Pod Insights 10% Happier with Dan Harris Rich Roll On: How To Pursue Health Without Becoming Unhealthy; How To Establish Motivation & Momentum; And Why People Hate Vegans About this episode Simple and realistic strategies from an ultra-endurance athlete.
Rich Roll https://www.richroll.com/ is a vegan ultra-endurance athlete and full-time wellness & plant-based nutrition advocate, podcast host, public speaker, and inspiration to people worldwide as a transformative example of courageous and healthy living.
This episode is part of our ongoing Get Fit Sanely Series.
In this episode we talk about:
How to harness the power of momentum The importance of intrinsic motivation What being "in shape" actually means Practical tips for people who aren't ultra-endurance athletes Why so many people hate vegans and why you should eat more plants anyway Unhealthy obsessions with being healthy and the dangers of orthorexia Addiction, recovery, and healing childhood wounds What Rich's exercise regime looks like now Psychedelics and non-duality And much more
Paid subscribers of DanHarris.com will have exclusive access to a set of all-new guided meditations, led by friend of the show Cara Lai https://www.caralai.org/#/, customized to accompany each episode of the Get Fit Sanely series. We're super excited to offer a way to help you put the ideas from the episodes into practice. Learn all about it here. https://www.danharris.com/p/a-month-of-guided-meditationsjust
Related Episodes:
The Anti-Diet | Evelyn Tribole https://www.danharris.com/p/the-anti-diet-evelyn-tribole-210?utm_source=publication-search Get Fit Sanely: the podcast playlist https://www.danharris.com/p/get-fit-sanely-0f2
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Subscribe to our YouTube Channel https://bit.ly/3FybRzD
Additional Resources:
The Rich Roll Podcast https://www.richroll.com/all-episodes/ Voicing Change Media https://www.voicingchange.media/#home Links to Rich's books https://www.richroll.com/books/
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Transcript 16,525 words · 4 speakers
Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.
0:04 Dan Harris? It's the 10% Happier Podcast. I'm Dan Harris.
0:19 Dan Harris? Hello, everybody. How we doing? I don't use the word inspiring a lot largely because I think that word has been overused, ground down into near meaninglessness through rote repetition. But I genuinely do find my guest today inspiring. Rich Roll is a guy who found himself at midlife overweight, unhealthy, and unhappy in his legal career. He then took a huge risk and walked away from it all and became an ultra endurance athlete. To be very clear, right from the jump here, I am not planning on becoming an ultra endurance athlete. I'm not recommending you become one. But I do love the idea of pushing my body for as long as I have it. And the fact that Rich was able to achieve so much is hugely motivating for me, especially
1:02 Dan Harris? at age 53. What makes me like Rich even more is that even though he's taken fitness to some pretty serious extremes, he has lots of thoughts and strategies for how any of us at any age and with whatever goals can get ourselves moving. And unlike many fitness influencers, Rich is actually very thoughtful about the pitfalls of what psychologists call orthorexia, the unhealthy obsession with being healthy. In this conversation, Rich and I talk about how to harness the power of momentum and the importance of intrinsic motivation, what being quote unquote "in shape" means, who exactly sets the standards for what the shape should be, and the toxic effects of trying
1:45 Dan Harris? to look a certain way, why so many people hate vegans, and why you should eat more plants anyway, Rich's experiences with addiction, recovery, and healing from childhood wounds. And toward the end of the conversation, we delve into more esoteric subjects, including psychedelics and non-duality.
2:05 Dan Harris? Just a few things to say before we dive in here. First, we recorded this at Rich's studio in Los Angeles, where he records his own show, The Rich Roll Podcast. Big thanks to Rich and his team for letting us do that. His team is awesome, by the way. Second, this episode is part of our month-long Get Fit Sanely series, where we talk about how to take care of your body without losing your mind. And third, every episode this month comes with a companion guided meditation from my friend, the great Dharma teacher, Cara Lai. Today's meditation is all about resilience and endurance, staying centered when things get physically or emotionally challenging. These meditations are only for paying subscribers, so if you're not signed up, head over to danharris.com to make that happen.
2:48 Dan Harris? We'll get started with Rich Roll right after this. If you care about supporting independent media, and if you care about being a node of sanity in an insane world, there are a few quick, easy, and free ways that you can support me and my team, which I would be really grateful for. One way to do it is to sign up for my newsletter, which comes out on Monday mornings. It's a little dose of sanity in your inbox at the beginning of a busy week. The second way to do it is to follow and subscribe to the show wherever you're listening or watching right now. That really helps. Three, share your favorite episode with a friend. This is a great and low-stakes way to connect with somebody in your orbit, and not for nothing, it also helps us grow. And all of these things take about 30 seconds, and they really do help.
3:33 Dan Harris? You will be supporting me and my team and our mission, and I, as I said, would be immensely grateful. You can find everything we do at danharris.com. It's all right there. Thank you. I mean that seriously. We'll be right back with more show. If you care about supporting independent media, and if you care about being a node of sanity in an insane world, there are a few quick, easy, and free ways that you can support me and my team, which I would be really grateful for. One way to do it is to sign up for my newsletter, which comes out on Monday mornings. It's a little dose of sanity in your inbox at the beginning of a busy week. The second way to do it is to follow and subscribe to the show wherever you're listening or watching.
4:14 Dan Harris? Watching right now, that really helps. Three, share your favorite episode with a friend. This is a great and low stakes way to connect with somebody in your orbit. And not for nothing, it also helps us grow. And all of these things take about 30 seconds and they really do help. You will be supporting me and my team and our mission. And I, as I said, would be immensely grateful. You can find everything we do at danharris.com. It's all right there. Thank you. I mean that seriously. We'll be right back with more show. Rich Roll, welcome back to the show.
4:45 Speaker 01 I'm so happy to be here.
4:47 Dan Harris? I'm happy to have you here.
4:48 Speaker 01 In my studio.
4:52 Speaker 01 I'm sitting in my same chair. The tables have been turned.
4:55 Dan Harris? Thank you for letting us use your studio.
4:57 Speaker 01 I'm delighted.
4:58 Dan Harris? I have massive studio envy. I record in a closet in my house and you have this awesome room with this cool staff. You're doing it right.
5:08 Speaker 01 It is cool and I'm supported by an amazing team that allows me to focus on what I do. And they take care of the rest. I'm learning from your enterprise where I could make some improvements there. But I've been doing this for a long time. This is no overnight success, as you know. Like I've been doing this for 12 years and so it's just been real incremental growth year after year. And so I pinch myself that we get to have this space to do this thing. But also we earned it and I feel really proud of it as well.
5:40 Dan Harris? Yeah, you did earn it. I was doing an interview for your show right before this. Just to step back for a second, a little behind the scenes for my listeners. This all started because I was coming to LA to do some speeches. And I texted Rich and I said, well, you have lunch with me because I want to learn about your business. Cause I'm starting a new business and you were like, yeah, I'd be happy to. But maybe you would come and be on my podcast. And I was like, oh, I want you on my podcast. So now I've like.
6:07 Speaker 01 We're going to spend the entire day together.
6:08 Dan Harris? We are spending the whole day together, which is great. And I was saying when you interviewed me for your show, that I have this visual of the first time. Actually, it was the second time we met, but you were taking the escalator. Up into my office at ABC News and you were carrying your own audio recording equipment. This was 2014 and you interviewed me in my office and podcasts were not that big of a thing at the time. And now, look what it's grown into. It's pretty amazing.
6:38 Speaker 01 Yeah. I spent many years as a traveling salesman, podcaster, knocking on doors, begging people to come on the show. As we discussed earlier on my show, at the time, I was so excited to meet you. Like, this was a really big get and I was absolutely delighted to be inside the walls of ABC. I was like, wow, I really made it. You know, as I'm carrying my briefcase, this one man show at the time.
7:04 Dan Harris? Yeah, well, and now there are many people at ABC News trying to figure out how to get into podcasting and creating and it's really wild.
7:12 Speaker 01 It's wild. Like, I always knew that it was a powerful medium that was underappreciated, but I could have never imagined that it would become the kind of prominent form of content that it has become, especially in like the last, even like just year. It's crazy.
7:31 Dan Harris? The last time you were on my show, you told your kind of origin story, but it's been a while. So can you just retell it? Because again, within the, the series is called Get Fit Sanely, you kind of got fit in a rather extreme way, but you learned a lot about how the rest of us can get fit and are within the course of our daily lives. But can you just tell what happened at age 40 to you?
7:53 Speaker 01 Yeah, sure. So, leading up to 40, I had been an athlete in college. I swam for Stanford. After that, went to law school and was a lawyer and kind of during that period of time was, you know, kind of overindulging and engaging with my inner alcoholic and somehow managed to squeak through law school and get a job at a law firm. But basically, from age, I don't know, 24 to 31, was kind of a whole blackout decade where I was just sort of getting by. And in a career that I didn't really feel like I ever consciously chose. Looking back on it now, like, I was trying to do the safe thing, trying to do the responsible thing, but didn't really have any kind of...
8:38 Speaker 01 Relationship with myself where I thought, what do I want to do? Like, what's important to me? What are my values and what am I here to express? I ended up getting sober at 31 and continued as a lawyer for a number of years and made sobriety my number one priority and built this incredible foundation and really rebuilt my life from the ground up. But during that period of time, I kind of parlayed that alcoholic tendency into lifestyle habits and dietary habits. So, working the crazy law firm, 60 to 80 hour weeks and basically just subsisting on fast food and not exercising, not looking after myself. By the time I was 40, I wasn't like morbidly obese or anything, but I was like 50 pounds
9:21 Speaker 01 overweight and just sluggish, semi-depressed and had an incident where I was walking up the stairs to my bedroom and, you know, had to like take a break, like pause, like I was winded and out of breath. And this didn't really fit with this idea I had in my mind that I was still a Stanford swimmer. Tightness in my chest, heart disease runs in my family. And it was a moment of clarity, not unlike the day that I finally decided this is the day I'm going to get sober and made a decision in that moment, like, I can't live this way anymore. You know, the backdrop was I was also having this existential crisis about like what I was doing with my life. On the outside, everything looked fine, but I was really unhappy with what I was doing professionally and was suffering from like a crisis of meaning in my life.
10:06 Speaker 01 And this moment of clarity led to first redefining my relationship with food and I went on a whole adventure with that and sort of cleaned all that up and revitalized, had this enthusiasm for moving my body again and perhaps some unfinished business as an athlete that led me into the world of ultra endurance sports. And in my mid 40s, I performed well and acquitted myself in this kind of emerging, you know, subculture of endurance, which got a bunch of media attention. Like, how is this mid 40 something lawyer who is eating a plant-based diet, no animal products, like performing so well in these multi-day, double Ironman, like crazy races?
10:48 Speaker 01 And that media attention led to the opportunity for me to write a memoir about this called Finding Ultra that came out 12 years ago. And in the wake of that, book coming out, starting the podcast that I still host today.
11:02 Dan Harris? Is it true that you, two years before your first Ultra, is it Ultraman, Ironman?
11:09 Speaker 01 Yeah, so the main race that I did was a race called Ultraman, which is a double Ironman, three day race where you circumnavigate the big island of Hawaii.
11:18 Dan Harris? Okay, get fit insanely. Two years before your first Ultraman, you didn't even own a bike?
11:26 Speaker 01 That's true.
11:27 Dan Harris? You just went from winded on the stairs to hardcore in a pretty rapid amount of time.
11:36 Speaker 01 Yeah, I mean, I think it's easy to frame it like it just happened very suddenly, but I think it's important, especially if we're going to have a conversation around habit change and how you kind of like level up your, your fitness routines and your dietary routines and your just wellbeing routines. I did have this incredible background in swimming. Like I swam at a very high level from a very early age through college, like all through high school. I got up at 4:45 every morning, trained for an hour and a half, went to school, went back to the pool after school, trained for two hours, went home, did my homework, was in bed by nine o'clock. Like that was my high school experience. So I had this foundation,
12:19 Speaker 01 this like robust foundation of endurance that was sort of latent that doesn't really go away. And on top of that, I knew how to push my body. Like I had a PhD in that throughout my life. So when I made this decision to step back into this world, it was very gradual at first. I didn't have an aspiration of becoming a competitive athlete again. I honestly, for vanity reasons, like I was fat. I didn't want to be fat. I wanted to feel good in my body. And I started jogging occasionally and I went to the pool and I was seeing really rapid results and my wife got me a bike for my birthday. You know, I was like, This middle aged guy who starts to think, well, a triathlon would be cool.
13:01 Speaker 01 It's like a very like midlife crisis kind of thing, right? But I'm extreme to a fault. That's in part how I'm wired and that's part of, you know, what drove my alcoholism. But I was able to kind of leverage that proneness towards extremism to apply it in this world of ultra endurance. And really the question was, what am I capable of? Like, I never reached my peak as an athlete in college because of my drinking. I felt like I had more to say there. And here was this template where I could apply that. And yes, it was two years, but those two years were incredibly rigorous and focused.
13:40 Speaker 01 Where I was started slow, but then for the second year of that, I had periods where I was training like 25 hours a week. So it's not snap my fingers and I had some great talent. And people who think like, oh, well, you're just genetically wired for this, or you have some predisposition or some innate gift for this. Like, I'm always quick to disabuse people of that. Like, I worked really hard for that. And I was never the most gifted swimmer. I'm certainly not gifted on the bike or on the run. Like, I just know how to train really hard and effectively. And so I feel like I earned those results through toil and suffering. Like, that's my language.
14:22 Dan Harris? That's your language. That's interesting. I'll come back to that. How did you find time to train like this? I might be doing the math wrong, but like, I think you had a bunch of kids too, and a busy job as a lawyer. So how did you fit all of this in?
14:37 Speaker 01 It was very trying and difficult for a number of reasons. On the lawyer tip, I had already left like big corporate law firm life and had a small boutique practice. They took on a couple of different forms over a period of time. One, I had two partners for a while and then I was on my own. And then I had a partnership with somebody else. But I did have some control over my schedule and my time because I wasn't working for anybody anymore. But I also wasn't making very much money. You know, we were struggling financially. But what made it work, honestly, Dan, was that I had the full support of my wife because she saw what I was going through. My wife is a deeply devotional,
15:21 Speaker 01 spiritually committed person, and she was able to like identify this kind of existential angst that I was experiencing and saw something in what I was doing in the endurance space that was helping me. And when I look back on it now, like it looks like this physical pursuit, but it was really a spiritual journey that I needed to go on. And all of that time on the bike or on the trails alone, most of the time, was the space that I needed to try to make sense of like who I was and who I wanted to be. Although I wouldn't characterize that as quote unquote,
16:01 Speaker 01 like formal meditation, there was an active meditation aspect to it. Like when your heart rate is elevated and you're just paying attention to the breath and you're alone and it's just you on the bike and eight hours or whatever, there's a lot of space there to ask yourself those questions and grapple with the answers. And she was able to see what I couldn't, that like this was ultimately going to lead me to a better place and was willing to go on that journey with me, despite the fact that it was incredibly challenging for all of us and hard for the kids too, honestly. I put the family through a lot and there were plenty of moments where I was like,
16:44 Speaker 01 this is insane. And we had friends who were like Julie's friends, like, what is he doing? What is happening here? This doesn't make any sense. And it didn't make any sense, other than the fact that in my intuition, in my like heart mind, I was like, this is what I have to do. And when I had those moments of doubt where I was like, this is insane, I'm just going to go to a law firm job. Julie's like, no, we're in this. You're going to find your answers on the other side of this. And it took a long time, but what those words proved to be true.
17:16 Dan Harris? How would you describe what the answers were?
17:20 Speaker 01 I guess in the most general way, I would say.
17:25 Speaker 01 I had to figure out how to live in a way that was authentic to myself. And that meant making choices about like, not only who I wanted to be, but what am I investing my time in? And there was something about physical movement that just felt like this is who I am. It makes no sense. Like, how am I going to pay bills? Or like, it doesn't make any sense at all. But through that commitment to trying to get to what was authentic was the unlock that created the foundation for everything that followed.
18:01 Dan Harris? That being writing a book, starting a podcast, becoming a speaker.
18:06 Speaker 01 I mean, it wasn't like a whiteboarded thing. I was like, I'm gonna do this and then this is gonna happen. Like, I had, you know, we were walking a tightrope the whole time and I was waiting for the phone to ring. And, you know, there were lots of navel gazing moments of, what are we doing?
18:20 Dan Harris? I mean, there's some crossover. I didn't take as many risks, but when I was writing 10% Happier back in 2009 through 2014, we didn't have any kids at the time, but it was this massive side hustle, writing this book over five years and about meditation, which was not something that anybody, this was not a whiteboarded mission to pick up on your language. And while holding down this incredibly demanding job at ABC News, and I had a ton of support from my wife, and I think we kind of just both had this sense of like, there's something here. We don't know what it is. Let's just follow it.
19:02 Speaker 01 You know, when your heart has a certain yearning and you honor it, my experience is that ultimately you will be guided. And you don't get to know what that looks like. And it's never going to be on a certain type of schedule that you have in your mind. But I think when you are in a place of surrender to that, that's when these magical gifts that you couldn't possibly whiteboard are allowed to like blossom and flourish. And so you have to be in the humble surrender of it and get comfortable with not knowing. And I think so many people. You know, they have a dream or they have an ambition or they want to express something, but they want to know what it's going to look like and they get paralyzed because well,
19:46 Speaker 01 if I do this, then this is going to happen. And what if that happens? And you know, if I do this, it has to go this way. And you hold on to it so tightly that you never like get out of the gate because you're resistant to that surrender piece.
19:59 Dan Harris? Yep. I want to come back to you've talked publicly about, and this is your phrase, trusting the whispers or intuition and how one can get more in touch with that. But let's just stay on the fitness tip for a minute. You talked about this pretty extreme, totally extreme fitness kick that you went on in your early to mid 40s. And you used the phrase earlier that toil and suffering is my language. I can imagine people listening to this thinking, oh, this is an incredible story. Good for him. But like, there's nothing for me as a person who struggles to like, get to the gym every once in a while to learn here. And yet I think there is. So I'm curious, like, what is scalable from your story, applicable from
20:42 Dan Harris? your story to the lives of the average person who may have an ambivalent relationship to exercise?
20:48 Speaker 01 Maybe two things. I mean, first of all, I just had Arthur Brooks on the show and he said something along the lines of never squander your suffering, like suffering will find you or pain will find you, right? And rather than resist it, like, how can you leverage that for growth or look at it as an opportunity as opposed to something you're trying to avoid? I happen to be somebody who's well-trained in the vernacular of suffering and learned early and often that you can achieve goals when you're kind of willing to do a little bit more than everybody else. And that has served me well, but it's also entrenched me in this idea of self-will, right? That has made the surrender process even a little bit more difficult. We were talking earlier about like, that idea, like, if you're not clenching,
21:33 Speaker 01 you know, like, you're not working hard enough. And what does it feel like to be in a state of ease and allowing? And these are the tensions that I still like, have to deal with all the time. So back to your question, the first thing is, How can you turn pain into an opportunity? And the second part is just understanding you are far more capable than you probably allow yourself to believe and that all of us are dancing or tiptoeing on top of these reservoirs of potential that we're completely unaware of. And for me to be able to unleash these performances in my 40s, as somebody who grew up thinking like, well, once you're 25 or whatever, forget about anything athletic, I proved to myself
22:16 Speaker 01 that I was capable in a way that I couldn't have imagined. And that is an esteemable act on behalf of myself that continues to pay dividends because it teaches me that there must be other areas of my life where there's hidden potential. And if I could grow and change in midlife in such a drastic and dramatic way, that there is growth that awaits in other areas. And I think just getting people, shaking them up out of their routines of the daily life and the pressures that kind of we all have to just get through the day, to take a moment to stop and like attune your attention to your life, what's working, what's not,
22:59 Speaker 01 and understand that change is in your midst. And that doesn't mean that it's going to be easy. It's always a level of willingness and commitment to make those changes possible. But I believe that everybody has latent potential, that most of us live our lives kind of declining to tap into.
23:19 Dan Harris? So two things there. One, don't waste your suffering. Like if you're having a moment on the stairs where you're short of breath and you're too young for that, there's an opportunity there. And by the way, it might not be that exact thing, but there's something in your life that you can use to wake up. Don't let those opportunities pass by. And then the other thing is what your story illustrates, you say, and I tend to agree, is that we're all capable of more than we might think we're capable of.
23:46 Speaker 01 Sure. I mean, I got sober at 31 because I hit a bottom and I was suffering enough to do something different. And I think we change when the pain of our circumstances exceeds the fear of doing something different. And that's a calculus that is going to be different for every single person. But in my experience, if you're living your life out of alignment, the universe will like, give you a little knock to let you know, like, hey, something's not right here. And that knock will be gentle. But if you ignore it, it'll knock again a little bit louder and it will continue to knock until that knock is loud enough to get your attention. And so you don't
24:28 Speaker 01 have to hit bottom or like go into some extreme suffering to make a change. But if you would tune your attention to those knocks and you can see them and hear them and heed them when they're knocking lightly, you're in a place to be able to make those changes short of creating too much chaos in your life.
24:48 Dan Harris? Well said. Let me just come back to exercising on a very practical tip here for people listening who are never going to be extreme athletes, who are, as I said before, struggling to get themselves to the gym or to do any type of movement. What recommendations do you have for people like that? Because we all know, exercise is so important for our brain health, for the rest of our body, for our psychology, and yet so many of us aren't doing it.
25:15 Speaker 01 Yeah, I mean, there's a lot in there. First, it begins with your perspective or your frame on exercise, because I think a lot of people who kind of struggle with this have a story. And that story is, I'm not an athlete, or I hate exercising, or this is a burden, or it's too self-indulgent, or I don't have time. So I think the first thing is really... Getting an objective perspective on what that story is and understanding that you have the agency to tell a different story. And meditation is very effective for that and journaling. And the second thing is, you know, whether you call it small wins or atomic habits, start small. Think of something you actually enjoy doing and make that barrier just easily achievable.
26:00 Speaker 01 Like if it's in the context of going to the gym, you're going to go to the gym and you're going to literally go for 10 minutes and you're going to do one thing and you're going to leave. Just make it so easy that it doesn't feel hard or burdensome or time consuming. I think that's huge and you can begin to compound that. But these things don't happen overnight. The idea is to create something that's sustainable over time. And so I think little minute chunks is the way to approach it. You know, some people are in enough suffering, they're going to change everything overnight. Most people aren't wired that way.
26:35 Dan Harris? Except for you.
26:36 Speaker 01 Yeah. I'm like, the line is in the sand, I'm never going back. I understand well enough that most people aren't like that. But, you know, I find myself with things that I struggle with and I find that the little, little nuggets are really the way to go. And then something magical happens. Like when you string enough of those little small wins together, you create a little momentum. And I think there's something magical about momentum. It is its own like sustaining energy. To keep it in the gym context, if you've been going to the gym every day for 30 days, it's really easy to go on day 31. Something happens, you have to go out of town, there's a wedding or a business trip, you miss a couple of days and then suddenly it's like really hard to get back.
27:19 Speaker 01 So when you build momentum, protecting that momentum, I think is really key because it just has this ability to like move you forward. And whatever goal you're seeking, whether it's fitness, nutrition, meditation, whatever, it's really about consistency. That doesn't really track on social media. People like to share their gigantic massive workouts or their big wins, but change takes place in the tiny micro actions taken anonymously, rigorously, and consistently. And so it's really about the showing up piece. And even if it's just doing the smallest amount, when you do that consistently, you create the momentum,
28:00 Speaker 01 it builds upon itself. And that's how like real meaningful sustaining change occurs.
28:08 Dan Harris? That's well said. The other piece of advice, this is something I learned from you and I'm going to state it back to you, is finding a type of movement that you actually enjoy. Because if you're going to force yourself onto the rowing machine and you hate the rowing machine, good luck.
28:24 Speaker 01 Yeah. I mean, maybe you'll fall in love with it if you start to get good at it, but movement, fitness, all of these things, think more expansively about it. They should be things that we enjoy, things that we look forward to. So whether it's riding horses or mountain bikes or going on a walk, it doesn't have to fit into somebody else's definition of what they think a fitness routine is.
28:49 Dan Harris? So as an extreme athlete yourself, you don't think all of us need to be extreme?
28:54 Speaker 01 No, absolutely not. If anything, because I am this extreme person, like, and now a public facing person, I went and did these really extreme things and I did it on a totally plant-based diet and I did it as a sober person. Like, I'll dance out on these extremes, not because I think people should copy me, but to say, if I can go this far, can you meet me halfway? Or maybe it helps other people reframe their own sense of possibility in their life.
29:24 Dan Harris? You were talking before about the power of momentum, 10 minutes in the gym, five days a week, you start creating a streak and you want to keep that streak going. Also, something that happens, and I'd love to hear you talk about it if you agree, is that at some point you switch over from extrinsic motivation
29:42 Dan Harris? Rich Roll and Dan Harris telling you what the science says around the benefits of exercise to intrinsic motivation of like, oh yeah, I'm seeing the benefits of exercise ripple out into so many aspects of my life. Does that make sense to you? And what do you think those ripple effects might be in an individual life?
30:00 Speaker 01 Yeah, I mean, maybe you begin this because your spouse is like, you're fat, you need to get healthy and you're trying to get somebody off your back. That would be an extrinsic motivator. You're not really doing it for yourself, but you kind of know you need to do it even if you don't want to. So you're not intrinsically motivated. You begin to do it. First, you need to find some intrinsic motivation, but maybe you can't initially and you're doing it for other reasons. Maybe you're going to an AA meeting because you got a DUI and your lawyer told you, go to meetings so we can tell the judge, even though you're not interested in being sober, right? But at some point, something locks in and you realize you're performing an esteemable act on behalf of yourself. That is an act of self compassion
30:43 Speaker 01 and self love. And incrementally, over time, you start to see results. Maybe you feel a little bit better in your body. Maybe you notice you've lost a little bit of weight and that feels good. And it allows you to have a little bit more self-love. That is empowering. And when you feel that sense of esteem, suddenly you have this emotional connection to your own well-being that you didn't have prior. And that does spill out into the rest of your life. Hey, like, I'm starting to feel better. Maybe I should get my blood work done. Maybe I should sign up for some adventure. Or maybe I should call that friend that I know I should call. Like, it's not relegated to like, one bucket. It
31:28 Speaker 01 tends to permeate every aspect of your life. And then suddenly, you're living a better life across the board in all these different ways when all you really wanted to do was lose 10 pounds or maybe not feel so lethargic throughout the day.
31:47 Dan Harris? Coming up, Rich talks about what being in shape, quote unquote, actually means. For example, like, who decides what the ideal shape is? And the toxic effect of trying to look a certain way. We'll talk about what Rich's exercise regime looks like right now. And we'll talk about plant-based diets, the role of flexibility, and why so many people hate vegans.
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34:57 Dan Harris? The issue of weight has come up a couple of times in this conversation, and this is something, to me, in terms of a motivation for exercise, I have struggled with this mightily. And I've talked about it on the show before, so people who've heard me say it before, I apologize. But I, in my mid 30s, got very fit and had like, visible abs and all that other bullshit. And it would, as I've often joked, take an archaeological dig to find those again.
35:27 Speaker 01 I was gonna, I was gonna ask for photos. Like, do we have evidence of this?
35:31 Dan Harris? Yes, we do. There's, I found this video that was taken like in a pre iPhone time, like on a flip phone of me in my underwear, playing with new cats that my wife and I got. And I was like, I had a laser pointer and like, my wife took this video and like, you can see that like, I have abs. And that was 20 years ago, or something like that. And I feel in me a motivation, especially since you and I both work in front of the camera, and I, you know, was, came up as a news anchor, I feel in me sometimes this motivation to achieve a certain shape or to lose weight. But then also, I've been kind of red pilled on that, too. Like, when people talk about being quote unquote, "in shape," what shape
36:16 Dan Harris? are we talking about? And who sets the aesthetic standards for that? And so, yeah, I'm just curious, where's your mind around this? Because I do worry about the really toxic effect, especially on young girls, of trying to look a certain way and having that be the motivation for exercise.
36:37 Speaker 01 Yeah, I get that. I'm glad that you identified that. The way I think about it is this. Yes, we have a, as a culture, very toxic perspective on what we consider healthy and these impossible to achieve standards for women, young girls, of course, but you know, for men, too. I think there's a lot of men who suffer quietly because it's not as permissive to kind of talk about men who have eating disorders or have body shame issues, et cetera. It's important to also not go too far into the body positivity mindset
37:20 Speaker 01 where being obese is okay, especially in a culture in which we are suffering exponentially as a result of chronic lifestyle ailments, many of which are exacerbated or rooted in obesity. So when I say losing weight, anybody who's obese should really pay attention to that and try to address it because there's a whole domino effect or downstream consequences of obesity that lead to poor health outcomes that are going to be impairing your life in a number of ways. That's very different from you got a couple of pounds on you and you feel like you don't measure up. Like, I think that's a different conversation. And
38:03 Speaker 01 I think everybody has their own relationship to their own body. Like, how can you accept where you're at while also understanding that there might be better ways to be more well in mind, body, and spirit without aiming your focus on like unattainable low body fat percentage?
38:23 Dan Harris? Yeah. I think one of the areas where, and I'm not an expert in this at all, but the one of the areas where there can be some room for debate is around like how are you defining obese? Because there are large bodied people who might call themselves fat, but like in a kind of empowering way, who if you measure their underlying health, blood pressure, resting heart rate, cholesterol, like are healthy and they're active and they're moving their bodies, they're just, their shape is larger.
38:51 Speaker 01 Yeah. There's a difference between people who Are overweight because of visceral body fat versus people who are overweight with subcutaneous like the fat underneath your skin versus like fat on your organs, which is visceral fat. Right. And that's where it really becomes harmful. So, you know, everybody should have their blood work done and all these sorts of things and make these decisions for themselves. And it's not about appearances. It's about like overall well being like we all want to live vital lives as long as we possibly can. And to the point of like, we all have more potential than we realize. Like we all have more agency over these outcomes than we realize. And we may have been reared in a time in which we've been told this is going to happen to you because of your genetics.
39:35 Speaker 01 And now we're realizing like, actually, in most cases, we can exert influence over these things in a way that maybe a couple of decades ago, we didn't think was possible.
39:46 Dan Harris? Yeah. Just getting back to the motivation and being personal about it again, like I've really tried and I don't always succeed. You know, I was in the gym this morning and I see in in myself like I'm gonna lift these weights and then hopefully certain things happen to my bicep or my abs. I constantly have to kind of work with that in a gentle way of like, no, you're 53, dude. Like the goal is to be healthy, to be around as long as possible for your now 10 year old son. And to be as healthy and to feel good as possible so that you can be useful to other people.
40:23 Speaker 01 Yeah.
40:23 Dan Harris? To be okay with the fact that I'm not willing to do what it would take to get those abs back. Like the strictness of my diet.
40:31 Speaker 01 Well, and what would you actually get out of that?
40:34 Dan Harris? I don't know.
40:34 Speaker 01 That's the thing, you know?
40:35 Dan Harris? Right.
40:36 Speaker 01 There's a self acceptance piece here, right? Like if you Google my name, like immediately all these pictures come up of me just like absolutely shredded. Right. And those were taken. When I was 43, 44, on the heels of like week after week after week after week of just insane training, probably a month after that photo, like I didn't look like that. Like that was a very specific moment in time. I appeared that way for a fraction of a second. And now I'm 58 and people know me as this ultra endurance athlete, but like, I've got lower back problems. I'm not really running that much right now. I might have to get back surgery. I don't look like that guy, but as a public facing person and people
41:17 Speaker 01 wanting me to like, tell my story, I'm constantly confronted with this narrative of like, feeling like I have to compensate for that. People expect me to look a certain way and that's just not reality. And then I'll judge myself. So how can I be and accept myself for how I appear right now and what I can or can't do physically in this moment? Everybody has their version of that, I think on some level.
41:43 Dan Harris? What's your exercise regime look like now?
41:46 Speaker 01 I mean, now it's shifted a lot. Like I'm not training for ultra races and I haven't for some time. I'm doing a lot more strength training, which I never did when I was competing in these races. Because the more I learn about muscle mass with aging, the more important it sounds like this is something to be on top of. And I was never like a gym rat, but like now I'm, I'm pretty active in the gym. And I still ride and run, but I do it so that I can feel good in my body as opposed to killing myself and being exhausted all the time so that, you know, I can go do a race in many months later. Like my priorities have shifted. How can I show up and be of service in this thing that I do with the best
42:29 Speaker 01 energy possible and then go home and be present and available and energetic for my wife and children? And yeah, I want to be able to lift up the luggage and put it overhead in 20 years from now. Like that's, you know, I'm training for stuff like that at this point. And maybe I'll do a race at some point, but. I don't feel like I have to. I feel like I learned the lessons that I needed to learn in that world. And I want to take advantage of other growth opportunities in other areas of my life, rather than getting stuck in one world and going back to that well time and time again with diminishing returns and how it's going to impact my growth as a human being.
43:09 Dan Harris? You mentioned your lower back. Let's talk about injury for a second, because whatever age you're at, injury happens. And I'll just say for myself, I get hurt a lot. And one of the frustrations of my exercise life now is that my cardiovascular fitness is actually very high, but I have musculoskeletal things like tendonitis that stop me from exercising the way I would love to do like a 10 mile trail run, but I can't. Or I can't right now because I keep getting hurt. And so I'm just curious, what's your attitude about avoiding injury and resilience in the face of injury, et cetera, et cetera?
43:47 Speaker 01 Yeah, I mean, I think patience and slow progression is really important. Also, that has to take into consideration, like, what is your athletic background? Like, how robust are you? Are you new to this? Or is this something you've always been doing your whole life? And what age are you at? Like, at our age, like, the truth is, we need more time to recover. We can't do it like we did when we were 25, or we're going to get injured. You just need a little bit more time for the body to repair itself. And I think in the context of running, a lot of running injuries across the board are the result of the fact that the cardiovascular system can adapt and get more fit more quickly than
44:31 Speaker 01 the musculoskeletal system, like the tendons and the ligament, all those things, they have to adapt very slowly over time. And so while you feel like you can go and go and push yourself or whatever, that other part isn't ready for that, right? And so that's when you run into trouble. And so for tendonitis, or whatever the situation is that you're confronting, Also being older, you gotta do all the annoying things that you could get away with when you were younger, like the stretching and the foam rolling and you know, maybe you need some body work and all that, you know, it's like it becomes like a time consuming thing, right? In the interim, like maybe space out your runs and shorten them and just give yourself a wider time horizon to progress to that 10 mile trail run. Like we think we can just
45:16 Speaker 01 do these things really quickly and then we run into trouble and get injured and then we're out of the game more than we're in it. And the goal really is to figure out a way to be in it every day in some way. And that's why I'm always advocating for like less is more.
45:33 Dan Harris? Three practical things I'll, I'll throw at you that I've thrown into my routine. One is, and I think you just kind of hinted at this, is really being mindful of cross training. I try not to like do one thing too much so that I am having repetitive motion injuries. So I run a little bit, not that often, just because I tend to hurt myself. I do elliptical, I lift weights, I swim, and I do it now, I started doing a little bit of Pilates, just to make it so that if one part of my exercise regime sneezes, the whole thing doesn't catch a cold, you know?
46:12 Speaker 01 Yeah, yeah, yeah.
46:12 Dan Harris? The other thing that I've tried to integrate into my routine recently, and this is an insanely privileged thing to say, but my wife and I bought a house a couple of years ago, we moved out of the city into the suburbs, and the house had in it a sauna. And for three years of living in the house, I never used the sauna. But then we have this German friend, a woman, a mom friend of ours, who's from Germany, and they're really into like the sauna culture there. She started using it. I was like, all right, I'm gonna use this thing. And sitting in there has really helped me not get hurt as much.
46:45 Speaker 01 Yeah.
46:46 Dan Harris? I forget what the third thing was, but those are two things.
46:49 Speaker 01 I mean, that sounds pretty good. It sounds like you have it pretty dialed in. Like you've diversified your workout regimen. You've got this sauna. You've got, you have it like all going on. And I love the fact that, you know, you're mixing it all up. And I think that's What keeps it interesting and intriguing and then you're working different muscle groups on different days and it gives those other muscle groups time to kind of recover in between. I think that that all sounds like top notch and the sauna, I have a sauna now too, and I just, I love it. It helps me with the quality of my sleep. I think it helps with recovery to your point. And there's a lot of science coming out about the positive impacts it has on heart
47:32 Speaker 01 health, kind of as a buttress against cardiovascular disease and brain degeneration because that's really a disease of the circulatory system as well. And it's cool that like sauna is like a whole thing now.
47:44 Dan Harris? It is.
47:44 Speaker 01 People, you just have, now you get to get the cold plunge.
47:47 Dan Harris? I know. I have mixed feelings about cold plunges. I hate them. I mean, I do it if I'm in an environment where it's
47:53 Speaker 01 You're so kind of supposed to hate it.
47:55 Dan Harris? Yeah, I know. And about, just to pick up on your point about how saunas are becoming, or bathing culture is becoming a thing. I think this is a really cool emerging wellness trend. And I live in New York, you live in LA, it's already a pretty well established wellness trend on the coasts, but it's now really like, I have a friend who's opening a bath house in Milwaukee and I have another friend in New York who was really involved in establishing the High Line. He knows how to like, do big things and he's now kind of like at the tip of the spear of making bathing culture in America a big thing. And the data are really encouraging, or especially around saunas. You don't have to be a privileged dude who has one in his house. Like they're in gyms all over the place and now there are bath houses
48:40 Dan Harris? opening up all over the country. And I think there's some data to suggest that this is something that you should check out.
48:46 Speaker 01 It's growing. In New York, there's, and now in LA as well, there's like, it's almost, you know how there's this rise of like these membership clubs right now? It's almost like this is the next evolution of the gym. Like now it's like, they're sort of like Soho Houses, but for like wellbeing. Like in New York, there's remedy place, like these beautiful places, but no alcohol. You're just going there to like sauna and plunge and like get a massage and stuff like that. It's
49:12 Dan Harris? It's cool. I mean, especially as young people stop drinking as much. I have a young female friend who's married to one of my old guy friends. And she is opening like a really high end bath house in lower Manhattan. And part of her business plan is like, yeah, people my age are not drinking. They want a place to go to be social together. That's not a bar. And that's what this will be.
49:35 Speaker 01 It's pretty cool.
49:36 Dan Harris? It is really cool. All right. So we've been talking about exercise. We have not talked yet about diet. You are vegan and I, with your help, was a vegan for five years. And we can talk a little bit about what happened there. People hate vegans.
49:50 Speaker 01 I know.
49:52 Dan Harris? It's kind of why I held off from asking about it until now. I noticed there was an episode where you were talking to your wife Julie about flexibility. In other words, my understanding is that you and Julie, both vegans. You're not overly dogmatic and strict about what you recommend to other people. Like you're somehow sinning if you're not fully vegan. Am I correct in that understanding?
50:18 Speaker 01 Yeah, I mean, I think there's two pieces there. The first is, and this is like a tenet of sobriety. I don't give advice. I will share my experience, but it's not for me to take anybody's inventory or tell them how they should live their life. That is not my vibe. So I'm not the guy who looks to camera and says, do this, or you shouldn't do that. Everybody's on their own trip, man. And our job is to grow and evolve. And I trust people to find, you know, their way through of that. And maybe I can put some guideposts and I can share some experiences along the way. But I'm never someone to like proselytize for anything, really. And yes, people hate vegans. And I think.
51:02 Speaker 01 With any kind of identity or group membership, there's a hardness, right? And there's a kind of calcification around who's in, who's out. That's like fertile soil for judgment. And there's a lot of judging. There's enough judging out there as it is, right? My whole thing is like, how do you help people get excited about being healthier? And maybe eating some more plants might be a good idea. Unless you're some ardent carnivore, it's kind of hard to argue with that. And I think for the most part, when I look at the chronic diseases that are, you know, making people sick and incapacitating people and ending their lives far too soon.
51:44 Speaker 01 I'm always encouraging people to realize that, again, back to the agency piece, you do have more control over these things than you think. And it really begins with what you choose to put in your mouth. And this gets into meditation and mindfulness, because I think we're sort of mindlessly just consuming without really being present for what's actually happening. Like even if you think you know what you're eating every day, if you get one of those apps where you have to actually log everything you're eating, like most people are like pretty surprised, like, oh, I didn't realize it was that bad, you know? And I'm, I would plead guilty to that as well. So for me, it's all about, back to habit change, like making small changes. Do you really need those processed chips? Like, maybe let's start there.
52:27 Speaker 01 Let's start with the low hanging fruit of the things that are really driving the negative outcomes in the most profound ways. And then from there, you create momentum and you tackle another thing and you move on and you can take that journey as far as you like. And I can just say that in my own experience, going plant-based for me has been an incredible journey. And in an effort to not be dogmatic about it, if I got blood work back and it was bad, or I felt like there was something off in me, or I wasn't feeling good, like I made a promise to myself that I would not hold on to this as an identity that would keep me from making a different choice or being trapped in the prison of like, I have to
53:09 Speaker 01 be this advocate for this way of living, especially as somebody does what you do publicly. But it continues to like, serve me. But I find myself talking about it less and less because of this negative association that people have with vegans and how annoying they can be. You know, they can be their own worst enemy. It's also not a monolith either. People become vegan or plant-based for a variety of reasons. Maybe it's for personal health. Maybe it's for vanity. Maybe it's out of compassion for animals or a concern about the environment. There's a lot of on-ramps to this. And then there's a lot of like bickering and arguing amongst these groups about what the real definition of this lifestyle or philosophy actually is.
53:54 Speaker 01 And that's really not of interest to me at all. Like, I'm interested in connecting with real people where they're at and trying to be helpful in terms of getting them to make more positive changes in their life.
54:06 Dan Harris? You're the least annoying vegan.
54:08 Speaker 01 And what happened to you over five years? What happened? I think I remember, like, I was giving you some tips, some smoothie tips.
54:13 Dan Harris? You were.
54:14 Speaker 01 For a minute there.
54:15 Dan Harris? Yeah, you were super helpful. So I was inspired by you and also by Sam Harris, who was a vegan for a while. And
54:23 Speaker 01 That was short-lived, though, I think.
54:24 Dan Harris? That was short-lived. And I lasted longer than Sam. I was motivated really by the compassion piece, not by the health or anything like that. I just wanted to get out of the murder game and still have those feelings in a very strong way. What complicated things a little bit for me was I became very highly influenced by this woman named Evelyn Tribole, who is one of the progenitors of something called intuitive eating, which is like an anti-diet. Her argument, which I believe is based in copious amounts of data, is that dieting is a reliable predictor of future weight gain. Diets don't work most of the time, essentially. And her argument is the best way to have a good relationship to food and your body
55:09 Dan Harris? is to listen to your body. You should eat when you're hungry and stop eating when you're not hungry. And many of these diets block our ability to have a relationship with our body that allows us to hear its signals, the satiety cues, et cetera, et cetera. So I was really taken by that. And it first had nothing to do with it. I stayed vegan even though I was doing intuitive eating, which basically just meant that I was eating what I wanted, when I wanted, without worrying about counting my calories or anything like that, because I did all of the biohacking moves in my day. And then I realized that there was a strictness in my life that was coming from
55:50 Dan Harris? the veganism that seemed to be at odds with the intuitive eating. I'm not saying you can't do these things at the same time, but there was a just a regimented nature to the way I was living. So what I ultimately landed on was I am mostly plant-based and almost never eat any animal products before dinner. So I guess I could qualify as what they sometimes call VB6, vegan before 6pm.
56:17 Speaker 01 Oh, yeah, yeah. Wasn't that Mark Bittman's book?
56:19 Dan Harris? Mark Bittman, yeah. And I feel better if I'm, and now I'm not talking about physiologically, I just psychologically feel better if there's flexibility. I don't have weird food rules.
56:33 Speaker 01 Yeah, the hardness is going on.
56:34 Dan Harris? Yes, and I just was struck by, I have a standing lunch date with a couple of guy friends that's been going for like 15 years. And just watching over time, the persnickety nature of people's orders, like, I don't eat this, I do eat that. And I think that's all part of the problem to a certain extent. And so I wanted to just be chill.
56:58 Speaker 01 Yeah.
56:58 Dan Harris? And so I don't know, does any of that make sense to you?
57:00 Speaker 01 No, it does. You know, I get that. I think like, everybody has to find the thing that works for them. I think the most important thing is sustainability. Like, you don't want to be in some kind of in and out rubber banding kind of deal. Like, what are you going to be able to sustain over time that is going to drive you towards health rather than away from it? The only thing I would say about the intuitive eating thing, it's a bit of a word of caution. I suspect your audience, like, these are people who are mindful, you know, and interested in meditation. So they are people who are inclined to be attuned to their body and its signals in an authentic and true way. But I think
57:42 Speaker 01 A lot of people, if not most people, are so disconnected from their bodies. And that's because of the overstimulation and the kind of foods that we're just mindlessly eating all the time. And that relationship, you know, that signal system isn't really firing properly. And so that person to say like, well, my body's telling me, you know, I need a big gulp or like, I need to eat this. It's like, is it really? Or are you just craving something? You're like, we can, we're so good at deluding ourselves and lying to ourselves and we can craft these arguments about like what we think our body wants and needs and don't have
58:20 Speaker 01 the mindfulness or the skillset to divide cravenness from what would be like an actual need.
58:29 Dan Harris? Yeah, well, I didn't probably do a great job of describing Evelyn's approach, but it's pretty deep and rigorous. And so developing the relationship with your body and its cues.
58:38 Speaker 01 That's the precedent. Like, I'm sure there's a lot of work to get to that place where you could trust that signal or that intuition or instinct.
58:46 Dan Harris? I interviewed her for the first time in 2020 on this show. That interview was electrifying for me. I'm still working on this and I still have Skype calls with her every couple of months to check in and talk about it. It is really hard. She doesn't overpromise. Her point is like, this is work that is, everybody should do if they're interested in learning. We all should learn how to listen to our bodies.
59:14 Speaker 01 It's also confronting you to live in that space of hunger or appetite in a mindful way. We were talking earlier about like emotions, just like letting them pass. Like, okay, I feel hungry right now, but do I really need to eat more and like this will pass? That's a practice, right? So that, these things are of a piece, like they dovetail into your meditation practice. I think for me, and I'm curious what you think about this is. I'm such an addict, man. Like, I crave certain things so deeply and so profoundly that I just have to take them off the table. You know what I mean? Like, if I went down the intuitive eating path and was like, well, I can eat quarter
59:57 Speaker 01 of a cheeseburger, you know, for dinner or something like that, like, I'm whetting that appetite, you know what I mean? And then that starts lighting up my brain. And maybe I only have 25% of it that day, but I know myself well enough that like, in a couple of months, 25% will be, 30% will be 50, and then I'll just be eating cheeseburgers again. Whereas if I just like, hey, I just don't do that. I am somebody who doesn't eat that thing. Then I liberate myself from that temptation and I never think about it. Maybe that's preventing me from engaging in that practice where I could overcome that urge, right?
1:00:37 Dan Harris? Let me, before I answer that question, go on record as saying, this is an individual thing. I do not take sides in the diet wars. This is a very individual thing and people should do what works for them and what you're describing, like, I have a lot of sympathy for. And what Evelyn would say is, every time she talks to somebody new about intuitive eating, this is the number one question. Similarly, it's like every time Kristin Neff talks to people about self compassion, they say, if I'm not horrible to myself, I'll never get anything done. This is very similar to intuitive eating. If you tell me I can eat whatever I want, I will never stop eating chocolate chip cookies.
1:01:21 Dan Harris? And what Evelyn has seen in her practice is that actually, once you truly give yourself freedom, you just self-regulate because you're listening to your body and your body doesn't want to eat cheeseburgers for every meal. And I have found this to be true in my own life. Do I occasionally, like, overdo it with Oreos? Because I don't have food rules anymore? Yeah. And generally speaking, if I operate with the question in my mind of, how do I want to feel right now? And I let that govern, like, my food choices? I make choices.
1:01:56 Speaker 01 Yeah, I get it. I get it. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, that's cool. It's cool.
1:02:02 Dan Harris? Coming up, Rich talks about the dangers of orthorexia, his experiences with addiction recovery and healing from childhood wounds. And then we go into some weirder stuff, some more esoteric territory. We talk about psychedelics and non-duality.
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1:02:53 Dan Harris? Okay. One other question, and I know you've covered it on your pod, is when it comes to fitness overall, now, I'm not just talking about diet. I'm also talking about diet and exercise, but also sleep and all the things that go into being healthy these days. One of the dangers, I think, and I know you've talked about this, is this concept of orthorexia, which is an unhealthy obsession with getting healthy. What is your view on this? How can one avoid it? Do you see it a lot in your world?
1:03:25 Speaker 01 I mean, I see it on social media, like writ large, everywhere. There is this obsession with the perfect body and the perfect diet that's going to get you there. And this is all exacerbated by all of the biohacking and, you know, the kind of six-hour morning routine and the supplement stack and the cold plunging and the sauna. Like, it's like, how many things do I have to do before I can just go live my day? If you added up all of these things, any sane person would go insane, and it's unsustainable. But it's all oriented around self-optimization. And I think... Within that, there's a control piece, right? That gets to that discomfort with uncertainty. We're all terrified of dying.
1:04:11 Speaker 01 And what can we control? We can control our bodies. If we eat the right thing and work out a certain way, we'll be perceived a certain way. So we'll be loved. And ultimately, we're going to avoid this thing that we pretend doesn't exist, which is that we're going to die. Like, that's what it all roots back to, does it not? It's attachment, you know? And I'm compassionate for anyone who suffers from that because we live in a culture that sets expectations high. And those expectations are predominantly unattainable for most people and really aren't something that we should aspire to attain. But it's part of the underlying mental health epidemic, for sure.
1:04:53 Speaker 01 So how do you get people to care about their wellbeing without tiptoeing into these unhealthy behavior patterns? I mean, you know, I'm not a clinician. I just think you have to be really honest with yourself. I tend to relate all of these sorts of things across the kind of rubric of recovery. Like, where does this fall within the 12 steps? And in this context, it's about like the honest self-inventory. Like, what's driving these choices? Is it some kind of deep insecurity? Is it a childhood wound? Is it a true, honest desire to take control of your health for the right reasons? And can you be honest with yourself enough
1:05:38 Speaker 01 so that you have that self-awareness piece to prevent you from, you know, going too far in the wrong direction? And I think accountability is really important. Like, when we were talking about habit change earlier, like, and you mentioned this when you were on my show earlier, doing these things with a friend, somebody who is encouraging, but also maybe somebody else or that same person who can give you like the honest feedback to tell you like, hey, you're getting a little crazy here, or is this really healthy? With that, and this gets talked about less, is learning how to receive feedback. Like, you want that person to like, tell you the way it is, but you also have to work on your receptivity to that. Learning how to receive feedback is a skill.
1:06:22 Speaker 01 Nobody wants to hear not-so-good things about themselves. And we have this Tendency to deflect or be defensive and not really hear what the person is saying. And that's another thing that I've learned in recovery. Like, I can sit with someone and they can like redress me and say all these things. And I can like take it in and not react to it. And then kind of assess what I think is actually worth listening to and what isn't. With meditation, you develop that practice. Like, can you be a quantumist when somebody is like telling you you're off the rails?
1:06:57 Dan Harris? I struggle with it. In doing all of your recovery work, did you go through the 12 steps and also then adding in meditation, journaling? Did you ever get a sense of like, what for you was driving your alcoholism?
1:07:11 Speaker 01 Yes and no. 12 steps really about moving forward. And one of the things you hear is that it doesn't really matter why you're an alcoholic or an addict. What matters is like, what are you doing right now? And how are you moving forward? So the program itself, it doesn't necessarily discourage trying to understand why you are this way, but it's really focused on like, what are we doing now? So the work within the program itself helps me to identify like my character defects and my errant behavior patterns and how I can correct them. But it doesn't really get to the heart of like, why this is the case or what happened.
1:07:54 Speaker 01 On some level, that can be either helpful or not so helpful. Like, if you spend all your time trying to figure out like, why did it happen? Or whatever, like, is that the best use of your time and energy? On the other hand, like, having been sober for quite a while, you know, I do want to know, is this a genetic? Like, I didn't grow up with alcoholic parents. There does have to be a reason. Is it just the way I was wired? And that's the lottery ticket that I chose? But I do think, and I've become more increasingly convinced, that not in every case, but I think there's a lot to be said for.
1:08:34 Speaker 01 The impact of early childhood wounds on addiction later in life. And Gabor Maté is doing tremendous work around this. And his books have been extremely impactful for me personally and have led me on this journey to kind of try to unravel this knot for myself and being able to kind of identify certain things that happened when I was younger or emotional needs that weren't getting met and how that led me to be a certain way and feel this discomfort in my own skin that led me to use substances to medicate that kind of low-grade feeling of not being enough or not feeling like I could connect with other people. Like, I can see a lot of wisdom and logic in that.
1:09:19 Speaker 01 And with that, that revelation itself is one thing, but like, what are you gonna do with that? And one of the journeys that I've been on is identifying those wounds and then figuring out how to heal them. Well, like, what are you gonna do about that? They're still there, and I have gotten sober and grown and evolved in all these different ways, but the impact of those old things continue to show up in my life in ways that aren't great, that impact the intimacy that I have with my wife, that spill out into how I'm parenting my kids, and recognizing that these are generational hereditary patterns
1:09:58 Speaker 01 that you're either going to pass on unconsciously or consciously to the next generation, or shoulder the responsibility to heal so that you can interrupt it and stop it in its tracks.
1:10:13 Dan Harris? It's deep work, that work.
1:10:15 Speaker 01 It's the hardest work that I've ever done.
1:10:18 Dan Harris? In doing that work now, what form does it take?
1:10:21 Speaker 01 A lot of it is the self-love, self-compassion piece, which doesn't come natural to me.
1:10:28 Dan Harris? Yeah, I believe you're the guy who said toil and suffering.
1:10:30 Speaker 01 Yeah, yeah. I have to, I have to forgive myself a little bit. I have to forgive my parents in the most open-hearted and honest way and realize they did the best that they could and to Find a way to love them unconditionally and heal my own wounding over what I feel like I didn't get that I should have gotten. And that's been a challenge for a couple of reasons, like my mother has dementia right now. I can't do it in that way of direct reconciliation. It's really about me and me, you know, and how I'm processing all of that. And going to see the Dalai Lama, which we talked about on my podcast, which I did this past year,
1:11:14 Speaker 01 was kind of a wake up call, but a revelation also in that, in the context of these two days of talks. Basically, whatever question Arthur Brooks presented to him, the answer was essentially the same and some version of the answer is always love, unconditional love. And if you struggle to understand what I mean by that, it's the mother's unconditional love for a child. That's the kind of love that I'm talking about. And that was very confronting for me because I have a whole story about how the love in which I was reared was conditional and not unconditional.
1:11:58 Speaker 01 It was premised on achievement and success and accomplishments. And there wasn't a lot of intimacy or safety around being yourself. And so I have a lot of pain and resentment around that. But that was exactly what I needed to hear from the Dalai Lama. Like that, I was like agitated by that kind of recursive theme that he kept returning to. But obviously that's the thing that I most want to avoid, but I need to go towards. And so in heeding that, it's like, it's this journey from anger and resentment and pain to a recognition and honoring of my mother as my greatest teacher,
1:12:44 Speaker 01 who gave me exactly, precisely everything that I needed to become the person that I am today. And so she is the gift of my life and to really like inhabit that without reservation.
1:12:59 Dan Harris? Is part of your job now to give yourself the unconditional love that you didn't get from her?
1:13:04 Speaker 01 Yeah, that's the harder piece that I'm trying to find a way into right now.
1:13:10 Dan Harris? As you sniff around for ways to get into that, what's on the table, therapy, meditation?
1:13:17 Speaker 01 Yeah, I mean, I've been in therapy for many, many, many years. I have a men's group every Wednesday night with a group of like seven guys that's moderated by a therapist. I've been doing that for years and years and years. I have 12 step. My wife and I occasionally, you know, see somebody together. My wife has been an incredible guide for this as well. And she's been saying for years, like, you have to heal this. It's like the thing I least want to do, you know what I mean? And I feel like, do I really have to do this? Like, things are pretty good, right? Like, I don't, this isn't that big of a deal. I can live with this. And she's like, no, this is the thing. So she's been nudging me and encouraging me to go deeper into this.
1:14:02 Speaker 01 And then, a couple of months ago, I made a decision to do this thing that I never thought that I would do, which was to undergo like a medically supervised psychedelic experience. And this is something I've changed my mind about over many, many years.
1:14:21 Dan Harris? Oh, right, because it's a sober person.
1:14:22 Speaker 01 Yeah, I'm a sober person. I'm indoctrinated in 12 step and I have this much time and this is who I am. We were talking about identity earlier, right? Like, I identify as an alcoholic in this group, as a member in good standing. And on top of that, as somebody who struggled with addiction, for somebody to say to me, like, hey, you might find answers, all the answers that you're seeking in this incredibly powerful mind-altering substance, just lights up my brain, right? Like, that's exactly what I want to hear. And that scares me, you know, that scares me. Will I activate, will I unleash the demon and wake up the, the monster again?
1:15:05 Speaker 01 It was a frightening prospect. And so for a long time, I was not open to this as something that I would ever entertain doing for myself. But slowly, over many, many years, I would have guest after guest after guest who would come on the podcast and out of the blue, I wasn't booking them because of this, but it would come up and I had this profound experience and it changed me in this certain way or that certain way. And, and then this science starting to emerge about the impact of these compounds on PTSD and depression is like, I can't dismiss this in Michael Pollan's book and the docu-series and all of that. And it just, it almost became comical after a while. Like we would joke with the guys here is like, again, somebody with their
1:15:48 Speaker 01 profound, you know? And so I was like, well, there's clearly something here. Like, you know, and the more I would look into it, I was like, obviously people are benefiting from this in a certain way, but I still wasn't looking to do it. And just circumstances aligned in a certain way recently, where a medical doctor who's a friend of a friend who is highly recommended by an acquaintance or a good friend of Julie and I was like, I think you could really benefit from this. And I was just like, all right, well, let's do it.
1:16:21 Dan Harris? What was the it? Which drug or medicine?
1:16:23 Speaker 01 It was psilocybin.
1:16:25 Dan Harris? And how did it go?
1:16:26 Speaker 01 It was the most profound single event experience of my life. Like no hyperbole.
1:16:36 Dan Harris? Now you're like one of your own podcast guests.
1:16:38 Speaker 01 Tremendously profound. I know. And I'm so allergic to being the guy who talks about the journey and like, suddenly I'm gonna like, wear like, deep cut shirts and like, I'm gonna start putting on a costume and I like, don't want to be that guy, you know?
1:16:54 Dan Harris? Yeah.
1:16:55 Speaker 01 But I can't escape the fact that it was very meaningful. And I, you know, and I had never done psychedelics before and I had no anything to compare it to. And I went in very intentionally, like, I'm here to like, heal this wound and I want to liberate myself from these patterns that keep showing up in my life. And I thought, oh, maybe I'll unlock some repressed memories or I'll have like some encounter with my mom or a, you know, some childhood experience will come to mind that will be helpful to me. And instead, I just had my head exploded and suddenly I understood non-dualism for the first time because my identity completely dissolved. And it was as if I was simultaneously in
1:17:41 Speaker 01 Interstellar and inception, like stuck in the tesseract where like time and space aren't really a thing and there's death and birth happening at the same time. I mean, it was like the craziest shit I could have ever imagined, but in a really profound and meaningful way that gave me a different perspective on reality altogether. That has stayed with me and is something I think about every single day and has profoundly deepened my meditation practice.
1:18:13 Dan Harris? So one of the big knocks on psychedelics is that if there's no integration afterwards, there may not be much benefit, but it sounds like your ongoing meditation practice is helping you integrate this profound experience into your life.
1:18:28 Speaker 01 Yeah, I mean, I would say, just to be abundantly clear, like, I'm not advising anybody to do this. I'm not a clinician. This was a decision made over a seven-year period. I didn't take it lightly. I think there's real risks and I think people who have fears around this, that those fears should be taken seriously. I did not take this into consideration lightly at all. And I did it under medical supervision in a scenario in which set and setting were everything and really cared for, and I think that made a huge difference, and the post-integration process, which I took very seriously. Like, there's a neural plasticity period of time in the aftermath of this, that period of
1:19:11 Speaker 01 time in which you're integrating all of this and you have this opportunity to either like learn a new skill or focus on something. And I chose meditation to be my focus during this temporary period of time. And I'm glad that I did. It's been meaningful and I continue to kind of extract meaning from it. And it's something that's very difficult to understand. It was like, all of these things that I hear Sam Harris talking about on the Waking Up app about not having a head and like not being a self and the notion that all there is is consciousness. Like, I felt like I could meditate my entire life and perhaps intellectualize those ideas, but not have a real tactile understanding or experience
1:19:54 Speaker 01 of what that actually means. And I felt like I was able to break through that and really kind of grok perhaps for the first time, like what that is really all about. And that was incredibly illuminating. And that's why it's deepened by meditation practice, because I see there's so much there more for me to like, learn in a way that I know will help me with growth and evolution.
1:20:18 Dan Harris? I mean, nonduality refers, I think, and hopefully I'm not screwing this up, to this idea of we approach the world from a dualistic perspective. We're the subject and everything else are the object of our attention. We're Dan, looking out at the world. What can happen in meditation and in psychedelics, in the right setting and dosage, is you see that you're actually not separate. You know, the phrase that I mentioned to you when I was on your show is, this is nature. It's every thought coursing through your head, every perception in your mind, it's all nature. You are not separate from the rest of the universe. And
1:21:01 Dan Harris? I mean, this is like the cliched experience of meditation and psychedelics, oneness.
1:21:07 Speaker 01 Yeah. And I would say that I was a guy who's like, yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, like, I get it. We're nature. We're already in, we think we're outside of nature. We're in nature. Yeah, I understand that. But all I can tell you is like, I understand that on an entirely different level now.
1:21:23 Dan Harris? And how does that change how you live?
1:21:26 Speaker 01 On one level, there's before and after, truly. Because it has changed my frame. But that doesn't mean that, you know, I just snap back into a body. Now it's just rose colored glasses and, you know, everything is like, yeah, oneness. Like, no, I back in my body and I'm like, back to my petty bullshit, you know? And then I remember and I was like, okay. It's allowed me to like, Snap back into a level of awareness that I didn't previously have. And in my meditation practice, I can kind of get right back there more quickly and inhabit that space that I couldn't quite access previously.
1:22:05 Dan Harris? Your comment about petty bullshit, it reminded me, um, Jack Kornfield, the great meditation teacher, has a book with an awesome title, After the Ecstasy, The Laundry.
1:22:16 Speaker 01 Yeah.
1:22:17 Dan Harris? And yeah, we can have these peak experiences and then we got to do the laundry. We got to put our pants on. We got to have a fight with our spouse or whatever it is. And can you just bring something of that perspective of the non-dual, the non-separate, the lowered ego walls perspective into your daily mundane activities? That seems to me like the assignment.
1:22:44 Speaker 01 Yeah, yeah. You either choose to accept it or you don't. And some days I do and some days I don't.
1:22:51 Dan Harris? As you know, because you heard me talk about it on, on this show, I have a lot of fear around psychedelics just because my first panic attacks were smoking weed as a teenage delinquent. Did you have moments of fear or real high discomfort when you were doing your trip?
1:23:10 Speaker 01 Yes, I didn't have a lot of fear going into it. I wasn't afraid like, oh my God, what's going to happen? You know, the prospect of doing it. But I would say in the midst of the experience, there were some scary moments. I went right to the edge of what I could deal with. And there were moments in which I thought, maybe I didn't wake up this morning and I'm, I'm dead and I'm in some afterlife experience, or maybe I'm a mental patient in a padded room and I've always lived in, in my mind and I will never escape that. And then it would be like, well, this is the best ever. Like, why would I ever leave here? There was a flirtation with.
1:23:50 Dan Harris? Madness.
1:23:50 Speaker 01 Yeah, yeah. And there were scary aspects of that. And so like, I was so grateful to be back in my body. And like I joked, I was like, I just want to watch Netflix now. Like, this is enough, you know?
1:24:04 Dan Harris? I've had enough for fun to be for a while.
1:24:08 Dan Harris? I remember having an experience several times smoking weed where I thought, I'm never getting out of this. I'm insane now, and I will always be insane. I just need to go to the hospital and never leave. I, I.
1:24:22 Speaker 01 And I think with your, with your panic disorder, you're right to be cautious about this. There might be an opportunity there for you at the right time, but you know, that's not for me to say or anyone to say, except for you. I'm very grateful for the experience and it did teach me a lot. And it's something I never thought I would do. And it's, it's like, okay, do I have like two months now in AA? Like, what is that? And then it's like, time isn't real.
1:24:54 Speaker 01 Like, not only is your group identity not real, like your whole, like your whole sense of self is this persistent illusion.
1:25:02 Dan Harris? My understanding of the Dharma take on all of this is that it's really important to understand that there are two things happening at the same time. There are two truths to use the Buddhist phraseology. On the one hand, yes, we are just nature. We are not separate from the universe and these identities we carry around are illusions and sometimes very harmful illusions. So yeah, that ultimately is true. On the other hand, we do live in a consensual reality where you're you, I'm me.
1:25:38 Speaker 01 Sure.
1:25:38 Dan Harris? We need to put our pants on, we need to make dentist appointments, et cetera, et cetera. And it's about like using these two levels of reality to inform one another in an ongoing way. Because when you're overly stuck in.
1:25:54 Dan Harris? Petty bullshit, it can be helpful to remember, oh yeah, I had awakening experience in meditation or on psilocybin, and this is not as real as I think it is. And similarly, you know, if you're
1:26:06 Speaker 01 In the clouds all the time.
1:26:06 Dan Harris? Yeah, if you're in the clouds all the time, like, or here's a expression I once heard from a through my teacher, Joseph Goldstein, but it was from somebody else. There's no right and there's no wrong. And right is right and wrong is wrong. Right? Like, you don't want to get so stuck in the, in the non-dual view of things that you're not taking care of what needs to be taken care of in this realm.
1:26:35 Speaker 01 Right.
1:26:36 Dan Harris? Does that make sense?
1:26:36 Speaker 01 Yeah. It's instructive to help us kind of transcend this veneer that we wrap ourselves in that can make us insane, right? It's, it's more like, it gives you like a 10,000 foot view.
1:26:50 Dan Harris? Yes.
1:26:51 Speaker 01 That I think can be instructive and helpful.
1:26:53 Dan Harris? Yes.
1:26:53 Speaker 01 It can be paralyzing too. And I've seen people go way down the rabbit hole with this stuff in not great ways. I certainly don't want to be that guy. I want to take from that experience and find ways to integrate it into my life so that I can be a better parent, human, spouse, podcaster. Not in a self-optimized way, but in how can I be who I am and do what I do with a little more grace, a little more compassion, a little more love and a little less edge. Like for me, things like joy and gratitude come difficult. Like I'm not naturally inclined to either of those and I'm robbing myself of that experience. And in turn, robbing the people that I care about because they deserve more of that from me.
1:27:38 Dan Harris? So toil and suffering may be your language, but you're doing Duolingo in joy and gratitude.
1:27:46 Speaker 01 Think so. Yeah, I hope so. I got a lot to learn though, Dan.
1:27:53 Dan Harris? We all do, right? We all do. So let's see if we can sum up here. I went into this wanting to talk to you for this series that we do about getting fit with a very capacious understanding of what fitness is. It's not just, you use the term self optimizing, which I like to use in the pejorative too. Like, we're not just trying to check boxes or keep up with our favorite Instagram influencer in terms of hitting certain exercise and dietary markers. We want to be healthy in a holistic sense. Do you feel like we've covered all the various aspects? We've, I think we've talked about your exercise, history and current routine. We talked about plant-based diet and your view that it's important not to be
1:28:37 Dan Harris? totally stuck in an identity that's overly dogmatic around this. We've talked about mental health, journaling and meditation and psychedelics. Do you feel like we've kind of covered it in a panoramic sense?
1:28:49 Speaker 01 I mean, you know, there's always more to say. I guess I would button it up with one thought, which is, in my experience or in my observation, we get in our own way with these things by over complicating them. Like, we want to know how it's going to turn out, or we get into this analysis paralysis. Well, I got to get all the right gear and I need to research the, you know, like, we just, just make it easy, make it simple, and don't wait to feel inspired or motivated. It's an action-based thing, regardless of whether it's fitness, diet, meditation, whatever kind of up-leveling of your life you're seeking to do. Like, it's a function of taking action. And I have this mantra that I learned in AA
1:29:32 Speaker 01 from my first sponsor, which is mood follows action. We kind of sit around waiting to be struck with inspiration to get off our butts and do stuff, but motivation is a product of taking the action first. And the neuroscience like proves this. So it's about like developing that reflex to act irrespective of how you feel about it. And I think there's a mindfulness piece in there, too. It's about noticing or paying attention to your discomfort, or your reservation, or your resistance, and just being, oh, that's curious. I'm resisting doing this thing. But that doesn't mean that I can't or shouldn't do it. What happens if I just do it anyway? And then suddenly, your mood shifts,
1:30:17 Speaker 01 your emotional state is altered as a result of having done the thing, that self-esteem building act. And the motivation is a product of it, rather than the other way around.
1:30:30 Dan Harris? Joseph says, effort creates energy.
1:30:34 Speaker 01 I think that's so true.
1:30:36 Dan Harris? It's always fun to talk to you.
1:30:37 Speaker 01 You too, man. This was good.
1:30:39 Dan Harris? Can you just remind everybody the name of your show, the name of your books, the name of anything else you've made that we should know about?
1:30:47 Speaker 01 My name's Rich Roll. I don't know what I am anymore, Dan. But I do host a podcast called The Rich Roll Podcast. And you can find all my stuff at richroll.com. And it's just my name on all the social media places. I wrote a memoir in 2012 called Finding Ultra. My wife and I did a couple plant-based cookbooks.
1:31:07 Dan Harris? The Plant Power Way.
1:31:08 Speaker 01 The Plant Power Way, The Plant Power Way Italia. Oh, we have a meal planner, too. The Plant Power Meal Planner, which is like thousands of plant-based recipes customized to your personal preferences and stuff like that. And it's super affordable. You can find that on my website as well for people who are looking to get a few more plants on their plate.
1:31:28 Dan Harris? Awesome. Is it worth saying something about the, your podcast network?
1:31:32 Speaker 01 Sure. Yeah. This past year, we launched a media company called Voicing Change Media, premised upon this idea that conversations matter. I think they really do. I think they're vital right now. The notion behind it is to work with other
1:31:49 Speaker 01 Podcast creators to help amplify their voices and help them build businesses in which they're fairly remunerated. So it's a network. We have eight shows right now. We don't own the IP. We're supporting these podcasters in whatever production capacity they need and we're kind of managing their brand and sponsor landscape on their behalf. So we've got Rung and Chatterjee's Feel Better Live More. We have Simon Hills, The Proof, which is a nutrition podcast. Shane Parrish, podcast called The Knowledge Project. Lisa Demora is a parenting expert. Ask Lisa. Alexi Pappas, Mentor Buffet. You can find it all at voicingchange.media if you're interested in that.
1:32:30 Dan Harris? We'll drop links to all those in the show notes. In the meantime, Rich, thank you.
1:32:35 Speaker 01 Yeah, thank you, man.
1:32:41 Dan Harris? Thanks again to Rich. Always great to talk to my guy. Don't forget, if you're a subscriber over at danharris.com, you will get a guided meditation to go along with today's episode from the great Cara Lai, one of my favorite Dharma teachers. This guided meditation will help you develop some of the skills we talked about during the show, including mental and physical resilience. Again, go to danharris.com. If you sign up, you'll get guided meditations to go along with every single episode we're doing during this Get Fit Sanely series in the month of June. Finally, thank you to everybody who works so hard on this show. Our producers are Tara Anderson, Caroline Keenan, and Eleanor Vassili. Our recording and engineering is handled by the great folks over at Podpeople. Lauren Smith is our managing producer. Marissa Schneiderman is our senior producer. DJ Cashmere
1:33:26 Dan Harris? is our executive producer. And Nick Thorburn of the band Islands wrote our theme.
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