's an amazing story. It's one he shared with the Wall Street Journal, the New York Times, and on his bimonthly column in Men's Journal, and it's what we're gonna focus on today. So, let's just get into it, shall we? Let's do this thing. Ladies and gentlemen, Seamus Mullen.

• 6:39Rich Roll?

  I like how you just came up. You're all sweaty.

• 6:43Rich Roll?

  Do you ride like a mountain bike in the city?

• 6:45Speaker 01

  No.

• 6:46Rich Roll?

  What kind of bike do you ride in the city?

• 6:46Speaker 01

  I have a single speed. I've got like a Bianchi single speed that I ride in the city. But I'm thinking that I'm gonna, I have a, an old mountain bike that I'm gonna convert to a single speed as my town bike.

• 6:56Rich Roll?

  Right. Well, you don't want your city bike to be too nice.

• 6:59Speaker 01

  No, in fact, mine, mine is like so, so geared up that you can't steal anything off of the bike. I mean, well, you could steal like the brake levers and things like that, but the, you know, the seat post is locked down, the, the seat is locked down, the wheels are locked down. So I can just kinda lock it up and, and forget about it.

• 7:15Rich Roll?

  One lock or do you do the double lock?

• 7:17Speaker 01

  I just do one lock because I have the, the pinheads on, on my, um, front and rear wheels, so you theoretically can't really steal the wheels either. So it's, it's a bit of a pain in the butt, but you know, getting around on the bike is the, I, I don't take the subway and I don't take taxis. I go everywhere. I put in like 80 miles a week on the, on the single speed, just commuting around town.

• 7:35Rich Roll?

  Just commuting, yeah. Do you live in Brooklyn or where?

• 7:37Speaker 01

  I live in Brooklyn, yeah. So it's a minimum of like a 16 mile commute for me a day.

• 7:42Rich Roll?

  Right, right, right, right.

• 7:43Speaker 01

  But then running around doing other stuff.

• 7:45Rich Roll?

  When I came here, I almost just tried to find like a used beater bike to just buy, so I could just ride around. And then I was like, I'm so busy every day. It just seemed silly, like then I was gonna have to sell it. So I've been riding around on those stupid city bikes, but at least it's better than...

• 8:00Speaker 01

  It's better than being stuck in, in traffic.

• 8:02Rich Roll?

  Oh my god, it's so much nicer.

• 8:03Speaker 01

  No, I can't. I, I've been riding bikes for all my life, and the idea of, of having to be stuck in traffic in the city is just, I mean, it took me... What, like eight minutes to get here from, from the West Village and we're in Midtown?

• 8:16Rich Roll?

  Right, yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 8:17Speaker 01

  So, you know, that's, you can't beat that.

• 8:18Rich Roll?

  That's crazy, man. And you're coming off a three-day, 300-mile ride from New York to DC?

• 8:25Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, from New York to DC. We left on Sunday morning. Uh, we rode down to Philadelphia, actually just outside of Philadelphia to Bucks County.

• 8:32Rich Roll?

  Uh-huh.

• 8:32Speaker 01

  And then, uh, went and spent the night in Philadelphia. And then we drove out. So we took a, we didn't do a direct route. We did sort of a nicer route.

• 8:39Rich Roll?

  Mm-hmm.

• 8:39Speaker 01

  We drove out to Amish Country near Lancaster, Pennsylvania, rode through downtown, all the way into downtown Baltimore, and then spent the night in Baltimore.

• 8:46Rich Roll?

  Mm-hmm.

• 8:47Speaker 01

  Excuse me, then we rolled out the last day to, uh, to DC.

• 8:50Rich Roll?

  Cool. And that's, you, you work with a bunch of charities. What charity was that one?

• 8:53Speaker 01

  It's with an organization called Share Our Strength, and they focus on ending childhood hunger in the US, uh, primarily through providing breakfast in, in public schools for kids that don't have food at home.

• 9:03Rich Roll?

  Mm-hmm.

• 9:04Speaker 01

  So it was, it was really cool. We actually got to go to one of the schools that's a, uh, one of our pilot schools in Baltimore and, uh, meet all the kids that we came in. There's a bunch of media there. And just seeing actually the last, you know, the last 12 inches of the journey where the food's actually getting to the children.

• 9:18Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 9:18Speaker 01

  Was very, very cool. So we raised about $300,000, which is roughly 3 million meals that we're providing for kids.

• 9:24Rich Roll?

  Wow. So, so.

• 9:25Speaker 01

  Makes it dead.

• 9:26Rich Roll?

  So what is the difference? Like, what are they doing with the meals there that makes it special?

• 9:30Speaker 01

  Well, I mean, the main thing is, is that a lot of these kids don't even have food at home.

• 9:33Rich Roll?

  Mm-hmm.

• 9:33Speaker 01

  So if they don't get breakfast at school, they're not, they're, they're gonna be hungry through, through lunch. Um, and then trying to provide them a breakfast that is not just all processed food. So they're getting, they're getting fruit and vegetables and, and it's, you know, I, there's a, there's a long way to go and we can definitely improve the quality of, of the food. But the first part is just getting the, is the, is the context and getting, getting the kids food and getting them food that's real food. So that they're not, you know, they're not starting the school day without any nutrition whatsoever.

• 10:01Rich Roll?

  Yeah. I mean, well, school lunch is such a disaster.

• 10:04Speaker 01

  Oh, it's, it's a huge, huge problem.

• 10:06Rich Roll?

  And it's, it's amazing how difficult it is to. Enact change in that field because everyone agrees, but there's so much money being made and there's a lot of politics with it. Later, or next week, I'm gonna do a podcast with this guy, Steven Ritz. Do you know him?

• 10:21Speaker 01

  No, I don't.

• 10:22Rich Roll?

  He works up in the Bronx in schools and they're like growing all their own food in the library and doing all this amazing stuff.

• 10:28Speaker 01

  Oh, that's great.

• 10:28Rich Roll?

  He did a really cool TED Talk, so.

• 10:30Speaker 01

  Awesome. I wonder if he's affiliated with Karen Washington, who's in the Bronx. She's a, she's an urban gardener. She's done a great job getting, getting fresh produce into, into areas, neighborhoods that don't have fresh produce.

• 10:40Rich Roll?

  Yeah, cool.

• 10:40Speaker 01

  She's, she's super cool.

• 10:41Rich Roll?

  Yeah, well, I'll ask him now.

• 10:43Speaker 01

  Yeah, I bet he knows her. I mean, they're in the Bronx, so he probably knows her.

• 10:45Rich Roll?

  Right, right, right. Very cool. So, nice, man. So, you guys raised a bunch of money?

• 10:50Speaker 01

  Yeah, raised a bunch of money. It was, it was a lot of fun. It was all chefs riding. And this weekend, they're doing another ride on the West Coast from Santa Monica to San Diego.

• 10:59Rich Roll?

  Yeah, nice. And there was a, so it was chefs and then you were with a guy who's like doctors, Doctors Without Borders, right?

• 11:06Speaker 01

  Uh, no, that was on, that was a different ride.

• 11:09Rich Roll?

  Oh, that was the Baja.

• 11:09Speaker 01

  Yeah, my motorcycle adventure, yeah.

• 11:11Rich Roll?

  I can't keep track of all your adventures. I'm like, for somebody who's got a whole bunch of restaurants and seems like a super busy entrepreneur, it's amazing that you find time to go on these amazing adventures and make cool videos.

• 11:22Speaker 01

  Well, I sneak, I sneak out.

• 11:23Rich Roll?

  Like Men's Journal and stuff like that.

• 11:25Speaker 01

  Yeah, I sneak out. That, that one was cool. That was, that was a, that was a little bit more fun and less, less charity involved in that. But with my, one of my best friends who works with MSF and he, he's based in, he's in Africa, but he happened to be home on a, on a, on a break and Men's Journal wanted to make a video of an adventure. So they said, you know, what do you want to do? I said, let's go to Baja, man, riding motorcycles.

• 11:45Rich Roll?

  How does that work? Do they like finance that or they just?

• 11:48Speaker 01

  They got, yeah, they got sponsorship to do it and BMW hooked us up with bikes and, and we spent eight days motorcycling around Baja, which is, which is pretty tremendous.

• 11:56Rich Roll?

  It's a sweet gig.

• 11:57Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 11:58Rich Roll?

  And they send a guy to just, you know, film it and everything like that?

• 12:00Speaker 01

  We had a crew. We had like four, four guys filming. Yeah, we had some drones. It was pretty amazing.

• 12:05Rich Roll?

  That's pretty cool. Yeah, I watched it this morning. It was pretty neat.

• 12:07Speaker 01

  Cool. Yeah, it was fun.

• 12:08Rich Roll?

  And then you did, you did something for Men's Fitness when you rode La Ruta, right?

• 12:12Speaker 01

  Yeah, well, with Men's Journal, yeah. I, I've done stuff with them in the past. I didn't, for La Ruta, I didn't specifically do, do anything with them. I'm actually Actually working on a documentary that we're producing about that journey. So that was kind of this culmination of my coming back from being very unhealthy for many years and then getting back onto the bike and, and really rediscovering my love for the bicycle. And so I kind of had to give myself something that was more challenging than what, than what I'd been going through when I was six. So we figured, why not do La Ruta de los Conquistadores? It's a pretty, pretty epic, epic race.

• 12:43Rich Roll?

  Yeah, it's cool. And I want to get into that, but this is probably a good kind of like launch pad to kind of get into, you know, the pivotal part of your whole story, which is this amazing journey from, you know, being somebody who really had like a whole battery of health issues that were seemingly impossible for you to overcome and then overcoming them and then now living this, you know, very entrepreneurial, adventuresome, athletic lifestyle that you lead.

• 13:06Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's been an incredible journey and I, I really could not have done it without a lot of help from, from my family and from my friends and from, from Dr. Frank Lipman, who's become a very close friend. I, I went from being like this very healthy guy who was really athletic and, and competitive to slowly like all the nuts and bolts of the wagon started to get loose until eventually the wheels started falling off the wagon. And by the time I was in my late twenties, I was really sick. And I didn't know what was going on. I looked, you know, I looked around everywhere I could to try to find answers and, and my doctors didn't really have any answers for me. And eventually my, my health got to the point where I was basically incapacitated.

• 13:48Speaker 01

  I mean, working was really, really hard, getting out of bed was really hard. And I was eventually diagnosed with rheumatoid arthritis, which, you know, for, for most people that, that have, most people have heard of arthritis and they think of osteoarthritis. They think of the wear and tear in your joints, as I had as well. But I, I didn't realize and a lot of people don't realize that it's an autoimmune disease, that the actual aspect of arthritis is really a presentation of the disease rather than the cause or, or the, the real issue. So I went through the very traditional treatment of treating the symptoms through heavy duty drugs, a lot of things like prednisone and methotrexate, which is a chemotherapy

• 14:29Speaker 01

  drug, and immunosuppressants. And it kind of, you know, I was able to function, but it wasn't, it was no life.

• 14:35Rich Roll?

  Right. But let's, let's like, take it back and break it down a little, in a little bit more detail. I mean, you, you grew up in Vermont, right? You grew up, essentially, and for people that are listening, like, I had the pleasure of hearing your story. And we met at Revitalize at this conference recently, and I was very moved by it. It's, it's an incredible thing, what you've overcome. But, you know, you kind of grew up with a mom and who loved to cook and

• 14:57Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 14:58Rich Roll?

  taught you about this connection between food and health. And you, you, you had a very kind of like physically tactile experience with food as a young person, right?

• 15:06Speaker 01

  Totally.

• 15:07Rich Roll?

  So you had that kind of seed planted early.

• 15:09Speaker 01

  I did, but then I kind of lost touch with it. So I had this moment where, you know, I grew up in a very, you could say, sort of back to nature environment in the seventies in Vermont, where, where my folks were raising all of their own stuff. And my mom was really, really concerned with the quality of the food that my brother and I were eating. But we were also in a really, really rural environment where there weren't a whole lot of educational opportunities for us. And so my folks decided it would make the most sense for us to go away to school, to go to boarding school. And we did. And what that really meant is that we were able to really kind of cultivate our intellect, if you will, but our, our, our internal culture, our bodies really suffered from it.

• 15:47Rich Roll?

  Back to school lunch.

• 15:48Speaker 01

  Exactly. Back to school lunch. I mean, it's about as, you know, that's school lunch is as bad as it gets. And that's the foundation of, of your health. And it really, you know, I, it's funny, I look at my brother and he's, he's very healthy and hasn't had any sort of health problems like I have had. But as I, I look back on my own history, I realized that all it takes is one little infection, or one, you know, one, one thing to kind of throw the gut off. And if you're not eating well, then it just can, it can set off a chain of events.

• 16:14Rich Roll?

  Cascades.

• 16:14Speaker 01

  Yeah, cascades into, to a series of other medical issues. And the problem with all of the, a lot of the, the Western approach to treating that is that you, you end up creating all these other subsidiary, whether they're symptoms or diseases, or other things that are a product of the actual treatment. So yeah, I had this really great upbringing, you know, lots of great food. Went, went away to school, started to get sick. My health slowly declined.

• 16:40Rich Roll?

  Well, you were bike racing when you were younger though.

• 16:42Speaker 01

  Yeah, I started bike racing when I was a teenager and, and even, you know, I, I, I was, at that point, I was lactose intolerant. Um, I had food allergies, you know, all sorts of things, but I was still able to, as you can when you're seventeen, eighteen years old.

• 16:56Rich Roll?

  Get away with it.

• 16:57Speaker 01

  Yeah, you can get away with it.

• 16:58Rich Roll?

  But you knew, but you kind of knew that already.

• 17:00Speaker 01

  Yeah, but I didn't know that, um, what I was dealing with was, was really part of a much bigger issue. I mean, I didn't feel like, I didn't feel terrifically sick, but I just felt like how I felt and I didn't have. I was young, so I didn't really have a, um, I didn't have a control to look at and say, oh, I should really feel like this. I should feel a lot better than I do. Um, it's only kind of now that I'm, that I feel really good, that I look back and realize how horrible I felt for so many years, which is really a remarkable, remarkable thing.

• 17:29Rich Roll?

  So, cyclocross racing?

• 17:31Speaker 01

  Mm-hmm.

• 17:32Rich Roll?

  Uh, mountain bike racing?

• 17:33Speaker 01

  Yeah, mountain biking and cross.

• 17:34Rich Roll?

  In high school or in college too?

• 17:35Speaker 01

  Uh, the end of, end of high school, college, and then after college is when I really got serious about it.

• 17:39Rich Roll?

  Right, right, right.

• 17:40Speaker 01

  So like twenty-one, twenty-two till I was about twenty-six.

• 17:43Rich Roll?

  Mm-hmm. And, and when does, so you go to Michigan to college, right?

• 17:47Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 17:47Rich Roll?

  And then do you come to New York right after that? Or you start, you went to Spain?

• 17:51Speaker 01

  I went to Spain, yeah. Yeah, I traveled a bunch. So I, my senior year in high school, I did in Spain. Went to Michigan for a year, then went back to Spain for a couple of years. Um, then came back and I moved to Philadelphia for a few years and then, uh, moved to California. And this is why I was really cooking seriously, moved to California.

• 18:08Rich Roll?

  When did the idea of becoming a chef, like, crop up?

• 18:11Speaker 01

  Kind of when I was in, when I was in college in, in Spain. Uh, I was working in a restaurant there, I was around food again and starting to rekindle that love for food and I really enjoyed cooking. Um, and I didn't think of it as something I could do professionally as a career, but my grandmother said, listen, this is what you like doing. You should do it.

• 18:29Rich Roll?

  Like you always liked doing that as a chef?

• 18:30Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, I always liked doing it and, and the notion, you know, in, in school, they don't really teach you, this is what you love doing. Then you should try to build a career out of it. It's kind of like they try to fit you into these little boxes.

• 18:41Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 18:41Speaker 01

  And I had this amazing moment with my grandmother where she was like, listen, this is what you're passionate about. You should, you can make a living out of this.

• 18:49Rich Roll?

  You can? Like, you know, wow. You know, what, I don't have to be a consultant?

• 18:52Speaker 01

  Exactly, exactly. I think you probably went through a very similar epiphany, maybe a little bit later in life.

• 18:56Rich Roll?

  Much later, much later.

• 18:58Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 18:59Rich Roll?

  Wow, so that's cool. So you're in Spain and you're starting to kind of apprentice and learning.

• 19:04Speaker 01

  Doing all that. And then I came back and so I was working in Philadelphia and cooking and I was also riding bikes and pretty seriously racing bikes, which is a kind of burning the candle at both ends because you're working late at night. You've got these long hours.

• 19:16Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 19:16Speaker 01

  And then I'd get up in the morning and I'd train and on the weekends I'd try to, sometimes I'd, you know, race on a Saturday and then I'd have to drive back to the city as quick as I could to get to work on time and then work all night long. But, you know, it's what I did and it gave me the days free at least to train.

• 19:31Rich Roll?

  Yeah, that's crazy because you hear these stories of, you know, the chef life and it's just, you're just, you just live in that kitchen all the time.

• 19:38Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah, all the time.

• 19:38Rich Roll?

  You even could, you even attempted to try to be an athlete on any level and maintain that lifestyle is kind of amazing.

• 19:45Speaker 01

  It was really hard, yeah.

• 19:46Rich Roll?

  There must have been a lot of adrenal fatigue.

• 19:48Speaker 01

  Oh, totally. I mean, I was wasted all the time. I think that eventually, that's why I stopped racing because I got to the point where you're, I mean, I was also racing with guys who, I was racing in a pretty competitive field with guys that were literally sitting all day long. They were, if they weren't training, they weren't even, you know, you know, the classic cyclists that are like, how many minutes can I spend sitting down, lying down, not using my leg muscles at all?

• 20:09Rich Roll?

  With Norma Tech boots on.

• 20:10Speaker 01

  Exactly, Norma Tech boots, legs up, yeah, watching television, icing themselves. And I, you know, I would like finish a training ride and go straight to work.

• 20:18Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 20:19Speaker 01

  So it was pretty hard. It got to the point where I just, I, I don't want to say I got burned out on racing, but I just, I couldn't compete at the same level. And I was really used to being competitive and being strong and then suddenly I was not in the same league.

• 20:32Rich Roll?

  What kind of, what level were you at when you were doing that? I mean, were you racing against the Tim Johnsons and, you know, those kind of guys?

• 20:38Speaker 01

  Tim was a little bit younger than I am and I don't think Tim and I ever raced together, but some of the guys just above him. I actually raced against Floyd at one point.

• 20:48Rich Roll?

  Oh, you did, wow.

• 20:48Speaker 01

  Yeah, way back when he was, when he was mountain biking, when he was wearing cutoff shorts, yeah. Uh, yeah, I raised, I mean, um, uh, Jeremiah Bishop, who, who's now like one of the, the top endurance mountain bikers. Uh, he was coming up just as I was kind of coming out, but I was in the, I was in the expert semi-pro field. Um, eventually semi-pro and then I just, that's when I stopped. I realized I couldn't. So the, the, the old categorization in, in Norvo, which was predates when Norvo and the UCI joined, or USA Cycling joined, um, there was beginner, sport, expert, semi-pro and pro. So I kind of worked my way up over the years.

• 21:26Rich Roll?

  Wow.

• 21:27Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 21:27Rich Roll?

  Pretty tough to make a living in that.

• 21:29Speaker 01

  Oh, I don't, yeah, I don't know how on earth you can.

• 21:31Rich Roll?

  Yeah, like I don't know how those guys do it.

• 21:33Speaker 01

  No, it's crazy and they're on the road so much. They were, you know. But you see the guys that are, I mean, they, they do get to ride their bike for a living. So that part is, that is pretty cool.

• 21:41Rich Roll?

  All right. So, so you make this decision to devote yourself full-time to the kitchen. And when does, when does the health stuff start to really impact you?

• 21:50Speaker 01

  It starts early on in very, um, sort of in, in like fits and starts. And I don't even realize that it's happening, but I'll, I'll develop like a pain in my shoulder or a pain in my elbow. And they'll be, and when I say a pain, I don't mean like, oh, my elbow kind of hurts today. It would be like a really severe acute pain that feels like something is dramatically wrong with the joint. And it would happen to me primarily in my, in my shoulder, my right shoulder, it happened a lot. It would last for like three days. I wouldn't be able to move my arm and then it would go away. And, uh, it was just as mysterious when it disappeared as when it came. Like I had, I couldn't figure out what might be bringing it on, if there's any, any sort of, um, set of, uh, uh, of, um, circumstances that might make it happen. It just would sort of happen.

• 22:35Speaker 01

  And that started getting to the point where that was becoming kind of chronic. Um, actually let me rewind a little bit before that I started feeling just general malaise, just sort of exhausted all the time. Hard time getting out of bed in the morning, not feeling myself, certainly was not exercising at this point at all. Not really taking care of myself, leading more of like the typical fast chef's life where you're drinking a lot and partying a lot and you're up late and all of that.

• 23:02Rich Roll?

  And just kind of grazing on food all day long, right?

• 23:04Speaker 01

  Yeah, no meals. I mean, literally I went years without eating a meal. I would

• 23:09Rich Roll?

  He's kind of always eating, but never

• 23:11Speaker 01

  Never really full, yeah. And you're, I mean, the classic chef move is you see the guy at nine o'clock at night with a a cork container full of like macaroni and cheese from family meal. And he's like throwing like three bites in his mouth as quickly as he can. He puts it back and he goes back to cooking like a maniac. Because you just, you don't ever have any time and the time that you should be eating or which, I mean, that's arguable. I'm not sure that I agree with it. We have to eat at three, you know, three designated times of the day, but at least I do feel like it makes sense to stop what you're doing and eat a meal and be aware of how much you're eating and that's that. But when you should be doing that, or when you could be doing that, you're actually feeding other people. So it's really, really hard to do it.

• 23:50Speaker 01

  So that was, I was, I was feeling pretty crummy and then I developed like a weird lump on the back of my neck and it grew and got bigger and bigger. Eventually got to the size of a golf ball. And

• 24:01Rich Roll?

  On the outside of your neck?

• 24:02Speaker 01

  Yeah, right on, right on the, it was, well, it was under the skin. It was subcutaneous.

• 24:05Rich Roll?

  Behind your ear almost.

• 24:06Speaker 01

  Yeah, right behind my ear. Exactly. And, um, which I now know it was a lymph node and my immune system was totally out of whack and that was, I was inflamed or it had, it wasn't draining properly or whatever was going on. But, um, I went to my doctor. He looked at it, was concerned, did blood tests, saw that my white blood cell count was very elevated and that my liver enzymes are extremely elevated. And, um, then a few other markers for inflammation and he was very concerned there might be, it might actually be, um, lymphoma. So I was then sent to an oncologist.

• 24:37Rich Roll?

  How old were you then?

• 24:38Speaker 01

  I was 27, I think, 28.

• 24:40Rich Roll?

  Were you already here in New York?

• 24:41Speaker 01

  Yeah, I was in New York. And, um, uh, so they looked at that and they decided to take it out in biopsy. So they just kind of drilled into my neck and cut this massive thing out and then came back as benign. And they're like, well, we don't know what it is. Okay. See you later. And that was that.

• 24:54Rich Roll?

  Wow.

• 24:54Speaker 01

  And then I just started to like have more and more symptoms and, and

• 24:59Rich Roll?

  Yeah, clearly something is seriously wrong.

• 25:00Speaker 01

  Something's wrong, yeah.

• 25:01Rich Roll?

  Your white blood cell count is like super high. That's like causing your lymph node to engorge itself.

• 25:07Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah. It's not, it's not good. Something, but then again, there was, there was also like, you know, I, I turned to my doctor when, when he, when he said it was benign, which obviously I was glad that it wasn't cancerous, but then I said, okay, well, what the hell is going on? I mean, this doesn't make any sense. And, uh, you know, the classic, classic answer was, well, we don't really know. So we'll just, just wait it out and see what happens. So that went on and then the attacks on my shoulder became much more frequent and they started happening in my hip. And every time I'd have one of these attacks, it was so bad I'd end up going to the ER. And they'd sort of dismiss me for not having gone through any major trauma. So they figured it was just, either I was told I was a hypochondriac, or that there was some old sports-related injury that would need to be fixed by an orthopedic surgeon.

• 25:52Speaker 01

  And then it would just go away, but then they'd come back and they went on and on and eventually it got so severe that I was admitted to the hospital and that's when I was diagnosed with RA.

• 26:01Rich Roll?

  How long ago was that?

• 26:02Speaker 01

  That was, um, 2007. So it's eight years ago.

• 26:08Rich Roll?

  Right. And how old are you now?

• 26:09Speaker 01

  Forty-one.

• 26:10Rich Roll?

  Forty-one. Okay. So, alright, so you're in the, you get this diagnosis and what's the, you know, what's the prescription?

• 26:16Speaker 01

  So the prescription is, and that's exactly, you know, that was my exact questions with the doctor came and he said, "Listen, you have, you've got RA, don't worry, there are lots of great drugs, you're gonna be totally fine, we have all this great new technology for treating it." Which, you know, relative to the way they had been treating RA in the seventies and eighties, which was with things like gold injections and all sorts of stuff that just didn't really do anything. And if you look at folks-

• 26:39Rich Roll?

  Gold injections?

• 26:40Speaker 01

  That was a, that was a big, yeah, that was a big treatment.

• 26:41Rich Roll?

  Literally injecting you with gold?

• 26:42Speaker 01

  Yeah, exactly. I don't know, they didn't even know why it worked. I mean, a lot of these things would, would, they'd quell a lot of the symptoms and if you look at folks that had RA in the eighties and early nineties, a lot of them ended up with very disfigured joints, like their fingers would be all gnarled, or their wrists would be gnarled, and end up having to have lots of surgeries to reconstruct their joints. And what a lot of the newer drugs did do, and they do quite effectively, is they, they slow down the degenerative symptoms, the acute attacks that cause degeneration of the joints. But the main problem is that they don't, I mean, they do, they cause a host of other problems, and they don't address the root cause of any of the issues.

• 27:22Rich Roll?

  Right, symptomatic.

• 27:23Speaker 01

  Symptomatic, it's symptomatic.

• 27:24Rich Roll?

  And what are the, what are the, what are the effects, the negative effects of taking these drugs?

• 27:29Speaker 01

  They're horrific. I mean, when you talk about prednisone, prednisone is one of the most over-prescribed drugs on the market, and it's-

• 27:36Rich Roll?

  It's a steroid, right?

• 27:37Speaker 01

  It's a very powerful steroid and it, you know, it's, it's, it's very good for stopping acute inflammation.

• 27:46Speaker 01

  That to me is not really a great thing to do because you need to understand what is driving acute inflammation.

• 27:51Rich Roll?

  What's causing your immune system to create the inflammation in the first place.

• 27:55Speaker 01

  So prednisone is one of the major ones that they use. Then there are all these drugs they call biologic drugs, which are mostly injectables. And those are drugs that will target specific inflammatory cytokines, specific inflammatory proteins, and reduce the production of them to stop inflammation in the joint. Essentially, what happens with, the way rheumatoid arthritis is usually explained by a rheumatologist is that it's a glitch in the immune system whereby the immune system perceives some sort of problem within a joint and will attack that joint with white blood cells to cure this infection that's perceived to be there.

• 28:35Speaker 01

  The problem is, is that then that becomes hugely inflamed and then causes deterioration of the joint. In addition to also just creating a whole host of other problems from respiratory problems to just general, to fever, malaise, achiness, fatigue, all of that.

• 28:54Rich Roll?

  And this glitch, right? So they're just saying, well, there's some kind of mistake here that's causing this to happen without kind of looking behind, maybe there's some other reason that might be provoking that. Is there a rationale that like conventional medical wisdom would say is the reason that some people get this and some people don't? Like, is there a genetic aspect to it or is there a lifestyle aspect to it?

• 29:19Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, that's a question that most rheumatologists are really, they're really hesitant to respond to. And I think that's part of the problem with allopathic medicine in general and the fact that we live in such a litigious environment that most doctors are very, very, very hesitant to make a claim and say, this is what is causing this, or this is what I believe is causing this. Because if they turn out not to be right, then they can be sued for malpractice and all sorts of other things.

• 29:48Rich Roll?

  So that's the whole reason you're going to them.

• 29:50Speaker 01

  Exactly. No, it's a problem, it's the major problem with the way, yeah. But, you know, they will say Things like, well, we don't really know what causes RA, but there are some, you know, there are some suggestions it might be caused by bacterial infection or a viral infection at some point, or it could be caused by, you could be genetically predisposed to it. There does seem to be a prevalence of mothers who have RA, who have children who have RA. Of course, when I look at that, I look at that as nurture, not nature. This is the environment in which-

• 30:25Rich Roll?

  Yeah, what kind of environment-

• 30:26Speaker 01

  Exactly. If you're, if you have, are living in a toxic environment and you're sick, in all likelihood, the children you raise in that environment are also going to be sick. And it's not because you are predisposed, or they are predisposed to that, to being sick, but rather that the environment in which we were growing up-

• 30:43Rich Roll?

  Or to the extent that there is a genetic aspect to it, that the environment helps that genetic predisposition get more fully expressed.

• 30:51Speaker 01

  Right, exactly, exactly.

• 30:53Rich Roll?

  And how many young people get rheumatoid arthritis?

• 30:55Speaker 01

  More and more. I mean, it's amazing, you know, and RA is, there's sort of a family of these autoimmune diseases. There's rheumatoid arthritis, or RA as we call it. There's Crohn's and colitis and-

• 31:10Rich Roll?

  Ulcerative colitis. So these are all-

• 31:12Speaker 01

  Yeah, MS.

• 31:13Rich Roll?

  Interesting, because yeah, you think of it just being like, related more to something like carpal tunnel than you would to ulcerative colitis. But, you know, I have lots of friends that deal with these kind of digestive problems, you know, it's becoming a much more prevalent thing.

• 31:28Speaker 01

  Way more prevalent. And we have to ask ourselves why-

• 31:30Rich Roll?

  When we were kids, did you know anybody that, you know, like, nobody suffered from this kind of stuff?

• 31:34Speaker 01

  And now, who do you know, I mean, just to name a few, I mean, like colitis and MS, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. I'm sure that you and I, between the two of us, we could name like 10 or 15 people within our immediate circle that have some sort of, whether it's psoriasis, MS, or they're touched by it, or they have autism spectrum children, or whatever the case may be, all of these modern diseases which are definitely- Part of it, we're more aware of it, but I think definitely much more prevalent than they were when we were younger.

• 32:00Rich Roll?

  Mm-hmm, for sure. All right, so you get this battery of prescriptions and you start taking these medications, I presume, right?

• 32:07Speaker 01

  Yep. And I get sick.

• 32:09Rich Roll?

  Did it alleviate it, though, at the same time?

• 32:12Speaker 01

  Yes, so two things happened. One, the acute flare-ups, as they call them, stopped happening, or became much, much more infrequent. The general malaise didn't really get any better. And then I just felt, you know, crummy all the time. Like, my hands were so swollen in the morning, I could barely button my shirt. At work, I'd often, like, wouldn't be able to hold a knife because my hands hurt so much. Sometimes I'd get an ache in a joint, like, on my pinky toe, that felt literally like someone had put a nail through my pinky toe. So it was so distracting and painful, and just this one very small part of my body, that it would make the rest of my day, you know, dysfunctional.

• 32:55Rich Roll?

  Wow.

• 32:56Speaker 01

  But what the drugs did do is they kept me out of the hospital, for the most part, with those major, major attacks that I was getting in my joint before. But they also severely weakened my immune system, so I would get sick really, really easily. When you're taking an immunosuppressant, it makes it very easy to get sick.

• 33:16Rich Roll?

  Whatever's going on, your body can't react to it to combat it.

• 33:20Speaker 01

  And what's, you know, what's really sad about that is that, you know, there's so much money to be made on, obviously, in the pharmaceutical industry, and particularly with biologic drugs. But what they do is, while they do take care of the symptoms, they actually make the disease a lot worse, because they're doing, they're combating the exact source of the problem, which is the immune system. So they're compromising the immune system even more, which is already what needs to be fixed.

• 33:47Rich Roll?

  Yeah, interesting. I mean, that's sort of endemic, though. I mean, you know, and it pretty much... Every single sort of prescriptive drug out there is treating symptoms and not underlying. I mean, it makes me crazy when you see something like, I mean Viagra, for example.

• 34:03Speaker 01

  Right.

• 34:04Rich Roll?

  Right? Like if you have erectile dysfunction, that's the canary in the coal mine. That's your body telling you that that very tiny artery is not receiving blood flow, which is your body's way of saying that you're, you quite possibly have, you know, you're on a crash course with heart disease.

• 34:18Speaker 01

  Exactly.

• 34:19Rich Roll?

  You might want to look at that, but you take the blue pill and then you don't have to worry about it anymore.

• 34:22Speaker 01

  Right.

• 34:23Rich Roll?

  And then, you know, the heart attack looms in the future.

• 34:25Speaker 01

  Exactly.

• 34:26Rich Roll?

  It's actually preventing you from getting healthy.

• 34:28Speaker 01

  Yeah, no, it's-

• 34:29Rich Roll?

  Because it's removing the, the warning sign.

• 34:32Speaker 01

  And that's the exact problem that I was going through is that when, when you're taking all of these things that, that do symptomatically make things a little bit more livable, then you don't really address it.

• 34:41Rich Roll?

  It's cool now.

• 34:42Speaker 01

  Yeah, I can deal with it. I can deal with it. And I did get to the point where, you know, there, I, for me, there was a, there was a big element of, of just feeling completely overwhelmed and exasperated too, where I just wanted to, okay, you know, if I take the pill, I'll feel a little bit better and I can get on with my life and I don't have to, I'll deal with this later. I'll deal with this later. I just don't have the time, I don't have the energy, I don't have the capacity. And, and the reality was I also didn't know that I could improve my situation.

• 35:09Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 35:10Speaker 01

  That was a huge, huge-

• 35:10Rich Roll?

  Yeah, you didn't have anybody in your corner who was empowering you or, or who believed actually that this could be positively resolved.

• 35:18Speaker 01

  Absolutely not. No, I was completely at the behest of the medical community, which really is not very good at, I mean, it's great at dealing with acute trauma and terrible at dealing with chronic, chronic disease.

• 35:30Rich Roll?

  Mm-hmm. So where do you kind of hit bottom with this?

• 35:33Speaker 01

  I, I hit bottom, you know, I kind of hit the bottom and then I bounced off the bottom a few times. So I, I hit bottom and then I kind of came up a little bit. The first real nail hitting bottom was, um-

• 35:45Speaker 01

  I was on vacation, uh, my wife and I had gone to, um, to Thailand for a friend's wedding. And, uh, think about how bad this is. I went to Thailand for two weeks and I don't remember any of it. That's, that's how, I mean, like, how, I mean, I've been, fortunately, I've been to Thailand before, but yeah, I went there for two weeks and I don't.

• 36:01Rich Roll?

  Well, that could mean it, that could mean a couple of different things.

• 36:03Speaker 01

  Yeah, I suppose it could, yeah. It depends on what movie you're, what script you're reading, but.

• 36:07Rich Roll?

  Yeah, yeah. In my life story, that means it's something probably very.

• 36:10Speaker 01

  Exactly. Yeah, no, so I, I, I, we got to Thailand and been there for two days and, uh, I was having breakfast with some friends in the hotel and the next thing I knew, it was like 12 hours later and I was in a hospital. And I'd had a grand mal seizure, um, in the, uh, in, in, in the hotel. And my brain was so scrambled from that that I really, I don't remember anything from those two weeks or very little. Um, and it turns out that was caused by two, two medications that were prescribed to me by, by, um, one by a neurologist and one by a rheumatologist.

• 36:43Rich Roll?

  So was the, it was the intermixing of those two things. I mean, what is, what is a grand mal seizure? The only time I ever hear that described is also like detoxing off of, you know, when you're kind of detoxing off alcohol, that becomes a.

• 36:54Speaker 01

  Oh, really?

• 36:54Rich Roll?

  Problem for, yeah, for like a real alcoholic.

• 36:57Speaker 01

  So, I mean, it's, it's, I don't really know that much about it. Um, you know, it's similar to, to an epileptic seizure. It goes on for a long period of time. Your brain, there's, there's some sort of neurological inflammation and, and, and disconnect in your brain and, and, uh, the nervous system goes haywire. Um, so, you know, I think from, I don't know, because I, I was not there. I don't remember any of it.

• 37:21Rich Roll?

  You don't have, you don't have any memory of the actual experience of having that?

• 37:24Speaker 01

  No, but the, from, from what my wife told me and everyone else, they sort of, they watched it happen and it was sort of the classic. My eyes rolled in the back of the, back of my head and then I just started convulsing and wouldn't stop convulsing for like 10 minutes or so. So it went on.

• 37:38Rich Roll?

  That's a long time.

• 37:39Speaker 01

  Yeah, um, so that, that, that happened and I, I kinda bounced back from that and I was, that was kinda bouncing off the floor of the, the rock bottom and I got a little bit better. And about a month and a half later, um, I was filming some TV, a TV segment and I developed this, this headache that was unlike a headache I'd ever had before. I mean, it was like a searing, searing headache that, that just came on out of nowhere and progressively got worse. And within an hour and a half, I had a very high fever. Um, so I called my doctor and he said he'd go straight to the ER. And I got there and by the time I got there, my fever had gone up to a hundred and five.

• 38:15Rich Roll?

  Wow.

• 38:15Speaker 01

  And then it went up to a hundred and six and.

• 38:18Rich Roll?

  Can't really get much higher than that.

• 38:19Speaker 01

  No, yeah, I can't even believe it got that high.

• 38:21Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 38:22Speaker 01

  And, uh, and that was a moment where I literally had one of those, you know, people talk about seeing the light at the end of the tunnel. I mean, I was in that tunnel and there were two directions I could go. I could float up towards this light, which was a very peaceful and, and, and enticing place to go that required no battle whatsoever. Where I could dig my nails in and grip and, and pull myself back away from that. And I had this, I mean, I remember it very clearly. I had this moment where I just was like, I'm not, it's not my time to go. I'm not, I'm not gonna die right now.

• 38:52Rich Roll?

  So you really had like.

• 38:53Speaker 01

  I had that whole light, yeah. And I crawled back in my brain. I crawled back and suddenly all the noises in the ER, uh, got louder and louder and louder and I could start to see faces and, and then the next day, I remember the doctor coming to me and saying, you know, we almost lost you. And I said, no, I, I know I was there. I remembered it very, very vividly. And that was that moment where I kind of decided, this is the end. I cannot live my life like this. I cannot live my life never knowing what's gonna happen tomorrow, if I'm gonna be in the hospital tomorrow, if, if the, if the wheels are gonna completely fall off the wagon. And, um, and I made a commitment to myself then that I would do whatever it took. The, the big problem for me was that I didn't, I had no idea what it was. I mean,

• 39:36Speaker 01

  I had, I had committed to myself that I was gonna get better, but I didn't know what that meant. And, uh, so it took a couple of, of, you know, over the next six months, I had a few really, really, um, revolution, revelatory moments with, thanks to other people that, that really started, set me on, set me on my path.

• 39:55Rich Roll?

  Well, a couple of observations. The first is this sort of glossing over of the near-death experience, which could be its own podcast. I might have to have you back just to talk about that, you know. Have you heard of this neurologist named Dr. Evan Frick? I'm forgetting his last name. I want to say Evan Alexander, I'm not sure, but anyway, he's like a Harvard-trained neurologist.

• 40:18Speaker 01

  Oh, I have. He had a near-death experience.

• 40:20Rich Roll?

  Right, because he went into a coma and he had this, and he wrote a whole book about it.

• 40:23Speaker 01

  Yeah, and he was a total skeptic until he actually...

• 40:26Rich Roll?

  Yeah, I just met him at another one of these wellness conferences, and he gave me his book, which I just started reading. But yeah, he was a super skeptic. And then he was in a coma for like seven days, but during that period of time, he experienced it as a much longer period of time, where he had all these vivid experiences. Now, his whole perspective on everything in life has changed. But anyway...

• 40:45Speaker 01

  It's amazing. The power of the mind is incredible.

• 40:48Rich Roll?

  I mean, the fact that you had that, like you, I mean, you were out of it, but you had that, you know, vivid experience that you recollect, you know, with clarity.

• 40:58Speaker 01

  It was incredibly lucid.

• 40:59Rich Roll?

  It's kind of amazing.

• 41:00Speaker 01

  Yeah. Yeah, it was, and it was a moment, I wasn't even in that moment that I was like, oh, I have to fix myself and I gotta get better. It was more like, here are two choices. I can either go the easy route, which is just to let go, and I know, and I knew then, that letting go meant I was gonna die, or I could fight. And the weird thing about the fighting aspect is that it wasn't like it's a physical struggle, but it really, when I think about it, it was kind of like being, you know, hanging off the edge of a cliff or something, and you're holding on for dear life, and you can feel your fingers slipping away, and you're down to like two fingers, and you can either just slip away and finally relax, because you're just at that, you're at that very last moment and your body can't anymore, or you can just suck it up and dig in and find it, you know, somewhere to pull

• 41:45Speaker 01

  yourself up, back up over the cliff. And that's what that, that's what that moment was like. It was really, really remarkable.

• 41:50Rich Roll?

  That's interesting. All right, so you come out of that and you're like, I gotta, I gotta do something different.

• 41:55Speaker 01

  I gotta change my life, yeah.

• 41:56Rich Roll?

  First of all, you gotta fire your doctor.

• 41:58Speaker 01

  Exactly.

• 41:59Rich Roll?

  This guy is not...

• 42:01Speaker 01

  That was the last time I went to see him, actually, yeah.

• 42:03Rich Roll?

  That was the end. And what leads you to Frank?

• 42:06Speaker 01

  So, you know, well, first, first, I, before I even met Frank, I met this guy named Ari Meisel, who I didn't meet, but I saw a podcast that he did, or rather, I saw a TEDx talk he gave. And in it, he had been living with Crohn's for a number of years, and he had managed to turn it around through diet, exercise, supplementation. He got off of all of his meds, and to, you know, to the complete disbelief of his doctors, no longer had any sign of Crohn's in his, in his bloods. And so I watched this talk, which was really just kind of about his experience, and it, it, it was this moment where I saw it, and I was like, God, I really want to be this guy. This guy did it, then if he did it,

• 42:49Speaker 01

  I can do it too. You know, he, he went from being hospitalized a year later to doing an Ironman. So, if he could do it, I could do it too, right? And I got to meet him, and he became friends. And the most important aspect of all this was really just learning, that was the inspirational element of, of, of knowing somebody who'd gone through a very similar experience, and knew what it was like to feel helpless, and knew what it was like to feel self pity, and anger, and depression, and all these things that come along with being chronically sick. And, and was, was very supportive. And it wasn't so much that he was like, oh, take this supplement, and do this, and don't eat that. It was more that just he, he had done it himself, and I was gonna have to figure out my own path, but there was, there was some, there was some, there was some

• 43:34Speaker 01

  inspiration. So I met him, and I met Frank Shirley after that.

• 43:37Rich Roll?

  A little accountability, too.

• 43:38Speaker 01

  Accountability, too, yeah.

• 43:39Rich Roll?

  To say, to bounce ideas off of, or somebody who at least could hold that belief that maybe you do have the power to resolve this for yourself.

• 43:46Speaker 01

  Totally, totally.

• 43:47Rich Roll?

  And you just reached out to him randomly after seeing the video?

• 43:50Speaker 01

  Actually, no. So, the way it ha, the way it, he was, he's actually very good friends with, with a friend of mine. And my friend had seen what I was going through and said, you've gotta meet Ari. You really gotta meet him, because... You guys have gone, he went through a very similar thing and I, when he told me that, I was like, the end of all, you, when you're, when you're not well, you get so much unsolicited advice about what you should and shouldn't do. Oh, you gotta eat cherry, you gotta drink cherry juice and you gotta stop eating.

• 44:15Rich Roll?

  Everybody's an expert on your.

• 44:17Speaker 01

  Exactly. When they have no idea what it's like to, to, to be in your shoes. And that makes, you know, it, it makes you pretty jaded, honestly, like. At this, I, you know, I never offer advice to people unless they really ask me for it. Uh, I'm happy to, to, to, to share my experience and I'm happy to, to be as empathetic as I can. But I'm not going to offer any advice to anyone until they come and ask for it. Because it's, I feel like it's just not appropriate and, and people aren't really ready to change until they're ready to do it. So for me to try to impose my own values or my own, my own experience upon them, it may not, what works for me may not necessarily work for someone else either. But, but that was, you know, that was a moment where Ari kind of got me to think about

• 45:02Speaker 01

  the fact that what I was living through, RA or Crohn's or whatever you wanted to call it, or colitis or MS or any of these diseases, which are, all have the same root cause. That if, if you just try to deal with the symptoms, you're never going to get better. Um, if you kind of re, you, you give birth to yourself in a new way. You bring your body back to where it's meant to be and you really care for your body. That then you set yourself up for success and you, you, you stack the cards in your favor. If you're constantly getting in the way of your immune system and getting in the way of your body, your body wants to, it wants to heal itself. It doesn't want to be sick. You know, our bodies do not want to be sick. But we, we put up so many hurdles and roadblocks that make it really hard for our body to do its job and to be, to be healthy.

• 45:46Speaker 01

  And so what he was kind of pointing out to me was that if we can start to remove some of those roadblocks and clear things up and, and, and then also get that tailwind, because that's what you want, is you want a little bit of tailwind behind you so your body can do, do what it does best. And that was the beginning and then, and then I was very, it was fortuitous to meet Frank Littman, um, who I'm sure some of your listeners are familiar with.

• 46:08Rich Roll?

  Well, I've had him on the podcast.

• 46:09Speaker 01

  Oh, great. Awesome. Then they should definitely.

• 46:11Rich Roll?

  It was a while ago, but yeah, yeah.

• 46:12Speaker 01

  Yeah. So I just had dinner with Frank last night.

• 46:15Rich Roll?

  Oh, you did? Cool.

• 46:15Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 46:15Rich Roll?

  And you're going, are you going out to see him this weekend?

• 46:18Speaker 01

  Yeah, I'm gonna see him this weekend. We're, um, we're gonna, uh, talk at the Bank of America Wellness Retreat, um, in, in Montauk.

• 46:24Rich Roll?

  Very cool.

• 46:25Speaker 01

  Which will be nice to get out there.

• 46:26Rich Roll?

  We'll say hi to Frank.

• 46:27Speaker 01

  I definitely will. Um, so I met Frank and Frank was, was, um, was super cool. You know, I didn't think I was gonna see him as a doctor. Um, I met him socially. Uh, but as soon as I, I, I met him, he took a, a deep interest in, in me. I think he saw, he saw how sick I was. You could see in my face. He saw how inflamed I was. He could tell that I was not well.

• 46:48Rich Roll?

  Good God, man. What are you doing?

• 46:49Speaker 01

  You know, even worse.

• 46:50Rich Roll?

  What are you doing to yourself?

• 46:51Speaker 01

  Doing to yourself. You look like shit, mate. You look terrible. Yeah. And his South African accent. Um, no, what he did say, which is amazing, he's like, he looked at me and said, "It's a shame. It's a shame what you've gone through." That I had suffered so unnecessarily that, that really that what I was dealing with and what I was living through was totally not necessary. You know, I didn't have to live that way. I didn't have to be suffering from RA. I didn't have to be going through all of these issues that I was going through for years and years and years. Um, if, if Western medicine had just not been so arrogant and if I had, you know, if I had met him 15 years earlier, uh, things would have been a lot different. Um, but what he, what he made very clear to me was that he wasn't interested

• 47:34Speaker 01

  in treating rheumatoid arthritis or anything. He didn't even really want to call it RA. Um, he, he wanted to treat this underlying issue, which is the, the, the immune system or, or, you know, as he refers to it, as the gut, which is really treating the microbiome as the driving force behind the majority of, of modern disease. Um, and rebalancing our, our relationship with our bacteria and developing, uh, a much more, you know, reversing this dysbiosis that I was experiencing and been living through for years and years and years that I was totally unaware of.

• 48:04Rich Roll?

  Mm-hmm.

• 48:06Speaker 01

  As it was being driven by, probably by a number of factors from infection to overuse of antibiotics, to bad diet, to all sorts of issues.

• 48:18Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 48:18Speaker 01

  But, you know, all this-

• 48:19Rich Roll?

  You took antibiotics a lot as a kid?

• 48:20Speaker 01

  Well, I didn't until I was a teenager, and then I did a lot. And I started getting sick a lot as a teenager, so I would get, you know, pneumonia, which is not very common for teenagers to get, or bronchitis. And every time I had, you know, some sort of infection or illness, boom, take, you know-

• 48:36Rich Roll?

  Right, even if it's viral.

• 48:37Speaker 01

  Moxacillin.

• 48:38Rich Roll?

  Even if it's viral.

• 48:39Speaker 01

  Even if it's viral, yeah, they would just throw it at you.

• 48:40Rich Roll?

  Did you take, uh, touch recycling for acne? Cause so many kids do that.

• 48:42Speaker 01

  I did not, but I know a lot of kids. I didn't, I was lucky I didn't have, I didn't have acne, but I know that a lot of people that, that do take that, and the real, the horrible thing about that is that they're making it worse.

• 48:54Rich Roll?

  Mm-hmm.

• 48:54Speaker 01

  You know, oftentimes acne is driven by a dysbiosis in the gut, and then you take this really powerful antibiotic that is just gonna, gonna wipe out the majority of the good bacteria that you need to have in your gut. So, um, he, he, he helped me kind of reevaluate the way I was living my life, and then through, you know, a bunch of different tools, I'll call them, you know, some being, actually being, believe it or not, antibiotics, for a short period of time, because I did have a pretty serious infection that we had to clear up. But then switching to a very, very, uh, strong pre and probiotic, um, protocol, and, and healing the gut lining, and trying to, to, to close up, um, uh, the, you know, overporous,

• 49:39Speaker 01

  leaky gut, and, um, and then cleaning up my diet, and just trying to get me healthy. And a large component of that too was also mental health, understanding the importance of, of letting go of things, and, you know.

• 49:52Rich Roll?

  Well, it's, it's almost an Ayurvedic approach, in the sense that, you know, the body is composed of energy systems, and if these are, if these systems are out of balance, you're, you're headed towards dis-ease.

• 50:03Speaker 01

  Yes, exactly.

• 50:04Rich Roll?

  Right, like you're, you're in dis-ease, and so how do we bring this back into balance?

• 50:07Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 50:08Rich Roll?

  You know, it's interesting that, that, you know, the gut biome, it's, it's now sort of at the advent of, you know, everybody's, you know, it's on the tip of everyone's tongue. It's kind of this zeitgeist thing in the medical field, but it wasn't that long ago that, you know, that was a crazy idea.

• 50:22Speaker 01

  Totally crazy idea.

• 50:23Rich Roll?

  So, uh, so how do you even begin to parse that out? I mean, does he take like a sample from your gut biome and figure out what's in there and what's missing and what's bad? And like, what's the difference between good and bad? And how do you figure that out?

• 50:36Speaker 01

  Yeah, no, it's hard. I mean, it's not, and it's not as simple as saying, this is good bacteria and this is bad bacteria. Now, they're, they're kind of two families, if you will, of bacteria and having the right balance of, of both is important. It's, it's kind of like saying, well, you can't say that omega-3 fatty acids are good and omega-6s are bad. They're both necessary, but if you don't have them in the right balance.

• 50:56Rich Roll?

  Right ratio.

• 50:57Speaker 01

  Exactly. So, yeah, I mean, we, we can test the gut biome as we did. We can do all those sorts of things, but it's ultimately right now kind of more flying, flying blind. It's a lot of intuitive response.

• 51:17Speaker 01

  And Frank kind of started with me. We started together and then I, I really just like took off on my own and just threw myself into this a thousand percent. And, um, my approach, you know, I, I saw, I saw him on a weekly basis, if not bi-weekly basis for a very, very long time. But I also was, I changed the way I thought about working with a doctor, uh, which was not this, the notion that I'd really been mired in for a long time was that I got sick and I would go to the doctor and the doctor would treat me and then I'd go about doing everything else in my life. And that was it. Like I dealt with the treatment, now I can go back to doing everything else in my life. Um, and Frank really got me to realize that, no, if I wanted to really care for this, it had to be a whole package.

• 51:59Speaker 01

  So it meant that every decision I was making throughout the day really was made with the, um, the, the background of my health in mind. So always thinking about that. So whether that's the food that I was eating throughout the day or, uh, my stress levels or how much rest I was getting, all of these things in conjunction with the supplementation that I was doing and. And any other treatment that I was doing with him. So it was this notion that I had to be, I had to have full buy-in and I had to be an active participant in my own well-being.

• 52:27Rich Roll?

  Yeah, you have to take ownership of it and understand that you're in partnership with your doctor.

• 52:31Speaker 01

  Exactly.

• 52:32Rich Roll?

  Right? And that he's not the person giving you the answers. He's only as effective as, you know, his ability to be effective to you is in direct proportionate to your willingness to engage in the process and communicate and follow through on all that kind of stuff.

• 52:46Speaker 01

  It's like a good coach.

• 52:48Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 52:48Speaker 01

  You know, a good coach that you do the work, the coach can help you. But while you're doing the work, you might figure out, oh, I can change my stride a little bit like this. Or, or if I, you know, if I accelerate right now or change my cadence slightly. You, you learn things on your own as you're doing it, but the coach is there to kind of guide you and give you some structure.

• 53:06Rich Roll?

  But if you don't do the work, it doesn't matter.

• 53:07Speaker 01

  Doesn't matter. Yeah, you can get your weekly workouts and never do them. And it looks, it looks great in your emails and it looks great to everyone else. But if you're not doing them, you didn't make no progress.

• 53:16Rich Roll?

  Right, right, right. Interesting. And, and also important to understand that this is not going to be an overnight thing.

• 53:23Speaker 01

  No.

• 53:24Rich Roll?

  You're on, you're on a long road that is about a lifestyle change.

• 53:27Speaker 01

  Mm-hmm.

• 53:28Rich Roll?

  And, you know, sort of being open-ended as to where it would lead and adjusting and understanding that this is now your life. This is not

• 53:35Speaker 01

  Exactly.

• 53:36Rich Roll?

  Something with a destination, you know, in mind of, oh, I, I heal this or I resolve this issue and then I can go back to living the way I was living before.

• 53:44Speaker 01

  Yeah, I think that's, that's indicative of one of the, one of the problems of setting goals. You set these goals and then there's this notion that, okay, then I've accomplished this. Now it's done. I can check that off my list. And you can't do that with your health. Because you're, you're, I mean, we're changing every moment. You know, our cells are changing every moment. And if we want to thrive in that change, we have to also be changing every moment. And we have to be aware of it. And it's an ongoing process. You know, you aren't, you're not arriving at, at good health finally. And you didn't arrive overnight at bad health. It was a slow and insidious process. And to, to get out of that, that, that, that deep hole, it's going to be a slow and intentional process. And you have to kind of go through that and be willing to. And in our, our environment,

• 54:28Speaker 01

  our culture is very much based on, we want what we want and we want it right now. You know, we want our Amazon Prime to be delivered tomorrow. We want our Netflix on demand right now. We want all of those things.

• 54:39Rich Roll?

  We want the biohack that's gonna deliver the result immediately.

• 54:42Speaker 01

  Right now. And I, and I, you know, I think there's a lot, you know, there's a lot of talk now that, you know, in the, in the, one of the next and most exciting future treatments is, is fecal transplant. And people are really excited about it. And I think it's really, it's very cool because it does have, it's a, it's, it opens up a whole world of, of potential that we haven't seen to date. But the expectation that you're gonna take a poo pill and tomorrow have like a great microbiome is also not, you know, that's not, that's just as bad as thinking you can just take a, um. A lot of people switch the supplements, the, the drugs for the supplements and they become hooked on the supplements. And when ultimately the goal is to get your body to a point where you take things that you might need periodically, but you really are at a state, a place of homeostasis.

• 55:25Rich Roll?

  It's human nature, you know, we just, we want that one thing and what's the next thing? And, you know, we're always looking for what's gonna be the next thing. And so when we were at the Revitalize Conference, we both got to hear Dr. Robyn Schucan speak. And she's this expert doctor on the mi- on the microbiome, gut biome. She's amazing.

• 55:42Speaker 01

  She's incredible.

• 55:43Rich Roll?

  I know you had a long talk with her after.

• 55:45Speaker 01

  She's so cool.

• 55:47Rich Roll?

  She really is cool and I've got to get her on the podcast, dude. She's like a firecracker, right?

• 55:53Rich Roll?

  But she pointed out something in her talk about she could foresee like these beautiful salons.

• 55:58Speaker 01

  Yeah, exactly.

• 55:59Rich Roll?

  People would go in and it would all be very sheeshy, you know, sort of Madison Avenue and people would get their fecal transplant.

• 56:05Speaker 01

  These beautiful little vials, yeah.

• 56:06Rich Roll?

  They'd be branded with, you know. Bizarre, like dystopian future.

• 56:10Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 56:11Rich Roll?

  But I can see that happening, you know, just like there, listen, there were oxygen bars, you know, in Los Angeles not too long ago. So it's like anything's possible, but I think you're, that's very astute that, look, this, that's, that's the thing everyone's gonna go to and think that they've solved the problem. But it just doesn't, it doesn't work that way. Like, it really involves, you know, a comprehensive approach to every aspect of, of how you're living your life. If you want to have any expectation that any of these one things, which all in their own right, play a part.

• 56:38Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 56:38Rich Roll?

  But if you want them to function properly and maximally, that, you know, you have to have that global approach to your health.

• 56:45Speaker 01

  Yeah. No, it's totally true. And I, I get, you know, I, I'm very, very lucky in that. You know, I have regained my health and I feel really, really wonderful and I'd forgotten what it was like to... I mean, being a healthy human being is a wonderful thing. It's a really remarkable gift that we have, being able to play outside on a bicycle or jump in the ocean and go swimming and feel good about doing those things, or eating really good food, or hanging out with the kids, or any of that stuff. Those are really amazing things to be able to do in a body that wants to do them, and I'd forgotten that, I'd forgotten what that was like. But we, you know, we really do need to understand that it is an ongoing process and you've got to, you have to, you have to look at your body as, you

• 57:28Speaker 01

  can't separate your everyday life from your body. You experience your everyday life in your body, which means you really need to be constantly caring for it, and the decisions that you make will really impact your ability to have a wonderful life in your body. And if we expect that we can just kind of take a pill, we can do whatever we want and abuse our bodies and do everything, and then just take a pill and everything's gonna be fine, regardless of whether that pill is a pharmaceutical pill, or it's a, you know, it's a poo pill, you know, it doesn't matter. Like, you have to, you can use tools as you go and as you need them, but if you become dependent upon expecting one tool to change everything, you're really setting yourself up for a big disappointment.

• 58:09Rich Roll?

  Yeah, and whether you feel lousy or great, the ripple effect of that is, you know, unfathomable. It impacts every single microsecond of every single day.

• 58:19Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 58:20Rich Roll?

  And how you interact with people, and then how they then, you know, interact with you and their perception of you, you know, throughout your relationships, your marriage, your kids, your profession.

• 58:29Speaker 01

  Totally.

• 58:30Rich Roll?

  You know, like, every aspect of it is indelibly, you know, marked by your emotional state, your physical state, all of that. And so, you know, I don't know, I just think that, that...

• 58:43Rich Roll?

  That we don't think of that enough in its most comprehensive sense.

• 58:48Speaker 01

  It's true.

• 58:48Rich Roll?

  So, and that's what somebody like Frank can really bring to the surface, like, oh, this is not just, this isn't one thing, you know, it's like, it's symptomatic, it's funny, it's symptomatic, but it's symptomatic of this reductionist approach to medicine, which is, you know, medicine by its very nature has to be reductionist as a means of trying to understand it. But that also gets in the way of how we address these health problems.

• 59:14Speaker 01

  Sure.

• 59:14Rich Roll?

  Because we're complex systems.

• 59:16Speaker 01

  Yeah, we're not just a hand, you know, we're not just like an eyeball. So you can't just look at what's going on in your hand without looking at the greater system. I mean, we are these complex systems. And, and one of the, the, the problems that I think we've gotten into with allopathic medicine through the 20th century is that we treat things in verticals and, and in highly specialized verticals. So they're, they're, these are all the sets of symptoms that, that fall into my area of expertise as a, you know, as an, as a, as a, as a hand specialist. And as a GI doctor, these are all the symptoms that fall into my area of expertise. And what I find often ends up happening with a lot of people who are ill is that they, they might end up going to see an immunologist or whoever they might see.

• 59:58Speaker 01

  And that person looks at what they're going through and tries to fit their symptoms to what their, their knowledge base is without looking at, okay, well, that's related. Let's connect the dots. Let's look at the whole system and see everything that's going on within the body. And, and, and it really is, I mean, I think it's the future of medicine to look at things in a much more broad, broad element and not only, and, and to, to also start to look at the correlation between mental health and, and, and the gut biome and mental health and the physical health of the body. You mentioned something that, that made me think about this idea that has been resonating in my mind, kind of rebounding in my mind for the past few years, that we, we talk about disease, we've always thought of disease as being something that's contagious, you know,

• 1:00:41Speaker 01

  you catch a, you catch, you can catch a disease or you can catch a virus or catch a bacterial infection from someone. But you, I, I've really started to look at, at health as being contagious in a way that... When, when you start to make really, really good and considered choices about your own wellbeing, the people around you take notice and they start doing the same thing as well. They start asking the same, they're like, "Oh, that's a good idea. Maybe I should do that as well." And sometimes it's through pressure, it's through a little bit of peer pressure, like they feel guilty about eating a bag of potato chips. Like I see this with my, my cooks around me, like they feel guilty about eating a bag of potato chips in front of me. But that's okay. I'm okay with that kind of, a little bit of guilt like that. But then I see them doing, like I have my, my chef de cuisine, who's a great guy who's

• 1:01:25Speaker 01

  been working there for a long time, and he, he's kind of my, my right hand. He's, you know, as, as I've become more and more and more enthusiastic about understanding the gut biome and, and the importance of, of bacteria in our, in our health, he's like gone way deep on fermenting vegetables. And so like, he's like the fermenting, if it can be fermented, he's fermenting it. And he's all about, you know, about integrating some fermented vegetables into, into his daily diet for, for health. And I just think that's really cool, because I see that and that's just sort of like, that's another example of how health can really be contagious. And leading a healthy lifestyle can inspire other people to lead a, lead a healthy lifestyle.

• 1:02:03Rich Roll?

  Yeah, there's no question about it. You know, I think that's, that's beautifully articulated.

• 1:02:08Speaker 01

  It's important.

• 1:02:09Rich Roll?

  That's a great ethos, I think, to kind of carry around with yourself.

• 1:02:12Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:02:13Rich Roll?

  Yeah, nice. So how long did it take before you, you balanced out?

• 1:02:16Speaker 01

  Well, it was, so, it's still happening.

• 1:02:20Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 1:02:21Speaker 01

  It's still going on. And it's gonna be going on for as long as I'm around, till I become compost, I think. But, uh, but it, it took, you know, it took six months before I actually noticed any change. For the first six months, I still felt exactly the same.

• 1:02:35Rich Roll?

  Did you, I mean, that's a long time to feel, continue to feel lousy and maintain hope that there's gonna be a light at the end of this tunnel.

• 1:02:42Speaker 01

  Yeah. And, and there were definitely times that I kind of thought, "What's the point? I'm not getting any better. This is not changing." And I think the thing that really, um...

• 1:02:53Speaker 01

  That really helped me in this was that I did see Frank so frequently. And he was really supportive and said, listen, don't despair. It is gonna take time. But please, please, please trust me that if you continue at it and you stay, you know, you stay focused and you're disciplined, you are gonna see change. And it may not be a 90% or 100% change. It'll probably be somewhere between, he kept saying between 30 and 90%. That's what we're looking for. A 30 to 90% recovery.

• 1:03:21Rich Roll?

  But he had conviction that, that there would be improvement.

• 1:03:24Speaker 01

  There would be improvement.

• 1:03:25Rich Roll?

  And that's interesting, you know, I can't remember whether I told you this story the other day, but my wife Julie, she healed herself of a cyst on her neck, right? And so her Ayurvedic doctor, who, you know, really in many ways is not dissimilar from the protocols that Frank prescribes, you know, is basically like, it's a comprehensive approach of, you know, sort of

• 1:03:46Speaker 01

  You can eat this, you can eat that, yeah.

• 1:03:48Rich Roll?

  Yeah, and like some crazy herbs and, you know, some wacky stuff in there, but essentially, you know, not really that far left of field. But, but the point that I'm trying to make is that this Ayurvedic doctor basically said, it wasn't like, well, try this and we'll see how it goes, you know, I don't know, you know, it should work, but you know, we'll just, we'll just, you know, evaluate it in six months. This guy was like, no, this, this, this, he had, there was no doubt in his mind.

• 1:04:14Speaker 01

  Total conviction, yeah.

• 1:04:14Rich Roll?

  Complete conviction. And whether that's placebo or not, it doesn't matter to have somebody like that who believes in you. Because when it is gonna take a long time, like you need to, you need to be able to hold on to something like that. And this guy was like, no, this, this, there was no doubt in his mind.

• 1:04:29Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 1:04:29Rich Roll?

  You know, so I think that was what Julie was able to hold on to.

• 1:04:33Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:04:33Rich Roll?

  Cause it took her like nine months, you know, that's, that's a long time.

• 1:04:36Speaker 01

  But she completely made, made assists disappear, which is virtually unheard of in Western medicine.

• 1:04:41Rich Roll?

  I mean, he's, every single specialist said it was impossible.

• 1:04:44Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:04:45Rich Roll?

  Impossible, you know, so. You know, it just makes you, it broadens your horizon as to, you know, how you think about these systems in terms of, of health. I mean, and, and indeed, and in kind of going through this protocol with Frank, I mean, were you doing, you know, acupuncture and meditation and what other aspects of your lifestyle were kind of, you know, altered through new modalities?

• 1:05:07Speaker 01

  Yeah, so I mean, I was doing acupuncture with Frank at least once a week and I would, it's a pretty amazing experience having, I don't know if you've had needles from Frank, but it's a really cool experience.

• 1:05:17Rich Roll?

  Not from Frank, but I've had acupuncture by now with Frank.

• 1:05:19Speaker 01

  So he, he does, you know, he, he puts in the needles and you get in a really comfortable place and then he puts on like some noise cancelling headphones with, with some just beautiful sounds, whether it might be just birds or ocean or something and turns the light off and you're in complete darkness and then you lie there for like 45 minutes with yourself.

• 1:05:39Rich Roll?

  Mm-hmm.

• 1:05:40Speaker 01

  Needled. And, you know, I experimented.

• 1:05:43Rich Roll?

  You're gonna roll over.

• 1:05:44Speaker 01

  No, you don't wanna move, no. I, I, yeah, no, I never, I was always worried that I might find an extra needle in my shirt when I got back to work or something. But, um, no, I would, I would experiment, those, those moments, those 45 minutes or sometimes longer, sitting with, with, lying there with, with needles, I would do different things, like I would, I, I practiced some, some breathing techniques and I would do box breathing and I would try some, some, some mindfulness, body scanning, things like that. But the thing that I found to be most interesting and most therapeutic for me was to just envision all the points at which I had contact with needles and just kind of become extremely aware of my body. And in doing that, like you could, I could feel myself breathing into the, into each point.

• 1:06:28Speaker 01

  And, and that was, that was a remarkable moment just to cleanse myself completely of everything else that was going on in the world. Like it didn't, I didn't care if my phone was ringing somewhere, I didn't care if, you know, if I had a bill that was due, I didn't care if, you know, I was getting a million emails, it was just that moment to be there and that was really, really, really important. So, yeah, I did a little bit of, of that, mostly what I did with him was, was acupuncture and, and herbs and supplementation and, and diet. There was, there was a lot of, um... Also, just a lot of, same thing with Julie. I mean, there's a lot of, there's a lot of like just belief that I was gonna get better and, and the confidence that he had that I was gonna improve made it much, much easier for me to have buy-in and to really believe it. Stick with it.

• 1:07:11Speaker 01

  Yeah, and, and I think the other part that was really huge for me is that even going back, you know, a year before I felt better was when I had first seen that, that TEDx talk that Ari, Ari gave. I had, at that point, planted the seed in my brain that I could get better. So I believed it. And even through those six months where I didn't feel better, I still believed it. I, I still believed that I could get better. I think that if you don't actually believe in your own ability to, to be well, you can't, you'll never get better. You have to, you have to believe, and it doesn't mean that you can believe, it has to start with, I mean, it has to start with this, this very positive outlook where you, you just have to get past feeling like a victim and you have to get past feeling a sense of hopelessness

• 1:07:56Speaker 01

  and self pity because those are very easy traps to get caught in. And it's not easy to get past them. And for me to get past them, it took Frank telling me, "I'm gonna get you better." I actually didn't say it like that. He said, "We're gonna get you better." And that was the, that was the first- That's a huge difference. Yeah, huge difference, yeah. Saying, "We're gonna get you better." Yeah, and that was, yeah, and that was something that was very different from what doctors in the past had said, which is like, "I can give you this drug and I can give you that drug." "I'm gonna tell you what you need to do." Exactly. Yeah. But he kept pointing out, he's like, "We're gonna do this, you're gonna have to do all the work. It's gonna be really hard for you, but we'll be, we'll go through this together." So it was six months, and then I woke up one day and literally, and he even told me though, he told me, he said, "I think it'll take about six months."

• 1:08:39Speaker 01

  And it was remarkable because it literally was six months, almost to the day- Wow. -that I woke up and I walked down our stairs. We have a really large spiral staircase in our apartment, and I used to hobble down it one step at a time. And I was walking down the stairs, no handrail, like a normal human being, and I got halfway down the stairs and was like, "Oh my God, I'm actually walking down the stairs and I don't hurt." And my wife was on the, on the ground floor and she looked up at me and she's, she's just like, I can still remember her, she had like an apple in her mouth and she just kinda stopped chewing and was staring at me. And I said, "It doesn't hurt. I feel good." And she had only ever known me as a sick person. And she immediately started crying. I mean, that was like, she couldn't believe it. And-

• 1:09:25Speaker 01

  I was like, I was totally worried that I wasn't gonna make it to the bottom of the stairs without it coming back and out, you know, without things going, going south again. But what's amazing is that was, you know, over two years ago, and I've had nothing but positive change since then.

• 1:09:42Rich Roll?

  Wow, so you don't get occasional flare ups or things like that anymore?

• 1:09:45Speaker 01

  Nothing, nothing. And, you know, I'm actually just about, I just did another set of blood work, I haven't done blood work in about, about a year, but I just did another set of blood work, blood work, and I'm waiting for those results. And I also got my, my, my microbiome checked. But I'm curious to see what the results are, but the last time I was checked, everything is completely normal and healthy. And I feel even better than I did then, so I can only imagine, you know, I'm sure I'm doing totally fine.

• 1:10:13Rich Roll?

  Yeah, amazing. Well, a big part of this also is, is the diet aspect of it. And, you know, in, in the most general sense, I suppose I would characterize that as just a return to whole food, right? I mean.

• 1:10:24Speaker 01

  Real cooking.

• 1:10:25Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 1:10:26Speaker 01

  And that can mean a lot of different things. I mean, you know, I, I, I, I believe that if we eschew foods that are adulterated and taken away from their original, their, their original source, their original, their, their, their original content, how they, how, you know, whether it's using an excessive amount, like even you look at a lot of the gluten free foods that are out there, they're, they're just as bad as foods that are full of gluten.

• 1:10:54Rich Roll?

  They're super processed.

• 1:10:55Speaker 01

  Yeah, highly processed. So if you can, if you can kind of return to a very natural way of, of relating to food, whether it's cooking, whatever that means for you as an individual, you know, everyone's very different. And I've found myself, interestingly enough, like I've found myself gravitating more and more towards, towards a plant-based diet, even though I don't, I'm not a vegetarian by any stretch of the imagination. But I treat, one, I only eat meat that I know where it's coming from, and, and I'm very, very careful about the quality of that meat. And, and when I do eat meat, it's like 10% of the meal. You know, it's not like it's 80% of the meal. And, and I think that, you know.

• 1:11:36Rich Roll?

  I mean, that's really a more paleolithic approach anyway. Like this idea, like, I don't understand, like, I'm no expert on the paleo diet, but it seems to me that. First of all, like whatever Paleolithic man was eating was probably highly contingent upon where they lived.

• 1:11:51Speaker 01

  Exactly.

• 1:11:51Rich Roll?

  But in either case, unless you were living in a place where there was no vegetation and there were only animals, like animals are hard to catch, right?

• 1:11:58Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:11:59Rich Roll?

  So that was a rare kind of like exceptional circumstance.

• 1:12:02Speaker 01

  Sure, that was north of the Arctic Circle.

• 1:12:03Rich Roll?

  So for the most part, it was like, you know, it would be a delicacy, you know, on the plate. And so the idea that it's been perverted to this very meat-heavy diet, like in its sort of modern incarnation, I think is not really maybe the original idea behind it.

• 1:12:19Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:12:20Rich Roll?

  You know, and if you look at the Blue Zones and all these places, like they're not, you know, they're either plant-based, or if they're eating meat, like the meat is like a really small aspect of it.

• 1:12:28Speaker 01

  Small amount, yeah.

• 1:12:29Rich Roll?

  It's a side dish to, you know, a proliferation of.

• 1:12:32Speaker 01

  Yeah. It's an ingredient that's no more or less important than the asparagus or the, you know, anything else that's on a plate. And I do think that there are a lot of people in the paleo movement that get that.

• 1:12:43Rich Roll?

  Yeah, I think so too. I'm not saying, I'm not saying they don't, but it's become like, suddenly it's all about like bacon, as if like they're supposed to eat bacon at every meal.

• 1:12:51Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:12:51Rich Roll?

  You know, like, I don't really understand where that's coming from.

• 1:12:54Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:12:55Rich Roll?

  I guess people like, you know, they like to hear that, so that becomes a popular meme.

• 1:12:59Speaker 01

  Yeah, to be able, to be told that you can, oh, this thing that was indulgent and we weren't supposed to eat before is actually now, I can justify it and it's really good for me, then I'm just gonna throw myself whole hog into it, you know, pardon the pun, I didn't mean that as a pun. But that, that, that's just as dangerous as, you know, I mean, any ism in general or any, any like extreme, extreme adaptation of a life with food, I think is kind of dangerous too. I think it's, I think it's good to go to variants too. If you look at humans as they evolved, like we didn't, we ate meat when we could get meat, but there was a lot of times when we couldn't get meat and we ate what we could get, which

• 1:13:40Speaker 01

  was, you know, a lot of fibrous vegetables and tubers and all sorts of other stuff. And also, the foods that we have available to us now are very different from the foods that Paleolithic man had. So to draw a complete conclusion, you know, the strawberries we have now are very different from the wild strawberries that they might have been, they might have been foraging.

• 1:13:59Rich Roll?

  Well, certainly the grains and the wheat.

• 1:14:01Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:14:01Rich Roll?

  It's very, very different.

• 1:14:02Speaker 01

  Anything that's been hybridized and then forgot about.

• 1:14:04Rich Roll?

  And our gut biome adapts to that, right? So, you know, the foods that you're eating is what's cultivating your gut.

• 1:14:10Speaker 01

  Absolutely.

• 1:14:11Rich Roll?

  And then that becomes the foods that you crave and that ecology in there then demands those foods to survive. So that's, I think that that plays a part in people getting stuck in however they're eating and it makes it more difficult to change.

• 1:14:24Speaker 01

  I mean, if you have a proliferation of firmicutes and bacteria in your gut which feed on sugars and starches, refined sugars and starches, you're gonna have to eat more to feed them. And the more you eat, the greater that population of firmicutes grows, which is very likely to be one of the driving forces behind obesity, one of the elements that causes obesity. It certainly causes dysbiosis. Whereas when you're feeding gut bacteria low in your lower intestine and your colon, you have to be eating a lot of fibrous vegetables. And the stuff that we can't actually digest is the stuff that the bacteria is breaking down and eating and living off of. So, yeah, what we eat directly affects how we feed those bugs and that affects our performance

• 1:15:09Speaker 01

  and our health.

• 1:15:10Rich Roll?

  Right. Well, I like the idea that you're moving more plant-based. I dig it. When's the vegan restaurant?

• 1:15:18Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah. Well, I wouldn't be beyond doing something like that at some point. You know, I think the thing for me that's hardest is that I don't like to, I don't like to, I try to keep food in politics. I know it's hard to separate them. But I have a real problem when people confuse like a moral statement with a health statement. And they make a moral decision about, like, I know a lot of vegans that are really, really unhealthy people. And their decisions to be vegans come from a position of ethics and morality, which I totally get and I actually am completely in align with.

• 1:15:58Speaker 01

  You know, I look at the state of factory farming and I find it appalling. And I don't want any part of that and I don't want to support that system in any way. And I don't think it's, unlike a lot of paleo people who are just like, well, meat is meat and, you know, it doesn't really matter if it's Hormel pepperoni or if you're getting, you know, you're getting a heritage pig from a small farm that's raised naturally. I don't agree with that. I think there's a huge difference in quality of product and quality of life of that animal. But to that end, like, I don't like to, personally, I don't like to say, I never would call myself

• 1:16:37Speaker 01

  a paleo, a paleo person, or a follower of the paleo plan. I wouldn't say that I'm a gluten-free person. And, I mean, I don't happen to eat grains that have gluten in them, but that doesn't mean I want to be labeled as being a gluten-free person. You know, I don't like these camps. So, I would certainly have, you know, in my restaurants, there are lots of options for people that choose not to eat dairy, or choose not to eat grains, or choose not to eat meat. But I would never call any one of them, I wouldn't say, "This is our gluten-free..."

• 1:17:09Rich Roll?

  Yeah, yeah. Well, it's really tricky. I mean, food, you know, to the extent that you can extract politics from food, you know, is very difficult. And, you know, it's very emotional.

• 1:17:19Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:17:20Rich Roll?

  And it's becoming increasingly more and more difficult to even talk about it.

• 1:17:23Speaker 01

  Sure.

• 1:17:24Rich Roll?

  Without, like, people getting inflamed.

• 1:17:25Speaker 01

  Fired up.

• 1:17:26Rich Roll?

  Getting inflamed. And, you know, when you said, kind of at the outset of the podcast, that you don't like to proselytize, and you don't like to give people advice, and, you know, you're there to share your experience, to the extent that people are interested, like, I kind of share that perspective. You know, maybe I'm a little more vociferous because I have a podcast.

• 1:17:45Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:17:46Rich Roll?

  And all this sort of stuff. But, but I don't go around taking people's inventory about how they live their lives.

• 1:17:51Speaker 01

  And saying, "You've got to do this."

• 1:17:52Rich Roll?

  No, I say, "If you're interested, this is what happened to me, and this is how I did it."

• 1:17:56Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:17:57Rich Roll?

  And I'm happy to speak to you about that. And I'm happy to have people on the podcast that share my point of view. And I'm happy to have people on that disagree with me.

• 1:18:04Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:18:05Rich Roll?

  That's part of the dialogue. But I think it's important to remain, you know, kind of grounded and mature in those discussions. Because when they get inflamed and heated, you know, it turns into like, an episode of Crossfire on Sunday morning. And it's like, everybody's just kind of preaching to their base. And it's not really productive or helpful.

• 1:18:25Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:18:26Rich Roll?

  You know what I mean? There are huge problems with our food system. You know, we talked about school lunch, and certainly, nobody is going to disagree that factory farming is an abomination. And... You know, it's also incredibly destructive on the environment. It's not sustainable. We're not going to be able to feed the planet this way much longer.

• 1:18:42Speaker 01

  No way.

• 1:18:43Rich Roll?

  Unless we're just so short sighted that we're just going to run the planet into the ground and then go, uh oh. You know, which is kind of our MO.

• 1:18:50Speaker 01

  That's the way we roll. Yeah, that's what we do. We're kind of rats in that sense.

• 1:18:53Rich Roll?

  So to the extent that, that, you know, you are sourcing your ingredients for your restaurants, you know, sustainably and all of that, like this is, this is a positive thing, but it does get, it does get tricky with the politics and all of that.

• 1:19:06Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:19:06Rich Roll?

  And I'm sensitive to that, you know, and I think that to the extent that you are able to accommodate people from all the, I mean, it's getting harder and harder. Well, I don't eat sugar and I don't eat grains and I'm vegan, but I'm lacto and I mean, it's like, dude, how many subcategories are there at some point, right?

• 1:19:22Rich Roll?

  But I know that you're, you know, real careful about, you know, where you're getting all of your ingredients.

• 1:19:27Speaker 01

  Yeah. Yeah. That's really.

• 1:19:29Rich Roll?

  As local as possible.

• 1:19:30Speaker 01

  Yeah. And that's super, that's really, really important to me. I mean, it's important to me for a number of reasons. It's important because it tastes better ultimately and is better for you. I mean, it's just simply better for you to eat food that is in season. You get something that's local, that's harvested ripe, you know, a few days ago versus something that's gassed and put in a box and comes across the ocean. That's not good for your body. Also, the fossil fuels that are involved in bringing it from Peru to New York City, that's not good for the body of the, of the planet. The, the, you have very little control over the quality of the grapes that you get from Peru. But when I talk to the guy that I get grapes from the Finger Lakes from, and you know, in the height of summer, I know exactly how he's growing his grapes.

• 1:20:15Speaker 01

  And there's a, there's a, there's a distinct difference and it, it forces me to have a relationship with, with not only the food itself, but with the people that, that are growing the food who. Tend to be pretty passionate people because like other aspects of the food world, you don't get into it if you just want to get rich.

• 1:20:33Rich Roll?

  They have to be to be doing that.

• 1:20:34Speaker 01

  Yeah, you're not doing it. It's a labor of love.

• 1:20:36Rich Roll?

  And is this something that has always been a through line through your cooking as a result of the traditions with which you were brought up?

• 1:20:43Speaker 01

  Definitely.

• 1:20:44Rich Roll?

  With your mom? Or has, how has the experience of, you know, weathering, you know, your disease and your kind of recovery from that informed how you approached the kitchen in your restaurants?

• 1:20:54Speaker 01

  Well, actually, well, both. Those are two, two really interesting points. One, yeah, I definitely, growing up, I had this relationship with food because I grew up, you know, planting carrots, harvesting carrots and cooking the carrots. And if you've never had a carrot that's like just out of the ground, that you wipe a little dirt off of it, maybe a little bit of cold water and then you eat it and you still got some dirt on it, you've never really eaten a carrot. I mean, honestly, I believe a carrot stops tasting like 100% carrot about a minute after it comes out of the ground. There's that moment when it comes out of the ground is just really remarkable. But so I had that, you know, growing up. And then when I went away to Spain and I lived in Spain, there was, it's changed a lot in Spain now, but a long time, well, not so long ago, in the 90s, you know, 20, 25 years ago, there were not grocery stores. There were very few grocery

• 1:21:37Speaker 01

  stores in Spain and people shopped at the markets. They bought fish from the wife of the, of the fisherman. They bought potatoes from the wife of the potato farmer. There was, you know, every, every kind of specialty grower producer had a little stand in the market and they brought their product to market. And, and as a result, you ate seasonally and locally because that's what you did. There were no other options. So that is, I was kind of learning to, to cook in Spain, that, that really was a big part of, of how I cooked and how I thought about food. And then getting sick. The irony is, is that I was sick for so long and I didn't know, and I talked about this in my talk at Revitalize, like I didn't, I was so blind, I couldn't see that the answer was right in front of

• 1:22:21Speaker 01

  me, that, that it was food all along, that that was the answer to my.

• 1:22:25Rich Roll?

  And the answer was given to you as a small child.

• 1:22:27Speaker 01

  Exactly.

• 1:22:28Rich Roll?

  Out of your whole life.

• 1:22:29Speaker 01

  Out of my whole life. And, and I guess the moral of the story is always listen to your mom and listen to your grandmother because they're so smart and they know, I hope my mother hears this because that'll give me good brownie points. But, uh, no, she completely, I mean, my, my mother and grandmother intuitively, and maybe it's a maternal thing, maybe mothers kind of know this. They know how instinctively they know what to do to care for their, their children. But my, my mom and my grandmother just kind of. They, they kept saying, "Look at food, look at food. That's, you're gonna find your answers in food." And like most kids, like, you know, your mom tells you what to do, you don't do it. But then someone else tells you what to do and it's the same thing your mom told you and you do it.

• 1:23:09Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 1:23:09Speaker 01

  And then your mom's like, "See, I told you so." She's just listening. But, but, uh, no, so I did, you know, I eventually came around and, and obviously that was a huge component, a huge aspect of my, of my journey and, and, and healing. And as a result, it has had a huge impact on how I cook in the restaurants. Um, and how I think about food in the restaurants.

• 1:23:29Rich Roll?

  In what specific sense?

• 1:23:31Speaker 01

  Oh, I mean, you know, in the reduction of the amount of gluten that we have on the menu. Um, in getting rid of any refined white flour. We only use heritage grains when we use grains. I mean, there's things in the menu that I don't eat. Don't get me wrong. Um, like I don't, I don't eat sugar. We have to use some sugar. Um, but we use almost no refined sugar. Now, we do, uh, pretty much all of our, our desserts are, are, you know, when you have the desserts, they're not that sweet. We've taken a lot of the sweetness out and we use just natural sweetness from the fruits that we're using. If we do use, uh, sweeteners, it's things like raw honey or using some maple syrup. But we've really reduced that a lot. Um, we've reduced the amount of, of bread. Like there's much less bread within the restaurant.

• 1:24:16Speaker 01

  Um, ratcheting back the way we, we look at the proteins, as I talked to you, as I mentioned before, like using, using meat as an ingredient rather than as a, as a main component. I mean, we do have some dishes that are meat dishes that are meant for sharing, but they're not meant for a single person to sit down and eat 42 ounces of beef. I mean, that's not, that's not the way it's, it's designed. Um, so there's definitely been an impact and then certainly how I cook outside of the restaurant. And the, the, the, the challenge that I do have is that my restaurants right now are Spanish restaurants. So they're very much within a concept of, of Spanish food. Within that, I have a little bit of leeway in terms of what I can do, but there's an expectation that there's going to be, you know, some of the greatest hits of Spanish cuisine are gonna be on the menu. So I, I do have to also be conscientious of that.

• 1:25:00Rich Roll?

  Right. But it's kind of a sharing culture, right?

• 1:25:02Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:25:02Rich Roll?

  And this sort of tapas tradition.

• 1:25:04Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:25:04Rich Roll?

  So it's the idea of ordering a bunch of plates and kind of.

• 1:25:06Speaker 01

  And snacking. Yeah, exactly. Yeah.

• 1:25:16Rich Roll?

  Well, let's talk about the career a little bit. I mean, you know, here you are, celebrity chef, you know, you

• 1:25:22Speaker 01

  I hate that term.

• 1:25:22Rich Roll?

  I know, but it's like, that's why I'm laughing, because I'm sure you're kind of like... But, you know, it's a weird time, where suddenly the ascendancy of the chef as a, as a, as a, you know, kind of celebrated personality, it's never been like, kind of a better time for that. And maybe you kind of lament that on some, in some respects, but I think it's probably also been, you know, it's a good time for you.

• 1:25:43Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:25:43Rich Roll?

  There's a lot of interest in what you do, and, look, you've been on TV, and you, you get to, you know, contribute to Men's Journal, and Esquire, and all these magazines, and you're doing stuff on Vice, and, and you've had a pretty storied career. I mean, you've got three restaurants now, Tortulia...

• 1:25:59Speaker 01

  Four, with one in London, yeah.

• 1:26:01Rich Roll?

  Four. Oh, so, well, Sea Container is London.

• 1:26:02Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 1:26:03Rich Roll?

  And, what was the, so I thought there were three, there's

• 1:26:05Speaker 01

  So, El Colmado.

• 1:26:06Rich Roll?

  El Colmado.

• 1:26:07Speaker 01

  El Colmado Butchery, which is sort of a natural butcher shop in Tapas Bar, and Tortulia.

• 1:26:12Rich Roll?

  Right. And Sea Container.

• 1:26:13Speaker 01

  And Sea Container's the fourth. Sea Container's is the fourth one.

• 1:26:16Rich Roll?

  So, I'm still missing one.

• 1:26:17Speaker 01

  Tortulia, El Colmado, and El Colmado Butchery.

• 1:26:20Rich Roll?

  Oh, okay, I thought those were the same thing.

• 1:26:22Speaker 01

  No, they're separate, they're two different units.

• 1:26:24Rich Roll?

  Mm-hmm.

• 1:26:24Speaker 01

  Yeah. So, I mean, it's, it's about, it's funny, you're, you're mentioning earlier, it said, well, you're running around, you're doing these things, like going on these trips, and doing all this stuff, and that plays into that part of, um...

• 1:26:36Rich Roll?

  It's very, you're, you're like this Hemingway-esque, you know?

• 1:26:40Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:26:41Rich Roll?

  You know, getting to do all these crazy adventures, and then write about it.

• 1:26:44Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:26:45Rich Roll?

  And then, you know, it's all very, you know, related, and kind of interwoven with the food

• 1:26:50Speaker 01

  Yeah, there's a common thread.

• 1:26:51Rich Roll?

  And the story that you tell around food, you know?

• 1:26:53Speaker 01

  Yeah. Well, that's the great thing about food, is food can be this really amazing narrative. You know, food is, food is like the oldest ingredient in culture. It's the one thing that brings us all together. It's the, it's, I, I like call it the language of culture. You know, it's, you look at, can you imagine Italian food without tomatoes?

• 1:27:12Speaker 01

  That's a new ingredient. It's only been in Italy for 350, 400 years. You know, so it's a very, very new thing in so many ways. There are potatoes, Spanish food without potatoes. Nobody wanted to eat potatoes until the 17th century. They thought they were poisonous. So, so food evolves and the culture of food evolves and nowhere does it evolve faster than New York, which is this confluence of all these different cultures. And we're constantly reinventing ourselves and what cuisine in New York is because you have all of these new food cultures all the time

• 1:27:43Speaker 01

  that we're aware of and that are flowing by us. So having this as this great narrative thread to be able to explore, whether it's, you know, I'm going to Spain in two weeks on my bicycle, but we're going to be going to wineries and to small little restaurants and markets and I'm going to be cooking some dinners and it's, food is an element of it, but it combines food and cycling, so two of my favorite things, you know, in a great place. That's a great, another great way that food can be a, and it is, now you look at travel, people base so much of their travel on food. Like they don't go to places that have bad food. They make whole decisions about their vacations based upon a single restaurant that they want to go to or a food destination that they've heard about or they've read about.

• 1:28:26Speaker 01

  And there is a bit of a, of a, of a national obsession, even an international obsession with food these days. And some of it is fetishistic, some of it is, is, you know, folks going to the market and, and taking pictures and updating their Instagram so everyone can see how, you know, food conscious they are. But I think a lot of the, the, the, the noise that that creates is, is good because it, it forces us to, to constantly go back to thinking about food and about real food and being aware of it because we went, we've got, we went through this real, this, this vacuum dark age from like the 1940s to very recently.

• 1:29:05Speaker 01

  Where, you know, we were really geared towards efficiency in food. Getting your calories and the right calories and just enough of them, not too many, because that's what's important, as quickly as possible so you can get on to being a productive human being. And, you know, it sounds, it sounds almost misogynistic, but I really, and I don't mean it to sound this way, but, but our health really kind of went off the rails when, when women started working and developing careers. And not that I don't, that I think it's a bad thing, I think it's a wonderful thing that, that, that we've been able to come much closer to equal rights for women, although, you know, there's still a lot of disparity in terms of income. But what it meant is that we stopped having somebody within the family whose primary responsibility

• 1:29:50Speaker 01

  and goal was making sure that there was good food for the family and they were considering food. So we, we had to, there was a hole that had to be filled and that's where, you know, TV dinners started happening and canned food and frozen meals and packaged and prepared foods. So if we can get back to more of a dialogue about real food, and if that has to come from a point of food fetishism, then it's not such a bad thing. But it is like this really interesting narrative thread that goes through so much of our lives.

• 1:30:21Rich Roll?

  Yeah, that's, that's really interesting culturally, how that's kind of evolved and it'll be interesting to see, you know, with this new kind of welcoming of mindfulness practices, how that influences how we approach the mealtime and how we approach like communion, you know, like actually just sharing this, you know, sacred thing with our friends and our, and our loved ones, which is something that we just, you know, moved too far away from. But I, I do see it moving back, you know, it's almost like this recapturing of that lost tradition that's so integral and important when it comes to what it means to be human.

• 1:30:56Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:30:57Rich Roll?

  Be fulfilled and be happy, that connection.

• 1:30:59Speaker 01

  There, there is, I mean- Since time eternal, we've gathered around food. And that's how language evolved and that's how culture became more complex and diversified. I mean, we literally at its most basal level, we went out and we looked for some, we looked for some roots and shoots and we picked them and we huddled down and we, and squatted around a campfire and we maybe cooked them a little bit together. But we did it, generally speaking, we did it together. We're, we're social animals. So the notion that you eat food out of a bag interfacing with a device is very much in, um, in opposition to our nature. And, and I think that we, you know, it has detrimental effects, both emotional, psychological and physical effects on the human being.

• 1:31:42Rich Roll?

  As a culinary entrepreneur, is it fair to call you that?

• 1:31:46Speaker 01

  Sure.

• 1:31:47Rich Roll?

  I guess it's a fair, you know, what, how would you characterize, you know, what you do or how what you do distinguishes yourself from the other chefs out there? I mean, what, what do you attribute your kind of success and ascendency to? Like, what is it that you're doing different or, or what is it that, you know, you think, when you, when you think back on your path has allowed you to become so successful?

• 1:32:11Speaker 01

  Um, I mean, I think that one of the things that, you know, there's, there's, first of all, there, there are a lot of amazing chefs in, in, in our space. And there's been a real, I'm, I'm one of many guys that has gotten to a point where I'm really concerned with food and wellness. And I see it from, you know, to differing degrees, I see, I have a friend, Bill Telepan, who's a great chef in New York, and he's focused, he, he, he started a foundation called Wellness in the Schools. And he's taken his platform as a chef and as, and his knowledge as a chef to, to really try to, to innovate and make change in, in the, in the school lunch programs within, in New York City and now expanding beyond New York City. And he's done an incredible job.

• 1:32:52Speaker 01

  So there, I think we all have this sense of responsibility with the attention, the focus that's put on us through the media. Um, you know, we have a sense of responsibility and ownership over what we do. Um, you know, in my case, I think that initially I was very fortunate to start cooking in a space that very few people were cooking in, which was in Spanish food, there weren't really a lot of spokespeople for Spanish food. And then over time, as as I my health has really become a focus in my life and something that's that to me, I feel, you know, I'm one very grateful to have to have reclaimed. And to be aware of the relationship I have with with food and how it impacts my well being. I feel that I have a lot to share with that and I'd like to share as much as I can.

• 1:33:36Speaker 01

  So I, you know, I don't know that. I wouldn't say that it distinguishes me from my my colleagues and I think there are a lot of great. There I have a lot of amazing colleagues. I don't think of myself as being more or less successful than than than most of them.

• 1:33:49Rich Roll?

  Right. I mean, but you're comparing yourself, you know, to sort of the great talents of of Manhattan or perhaps the world. But in the sort of grand scheme of, you know, people that are interested in doing what you do, you know, it's like, look, you've got four restaurants. You're growing. I'm sure you've got plans to you've got other things that you're working on right now. You know, how does that? How does that happen? Like, how do you? You know what I mean? Like, what's the difference between you and the guy who might be a great talent in the kitchen? But just can't can't move it to the next level.

• 1:34:20Speaker 01

  Well, I think a big part of it is letting go and developing a team and understanding that when you when you foster a team and you have people that are really successful, give them autonomy. Let them let them spread their wings and in spreading their wings. You know, that's part of why I can do a lot of the things that I do outside of the restaurant. Because I have a I have a great support system within the restaurant that I've spent 10 years developing.

• 1:34:43Rich Roll?

  And that's, I would think, counterintuitive because I would imagine that, you know, a sort of great talent in the kitchen is gonna go hand in hand with being a control freak.

• 1:34:52Speaker 01

  Totally, it does.

• 1:34:53Rich Roll?

  But you that's how you run yourself into the ground.

• 1:34:55Speaker 01

  Yeah. And the problem is, is that when any any someone was talking to me recently about a a the way a lot of of hedge fund guys, the way they work and they they'll go into a business and they'll say, okay, tell me who's the one person here who is indispensable. And they'll find the one person that's indispensable and then they'll fire that person. And they're no longer indispensable because they're gone. No, no business should really depend upon and it happens in the restaurant, too. If the restaurant is completely dependent upon the chef and the chef has to do absolutely everything. And it all comes down to that one individual, then you're never going to be able to grow. You're going to be completely hamstrung by that one individual.

• 1:35:36Speaker 01

  You need to foster a team and a community of people that that all has autonomy and takes ownership over what we do as a group. And I think, you know, a lot of that comes from creating a culture and the language that you use. Like I, within the restaurant or even outside the restaurant, I never talk about people in terms of so and so works for me and he works for me and she works for me. I always say, well, we work on this. And I use the term we, and I think it's really important to remember that. And I have to sometimes remind myself to do it, but it's a conscious thing because it ultimately, people, when they have, when they feel a sense of autonomy and pride, a sense of pride and ownership in what they do, they have much more allegiance to the organization that they work for.

• 1:36:18Speaker 01

  They care much more about what they do and they have a greater sense of pride. But to work for a tyrant who just says, no, you work for me and you do it my way and this is the way it is, that gets old pretty quickly.

• 1:36:30Rich Roll?

  I'm sure you've worked for.

• 1:36:32Speaker 01

  Yeah, I've worked for, sure, I worked for a chef that used to burn me all the time intentionally or hit me and do all sorts of crap like that. And that, you know, that works for a period of time. You can manage through fear for a period of time, but eventually that'll backfire. You know, the whole Gordon Ramsay syndrome of yelling and screaming at everyone, belittling people, that doesn't work very long. You know, eventually people get sick of it and they go and find someplace else to work.

• 1:36:56Rich Roll?

  Right, right, right. Unless their self-esteem is so low, but then.

• 1:37:00Speaker 01

  Yeah, exactly. You want, yeah, that's not who you want.

• 1:37:03Rich Roll?

  They think so poorly of themselves.

• 1:37:05Speaker 01

  Exactly. I have, I have a guy that works with us, Shaka, I really, really like him a lot. And he's, he's, he's from Gambia. And, you know, he's, he has a degree in accounting. He got a scholarship to come to the US to study accounting. And then the university that he went to went belly up and he lost his scholarship and he ended up in the US. And here's a guy who'd never worked in a restaurant before, but he needed a job and he showed up as a dishwasher. Um, that was like almost two years ago. And now he's, he's a, one of the best cooks we have. And he's totally like, he's on the path of being a chef.

• 1:37:44Speaker 01

  Because he, we, we saw that he had potential, he cared, he was very, very loyal and hardworking and really wanted to be there. And so we started giving him more responsibilities and every little responsibility we gave him, he kind of grabbed it and took a hold of it and took ownership of it and took pride in it. And so we rewarded him by giving him more responsibility and he just started growing through the ranks and he's coming up through the ranks in the, in the kitchen. And he's learning new skills and earning more money and becoming a more indispensable part of the team, you know? And that's, that's something to me that's really, i- i- it's really important to look at, um, the individual and, and, uh, one of my partners in the restaurant, Gil, um, who runs all of the service in the front of house.

• 1:38:25Speaker 01

  He taught me something, we've worked together for about 10 years and he taught me something a long time ago that I, I always think about and it's a, it's a great lesson. Don't try to fit the, the, um, the job to the person. Fit the person to the job, or sorry, vice versa. Don't try to fit the person to the job. So, so find, find the job that that person will succeed at.

• 1:38:44Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 1:38:45Speaker 01

  Rather than trying to change the person. It's easier to change the job than to change the person. So find out what they're really good at and make the job fit them. And.

• 1:38:55Rich Roll?

  But then there's certain jobs that just, that's the job.

• 1:38:58Speaker 01

  Yeah, but there are some people that are good at just that's the job. Like for some people, it's that's, that works for them. They don't want the burden of responsibility or they don't want the burden of creativity. Um, and I totally get that too.

• 1:39:10Rich Roll?

  Alright, cool. Alright, well, we gotta close it down here soon, but, uh, it would be great, I would love to leave people with a couple sort of, you know, tips that they could take with them. Like if you had to articulate.

• 1:39:23Speaker 01

  Couple of nuggets?

• 1:39:24Rich Roll?

  Yeah, just like. Pressure.

• 1:39:26Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:39:27Rich Roll?

  You know, just, just a couple of things like, if you want to be more mindful about your health, what are a couple of simple things that people could incorporate into their life?

• 1:39:38Speaker 01

  Sure.

• 1:39:39Rich Roll?

  That have been helpful to you.

• 1:39:42Speaker 01

  All right, well, one is very, very basic, but I think it's, I think it's very valuable. That before you put anything in your mouth, ask yourself, is this helping me or is this harming me? And it's okay if sometimes the answer is it's harming me. I mean, there's, I think you'd be hard pressed to make an argument for eating ice cream and claiming that it's a health food, or sorbet and claiming that it's good for you. But sometimes that's okay. Like, sometimes the joy that you get from that, as long as you're keeping it in check with everything else that you're doing, is just as important. I think joy is really important.

• 1:40:21Speaker 01

  And on that note, if, if you don't feel joyful about the food that you're eating, then you're doing something wrong. You really need to, you need to find the joy and the pleasure in the relationship you have with food. Because if it's an antagonistic relationship, it's, it's a doomed relationship. And I think the other thing-

• 1:40:47Rich Roll?

  Goes to the preparation of the food as well.

• 1:40:49Speaker 01

  Yeah, totally. The joy of preparing food, the ceremony of it. I mean, I think there's a lot of spirituality in food, and there's a lot of spirituality in cooking, if you think about it, in terms of providing sustenance to, to your friends and your family and your loved ones and to yourself. Like, there's, there's a very serious spiritual element to that. So, so do it with, with consideration and with consideration from where those ingredients came from, and with reverence and respect for those, for those ingredients, and then ultimately for the people that are gonna be eating them. So, I don't know, maybe that's too, too broad and heady, but I think that's-

• 1:41:25Rich Roll?

  No, I think that's good. You know, I think that's good. And I think that that's, those are things that are easy to sort of cast aside in our busy, you know-

• 1:41:33Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:41:34Rich Roll?

  -gestalt of our busy, modern lives. And, you know, I think that goes back to mindfulness as well.

• 1:41:38Speaker 01

  Totally.

• 1:41:39Rich Roll?

  It's just like being present and, and being aware of what it is that you're doing when you're, when, you know, when you're doing it.

• 1:41:44Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:41:45Rich Roll?

  You know, which is so basic and yet is- You know, eludes me most of the time.

• 1:41:50Speaker 01

  Well, it's, you know, it's hard because we live in this world of devices, which are like the, they're the biggest obstacle to mindfulness. When you're trying to sit here, I mean, even now, we're having this grave conversation. I feel my phone is vibrating, but I'm like, you know what? I don't care what it is. Doesn't matter if it vibrates all along. But they, they, they take us out of the moment and make it very hard to be mindful. So I think it's certainly with meals, I think that's a good time to put, put the device away. And just be, as you said, be in that moment and be whatever it is that you're doing, be doing it a hundred percent.

• 1:42:21Rich Roll?

  Well, the, the Spanish culture seems to understand that, at least with respect to mealtime.

• 1:42:26Speaker 01

  Oh, totally. They got it. They got it. They, you know, they learn something. And then they sit around the table and they talk and they talk forever. And so that's, yeah, I mean, that's what.

• 1:42:35Rich Roll?

  It's a beautiful tradition.

• 1:42:36Speaker 01

  It really is. And they do it in Italy as well. You know, it's a very Mediterranean, in Greece, obviously, it's, it's a very Mediterranean tradition, but it's one that I think we can, you know, everybody could benefit from.

• 1:42:48Rich Roll?

  Mm hmm. Cool. All right. Final question.

• 1:42:51Speaker 01

  Mm hmm.

• 1:42:51Rich Roll?

  How hard is La Ruta?

• 1:42:54Speaker 01

  Well, uh, let's just say, let's just say that after the first day, I really had serious doubts, even when I was lining up the starting line, the line the next morning, that I was going to be able to, to go on. And then I just found it.

• 1:43:11Rich Roll?

  Six days?

• 1:43:12Speaker 01

  It's only three days.

• 1:43:12Rich Roll?

  Three days?

• 1:43:13Speaker 01

  Yeah, only three. And only 29,000 feet of climbing. It, uh, it's really, it's one of those, you, I mean, and you've, you've done crazy, crazy feats on, in, in Iron Man's and Ultraman and all that.

• 1:43:26Rich Roll?

  Not on a mountain bike.

• 1:43:26Speaker 01

  Doesn't matter though. I mean, it's the same thing. You go into that place where you, you, you're, you know, people call it the pain cave, or you go deep in your head and you just, it's a psychological moment of, of moving the needle and knowing that you can do way more than you think you can do. But you just have to trust that you can.

• 1:43:44Rich Roll?

  What's the next big challenge?

• 1:43:46Speaker 01

  You know, this year, I wanted to do the Breck Epic, which is a similar, similar race in Colorado, but unfortunately, the timing didn't work out for me. So I, I think that this year is going to be not, not so many, not so much competition. I'm going to be doing a lot. I've already done a bunch of charity rides, a lot of long, long rides. I'm going to do this really cool race in Massachusetts called the D2R2, which is all, it's like a road bike race, but all on gravel.

• 1:44:15Rich Roll?

  Oh, wow.

• 1:44:16Speaker 01

  It's very cool. And then I think next year, I'm going to try to do this, do an adventure race across Mongolia on mountain bikes.

• 1:44:22Rich Roll?

  Uh huh.

• 1:44:23Speaker 01

  So that's, that's, I think, the one that we're going to really kind of gear for.

• 1:44:26Rich Roll?

  Nice, man. Is that going to be another men's journal?

• 1:44:28Speaker 01

  That'll be something. We'll see what it is. Yeah, it might be, it might be in a magazine. Who knows?

• 1:44:33Rich Roll?

  Figure that out. I need somebody to like fun, crazy adventures.

• 1:44:35Speaker 01

  Yeah. Maybe, maybe, maybe you can come and do this one with me.

• 1:44:39Rich Roll?

  Yeah, that's basically, that's the whole idea behind this.

• 1:44:42Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:44:42Rich Roll?

  Get you to invite me to come do one of those.

• 1:44:43Speaker 01

  Yeah, totally. We gotta get you on a mountain bike.

• 1:44:45Rich Roll?

  Well, at the very least, if you pass through LA, man, we gotta find a way to get out on, on bikes.

• 1:44:50Speaker 01

  Well, in, in, in July, I'll be out there. I'm going to bring my bike.

• 1:44:53Rich Roll?

  Oh, cool.

• 1:44:53Speaker 01

  So I'll be out there for two weeks in July. Hopefully you'll be there.

• 1:44:55Rich Roll?

  Let's make it happen, man. That would be awesome.

• 1:44:57Speaker 01

  Right on.

• 1:44:57Rich Roll?

  Cool. So, uh, thanks so much for doing this, man.

• 1:45:00Speaker 01

  Thank you. Thanks for having me. It's a real pleasure.

• 1:45:02Rich Roll?

  You're an inspiration. That was an absolute treat. I appreciate it. So if you're in New York City, visit Tortulia.

• 1:45:09Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 1:45:09Rich Roll?

  El Colmado?

• 1:45:10Speaker 01

  El Colmado.

• 1:45:11Rich Roll?

  Colmado?

• 1:45:12Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 1:45:12Rich Roll?

  You've rolled the tongue.

• 1:45:13Speaker 01

  El Colmado, yeah.

• 1:45:14Rich Roll?

  Just perfectly.

• 1:45:15Speaker 01

  Just a little bit, yeah.

• 1:45:16Rich Roll?

  Right. And if you're in London, see Container at the, is it the W?

• 1:45:20Speaker 01

  The Mondrian Hotel.

• 1:45:21Rich Roll?

  The Mondrian, okay.

• 1:45:22Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:45:22Rich Roll?

  Are you opening up something new since?

• 1:45:24Speaker 01

  I have a new place opening in Brooklyn in, but beginning of next year, 2016.

• 1:45:28Rich Roll?

  Does it have a name yet, or?

• 1:45:29Speaker 01

  It does not have a name, unfortunately. No, that's something I gotta get on.

• 1:45:33Rich Roll?

  Spanish infused, though?

• 1:45:34Speaker 01

  No, this is, this is, this is going to be right up your alley. It's going to be a, I don't want to say fine dining, but it's going to be sort of an elegant restaurant, but all focused around local ingredients and a lot of vegetable cooking.

• 1:45:45Rich Roll?

  Very cool. I like that.

• 1:45:47Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:45:47Rich Roll?

  All right. So if you're digging on Seamus, at Seamus Mullen on Twitter and seamusmullen.com, those are the best places to figure out, right?

• 1:45:54Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 1:45:54Rich Roll?

  And I'm going to go to Tortulia tonight.

• 1:45:56Speaker 01

  Awesome. Yeah, we'll see you in a bit.

• 1:45:58Rich Roll?

  Whip up some good plant food for me tonight.

• 1:45:59Speaker 01

  You got it.

• 1:46:00Rich Roll?

  Cool, man. I'm looking forward to it.

• 1:46:01Speaker 01

  Cool.

• 1:46:02Rich Roll?

  Thanks so much, man.

• 1:46:02Speaker 01

  Thank you.

• 1:46:03Rich Roll?

  Peace. Plants.

• 1:46:09Rich Roll?

  All right, we did it. That's the podcast. I hope you guys enjoyed that. Let me know what you thought of the episode in the comments section on the episode page at richroll.com. Keep sending in your questions for future Q and A podcasts to [email protected]. I'm loving all the questions that you guys are doing and of course, as you know, we're doing more and more AMA episodes of the podcast. For all your plant power needs, visit richroll.com. We've got nutrition products, we've got fine art, we've got signed copies of our books, we've got 100% organic cotton garments, we've got Julie's meditation program, we've got Plant Power Tech T's, basically everything you need to take your health and your wellness to the next level. We've got your bases covered at richroll.com.

• 1:46:51Rich Roll?

  I've got two online courses at mindbodygreen.com, The Art of Living with Purpose and The Ultimate Guide to Plant-Based Nutrition, both really great, multiple-hour courses that are very affordable. Just go to mindbodygreen.com, click on video courses, you can find it there. What else? Thanks for supporting the show, you guys. Thanks for telling a friend. Thanks for sharing it on social media. Thank you for giving us a review on iTunes and thank you for using the Amazon banner ad at richroll.com for all your Amazon purchases. I'll see you guys in a few days. I'm excited for some amazing upcoming episodes I'm going to be sharing with you guys. I'm really kicking it into high gear and I hope you guys have an awesome week. Peace. Plants.