The Best Of 2021: Part Two

If there’s one thing we learned in 2021, it’s that conversation matters. Allow me to indulge this truth by introducing Part Two of my annual yearbook—a means to reflect upon the twelve months past by revisiting some of the year’s most compelling podcast guests. It’s been an honor to share my conversations with so many extraordinary people over the course of 2021. Second listens brought new insights—and more reminders that these evergreen exchanges continue to both inspire and inform. For long-time listeners, approach this episode as a refresher to launch you into 2022 with renewed vigor. For those new to the podcast, my hope is this anthology will stir you to peruse the back catalog and explore episodes you may have missed. Guests featured in this first of two total anthology episodes (hyperlinked to their respective episodes) are listed here: The Rich Roll Podcast: Best Of 2021: Part Two Compiling this auditory yearbook is both a joy and a challenge. I have great fondness for all my guests. I take no comfort in leaving anyone out. Should you find one of your personal favorites missing, I get it—please don’t @ me! Special thanks to Blake Curtis, Jason Camiolo and Dan Drake for the behind-the-scenes heavy lifting required to pull this two-parter together. To read more click here. You can also watch it all go down on YouTube. And as always, the podcast streams wild and free on Apple Podcasts and Spotify. Thank you for taking this journey of growth alongside me. Here’s to an extraordinary 2022. Peace + Plants, Rich Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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

• 0:00Rich Roll?

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• 0:44Rich Roll?

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• 1:05Speaker 01

  The second that you're in a situation where you're procrastinating or you're thinking negative thoughts, it's your subconscious that's in charge of you. And so, in order to change, you have to interrupt subconscious patterns. You see, the five-second rule isn't just some dumb, counting-backwards thing. It is a form of metacognition that interrupts the patterns stored in your subconscious brain. Counting backwards requires you to focus, which flips on your prefrontal cortex. It gives you a moment of control over what you think and do next. That's the genius of it. Because it is simple, you remember it, and it immediately interrupts the negative and suicidal ideations that torture people.

• 1:49Speaker 01

  And speaking of suicide, we know of 111 people who have stopped themselves from taking their lives by 5-4-3-2-1, asking for help. So I am here to tell you, I want you to try it. I want you to share it with people. Because interrupting the patterns of thought and behavior that are holding you back and pushing yourself to take action or to think something different, it is the only way you are gonna change. And this is a tool that's gonna help you bridge that gap. And if you program your mind correctly, and if you're clear about what you want to create, your mind will help you get what you want.

• 2:28Rich Roll?

  That's Mel Robbins in one of many clips to come in part two of our Best of 2021 edition of the Rich Roll Podcast. The Rich Roll Podcast. Happy holidays, everybody. Welcome. I must say, it has been fun revisiting these conversations and splicing together this special episode. 2021 was a transformative year in so many ways, and part two of this recap tradition does not disappoint.

• 3:07Rich Roll?

  But before we dive in, let's take care of business. Today, as I look back on the year, I'm just filled with so much gratitude, not just for all of the incredible individuals who have shared their time and their wisdom and their hearts with me, but really for all of you guys, for the listeners. I don't take your attention and support for granted. I relish in our community, and this recap practice is just one way that I can honor

• 3:47Rich Roll?

  all of you, a way of saying thank you in this spirit of positive change, because I believe in the power we all have to do and be better and to own and actualize our best, most authentic selves. And so with that being said, what better way to kick things off today than by sharing the wisdom of author and one of my personal heroes, Steven Pressfield. Revered for his creative prolificacy, Steven has 20 books to his name, including a book that radically changed my life, a book that I gift more than any other book, The War of Art.

• 4:27Rich Roll?

  Steven joined me on episode 584, serving up truths, big and small, on honing creativity, overcoming resistance, the importance of persistence, and why art is about discipline, not talent. Please enjoy this excerpt from my conversation with Steven Pressfield.

• 4:51Speaker 02

  I call it resistance with a capital R. And like if we had a typewriter or a keyboard in front of me now, or you've got one there with a blank screen or a blank page in it, you would feel, we would feel, a force radiating off that page, a negative force, trying to push you away from it, right? And that's what I call resistance. It would be the same thing as if we went out and bought an exercise bike or a treadmill, and we brought it home to the house, and suddenly we realize we're coming up with every excuse in the world not to get on that treadmill. So, resistance is this negative force of self-sabotage that will work against us anytime we try to move from a lower level to a higher level,

• 5:36Speaker 02

  ethically, morally, creatively. If you have an idea for a book, if you have an idea for a podcast, if you have an idea for this studio or something that you want to do, a voice will come into your head, right? Immediately, that will say, "Who are you to put this thing together? This has been done a million times, and it's been done better than you ever could do or ever would do. You're too old, you're too young, you're too fat, you're too skinny, you don't have enough education, you have too much education, et cetera, et cetera." And that negative force is universal. I can tell you from the thousands of emails I've got, and not only is it universal, it's the same voice in all of our heads, you know? It may be tailored a little bit to you or to me, but it's the same voice.

• 6:21Speaker 02

  And I was never aware of that. When I first started to write as a 24-year-old, resistance just kicked my ass all over the place. And I, you know, I went through a lot of stuff before I finally kind of said to myself, "You know what? There's a force out there that's working against me." You know, it's not just something I'm inventing. There is a real force out there, just like gravity, just like, you know, the transit of Venus across the sky. And once I could sort of give a name to it... Then I could say, okay, now I have something I can deal with. How can I overcome this? Can I develop habits that will help me overcome it? Can I organize my day in such a way? Can I change my mindset in such a way?

• 7:05Speaker 02

  So anyway, that's kind of my definition of resistance.

• 7:07Rich Roll?

  Well, the first step seems to be disassociating your identity from the resistance itself. Because I think what we all kind of do is self-identify with that. That is part of who we are.

• 7:20Speaker 02

  That's a great way of putting it, Rich. I've never heard that before. That's exactly it.

• 7:23Rich Roll?

  Well, you have talked about, you know, this idea that exists outside of yourself, right? If you're just thinking, well, I can't do it. This is me telling myself this as opposed to this external force that we can, you know, define as this pernicious entity working at odds with our effort to climb to that, you know, elevated place. But what was it that was like the light switch for you that allowed you to kind of come to that realization? Was it just pain?

• 7:52Speaker 02

  You know, it was pain, I guess. But, you know, I can't actually remember. There was not like a moment when I said that. Or if there was to myself, oh, this is resistance? You know, just over time, I guess. I mean, there was a moment that sort of where things turned around in that way for me. But I don't think I identified a force as resistance. But what you just said, Rich, is exactly right. The of disassociating this concept of resistance, this fact of resistance from your own identity. Like, when we hear this voice in our head that says, you're not good enough, it's all been done, et cetera, et cetera. What makes that so powerful against us is we think it's our own thoughts. We think, oh, that's me assessing the situation objectively. But it's not.

• 8:37Speaker 02

  It's this other siren voice, this force that's just out there. That's a fact of nature. And once we can say, oh, that's not me, that kind of is the key to the whole thing.

• 8:48Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 8:49Speaker 02

  I think that it's the inner war, the writer's war, the artist's war that we were talking about, that in a way...

• 8:59Speaker 02

  To face the blank page, to write a book, to write a movie, to write whatever it is, or ultra endurance, things like that, you have to be a warrior. One way or another, you've got to take the warrior virtues, which I would name as courage, patience, camaraderie, love for one's brothers and sisters, selflessness, and very important, the willing embracing of adversity. And there are a lot of other virtues, but those virtues that a warrior, a Spartan warrior or Alexander the Great would use for enemies out there, the artist or the endurance athlete uses those virtues against the enemies in here, right?

• 9:39Speaker 02

  When you're on your fourth Iron Man in a row, and every fiber of your being is screaming out, "Stop, stop, you know, this is insane," you're having to call upon something, right? And I think it's that warrior mentality, the same thing that, you know, the Spartans called on when the day three at Thermopylae, whatever. So I guess, again, I was sort of drawn to write these books, and I didn't even know why, but I think I was kind of reinforcing for myself in a way, that code of honor, that sense of shame, and that ability to kind of endure and to keep going forward into the unknown.

• 10:23Rich Roll?

  Next up is a really powerful clip that's excerpted from perhaps the most emotionally resonant episode of the year, coming from elite marathoner and ultra marathoner Tommy Rivers-Pusey, offering poignant words of wisdom gleaned from his recent near fatal battle with a rare and aggressive form of lymphoma.

• 10:46Speaker 03

  You know, I remember being very aware that it was serious, and anytime you have something that's going on with your respiratory system, you really quickly lose your ego. I mean, there's not much bartering, and you can't really tough your way through that. You know, you take away somebody's oxygen, and it's just a matter of minutes, and you're begging for somebody, something, anything to save you. I mean, that's why... It's like being waterboarded, you know? And there's a reason why, gosh, that's so effective. Because there's this fear that comes over you when everything protective within your body is telling you you're gonna die, like you've got seconds, you know?

• 11:29Speaker 03

  Unless you change something. And, you know, you become desperate. And whatever it is, you know, whatever it is that needs to be done to to be able to make you stop feeling that you're willing to you're willing to do it, you're willing to concede. And I remember a year ago, a year and a half ago, bartering with whoever it is that's in charge of all of this. You know, if I can just, just let me get through this year. Just give me one more year. Like, if I can have a year, then, you know, I'll gladly go. And I've made it, it's been a year. And, um, gosh, and then you get selfish. You're like, okay, five more, 20 more, 50 more.

• 12:11Speaker 04

  Right.

• 12:11Speaker 03

  You know?

• 12:12Speaker 04

  Because we're humans, man.

• 12:13Speaker 03

  Yeah, exactly. But, I mean, it doesn't, it doesn't get any better than this. It's, it really doesn't. And, I mean, the tragedy is that we, that we don't see it until afterwards, you know? I, I mean, I've been thinking about, um, people say like, and they lived, and they lived happily ever after. Like, the operative verb there is lived, you know? They were alive. That's why it was happily ever after. Then they died, and it becomes a fucking tragedy, you know? But like, gosh, life is incredible. I mean, it just, as bad as it seems, as hard as it seems,

• 12:54Speaker 03

  it's just such a gift to be able to do it. And we talk about how tragic it is when somebody, when something happens. You know, somebody dies, somebody gets sick. Um, there's an accident, there's a disaster. And as though that's out of the norm. And in reality, the fact that we're alive, it's just, it's just a miracle. I mean, the fact that we're, that we're here, that we're...

• 13:21Speaker 03

  It becomes hard to talk about this stuff because you can't express it in ways that haven't been expressed in just such cliche terms, you know, but the fact that we're living and breathing and talking and all of this, um, with everything that's going on.

• 13:35Rich Roll?

  On a space rock?

• 13:36Speaker 03

  Yeah, exactly.

• 13:37Rich Roll?

  That emits oxygen that we can breathe and we give it back CO2. We're hurtling through space. I mean, it's all insane, right?

• 13:45Speaker 03

  That's spinning 16,000 miles an hour.

• 13:47Rich Roll?

  But our brains can't really, you know, brock that whole thing. And of course, obviously, we intellectually understand like that life is a miracle.

• 13:54Speaker 03

  Sure.

• 13:55Rich Roll?

  But we can't fully embody that or appreciate that on a moment to moment basis. And, you know, in my experience, people who have experienced certain types of trauma or life altering, you know, situations like yourself, come out of those experiences with obviously this renewed appreciation, but there's kind of a timeline, like that dissipates over time. Like, it's hard to hold on to that, right? And so here you are a year later, like, I feel like you really are holding on to that. You know, you really are in the moment. Like, when we first sat down and you're like, this is great, man, I'm so happy, like, I can feel it, like, that's real.

• 14:36Rich Roll?

  And I think that's an incredible gift for all of us to, like, hear you express that, for you to fully embody that and a powerful reminder of just how precious all of this is and how fleeting and how delicate and fragile.

• 14:51Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 14:52Rich Roll?

  And I just wanna, like, I want a piece of that, like, I wanna, like, feel that on a soul level in the way that you feel it.

• 15:00Speaker 03

  The lucky part is that as good as things are, they'll get bad again, for all of us, you know? I guess the key is to not waste that suffering when it comes, like, see it as a, see it as a gift, see it as an, as an opportunity to open our eyes and to be able to really to value, you know, what it is that we have.

• 15:25Speaker 03

  Is normal, a normal day, you know, just realizing how incredible that is. And the tragedy is that we don't recognize it until after the fact. But everything is, it's so cyclical, you know? Everything that is good, anytime we're in, we're having a good time, a comfortable time. Life is good, you know? We can be 100% guaranteed that it's going to get bad again, you know? And as bad as it is, you can be 100% guaranteed that it's going to get good again, you know? And it's just being able to see all of it, all at once and recognize, recognize what is good. And, um, and be able to really value it as it's happening. Because, you know, like I was saying, there is, there is no idealistic future, you know,

• 16:10Speaker 03

  where it's just gonna, it's gonna all be right and we're just gonna be happy, you know? Happiness isn't something, we're not a victim of it. It doesn't just happen to us, you know? It's happening all the time and it's our ability to see it and recognize it. And, um, it's just, it's incredible, really.

• 16:32Rich Roll?

  Next up is author, education luminary and fellow Stanford classmate Julie Lithgow-Hames. On the pod to promote her new book, Your Turn: How to Be an Adult. We discussed everything from the importance of honing conversation skills to fostering curiosity and how we can all grow up just a little bit more.

• 16:55Speaker 05

  Childhood had changed, so parents were arriving differently on campus. They were arriving and staying. They weren't just dropping you off, helping you move in. They felt they had a role to play in the day-to-day management of life in the life of their child. And I found myself thinking, you know, this child could be in the Marines. But here they are, you know, not putting their lives in danger. They're at a well-resourced university, which you're paying a tremendous amount for them to attend, quite likely. What are you so afraid of, parent? Why is it that you think you need to be the one to have the run-of-the-mill conversation with a faculty member, to get involved if there's a roommate dispute, to attend an overseas

• 17:36Speaker 05

  studies orientation because you don't think your child can go abroad unless you've had the orientation so that we know how we can be successful abroad? We listened to the pronouns changing. It was, we're going abroad. We've gotten into this seminar. So those were some of the changes I noticed. And my job was to root for young people to thrive. And I could see that those who were over managed were lacking in agency. And I found myself asking, hey, kid, have you ever made a choice? Have they let you make a choice? Or are you just incredibly good at doing what you're told?

• 18:14Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 18:14Speaker 05

  And it saddened me.

• 18:15Rich Roll?

  Yeah, it produces a certain handicap where the child not only lacks self-efficacy, but that produces lower self-esteem and a lower sense of their own inherent capabilities. And certainly, you know, Stanford is your experience, but this is not endemic simply to Stanford.

• 18:32Speaker 05

  Not at all.

• 18:33Rich Roll?

  This is a nationwide, if not a global thing.

• 18:35Speaker 05

  Absolutely.

• 18:36Rich Roll?

  That is so fascinating, and I feel like has only continued to metastasize. So the catch-all kind of umbrella phrase for this is helicopter parenting, of course.

• 18:48Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 18:48Rich Roll?

  Or, you know, the tiger mom.

• 18:51Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 18:51Rich Roll?

  Phenomenon. What is your sense of how this started and how we got to this situation?

• 18:59Speaker 05

  Very interestingly, there were a set of changes happening in this country in the mid 80s that conspired to, in the aggregate, change all of childhood. So in no particular order, Rich, five things. Stranger Danger was born with a made-for-TV movie, Adam, about the abduction and murder of Adam Walsh in 1983. And everybody watched it. There was no internet. All of your entertainment came through the big screen or the small screen or your headphones. Everybody tuned in for that show, and it scared the bejesus out of everybody. So Stranger Danger was born 83.

• 19:28Rich Roll?

  And then that guy's dad became the host of, what was the show that he did?

• 19:33Speaker 05

  Uh, America's Most Wanted.

• 19:35Rich Roll?

  Exactly.

• 19:35Speaker 05

  Yeah, John Walsh, exactly. And missing kids began appearing on, photos began appearing on milk cartons. And yes, occasionally, children were abducted by strangers. And it is, of course, as we know as parents, the most horrific thing we can imagine. And yet... Children are more likely to die at the hands of a family member than they are at the hands of a stranger. They're more likely to die as a passenger in a car, yet we drive them in cars constantly to get them to and from their activities. So we reshape childhood around the very, very, very infinitesimal likelihood of a stranger harming our children. And we can really trace that back to that movie, Adam, 1983. The playdate was born in 1984. Kids used to play with each other. We found each other, right, Rich?

• 20:18Speaker 05

  It was like, where are the bikes? That's where my friends are. That was a Gen X childhood. That changed. Parents started arranging play with other parents, deciding with whom and when, but also watching over it, hovering, micromanaging. Are they playing with the right things? Are they bored? Let me help them. The self-esteem movement. Give them ribbons and trophies, certificates and awards just for playing soccer or just for swimming, rather than for being any good at it. The notion that we need to always praise. Great job, Billy. You slid down the slide. Great job. You didn't hit Jack, you know? A Nation at Risk was published, saying American teenagers needed to be, you know, more high achieving vis a vis their international counterparts. We needed more testing, more teaching to the test. All of these things meant that childhood was now watched and

• 21:03Speaker 05

  managed by parents. We also got safer in cars with seatbelt laws and car seat laws and bike helmet laws and bicycles. We got safer in our transportation. It led to this mindset of you can put a helmet on them always. You can bubble wrap every aspect of their environment. Prepare the road for the kid instead of prepare the kid for the road. All of those things happened in the span of three to five years. The first kids to come to college en masse with parents who couldn't let go in the late 90s were the first to have been subjected to playdates in 1984. Yeah. And why does it persist? Because it works, Rich. When you stand next to the rock wall and prevent your kid from falling onto the plastic wood chips. They go unharmed. So you've saved them in that moment.

• 21:48Speaker 05

  But over the long term, your kid hasn't developed that kinesthetic sense of how their body works, or of how to do something different or better next time. So, short-term win, long-term loss.

• 21:57Rich Roll?

  Right. And on top of that, it's all set up within the construct of performance.

• 22:03Speaker 05

  Right.

• 22:03Rich Roll?

  How do I set my kid up to get into the best college? Like, that is the ultimate end game.

• 22:08Speaker 05

  Right.

• 22:09Rich Roll?

  And so, when you're looking at short-term gains, it's all oriented around academic performance, making sure that they have the appropriate extracurriculars. And the only way to ensure that is this level of over-involvement.

• 22:22Speaker 05

  Right.

• 22:22Rich Roll?

  That, of course, even in the successful cases, where a kid ends up at Stanford, that kid ends up knocking on your door, having all kinds of, you know, mental issues, or self-esteem issues, or, you know, body dysmorphia. I'm sure it shows up in a million different ways, where they're handicapped and unable to really figure out how to live and exist and thrive on their own.

• 22:46Speaker 05

  That's exactly right. So, we've done the thinking for them, the planning for them, the troubleshooting, the fixing, the managing, the handling, all in furtherance of these outcomes we think lead to a successful life. And it's almost like we take our helicopter rotors and we lift them in the helicopter and arrive them at the future we have in mind. And then we can say, "Look, you've arrived."

• 23:08Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 23:08Speaker 05

  "You're here." And then the kid is bewildered at the place of arrival, because they haven't done the heavy lifting. They've certainly worked hard. It's not to say that kids aren't hard-working in this context, but they've been so over-managed and over-helped, they really are unfamiliar with their own selves. In my first book, How to Raise an Adult, I call it existential impotence, unfamiliar with the self.

• 23:30Rich Roll?

  Hmm. My sense is that there's a pendulum that swings. And that pendulum swings generation to generation, where parents end up parenting in opposition to the way that they were parented, to ensure that their kid gets what they feel like they didn't get, right? So, if you have the Gen Xers, who were the latchkey kids, who were completely unattended to, they're going to be the ones who are more likely to show up and over-parent. Is that how you feel like it works? Or have we arrived in a situation now where the pendulum is kind of locked in this place, where parents are fixated, in an unhealthy way, on how their kids are doing and performing?

• 24:11Speaker 05

  I certainly agree with you that many of us want to parent either the opposite of how we were raised, or we appreciate how we were raised and we want to do it the exact same way. We don't seem to have room for nuance. I want to point out that it was the baby boomers that started the helicopter parenting phenomenon. We Gen Xers inherited it because you're in a community and you see how other parents are doing their kids' homework in the fourth grade and the seventh grade. Well, how are you not going to do your kids' homework? Because you need your kid to keep up. Right? So we arrived as parents in an environment where helicopter parenting was already in many communities, the norm. And I find it ironic, the baby boomers who questioned authority, I mean, that was their bumper sticker. When they were young, they were now questioning

• 24:54Speaker 05

  authority on behalf of their own kids. They had forgotten that they created and matured their own voice by using it. And instead, they sort of treated their own kids like little pets and projects that they would continually question authority on their behalf.

• 25:10Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 25:10Speaker 05

  With Gen X, you know, many of us can appreciate the freedoms of that latchkey childhood. Yes, there were examples that were neglectful and harmful, and none of us want to replicate that. But you see in the Gen X memes on social media, the kind of lauding, the pride of like, you know, look what I was able to do. Look what my childhood entailed. There's pride in that. And I hope that Gen Xers listening will ask themselves, why am I not offering that same degree of freedom to my own child? Why do I want less for them?

• 25:43Rich Roll?

  Despite what you might think, Alzheimer's is not a genetic inevitability, and a diagnosis need not come with a death sentence. So how do we take an insurance policy out against succumbing to these kinds of neurodegenerative diseases? Well, neurology duo, Drs. Dean and Ayesha Shirze, joined me on episode 589 to break down the basics of optimizing brain health. Here's a snippet from that insightful exchange.

• 26:14Rich Roll?

  Nobody wants to befall this fate, right? And, you know, when we're young and vital, we think we're bulletproof and this is never going to happen. But these diseases start to take root early in our lives. We don't see the symptoms for many years. So it's all about these habits that we form around diet and lifestyle. So set us up with this paradigm that you guys have come up with. And we can walk through some of these habits that you guys have realized have been extremely helpful in managing symptoms and preventing people from headed down this path.

• 26:50Speaker 07

  Sure. So not to go into the depth and details of the science, which we could do, and we probably will spend some hours just going into it. But when you look at the basis of the pathology that takes place in the brain and the body for that matter is, you know, just a few processes. These are inflammatory processes, oxidation, abnormalities in metabolism of glucose or energy, and abnormalities in the metabolism of lipid. These are the four main pathways that cause damage to the vasculature, the blood vessels in the brain. And it causes damage to the neurons and the neural connections as well. And when you look at the mechanism of how these come about, they're very closely linked to your lifestyle.

• 27:35Speaker 07

  So it has to do with food, with the way you move and exercise, with stress management, with sleep. My goodness, sleep, such an important part of our day. And also how we connect socially, emotionally to our communities. And whether it's, you know, studies coming from, say, for example, in Columbia University, where I trained, from the Northern Manhattan Study, or from the Rush University Studies, or from the Adventist Health Study, different studies from around the world. When you look at the factors that stand out that contribute to better brain health. It's nutrition, it's exercise, it's stress, it's sleep. And the one that we added is cognitive activity.

• 28:20Rich Roll?

  That's the O, the optimization.

• 28:22Speaker 07

  That's right. So when we wrote the first book, we came with this acronym, NEURO. N E U R O. Of course, it's self-explanatory and it was good because we're neurologists and helped us a lot too.

• 28:32Rich Roll?

  It all came together.

• 28:34Speaker 07

  It came together and, you know, N is for nutrition, E is for exercise, U is for unwind, which is stress management. Not just getting rid of stress, but increasing good stress and getting rid of bad stress. And R is for restorative sleep, deep restorative sleep that helps cleanse the brain and has its own function. And optimization of cognitive activity.

• 28:54Rich Roll?

  Right. Some of these, if not all of them, feel like common sense. And yet also, I mean, I think the nutrition piece, everybody knows you gotta, if you want to take care of your body, you gotta eat right, right? Sleep, exercise, challenging yourself mentally, being in a community of people that you're connected to. These are all things that we, we kind of intuitively know are good for our health. The nutrition piece, is there one that stands out as more important than the others? Or do these all work? Obviously, this is a holistic thing, so they're all interconnected. But if you had to pick one, is that even possible?

• 29:32Speaker 07

  I don't think it's fair.

• 29:33Rich Roll?

  I guess if you don't sleep at all and you eat a perfect diet, it's not gonna matter.

• 29:37Speaker 07

  No, I think it's the multifaceted nature of this that actually makes a big difference. And when you look at different communities and individuals as well, you know, they're, they might excel in one thing, but they might be falling behind on others. And, I mean, it's understandable. We can't really control everything, but all of them are important. What would you say?

• 29:55Speaker 08

  No, I fully agree with you. I think all of it has to be done. And it's incredibly empowering to know that because every time we say that, somebody says, oh, my, you know, my friend did all of it. But no, none of us did all of it. And we're talking about living a, let's, I'm not, the food part is pretty specific. I mean, not, we don't have that many communities that lived in the way that we were talking about. And we'll talk about it, you know, as far as whole food, whole food, plant-based. We're talking about exercise, significant exercise. We're not talking about, whenever we talk to our patients, oh, I got Dean, I'm fine. I, I, I do the gardening, I do the walking. No.

• 30:30Speaker 07

  Or for example, my patients, when they say, I'm walking all day long from my living room to the kitchen, back to the living room. That's not exercise.

• 30:37Speaker 08

  It's gotta be significant amount of exercise. And then a stress management, it's not about just getting rid of bad stress. By the way, we, none of us are doing that well. And it's not just because you meditated. Meditation is phenomenal, but also about good stress. One of the things that actually gets people to the dementia stage fastest is what they did throughout their life as far as cognitive activity and challenge. That's profoundly important. Sleep, none of us do sleep well. Just because we took some medicine, we're talking about a restorative sleep where people go through the circadian, you know, the, the four phases of sleep, four to five times a day, night deeply. We invest in incredible resorts. We've been invited to different venues. I say, take that money and, well, I'm not gonna tell, put it in a, in your bedroom.

• 31:23Speaker 08

  There's a reason why we're knocked out. Evolutionarily, how would it make sense that you're subject to being mauled by bears and lions for one third of your life? Unless it was that important. So sleep and investing in sleep is profoundly important.

• 31:39Speaker 08

  We study, we're doing the largest one with the sleep study is, shows that 70% increased risk of dementia for those who have bad sleep. And then there's optimization, which is challenging mental activity. If you think you retire and you can go lie down on the beach, that's great for a few months. But if you continue, that's going to be the fastest point of decline for cognition. Because if this brain, which is consuming 25% of your body's weight and realizes, oh, I'm not being used, especially at a time where you're aging, you know what it will do? It will actually shrink more rapidly. So all of it has to be done and all of them have to be done together. But the beauty is, if they're done and if it's not just a diet de jour

• 32:23Speaker 08

  or the new resolution run or walk, and if it's lifestyle, and especially if it's lived lifestyle, which is what we're trying to do in communities. We're talking about 90% reduction in Alzheimer's, dementia, stroke, without any biohacking or vitamin de jour or any of that stuff. What regular things you have in your, you know, in your environment?

• 32:44Speaker 07

  And I think one of the focus of our study, which is, you know, the largest community-based study in the country now in beach cities, is the applicability of this knowledge. I think we have tremendous amount of information about the kind of diet and the kind of exercises that are good for the brain, even stress management, so on and so forth. But what we haven't really focused and what I don't see much of is bridging that gap between the knowledge that we have, the incredible amount of information that we have, and how people apply it at their homes.

• 33:19Rich Roll?

  That's always the trick.

• 33:21Speaker 07

  It really is. It really is. And so I think more focus needs to go towards that, the translation of all this amount of information we have.

• 33:35Rich Roll?

  When it comes to phoenix-like personal transformation, there really is no one quite like Karamo Brown, who overcame tremendous adversity to enliven the best in others. The culture expert on Netflix's massive hit show Queer Eye, Karamo is a father, is a former social worker, psychotherapist, author, and just overall stellar human. Here's a look at his powerful story that has led him to the life of service he lives today.

• 34:07Rich Roll?

  When did, you know, the sexual identity aspect of growing up, you know, come to be a thing? I mean, you can't, you sort of came to terms with that around 16 or so?

• 34:17Speaker 09

  15. Yeah. It came across very quickly. I mean, you know, Zack Morris on Saved by the Bell helped that a lot. You know, I kind of figured it out very quickly, like, oh, I like boys. And so I think the journey to accepting and love myself was a difficult one because my father was Jamaican, is Jamaican, and The music and the culture previously, they've gotten a lot better. Subscribe to a lot of homophobic ways. And so there was a song called Boom Bye Bye by an artist called Boujou Bantin. And the song went like this, boom bye bye in a batiboi, which means homosexuals head. You're not supposed to promote these nasty men, you have to kill them dead.

• 35:01Speaker 09

  And that song would be playing at family functions consistently. And it had a great beat and people are dancing to it. And the whole song is about killing any gay men on sight. And this was like number one on the radio and number like 10 on the radio here in the States. So I want you to imagine a popular song that's promoting killing gay men. And I'm five, seven, eight, nine, and these songs are playing. And so it made me feel fearful for my own life. It made me feel, you know, unsure about the love that my parents really have. Because if you could sing that song, unknowing that I was gay, then do you really love me? Once I say this to you, are you gonna try to kill me? You know, those are the type of things you play in your head. That's horrible, man.

• 35:46Speaker 09

  Yeah. You know, but I think about that, you know, we still haven't got to a place with some rap, pop.

• 35:54Speaker 09

  You know, some rock lyrics, you know, they still promote this. And people don't realize that, you know, you saying no homo has a connotation to someone who who identifies as part of the LGBTQ community and who's having self-esteem issues. And every time you say no homo, how does that affect their self-esteem? Because you're saying that if I do something, no homo means it's not, it's bad. So like, I'm not bad, that's bad, I'm not bad. And so I think it's just about being clear about what are you subscribing to? And like really watching your language, because language has power of how it affects people's mood, self-esteem, growth, everything. Yeah.

• 36:32Rich Roll?

  Wow, that's heavy. And you're, are you, where are you at with your dad these days?

• 36:38Speaker 09

  Um, we have a, we have a like, you're good, I'm good. Like, hey, you know, you stay there. I try, the problem is that even, my father's 70 now. Um, I've, we had many years that we didn't talk at all. But then, like, as I got older, I did try to reach out, and he just could not, he just still to this day cannot reconcile his religion with his relationship with his son. And I think that's a problem. When you can't reconcile your religion with your relationships, then there's an issue there. Because for me, the religion is teaching you to have healthy relationships through love, but somehow, the Bible is then teaching a different version of what could be coming out of other people's mouth that it was supposed to be. And so he's just never been able to reconcile it. And so I had to come to the place and say, you know what?

• 37:21Speaker 09

  Since you can't reconcile that decision, I have to make a decision for myself. I have to love me more than I love you. I have to trust me more than I trust you. I have to be there for myself more than you could ever be there for me. And then that was sort of the, the first step in taking away the pressure of feeling like I have to have this relationship with my father just because he has the title father.

• 37:43Rich Roll?

  Right, right. That's the thing. I mean, I, I feel like most people have some version of issues with their parents. And it's the rare case that somebody can really process it and heal from it and get to the other side of it where they're not carrying around this burdensome, you know, resentment and anger and, you know, constantly looking in the rearview mirror, like analyzing what that experience was like. Like, that takes a lot of work. And most people just compartmentalize it and move on.

• 38:12Speaker 09

  Well, one of the things that I, I used to tell myself, and I try to help, especially when I worked in social services, I would tell kids, um, as sort of a, a, a, a, something to springboard them to a happier, healthier life, is that whatever situation happened, didn't happen to you, it happened for you. And I think that language right there, it didn't happen to me, it happened for me. It's such a beautiful way of helping you to understand that, yes, you had an experience that was traumatic. But what could you learn from this experience? How can you grow? How can you be healthier? How can you be the best version of yourself? How can you start to heal? Because when you say, "It happened to me," you live in this place of letting the trauma overtake you. It's always like, "This happened to me. I wasn't good enough.

• 38:56Speaker 09

  I wasn't strong enough to handle this. What did I do to make this, allow this to happen? Why wasn't I loved enough?" You start to do all these whys, instead of saying, "This happened for me so that I could understand that I could be stronger, that I could love myself." And so when I think about the relationship that I have with my father and uncles, who couldn't reconcile their religion with their relationship with me because of my sexuality, I say, "You know what? That happened for me so that I could be here today stronger, loving myself more, versus it happened to me."

• 39:24Rich Roll?

  Yeah. It's easier to be on the other side of it, though, and look at it that way. Like intellectually, yeah, of course. But when you're in it, when you're mired in it, it's very hard to see your way through and to really grab on to that.

• 39:36Speaker 09

  Oh, 100%. That's why I think that they should teach meditation. I think one of the things that I think that they should have not taken out of school was quiet time. I think they got it right in kindergarten and pre-K when you have quiet time, because what would happen is that it would allow all the kids to settle their nerves, to take a moment to reflect, to recharge. And I think we get into this as a culture, a society. It's like you have to go, go, go, go, go. And you don't look at social media, everything, and people don't slow down. And I think that if we had an opportunity for people to take a step back, especially in traumatic moments, through and organize, you know, through school where they're like, "Let's stop so you can process what's going on."

• 40:16Speaker 09

  I think it would allow people to then get to that intellectual place at a younger age versus being older. Because no one allowed me to stop, so I felt like I had to continue to run. I felt like I continued, had to fight because of the fact that I was like, "If I stop, they win." When actually, if I would have stopped sooner, I would have healed quicker. I would have won, because I would have had more understanding that, "This is your shit. This is not my shit." You know what I mean?

• 40:51Rich Roll?

  Okay, let's get back into it with Courtney Dauwalter, the world's best female ultra runner. And when it comes to races 200 miles and longer, arguably the best, period. Humble master of grit and boundary busting physical prowess, Courtney joined me on episode 618 to share the mindset techniques and tactics that have propelled her superhuman accomplishments. Here's a peek into our conversation.

• 41:21Rich Roll?

  Let's go a little bit deeper. Tell me a little bit more about what that is, when you reach that point, or that limit, or that place where you feel like you can't put one foot in front of the other. Like, what is the lesson that you find for yourself in that?

• 41:38Speaker 10

  So, I call it the pain cave, that place. And I guess, like, probably four or five years ago, I viewed the pain cave as like, this place that you should try to put off as long as possible in a race. Like, make your pain cave be as far away from you as you can. And if you arrive to it, then you just sit in it and you try and survive the pain cave. But in the past couple of years, I mean, it's just a mindset, right? It's like, all in our heads, this thing. And in the past couple of years, it's been the place I want to get to. So, like, changing it to a place where I get to celebrate that I made it there.

• 42:21Speaker 10

  And then, that's where the work actually happens. So, making the pain cave bigger is how I view it, instead of, like, pushing the pain cave away. And I think, I mean, our minds are so powerful. So, even just like, changing the storyline makes it a whole different game.

• 42:40Rich Roll?

  Right. So, what is the story that you, like, what is the script that you flip when you're, when you're in that headspace? And it's getting really hard?

• 42:49Speaker 10

  Yeah, it's like, perfect, this is what we wanted. Like, now we get to actually do the hard work of making the cave bigger. And so, it's like picturing a chisel and just like, making tunnels in my pain cave in my brain.

• 43:06Rich Roll?

  You actually visualize that?

• 43:07Speaker 10

  Yeah, I'm super visual.

• 43:09Rich Roll?

  Yeah, I like that. It makes it very visceral and like real. If you can, it's not just a mantra and mantras are great. I'm sure you have mantras, but actually creating that three dimensional image in your mind.

• 43:24Speaker 10

  Yeah, yeah. And all, I mean, it's just telling myself a different story about that place where it hurts so bad. You know, where before it was like surviving it and now it's like, this is so cool. We made it here and now we, we work.

• 43:39Rich Roll?

  Yeah. As somebody who's out there pushing the envelope in your sport, showing the rest of us

• 43:48Rich Roll?

  what's possible and breaking all these boundaries and barriers. How does that affect your mental disposition and how you approach other facets of your life? Like, how does it spill over and how you think about possibilities and potential in areas that are outside of running?

• 44:10Speaker 10

  I think it's possible in every area outside of running. I'm not like seeking it in any other area right now, but I think what it's shown me is that

• 44:21Speaker 10

  people are selling themselves short and setting their bars too low of what they could actually do if they went all in on something, you know, whatever they're psyched about to just see what happens if they invest a little more time and energy into it.

• 44:37Rich Roll?

  And what about for yourself?

• 44:39Speaker 10

  For myself?

• 44:40Rich Roll?

  So you deflected a little bit there?

• 44:42Speaker 10

  What?

• 44:42Rich Roll?

  Because I was asking you about you too.

• 44:44Speaker 10

  I never do that.

• 44:45Rich Roll?

  Yeah, I know.

• 44:48Speaker 10

  Uh, like, am I pursuing, am I?

• 44:53Rich Roll?

  Well, right now you're all in on running, right? This is 110% all your focus and all your time.

• 45:00Rich Roll?

  But there are other interests I'm sure that you have and you're married and you have a relationship and I'm sure there's other goals that maybe you're thinking about for your life after running or in conjunction with your running. Talk a little bit about that and how you kind of see your life unfolding.

• 45:18Speaker 10

  I don't know how I see it unfolding.

• 45:20Rich Roll?

  Because you're just, you're right where your feet are.

• 45:22Speaker 10

  Yeah.

• 45:24Rich Roll?

  You'll wake up in the morning and decide.

• 45:25Speaker 10

  Yeah, I am having, like, I love this chapter that it's in right now, and so just enjoying that fully and knowing, like, chapters don't go on forever. So this ride, you know, will end at some point, and what comes next, I'm not sure. But I hope whatever, you know, page it flips to next, I can be just as excited about finding out what's possible in it.

• 45:53Rich Roll?

  Punk rock icon, spiritual warrior, bhakti yoga devotee, and former monk, Raghunath Kapo graced the pod back on episode 583, dropping many a pearl on finding meaning beyond the ego, transcending the illusions that hold us back, and what it really means to be a spiritual being, having a human experience.

• 46:20Rich Roll?

  When you go to the ashram and you start living as a monk, what is the teaching like? And what is the day-to-day existence where you start to, you know, intuit these teachings and put them into practice?

• 46:34Speaker 11

  There's a lot to share. I'm working on a book right now that extracted six very powerful principles that I taught from the teachings. And the first one is, and these are based on the teachings of Chaitanya Mahaprabhu, who is a great, considered by some as a child prodigy, because he was a child prodigy in Sanskrit. Some other people that knew him more intimately thought of him as a mystic because he did, he performed so many mystical things, Christ-like mysticism. And then, but his intimate followers, who are great gurus in their own right, they considered him an avatar. So his teachings were very simple. And one of them is very basic, and it's a great takeaway. If you want to take

• 47:19Speaker 11

  away anything from today, you can take this way. Stop criticizing other people. Like the sound coming out of your mouth.

• 47:30Speaker 11

  Can be toxic. And that was a powerful thing. Stop criticizing. And I realized I'm living with so much criticism in my mind. That doesn't mean we should throw discernment out. We need discernment. But the condemning language that happens on a regular basis from finding fault with other people and how you would do things so much better if you were doing them. Cut it out. Stop letting that pour out of your mouth. That was, that's a big one. If you want, I'll just run through these six. Yeah, let's do it. No, this is great. That's one. And first of all, when did this guy live? What is this like? About 1400, same time Columbus was showing up here. Right. This person, Chaitanya Mahaprabhu, was in Bengal and traveled throughout India.

• 48:13Speaker 11

  And basically, he was, it was a renaissance of bhakti. Bhakti means, bhakti yoga means connecting to source through love. That's all the word really means. And so, a lot of the practices are singing, are cooking, are meditation. But everything is in an action. Like you're acting in a loving way and dealing with other people. And so, um, so yeah, this is one of the teachings. I call, the book is called The Six Pillars of Bhakti. And so, one is not criticizing. The second one is being tolerant, where it's criticism deals with, with other people.

• 48:52Speaker 11

  Another one is just dealing with life situation and stop blaming the world for your unhappiness. And this is very powerful. It's transformational. Even if you're a materialist, this main teaching can transform your life. But if you want to really experience like the higher echelons of meditation, it's got to be there. Criticism, tolerance, and this is a huge one, the number three. And if, if you can add this one to your life, it will, it's such a game changer. It's, um, I take no offense. Meaning, I will not be offended on a regular basis. And that's a very common thing. Sometimes we could see somebody talking over there and I get offended. I think they're talking about me.

• 49:36Speaker 11

  So without provocation, I think someone's got something against me. And sometimes we'll walk around, uh...

• 49:46Speaker 11

  Holding some resentment for a person who didn't even mean anything.

• 49:52Speaker 11

  And that gets split in two things, because sometimes people don't mean anything, but due to some proclivity that I have, that I don't trust the world. That I take an offense and I carry that resentment around with me, and it becomes a burden. But sometimes people have hurt me. They've actually deliberately hurt me. But still, that desire or that need to forgive has to be there. Because in the Bhakti culture is nothing's actually happening to me, it's happening for me. That there's a benevolent energy lifting us higher and higher and higher. And we have to see that everything is for my edification, for my purification, and sometimes even tragic things.

• 50:35Speaker 11

  And so there's a firm faith that everything's happening for me. Now, we shouldn't be... We shouldn't be heartless when it comes to someone else's suffering. I should see, oh, he's having a hard time. We should feel like I have to reach out to that person, they're having a hard time. But for my own situation, I should feel like, you know, I'm going through a hard time, and this must be for my benefit. What is that benefit? And I can look at life like that. So, we don't hold any resentment, we don't criticize, we're tolerant. Next one, we see the good in others, and we let them know it. Find good. And this is what we're talking about. Instead of finding what this person's doing so wrong, what are they doing right? Why are they good? This is such a powerful practice in this day and age.

• 51:20Speaker 11

  Because otherwise, we're gonna lock in, and we're just gonna foster hate with others. And we're gonna have no commonality whatsoever. What do we have in common? What is right about this person? And it's such a great thing. Truthfully, it's a marriage saver, it's a relationship saver. You know, what is good about this person? And then sharing it with them, telling them why I appreciate you. And that lack of appreciation can really kill...

• 51:48Speaker 11

  It can kill love, quick. I mean, isn't that what romance is? Is full 100% appreciation for that person.

• 51:55Rich Roll?

  Right, and the piece, the second piece about letting that person know is crazy powerful.

• 52:02Speaker 11

  Right.

• 52:03Rich Roll?

  And it's something that most of us don't do nearly enough of.

• 52:07Speaker 11

  I mean, we might have a person that would do anything for us. They would come anywhere, at any time, at any moment. "Hey, I need your help, can you come here?" Yeah. That person, I never let them know how much I appreciate them. Sometimes the people that are the closest to us, we never share with them how much we appreciate them. The next one was quick to apologize. If you feel like you hurt someone's feeling, if you're a little obtuse, you apologize first. You say, "Hey, I'm sorry. I don't know if that offended you, but please forgive me if it did." A big game changer. And another one is, we keep a tally of how we are blessed. We keep a list of how fortunate we are.

• 52:48Rich Roll?

  A gratitude practice.

• 52:49Speaker 11

  A gratitude practice. And sometimes people don't have a gratitude practice, they have a "this is unfair" practice. This is why, or entitlement practice. And the problem with that is, it's simple math. Entitlement makes you sad, gratitude makes you happy. If you feel like the world owes you everything, you're always gonna be miserable, there's never enough the world can owe you.

• 53:16Rich Roll?

  At the ripe age of 16, after qualifying for the Olympic trials, pro-runner Mary Kane was quickly establishing herself as the fastest girl in a generation. Until that is, she joined Nike's Elite Oregon Project team, run by infamous coach Alberto Salazar. After suffering immensely under Salazar's abusive coaching system, Mary bravely exposed it all in a New York Times video op-ed entitled "I Was the Fastest Girl in America Until I Joined Nike." Now, an advocate, resolute on creating positive change for the next generation of female athletes,

• 53:56Rich Roll?

  Mary joined me on episode 611 to share ways in which we can all work to fix women's sports.

• 54:07Speaker 12

  This whole situation has made me like, and this is, this is bad. This is something I'm working on with my therapist, but like less trusting. And it's made me like more skeptical of authority. And it's made me question like society's behavior in a way that I just never had done before. And I think that's really powerful and I think that's a great thing. But in that moment, it's like really horrifying to be like, oh my God, like this, this was condoned. This was normalized. People acted like this was okay.

• 54:45Speaker 12

  And I'm realizing right now how bad this was and like, who am I kind of in this big world to like, have figured it out? And I think knowing that I did, it was like, you know, 24 hours ago, I didn't. And like that person almost scared me and I was like, I need to help them. And obviously I couldn't go back in time and help myself. So how can I pass it forward to the next person? You know, it was like my immediate reaction. And I remember I pulled my parents aside, like maybe the next day or like really early on in this. And like I had, you know, I was like, I have to tell you everything.

• 55:30Speaker 12

  And like, we did the deep dive and we went like, this was like an hours long conversation of me just sharing everything. And as like, you know, there's obviously a lot of tears, like I can't even get through a podcast without crying. And at the end, like my parents' question was like, what are you gonna do? And I said, and I don't know why, I think I'm gonna start crying, but I was like, I don't think I'm ever going to be a pro runner again. But I love this sport.

• 56:03Speaker 12

  If nobody's ever gonna sign me, nobody's ever gonna follow me again. I said, but I can't live with myself if I don't share this. And if I don't like help that one person. And I remember like they were so scared for me and so proud of me at the same time. And I think for them, it was just like.

• 56:30Speaker 12

  Like, it was almost like this happy, proud, and this like, you're doing something bigger than yourself. And again, we didn't think anybody would watch the video. I thought, if, if anything, and I'm, I'm gonna be very honest when I say this, having so many people watch that protected me in a way that I don't know do people understand. And had that been something where like, a couple thousand people watched it, like, the same negativity from one side of that conversation would have been louder, and it probably would have been stronger. And, and you see it in how other athletes from that program have since

• 57:14Speaker 12

  been treated when they left, and when they came forward, and when they were vocal. And in many ways, like, that's what I thought I was going to experience. I mean, Kara Goucher has gone death threats. Um, you know, athletes have been called horrible things across, like, websites, social media, they've been gaslighted. Um, and I just, I was prepared for that. Like, that was what I was signing up for. And, you know, the sport is one in which, again, like,

• 57:45Speaker 12

  what, what was done was really horrible. And yet, like, a lot of the competitors of these organizations don't necessarily turn around and say, like, oh, wow, like, you're really trying to do something good in the world, like, let's, you know, like, support you. If anything, in the traditional space, it's much more like, no, you're not that fast anymore, like, whatever.

• 58:09Rich Roll?

  Yeah, everybody's running to protect their own at the same time. I mean, it is a David and Goliath story. It's not just, hey, this is Mary Kane, and she's gonna share her story, you know, of how hard it was. This is you, basically, taking on Nike. I mean, it's, you know, that's a very, and you're a young person, like, that's very scary. And you still want to have this career in running. So you're gonna become, you're risking becoming persona non grata in doing this. And that takes like, an unbelievable... Amount of of courage to do that.

• 58:46Speaker 12

  And I I thank you for saying that. And I think it's also like important for me as I'm going and embarking on this like new endeavor and creating a team and almost like learning, like it's important to learn what not to do, right? That's that's I have a lot of experience with what not to do. But I think the other thing is that as much as that's good, you know, you have to learn what to do. And you can't almost only be coming into this like beautiful journey of creating a team that I'm embarking on with like a cynical perspective, which I think would be really, really easy for me to do if I'm honest. And so there's

• 59:30Speaker 12

  so much importance.

• 59:32Rich Roll?

  To fuck all those Nike guys team.

• 59:34Speaker 12

  Yeah, exactly.

• 59:35Rich Roll?

  That's the name of the team.

• 59:36Speaker 12

  Pretty much. It's like really important for me to like, think about like, so many people who've helped me and so many people who supported me through that time, like the Alexis, or people who just like, like the Wes's who stepped up and said, like, I'm here for you. Because those are the people who I can lean on and learn from when creating something beautiful versus just kind of creating something out of a fear of what was. You know, when you look on the past, it can't ever be like, I'm just trying to rewrite my own story. It's how can I really make something good going forward?

• 1:00:23Rich Roll?

  The voice, the prophet of all things action sports, Salema Masakela is among many things about a surfer, a snowboarder, a skater, and the beloved host of the ESPN's X Games. On episode 594, we dove into his fascinating life story. We dug into the ways sport holds the power to break outdated paradigms and the progress many industries need to make to be truly accessible and equal to all.

• 1:00:58Speaker 13

  Moved to Carlsbad and you know, we wake up in the morning and you're in this place. Like we drove in that night in the U-Haul and then that next morning you wake up, walk out the front door.

• 1:01:08Speaker 13

  It smells different. I never smelled this before. And look up and like it feel, this air feels different. Palm trees swaying and I remember looking, panning right slowly and I recognized that we're on a hill and about two miles away, a mile or two away is the ocean. And I'm like, huh. Okay, I still don't, there's no point of reference about surfing. I'm just taking in where we're at. And like literally in that moment, as we're unloading the, the U-Haul, my, my stepfather and I, like a kid comes driving by on a purple Honda Revo scooter with a full waterfall haircut,

• 1:01:49Speaker 13

  a tank top t-shirt, board shorts, sandals and a bookbag between his legs. And I'm like, what, what is that?

• 1:01:59Rich Roll?

  What kind of alien?

• 1:02:00Speaker 13

  What, I literally was an alien. And I'm, then my mind is like, is he, he's going to school? What? And a couple of days later, I go enroll in this school and everyone's dressed like that. And I'm like in, literally like in like Timberland boots, jeans. I look like I've come from another planet. Everyone's speaking in this weird dialect and said, you know, dude and bro and bra and.

• 1:02:26Rich Roll?

  Right. You're like Run DMC in their Spicoli.

• 1:02:29Speaker 13

  Yeah. Exactly. But these kids that I met at church went to my high school and it turns out they were all surfers. And a couple of them were like deaf, they weren't like super holy. They were like, we're cool. And this kid, Justin, he invited me to lunch the next day at school and I was so stoked to meet some, some kids that were cool. And you could leave campus to go to, to go to lunch, which I'd never experienced before in the East. Like we go to school, you're in prison until it's time to get out. And we went to this beach parking lot after we'd gotten food at a, at a place called Carl's Jr. that I didn't know existed. And we're sitting in the car in the back of his, I mean, I'm in the, in the trunk of

• 1:03:11Speaker 13

  his Subaru hatchback with, and the car's packed with everybody like, you know, eating. And they're looking out in the lineup. And I look up and I'm like, ah, no way.

• 1:03:23Speaker 13

  Surfing and these guys were speaking in the language, talking about what they're seeing, waves and swell. And I'm just sitting there quiet like, what? I'm flashing back to a year ago in Bondi and I was like, hey, I've seen this before. And they're like, whatever, dude. I'm like, no, I was in Australia last year at Bondi Beach and they're like, now, wait,

• 1:03:48Rich Roll?

  pre-internet, pre like Bondi Beach must have been like Oz.

• 1:03:52Speaker 13

  Yeah, like seen it in magazines and movies. And also, mind you, there's like,

• 1:03:58Rich Roll?

  You're the least likely guy they would have ever imagined.

• 1:04:01Speaker 13

  There's two other black kids in the school. Yeah. One runs track and the other one plays football and I've shown up and they're like, what are you talking about? And then I tell them my story and like Paul Simon, my dad, except like, who, what? Who are you? Like, I'm like, I want to do that. Like I saw this and I was like, if I ever get a chance, I told Justin, like, I want to, I want to try it. And he's like, all right, be at my house on Saturday. And that's how I got to experience surfing. Yeah. Went there and they had a wetsuit and board for me and put the wetsuit on backwards. Everyone laughed and right, whatever. Finally

• 1:04:35Rich Roll?

  made it out. You ended up surfing like 170 days in a row, right? Without missing a day?

• 1:04:39Speaker 13

  Yeah, I served.

• 1:04:41Rich Roll?

  So there's a, you were committed to figure this out.

• 1:04:43Speaker 13

  The first time I stood up was like for five seconds and it was literally like I had gone to church thousands of times, you know, prayed in groups in large conventions and in our, you know, our three different religious meetings. I never ever felt spirituality before. I'd never felt a soul calling like I did at 16 and a half, standing on a surfboard for like five seconds. The time stopped, everything changed. It literally felt like whatever some spirit poured into me. And when I came up after falling, I screamed as loud as I could and my whole life just pivoted. And it was like, okay, this is everything now.

• 1:05:28Speaker 13

  And I'd never, it was,

• 1:05:30Rich Roll?

  You had that clarity.

• 1:05:32Speaker 13

  I had that clarity. It was the greatest spiritual awakening that I could have ever asked for at that, at the time.

• 1:05:38Rich Roll?

  Yeah. I mean, we could talk for two hours about the spirituality of surfing, but what's interesting is that It was etched into your soul in a way that almost makes it sound like some kind of past life thing, like when you had that experience in Bondi and then when you actually connected with it. I mean, first of all, you have that experience of Bondi and there's a knowingness about your path on some conscious, unconscious level. Then the universe conspires to move you to, you know, the epic surf spot in America. Like completely, I mean, nobody could have predicted a set of circumstances that would bring that about. And then the manner in which you just go all in on it from the outset, like it's wild.

• 1:06:25Speaker 13

  In retrospect, yeah.

• 1:06:26Rich Roll?

  You know?

• 1:06:27Speaker 13

  Yeah. I mean, it just was, it just clicked. It's like, oh, this is me. Everything associated with this. I need, I need to just soak. I would go to the library at school and read back issues of Surf Magazine. Like I had to learn the culture, the origins, everything. And as you're coming of age and you're dealing with all the challenges of your teen angst and then the extra layers of, that were particular to my family, but every kid had a version of it. Surfing became this mega oasis for like, none of that mattering. Like the ultimate freedom of expression of like, there was the one place that I could express myself

• 1:07:12Speaker 13

  wholly that I couldn't do with my mom and stepdad and I couldn't even do with my dad. Like surfing literally was that place where I could just express, even though I had the tensions of a community that thought they were the definition of the thing and that they were allowing me to visit in their space and people many times feeling uninhibited to tell me that I shouldn't be out there and using the N-word, et cetera, et cetera. None of that could actually get in the way of the thing. Like when I stood up to do the thing, there were no voices except mine.

• 1:07:51Rich Roll?

  Wow.

• 1:07:57Rich Roll?

  Point blank, Maggie Q. is the hero we all need. Actress, activist, fashion designer, and plant-based icon, Maggie is best known for her roles in action films like Mission Impossible and the Divergent films, performing her own stunts on screen and advocating for animal rights off screen. In episode 596, Maggie taught us the importance of finding your cause and giving your all fighting for it. Here's a clip from that empowering exchange.

• 1:08:31Speaker 14

  I mean, I work with a group, I'm on the board of a group called Social Compassion and Legislation. We do a lot of legislative work up in Sacramento. And it is the epitome of that, right? So you're going into these meetings with these senators and assemblymen and people who can, you know, these are lawmakers, these are people that really essentially work for us, right? And I go there and I'm lobbying senators in this building, and then there's no one there. And I'm driving down Melrose and there's 40 people in line for lip gloss. And it bums me out because it's like, we have so much influence. All you have to do is care.

• 1:09:16Speaker 14

  All you have to do is show up. Half of it's showing up, right? Life, gotta show up. And then, once you show up, you really have to be in those rooms with people that may not get it, but what you're gonna do in those rooms can be pretty remarkable.

• 1:09:29Rich Roll?

  Well, it's one thing to be a proponent of this lifestyle, and it's another thing to really shoulder that mantle and carry that responsibility, to use the platform that you have to advocate on behalf of these causes. So where does that come from in you? Because it would be very easy for you to be like, I'm doing my movies, I don't want to make waves.

• 1:09:51Speaker 14

  Sure. It is much easier to do that.

• 1:09:53Rich Roll?

  I don't want to upset people.

• 1:09:54Speaker 14

  Yeah, I know, I know it.

• 1:09:55Rich Roll?

  So where does that pull come from?

• 1:09:59Speaker 14

  I kind of feel like it's almost not even a choice in that, you know, we live this very privileged existence, like in every way, right? And I mean that in things that I've earned, I mean it in things that I'm living, like, okay, I'm given my health, I have this like gift of health and I can walk and I function. So that's a gift. And then I've earned these other things where I work in Hollywood and I have certain privileges and you start to develop a voice for certain things. And it doesn't feel like a choice, it feels like a responsibility, you know, doesn't it? When you sort of, when you have a lot, how do you not? And it can be anything, you know, pick what it is that you sort of

• 1:10:40Speaker 14

  feel isn't right in your mind, in your heart, in your soul. And you go out there and you really, you, you fight for it. And you hope that other people will do the same when something matters to them. Because I'm sure you get this all the time. I've gotten it for 20 years. Like, oh, you don't care about kids, you don't care about women, you don't care about, you know, libraries, I don't know.

• 1:10:58Rich Roll?

  Because you've chosen to advocate for one thing, that's at the exclusion of other things that are important.

• 1:11:03Speaker 14

  This is exactly it. I'm like, you're so right. I hate children because I love the environment, or whatever it is, you know? And it's sort of, there's always this line. And so it's always this thing of like, you know, I have people that, you know, write into me and go, you care more about homeless pets than you do about homeless children. I'm like, interesting. I'm so glad that you care about homeless children. Well, I do. I said, well, tell me more. What do you, what do you do for homeless children? I'm fascinated. I want to know. Nothing.

• 1:11:30Rich Roll?

  Crickets.

• 1:11:31Speaker 14

  Absolutely nothing. So I've never ever run into a person who puts themselves out there, who advocates for something they care about, regardless of what it is, who has ever criticized me. You know, and I'm in rooms with women's rights activists, my human rights friends in DC. We all kind of look at each other and go, thank you for what you do. Because what you do matters in your lane and in your category. It's always people who do nothing, who have a ton to say about what you're doing. So going into this industry, I did have this work ethic that was kind of built in. I have parents who work very hard, and then, and then Jackie. There's no one who works harder than Tom Cruise or Jackie Chan on different sides of the

• 1:12:11Speaker 14

  way. Same work ethic, same just tenacity, same leadership skills. I mean, they're very similar in that respect.

• 1:12:19Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 1:12:19Speaker 14

  Yeah. So you're, I'm surrounded by these people where it's like, you have to earn your way. There's no free lunch here. There's no like, you know, relying on your God given skillset or looks or any of this stuff. You have to work hard. So, okay. So I had that. And it was like, almost like emotional cutting. It was like very punishing, the way I went about things and like, okay, I'm just gonna work super hard. But I never felt like I had really gotten there. I had earned it. I was really worth much. I never felt that way. And that, that's a problem, right? Because no matter what you're achieving, you still, it's, it's, it's never enough, but not in an obsessive way, in an internal, kind of sad way. And so it wasn't until we were actually in Rome,

• 1:13:03Speaker 14

  I think it was our first day of filming. We were on the Tiber River.

• 1:13:06Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 1:13:06Speaker 14

  We're speeding up and Tom.

• 1:13:08Rich Roll?

  With the speedboat stuff?

• 1:13:09Speaker 14

  Yeah. Tom does everything, right? So he's manning the, I mean, he's the whole thing. And so we had a guy like kind of crouched on the bottom. If we have horse, if we had some like electrical failure or something, right? But he wasn't doing, Tom was doing everything. So it was me, it was the team, right? It was Tom, myself, Ving Rhames and Johnny Rhys Myers to run this boat. And we have a, you know, they're changing a lens or something, right? So we're at our ones and we're just sitting there in this boat. And, and there's, it was so intimidating because there was maybe 5,000 people that had lined, just to get a glimpse of him.

• 1:13:42Rich Roll?

  Lined up on the side of the river.

• 1:13:43Speaker 14

  Oh, I mean, you, as far as the eye could see and you're like, holy shit, I'm standing next to a movie star. This is a movie star. Like legit, like there's no question, this man, like the power that he holds. I mean, just a glimpse of him, like they were, it was crazy. So anyway, I'm sitting in this boat and it, you know, it's a really intimidating day, although I felt sort of like, no, I felt good about it and it was fine. And we're sitting in the boat and Tom's like, Maggie, tell me about your, like, I haven't seen any of your US movies. And I was like, I don't have any US movies.

• 1:14:13Rich Roll?

  He's like, what?

• 1:14:15Speaker 14

  Yeah.

• 1:14:15Rich Roll?

  They cast you?

• 1:14:17Speaker 14

  He's like, I don't understand. What do you mean? And I said, oh, um, This is, this is my first US movie. And he goes, "You're kidding me." And I said, "No, no, this is my first US movie." And he's like, "I don't believe this, there's no way." He's like, "Ving." And Ving's like on his phone or something. He's like, "Ving, get over here, get over here." And Ving's like, "Oh, what's going on?" And he goes, "This is Maggie's first US movie." And Ving goes, "No shit." And I'm like, "Yeah." And he's like, "Damn." He's like, "Johnny, Johnny, you believe this?" And he brings Johnny over. It's like so embarrassing. So Johnny comes over and he's like, "Johnny, this is Maggie's first US movie." And Johnny's like, "Really? No way." You know, so everybody's like having this conversation about me, in front of me. And I'm like, "Yeah, that's it." And Tom's like, "Let me get this straight. Let me get this straight.

• 1:15:02Speaker 14

  You have not done a movie in the US. And then the first movie you do is like a $200 million like monstrosity where we're like on the Tiber River in Rome, speeding up and down with this 200-man crew, blah, blah, blah, blah." "This is your first experience?" I said, "Yeah, that's right." And he goes, "You know, Maggie, if you didn't tell me that..." He goes, "I would never know it." He's like, "You act like you belong here." And I don't know where it came from. I looked at him and I said, "I do belong here." And he looked at me and he said, "You're goddamn right you do."

• 1:15:37Rich Roll?

  That's fucking cool. Like, that's a moment.

• 1:15:41Speaker 14

  It was. It was really like, I can't believe I just said that to him.

• 1:15:45Rich Roll?

  I got chills just hearing that.

• 1:15:47Speaker 14

  Well, I'm like, "Where did that even come from? Like, I don't have the confidence to say that. But I know that I put in..."

• 1:15:52Rich Roll?

  But you paid your dues.

• 1:15:53Speaker 14

  "Eight years of blood, sweat, and tears, literally, by the way." And I was there and I'm like, "Well, screw it. Like, why shouldn't I be here?" But that is not to say that, that I took it for granted, where I thought I was like special and like, "Oh, it had to be me." No. By the way, like, I don't care who it is, it can always be someone else. It doesn't have to be you. It doesn't have to be me. You know what I mean? So it's keeping that in mind, I think, that keeps it all into perspective for me in Hollywood.

• 1:16:22Rich Roll?

  Right. That's such a good story.

• 1:16:27Rich Roll?

  As a plant-based endurance athlete, it's probably no surprise that the question I get asked most frequently is, where do you get your protein? Well, to help me dive into the nuances of this understandable inquiry, Matt Fraser and Robert Cheek, authors of the aptly titled book, The Plant-Based Athlete, joined me to break down the basics of optimizing athleticism from strength training to endurance, all on the power of plants. Here are a few of their thoughts on plant-based performance lifted from episode 608.

• 1:17:04Speaker 15

  More than like, this is the trick to becoming a great athlete, like, that's not really what this is about. It turns out that it is that for the right person, and there are lots of people who, including all of us, I think, who kind of experienced our, the most success we had athletically once we went plant-based. But for me, it's more that like, you can do this, and you can get all these great benefits of longevity, really, and health span. To me, that's what it's all about. I mean, I just think, you know, you mentioned like, the omnivorous diet, like, what's wrong with this? This is natural, but natural doesn't really affect, doesn't really get into health, right? Nature selects for reaching reproductive age at a few years past to raise your kids,

• 1:17:45Speaker 15

  but it's not really about what gets you to 80, 90, and keep moving and being healthy, because that doesn't matter for, for natural selection. So, to me, that's like, where we should think about, like, not like, what is, and I don't honestly know what is the most natural diet, or whatever that even means, but what's one is the data saying is keeping people, giving them the longest health span, keeping them mobile and happy and active and, and healthy and alive, and, and it looks a lot to me like, that's the plant-based diet. That, that seems to be where the science is all pointing these days.

• 1:18:14Rich Roll?

  Right, right. Your on-ramp, Robert, was ethics. Matt, yours was more health-related. Mine was vanity. Vanity and health, and athletic performance ultimately. But what's so amazing and beautiful about how this movement has blossomed, is that now there are all these on-ramps, from the ethical considerations, of course, to sustainability, to climate change concerns, environmentally sensitive, you know, which we all should be, of course, and the longevity.

• 1:18:47Rich Roll?

  Health considerations of the foods that we eat. And now with this book, Plant-Based Athletic Performance. And I think it's so great because just like all the athletes profiled in your book, different people connect with and resonate with different individuals, right? So not everybody is gonna cotton on to the ethical argument, but perhaps they're concerned about the environment. And the way that I look at it as this umbrella lifestyle that checks every single box. Like you can opt out of the chronic lifestyle illnesses that are unnecessarily killing millions of people. Obesity rates right now are through the roof. Diabetes, it's predicted something like 50% of Americans are gonna be diabetic by 2030.

• 1:19:30Rich Roll?

  All of these chronic illnesses are lifestyle illnesses directly correlated to the foods that we're eating. Meanwhile, we're decimating the planet because animal agriculture just requires too many inputs, too much land, too many resources for us to sustainably produce enough animal products for the planet to eat as we careen down this path towards 10 billion people living on this planet. But the truth is, most people are walking around thinking about themselves. They're like, that's fine, but like, I just wanna be buffed and I wanna eat what I wanna eat and I wanna be able to kill it in the gym or, you know, qualify for Boston or whatever it is. And the truth is, is that all of those goals are not just possible,

• 1:20:15Rich Roll?

  but more possible by dint of learning what you guys have laid out in this book.

• 1:20:21Speaker 06

  And when you read the stories, one of the things you'll notice is that what brought people to a plant-based diet in the first place? For many people, it's inflammation. It's pain that they feel even as a young person. Like, take David Carter, NFL lineman, I mean, a completely star athlete in his 20s and he can barely push himself out of a bathtub because his joints hurt so badly. This is a guy who's supposed to be in his prime. He's playing in the NFL. And then when he went to a plant-based diet, not only did he drop weight, which helped him get rid of some body fat and then which he later added the weight back on with more muscle, he got faster, he got stronger, but the pain went away. I mean, the pain just went away. And his career lasted slightly longer than the average NFL career and he's been, you know, in incredible shape since then, too. I've seen him in his retirement and he

• 1:21:06Speaker 06

  looks fantastic. And you look at other athletes, national champion cyclists who had inflammation in their knees and at age 19, you know, had, you know, pain that made their career suffer to some degree. And then a plant-based diet eradicated that and they were able to perform and then become champions on all these different levels. And I know Fiona Oakes, someone you know and have talked to, I mean, she didn't have a kneecap in her right knee and wasn't even supposed to walk or let alone run and went on to overcome that and has been plant-based since age five or so, vegan for nearly 50 years and, and has gone on to set Guinness World Records. And when you look across the board, men or women, it doesn't matter the

• 1:21:50Speaker 06

  sport, so many people came to this lifestyle to reduce inflammation, improve recovery, and have better results. And that's what they did. And it's so fun to tell those stories. There's also stories of people who had all kinds of problems with addiction, you know, and overcame that, you know, like Dotsey Bowsh is open about that and, and John Joseph's rough childhood, you know, like, these are, these are inspirational and in a lot of ways, their success is aspirational. And that's what, I mean, I get moved every time I read the book because of those stories.

• 1:22:20Rich Roll?

  Just this past week, have you guys been following the Iron Cowboy who's trying to do these 100 Ironmans in a row? You're aware of this guy?

• 1:22:26Speaker 15

  That was a couple of years ago.

• 1:22:28Rich Roll?

  No, he did, well, he did 50, 50 Ironmans in 50 states in 50 days, but now he's in the midst of trying to do this thing called Conquer 100 where he's doing 100, he goes out the front door of his house and does an Ironman every day and he's on like day 72 right now or something like that. It's insane, right? Like every single day doing an Ironman. And he's had, you know, struggles that he's overcome, like he, and the whole thing is playing out on Instagram stories and he'll, he's very transparent about his injuries or what he's dealing with, like, this is no small feat, like, this is a big deal. But just the other day, the reason I'm bringing this up is just the other day, I think it was yesterday, he switched up his diet like a week ago. I've been trying to encourage this guy to go plant-based for a long time.

• 1:23:11Rich Roll?

  And I've kinda, you know, he flirts with it, but then he goes, you know, whatever. I don't know what he was eating, you know, for the first 50 some odd of these Ironmans, but he switched up his diet. I can only suspect that it became much more whole food-based and more plant-forward or plant-leaning. I'm not going to say he went plant-based. I know he didn't. But I know that he started building into his daily routine a lot more whole foods. And he said that he dropped five pounds of inflammation. Like, and he felt, he went, and then the next four days, he felt the best, like through 68 to 72 of these Ironmans, he said he felt the best that he had felt so far. So my point being that inflammation is not just a real thing.

• 1:23:52Rich Roll?

  Like, that's a, that's a, that's an extreme example of the impact of the foods that you're eating on your body's response to exercise-induced stress and how important it is. So if you're looking to recover, eating a plant-centric diet, plant-based diet, is going to take you a long way towards, you know, reducing that inflammation that impedes your body's ability to repair itself in between workouts and in turn, of course, you know, will power you through, you know, bigger breakthroughs than you would have ordinarily. Because that inflammation stunts your body's ability to adapt and grow.

• 1:24:28Speaker 15

  Yeah, that's like, everyone always asks what the mechanism is. Like, well, why is a plant-based diet supposedly so much better for sports if you're claiming that it is? And no one's ever really, you know, known, we don't know what it is. It just, it seems like you stop getting injured. And, but Brendan Brazier back in the, you know, early 2000s was saying that it was, when he, when he experimented with a bunch of diets back in high school, he found that this was the one that let him recover fastest and get back, so he could get in, you know, whatever, 10 workouts in a week when the competition could only get six or something like that. And so I think that's, that's a huge part of what, you know, of the story behind why a plant-based diet seems to be so good for sports, is that the anti-inflammatory compounds that are just naturally part of it without even trying, much less if you actually do try and seek out the foods that, that would maximize that, it just allows you to get back out there faster and, and be back out there 100% or very close to it, rather than

• 1:25:13Speaker 15

  every time you come out, you're a little bit worse so that eventually an injury follows.

• 1:25:28Rich Roll?

  Former lawyer turned CNN legal analyst Mel Robbins absolutely turntables in the RRP community. One of the most widely booked public speakers in the world with followers in the millions, Mel dropped by the studio to promote her new book, The High Five Habit, and basically just ignited a movement of self-belief along the way. Here's a peek into our conversation back on episode 630.

• 1:25:57Speaker 01

  Well, let me tell you my intention for this conversation. That you, listening to us, have this podcast be that crack that lets some light in and becomes a sliding door, that you might just see, oh, wow, maybe if that phone call I'm avoiding, or counting backwards, five, four, three, two, one, or high-fiving myself in the mirror even though I don't think I deserve it, and I think it's stupid, and I'm a failure, and why is this going to help? That you try it.

• 1:26:29Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 1:26:29Speaker 01

  Because I think that you can trace back, again, back to our dots analogy. Any change in trajectory was just a moment. And for me, that moment was when the alarm went off, I just counted backwards, like NASA launches a rocket, five, four, three, two, one, and I stood up. And you know what my first reaction to it was?

• 1:26:51Rich Roll?

  This is fucking stupid.

• 1:26:53Speaker 01

  Correct. Resignation.

• 1:26:55Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 1:26:56Speaker 01

  It was immediately like, okay, so you can get out of bed. So fucking what? You're $800,000 in debt, Mel. How is this going to help? And thankfully, I thought, well, what the hell do I have to lose? Why not just, for one day, anytime, Mel, you know what you should do, but you don't feel like it? Or anytime your emotions start to hijack you? Or anytime you feel afraid, or anxious, or whatever? Why don't you just count backwards and see what happens? And that's what I did.

• 1:27:27Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 1:27:27Speaker 01

  And I haven't looked back.

• 1:27:29Rich Roll?

  I think the power of it... Because it is like, on some level, it really is fucking stupid.

• 1:27:35Speaker 01

  Oh, totally.

• 1:27:35Rich Roll?

  And when I first saw you on Facebook or whatever, before I knew you, and I was like, "Who is this? What is this?"

• 1:27:41Speaker 01

  You can say the word, I don't care. I can take it, break it.

• 1:27:44Rich Roll?

  I was like, "The five, come on." You know, this is a bunch of bullshit, right? Now I've gotten to know you, I adore you, I love you. I think you're brilliant and talented in so many ways. But it took me a minute to get my head around this thing. But I think where I'm at now with it, there's a certain genius in the simplicity and the low-hanging fruit nature of it. Like, I had to pick up a phone and make a very difficult phone call. That phone weighs 1,000 pounds.

• 1:28:13Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:28:13Rich Roll?

  That's a leap, right? But to say, "Well, I can count down from five to one," right? I could do that at least. Like, it's creating permission and a welcome mat and something that's so accessible for anybody, no matter how much pain they're in or whatever circumstances they might find themselves in. So whether it's counting down from five to one or giving yourself a high five in the mirror, it may seem like childish or silly. But in truth, there's a neurochemical thing that takes place that sets in motion a chain of events that allow you to take that initial action. And that then puts you in a position to take further actions.

• 1:28:57Rich Roll?

  And that's where the cascading effect happens and lives change.

• 1:29:00Speaker 01

  Well, you said it earlier, so let me hit you with the science. Because the fact is, I used it in secret for three years to 5-4-3-2-1, pick up that phone that weighed 1,000 pounds. And part of the genius of this is that when you start counting backwards, you've already committed to taking action. So the counting itself moves you from a bias towards thinking toward a bias toward action. And the more you repeat it, the more you break the pattern of thinking and you program in a pattern of taking small actions. It creates agile moves and agile mindset. So that's one thing. The second thing that's crazy cool about this is that the reason why it's so fucking hard to change is because you talk about changing with the prefrontal cortex.

• 1:29:44Speaker 01

  You're conscious when you sit in your therapist's chair or you're listening to me and Rich, and you're using this sort of strategic part of your brain. The second that you're in a situation where you're procrastinating or you're thinking negative thoughts, it's your subconscious that's in charge of you. And so, in order to change, you have to interrupt subconscious patterns. You see, the five-second rule isn't just some dumb counting-backwards thing. It is a form of metacognition that interrupts the patterns stored in your subconscious brain. Counting backwards requires you to focus, which flips on your prefrontal cortex. It gives you a moment of control over what you think and do next. That's the genius of it.

• 1:30:27Speaker 01

  And the reason why I'm so fucking passionate about this is not only because kids can use it and senior citizens can use it. You don't have to have any kind of education or speak any kind of language. It works for anybody that uses it. It's because I am now standing with millions of people that have tried it. And we have pediatricians around the world that are using it to help kids interrupt thoughts that trigger anxiety. Veterans organizations that are using 54321 to help reprogram responses to triggers. We had an entire wing of a Pennsylvania psychiatric inpatient nursing unit show up at the talk show to tell me that of all of the tools that they give people that have

• 1:31:10Speaker 01

  an inpatient commit, the single most positive and effective tool is the five-second rule. Because it is simple, you remember it, and it immediately interrupts the negative and suicidal ideations that torture people. And speaking of suicide, we know of 111 people who have stopped themselves from taking their lives by 54321, asking for help. So, I am here to tell you, I don't give a fuck how stupid you think this is. I want you to try it. I want you to share it with people. Because interrupting the patterns of thought and behavior that are holding you back and pushing yourself to take action or to think something different, it is the only way you are going to change.

• 1:31:54Speaker 01

  And this is a tool that's going to help you bridge that gap.

• 1:32:02Rich Roll?

  I think it's safe to say that there is no one quite like the singular and the bold David Cho. An icon and an artist in many different senses. David is best known for his Vice special Thumbs Up, as well as The Cho Show on FX. But what interests me most about David has nothing to do with his copious talent, his wealth, or his fame. Instead, it's really just all about his honesty. He has this rare, beautiful, and raw vulnerability that is both sweet and endearing. So here's a slice of his wildlife story lifted from episode 626.

• 1:32:45Speaker 04

  So I've been to every type of 12-step meeting. And the ones like, because I'll be in a city where, oh shit, I can't find a gamblers, overeaters, or sex and love addict, or whatever the addiction, codependence, I have-

• 1:33:00Rich Roll?

  You're Helen of Bottom Carter and Fight Club, or Ed Norton.

• 1:33:03Speaker 04

  Exactly. And they're like, oh, there's only AA meeting, or Narcotics Anonymous, or Marijuana Anonymous. So I'll go to that meeting, even though that's not my addiction. And as I listen to thousands of people share their story, I go, oh, it's all gambling. Every addiction is gambling addiction. Every single- when you drink and you get in a car, you're like, I kinda don't care if I make it home or not. Right? That's gambling. When you're like, having sex and you're like, I'm not gonna wear a condom, and you're like, oh, I might have a kid, I might get AIDS, I might- that's gambling. And, and so, to go to my first Gamblers Anonymous meeting after going to 400 AA meetings in Los Angeles,

• 1:33:42Speaker 04

  I was, I was shocked. Because AA meetings and, and drug, NA meetings are kind of like parties in LA, right? Like, it's very social. There are bright lights-

• 1:33:54Rich Roll?

  Yeah, especially in LA.

• 1:33:55Speaker 04

  300 people, 200, you know, there's celebrities, speaker, you know, it's, when you go to a sex addicts meeting, a gamblers addicts meeting, you know, the process ones, there's more shame.

• 1:34:07Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 1:34:07Speaker 04

  So the lights are a little lower.

• 1:34:08Rich Roll?

  It's really fucking dark.

• 1:34:10Speaker 04

  There's a, yeah, it's darker. There's a lot of shares that end with suicide attempts, you know? So I went to a GA meeting and we went in a circle and every single share, it was a small meeting, it was like six people, every single person shared about how they try to kill themselves. And I've said this before, it's the reason why they don't have balconies in Vegas, because if they did, there'd be someone jumping off every day. One out of four gambling addicts kills themselves. So people go, gambling, I don't understand. It's like, so I'm sitting at the meeting and everyone's like telling how much money they've stolen from their family or lied and manipulated people out of so that they could keep gambling, getting that one Lotto scratcher, horse rate, everything, right?

• 1:34:54Speaker 04

  And I'm scared to share because it's going around the circle and it gets to me and I'm like, I just won three million dollars at my last, you know? That's so crazy. And I feel exactly the same as you. You just said you broke into a car to steal a quarter so you can get the next scratcher. I'm sitting here telling you, I have two rotting lobsters in my, in my hotel room, I'm having sex with all these prostitutes and gambling with millions of dollars, winning, handing like hundred dollar bills to everyone I know, and I feel exactly the same as you. So I sat there and I go, how do I feel? How did I feel when I won three million dollars at the, on my last trip, right?

• 1:35:38Speaker 04

  And I'm playing a quarter million dollar hands of blackjack in private, private rooms, you know? And at that point, I felt very little, you know? But like you win three million dollars, it feels good. But not that good, because I was already rich. When I lose three million dollars, and even better yet, when I lose thirty million, then that feels amazing, right? That feels amazing. So I think that was the disconnect with trying to talk to people in my tribe who are addicts and people who aren't addicts, right? And it doesn't matter if you're an addict or you're not an addict, because everyone knows an addict or at least has one in their family. So that's the thing when people go, I don't, but I don't understand, why don't you stop drinking or why don't you stop, why

• 1:36:23Speaker 04

  don't you stop the behavior? It's like, I want to fucking lose, that's why. Do you get it? Do you understand now? I don't want to win. I'm happier when I'm losing. I wanna lose everything.

• 1:36:34Rich Roll?

  But that's even harder for somebody to understand because you're not operating on a rational plane.

• 1:36:39Speaker 04

  Right.

• 1:36:40Rich Roll?

  You know, you're trying to, uh, you know, numb the discomfort of your internal pain while also seeking to feel something that will make you feel alive. And if winning's not gonna do it, losing certainly is going to.

• 1:36:53Speaker 04

  To have-

• 1:36:54Rich Roll?

  It doesn't matter what that feeling is, as long as it's a feeling different from however you feel.

• 1:36:59Speaker 04

  Right. And so, sorry, I got fired up there for a second.

• 1:37:03Rich Roll?

  Go ahead, no.

• 1:37:06Speaker 04

  So that's hard to explain. That's hard to understand. Like, wait. You know, you're trying to wrap your non-addict brain around someone who's doing everything they can to run away from everything, feel numb, feel nothing, feel everything. And so, everything was off. You know, I did, I did like these expensive brain scans to show that I had like frontal, like, like a kind of, um, temporary brain damage from just like complete overstimulation.

• 1:37:35Rich Roll?

  Like, yeah, your dopamine must have been completely fucked up.

• 1:37:40Speaker 04

  And so, doctor's orders, take a year off. And I had to sit in that. And it's like, well...

• 1:37:49Rich Roll?

  When was that?

• 1:37:50Speaker 04

  This was, um, seven years ago.

• 1:37:53Rich Roll?

  So is this like the, the bottom?

• 1:37:56Speaker 04

  I had never hit a bottom. Which, you know, when I asked you about the podcast and you're like, it's good and it, and, and there's the, the negative. So one of the things that I've, I taught myself into being a successful gambler was, it's the golden rule, get out while you're ahead. Right? It's like, how do you win at life? Get out while, it's like, uh, I look at a guy like Conor McGregor. Like, just loved and, you know, just, dude, if he had just stopped, like, three, four fights ago, he would just be a legend forever. And now he's starting to turn into the villain. And I'm like, fuck, if he just got out while he's ahead. And I think of, you know, a lot of people like that. But- You get addicted to the tension or whatever, you know, whatever the thing is.

• 1:38:41Rich Roll?

  If you don't, and if you don't, you know, die at 27 and become that like glorified.

• 1:38:46Speaker 04

  Right, and that's what I was playing for. I was trying to die. I was like, once I hit 30, I was like, shit, it was supposed to happen before that. Now I'm 45. So the positives, if I'm looking at the bright side of gambling, it had taught me, I had taught myself through discipline and hard work, how to get out while I was ahead. So.

• 1:39:06Rich Roll?

  Which is a very non-addict thing.

• 1:39:08Speaker 04

  Oh, right. And I was like, man, I've been to jail multiple times. I've lost, you know, small fortunes. I've, you know, I had this like, I've always had this like kind of, no matter how much I try to hurt myself, there was, this is what it was.

• 1:39:32Speaker 04

  I've always, shit, I might start crying talking about it, but I've always, my entire life, have valued

• 1:39:51Speaker 04

  friends over everything, right?

• 1:39:54Speaker 04

  So I've learned a lot now. I have a lot of tools. I've learned a lot of things in recovery, but I've,

• 1:40:00Speaker 04

  I have like the same friends that I've met when I was in third grade, you know, since I was eight years old. And I would do anything for my friends and I know that they feel the same.

• 1:40:14Speaker 04

  So I knew like girlfriends would come and go. I knew things, but I was like, what is the one thing that I must, because you hear stories, you're like, oh yeah, we used to be friends in college and you know, life happens and then you go, and I was like, no, like things come and go. The one thing that has to like stay constant in my life is friendship. So I nurtured those things. I nurtured, I made sure no matter what happened in my life, I would take trips, I would call and, and when we say love, we usually tend to refer to romantic relationships, but for me, I was like, love, love is for me like man love, me loving another man, telling, you know, calling a guy to tell him how much I love him. And so.

• 1:40:57Speaker 04

  That if I didn't have that, I would be dead right now. If I didn't have, I can tell you three stories right now where if I didn't have a guy in my life that was like, "We're not doing this, Dave," like, I would, I would be dead right now. So, that's the one, and even in all the recovery places, people were like, "Holy fuck, dude, you're getting a letter every day from someone?" Like, you have, we have more friends than anyone. And I said, "That, without that," and I know that's not in the 12 steps or certain things, but like, the most, one of the most important things for, for my life and my recovery is, these friendships are invaluable.

• 1:41:39Rich Roll?

  Spiritual psychologist, historian, philosopher, and the world's only rabbi with a black belt in jujitsu, I cherish my time with Rabbi Mordecai Finley, PhD, back on episode 614. A deep dive into the teachings of moral philosophy, spiritual psychology, skepticism, and Stoicism. This exchange is appointment listening for anyone grappling with life's biggest questions.

• 1:42:10Speaker 16

  There is a definition of self, because when people identify their ego, self, thoughts, feelings, and emotions as the self, I say, you know, there is such a larger self that you're going to discover, and you want to get out of that prison, because you're observing the world through prison bars. And if you think that's all there is, you're going to stay in that cell. But if you are willing to accept the fact that there's actually a world, this, this is not dissimilar to Plato's allegory of the cave. If you actually want to break the shackles and prick out of those prison bars, there's a way.

• 1:42:48Speaker 16

  I say, and the way, the main way you know you're living in that prison is suffering.

• 1:42:52Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 1:42:52Speaker 16

  If you're suffering, or you're causing other people to suffer unnecessarily, there's an indication that your, that your identification of self is insufficient.

• 1:43:02Rich Roll?

  But there's a competing idea that that suffering is serving that individual in some way, right?

• 1:43:08Speaker 16

  Serving the ego self, yeah.

• 1:43:08Rich Roll?

  The attachment to that suffering is playing a role in how this person navigates throughout the world. And when you come to them and say, you gotta let go of this, and there's a, there's a whole larger world available to you. It's, it's, it is, it's terrifying, right?

• 1:43:21Speaker 16

  It can be.

• 1:43:22Rich Roll?

  So unless somebody's in sufficient amount of pain, getting them to transition out of that is an uphill battle.

• 1:43:28Speaker 16

  It, it really is. So oftentimes when a person comes to me, I have several, I call this wisdom counseling. I have several methods depending on the person. But let's say a person comes to me and says, hey, Rabbi, what's this all about? Give me the big picture before I sign up.

• 1:43:44Speaker 16

  So I'll say, all right, I want you to give me a theory of the good in your life, every part of your life. Your romantic connections, children, work, and a relatively precise, as detailed as possible, what you would like, what you would think, what would you feel, what you would say, how others would react to you, as, as precise as possible. I call this a relatively precise vision for your life. If you could live optimally, what would it be like? So it's not that I say you have to, I want them to say, I have to. I say, I'm not telling you to do anything. But if you have a relatively detailed vision that you know yourself would lead to a life, a flourishing life,

• 1:44:26Speaker 16

  the Greek idea of eudaimonia, then the question is, what's the gap? And how do we close the gap? And if you want to close the gap, I'll help you.

• 1:44:36Rich Roll?

  I think it would be good to just end this with a few thoughts for the person who's listening or watching, who is tiptoeing around the idea of what it means to be...

• 1:44:51Rich Roll?

  A spiritual being having a human experience is trying to reckon with finding a little bit more meaning and purpose in their lives. And doesn't have the vernacular or the experience to really do this by themselves. Like, how do you?

• 1:45:11Speaker 16

  Sure, I love the metaphor. It's a very available metaphor. Spiritual being having a human experience? Is that what you said? But to mean that takes a tremendous amount of work. Because you have to go to your spiritual center. And that is the most and only real thing. And getting to that spiritual center, you know, to the place deep in the inner life, where the love of God is flowing in through the fountain, and you're standing right there in the fountain. You're at the deepest part of the soul. And you come out of that, and you have one urge, which is to love other people.

• 1:45:56Speaker 16

  And anything that gets in the way of that, you gotta stop it. And love life. And create beauty. So so many things come from rooting yourself into the deepest part of what I will call the life of spirit, which for me, as a religious person, is the interface between the mind of God and the mind of the human being, or the soul of the universe and the soul of the human being. Now, when you get there, it's not as if you have meaning. Meaning has you. This is one thing I really believe deeply. We like to say, "I have meaning in my purpose in life," but if you really feel it, it arrives at you and it grabs you by the lapels, and it owns you. So I don't have meaning, meaning has me. I don't have purpose, purpose has me.

• 1:46:41Speaker 16

  It's claimed me. You know, going back to the Stoic sense. So when you feel claimed by love, justice, truth, and beauty that propels you, now that we have claimed you, here's what you must do. So what happens is that deepest sense of being claimed by the divine, I'm speaking as a religious person. When God claims you in the garments of love, justice, truth, and beauty, and pushes you into life, well, now you know how to be a human. And what you have to do is you have to be, you have to live interfacing in the world, propelled by the meaning and purpose that has claimed you. For me, in the modalities of love, justice, truth, and beauty, but always go back to that deep experience of the soul.

• 1:47:23Speaker 16

  So it's a constant dialectic between, you know, being present in the world and being present to the soul. Present to the world, being present to the soul. So the person who's hearing this and says, "How do I do that?" You know, I would say, "Think deep things." You know, what is love? What is beauty? What is truth? Just start taking your consciousness and drilling through the block between the mind and the soul and drill down. I remember it happening to me when I thought, "Well, I have these holy words." And knowing that they had soul resonance, and drilling down through that granite block, and when I hit the water, and the water just flowed up, that's what I want to tell people.

• 1:48:06Rich Roll?

  Yeah, that's beautiful. I think there is an epidemic of people feeling a desire for, but a lack of that animating force. And I think for those that lack it or are seeking it, that was beautifully put, this idea of it claiming you. But in order to put yourself in a position to be so claimed, you have to commit to living an examined life and understand that patience is going to be important.

• 1:48:36Speaker 16

  That's the key.

• 1:48:36Rich Roll?

  Because it's not a, it's not a light switch.

• 1:48:38Speaker 16

  The examined life. You have to examine the contents of consciousness and go to the deepest place you can and do it every day. And that, you'll hit the waters. You'll hit the living waters of the soul. Just keep at it.

• 1:48:56Rich Roll?

  All right, we did it, you guys. Our final guest. Who better to close things out than one of my most popular guests to date, neuroscientist Matthew Walker? One of the world's leading authorities on the science of sleeping. Our conversation covered everything you need and truly ever wanted to know about, you guessed it, sleep. All in all, this is life-altering listening that will completely reshape your relationship with slumber. Here's a powerful clip from episode 600.

• 1:49:30Rich Roll?

  Sleep really is right up there with outer space and the depths of the ocean in terms of its mysteries and the idea that we're just beginning to learn what's actually going on. And it's not a matter of, I'm sure you get this question all the time, like, well, what's more important, REM sleep or non-REM sleep? Or what's the significance of being deprived of one over the other? But it's really the interplay of all of these things. And the more complex you realize it to be, it becomes impossible to consider that it's not crucial to all facets of human health.

• 1:50:06Speaker 17

  That's right. And when we go back to that evolutionary story of how detrimental sleep is as a state, and it is, let's face it. If there were any stage of sleep that were not important, that Mother Nature could have come in and excised, and had you, doing all of these benefits of wakefulness that you described, I'm quite sure she would have. And what we've learned is that every stage of sleep is important. Different stages of sleep perform different functions for the brain and body at different times of night. And so, yeah, I'll often get that question. People will say, how can I get more deep sleep? Or how can I get more REM sleep? And you know, I often say, well, why do you want more of that?

• 1:50:51Speaker 17

  And they say, well, isn't that the good stuff? And they're both absolutely critical. Now, I could make a scientific argument that REM sleep could be a little bit more important from a simple mortality state. Because there were studies done back in the 1980s with rats and they've actually never been replicated again. I found them difficult to read. I do research in humans, I don't do animal research. And I think they won't be replicated for good reason. What they wanted to do is see if a lack of sleep is deathly, is a lack of sleep fatal? And they had three different flavors of the experiment. In the first, they took rats and they just deprived them of sleep, you know, night and

• 1:51:36Speaker 17

  day after day, night and day after day. And what they found is that those rats died within about 20 days. So in other words, rats will die as quickly from a lack of food as they will from a lack of sleep. That's how fundamental it is. Then the two additional flavors of the experiment, they selectively deprived them of either just rapid eye movement sleep, so that they could get just non-REM, or they did the opposite. They just deprived them of non-REM and gave them REM. And firstly, both of those were fatal. But what was interesting is that the rats died from REM sleep deprivation within about 30 to 40 days.

• 1:52:17Speaker 17

  And they died from deep non-REM sleep deprivation within about 50 or 60 days. So if we want to sort of do a Coke Pepsi challenge between sort of, you know, non-REM and REM, which one wins out in the mortality battle? It seems to be REM sleep. And to me, that's interesting too. If you'd asked me where I would place my bets, I would have said non-REM. The reason is because non-REM came first. If you look during the sort of the time course of evolution of cross phylogeny, non-REM sleep was the first sleep to emerge. And it was only when we went from reptiles, amphibians and fish, and then there was that

• 1:52:59Speaker 17

  bifurcation to birds and then mammals, did the evolution of REM sleep emerge. So REM sleep is the new kid on the evolutionary block. And furthermore, REM sleep evolved twice independently in birds and mammals, which I find, you know, is fascinating too. So to come back to your point, I'm sorry, I'm drifting, but all stages of sleep are critical. No one stage of sleep you can do without, without suffering detriment.

• 1:53:27Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 1:53:28Speaker 17

  I think if I were to have something, a single sentence, I would say that sleep is the single most effective thing that we can do each day to reset the health of our brain and our body.

• 1:53:39Rich Roll?

  Mm hmm. That would be a beautiful place to end this, but I just realized there's an important thing we also didn't talk about that I would like you to touch on quickly.

• 1:53:48Speaker 17

  Yeah, of course.

• 1:53:49Rich Roll?

  Which is, you talked at the, at the outset about what happens when you get a flu shot and you're sleep deprived. We're still in the midst of this pandemic. We're slowly emerging out of it, but can you talk a little bit about what you've learned about sleep, COVID, immunity, and how people should be kind of thinking about their relationship with the virus?

• 1:54:11Speaker 17

  Yeah, so let me, I'll speak about sleep and immunity sort of more generally and then come on to sleep and COVID, because sleep has changed in at least four different ways because of COVID. Quantity, quality, timing, and dreaming. So I'll try to mentally put those stickies up on my cerebral wall so I come back to them. But in terms of sleep and immunity, there is a very intimate association between your sleep health and your immune health. Firstly, what we know is that individuals who report sleeping less than seven hours a night are almost three times more likely to become infected by the rhinovirus, which is the common cold.

• 1:54:52Speaker 17

  Second, we know from a prospective study in, I think it was well over 30,000 women, women sleeping five hours or less a night are more than 60% more likely to develop pneumonia across a five-year period, which of course is a critical part of the COVID mortality equation.

• 1:55:11Speaker 17

  We've also mentioned that statistic about if you're not getting sleep in the week before you get your flu shot, you can't produce the normal antibody response. Do we know that that's the case for COVID yet? No, we don't, but we're looking at that. We also know it's the case for hepatitis A, hepatitis B vaccination too. So I think there's an interesting case to be made that it could make a difference. We also know that, just as we mentioned before, just one night of short sleep, you know, just four hours, will drop those critical anti-cancer fighting cells, natural killer cells, by 70%. If that's true, then what is sleep doing for our emotional health? And sleep provides us two different benefits. Firstly, it's during sleep, and particularly during deep sleep, where the body will be

• 1:55:56Speaker 17

  stimulated to produce many more of those critical immune factors. Even better, sleep will actually increase the sensitivity and the receptivity of your body to those increased immune factors. So you wake up the next morning as a more robust immune individual. Sleep will restock the weaponry in your immune arsenal. So on that basis, I think sleep has become very relevant in this pandemic.

• 1:56:35Rich Roll?

  I really hope you enjoyed this reflection in the rearview and found these two episodes uplifting and inspiring. Thank you for watching, thank you for listening, and of course, I appreciate all the love and all the support. The podcast has just been an absolutely amazing journey, and I'm just so grateful that you're on it with me, and I look forward to growing and learning together in the new year ahead. If you'd like to support the show, the easiest and most impactful thing you can do is to simply subscribe to it on Apple Podcasts, on Spotify, and on YouTube. Sharing the show or your favorite episode with friends or on social media is of course always appreciated. And finally, for podcast updates, special offers on books, the meal planner, and other

• 1:57:16Rich Roll?

  subjects, you can subscribe to our newsletter, which you can find on the footer of any page on richroll.com. Today's show was produced and engineered by Jason Camiolo. The video edition of the podcast was created by Dan Drake and Blake Curtis. Portraits, courtesy of Davy Greenberg and Grayson Wilder. Graphic elements are by Daniel Solis. And our theme music was created by Tyler Pyatt, Trapper Pyatt, and Harry Mathis. I appreciate the love. I appreciate the support. Thanks for listening. Thanks for watching. See you back here soon. Peace. Plants. Namaste.