Kamal Ravikant On Why Self-Love Is Everything

I've got nothing but love for stories of personal metamorphosis, perhaps the most predominant theme of this show. We call it the hero’s journey. Archetypal and totemic, it’s a most powerful narrative that unites, connecting with something indelible and universal within us all. Over the years, I’ve hosted many flavors of physical triumph. From Olympic medalists to arctic explorers, I celebrate the arc of the athletic warrior. But life’s greatest passage isn’t physical. It’s not free-soloing El Capitan, crossing Antarctica, or running ultramarathons in Patagonia. Our most challenging voyage is learning how to love ourselves. No one embodies this genus of the hero’s journey better than Kamal Ravikant. To be clear, Kamal has more than earned his spot as a respected adventurer living beyond convention. From modest beginnings, he’s trekked to one of the highest base camps in the Himalayas, earned his US Army Infantry patch, walked 550 miles across Spain, and meditated with Tibetan monks in the Dalai Lama’s monastery. Professionally, he’s done it all too, founding a company with the guy who wrote the first browser. From launching startups to managing venture capital funds, Kamal has spent the better part of his career working alongside some of the smartest investors and engineers in Silicon Valley, writing books in his free time. But Kamal's most transformative experience has been the simple act of learning how to love himself. Why is it so hard for us? I first heard about Kamal by way of his frequent appearances on our mutual and beloved friend James Altucher’s podcast. Compelled by his honesty and vulnerability, I felt myself holding space with someone who embodied an important wisdom. A wisdom I lacked. Reflexively, I picked up Kamal's latest book, Love Yourself Like Your Life Depends on It. Spiritual and emotional growth is my jam and yer I never thought much about self-love. So I freely admit I met Kamal's book with a healthy dose of initial skepticism. However, the read ignited a realization that I continue to harbor unhealed wounds. Simple, straightforward and profound, I discovered practices not just helpful, but truly transformative. I wanted to know more. Today we unpack Kamal's heroic journey of the heart. It’s a conversation about his trials and his triumphs. His divine moment. The path of self-discovery that followed. And what he learned surviving a recent near death experience. It’s about how he learned to love himself. The simple routine he deploys to maintain it. And why this practice is essential to living an examined, self-actualized life of presence, purpose and contentment. For the stoics and skeptics, I implore you to set aside whatever resistance you may be feeling right now. And give this one a shot with an open mind and heart. Note: This conversation was recorded pre-pandemic (February 12, 2020), thus there is no coronavirus reference. Nonetheless, Kamal's wisdom is timeless. Moreover, the practices we discuss are powerful tools of self-discovery than can prove transformative as we navigate this challenging time. The visually inclined can watch it all go down on YouTube. And as always, the audio version streams wild and free on Apple Podcasts and Spotify. Kamal’s vulnerability is refreshing. I love this conversation and the friendship it has birthed. I hope it serves you as it did me. 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

  I remember looking at the Bay Bridge from my window. And I was like really sick, burnt out, you know, whatever they call it, you know, fatigue, all the works. Like, I went to some doctor who worked with me later on it. And I didn't have the strength to walk over to the Bay Bridge and throw myself off, otherwise I would have. And I think it was the next night or the night after that I remember getting up and I was like, I was miserable. I was like, I can't do this. I gotta get out of this. I mean, again, I get out of this or die trying. That's it. I can't be in this space. And I walked over to my desk, and I have a journal that I write in. And in there, and I still don't know where I came from. I sat down, I wrote a vow to myself. Now, I do believe in the power of personal commitment. Like, if I make a commitment to myself, I'm gonna keep it.

• 1:49Speaker 01

  And that's something I've had for a while. Something I've trained myself for a while. But a vow? I've never written a vow to myself. I don't even know where that word came from. And then it was a vow to love myself. It came in the moment. I am not a guy who was thinking about, hey, you know what I need? You know what I really need? I think I need to love myself. That never occurred to me once. But yet, in that moment, that's what came out. If you're ever in a place where you just need to get out of it, make a vow to yourself, write it down, put it somewhere where you can see it every day. Be reminded of your promise to yourself, and then do your best to live it. You'll fail horribly every day, but you'll get better and better. Do your best to live it every day. It's really that simple, that power of that personal commitment to yourself.

• 2:31Rich Roll?

  That's Kamal Ravikant, and this is the Rich Roll Podcast.

• 2:46Rich Roll?

  The Rich Roll Podcast. Greetings, seekers. Hello and welcome to my podcast frequency. I am Rich Roll. Good to be with you today. I hope that you are maintaining your health, your sanity, your immunity, your equanimity, as our chaotic world is spinning off its axis. All good here. Can I read an email? I'm going to read an email. This one is from Dr. Heidi O'Connor, and it goes like this. "I'm sending you this note after completing a seven-day stretch covering the ICU as a pulmonary critical care doctor in Boston, Massachusetts." Wow, how about that? "Several years ago, I somehow stumbled upon your book, Finding Ultra. I had been a three-sport athlete in high school and then continued playing two

• 3:31Rich Roll?

  sports in college. I kept up with running during med school and was able to complete a marathon, but really used running as a way for managing stress. Unfortunately, working long hours during my subsequent medical training and when I became an attending physician led to reduced exercise, poor diet, and worsening stress over the years. I became increasingly unhappy and burned out with work and felt truly unhealthy. I read your book, and it inspired me to make a change. I became predominantly plant-based and gave up eating meat. I'm a diehard New Englander, so haven't been able to give up occasional Cape Cod seafood or Vermont cheese yet." Oh Heidi, we'll work on that. Don't worry. I bought a Peloton, which has been a saving

• 4:14Rich Roll?

  grace. I've gotten into hiking and took up meditation. I even got back to running from time to time. I've been able to lose the 20 pounds that I crept on over the years and actually feel I'm in as good a shape as I was in my twenties. The reason why I felt compelled to write you is that I think you have had a major impact on my life, getting me in the best shape I could be in to help take care of my patients and myself during this COVID pandemic. It's been some of the most emotionally heart wrenching times I have experienced, taking care of patients, trying to support their families and my ICU staff, and also very physically demanding. I haven't been able to do another marathon or any other great athletic feat yet, but in some ways, I think getting through the

• 4:57Rich Roll?

  terrible times we are experiencing is my marathon. Thanks again for all your inspiring, thought provoking, and humorous podcasts to keep me company on my drive in and home from work. You are helping more people than you know. Take care, Heidi. Wow. Heidi, thank you for the kind words, but mostly thank you for your selfless service on the front lines. I can't imagine what you're currently enduring right now. And please set aside any kind of self flogging that you're doing over not being able to take care of yourself physically in this incredibly stressful moment. I'm sure we're

• 5:38Rich Roll?

  going to get through this, and I'm also sure that what you are currently enduring dwarfs running a marathon. And I have no doubt that you will succeed in whatever you put your mind to, whether it's a marathon or anything else. So thank you again for sharing that story. Speaking of metamorphosis, I've got nothing but love for stories of personal transformation and

• 6:00Rich Roll?

  That is perhaps the heart, the most predominant theme of this show. The underdog, the everyman, meets unforeseen obstacles. The odds are stacked against him or her. That person is brought to his or her knees, compelled to seek deep within. And rather than buckle or perish, ultimately leverages that experience to evolve, to evolve into something stronger, something more deeply self-actualized and authentic. We call it the hero's journey. And it's this irresistible archetypal narrative that speaks to, that connects with

• 6:43Rich Roll?

  the mystical embedded deep within all of us. There's just something indelible and powerful and universal about these stories. And over the years, I've had the good fortune of hosting many flavors of this hero's journey, from Olympic medalists and Arctic explorers to professional dirtbags, all sharing their version of the hero's journey, their story of physical triumph. But here's the thing, life's greatest journey isn't physical. It's not free soloing El Capitan, or crossing Antarctica, or running ultra marathons in Patagonia. Ironically, it's learning how to love ourselves.

• 7:24Rich Roll?

  And nobody embodies this specific genus of the hero's journey better than my new friend, Kamal Ravikant. Now, to be clear, Kamal has more than earned his spot as a respected adventurer. He's a guy who was brought up from humble beginnings and has gone on to trek to one of the highest base camps in the Himalayas. He earned his US Army Infantry Patch. He walked 550 miles across Spain and meditated with Tibetan monks in the Dalai Lama's monastery. And professionally, this guy's done it all too. From launching successful startups to managing venture capital funds, Kamal has spent the better part of his career

• 8:08Rich Roll?

  working alongside some of the smartest investors and engineers in Silicon Valley, all while writing books in his free time. But his most transformative experience, he would say, has been the simple act of learning how to love himself. So. Why is this so hard for us? I got a bunch more I want to say about that and Kamal, but first, you know what time it is.

• 8:41Rich Roll?

  Okay, so I first heard about Kamal by way of his frequent appearances on our mutual and beloved friend, James Altucher's podcast. And I can't quite put my finger on it, but there was just something really compelling about this guy that left me wanting to know more about him. So I got ahold of his book, Love Yourself Like Your Life Depends on It. And here's the thing. I'm all about spiritual and emotional growth, but I also have a pretty deep, profound aversion to schlocky self-help. And despite my many fears, my insecurities, my profound imposter syndrome, my people-pleasing tendencies,

• 9:24Rich Roll?

  I actually never thought I had much of an issue with self-love. So I freely admit to a little bit of initial skepticism about this book. But I have to say that it really ignited something in me. It's simple. It's very straightforward, but also profound in its simplicity, I suppose. And it's led me to this realization that I actually still harbor a lot of unhealed wounds. And it sets forth all these practices that I found not just helpful, but actually transformative in many ways. So today, we unpack the hero's journey of Kamal Ravikant. It's a conversation about his trials and his triumphs,

• 10:08Rich Roll?

  his divine moment, the path of self-discovery that followed, and the near-death experience that he recently survived. It's about how he learned to love himself, the simple routine he deploys to maintain it, and why this practice is essential to living an examined, self-actualized life of presence and purpose and contentment.

• 10:31Rich Roll?

  For the stoics and the skeptics out there who are listening, I implore you to set aside whatever creeping resistance you may be feeling right now and really give this one a shot with an open mind and an open heart. Final note, this was recorded pre pandemic, so there is no mention of coronavirus. But nonetheless, it's a conversation packed with timeless wisdom that I think you're going to find very helpful in this unique moment. Kamal's vulnerability is refreshing. I love this conversation. I'm enjoying my newfound friendship with him and I really hope that this serves you. So this is me and Kamal Ravikant.

• 11:08Speaker 01

  Yeah, I've been very, very grateful with Harper One. They're just, they're really, and look, they published my favorite book of all time, The Alchemist.

• 11:14Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 11:16Speaker 01

  You know, so like to walk in there, obviously that poster, then when they like, my poster is going to be by it, you know, like it's, it's pretty special.

• 11:22Rich Roll?

  It's a crazy thing when you go to the publishing offices and you see the cover of your book, or you see it like on the wall with these other authors that you revere and have read over the years. Like, there's something really magical and special about that.

• 11:38Speaker 01

  It really is. I remember just walking into, like, when I was going to, you know, like, because I've written other books as well, like a novel and so forth, and going with my agent to Simon and Schuster, Random House, Harper Collins, all these, like, these are, I grew up reading and knowing these names, and to be there and there's just offices full of nothing but books.

• 11:56Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 11:56Speaker 01

  It's beautiful and as a writer to be there, you know, it's, it's what you dream of.

• 12:01Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 12:02Speaker 01

  Right?

• 12:03Rich Roll?

  It's cool also because you went from this self publishing phenomenon into traditional publishing rather than the other way around. Like, a lot of people, they're, they'll do their initial books in a traditional manner. And then when they develop an audience, then they'll self publish. But for you to have this kind of viral phenomenon, almost eight years ago, right?

• 12:29Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 12:30Rich Roll?

  With a, you know, a sort of truncated, limited version of the book, and then to develop it with a traditional publisher is, is interesting.

• 12:38Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's not something I planned on. You know, like when I did the original version, it was tiny, right? I mean, but I edited it in X, I cut out 90% of what I wrote, right? And I put it out and I didn't think I was, and I've said this enough, you know, like, I really didn't think I was going to sign any copies. Like, I was an unknown writer, you know, I was just a Silicon Valley guy. Wrote a book called Love Yourself Like Your Life Depends on it. Like, look, I failed, but look, I learned to love myself, so life's great. And, and it took off. The thing took off insanely, changed my life, like showed me just the power of my words.

• 13:11Rich Roll?

  Well, let's back it up a little bit because it kind of began with our mutual friend, James Altucher, who's actually coming here tomorrow. And you saw him this morning, it sounds bizarre, yeah.

• 13:22Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, and I promised to him that I would actually write, write it. And if he, and if he liked it, I would publish it. Otherwise, I never would have.

• 13:32Rich Roll?

  But didn't it begin, like you, you had, as you say in the book, like you gave, you got up on stage at a conference and had kind of an epiphany and made this decision to share openly and honestly about what was really going on with you in front of a, a group of CEOs and the like.

• 13:51Speaker 01

  Senators, congresspeople, pending out officials and CEOs and media types. And I was given two minutes to talk, give a talk, call if I could do anything. And other people were doing this talk too. And I had to, you know, I had a talk prepared and I got up and I, like right before I got, I'm like, this doesn't feel right, this doesn't feel right. And I got up, I'm like, I know what I'm gonna do. I'm gonna share, just share with them what changed my life this, this past summer or fall. And for two minutes, I just rambled about how I changed my life, I learned to love myself. How it saved, saved me, changed my life, how, you know, like literally transforms everything. And I got off the stage thinking, okay dude, that was, that was, that was insane. What did you just do? Like, I was trying not to look at the faces of the people.

• 14:35Speaker 01

  I wasn't used to giving talks then. And there was a line of people wanting to talk to me afterwards. It was insane. Like, people like, this is why I came to this conference, to hear you, like, say this.

• 14:46Rich Roll?

  Was it just that they found the vulnerability refreshing? Or what do you think it was specifically that connected?

• 14:55Speaker 01

  I'm guessing I was probably the only one who spoke that open at that conference first. But one, but I think it was something about just a reminder. You know, like sometimes a reminder and I share with them like, look, this was, this turned out to be a very, we all know, we've all been told, love yourself, right? In fact, it's kind of annoying and cliche, right? What I told them was like, look, I was at bottom and I figured out a practical way to do it for myself. You know, because I needed it. You know, it was the one thing that I felt something inside me said, this is going to save you. And I just went with it. I figured out in a very practical, you know, I'm a Silicon Valley guy. So it's like a very practical, methodical way that just that ended up working for me. And so it's like, I got the secret.

• 15:37Speaker 01

  It's not like, hey, love yourself, here's love yourself, step one, two, three, four, five, bingo, you'll love yourself. You know, so I think I shared briefly, quickly the steps and then they all wanted to know more and like how to do them. And so that's when there was a line afterwards. And then when I would share with friends how to do it, there'd be like all these questions. So which is why I originally wrote the thing down to just, okay, I'm just going to give out copies to people.

• 16:00Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 16:01Speaker 01

  Right.

• 16:02Rich Roll?

  Wasn't it, was it, you got, you got an email that you forwarded to James and James was like, you should write a blog post. I'll post it on my site. And you were like, there's no way I'm doing that.

• 16:10Speaker 01

  No way, man, no way. I'd sent an email to a friend who's going through a hard time just describing briefly.

• 16:16Rich Roll?

  The like the practical, you know, aspect of.

• 16:19Speaker 01

  And it really helped him. And James was like, oh, I'm going to publish this on my blog. And this is before he had his podcast, right? I'm like, I was like, no way all my friends read this. I'm terrified like I, but he's like, he was really, he's responsible for this happening because he's like, look, this, you could write about entrepreneurship, you could write about fitness, all these things. Plenty of people can, but this, the most important thing, you're writing about it, you're sharing it where no one else is. You gotta put this out there.

• 16:44Rich Roll?

  He's usually right about those things.

• 16:46Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 16:46Rich Roll?

  And I think he's been proven historically correct in this case. But his sweet spot, I mean, he's basically created an entire career about, you know, around having the courage to share your, you know, your failures and your vulnerabilities. And he obviously identified something special in your story. And that kind of dovetailed, you know, right into the sweet spot of the kind of things that he likes to share about.

• 17:14Speaker 01

  Yeah, and you know, I still didn't think I was gonna do it. So I was like, tell you what, you know, I've been, I've been training myself to be a literary fiction writer for like over a decade when I was building startups, right? I wanted to write literary novels, you know, like I was just studying like crazy. I was like, well, let me write this down as a little practical, almost like a primer of something. And, and I don't know where like, where how we decided that if he liked it, I would self-publish it. At that time, you know, Kindle was out and like, you know, they were like, all these success stories happening there. And I did it. It took me a month and I sent it to him and I didn't hear from him a few weeks. And I was like, oh, thank God, he hates it. I can move on, like blah, blah, blah. Because he's like, I love it.

• 17:56Speaker 01

  I'm gonna write a blog post about you publishing it, but this day. So that means I had to publish it by that day. And so, and so I, I remember when I, a friend of mine reached out to me. She's like, come on, do you remember how terrified you were when you pressed submit on Kindle? Like, I think I was calling people. I was like, I don't want to do this. I don't want to do this. I don't want to do this. Best thing I ever did was click that button, you know?

• 18:19Rich Roll?

  And, and it was a very short, kind of truncated version of what, you know, ultimately, you've recently published, right? This is kind of like a practical manual.

• 18:27Speaker 01

  It was more of a primer. Here's, because I was scared. I didn't know what to expect. It was just like a little thing I was gonna give out to people, to friends, right? Who I knew needed it. Because like, you understand this, when you find something that works, that makes you better, you kind, you kind of feel a responsibility to share it. You know, you really do. Like, that changed my life. And so you, when you, especially when it's yours, when you come up with it, you're like, I gotta share this, because I'm not, you see the good impact it has on you, and then you see other people struggling. You're like, wait, I think I have a solution here. You know, at least try it. It worked for one human being. It's on the human mind, the human heart. You have a human mind, human heart. Try it out. You know, it's

• 19:07Speaker 01

  a very basic thing. But when I put it out, I held back a lot, you know, because I was scared. I wasn't expecting it. I didn't want to share all my stories or whatever. But this exists, actually, not because of me, this exists because of readers. So I did something. I didn't, I was expecting to sell a lot of copies, so I put my email address on the book. I was like, hey, if you got questions, email me. Guess what? People emailed. I have, God, I know so many emails. You know, a lot of wonderful, beautiful emails saying how it changed people's lives, saved their, literally saved their lives, you know. Like, in the moment of reading the book, they decided not to kill themselves. Many of those. And then just like how, you know, changing their lives, any confidence, self-esteem, all this. It all arises from the same thing, you know?

• 19:52Speaker 01

  And, but there were questions. And after six, seven years, there's a whole, you know, because I read all the emails or respond to them, is, there's a pattern. You know, there's themes. And I was like, look, I held back. And I realized I need to put this book out. If I'm gonna have it out, I need to have it in a real way. I need to, I need those questions resolved. I know why those questions are coming up is because I held back. So I gotta stop holding back.

• 20:17Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 20:17Speaker 01

  And so that's what I set out to do.

• 20:20Rich Roll?

  And that's why it took seven years.

• 20:22Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 20:22Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 20:23Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 20:24Rich Roll?

  To what do you attribute the virality of the original self-published version? I mean, you sold like half a million copies, right?

• 20:30Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 20:31Rich Roll?

  It's crazy.

• 20:31Speaker 01

  That.

• 20:32Rich Roll?

  Did it start with James's blog? Or like, how did the word get out?

• 20:35Speaker 01

  Yeah, it started with James's blog. Then people got on their own and started tweeting it, Facebooking it. It was all over Facebook. People were just sharing on Facebook. Tim Ferriss tweeted about it, that it got him out of a funk. So there were all these people like trying to do it. But here's the interesting thing, you know, I've, I've built companies in Silicon Valley. I know the online game very well. Like, if you, if you get an app, if like, if you're looking at someone to invest in someone's app, right? You look at the data. Now, you can game metrics, you can buy downloads, you can game even book numbers, you can buy your own books and all that, right? But with this, what happened was, it, it was just, it came out, it's hovering like this, it shot up, came out a little bit, and then just stayed for seven years like that.

• 21:19Speaker 01

  Just up there consistently. That is when you know you have something special. When a product does that, whatever it is, it hits something. You know what it was? It was, I'm not a self-help, it's a self-help book written by a guy who's not a self-help guy. Just a guy who works on himself, who's lived a bit, you know, who shares his personal journey and exactly how he did it.

• 21:41Rich Roll?

  And it's very easy to read, easy to digest. It's very plain spoken.

• 21:46Speaker 01

  On purpose.

• 21:47Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 21:48Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 21:48Rich Roll?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, I wanna, I wanna work our way up to getting into the, the nuts and bolts of the book, but let's, you know, take it back a little bit, because I wanna better understand what got you to this point and, and to kind of contextualize the whole thing. So you grew up in Queens.

• 22:06Speaker 01

  Jamaica, Queens.

• 22:07Rich Roll?

  Single mom.

• 22:08Speaker 01

  Where rap, Jamaica, Queens, where rap came from.

• 22:11Rich Roll?

  Uh huh.

• 22:11Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah.

• 22:12Rich Roll?

  I'm a DM C from there. And, and, and my sense is that you were always like your own person, like, you know what I mean?

• 22:19Speaker 01

  Yeah, I was a pain in the ass.

• 22:20Rich Roll?

  Not, not an easy person to control or corral.

• 22:22Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 22:23Rich Roll?

  You had a mind of your own.

• 22:24Speaker 01

  Yeah, I was always a pain in the ass that way.

• 22:26Rich Roll?

  Uh huh. School came easy.

• 22:29Speaker 01

  It did. It was boring. I never felt like I fit in anywhere, you know, I never fit in. Look, I was a shy kid. I just read like crazy, you know, like I read a lot. Books from my refuge as a child. We went through some really rough stuff, like really, at one point we were homeless, you know, had an abusive dad. There's like, you wanna start listing things, we went through them. And it was rough. And books from my refuge, that's what I escaped to. And which if you think is amazing, and now I write books, right? But yeah, that was the childhood. But I always, I've always done my own thing. Like even I went to college, had a full scholarship, and after a year I'd left it and joined the army.

• 23:12Rich Roll?

  I know. That's such a strange choice. Like, you know, walk me through that decision tree.

• 23:19Speaker 01

  Step one, I'm 18. Step two, I'm in college for a year. It's a state school, and you can get straight A's without really going to classes, just partying. Bored out of my mind. I wanna challenge. Thirty, step three, I'm an immigrant child. I want to serve this country. You feel that, you know? People often forget that about the immigrant story, just how much, how grateful you feel to this country, you know, for being a part of it. And, and I wanted to be challenged, and I wanted to just, so all that, put that together, and then just walking by recruiter's office one day, decided to pop in, and they had a good, good sales pitch.

• 23:57Rich Roll?

  Effective marketing.

• 23:59Speaker 01

  It works, man.

• 24:00Rich Roll?

  Wow. So you had one by one Marines, Navy.

• 24:03Speaker 01

  All of them, right?

• 24:04Rich Roll?

  Army, Air Force.

• 24:05Speaker 01

  All of them. At that time.

• 24:06Rich Roll?

  What was it that put the Army over the top?

• 24:09Speaker 01

  Yeah, that's a great question, right? That's a great question because they offered the most money for college after. Because I still knew I wanted to get my education. It was very important to me, but I knew I didn't want to go to a state school. I wanted to go to a smaller private school. And to be able to afford that, also Army would give me more money. Because they also, not only they offered money, they said, okay, I'll tell you what. You know, they give you this test called the ASVAB, which is decides what specialty you can choose. I got 98th and 99th percentile, so I could choose anything. They're like, but if you choose the one that people who fail take it, will give you more money. Which is infantry, you're a cannon fodder. I was like, sweet. But on top of that, if you take a harder one, mountain infantry will give you even more. I was like, sweet.

• 24:53Rich Roll?

  Just signed up for the hardest thing with the most financial upside.

• 24:57Speaker 01

  But you know, it was great. It's like, the way I look at it, if you're gonna do something, you know, do the, do the, do that all in version. I don't want to drive a truck.

• 25:05Rich Roll?

  Another part of the immigrant story, you know, I presume that, you know, on some level, your parents immigrated here to, you know, try to, try to create a better life or a different kind of life than, you know, what was being experienced in, in India. So, what's the phone call, you know, back to mom like when you tell her?

• 25:27Speaker 01

  You know, it's actually interesting if you think about it. The life in India they had was like middle class, upper middle class. But there's something about the pull of America that draws people to it because it is, there's something special about it. So it wasn't like escaping from poverty or anything like that. You know, there is a, there is a draw to this country, to, to the freedom to be able to do anything, go anywhere. I think that that is also part of that immigrant story. Although we didn't have that when we came here, you know, it was pretty, quite the opposite in the beginning. The phone call to mom was a very interesting one. It's from college. Mom, I'm thinking about joining the Army. Pause. Okay, think carefully. A week later, Mom, I joined the Army.

• 26:17Speaker 01

  That was.

• 26:18Rich Roll?

  That was. And, and her reaction, silence?

• 26:21Speaker 01

  Silence.

• 26:22Rich Roll?

  That was it?

• 26:23Speaker 01

  Silence.

• 26:23Rich Roll?

  Uh huh.

• 26:24Speaker 01

  I mean, I was at the age where she couldn't do anything.

• 26:26Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 26:26Speaker 01

  And she knew me, you know?

• 26:29Rich Roll?

  You had already established a pattern of doing your own thing.

• 26:32Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 26:32Rich Roll?

  And, and she had a healthy dose of like, I can't control this kid anyway.

• 26:36Speaker 01

  And she was like, this might be good for.

• 26:38Rich Roll?

  On board with this?

• 26:38Speaker 01

  She was actually, I remember she told me.

• 26:39Rich Roll?

  A little discipline?

• 26:40Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 26:41Rich Roll?

  Right?

• 26:41Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 26:42Rich Roll?

  So, boot camp then, right?

• 26:44Speaker 01

  Boot camp, Fort Benning, Georgia, in the middle of the summer.

• 26:47Rich Roll?

  Uh huh.

• 26:50Speaker 01

  It was, it was, um, I look back at that as actually like one of the defining experiences of my life. And I'm so glad I gave myself that gift as an 18 year old. And I wasn't thinking of it that way that back then. Cause look, you know, if you look at any tribal society, any primitive society, quote unquote, primitive, you know, there's always a rite of passage you go through from going from boy to man, you know, girl to woman. There's something about you challenged, you tested, then you welcomed into the tribe. Now you're a man, now you like, you've earned this right. We miss that often in our society. I don't think college and partying is that, you know, there's like something about where you're challenged and you step up and you step up, you realize what you're made of.

• 27:28Rich Roll?

  Mm hmm.

• 27:29Speaker 01

  Boot camp did that for me. And then infantry boot camp did that for me. Like every day you're challenged. There's no pleasant day. There's no like, ah, man, I'm just gonna sit here and, but I was still the guy and, and, you know, patrol and I'd be, they'd be like, hey, move, cause I'm standing there looking at stars.

• 27:43Rich Roll?

  Yeah. But a sense of pride and, and ownership, like.

• 27:47Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 27:48Rich Roll?

  I did this hard thing. This is mine.

• 27:50Speaker 01

  Yes, at that age.

• 27:51Rich Roll?

  Kind of cruising through school, there probably wasn't that same, you know, sense of accomplishment.

• 27:57Speaker 01

  Yeah, there wasn't that at all at school. And the military is good about that. They do give you that. You know, they do challenge you and, and they do make you feel like you earn what you get.

• 28:08Rich Roll?

  Uh huh.

• 28:08Speaker 01

  Yeah, they're very good about that.

• 28:10Rich Roll?

  And were you deployed?

• 28:11Speaker 01

  No, I uh, I was in during Desert Shield as a storm. By the time they said, hey, if you may deploy you, I was light infantry, mountain infantry. The thing was over because it was an air war.

• 28:22Rich Roll?

  Uh huh. So you're just hanging out in Georgia?

• 28:25Speaker 01

  Georgia, foot drum, yeah, just, I um, funny enough, I ran into someone who was in tenth mountain of flight here. And randomly, I never meet people, we were talking, she's like, yeah, I was deployed all the time. I was like, yeah, well, you actually worked, I didn't. So that, you know, kudos to you.

• 28:41Rich Roll?

  So how long were you in the military then?

• 28:43Speaker 01

  Total, I think a little over three years. I did some in the reserves because I went to school. I had a chance to go to your um, a private school upstate in New York, so I went there.

• 28:51Rich Roll?

  So you took that, that sweet army money, put it to work.

• 28:54Speaker 01

  It wasn't, it turned out to be not much.

• 28:57Rich Roll?

  It was, it was all, it was all marketing fluff?

• 28:59Speaker 01

  Yeah, it turned out to be way little. There's all these stipulations. You know, when you're an eighteen year old signing a contract, you do not look at the fine print. You just said, they just said this much money, you say, okay, sweet. It's very, when the road meets the road is like, there's loads of fine print. But I'm still, you know, that's fine.

• 29:17Rich Roll?

  So you go back to school. What's the plan?

• 29:24Speaker 01

  The plan is to, it wasn't a plan, I was studying economics at the time. Ended up studying economics and biology, and I thought I was gonna go to med school and be a uh, emergency pediatric uh, person. I was working hospitals and level one trauma centers uh, to get that experience, you know, for med school.

• 29:45Rich Roll?

  What was the allure of medicine?

• 29:48Speaker 01

  Do something useful. Like I, it was like, I could go anywhere in the world and be useful. I could land in a random village in Timbuktu, you know, and I could be useful. That's what it was.

• 30:00Rich Roll?

  Yeah. And so how come that didn't happen?

• 30:03Speaker 01

  Um, I took a break. I backpacked around for a while. My dad died. I went to India to Kazakhistan. We weren't close at all, so we were estranged, but I was with him when he died. And I was in the hospital when he died. And it was being in the hospital, watching the experience kind of shook me up. I couldn't be in, I had to get away from hospitals for a little while. And when I came back, I ended up actually wandering with a backpack for about eight months through India and Nepal and Europe with like $3,000 to my name, nothing more, like no credit cards, nothing. And living, I think, in Europe on $5 a day. That was my

• 30:44Speaker 01

  budget, $3 a day. And when I came back, I knew I wanted to write what I'd experienced. I wanted to, I knew I had stories to tell. So I started writing and I was looking at medical school and then Silicon Valley was happening. And my brother, he, he called me, he said, hey, get the New York Times this weekend. I said, why? He said, just get the New York Times. I said, okay. And so I'm reading the New York Times, trying to figure out why. And the Sunday Magazine, there's a two-page write-up of my little brother, you know, on this, on this company he started.

• 31:16Rich Roll?

  Is that for Angel List?

• 31:18Speaker 01

  No, no, Angel List is more recent. That was way back in the day, like, you know, the first dot com.

• 31:24Rich Roll?

  Right. So we're early dot com boom.

• 31:26Speaker 01

  Early dot com boom. And a two-page write-up. I mean, in fact, Amazon reviews and all this stuff copied what he built. They didn't have that. Like, that's, you know, and all those ratings that exist on the web exist because of what he built. And I called him up and he's like, look, what are you doing watching people die every day? He said, come out here, we're building the future. I was like, man, you know, like, I was kind of worn out watching people die at work. And, and I'd just finished a first draft, a terrible, terrible draft of a novel.

• 31:57Rich Roll?

  Right. You went, like, you went up, upstate, in upstate New York and hold up to try to write a novel, right?

• 32:02Speaker 01

  Yeah. And wrote it. And it was atrocious, absolutely atrocious, you know? Six months, you know? But sometimes you gotta do the atrocious to understand that, look, there's a path to not atrocious.

• 32:15Rich Roll?

  Of course, you know, this, this book here doesn't exist without doing a lot of atrocious writing, you know, over the decades.

• 32:23Speaker 01

  I've done those 10,000 hours.

• 32:25Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 32:26Speaker 01

  And when he said that, I thought about it and I was at the gym, at Gold's Gym, I was working with this guy. And I was talking to him, I was like, man, I want to go out there, but I'm scared. I'm like, you know, there's, what if? He's like, look, come on. I have one piece of advice. I said, what? He said, leap and then that will appear. And I don't know what it was, but literally that shifted for me right there. So I got rid of everything, bought a one-way ticket and just moved out and.

• 32:54Rich Roll?

  Leap and then that will appear.

• 32:56Speaker 01

  Yeah. And it's something I've learned. That's how it works.

• 32:59Rich Roll?

  It does. It absolutely, I mean, that's, I've had many experiences with that very thing. And what I've also noticed is when I try to sidestep that by having my foot in both camps at the same time, trying to do the safe and secure thing, like, well, I can't quite leave this thing yet. So I'm going to develop this on the side and when it matures, then I'll take the leap when it's safe. Never works out.

• 33:24Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 33:24Rich Roll?

  I mean, maybe it does for other people. There's a, there's a rational argument for that. But there is something, I think, transcendent and magical when you have the faith and the courage to completely let go of what's not serving you and, and take that step into the unknown. And in my experience, when you do that full of heart, well-intentioned and prepared to work your ass off, that inevitably something happens to catch that fall and create a soft landing.

• 33:50Speaker 01

  That is, you know, I think it's one of the fundamental truths of life. It really is. But there's no way to learn it. You have to experience it, you know, it's.

• 34:01Rich Roll?

  And scary.

• 34:01Speaker 01

  Yeah. It's scary each time you do it. Because it's a different, it's a different cliff you're jumping off, different scenery.

• 34:08Rich Roll?

  But you got little bro out there killing it. And we should say, your brother is Naval, right? He's, he's kind of become like a guru in his own right. It's kind of an amazing thing, right? What, what's going on with you guys?

• 34:19Speaker 01

  I don't know, man. Maybe it's in the blood. Who knows? Uh, but you know, he was doing his own thing. I went there to do my own thing. And uh, so I end up like working there and building startups and kind of fell in love with it. Like the ability to create these companies and no one knowing what they're doing. We're just making it up at the point, right? Figure it out and just throwing it online and seeing if it works. If not, you're iterating and there was a, there was a energy that I hadn't experienced before. There was an excitement and an energy of building the future.

• 34:54Rich Roll?

  Well, it was this crazy moment where ideas could get funded seemingly overnight and turn into these realities.

• 35:02Speaker 01

  We just had the experience of the cryptocurrency boom, same, but cryptocurrency boom was way more scammy, you know?

• 35:07Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 35:08Speaker 01

  Um, but yeah, it really was. And, and people coming from all over the world, uh, from there just to like, you know, go west. It was, it was literally go west, young man, all over again. And it was a very special moment in time and that's where I trained. I look at that as my MBA where I trained. You know, you just get thrown in a little, we have to, okay, now we've gone public. We gotta figure out how to monetize. I don't know. Come on, figure it out. Okay. I'll figure out how to monetize this public company on the web, you know, cause just no one knew.

• 35:38Rich Roll?

  Did you have a sense that, that your kind of multi, multi-disciplinary approach to life served you in that regard? Like as somebody who had, you know, a, a kind of variety of interests and, and, you know, kind of a jack of all trades, master of none approach came in handy for that kind of thing?

• 35:57Speaker 01

  You know, it's interesting you ask that because I used to beat myself up when I was younger for having too many interests, which is why I struggled with the whole medical school thing. Because as much as I wanted to be a doctor, I knew I would have to give everything else up. I love to travel. I love to take all this time to read and write and do, do these other things, right? And startups, to be able to build a company from scratch and go take it somewhere, you basically had to do everything. And it turned out to be what I thought was my greatest weakness. Turned out to be you, you take what is you think is your weakness, you just put it in a different environment. It's your greatest strength. So yeah, it was a perfect fit and that was part of the reason why I made that choice. Cause I, I was flourishing in that.

• 36:37Rich Roll?

  Were people prior to that, throughout your life, telling you, you need to focus?

• 36:43Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 36:46Speaker 01

  Oh my God, it's so true.

• 36:47Rich Roll?

  Come on, you could be so great. Just pick a lane.

• 36:50Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah.

• 36:51Rich Roll?

  You know, and it makes you think about how many people are out there being fed, you know, some version of that story who, you know, don't find that situation where suddenly the round peg fits into the round hole.

• 37:08Speaker 01

  You know, that's probably more common than not.

• 37:10Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 37:10Speaker 01

  I would say so. I think that's the best thing is like, switch your environment. If that environment is not the fit, but it's hard. It's hard to do.

• 37:27Rich Roll?

  So you've built a bunch of startups, multiple companies over the years, rocking and rolling.

• 37:33Speaker 01

  Off and on.

• 37:33Rich Roll?

  Yeah, I mean, it's, it had to be pretty exciting. Making good money, everything's good.

• 37:38Speaker 01

  I mean, most never go anywhere. That's the dirty little secret of startups, right? Like 90 something percent fail.

• 37:44Rich Roll?

  That's similar to like, screenwriters in Hollywood or projects. You know, there's so many projects that you think are going to go, people toil on them for years and then they just end up in a drawer somewhere.

• 37:55Speaker 01

  Yeah, but at least in Hollywood, they get paid for doing those. Like, you could be working a startup for years, making practically nothing and it goes nowhere. You know, and so some went places, some went nowhere.

• 38:09Speaker 01

  But it was a, it was a good gig. Yeah, no complaints. I enjoyed it and I enjoyed working with some of the smartest people on the planet. You meet people who are stupidly, scarily smart, you know, but everyone's smart in their own way. And then to be surrounded by people who are smart in this, in a way that I'm not, and to be able to work with them and lead them and, and learn from them was, was beautiful.

• 38:33Rich Roll?

  What are some of the biggest lessons that you learned? During that tenure about life and business.

• 38:40Speaker 01

  You know what's interesting? The lessons I learned were stuff I knew. And like, like, for example, I developed a reputation for being able to build really great teams, just be able to get really great people to come on board for my crazy ideas, for me paying them nothing when they were getting massive offers, like, how, you know what, I went, I basically, I just did what I learned in the military. You know, someone used the word men because I was in the infantry and it was all men, or boys or whatever. And you take care of your men. If you're leading, you take care of them, you eat last, you know, they, you, you show up first, you leave last, you lead by example.

• 39:17Speaker 01

  Like, when you go to Fort Benning, I remember being in that bus, being taken from Atlanta Airport to Fort Benning, and there's a statue, the very famous statue of the, of an infantryman in World War II. And he's, he's got his rifle and he's got his hand up like this and he's charging forward and it says, follow me. That's basically leadership in a nutshell. Follow me. And so that's how I built stuff. Like, I was the hardest worker, I was the lowest paid guy, I led, like, all the credit always went to the team, never took any credit. Because I don't care if we win, I, I'll do just fine. I'd rather have the rewards than the credit.

• 39:54Speaker 01

  And, and, but that came from an eighteen year old. You know, I didn't learn anything like that, doing it. I learned it, it's very interesting.

• 40:05Rich Roll?

  Yeah, that is interesting. So, there's a good chance that, you know, short of some experiences that you, that you had that were working our way towards, this could have just gone on ad infinitum, iterating on, on, you know, startups, going from startup to startup.

• 40:24Speaker 01

  And then writing novels on the side and collecting rejection letters.

• 40:27Rich Roll?

  Did you keep the writing up persistently throughout all of this?

• 40:30Speaker 01

  Yeah, that's what I did in my free time. Obsessively studying the greats, like, there's certain Hemingway books I read, I don't know, twenty, thirty, forty times, underlining, see how he did what he did. I was obsessed.

• 40:41Rich Roll?

  But never the thought that, that this, that that would become your vocation? This was something you did purely for the love?

• 40:47Speaker 01

  For the love, and, and people are like, what are you doing wasting your time? You're not getting, you're getting rejection letters. Like, what are you doing, right? But it was like, I knew I wanted to put books out there, I just didn't. Know if it was gonna happen. In fact, by the time I wrote the original Love Yourself, I'd given up on writing for a couple of years. I hadn't written for a couple of years. But man, that training that I thought had been useless, you know, came out and it's been amazing.

• 41:11Rich Roll?

  Yeah. So, talk to me about the precipitating event that kind of catalyzed this whole, this whole thing. I feel like, well, here's the thing, like, like, all great, you know, personal evolutions begin with some, you know, act of destruction and, you know, it lends itself to the belief that, you know, these amazing epiphanies about the human condition grow, they emanate out of the ashes of, you know, you know, various forms of disaster.

• 41:46Speaker 01

  Well, you know, to be a phoenix.

• 41:48Rich Roll?

  Those opportunities exist. They're, they're, they're there for the taking for anybody. You can read your book and, and, you know, get a sense of, of, you know, what led you to this point that set you on a new trajectory. But the opportunity exists for anybody to take advantage of these tools for personal growth and, and evolution, shy of having to, you know, meet your maker, so to speak. But unfortunately, pain is the ultimate motivator.

• 42:14Speaker 01

  It does get your attention, I'll tell you that, you know, but it's like, I've thought about this. It's like, to be a phoenix, you gotta burn. Yeah. It's like the whole process of rebirth. It's not, it's not easy. It's not painless. You know, like, so, so the precipitating event for what led to Love Yourself.

• 42:36Rich Roll?

  The inciting incident.

• 42:37Speaker 01

  That's an incident. So what is it you call in chemistry, you know, when the reaction happens? I was, I'd built a company, I'd self-funded it for, this was gonna be my FU money company, right? And it was doing very well. I was taking, I was actually taking away a real business from Google, Yahoo, in a vertical no one had ever done before. I was pulling it off, built a great team, got the deals that no one could get. It was like, I was obsessed, right? And, and I was building three and a half years and then I ran out of money. You know, building a tech company for three and a half years, you run out of.

• 43:09Rich Roll?

  Self-funded.

• 43:09Speaker 01

  Self-funded, right?

• 43:10Rich Roll?

  Pretty much everyone's got a lot of money.

• 43:12Speaker 01

  Except for a couple people. Yeah, and I took investment and it was doing well and the whole thing blew up. And I lost everything, you know, I was, I lost my company, but along with it, I lost my, my sense of self-worth, if, to put it mildly, because my company was my complete identity, you know, what I was doing was my identity. I've, I was depressed beyond belief. I had no money. I was living off credit cards. I remember having to make some payroll on the side to some of my employees off credit cards. I was like, look, man, you bought him a crazy dream. I can't have your wife and kids, because, you know. Wow. And it was, it was a rough to be an understatement. There were times where I was like, look,

• 43:55Speaker 01

  I remember looking at the Bay Bridge from my window and really, like, I was so exhausted. I was burnt out. I was like, I was like really sick, burnt out, you know, whatever they call it, you know, fatigue, all the works. Like, I went to some doctor who worked with me later on it. And I didn't have the strength to walk over the Bay Bridge and throw myself off, otherwise I would have. You know, I was literally like that. And I think it was the next night or the night after that, I remember getting up and I was like, I was miserable. I was like, I can't do this. I gotta get out of this. I mean, again, I get out of this or die trying. That's it. I can't be in this space. And I walked over to my desk and I have a journal that I write in. And in there, and I still don't know where I came from. I sat down and

• 44:38Speaker 01

  I wrote a vow to myself. Now, I do believe in the power of personal commitment. Like, if I make a commitment to myself, I'm gonna keep it. That's something I've had for a while. Something I've trained myself for a while, but a vow. I've never written a vow to myself. That, I don't know where that word came from. And then it was a vow to love myself. It came in the moment, I am not a guy who was thinking about, hey, you know what I need? You know what I really need? I think I need to love myself. That never occurred to me once. But yet, in that moment, that's what came out. Where did it come from? Where's that, what's that deep stillness that, you know, runs the whole show?

• 45:14Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 45:14Speaker 01

  You know?

• 45:15Rich Roll?

  Well, you have this, you know, crushing incident. Your ego is, is crashing down. You've been humbled. You've been stripped away from all of the externalities that you were living for. And it's like a deconstruction of your character all the way to your very core. Right? Like, there's few things more painful in life. And to be confronted with that presents you with a choice, like destruction or rebirth. The bridge, or in your case, finding a way to love yourself.

• 45:47Speaker 01

  And they're both very tempting. I mean, in fact, that bridge is more tempting than the love yourself. I'll be honest, because the bridge is easy. Love yourself.

• 45:57Rich Roll?

  What does that even mean?

• 45:58Speaker 01

  Yeah. I remember sitting back, kind of looking at myself, like, looking at this, like, what have I just done? But I had written a vow, right, to myself. Like, there was something there, like, that doesn't just happen. And so, I was like, all right, now what? I'm gonna have to figure this out. I'm gonna have to do this. Now, even though I've written a book about it, I didn't go read, read books on it. You know, anything I'd come across in that genre had been all like platitudes, but nothing. I'm a big believer in, like, if, if someone's on fire, don't lecture to them about nature or combustion. Throw water on them, right? I didn't.

• 46:34Rich Roll?

  Practical solutions.

• 46:35Speaker 01

  Practical solutions. Show me how to mind, how to fix my mind. You know, this misery, this pain, this angst, I'm gonna get me out of it. And so, I was like, well, it's my mind. So who's gonna work on it for me? I am. I have no choice. I made this vow. So I, and now I have a direction of this, this love, this L O V E word, which I wasn't even sure what it meant. And so I started to try to do it. And I didn't know what, I tried like, I, I was like a crazy mad scientist in my apartment, just trying things. I was like, should I write it down this many times a day? This, that? Should I like, just feel excited? What should I, like, I was trying all these things. And at one point, I stumbled, I was tired. I was like, you know what? I'm just gonna start saying it to myself, because that's one thing I can do. And so I started repeating it to myself.

• 47:21Speaker 01

  And it was interesting to happen. After a couple of days, I had nothing else to do. The company was gone. I had no money, like, I wasn't like in a shape to go get a job, right? I had time. And, you know, I had a credit limit on my credit cards. And. Something started to shift after I think about two, three days. And you know, it's my mind, I'm keeping, you know, so I noticed I started to feel a little better. And all I've been doing was just running this.

• 47:45Rich Roll?

  Just looping this phrase.

• 47:47Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 47:48Rich Roll?

  Telling yourself time and time again, I love myself, I love myself, I love myself.

• 47:53Speaker 01

  That's simple. And I was like, okay, this, it could be basically because by doing this one loop, I'm actually keeping all the other loops from running, you know, with the self-destructive loops or the negative loops, but could be maybe I'm going somewhere deeper. And after three, four days, I remember I was like, well, let me try to feel it. And I started making myself feel it, you know, and it feels really fake in the beginning.

• 48:15Rich Roll?

  What, what is the process of going from head to heart with that? Like the, the, the distinction between repeating this mantra time and time again and attempting to feel it?

• 48:27Speaker 01

  Well, this is what I came up with, was I somehow connected the sense of light to the feeling of love. I don't remember, I think it might have been because of the moonlight was coming in one night through the window as I was doing this. And I was feeling the light coming from the, like a big moon and big, you know, window and in the bay. And yeah, that's what it was. I'd forgotten it, right? And, and so I remember I started to feel like light coming in and I would take a deep breath with the light coming in. And I would imagine this is not just the light from the moon. It's like all the, it's like galaxies tipping over and just the light pouring from them into my head, just coming in. And the light coming in through my body as I breathe in and I'm feeling, and I'm feeling the love come in. And then I just breathe out whatever gunk needs to go.

• 49:12Speaker 01

  And I started doing that and that shifted things like that. That was like, okay, there's something here.

• 49:18Rich Roll?

  And what was that shift? Like what, what was the physical manifestation of that?

• 49:24Speaker 01

  You noticed, you noticed like a heaviness that goes away.

• 49:28Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 49:29Speaker 01

  You know, and in fact, when I was just describing, I was kind of sort of doing it and I felt like my, my chest feel lighter. It's, there's a, you're absolutely right. There is a physical component to it that I've sort of forgotten because now I just do this, a lot of this on autopilot. But that was one of the things. And then I started doing a meditation with it. So I was just practicing, trying things because I, like I said, I had avowed nothing else to do and something was working. And so I, if it didn't shift things, I threw it away. And so by the end, I'd basically taken this basic loop. And built like a practice around it of a meditation of like a seven meditation of looking in the mirror, doing it to myself, which is more of a physical anchoring myself to my physical self, and then walking into this mental loop. And I started to shift

• 50:14Speaker 01

  everything inside.

• 50:17Rich Roll?

  How long did that take?

• 50:21Speaker 01

  Less than weeks, couple of weeks.

• 50:23Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 50:24Speaker 01

  You know, keep in mind, there was a trial and error. There's a lot of trial and error going on and a lot of disbelief. I did it because I didn't think else to do it because I made a vow and I was desperate because there was the Bay Bridge. That was my other choice.

• 50:35Rich Roll?

  Right. Desperation fuels willingness, though.

• 50:38Speaker 01

  Kind, yeah.

• 50:40Rich Roll?

  What I think is really interesting about this is that the typical reaction to experiencing something devastating would be to seek out a therapist, go to the doctor, or perhaps even, you know, go to an ashram, or seek out a guru, or start reading a bunch of books, like to, to seek externally for answers. But in your case, you kind of did the opposite. Like you just went in deeper and deeper and deeper and experimented with your own intuition and instincts. The tools that came out of this are not, I mean, there are other people

• 51:22Rich Roll?

  that do, you know, variations of the things that you're talking about. So it's not like you invented something that didn't already exist, but you, but you had to discover it within your own personal experience, rather than sit at the foot of a guru and have that person tell you to do that.

• 51:39Speaker 01

  Yeah, I'm trying to remember why I didn't seek externally. Part of it is, I'm kind of, I'm almost trying to figure things out. I've always been that kid who's trying to figure out the nature of reality since as far as I can remember. And, but you're right, it was instinct, but it was also like.

• 51:56Speaker 01

  I didn't think I could go to anyone with the level of desperation I felt.

• 52:02Speaker 01

  Like I'd done therapy in college. It was one of the best things I ever did to, to, you know, go for some childhood stuff, but I'd done it, right?

• 52:12Speaker 01

  I'm trying to remember, this is a great point. I'm trying to remember why I just went in. I think because of that vow. And I was like, I made a vow to myself. I gotta keep it to myself. And

• 52:21Rich Roll?

  Was there a fear of letting anyone else know what you were experiencing?

• 52:25Speaker 01

  This crazy talk? Yes.

• 52:27Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 52:27Speaker 01

  That's a great point. That's a great point.

• 52:28Rich Roll?

  But no, I mean, just calling your friend and saying, listen, I'm thinking about jumping off the bridge. Like I'm in a, I'm in a bad state. Like I need help. Or were you just, were you isolating and like determined to figure it out on your own?

• 52:40Speaker 01

  The latter.

• 52:40Rich Roll?

  As opposed to seeking help?

• 52:42Speaker 01

  The latter.

• 52:43Rich Roll?

  Cause that can also be, that can lead people to

• 52:46Speaker 01

  To the bridge.

• 52:46Rich Roll?

  Greater depths of darkness.

• 52:47Speaker 01

  That could lead them to the bridge. Yeah. That was, I wouldn't recommend it.

• 52:52Speaker 01

  Yeah. Been that, that path. It's, there's many paths to transformation. Some are easier than others. I would recommend an easier path.

• 53:01Rich Roll?

  So I had, yesterday I had this guy Shane Parrish in here. Do you know who Shane is? Farnham Street?

• 53:06Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 53:07Rich Roll?

  And, and there's an interesting juxtaposition between the things that we talked about and what he talks about in his writing and his, and in his book. And, and, and what you talk about in that Shane is a guy who has a computer scientist mind and realized that nobody had really canonized how to make good decisions. And so he sought, he sought, he went out into the world and canvassed the best information possible and tried to create like a, a lattice work, an encyclopedic lattice work of how to make good decisions.

• 53:47Speaker 01

  Interesting.

• 53:48Rich Roll?

  You know what I mean? Like in a very kind of rational, logical way, saying, we need, we need a better guide on how we're making decisions that impact our lives. So we can lead better lives and, and create better businesses, et cetera. And his, so his focus was, was, was very much a looking outward. What are the, what are the greatest minds of all time? What have they had to say about this? Let me take the best of that and figure out a way to synthesize it in a way that can, that can help me.

• 54:18Rich Roll?

  Help me figure out like a program, for lack of a better word, to make better decisions. In your case, there's, there's, there's an analogy here and kind of a converse relationship in that you looked inward and rather, rather than, than going outward and saying, what do the greatest, most enlightened minds have to say about how I can get myself out of this hole, you just went inward and trusted your instinct, you know, it was, it was very much an emotional, spiritual journey of, of trying to deepen your connection with self and, and, and not be influenced by the outside world.

• 54:55Speaker 01

  Man, you should have been around then. You put it beautifully. I, I look at it, I didn't know what I was doing.

• 55:01Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 55:03Rich Roll?

  And, and in that original version of the book, and now, you know, more fully fleshed out.

• 55:08Speaker 01

  Significantly fleshed out.

• 55:09Rich Roll?

  In, in Love Yourself Like Your Life Depends On It, you, you kind of walk people through like, here's what I did, and here's how you can do it too. And there's a variety of practices that begin with looping this mantra of, I love myself. You've got a breath work practice, ten breaths. This meditation practice where, in your case, it's seven minutes, you find a song that, you know, basically allows you to anchor yourself, and that's a daily thing. This mirror practice, which I want to talk about. And they're all like very short, easy things to do. When undertaken consistently, can really shift those neural pathways and, and, and alter, you know, how you, how you, how you feel physically and how you feel emotionally.

• 55:52Speaker 01

  Yeah, because that comes from just like, I, I want to be efficient. It's just called, basically, I'm lazy. You know, so I want to do the least amount of work for the greatest, greatest impact. And, and I don't want to spend the rest of my life walking around doing like a crazy man, you know, just speaking to myself, I love myself, right? So like, I was just trying to, what is, what causes the greatest shift that I can do? And just start doing those regularly. So these were some of the things, the ten breaths one is really, it's simple, man. It's so simple, but.

• 56:22Rich Roll?

  Walk me through it.

• 56:23Speaker 01

  It's, so remember the prior, what I told you about, it's, so we're breathing every day, whether we want to or not, until we're not. So ten breaths. Throughout the day, like actually I was doing on the, on the Uber ride here, I'll actually just pause from everything, like if I can, I'll close my eyes and I'll take. A deep, the ten deep and purposeful breaths, these are intentional breaths. This is for these ten breaths, this is what I'm doing. This is who I'm being. And with the in-breath, same thing. The light from galaxies coming in above, the light, but the light comes a feeling of love. You know, we're wired for light.

• 56:56Rich Roll?

  And are you saying I love myself as you're doing that?

• 56:59Speaker 01

  Sometimes, sometimes no, sometimes just feeling the love. Because I, because I've anchored the feeling of light to love. Right? And you just, if you do it enough times, it just becomes natural. And I feel the love come in and just go in. And I just feel my heart and my chest just open and get lightened. And then I just breathe out. And what happens is usually about the sixth or seventh, I notice automatically, but I'm breathing out, breathing out, thank you. So breathe in love, breathe out, thank you. Ten breaths, just throughout the day, pause and do that. It settles you better than anything. It's a very simple thing. So I've added these throughout the, basically what I've done in the book, I've showed all the different things I do. Pick and choose what works for you, but this is also the core practice. But that's, that one, anyone can do anywhere. You can do it in the toilet, you can do it in the shower.

• 57:44Speaker 01

  You have no excuse not to breathe.

• 57:47Rich Roll?

  What's funny is that, is that they're so simple, right? And, and it's easy to, to dismiss them as hokey, right? Like you think, oh, this is like Stuart Smalley looking in the mirror on Saturday night.

• 57:58Speaker 01

  Living in a bad town by the river.

• 58:00Rich Roll?

  You're worth it and you have value, you know? And it's just like, come on, man, are you serious? But I know that the, that these techniques are effective. I can't say that I've practiced this specific regimen, but I do have a very good friend. I'm part of a, like a men's group. I get together with a, with a group of guys once a week and we, with a therapist, and we talk about things that are going on in our life. And there's one friend who, who's part of this and he has been doing. This very, I don't think he's read your book, but he has been, he has been practicing the I love, I love myself mantra. And he's been doing the mirror work, like basically

• 58:42Rich Roll?

  for the last, I think like maybe four or five weeks, spending time in front of the mirror, like just staring into his eyes and saying, I love myself.

• 58:51Speaker 01

  He's read the book.

• 58:52Rich Roll?

  He must have, right?

• 58:53Speaker 01

  I haven't come across anyone else doing that.

• 58:55Rich Roll?

  And, and he has been sharing that it has been completely transformative. And this is somebody who is already very much, you know, a spiritually advanced individual. Like this guy's not new to, you know, techniques like this. He's already like, you know, a very evolved human being. And he has been telling us that like, this has really notched things up to a whole nother level for him in, in the way he's experiencing the world.

• 59:24Speaker 01

  That's awesome.

• 59:25Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 59:26Speaker 01

  You know, it's, you know, in art, you know, what is a simplicity is ultimate sophistication? If you, you gotta distill down to the simplest, simplest thing. That's where it works. That's where the truth is. It's easy to create complicated practices and, you know, I could have put in all sorts of instance bowls and this and that, which are great for, for ambiance, but...

• 59:46Rich Roll?

  People like that though. They're like, take me, yeah, I get that. I love myself. But like, take me behind the velvet rope. Like, what's the VIP version of this? It's the same thing. Like, you know, look, I've been in, I've been in 12 step forever. And you're like, really? It's the same steps? They haven't updated this thing? You know, it's like...

• 1:00:01Speaker 01

  It's a secret wall.

• 1:00:02Rich Roll?

  What? Oh, I have to like do an inventory again? Come on. Like, give me the, give me the advanced program, the AP version.

• 1:00:09Speaker 01

  Well, I did something in the book that, in the new version, that does help, does kind of go there, which is I took an experience of when I felt, this is, this is after I've been doing the practice.

• 1:00:21Rich Roll?

  Uh huh.

• 1:00:22Speaker 01

  And I kind of got lazy. I got very lazy and let life get in the way and I fell apart.

• 1:00:25Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 1:00:26Speaker 01

  You know, it turns out...

• 1:00:27Rich Roll?

  This is the whole third part of the book.

• 1:00:28Speaker 01

  Yeah. It turns out you don't just fall apart once in life.

• 1:00:30Rich Roll?

  No.

• 1:00:31Speaker 01

  You know?

• 1:00:32Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 1:00:33Speaker 01

  And, and what I did was I started doing the practice again from scratch because I hadn't been doing it for a long time. I'd gotten lazy, you know, and I'm the guy who wrote the damn book, right? And so what I did was I wrote down exactly what I went through, also the inside, and shared that in here. So one can actually see, okay, it's not just like here do this, this work, we do that, but actually see me doing it and see the inside effects. So it's the nuances matter in these things. See the nuances that are happening. See the shifts that are happening. See what I'm doing right. See what I'm doing wrong. And let me point it out to you, which is actually what get, I wanted to cut that part out so badly because it's so honest, so vulnerable. And it's thanks to Gideon. He was like, no, no, no, this is the reason why.

• 1:01:17Rich Roll?

  No, that's the shit. Yeah. I mean, that's, that's the whole thing. Because it reinforces our shared humanity, like we are fallible human beings. This is a practice. This isn't something you do and go, oh, it's all good. And I did that. And now I'm moving on to this other part of my life. Like this is, this is a recursive thing. It compounds over time. But if you take your foot off the gas, you're going to reset and you're ultimately, you know, going to regress. And the way I like to think about, I mean, I think it's profound. And I think that that third part really anchors that whole idea in a, you know, in a really grounded and beautiful way. You know, I have my own version of, of that story.

• 1:01:58Rich Roll?

  You know, it was, it was, it was impressed upon me when I was in rehab, like, look, you know, every moment, every decision that you make, every thought you entertain, every, every person that you encounter, these things are either moving you, you know, back towards a drink or moving you further away from a drink. You're either growing or you're regressing. There is no stasis. As human beings, we want to believe that we can arrive at a static state. And, and that's a great delusion that I think leads most of us astray. And when I was finishing Finding Ultra in late 2011, this memoir about addiction and recovery and this, you know,

• 1:02:37Rich Roll?

  journey towards greater self-actualization, I, I, I relapsed like 13 years sober. And I, and I relapsed. And this, you know, I'm putting, I'm turning in the manuscript, like this book's almost done. And it was one of the most shameful, embarrassing things I could ever possibly imagine. Like, how could I actually pick up a drink after 13 years when I'm about to put up, put out this book that talks about this journey towards sobriety as one very significant component of it?

• 1:03:08Rich Roll?

  And it's the very same thing, which is that I, you know, got to a place where I was on cruise control and thought that I had it handled. I never questioned whether or not I was an alcoholic, but I took my foot off the gas and deprioritized my engagement with 12 step and that community. And ultimately, you know, after, you know, a year of that, it was inevitable that what happened, happened. And luckily I found my way back immediately. And I've shared about this publicly many times, but and, and now I look at it as a gift because it rebooted my, my engagement with that, with that aspect of who I am and really reinforced this idea that it is a practice and

• 1:03:50Rich Roll?

  that this is not something you're, you're going to ultimately transcend. Like you, this is, oh, I woke up again today. Okay. I'm, I gotta go do that thing again, you know?

• 1:03:58Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's a, it is a practice. And like I use the word coasting and that's one of the reasons why, you know, I was like, look, here's the dangers of coasting and here's, but really that third part, you know, we're talking about getting Wild Harper one. He's the reason why that's still there. I was too terrified. But I'm glad I kept that because that's been very impactful to people.

• 1:04:16Rich Roll?

  Yeah, I think the vulnerability in it is, is powerful. So why don't we explain what it, what it is that, that, that kind of catalyzed that?

• 1:04:24Speaker 01

  Well, it was a really traumatic breakup. Someone I loved dearly, still love, you know, and, and it wasn't my choice. And, you know, it just kind of, I'd been going through stuff at the time I knew and that was like the incident that just kind of made me come apart at the wheels. And, and for the interesting thing was, I'm like, part of it, there was that, there was that shame. It was like, look, I'm the guy who wrote the book on how not to, how to be, how to fix this stuff, right?

• 1:04:52Rich Roll?

  You've graduated.

• 1:04:53Speaker 01

  I've graduated. I'm like, I got a day, I got a corporate job, you know, like. And, and that was actually, so I actually kind of struggled and I fought it almost like, I was like, well, maybe it won't work this time because I've fallen off this wagon. And but it's like, in the end, it was like, go what you know that works. You gotta go back to what you know that works. And I started doing it almost grudgingly, almost like, shit, grudging and grudging. And you know what? It started to work. It started to work. It started to work. And so I even show how I did the process, kind of like ass backwards. And I say like, look, this is the actual process is taking me this long because I'm, I'm fighting it. And but look, even as I'm fighting it, look at what's happening inside. Look at the effect. Every single word, every single word in this book is true.

• 1:05:37Speaker 01

  It has happened. It's what I felt. It's what I experienced.

• 1:05:42Speaker 01

  Yeah, but man, that was interesting, feeling the internal shame. I remember sitting in the airport, getting ready for flight to San Francisco, just reading David Goggins book has come out, had come out, you know? And I was reading it and I was like, you know, when you read something like David Goggins, you're like, damn, that guy's impressive, you know? And you're feeling like me, I just fell apart again, like.

• 1:06:03Rich Roll?

  Right, I know. Yeah, he could have that effect, right? A mirror for our own fallibility, right?

• 1:06:17Rich Roll?

  Well, I think what is profound about it is that destruction, it's like what you said, like, you know, if you want to be a phoenix, you gotta burn. Like, opportunity finds its moment in destruction, right? And it's, it's this grand opportunity to deepen your surrender to something more powerful than yourself, right? It's a, it's a, it's, you're being asked to, you know, prostrate yourself a little bit lower, to, you know, to really give over your ego even more, to humble yourself and, and to.

• 1:06:49Rich Roll?

  And to, you know, let go, like you're being confronted with your character defects in a really profound way, right? So then you have to forgive yourself again, and you have to do it even more profoundly than you had to prior.

• 1:07:02Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's actually, you know, I'm learning like life, you know, it's like a building a startup, excuse the analogy, but no company just rocket ships straight up to the right. It's like, it's, it's loops, you know, and, but there is something to be said about consistency and what you, what really matters, like fitness, right? If you're not consistent in your practice, it'll show, your body will show. Same with the mind. And the mind is actually more plastic, more malleable than anything else, yet it's the one that we work on the least.

• 1:07:33Rich Roll?

  We really do, right?

• 1:07:36Speaker 01

  Right?

• 1:07:37Rich Roll?

  We really overlook it.

• 1:07:38Speaker 01

  And so-

• 1:07:39Rich Roll?

  That's starting to change, but-

• 1:07:40Speaker 01

  It's starting to change, but there's a lot of stuff out there that's, I don't know if it's effective or not, there's a lot of stuff out there. In the end, it's gotta be something, what is the best workout? What is the best nutrition plan? It's the one you can do consistently. You know, that's, that's what you gotta go for. But it's consistently again, that gives you results.

• 1:08:02Rich Roll?

  Let's go back to forgiveness for a minute. I think that's an important piece in all of this. So how do you think about and practice that?

• 1:08:11Speaker 01

  Well, forgiveness, there's two forms, right? Forgiving others or forgiving yourself. The novel I wrote, Rebirth, that's about forgiveness, but that's about forgiving my father after he died, the whole journey while I walked a pilgrimage in Spain. And the result of that pilgrimage was I learned how to forgive him.

• 1:08:30Rich Roll?

  Right, like 550 miles.

• 1:08:32Speaker 01

  Yeah, Camino de Santiago. And you know what it was? In the end, it was just realizing his humanity. He was a human being, man. You can't hold- Humans to the criteria of gods, you know, but we seem to do that with the, you know, and this really is humanity. That's when you realize someone's humanity is very easy to forgive.

• 1:08:54Rich Roll?

  But in order to do that, you have to, you have to transcend your child, your childhood lens on your parent, right? And, and, and shift that perspective to see it through the eyes of the parent.

• 1:09:08Speaker 01

  Or to see the eyes of a human being looking at another human being. You can never completely remove that, right? The parent, but if you can just do a human being to another human being, that right away shifts it. And you see their struggles, you know, their even faulty decision making, whatever, but their struggles. And that's when you understand that forgiveness actually comes naturally. You can't help it. You kind of understand, you know, you don't, you don't have to accept it. You don't have to say, yes, I agree. I'm glad you, you were that way. And I'm glad you did X, Y, Z. But you can, because forgiveness ultimately is freeing yourself.

• 1:09:42Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 1:09:42Speaker 01

  You know?

• 1:09:44Rich Roll?

  Yeah, I think we look at it as a two-way street. Like, I'll forgive you when you ask me for forgiveness, or you admit what you did and how you wronged me. But ultimately, the person who's carrying the resentment or the anger, or that pain is the one who is suffering. The one who is the object of being not forgiven is often even unaware.

• 1:10:07Speaker 01

  That's our great irony.

• 1:10:08Rich Roll?

  So it's a self-inflicted harm. I was at an event, a thing last night. It's another like little group thing that I do that was created by this organization called the Nantucket Project. And they created these neighborhood, they're, they're called neighborhood projects, where little, you know, small groups of people get together and they watch a, a short film that the Nantucket Project produces. And then there's a, a discussion ensues. Kind of like to create, you know, uh, you know, greater community in our neighborhoods. And the movie that, that we watched last night in this group setting was a short documentary about the genocide in Rwanda and how the president of Rwanda was faced with this.

• 1:10:55Rich Roll?

  Prospect of how to repair his country in the aftermath of this horrible tragedy. And the story is told from his perspective and also through the perspective of a perpetrator of the genocide, somebody who killed a lot of people, and a woman who whose family had been killed. And ultimately, it's a story about how these two people forgive each other.

• 1:11:18Speaker 01

  Wow.

• 1:11:18Rich Roll?

  And it's incredibly inspiring. And it left me thinking about the incredible exponential power of forgiveness. I think there's something beautifully transcendent and unique about forgiveness in that it holds this potential energy capacity to to be so incredibly transformative. Maybe it's because it's rare. I don't know what it is about it uniquely, but but to see that, it's impossible not to be moved. And it leaves you thinking about the people in our own lives that that we refuse to forgive, or the resentments that we hold on to about how we've been wronged and the pain that that creates and the impediments

• 1:12:01Rich Roll?

  to moving forward that that constructs in our lives. And also about the people that we've harmed and thinking more deeply about people who might be out in the world carrying that kind of pain over things that we might have done.

• 1:12:18Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:12:19Rich Roll?

  And then forgiving ourselves, right, to repeat and loop the mantra, I love myself. I think self forgiveness is a subset of that, is it not?

• 1:12:30Speaker 01

  Yeah, that's actually the other part of forgiveness, right? Self forgiveness. What I found, you know, for me, it's what I've learned is start with the self first. You work on the self, the rest actually gets easier. That just naturally starts to work. And same thing with here was like in this book, you know, I have a practice that I do on forgiving myself. And it actually works beautifully. And it's a very practical practice, you know, like everything, it's practical, you can do it, and you will notice the shift. And what I learned was, I didn't have that in the original version. What I've learned is, if you're gonna make a commitment to love yourself, you can do this practice, you know, leave the path, you leave the shack, you can't leave the past, but leave the shackles of the past behind. And what you do is you forgive yourself, and then you start to love yourself. That's almost like the step by step.

• 1:13:14Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 1:13:14Speaker 01

  And makes, it makes a huge difference. And again, it's not platitude, it's actually how I do it. It's like, you know,

• 1:13:23Speaker 01

  I mean, if very quickly, it's like, I don't know where I came up with these crazy things. I had a girlfriend at the time, and she was really holding on to some stuff against herself. And I was like, look, I think I know what to do. Come with me. So we drove down to Pescadero, by the beautiful, like, just open land, cliff, looking at the oceans by the lighthouse.

• 1:13:44Rich Roll?

  It's an incredible beach. It's very wild.

• 1:13:47Speaker 01

  Oh, one of my favorite places on the planet. You can watch whales go by. It's amazing, right? Rugged Northern California. And we got there, and I gave her a piece of paper and a pen. I said, look, write down everything you're holding against yourself. Start with, I forgive myself for, then I forgive myself for, just keep on doing, keep on doing it until you're spent. And she said, okay. She said, but then you have to do this too. Shit. All right. I wasn't planning on it. And because what it was for was that she's like, you haven't forgiven yourself for not going to medical school. You beat yourself up for it. You need to redo this for that. I was like, okay. So I sat there and I wrote all the ways I forgive myself for not going to medical school.

• 1:14:29Speaker 01

  And then we both read ours out loud, away from each other. So it's a private, you could say anything, out loud until you just really feel the weight of what you've been carrying. You have to feel the weight. There's a weight, right? It's a physical thing. And you read out loud, and if not, you feel the way you're like, I'm done carrying this. I want to let it go. And then just balled up the paper, walked out to the ocean. Say, okay. And then just threw it as far as we could. And you know what? It worked. I literally, ever since that whole thing about not going to medical school disappeared, and her thing disappeared. And I've done this other times in my life for other things, or just like generally, hey, I forgive myself for every screw up over the last three months.

• 1:15:12Speaker 01

  Being human and all. And you know, like when, when I fell apart with the, with the breakup, I had, I did this exercise to forgive myself for knowing better, you know, for, for falling apart and for, um, you know, not being better. And it works. It's really, it's a simple things. And part, I think part of the reason why it works, and I say like, look, you don't have to go by an ocean. You can sit on fire. You could throw it on the toilet. It doesn't matter. It's the intention because you realize the weight of what you're carrying. You say, I let this go. Right. I choose to let this go. And it's that act of deciding that something inside shifts.

• 1:15:46Rich Roll?

  It's very similar to step four and step five and 12 step. Do you know that?

• 1:15:51Speaker 01

  No.

• 1:15:51Rich Roll?

  Oh my God. It's, yeah. I mean, basically step four involves doing this inventory of your life and your behavior, sexual inventory, a resentment inventory. It's a very robust document that you work on over time to kind of purge your, to get clarity on where your character defects come up and how you participate in these crises that you form stories around. And, and ultimately to, uh, to then give it over, to, to let it go, to surrender. And, you know, in, in the case of, of 12 step, it's like letting the higher power take it,

• 1:16:30Rich Roll?

  take it for you and letting it go. And there is, there, it is, it is a, um, it is a transformative experience. Like I, the first time that I did it, I was in rehab in Oregon and I went, I finished my inventory and I drove to the, the beach, another rugged, you know, Pacific Northwest beach, sat on the, sat on the beach by myself and did a private ceremony and I, and I, and then I, and then I burned it, you know, it was a similar to, you know, the kind of experience. And, and, and it was incredible how different I felt after that. But here's the thing, we already kind of touched on it a minute ago, but that doesn't mean you're done.

• 1:17:12Speaker 01

  No, you, there's no

• 1:17:13Rich Roll?

  You gotta go back, you gotta go back and, and it's like, okay, you went through that? All right, time to start again.

• 1:17:19Speaker 01

  But then it's like not just forgiving yourself, it's like who are you gonna be now? Right? That's where that, what I realized for the next step is you make a commitment to yourself. You know, for me, it was loving myself and that's what this whole book is about. You, then you make that commitment and then how do you keep that commitment day by day by day? So it becomes a way of being.

• 1:17:36Rich Roll?

  Uh huh.

• 1:17:36Speaker 01

  And the effects just happen in your life.

• 1:17:40Rich Roll?

  My favorite of all of these tools is, is this other recursive phrase, which is, if I loved myself, what would I do? Or some version of that, right?

• 1:17:52Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 1:17:52Rich Roll?

  If I love my, what would be the right action here if I actually loved myself?

• 1:17:56Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's a question I came up with, um, when I realized I was making poor choices and, and, and you know, like if you, most of the time in our, in our, I realize in our head, we're basically answering questions. That's what we're doing, we're asking, answering questions or, and so it was like, why don't you just create a question that I ask myself whenever I'm making, have to make choices, just to make it a habit. And, and the, the best part was the if, if I loved myself, because then it doesn't have to be, I have to be loving myself in the moment. If I love myself or what I do, because then you know the answer. Then it becomes a conscious decision. I can still choose to make the, the choice I, you know, I shouldn't make, right? The, the choice, the poor choice, whatever you want to call that. But at least I'm doing it consciously. You start living more consciously that way.

• 1:18:40Speaker 01

  And sooner or later you get tired of, you know, making the poor choice consciously and start making the better choice.

• 1:18:46Rich Roll?

  I was practicing it yesterday.

• 1:18:48Speaker 01

  Oh yeah?

• 1:18:48Rich Roll?

  Um, it's incredibly practical and it really makes you confront yourself. Like I was just, I was in the grocery store and I'm walking down the aisles and I'm like, what am I gonna eat? And it's like, I'm, I wanna, I wanna get this thing. And then I'm like, If I love myself, is that the choice that I would make? Like, if I love myself, what would I actually choose? And of course, you're gonna, you're gonna say, well, I would choose the healthy thing, the thing that's gonna make my body healthier and stronger, right? And if you have that in your conscious awareness as you're navigating these seemingly like small little decisions that you have to make throughout the day, there is a, there is a like, strong ripple effect.

• 1:19:24Speaker 01

  It's very practical. This one actually can change the trajectory of your life, this one alone. But all of these require practice, to do them, right?

• 1:19:32Rich Roll?

  Yeah. So you'll never graduate?

• 1:19:37Speaker 01

  No, apparently not. You know, and I'm always trying to figure out, what's the next level? What's the next level? Like, but man, this is a good foundation.

• 1:19:47Rich Roll?

  How does this dovetail with gratitude? Like, you hear about practicing gratitude, which is kind of an ephemeral concept. Like, how do you practice gratitude? How do you, what are actions that you can take to infuse your emotional experience with more gratitude?

• 1:20:03Speaker 01

  You know what I found is sometimes I play around, rather than love, I'll use other concepts, but the same exact practice. And I feel a light, and I feel just like all the magic of life coming down on me. And then, when I breathe out, what do you feel naturally when you feel that? Gratitude comes out. Or when you feel real love, what comes out naturally? Gratitude. I found that gratitude actually comes up naturally when you're doing this, as a side effect. But I don't even have to work on it if I work on this.

• 1:20:32Rich Roll?

  Yeah, I can see that. I'm wondering what it would be like if you walked around saying, if I was grateful, what would I do?

• 1:20:40Speaker 01

  I'd be happier.

• 1:20:41Rich Roll?

  A corollary, yeah, a rule to that.

• 1:20:43Speaker 01

  That's a great question, actually. You know what? Your mental state would be better.

• 1:20:47Rich Roll?

  I'm sure it would be.

• 1:20:48Speaker 01

  Like, this is little, simple questions that are, you know, we can ask, we should, if I was grateful, if I was, if I loved myself, you know, but we stick with the basic, basic foundation things. What's love, gratitude, there's fear, there's a few things that are just, we're just wired for, and that's it.

• 1:21:03Rich Roll?

  Yeah. Well, we've been talking for a while, and, and I feel like there's an elephant in the room, because...

• 1:21:10Rich Roll?

  You are here. It's kind of a miracle that you're even here. Like, you know, there but for the grace of God go I. You just experienced

• 1:21:21Rich Roll?

  a very near death experience that I think until very recently, you weren't even allowed to travel. So I want to hear that story. And more importantly, I want to hear how that experience has kind of colored how you think about these practices and what you wrote in the book and how it shaped, you know, how you how you think about your life going forward.

• 1:21:45Speaker 01

  Yeah, that is a hell of an elephant.

• 1:21:47Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 1:21:49Rich Roll?

  I was gonna open the podcast and talk about that, but then we just started talking.

• 1:21:52Speaker 01

  Yeah, which was great. I didn't realize we were rolling. I feel like I think we're rolling.

• 1:21:56Rich Roll?

  Yeah, we started. That's how we do it here.

• 1:21:59Speaker 01

  I like it. It's actually very comforting. You know, there's no, and we're on.

• 1:22:03Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 1:22:05Speaker 01

  It's in October. I went in for a for a surgery for an old injury I had being fit and active. I'd injured an artery. And so they went in and they fixed it. And the next morning I was going to be discharged, but the artery burst. Basically, the stitches hadn't taken. And immediately, like boom, all of a sudden, I had a soccer ball grow in my lower abdomen really fast, and that was blood. You know, an artery.

• 1:22:39Rich Roll?

  Internal bleeding.

• 1:22:40Speaker 01

  Yeah, but an artery bursting is a one way street. You know, it's a pressurized system. The hose, one of the hoses breaks. That's it. There's no, you know, like in a submarine where they shut the doors kind of thing. And it grew so big, so fast, so much pressure that it burst, and it was spraying blood out.

• 1:22:59Rich Roll?

  Spraying blood out where?

• 1:23:01Speaker 01

  Out of my lower abdomen.

• 1:23:03Rich Roll?

  So it broke through the skin?

• 1:23:05Speaker 01

  Broke through the fashion, everything. Like, imagine, I mean, it's pretty painful. I'll tell you that. But it got their attention in the hospital. Because I'd been complaining about pain and they weren't giving me any attention. And the nurses thought I was trying to get more narcotics. And then when I started spraying blood, I all of a sudden I noticed they're calling doctors. And.

• 1:23:26Rich Roll?

  Yeah, like this guy just wants more drugs.

• 1:23:29Speaker 01

  And so they immediately had to wheel me into emergency surgery. It was like right away, like boom, there was a surgery, there was someone going into a surgery. They pulled that person out, pulled me in that OR. Um, because this was literally a life or death. I was bleeding out, I bled, lost so much blood. I remember one guy just trying to like hold his hands over, but trying to hold, just stop the spray. You know? And, and I remember being in the, the OR, still being kind of wide awake. Wide awake because I was in shock and adrenaline. And all of, there was nothing, you know, no like long, drowned out, floating towards a light thing. It was just, it was flashes of images of love. It was basically images of love and fear.

• 1:24:10Speaker 01

  You know, images of just like regret, love, fear, like, um, and, and, uh, and fear in a way I've never felt fear because it was so primal. Your, your body, your mind doesn't know what to do if you lose blood like that. And you're watching your own blood spray out of your body. It, we're not designed for that. That's not a normal occurrence. Usually that results in death.

• 1:24:32Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 1:24:33Speaker 01

  And, and spraying out of your abdomen, you know, like it's not like out of your arm or something like that. And, um, and I remember the anesthesiologist and she was leaning over. And, you know, everyone had just been rushed in. This was an emergency, they're all running and there's like mayhem, they're moving things around. And, and, um, I remember these glasses she wore, they were pretty cool funky glasses. And she's like, okay, I'm gonna, you know, put something in you. I just like pushed her aside, grabbed her hand and just brought it close. I don't know what it was, but it was like, I had to tell somebody. And I was looking her in the eyes, just kind of like brought her in close. I'm like, I'm scared. And, and, and then what she did was she put her hand on my hand and something in me calmed. And as something in me fed, the two thoughts went through my head. I wasn't thinking much.

• 1:25:18Speaker 01

  One thought was, what a shitty, messy way to go. Cause here I'm watching blood spray out, people running out in an OR. This would be my last, realizing this is my last experience of life. This is my last images I'm seeing. This is not what I would have wanted, right? That's one. And second, realizing I have no fucking choice.

• 1:25:40Speaker 01

  And something got very clear, all of a sudden, you know, like the images and everything just go away and it just becomes very clear, like I have no choice. And there was a sadness to that, but then there was also like, okay. And I remember she hadn't put the IV in yet, and yet, she hadn't put the stuff in the IV, so this wasn't the drugs had kicked in, because I used to work in a hospital, so there's a part of me that still keeps an eye on that. I'd actually talked to them about it afterwards, too. And just feeling like, okay, this is it, this is it. I remember like leaning back and, because I think I'd be sitting, trying to sit up a little bit, just from the adrenaline, leaning back, feeling like this image of I'm falling

• 1:26:24Speaker 01

  backwards into the darkness, like, like you, you know, see like someone falling in an ocean, dark ocean, just falling, falling. That's what I felt like, I was just falling, falling, falling, I'm like, and that was it. That was my memory, and I didn't know you were in, that's it.

• 1:26:38Rich Roll?

  Were you conscious the whole time?

• 1:26:41Speaker 01

  Well, and then, in that, then I could feel them put something in, and then slowly, like I was starting, because they had to slash me open.

• 1:26:47Rich Roll?

  Yeah, they'd open you up, suture, that find the artery suture.

• 1:26:50Speaker 01

  Well, then, but one other thing was, I, the surgeon, when she came, she was, she had come in too, and I grabbed her hand, I was like, look, don't make me have gone through this for nothing. Fix, fix the thing I came here for. She's like, okay.

• 1:27:02Rich Roll?

  How complicated was the original surgery? I mean, did they pitch it to you like, this is like kind of a thing, you'll be laid up for a while, or like, oh, you'll be in and out, this is no big deal?

• 1:27:12Speaker 01

  Well, it was complicated, but it was a very standard microsurgery procedure. This was not expected.

• 1:27:19Rich Roll?

  Were you, was it like the same day in and out, or had you spent the night?

• 1:27:23Speaker 01

  No, I would have spent a day or two in the hospital.

• 1:27:25Rich Roll?

  But you were getting ready to be discharged when this happened. So conceivably, you could have been in the Uber on the way home, or sitting in your apartment when this happened.

• 1:27:34Speaker 01

  Yeah, if that was the case, that would have been it.

• 1:27:36Rich Roll?

  You would have, yeah, you would have, you wouldn't have made it.

• 1:27:38Speaker 01

  Yeah. It was literally like when I was, they were like process getting me ready to like say, okay, I'm getting ready for discharge.

• 1:27:45Rich Roll?

  Hmm. How much blood do you lose?

• 1:27:48Speaker 01

  I don't remember a lot, but I remember the resident saying, one of the, the resident, I was in the hospital for a while after that. And the residents and the staff that became my friends used to come hang out and talk with me in their off time and we'd eat together.

• 1:28:02Speaker 01

  And they said like, man, you were like gone. You'd like, like you'd lost as much as we could let you. And it was just like a freaking soccer ball just built up so fast.

• 1:28:13Rich Roll?

  Wow.

• 1:28:14Speaker 01

  It's insane. And that was all blood.

• 1:28:18Rich Roll?

  And in that like release, there's an acceptance and I guess an even deeper surrender, like a sense of absolute powerlessness.

• 1:28:30Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:28:31Rich Roll?

  And is there, is there a peace in that?

• 1:28:34Speaker 01

  I guess in the moment there was because you have to, because struggle doesn't do anything.

• 1:28:39Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 1:28:41Speaker 01

  And you realize that is the, when you have no choice, right?

• 1:28:45Rich Roll?

  But no white light?

• 1:28:47Speaker 01

  No, if I, the white light, it was felt like my body was, was in, was light, but everything else was darkness and it was just falling backwards. That's like the kind of image I remember. But that's almost like a third party image. So keep in mind, I was also in shock at the time.

• 1:29:01Rich Roll?

  Right, right. And, and I know you're somebody who's done like a lot of plant medicine and you know, packed into that. There are, you know, these, these experience, these sort of near death experiences that you have or rebirthing and the thing, and you know, things of that nature. Did it bear resemblance to those experiences?

• 1:29:20Speaker 01

  None. Dude, I've done it all. And let me tell you, none.

• 1:29:23Rich Roll?

  Okay. Actually makes you feel better. I'm, I'm actually glad to hear that.

• 1:29:27Speaker 01

  I am being a hundred percent honest. I'm very experienced in plant medicine. Okay. I'm, I'm a very curious person. I've gone tried. I've done some crazy stuff there. I've, I've, I've experienced what I thought you could experience. Not the same.

• 1:29:40Rich Roll?

  Not the same.

• 1:29:41Speaker 01

  Not the same.

• 1:29:41Rich Roll?

  So does that color how you think about the value of those experiences?

• 1:29:45Speaker 01

  No, because I think they still give you a taste. They still make you better. They still make you face yourself, you know? I think they're, they're wonderful teachers. I highly recommend them.

• 1:29:57Rich Roll?

  So this experience, you end up in the hospital for quite a while after that. Has it?

• 1:30:04Rich Roll?

  Altered, you know, kind of the things that you say in the book. Like, how has this shaped how you think about life going forward?

• 1:30:13Speaker 01

  Well, honestly, I had to return to the practice again to keep myself from just, you know, I spent months writhing in pain, you know, I was in insane amount of pain, you know, two back to back surgeries, one a very aggressive, one major surgery and then 12 hours later, one very aggressive emergency surgery.

• 1:30:29Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 1:30:30Speaker 01

  You know, like.

• 1:30:33Rich Roll?

  Oh, my God.

• 1:30:35Speaker 01

  One of the surgeons told me, if anyone qualifies with these narcotics, it's you.

• 1:30:39Rich Roll?

  What caused this? Was there any kind of, is there an argument for malpractice here? Was it just, was it a human error?

• 1:30:45Speaker 01

  You know what? I've thought about it. I'm not a, I'm not a litigious guy. Everyone does their best, but there were some things that happened and it's just been the, the level of pain I've had to deal with for so many months. You know, I was talking with your wife about this earlier. I have such empathy now for people who live with chronic pain. Pain grinds you down. Physical pain, like extreme physical pain, just grind. And so like, I've had to do this work hard just to keep afloat when I'm in physical pain, you know? It's like some, like to be able to just like get up and walk across a room and not be sweating, you know, like what that takes you like. So I've actually had to go deeper in this, but almost in a survival way.

• 1:31:28Speaker 01

  Like I am right now, an animal in survival mode and all loving myself is literally just surviving.

• 1:31:35Rich Roll?

  Yeah. You're pain free now, though.

• 1:31:38Speaker 01

  I'm better. There are times where I still deal with it, but it's very manageable. I'm getting better. The body's amazing, right? And I literally feel like I've been rebuilding my body. You know, I'm used to being very fit and healthy. Thankfully, the surgery, they went, the second procedure they did, now they went in, they went in and took a vein out of my leg, like a big, thick pipe.

• 1:31:59Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 1:31:59Speaker 01

  And put that in as a, as a big conduit. So, so at least if, because I was like, don't make me go through the experience. If I come out of this.

• 1:32:05Rich Roll?

  At least we know that artery is strong now.

• 1:32:07Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's, it's better than, like, that would even made it worse.

• 1:32:12Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 1:32:14Rich Roll?

  And, and what's interesting is, is, is trying to divine the lesson in all of this, right? Like, we were joking before the podcast, and you're like, I thought that I'd had, I'd been tested, you know, I'd, I'd kind of been brought to my knees a couple of times in my life, and I felt like I'd learned the lessons and, and moving in a good direction. Did I really need, did I really need this to happen? Haven't I already had my wake up moment? Like, why this? Why now?

• 1:32:41Speaker 01

  I'll be honest, man, this, this brought me to my knees in a way I've never have. I struggle at times. It's like, I almost left, why am I here? I don't, I'm struggling, especially when you're in pain, your mind goes there, right? I'm still struggling with it. And I'm so grateful that, so I turned in the final, final master of this book, I think a week before I went into surgery, right? And, and now, this book comes out, and this is a book I so care about. You know, I have such an obligation to the readers, you know, who emails me and who gave me the cushions that, to put this out to the world, that, that's the thing I get up for. Like, that's

• 1:33:22Speaker 01

  why I got on a plane and came to LA to see you, is to share this book. You know, it's, it's like I gave myself this gift before going to experience. I don't know if I had, didn't have this book, what I would have done, honestly. It's like, I, it's, it's something that's bigger than me, that's more important than me, that'll make me get on that plane, and if I'm feeling pain, I will get out of pain and come and share the book. That, that's been a great gift. I don't know where I'd be if I didn't have it. And, secondly, because I have the book, I read it.

• 1:33:52Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 1:33:53Speaker 01

  And, and it's like, sometimes, you know, I wrote this for myself. And, and so, so there are moments in life where a practice like this could literally just make you survive, and sometimes that's all you can do. You know, you're just, it's, it's very interesting. That's something I just realized the other day, because I've been beating myself up for, for being like, closed off from every bond, and just being curled up in pain, and just, I was like, dude, you're, you're survival mode.

• 1:34:16Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 1:34:17Speaker 01

  It's okay.

• 1:34:18Rich Roll?

  Nobody's expecting you, you know, going on the talk show circuit. You just got out of the hospital. Like...

• 1:34:26Speaker 01

  I mean, I got out of hospital in October, but, you know, I couldn't wait to get out. It was like, the first one, they said, you might be out. I was like, take these damn things. Worst place to be if you're not feeling well is a hospital. Really, it is the worst place on the planet. All your dignity is gone, you've been poked and prodded 24/7, you know, and just, and that's where a lot of the germs are anyway.

• 1:34:47Rich Roll?

  Right, right, right, right. But it's interesting that after all of this, you're still beating yourself up, measuring yourself against some standard that, that nobody else is applying to you.

• 1:34:57Speaker 01

  Well, I have to do the self-forgiveness practice again, don't I?

• 1:35:01Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 1:35:01Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:35:02Rich Roll?

  Don't we all?

• 1:35:02Speaker 01

  Yeah, that's, that's the interesting thing I'm realizing, that I need to do some of the stuff that more, that practice more often than I thought.

• 1:35:12Speaker 01

  You know, I'm learning this stuff myself, you know, I'm still evolving it myself. And it's, it's very interesting. I've had to go back to it, but in a very different way. And now that I'm getting better, I'm very curious to see the, what the effects of still doing it will be.

• 1:35:28Rich Roll?

  Yeah. And I think there is, there is a deeper lesson in what you just experienced. I think you just need time and distance from it before that becomes evident or clear. But I think, I think more will be revealed. I, I think that something will come out of that, that will, that you will then realize is an opportunity.

• 1:35:50Speaker 01

  I hope so, you know, I always, I would believe if you go through something, there's a, there's something good, that a gift that comes out of it, but it's up to us to find that gift.

• 1:36:01Rich Roll?

  Right, I mean, one of the things you talk about is this idea of, of inverting the idea that things are happening to you and looking at it from the perspective of you happening to things. Or maybe even another corollary to that is things are happening for you.

• 1:36:16Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah. That one's been hard with this experience, you know, but I think,

• 1:36:22Speaker 01

  maybe it might be who I've become because of it, you know, who I choose to be as I rebuild myself, who I've become. We'll see.

• 1:36:30Rich Roll?

  Yeah. Well, I, I can't imagine that you, you came out of this, and you must have come out of this thinking, life is even more precious than I real, you know, previously appreciated. And that time is short and we don't know how long we're going to be here. And, you know, if you have a message that you feel strongly about, like now is the time to, you know, give your all to what is most important to you.

• 1:36:55Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, I'm lucky I have it, you know, but putting this book out. It's interesting to think about precious, some of those, it's weird. Because time still goes by, slips by, and I find, you know, we fall back into our way of living, which is just like, you know, often wasting time. The mind is very interesting, how it quickly forgets lessons. One has to be constantly reminded. What I like to do is I like to remind myself of feeling, just feeling life, feeling blessed by life sometimes. Because I have to look at that being surviving, no matter what I went through, as a blessing. There has to be a blessing in there.

• 1:37:31Rich Roll?

  And what does that look like? Like, what is the actual practice of that?

• 1:37:34Speaker 01

  I do the same thing as I do with the ten breaths, except now the light becomes blessings.

• 1:37:39Rich Roll?

  Uh huh. I like that. I like that it's so simple and practical. You know, it's not, it's, there's not a lot of, you know, in the book, there's no window dressing around anything woo woo. It's like, this is what I did. Feel so much better, like, and here's how you do it. It'll take you five minutes. You know?

• 1:38:00Speaker 01

  I get a lot of emails from people who say like, what made them use the book, or what made them share it was the fact they could tell it was just a guy, just a dude who wrote it.

• 1:38:08Rich Roll?

  Dude who did it, yeah. Yeah, yeah, I listened to the podcast that you did with Jonathan Fields, and he, he put you, he put the question to you, like, given that you had had an interest in, in, in fiction writing, like, why not make this a parable? This book, rather than making it a practical primer, doing some storytelling in a, in a, in a fiction setting?

• 1:38:34Speaker 01

  I don't remember what I said to him, but what comes to mind now is because for something like this, you just need the simple truth. Straight to the fact, this works, this is how it works, this is what to do.

• 1:38:46Rich Roll?

  I think what you also said to him was that, that it's the honesty, like, the personal honesty and accountability was what, in your, in your belief, was, was what made it connect with people.

• 1:38:59Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's amazing. People are, readers are wonderful, you know, just how they reach out. They give you more than you give, and I feel like you give.

• 1:39:08Rich Roll?

  So are you still like a Silicon Valley? You live in San Francisco, right? But are you still like a VC and all that? Or are you just full on?

• 1:39:17Speaker 01

  No, I'm in New York these days.

• 1:39:18Rich Roll?

  Oh, you are? You're in New York? Okay.

• 1:39:19Speaker 01

  Yeah, it was a long flight to come see you.

• 1:39:21Rich Roll?

  I thought you came from San Francisco. I didn't realize. Wow.

• 1:39:23Speaker 01

  Yeah, my flight was delivered multiple hours, a full cross country. Totally worth it.

• 1:39:27Rich Roll?

  Yeah, yeah, thank you.

• 1:39:30Speaker 01

  No, I run a VC firm that I built on my own after I had lost everything and I rebuilt myself. And so I invested in tech startups. And writing is what I realize is what I'm putting this planet for. And that's, that's the thing that I'm gonna leave behind, you know, these books.

• 1:39:49Speaker 01

  But yeah, I enjoy, I love working with, like I advise some companies, I invest in companies. It keeps that part of my brain active, you know, and I actually enjoy it. You know, you get to work with people building the future, you know, it's fun.

• 1:40:02Rich Roll?

  Yeah. Well, you gotta write about what just happened to you.

• 1:40:07Speaker 01

  Think so?

• 1:40:08Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 1:40:09Speaker 01

  But I don't have a, there's no lesson there.

• 1:40:12Rich Roll?

  Well, maybe it's not, it's not yet time to write about it. But at some point, I, I think there will be a lot that comes out of that. And like I said earlier, I think, I think it will be revealed to you. But at some point, you're gonna, I think it's gonna be important that you write about that.

• 1:40:27Speaker 01

  Okay, thanks.

• 1:40:27Rich Roll?

  What else are you, what else are you working on?

• 1:40:29Speaker 01

  That's the thing. That's one thing I'm struggling. I have nothing, I've tried writing and there's nothing that's coming out that's inspiring me.

• 1:40:36Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 1:40:36Speaker 01

  You know?

• 1:40:37Rich Roll?

  You're in your gestation period.

• 1:40:39Speaker 01

  So I'm reading a lot. I've actually been reading a lot of physics and, and quantum physics and just diving a rabbit hole in nature of reality.

• 1:40:47Rich Roll?

  That's interesting.

• 1:40:48Speaker 01

  Yeah, just like, okay, look at, look at Stephen Hawking's paper and this and that, like what is, you know, the smart guys, the really smart guys. Their interpretation of nature of reality. I've been really fascinated by that. So I'm just kinda like right now, feeding my curiosity about these things.

• 1:41:04Rich Roll?

  Is there like an approach that you take towards trying to decide what to read? Or is it just your muse?

• 1:41:11Speaker 01

  It's my muse is the internets, you know, there's rabbit holes. Reddit is amazing. You can find an expert in everything or someone who thinks they're an expert in everything. You know, I've also been working on, okay, what is my, what is a practical philosophy of life I want to live by? After all that I've been through? What is something that, that I can actually live? And this is the philosophy I've been working on practically. And I'm not suggesting this for anyone, so I don't, please, people don't send me any emails about, you know, the flaws in it. It's literally something I'm trying to do, which is, I am the cause of everything in my life. Because when I do that, it's all personal responsibility. There's no victim, there's no, there's no feeling sorry for myself, there's only choice. Everything that has happened in my life.

• 1:41:56Speaker 01

  Because, look, the nature of reality, if you were to really bring it down, is that there is no reality. We don't know what the whole show is, but there, there's this whole 3D dimensional, you know, thing. There's more to this game than that.

• 1:42:08Rich Roll?

  I'm with you, I'm with you on that.

• 1:42:09Speaker 01

  We know that. So then, okay, if that's the case.

• 1:42:12Rich Roll?

  You talk to my wife.

• 1:42:13Speaker 01

  Yeah, she's awesome. I love your wife. By the way, please, people, order her cheese, it's out of this world.

• 1:42:20Rich Roll?

  I mean, you know, she's, she's functioning on, in, in multiple realities simultaneously, I think, but go ahead.

• 1:42:26Speaker 01

  Yeah, so I've been thinking like, look, what, but how do I, my whole thing is, how do I practically live something? I don't want to just theory, I want to be better because of it. So I'm like, look, if there's this underlying layer, and somehow we're just, I'm, I'm a part of it, connected, it's like consciousness. Let's say it's all consciousness, and that's the ocean, and I'm just a wave in the ocean that blip comes and goes, that almost, the wave almost went, but it's still in the ocean, right? What is the way I can live that somehow almost frees me, but also gives me forward momentum? Because if it's all this choice, then it's in your control. So I am the cause of everything. I've been actually looking, I'm the cause of that experience of the surgery. I'm the cause of good things happening to me, I'm the cause of bad things happening, I'm the cause of it all. So what do I do?

• 1:43:09Speaker 01

  So that's a personal philosophy I've been kind of working on myself, and just trying to mentally. Do it. Everything I go through, I am the cause of this. Not that I made you appear out of thin air in our ritual, but more like my experience of life.

• 1:43:23Rich Roll?

  Right. No, I get that. I mean, I think it's a spiritual bent on a very Goggins-esque idea.

• 1:43:29Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah?

• 1:43:29Rich Roll?

  Just sort of unbridled absolute responsibility for everything in your life and never blaming anyone. And I think when you're of that mindset and you approach and navigate life in that way, it's impossible to be a victim, right? Because if you're taking responsibility for everything that happens to you, good or bad, or taking responsibility and ownership for every conflict that you find yourself in, then you become an actor rather than a reactor. You become the hero rather than the victim. And you're presented with opportunity rather than dead ends, I think.

• 1:44:07Speaker 01

  Correct.

• 1:44:08Rich Roll?

  You know?

• 1:44:08Speaker 01

  And I'll tell you, it's not easy to live this in your head because the mind rebels. The mind wants to find cause outside yourself.

• 1:44:15Rich Roll?

  Sure.

• 1:44:15Speaker 01

  That's what the whole...

• 1:44:17Rich Roll?

  Who doesn't want to point the finger?

• 1:44:19Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:44:19Rich Roll?

  You know?

• 1:44:20Speaker 01

  So it's almost like a little mental training I'm doing for myself. So that's kind of like a new thing I'm working on, just Kamal's... Welcome to Kamal's world.

• 1:44:26Rich Roll?

  Right. Well, I know, I think that that's... I mean, that's a...

• 1:44:32Rich Roll?

  It's a harder thing, I think, to practice than repeating "I love myself" or doing the mirror work, you know, because it gets harder. And I found, and this is, you know, for me, it always goes back to 12 steps. This is another thing I learned, that like even when I find myself in a conflict with somebody else where it's clear that I've been wronged and everybody that I talk to about this thing will all agree with me that I am the victim, this person wronged me, there's no gray area here. Always, always, if I'm honest with myself, I can find my part in how that situation or that dynamic was created. And I think taking ownership of that allows you to transcend that victim mentality

• 1:45:17Rich Roll?

  and also provides the opportunity for self-forgiveness and forgiveness of the other person so that you can release, surrender, and free yourself from whatever pain or emotional weight that that, you know, that that forces you to carry around.

• 1:45:36Speaker 01

  Yeah, I think it can be very powerful. Yeah, but it's hard.

• 1:45:40Rich Roll?

  Yeah, I know. How are you doing with it?

• 1:45:43Speaker 01

  Depends on the moment in the day. But I'll tell you, but like even doing the love yourself practice, I do it because if I'm the cause, I have to work in my inside. If who I am is the cause of my experience of life, that then I have a responsibility to work in my inside. Because if I don't, then I'll be the cause of shitty things.

• 1:46:02Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 1:46:04Rich Roll?

  Another thing I wanted to talk to you about is is honoring the child within. Right? As somebody who, I mean, you've endured a, you know, a fair amount of childhood trauma. It's easy to fall into victimhood over that as well, right?

• 1:46:19Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:46:19Rich Roll?

  And it's, and it's the kind of, the more you evolve and grow, the more you realize that you loop patterns and tell stories that were formed from that childhood experience that then show up in, in, in, in behavior patterns in, in adult life that don't serve you, and yet you feel powerless to kind of snap out of them.

• 1:46:41Speaker 01

  Yeah, that is, yes, all our facts.

• 1:46:45Rich Roll?

  Yeah. So, but you kind of have a practice around how you, how you kind of talk to the inner child or, or honor that young person inside of you.

• 1:46:55Speaker 01

  Yeah, and it all comes from this, this practice. What I do is I take the foundation, this practice of foundation approach, different parts of me and my life through this lens. And, you know, the first time I did it, I remember something shifted because I realized something about the child. You know, I was used to be ashamed of what the child went through. You know, it was, I was shamed or dirty at this or that. I was wounded. I was tainted, like these things. I overcame them, right? But I was ashamed of what the, of the, of the experience of the child. And when I did this exercise the first time, it's interesting when you do these, your perspective shifts. You know, and like if your perspective shifts, everything shifts. And I was no dumbass, excuse my language, no dumbass.

• 1:47:40Speaker 01

  This child survived to so you could be you. This child went through this. I mean, think of the strength it takes to be a child. You know, and go through things and continue on and not quit and keep on working to like, one day I'll get out of this, one day I'll be better, one day I'll get out of this, one day no one will screw with, blah blah, whatever, right? But that child deserves medals, you know, not like keep that child hidden. And it was like, oh, my God. It was a huge perspective shift and it was a game changer where like you're grateful for the child for having the strength. You don't think of a child as having strength. You realize the strength it takes to be a child and endure abuse. That's insane.

• 1:48:22Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 1:48:22Speaker 01

  Right? And so like now I just feel so much gratitude and gratitude to this child. Like, thank you for, for your strength. You know, I'd never realized that before until I did this.

• 1:48:35Rich Roll?

  Right. I like that. I mean, that's, that's a very cool practice and way to think about that wounding. You know what I mean? When you think about the experience of a child, even a child that grows up in a healthy environment, a young child in the period of 24 hours will throw a couple tantrums, cry a bunch of dimes, be frustrated, feel angry because they can't communicate their idea or whatever idea they're trying to communicate isn't landing right. Like the emotional turmoil of a childhood experience, even under the best circumstances, is incredibly challenging when you think about it. Like they go through more emotional turmoil in a day than I certainly do. Right?

• 1:49:20Rich Roll?

  So the strength, the capacity of a young person to, you know, weather so much,

• 1:49:28Rich Roll?

  it seems obvious that we should honor that.

• 1:49:31Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:49:31Rich Roll?

  You know?

• 1:49:31Speaker 01

  Yeah. It's kind of, it's very interesting. I've mentioned this to other people and it's actually caused that shift to them too. I find I'm not the only one who was that way about his childhood. You know, when you come from a traumatic childhood, you kind of like want to put it on the rug. You're like, I got over it.

• 1:49:45Rich Roll?

  Right. That's in the past, I'm done with that.

• 1:49:47Speaker 01

  Yeah, I overcame it. I got over it. I'm fine, right? Whatever. But honoring that child who made it happen, who had the strength, you know, that's special.

• 1:50:00Rich Roll?

  I think that's a good place to end it.

• 1:50:04Rich Roll?

  Love yourself like your life depends on it. What, uh, what is like, you know, just to kind of close this down, for somebody who's listening to this, who feels stuck, or perhaps finds themselves in a, in a, in a situation that they can't see their way out of, give that person a starting point.

• 1:50:25Speaker 01

  Starting point. Look, what did it for me was making a commitment to myself. You know, and first deciding that, look, I'm going to keep commitments to myself. Right. But if you make a vow to yourself, if you're ever in a place where you just need to get out of it, make a vow to yourself, write it down, put it somewhere where you can see it every day, be reminded of your act, your, your promise to yourself, and then do your best to live it. You'll fail horribly every day, but you'll get better and better. Do your best to live it every day. It's really that simple, that power of that personal commitment to yourself.

• 1:50:56Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 1:50:57Speaker 01

  It's that simple.

• 1:50:57Rich Roll?

  And you don't have to, you know, lose your company and all your money, or get left by, you know, your one love in order for you to take advantage of that, right? I think that's the important thing. Like, you know, a lot of people's elevators are going down. They don't realize that they can get off every, you know, at any moment. They have to experience that bottom, and that wake up call is required or necessary to get that person's attention. But the truth is, these tools are powerful and transformative and available to you, you know, wherever and whenever you find yourself.

• 1:51:29Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's the human mind.

• 1:51:30Rich Roll?

  I know. Well, thank you for sharing.

• 1:51:34Speaker 01

  Oh, man, this was so worth it. Thank you.

• 1:51:36Rich Roll?

  I love the book. Like I said, it's, it's not only packed with these amazing transformational practices, but it's super easy to read and enjoy. Like, you can, you can literally, you know, read the whole thing in a, in an afternoon. It's very easy to digest. So I appreciate that. And that doesn't come easily. That's because you put in those 10,000 hours, right?

• 1:51:58Speaker 01

  Yeah. Yeah, that's craft. Thank you.

• 1:52:00Rich Roll?

  So, thank you for the book. I think it's a, I think it's a gift, and I think you're a gift to humanity, and I appreciate the work that you do, my friend.

• 1:52:07Speaker 01

  Thank you so much.

• 1:52:07Rich Roll?

  So come back and talk to me anytime. You can find the book at your favorite independent bookseller, or on Amazon. You can find Kamal on Twitter, at Kamal Ravikant, but he will not follow you back, because he only follows one person, The Rock. What is that about?

• 1:52:26Speaker 01

  Well, if you read the book, you'll understand.

• 1:52:29Rich Roll?

  Um, where else can people find out?

• 1:52:32Speaker 01

  Twitter, Instagram, the usuals, you know, but just my email address is also in this book.

• 1:52:36Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 1:52:37Speaker 01

  Email me.

• 1:52:37Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 1:52:38Speaker 01

  But, you know, email me if you read the book.

• 1:52:39Rich Roll?

  Do you respond to all the emails?

• 1:52:40Speaker 01

  I do. Sometimes it takes a while because I get backlogged, but I always do. People are really good. Sometimes you'll find someone who just has an ax to grind and you just happen to be the one they want to do it. Polite, respond and end it. But most people, I made friends with readers, like people like considered good friends, who reached out to me, just started having conversations, you know, it's amazing.

• 1:53:00Rich Roll?

  Yeah, that's cool, man. Um, well, I'm going to be in New York this spring. Can we, uh, go grab dinner?

• 1:53:05Speaker 01

  God, I would love it.

• 1:53:06Rich Roll?

  Get James and we'll all go out for a bite.

• 1:53:08Speaker 01

  I would love it.

• 1:53:08Rich Roll?

  Some vegan food?

• 1:53:09Speaker 01

  Yes, sir.

• 1:53:09Rich Roll?

  Okay, thanks, man. Um, all right, that's it. Thank you, Kamal. Appreciate you. Peace.

• 1:53:15Speaker 01

  Dude, this is the best interview I've had.

• 1:53:19Rich Roll?

  So happy to hear that.

• 1:53:20Speaker 01

  This is the best interview I've had. Like, I can't wait, like.

• 1:53:23Rich Roll?

  That's the title of the podcast now. Kamal Ravikant, the best interview he's ever had.

• 1:53:32Rich Roll?

  Amazing guy, amazing story. I told you guys, right? Pretty cool. To dig deeper into all things Kamal, check out the links and the resources on the episode page at richroll.com. And be sure to give Kamal some love on the socials. You can find him at Kamal Ravikant on Twitter and Instagram. His book, Love Yourself Like Your Life Depends On It, is available everywhere. Pick it up. Just might change your life or at least your perspective. That's it for today, you guys. Thank you for tuning in. If you'd like to support our work here on the show, subscribe to it on Apple Podcasts, Spotify and YouTube, where you can also leave a review or a comment, share the show or your favorite episodes with friends or on social media, and you can support us on Patreon at richroll.com/donate. Thanks to everybody who helped put on today's program.

• 1:54:16Rich Roll?

  Jason Camiolo for audio engineering, production, show notes and interstitial music. Blake Curtis and Margot Lubin for videoing the show, editing it, creating all the short clips that we share on social media. Jessica Miranda for graphics. Ally Rogers for portraits. Georgia Whaley for copywriting. DK for advertiser relationships and theme music, as always, by Tyler Pyatt, Trapper Pyatt and Hari Mathis. Thanks for the love, you guys. I appreciate all of you. I hope you are safe. I hope that you are taking care of yourselves and your loved ones. And I'll see you back here in a couple of days with another awesome dose of amazing. Until then, peace. Plants. Namaste.