Introducing The Rich Roll Podcast

In the debut episode of the Rich Roll Podcast, Rich converses with his wife Julie Piatt about life in Kauai, sustainable lifestyle, enhancing your personal creativity and homeschooling. Finally! I've been talking about doing a podcast for what seems like eons. For whatever reason, I just couldn't seem to get around to actually figuring out how to do it, let alone get it done. But I finally found the time to sort through at least the initial barrier configuration issues and am happy to announce my virgin episode, which features my wife and (much) better half Julie Piatt. We are still sorting through some tech issues so it's far from studio polished, aside from the killer intro / outro music courtesy of my very talented son Tyler and nephew Harrison! The sound from this episode is admittedly a bit echo-y due to the warehouse recording environment– and I have yet to configure it for video and livestream broadcasting, which I am currently working on. But rather than wait until I had everything perfect, I wanted to just begin. Start slow and organically and let it grow as I find my voice and legs so to speak. I'm far from a professional broadcaster, but I hope that through this effort I can bring some insights and interesting people to your ears that will both enlighten, provoke and entertain. First off – this is NOT a “triathlon training / coaching” styled podcast. There are plenty of those out there already that are very well done ( Zen Triathlon and IMTalk are my faves for this), so if you are looking for a podcast that is very narrowly tailored to this specific subject and this subject only, then I fear my program may not be exactly what you are looking for. And yet, I implore to nonetheless give it a trial run with an open mind (and ears). Instead, my plan is to provide a long-form discussion platform to raise and converse about a wide variety of subjects that interest me. Certainly, triathlon, running, cycling, swimming, training, fitness in general and everything that goes into that is of course a subject that interests me dearly, so of course I will be programming helpful information in this regard. But my focus will broaden from there into plant-based nutrition for the athlete and everyman (and woman); wellness in general; spirituality; yoga & meditation; and sustainable lifestyle. Most importantly, my desire is to create a platform to help lead the way to unlocking the best version of yourself. How to live more authentically. And thrive from the heart. I hope you enjoy this first episode. Many more in the works and I hope to record at least 2 to 3 of these per week. I am very interested in your thoughts on the episode, comments in general and ideas for future episodes. In the comments section below, PLEASE let me know what YOU think, would be interested in hearing me talk about in future episodes, people you would like me to interview, and anything else on your mind. I'm wide open. 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.

• 0:01Rich Roll?

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• 0:46Rich Roll?

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• 1:13Julie Piatt?

  The Rich Roll Podcast.

• 1:17Rich Roll?

  Hey, everybody. It's Rich Roll, coming to you from the Rich Roll Podcast, Episode 1. I've been talking about doing a podcast for a long time. It's something I've always wanted to do. I'm a huge podcast fan. I listen to tons of podcasts. I listen to them when I'm in the car. I listen to them when I'm training. And really, they've brought a lot of value to my life, as well as entertainment. And it's just, I think it's a fantastic medium for connecting with people and providing a long-form opportunity to get to know interesting people and learn something. And it's a medium that is sort of old as time and as new as it gets as well.

• 2:01Rich Roll?

  You watch TV, and the interviews that you hear are five-second clips of somebody promoting a movie or whatnot, and you never really get to know the person. You never get to get behind what it is, the initial message that they're trying to deliver. So I thought it would be interesting to check it out myself. And... Start my own podcast and kind of take a tip from others that I've listened to and have enjoyed and see what I can bring to the table. And my hope is that over time, I'll be able to bring, you know, some interesting insights to you, not just things that I've learned personally and experiences that I've had, but also to introduce you to people in my world, you know, interesting guests, people

• 2:43Rich Roll?

  with different differing points of views on a whole variety of matters. You know, not necessarily all that I agree with, but to kind of create a safe and broad platform for lots of different ideas to converge, I guess, is what I'm thinking. And if you listen to the Joe Rogan podcast, I think he does a great job of that. Like, he'll have all sorts of dynamic guests on, and his only real criteria is, you know, is a subject matter or a person that interests me. And it doesn't mean that he agrees with them or whatever, but he gives the person a safe space to, you know, breathe and convey their point of view. And the conversations, I've found at least, are generally quite remarkable.

• 3:24Rich Roll?

  And so I would like to try to take a stab at it myself. And this is our first attempt, so it's going to be rough. It's not going to be polished. It's very amateur. We're here at Common Ground in Kauai, and I'm going to talk a little bit about that in a minute. And we're set up in a warehouse. So we've kind of jerry-rigged up my son's and nephew's musical recording instruments into a mixing board to try to see if we can make this work. So if we get, if we run into some tech problems, I won't be surprised. And the idea is to kind of start this organically and grow it slowly over time. I would love to be able to videotape them also and throw the videos of the interviews up on YouTube and Vimeo.

• 4:08Rich Roll?

  So that's the next step. And then beyond that, I think it would be cool to do live streaming also, which we have the capability of doing here, but we're just lacking a few pieces of equipment that we need. And I just wanted to get going, get an initial episode up, try to gauge people's interests and what they want to hear about, and kind of go from there slowly. So that's the deal. I hope you come along for the ride, and I hope that I can, you know, provide enough interesting information to capture your attention and your interest so that you'll follow along.

• 4:47Rich Roll?

  First of all, my name is Rich Roll. You probably already know a little bit about me if you're listening to this because you probably didn't happen upon this podcast randomly. But if for some reason you don't, I am an ultra-distance triathlete. I'm a vegan, plant-based athlete. I've been vegan for about six years. And my story is one of stumbling into middle age, out of shape, overweight, dissatisfied with my life and its trajectory, and feeling lost and awash in society. And the last six years have been a journey in trying to find my way and course-correct my life's direction.

• 5:30Rich Roll?

  And it's been an amazing journey, and I chronicle it in my book, Finding Ultra. If you haven't already checked it out, you can find it on Amazon, which tells my story of how I got from there to where I am now as a wellness advocate, a plant-based nutrition advocate, an ultra-distance triathlete, among other things, blah, blah, blah, or whatever. Not to mention the fact that I'm happily married and father of four children. My wife, Julie Piatt, is here. You want to say hi?

• 5:58Julie Piatt?

  Hi.

• 5:59Rich Roll?

  My better half by a long shot, for sure. So I wanted to talk about what's going on right now. If you are a fan or read my blog, which is at richroll.com, and you read my most recent post, you know that we have relocated our family from our home in Malibu Canyon, California, out to Kauai. And right now, there are seven of us, my wife and I and our kids, as well as our nephew, Harrison. And we are living at a place called Common Ground, which is an organic, sustainable farm on the north shore of Kauai. It's a 50-acre, sustainable community on this incredibly pristine piece of property.

• 6:47Rich Roll?

  That's owned and founded and run by a gentleman named Chris Jabe, who's a really fascinating, interesting guy, who I'm definitely going to have as a guest on the podcast, who Julie and I have been talking to over the last couple of weeks. He's sort of a new friend. And he's doing some interesting things here. And there were some opportunities here to explore in terms of some new business ventures that he's working on and that seem to be very in alignment with our mission and what we're doing. And it just made sense for us to come out here and explore that with Chris. So here we are. We're in Kauai. We're living on this farm. And we're living in a yurt village that we share with four 20-something kids who work the land and work in the restaurant here.

• 7:32Rich Roll?

  There's a phenomenal restaurant on the property here. So if you happen to be in Kauai, you should definitely come by and check out Common Ground. So we've been here about three weeks now. We're going to be here through January 10th before we go back to Los Angeles and kind of reassess our situation. So it's been an interesting adventure so far.

• 7:54Rich Roll?

  And if you read my blog post, you know this already. I don't mean to repeat myself. But part of the idea of coming out here was to simplify our lives, to experiment with a more minimal, sustainable way of living, a more sustainable lifestyle, of getting sort of closer to the earth and where our food comes from. And, you know, I've been traveling around. My book came out in May. And since then, I've been kind of on the road quite a bit, traveling around and doing book signings and speaking at certain events and conferences like, you know, Veg Fest and the like, meeting tons of people. It's been an incredible experience. And part of, you know, my gig when I speak

• 8:37Rich Roll?

  is I talk about, I talk a lot about repairing our health.

• 8:43Rich Roll?

  Through plant-based nutrition and sort of developing a more intimate relationship with the foods that we eat and where they come from and getting closer to nature in that regard. And the truth of the matter is, is that, you know, after I do my speaking gig and sign a bunch of books, I get on an airplane and I fly home and then I get in my car and I drive to the Ralph's supermarket or the Trader Joe's or the Whole Foods and buy my groceries at the, you know, at the grocery store, just like everybody else. And I try to be conscious in those choices and I try to purchase foods that are locally grown and that are organic, provided it doesn't break the budget. But I could certainly do better.

• 9:26Rich Roll?

  You know, I don't always look, you know, when I buy a packaged food, I don't always look, well, where was this made and how far did it have to be shipped and what exactly is in it? And I'm, you know, I'm probably more conscious of that stuff than most people, but, you know, still, I don't necessarily always pay it, uh, the, give it the attention that it deserves. And so coming out here to Common Ground and kind of living on this farm is really an effort to greater align my, my actions with my words. Like, you know, we can do a better job of getting close to where our foods come from. The kids are working in the fields and we're eating produce that's pulled right out of the ground that day and, and sort of, you know, helping with the, with the restaurant

• 10:09Rich Roll?

  in terms of planning more vegan meals and working with Chris on improving some healthy food options for his kids and the like. And it's been, it's been great. You know, it's been really grounding and it's definitely been an adjustment to kind of get out of Los Angeles and traffic and, you know, the distractions and the commute and, you know, all the sort of things that, that come with living a busy urban life and to just be out here and settle. You know, it's, it's had its high highs and it's had its sort of bumps and adjustments, but I think overall we're doing pretty good. And so I wanted to bring Julianne and talk a little bit about, you know, you know, why she wanted to come here and how she feels like it's been going and what, what she thinks

• 10:54Rich Roll?

  is important about this experience that we're having, not just for ourselves personally, but for our kids.

• 11:03Julie Piatt?

  Hi Rich. I'm really honored to be on your first podcast. Thanks for inviting me to come on your show today.

• 11:10Rich Roll?

  I hope it's recording. Is it recording? It's recording. So I'm sitting here, just so you know, I'm sitting here with my eldest Tyler, who's 17, and Harrison, who's 21, and they're manning the laptop and checking the levels, so it's all good. And also, I want to make sure that I point out, the awesome intro music, and you also hear it on the outro here, was produced and created by Harrison and Tyler. So, thanks a lot for that. It's pretty rockin'. I think it's pretty cool.

• 11:38Julie Piatt?

  So, hi. So, yeah, so getting to the food and getting to the core and the source of where it comes from. You know, Kauai, as you know, has been a dear love of mine for over 10 years. And the really sort of profound thing is that I've always seen our home connected to this exact point on Kauai. And I've always known that there was something that was connecting the two places. So, when Chris contacted us a few weeks ago, it was sort of like a beautiful message from above.

• 12:21Rich Roll?

  I know, it's pretty cool. So, just a little background. My book tour was wrapping up and things were kind of slowing down in terms of my travel. And Julie and I were kind of sitting down thinking, "Well, what are we going to do next?" Or, "What's our next step?" Or, "Where do we go from here?" And these issues of sort of sustainability and living more minimally and kind of reducing our overhead and all of that are kind of, have been paramount topics of conversation at the dinner table and beyond. You know, we've been sort of living more extravagantly than we should be for too long, and it's high time that we kind of reduce that. And really kind of, you know, dial things in a little bit.

• 13:06Rich Roll?

  And we were looking at actually leaving Los Angeles, like moving out of LA and looking at different places where we might live. We looked at Austin, we were looking at Asheville, North Carolina, like cool communities of sort of like-minded individuals, supportive communities where we could live more affordably. And, you know, Julie had been out to the North Shore of Kauai several times and definitely has always had a deep kind of spiritual connection to this, to this, you know, geographical location. And I remember 10 years ago, she was talking about how she wanted to open up a healing center here, and that she had big plans, and she wanted to do this and that here. And when we were having these conversations about possibly moving, or where would we go, Kauai didn't even come up.

• 13:49Rich Roll?

  I mean, it was because, you know, we were looking at moving someplace that was, you know, it's not exactly cheap here, and it didn't seem to, you know, there didn't seem to be opportunities here. And like, you know, we've worked so hard to kind of get to a place where we have a certain audience and a mouthpiece to kind of continue to do the work that we do, why would we exempt ourselves and go, you know, hibernate on an island? So it wasn't really part of the equation at all until Chris called. And Chris was a guy who I had known of over the years, but had only actually met like nine months earlier. I first heard about him through a college friend of mine, Nathaniel Coram, he's an architect. He's actually a really cool guy. I'll put a link in the show notes to some of the interesting stuff that he did.

• 14:34Rich Roll?

  He's a, he works with Architecture for Humanity and builds sustainable housing in indigenous communities like Indian reservations. He's always traveling. He lives a very kind of nomadic lifestyle, but always finds himself working on incredibly cool projects with incredibly cool people.

• 14:52Julie Piatt?

  Yeah, and he had actually come to visit us. He had been out to our house when we were living in the teepees in the airstream when we were building Jai. And so we'd met him there.

• 15:02Rich Roll?

  Right, so he, and at the time, he had just completed Working on, he designed the cabin on David de Rothschild's plastiki boat. And if you don't, David de Rothschild is a sort of modern day explorer who's done some incredible things, including sailing a boat made entirely out of plastic bottles across the Pacific to raise awareness about the health of our oceans, et cetera. And he had come out to Common Ground to help Chris design the restaurant space and how he was going to sort of lay out and build the community that we have today. So, long story short, he had come out, he had told us about Chris and said, "Yeah, you should check this guy out, he's doing some really cool stuff."

• 15:45Rich Roll?

  At which point, this was years ago, we hadn't even finished building our house, we were living in an airstream in a teepee at the time. Julie, you emailed Chris, did you not?

• 15:53Julie Piatt?

  Right, but that was, I actually emailed him a couple of years ago. Nathaniel actually contacted me on Facebook and let me know about Chris. And, you know, of course, it didn't go unnoticed that Chris was exactly at this point on the island that I had seen in my meditations connected to Jai. So, you know, I just took a moment and sent him a quick email and said, "You know, I'd like you to know about my husband and me and what we're doing and that I shared a similar vision for a community at this specific point on the island." So I just wanted to, you know, kind of say, "Hey." And he sent back an email and just said, "Let's keep in touch." And then we never met him over all those years.

• 16:34Rich Roll?

  Yeah. And then I, until, I was at the Natural Food Products Expo in Anaheim this past year. And that must have been like, I don't know, nine months ago or something like that. It was before my book came out, I know that.

• 16:47Julie Piatt?

  Six months or so.

• 16:48Rich Roll?

  Yeah, I gave him an advance copy. And kind of walked the floor with him and Compton Rom, our nutrition buddy.

• 16:55Julie Piatt?

  Our guru.

• 16:56Rich Roll?

  Our nutrition guru.

• 16:57Julie Piatt?

  Compton Rom Bada.

• 16:58Rich Roll?

  Yeah, he'll definitely be a guest on the podcast. That guy will blow your mind. Warren, a fair warning in advance. But, you know, I had a chance to kind of connect with Chris a little bit, but that was that. I mean, he, you know, he came back to Hawaii. I think he was in, he went off and went to some TED conference and then went back to Hawaii. I didn't hear from him. And then, you know, really didn't talk to him at all until he emailed, he emailed us, like, literally, it was like a month ago.

• 17:24Julie Piatt?

  Yeah, well, when we, when we were really considering, you know, making the shift and we started to get real about it, you know, I think we looked at Hawaii, we looked at the Big Island and, you know, glanced at Kauai for like five seconds and then we just, we didn't even consider it because, you know, we just didn't feel like we could really build a business here or really get momentum here and keep spreading the message with what we've been doing with all the plant awareness and everything that Rich has been doing with his book and also the music with me and the boys and, you know, our records and albums that we're recording and releasing. So, but I did say to you, I said, all of this research we're doing, we spent many hours on Trulia.

• 18:06Rich Roll?

  Yeah, Trulia.

• 18:08Julie Piatt?

  Trulia became our new pastime.

• 18:10Rich Roll?

  Yeah, exactly. Like, ooh, look at this house in Austin.

• 18:12Julie Piatt?

  We were all emailing each other potential living, dwelling spaces and places we could live. And I said to you, I said to you, I was on my way up to chef for Sol Rey up in Ojai, and I said to you, you know, all of these actions that we're doing, they're just for our ego, they're to calm ourselves down because there's no way that we're coming to this point and that we may be being moved from jai, that there won't be another opportunity presented. And I told you it was coming.

• 18:43Rich Roll?

  That's right. I mean, basically, she's like, we gotta do all this legwork and, you know, you can spend all day on Trulia looking for rental houses or whatever, but the solution isn't, you know, you kind of have to do that legwork. You gotta do the lifting, but...

• 18:57Julie Piatt?

  I mean, we do have children.

• 18:58Rich Roll?

  But also with the awareness that knowing, like... We're probably not gonna find our next place to live through Trulia, even though we kinda have to do it. And that the solution will be presented to us somehow. And it really, it hearkens back to the line in the book that gets the most sort of repeated back to me or tweeted to me as kind of the quote of the book, which was that the universe, you know, will provide when your actions are in alignment and you're living in faith, that, you know, the universe will provide the solution that you're looking for.

• 19:33Julie Piatt?

  Inspired to support you.

• 19:35Rich Roll?

  It was the word that you said to me during times of self doubt and, you know, really wondering what I was doing when I was preparing for Ultraman and the like, that really kept me going and proved to be true and have proved to be true time and time again in my life. Like every time I'm in some kind of weird crisis or whatever, and I can't see my way out of it, or I don't know how we're gonna solve this problem or whatever, it's just sort of to, you know, tap into what it is that you love doing, pursue that and have faith that, you know, you will be cared for, that you will be provided for, that the universe is, you know, without getting too new agey about it, is infinitely abundant and that, you know, you will be cared for in due time.

• 20:18Rich Roll?

  And having that faith, it's like, it's easy to have faith when everything's going your way, you know, when all the breaks are cutting in your favor. But when you're pounding your head against the wall and things don't seem to be working out and your faith is really tested, that's when, you know, you really meet, you know, what you're made of in terms of, do you really have faith or you just say you do?

• 20:38Julie Piatt?

  Well, and it always comes down to that one question, really, when you're really pushed to the limits. And it's still, it's always the same question for me, and that's, how strong is your faith? Like, that's it. That's everything right there. You know, and even for me, for this blessing and this sort of answer to, I mean, you know, I've traveled to Kauai at very, very, very profound times of my life, births, deaths, you know, spiritual pilgrimage. And I've done ceremony, I've meditated, I've offered my heart. And, you know, it was, it's really just sort of a love affair that I've had with this island and also a remembrance of something very ancient here

• 21:23Julie Piatt?

  and very, very deep.

• 21:27Julie Piatt?

  And, you know, in the world, as you're going through the world and all these physical things are happening and people have, you know, credit scores and bank accounts and job descriptions and stuff like that, you know, it's easy to lose, you know, it's easily easy to even doubt yourself, you know, and also we we become impatient. So, you know, ten years is a long time.

• 21:48Rich Roll?

  Mm-hmm.

• 21:49Julie Piatt?

  In one sense, and then it's just a, it's just a, like a, a blink of an eye in another sense. But anyway, it's been a really beautiful, just sort of love that I feel from the universe, that Chris appeared and that we're getting this opportunity to have this exchange, and even though we all don't really know what that's gonna be yet at this point.

• 22:16Rich Roll?

  Right, I mean, it's, but it, just to bring it back, I mean, it is kind of amazing that, that, you know, here we were at this apparent crossroads and not sure what we were gonna be doing and, and sort of looking at apartments and towns and never would have predicted in a million years that, you know, Chris Jay would call up and say, "Hey, I'm working on some interesting things, like I'd love to get your input, and, you know, why don't you come and check it out?" Like, that was not part of the anticipated equation by any stretch of the imagination.

• 22:46Julie Piatt?

  No, that was not on the list.

• 22:47Rich Roll?

  So it goes back to, like, you can't, you know, we, we, I think as human beings, it's in our DNA, it's in our nature to, to judge, you know? We judge ourselves, we judge other people, we judge scenarios, we judge situations. Every, as much at work as we try to do to not judge things, we just do. So we look, we perceive a situation and inherently and intuitively, we make a judgment in our mind. We may not articulate that judgment, we say, "That's good, that's bad, oh, I see that over there, that's not good."

• 23:17Julie Piatt?

  Right.

• 23:18Rich Roll?

  That's not bad. And, and if you take a step back and look at it, go, "Well, what is that based on?" That's based on an incredibly limited amount of information and total lack of foresight.

• 23:29Julie Piatt?

  Right.

• 23:30Rich Roll?

  Right? So, you know, it's that old...

• 23:33Rich Roll?

  What is it, that old fable of the, you always hear that story of the guy who, the kid who's gonna go off to war.

• 23:39Julie Piatt?

  Right, right.

• 23:40Rich Roll?

  And then he breaks his leg and he can't go.

• 23:41Julie Piatt?

  Right.

• 23:42Rich Roll?

  And whatever, I don't wanna repeat it, most people have already heard that. But you can't, you can't know where things are leading.

• 23:48Julie Piatt?

  Exactly. Your view is very limited.

• 23:50Rich Roll?

  And I think most people make premature.

• 23:52Julie Piatt?

  Yes.

• 23:53Rich Roll?

  Judgments on scenarios, situations, people, and the like, so.

• 23:57Julie Piatt?

  That's right. So you don't know. So an event happens and it's like, you know, you go, oh, it's, I call it the big teeter totter of insanity. So, you know, something happens and you go, oh, that's great, that's so great. And then another event happens, oh, that's not so great. And it just goes back and forth between the two extremes.

• 24:13Rich Roll?

  It's really ridiculous, actually.

• 24:15Julie Piatt?

  It's insanity, quite frankly.

• 24:16Rich Roll?

  It is, it's complete insanity. Like, if aliens came down and looked at how humans behaved in that regard, they would, they would just say, you people are crazy, you don't know what you're doing at all.

• 24:24Julie Piatt?

  It is, it's crazy making. And if you review those times when, when we act that way, and when we, we are not in control of our emotions and we go to those highs and lows, 99.9% of the time, if you look in the rearview mirror at what occurred, it was nowhere near what any of your perception was.

• 24:45Rich Roll?

  Yeah, I mean, does it, it never plays out like you think it's going to, ever, right? So, no matter how good a predictor you are.

• 24:51Julie Piatt?

  You can't be.

• 24:52Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 24:53Julie Piatt?

  So, my favorite is the, is, you know, the universe knows your heart's deepest desires better than you know. And that's the thing that really just touches me so deeply when, you know, I love something so dearly and then life just presents it to me even better than I asked for it, or even better than I imagined it. Like, it's just like, oh, I, I love that.

• 25:16Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 25:17Julie Piatt?

  So.

• 25:18Rich Roll?

  Wait, what were we talking about before, though? What, what got me into the whole judgment thing?

• 25:22Julie Piatt?

  We were talking about thinking that you know the outcome to something, or that you know what a good, what a good choice is, or what a bad choice is.

• 25:29Rich Roll?

  Right, but what was I talking about before that?

• 25:31Julie Piatt?

  Before that?

• 25:32Rich Roll?

  I don't know.

• 25:33Julie Piatt?

  Okay, go back that far.

• 25:34Rich Roll?

  What made me start talking about that?

• 25:35Julie Piatt?

  Don't freak me out.

• 25:36Rich Roll?

  I don't remember. Anyway.

• 25:38Julie Piatt?

  I'm in the Kauai vortex, I can't think back that far.

• 25:39Rich Roll?

  Yeah, exactly. So, uh, so, yeah, so, so Chris, you know, kind of popped up on the radar and, and it was, it was just a situation where... It just seemed so in alignment and the timing was so good that we would have been foolish to not explore it.

• 25:57Julie Piatt?

  No, there was no way and the thing that was beautiful was that he felt the same way and it was one of these things is like, one of the things we're exploring with Chris, which is really exciting is, we're exploring a new paradigm of, if you can call it business, I don't even like to use that word anymore, it's a new paradigm of co-creating together, so that's a word that we use a lot together and sort of more than any single individual that Rich and I have ever met, our alignment was literally stacked on top of each other. So that, in effect, if we were doing one expression or one activity or one act, you know, for Chris or for Common Ground, that just stacked right on top of, you know, Rich

• 26:41Julie Piatt?

  and my, you know, life expression or anything that we're doing for Jai Lifestyle. So, it makes it such a rich, such a rich sort of pool to swim in because we're able to sort of serve ourselves, serve this community and serve the greater whole by being authentic to ourselves and authentic to our heart. And that's, I think, the core thing that's super exciting and why we dropped everything and came here and really wanted to pursue this.

• 27:13Rich Roll?

  Yeah, I mean, it is kind of crazy. I mean, from our first sort of phone call or meeting, it was like we were, suddenly we're on a plane and we were already here and we're like, what are we doing here?

• 27:25Julie Piatt?

  It was actually sooner than we thought.

• 27:27Rich Roll?

  I know.

• 27:27Julie Piatt?

  That's our drummer just saying.

• 27:30Rich Roll?

  Yeah, our audio expert.

• 27:32Julie Piatt?

  Just hit the hi-hat. That's all right.

• 27:35Rich Roll?

  But, you know, that's what's amazing and what's so cool is that we were able to kind of, you know, take this adventure on without knowing where it's going and really...

• 27:47Rich Roll?

  You know, I mean, Chris wants us here to help him co-create broader community with what he's trying to do at Common Ground, and that extends through multiple avenues, from the food that they're growing and preparing, to the outreach that they're doing with the local community, to the internet portal that Chris is trying to develop, which is really kind of the primary thing that he's focused on right now. Chris Jade, his background is in internet broadcasting. He was a co-founder of Broadcast.com with Mark Cuban back in the 90s.

• 28:26Rich Roll?

  It was a company that went public and was ultimately sold to Yahoo, and, you know, Chris did very well in that transaction, and he was presented with choices. You know, I mean, he's a guy who very well could have gone the Mark Cuban route and tried to empire-build and buy and sell businesses, or, you know, continue to, you know, stick his head in business and get all mired in that, and he decided that he didn't want that. He wanted to have a simpler life. And he explored different places to live, et cetera, and finally, you know, found the North Shore of Kauai and brought his family out here, and has been living, you know, a pretty simple existence for a guy like that.

• 29:08Rich Roll?

  And, you know, he bought this parcel of land, this 50 acres, which is a former guava plantation, and has slowly been, you know, turning it into what it is today, but he has plans for what he wants it to become. And along with that, he wants to leverage his experience in internet broadcasting and bring that into the world of wellness. So I'm working with him on developing a web portal to facilitate that, that would aggregate wellness content for live broadcasts and video distribution for products and services for people that are active experts in this field. And, you know, we're in the very, very early stages of it. I don't want to get too into it, because there's a long, long road.

• 29:50Rich Roll?

  Road to travel for that, but you know, that's something that I'm obviously very interested in and seems to, you know, make great sense for me to align myself with a guy like Chris, who seems so like-minded and his heart is in the right place and is really committed to trying to help people and improve lives.

• 30:09Julie Piatt?

  Definitely.

• 30:10Rich Roll?

  So, you know, there was no way we weren't going to come out here and, and check it out and explore it. So, that's what we're doing. That's the Common Ground mission.

• 30:26Rich Roll?

  Meanwhile, we're living in, you know, we've left our nice house and that coincidentally, on Thanksgiving Day, I don't know how many of you caught it, but you were probably watching football, but on HGTV, they have a TV show called Extreme Homes and they featured our house. They actually filmed that like-

• 30:44Julie Piatt?

  In June.

• 30:45Rich Roll?

  It's a long time ago.

• 30:46Julie Piatt?

  They spent a day with us in June.

• 30:47Rich Roll?

  Right. We weren't even sure that was even going to air and I think it got cut down. We didn't even see it because we don't have a TV here, but it got cut down in probably, you know, like a one-minute or a 30-second clip or whatever, but we heard that it-

• 30:56Julie Piatt?

  We had no idea.

• 30:57Rich Roll?

  We heard that it aired. So, it's just funny that our house was being shown on TV with Julie and I sort of walking around our house, talking about our home while we're out living in a yurt out here and like in a, on a farm.

• 31:09Julie Piatt?

  Yeah, but it's beautiful and I mean, you know, I mean, I loved living in the teepees when we lived in the teepees and we were building the house and, you know, I have a background in design and interior design and art and that teepee was one of my favorite spaces and, you know, Chris has done an amazing job and made our yurts really, really comfortable. We actually have a 30-foot yurt, which Rich and I are living in with the two little girls and then the boys have their own 30-foot yurt and then we share a communal kitchen and we have, you know, community showers and toilets. So, it's, it's really sweet and we're really blessed and really grateful to be here. It's definitely not a hard life.

• 31:53Rich Roll?

  No, it's not.

• 31:54Julie Piatt?

  It's a very blessed life.

• 31:55Rich Roll?

  You know, I think a lot of people out there are, they're like, "Well, what's it like to live in a yurt?"

• 31:59Julie Piatt?

  It's actually amazing and isn't it amazing when the rain pelts? I was, I was waiting for one water leak. There are, there's no leaking. I mean, the rain is just dumping and they're completely- You know, watertight.

• 32:12Rich Roll?

  I know, they're a pretty incredible design. What is, are they like, is it Turkish? Like, who are the people that came up with the year design?

• 32:19Julie Piatt?

  I don't know, I want to say Mongolian, but I might be wrong. Mongolian, I think. Yeah, they're really, really cool. And of course, you know, we like everything open with us. You know, we have our bathtub in our bedroom and we would prefer no walls inside of a building. There's a Quonset hut on the grounds that I would love to have, just keep it empty and build a couple loft levels on the side. It's pretty cool.

• 32:40Rich Roll?

  If you follow my Instagram feed, I Instagrammed a picture of the Quonset hut a while back.

• 32:45Julie Piatt?

  Yeah, I was all over that the first day.

• 32:46Rich Roll?

  It's pretty cool. You could totally build a house within that structure.

• 32:49Julie Piatt?

  It'd be amazing.

• 32:50Rich Roll?

  That would be pretty incredible.

• 32:51Julie Piatt?

  So anyway, so they were really sweet and they gave us walls like normal people, which is really nice. But if, you know, we stay in the future, we'll probably break them all down and let everyone in.

• 33:02Rich Roll?

  Yeah, I mean, I'm completely comfortable in them.

• 33:04Julie Piatt?

  Are you? What's your, what's your biggest sacrifice of being in the year? Like, like your living?

• 33:08Rich Roll?

  Well, I mean, we didn't have, you know, kind of getting back to the discussion of living minimally or, you know, sort of, you know, dialing things back. I mean, we had gotten rid of television a while ago, right?

• 33:19Julie Piatt?

  Oh, yeah.

• 33:20Rich Roll?

  At our house.

• 33:21Julie Piatt?

  I won that battle finally.

• 33:22Rich Roll?

  I know, believe me, that was, I went kicking and screaming on that one.

• 33:26Julie Piatt?

  For years.

• 33:27Rich Roll?

  So, I still, I still do. But at our house, ironically, our house in California, we live in kind of a remote, sort of secluded area, and they don't have DSL. Like, the broadband offerings where we live are really poor. You have to, the only option available to us is a really slow internet connection. It's, I mean, it's better than dial-up, but it's kind of like satellite, like, it's not good. So, you can't really stream stuff that well, or, you know, it's...

• 33:58Julie Piatt?

  Especially with all the people in our house that are trying to...

• 34:00Rich Roll?

  Yeah, exactly. It's pretty spotty.

• 34:02Julie Piatt?

  Get connected.

• 34:03Rich Roll?

  So ironically, we're here in the yurts and we've got like lightning-fast Wi-Fi in our, so it's actually a step up technologically from where we were living. Because Chris, you know, I mean, he's the internet broadcast guy. There's no way there's not gonna be fast internet here.

• 34:20Julie Piatt?

  He's got good stuff here. He's got it wired.

• 34:21Rich Roll?

  So actually, the little girls, I think, are happy because they can stream the stuff that they want. But, so I'd already made peace with the no TV thing, which ordinarily, that probably would have been the hardest thing. But the beds are totally comfortable. I love hearing the rain at night.

• 34:34Julie Piatt?

  Yeah, sweet.

• 34:35Rich Roll?

  There's Wi-Fi and, you know, it's, you know, you don't have to get in your car to drive somewhere to do something.

• 34:42Julie Piatt?

  It's pretty insane. I get up, I get up and walk across the lawn to go teach my yoga class.

• 34:49Rich Roll?

  Right. Julie's been teaching yoga in the mornings to the kids and to me and to the people that work here, Chris and his wife. And that's been really cool. Yeah, just walk across the lawn to this beautiful little yoga room that Chris erected on the property.

• 35:04Julie Piatt?

  Gorgeous.

• 35:05Rich Roll?

  It's pretty nice, right?

• 35:06Julie Piatt?

  Yeah, it's beautiful.

• 35:07Rich Roll?

  So what do you think? Like, could you, do you think?

• 35:10Julie Piatt?

  Yeah, I could totally hang. I mean, you know, there'd be some design stuff that I'd like to do just for my own, you know, for my own vibe.

• 35:16Rich Roll?

  But what do you think about, like, living on an island all the time?

• 35:21Julie Piatt?

  Well, a lot of me really, really, really loves it a lot. And I think that if I can convince some of my friends to come here, then I'll be, it would be even better. But no, I'm meeting friends here and I am connecting with people from the mainland that I know that are here. You know, I think that there is, there's a need to just, you know, connect in on the mainland. And I'm already calling it the mainland. I'm some kind of islander on the mainland. Now, just to, you know, be back in LA. And I mean, I still have, I do have a pull to Austin. I think there are some relevant things for us there. And I think it's a cool community. I never meet anybody that doesn't say amazing things about Austin.

• 36:03Rich Roll?

  Yeah. I've been hearing good things about Asheville, too.

• 36:06Julie Piatt?

  Have you really?

• 36:07Rich Roll?

  That might not be out of the...

• 36:08Julie Piatt?

  Well, the good news is, is, I mean, you know, listen, there's really not that much to not love here. I mean, I think our biggest challenges are that the movie theater, the movie-going situation is not good at all.

• 36:20Rich Roll?

  Yeah, we're big movie people and the movie theater needs a little work.

• 36:24Julie Piatt?

  The only epic thing is that they were playing Santana, like Black Sabbath woman, like the whole, the whole record from start to finish, instead of, what do they call that? First look? That really cheesy, horrible thing that they play before movies in LA?

• 36:38Rich Roll?

  I think, you know, for me, like, that's, that's one thing I struggle with. You know, the idea of, like, there's, I can't, I have, I have trouble getting my mind around this idea that we're, we're exempting ourselves out of, like, the flow of what's happening and culture and society. And I've always been one that thrives on kind of an urban beat. Not that Los Angeles has the most, the biggest heartbeat of any city, but it's a huge city and it's a center of a lot of things that are going on. And I like being part of that. And I love New York City. Like, you know, I spent some time living in San Francisco and, you know, I was like, I need to be back in New York or back in, like, I want to be, like, where it's happening.

• 37:19Julie Piatt?

  I know, but even when-

• 37:20Rich Roll?

  For me, but what I'm saying is, that's an interesting opportunity for me to look at myself and go, well, why do I feel that way? Or what is it about me that feels like I need that? Like, is that like a, like a fear? Like, I want to be part of what's going on? Or the world is passing me by? Or I'm not relevant if I'm not living there?

• 37:38Julie Piatt?

  Right, right.

• 37:39Rich Roll?

  Or, you know, my ego wants to attach itself to people that are doing interesting things so that I'm, like, interesting by proxy or something. You know, I don't know what that's about.

• 37:48Julie Piatt?

  Right.

• 37:48Rich Roll?

  But I definitely feel that. And so when, like, when we first got here, I was like, oh, my God, we're on an island.

• 37:54Julie Piatt?

  I know, you had a couple freak out, like-

• 37:55Rich Roll?

  Right, a couple freaked out.

• 37:56Julie Piatt?

  What cracks me up is when you get like that. I, I remember, because Rich is a huge Lost fan, like, I mean, beyond, like, he just watched it and studied it and went into it. It was like, it was, he was all about it. Like, was, he was all about Lost. So sometimes when I'm driving around, I'm like, Rich thinks he's on Lost. He's lost on that.

• 38:17Rich Roll?

  It is a little bit like Lost here.

• 38:18Julie Piatt?

  It has a little bit of-

• 38:19Rich Roll?

  Well, I mean, you know, Lost is essentially a spiritual adventure, you know, like, there's crazy-

• 38:24Julie Piatt?

  I know.

• 38:25Rich Roll?

  Things happening. And there's something about this island, there's, there's a supercharged energy. And that energy can be light or it can be dark, you know? And there's a, there's a definite heaviness that I think you have to, like, be aware of and be careful of.

• 38:40Julie Piatt?

  Respect.

• 38:41Rich Roll?

  Yeah, you have to, you have to respect this land, you have to respect the people. And, you know, it's a, it's a tricky, interesting, social dynamic with the people that live here, too. You know, whether you're relocated from the mainland or you're, you know, you're a native to Kauai or Hawaii, it's not, um-

• 39:02Rich Roll?

  It's not always simple.

• 39:04Julie Piatt?

  No.

• 39:04Rich Roll?

  Knowing how to socially interact appropriately with the people that live here.

• 39:07Julie Piatt?

  Well, we experienced that when we first arrived. Like, we were like the hillbillies from LA, just completely open. And we got a little bit of Kauai vibe. We ended up calling it Kauai vibe.

• 39:19Rich Roll?

  Yeah, I mean, you know, but I mean, I think that comes from our, not really ignorance, but just

• 39:25Julie Piatt?

  Kind of.

• 39:25Rich Roll?

  maybe lack of awareness of how things work here.

• 39:28Julie Piatt?

  Right, exactly. We just didn't even know.

• 39:30Rich Roll?

  Yeah, there's a, there's a cultural, even though we're in the United States and you know you're in the United States, we're a long way away. And there's some cultural mores and sort of unwritten rules that, you know, you gotta kind of learn as you go.

• 39:42Julie Piatt?

  Sure. I think we've got it, we've got it down now.

• 39:46Rich Roll?

  So how do you think, I think other people are wanting to know, like, well, you have all your kids there and like, why aren't they in school?

• 39:53Julie Piatt?

  Yeah, well, we homeschool.

• 39:55Rich Roll?

  That's scary.

• 39:56Julie Piatt?

  We unschool, homeschool.

• 39:59Rich Roll?

  That's scary.

• 39:59Julie Piatt?

  It's even scarier. That's another, another kind of, kind of, what I want to say, battle that I'm, that I'm winning, that I've been winning. No, we just, you know, we live a really creative life and we live a creative life at our house in, you know, at Jai House in Malibu Canyon. And, you know, we're always creating and we're sort of all spontaneous in the way that we move. And I think our two younger girls, the arrival of the two little girls sort of dictated that we needed to come up with something else because the regular school structure that exists today was not supporting them. And we have two little girls that are very sensitive. They're extremely strong.

• 40:44Julie Piatt?

  They are not easily convinced to do other than what they have their mind set on. But they're also just very energetically sensitive and they're affected by their environment. They're affected by You know, lots of things in the environment and other people, places, energetics. And so I think it just came out of a need that I started trying to start the homeschool at our house and.

• 41:12Rich Roll?

  Yeah, I mean, I think, you know, particularly with Mathis, our eight-year-old, like she is a handful, man. Like she requires the work of like four kids.

• 41:21Julie Piatt?

  She's a stallion.

• 41:22Rich Roll?

  She's not an easy child. And she's got it. Yeah, she's a stallion. She's like a horse that you would want to break in.

• 41:29Julie Piatt?

  She don't want to break her.

• 41:30Rich Roll?

  But you don't want to break her in. Like she's got a fire and a spirit. And that's a beautiful thing. Like that's something that you want to, as a parent, you want to foster and you want to develop.

• 41:39Julie Piatt?

  As a human.

• 41:40Rich Roll?

  Exactly. And we had experimented with having her in, you know, a bunch of different schools. And she was in like three or four schools over the last couple of years. And it just was, it was never a fit. But the sort of common theme was that she, after a few weeks, she'd start to come home like deflated with her head hanging low and, you know, sort of.

• 42:00Julie Piatt?

  She'd go to school with like, you know, two odd shoes or especially when she was even, now she's almost nine.

• 42:05Rich Roll?

  She's like a mini.

• 42:06Julie Piatt?

  She's starting to get more normal.

• 42:07Rich Roll?

  Betsy Johnson. Like she comes up with these crazy outfits and, you know, is like stitching her own clothes together with yarn.

• 42:12Julie Piatt?

  But then dirt on her face, avocado smeared on her forehead or something like that.

• 42:17Rich Roll?

  Right. And, and there's something really cool about that, too.

• 42:20Julie Piatt?

  Oh, we think, yeah.

• 42:21Rich Roll?

  Right? So, but then she would kind of, you could see her getting beaten down.

• 42:25Julie Piatt?

  Well, no, there were all, actually in, in first grade, there were already girl cliques developing in the classroom. So there was already, there was already a culture that had developed in first grade on what was acceptable to wear or what, how you had to be. And Mathis is an artist and while she's a wild stallion, she's actually selling original art now. She made like 900 bucks before we left selling. She had one commissioned piece and one piece that she sold to grownups, couples that we know that are in our community. And she actually went on eBay and got herself a MacBook Air.

• 43:04Rich Roll?

  She's very entrepreneurial.

• 43:05Julie Piatt?

  She's amazing. And the thing is, and I let her go crazy. And she had, and she has an amazing space at our house. It used to be my yoga room, and then we kept procreating, and that had to go away. But anyway, so the girls have been in there, and they have their art studio. And I really let, I mean, I let the kids draw on the walls when they were little, and I really let them go. And it was a lot of mess and a lot of debris for many years. And especially Mathis would bring in like sticks and dirt. And, you know, I just turned my head for one second, and some mess would be sitting in the house. And then, you know, I saw her Kindle art, the stuff that she's done, you know, on her computer, and it's just extraordinary. The composition is amazing. And I just said to myself, thank God I was right. And I just let her go.

• 43:50Rich Roll?

  So what do you think, but getting back to like homeschooling versus traditional schooling? And I think, you know, there's a lot of parents out there that struggle with this. And, you know, their experience, they, obviously, every parent wants to do the best for their children, of course, right?

• 44:04Julie Piatt?

  Absolutely.

• 44:05Rich Roll?

  And I think there's a lot of parents that are interested in homeschooling, but it's scary. It scares me. It still scares me. I come from a very traditional academic background. And maybe just too scary to really explore it. And so they either, you know, spend all their money to put them in a private school that's unbelievably expensive, or try to do the best parenting they can with the, you know, with the schools that are available. And, you know, what do you think it is about the system that is not working?

• 44:40Julie Piatt?

  Well, I think that, first of all, I think every child is different. And I think, and I just want to, before I say anything, I just want to give complete respect and honoring to the mother's intuition, or the father, whoever, you know, whoever's involved with the children.

• 45:00Julie Piatt?

  But I will say that there are an increasing number of children that are coming into bodies that are being born, I guess I could say in a more layman term, that are being born, that they have a different energetics, okay? So I think as parents, we often try to say, "Well, when I was a kid," you know, you always hear that statement, "Well, when I was a kid, it was like this." And when you were a kid and an old person said that to you, you were just like, you know, "You're old." And yet, we say it to our own kids, you know? So I just think that the planet is shifting at such a rapid rate that there is no way that these kids that are coming in are so much more evolved than we are. And they're evolved in ways we don't even understand.

• 45:44Julie Piatt?

  So they have abilities, or awarenesses, or ways of operating that are beyond the structure that exists here. So that poses a very difficult challenge for us as parents. And it takes a very courageous parent to allow themselves to step out of the box and to break the rules in service to their child. A lot of these children that are coming in, like we were talking about, you know, our girl Mathis, she's very strong and she has a lot of energy. And if it's misdirected, or it's damaged or hurt, it can be expressed in a dark way.

• 46:28Julie Piatt?

  These energies that are coming in are very, very powerful. They may remember their past lives. They know they're not just a three-year-old little baby. They know that. So I think that the challenge for all of us, really in a lot of different structures that are on the planet now, not only education, we're starting to say, "Hey, wait a second, like, that doesn't really make sense." Like, just because my son can't sit in a desk in a classroom, you know, with minimal art and, you know, toxic food served, you know, for lunch, and then the energies of all these other kids around me all the time, just because my son can't do that doesn't make him sick.

• 47:12Julie Piatt?

  Or does it make him, you know, in need for medication?

• 47:18Rich Roll?

  Or bad, or wrong?

• 47:19Julie Piatt?

  Or wrong, right.

• 47:20Rich Roll?

  Or required to be disciplined?

• 47:22Julie Piatt?

  No, and so, and the thing is, is once you start to, see, I go, I come back to the point that if everyone understood and remembered that we are all divine emanations from one source, right, so we are, we are created by this like amazing force that is the conductor or the creator of all of life. So if we just, just remembered, and I say remembered because we know it at our soul level, but if we just remembered that each being is divine, each being is perfect, then how about if we switched our awareness to, instead of saying, "Oh, Johnny doesn't fit

• 48:03Julie Piatt?

  in the box, something's wrong with him," to let me try to serve this individual in my highest way that I know how, keeping them safe, you know, yeah, you've got to keep the knives away from them, the car, you know, the fire, like anything, you know, yeah, you have to parent, but what if you just did that with the intention of, "I want to know who you are, I want to know who you are, and I want to support you, and I'm here for you, so please, tell me more of who you are," instead of, you know what, you, you know, like, Osho has a beautiful story that he tells, and the summary of it is, is, Osho

• 48:44Julie Piatt?

  is an, is an Indian master who, who, you know, is semi-controversial, I won't get into it, anyway, you can Google him if you want, brilliant, brilliant, brilliant consciousness, but he, he talks about how that education was created this way, they got like a bird, a fish, a snake, and a squirrel together, and they decided to make a standardized education. So therefore, you know, the squirrel would have to fly and swim, the fish would have to, you know, tree jump, and the bird would have to dig into the dirt, right, so the, the

• 49:25Julie Piatt?

  whole story goes on, and at the end, they were all wounded, you know, the, the fish crashed tree, tree jumping and fell to its death, and then, you know, the bird broke his beak trying to dig, and, you know, the, the point is, is that

• 49:41Rich Roll?

  And they all felt like shit because they couldn't.

• 49:43Julie Piatt?

  Well, no, I think that, and I'm telling you.

• 49:45Rich Roll?

  They all had poor self-esteem at the end of the day.

• 49:48Julie Piatt?

  Exactly. They all had very poor self-esteem, which is really like the big thing in these schools. And I think, I think in his story, he says, you know, well, the brain-dead eel, or the very, you know, sort of simple eel is the one that excelled the most because he was medium. He was like, less than medium in all of these.

• 50:03Rich Roll?

  Could kinda do all of them a little bit.

• 50:04Julie Piatt?

  Exactly, so.

• 50:05Rich Roll?

  Well, it's, it's, it's an interesting thing because getting back to, you know, like Mathis and her own experience, and her being sort of strong-willed and having a very, you know, strong personality, and as a parent wanting to foster that and, and, you know, and allow that to develop and not get crushed, I think is, you know, really important to both of us, and probably to most parents who, you know, they want to see their kid flourish and their personality come alive, and not get kind of crushed and beaten down by a system. And then, at the same time, we're dealing with a system that, you know, sort of gives participation medals to everybody, you know, like whether you suck or you're

• 50:49Rich Roll?

  good, right? Like, like it's not okay anymore to tell a kid, hey, you know what, like, you're not any good at that. Or like, you know, you need some work, like, let's work on it. Like, you know, you play a sport and everybody gets to play no matter what, and, you know, if the team goes 0 for 10, they still get a trophy at the end of the year, you know? Like, I kinda have a problem with that, too.

• 51:11Julie Piatt?

  Right.

• 51:11Rich Roll?

  Like, it's sort of, where, what happened to honest dialogue?

• 51:15Julie Piatt?

  Right.

• 51:15Rich Roll?

  You know, like, what happened to just saying?

• 51:16Julie Piatt?

  Or just playing a game.

• 51:17Rich Roll?

  Or, hey, it's okay if you lose, but like, let's learn from that, but let's not pretend that you're good at something that you're not. Like, I think that that's a problem at the same time.

• 51:25Julie Piatt?

  I think, I think that's a, that's a correction in the opposite direction to not a good balance.

• 51:31Rich Roll?

  Yeah, it's like this weird politically correct, like, response where you can't, like, even have, like, an open conversation or dialogue about, like, what's really happening.

• 51:38Julie Piatt?

  Yeah, it's not a balance.

• 51:40Rich Roll?

  And so I don't think that's good either.

• 51:41Julie Piatt?

  No, it's not, Ben.

• 51:42Rich Roll?

  Oh, sorry. But, and I also think that we're in an incredible time. Like, for you and I, you know, the internet's really only been part of our lives for not even half of our life, right? And I don't think that we can overstate or overdramatize like how impactful it is to the way that we live. It's huge. You know, I mean, it's changed our lives completely. I mean, we wouldn't be doing what we're doing at all without it, and, you know, in a million other ways, of course. But, you know, I look at our youngest, who's five years old, and she plays Minecraft on the iPad, and she's creating cityscapes that look like they're out of, like, inception. I mean, it's insane, right? She's actually kind of good at it. And she just intuitively knows how to do it, and she teaches herself.

• 52:27Rich Roll?

  And when you see that, and it gets back to what you were saying, like, the kids that are coming in are different now, well, they're coming in different, but they're also exposed to things that we can't even fathom the impact of that, and how that's going to play out over the course of their lives. So, you know, when they're learning how to intuitively interact with technology at such an incredibly young age, you know, where does that lead? And I think it leads to a future that we can't predict that's going to be completely different than anything we can imagine. It is. And I think that that calls into question and requires a dialogue about the nature, the very nature of education. Yes. Because, you know, we're really teaching curriculum, curriculums, curricula, that

• 53:10Rich Roll?

  were, that have been established, you know, were established a long time ago and have really not changed much at all. Like, you go to, you know, you study English, and you study history, and you read these history textbooks- Right. ...without any real perspective about whether that's really the way anything went down. It's, in certain respects, yes, it's required to have a kind of a functional knowledge and understanding of our world, and at the same time, you know, there's, there is an argument to be made that it's incredibly antiquated, and that our, even, even the collegiate system- Like, what is the point of that now? Like, if you want to be an English professor, or you want to be a mechanical engineer, or you want to be a doctor, or something like that, of course. Like, you know, if you want to be a doctor, you've got to go to medical school.

• 53:55Rich Roll?

  There are certain things that you need to learn to practice that.

• 53:58Julie Piatt?

  Depends on what kind of doctor.

• 53:59Rich Roll?

  Well, to practice that trait. Oh, don't even get me into like that. Well, that's, I can go for hours on that.

• 54:04Julie Piatt?

  Okay.

• 54:05Rich Roll?

  And, by the way, we talked about going for, talking for an hour, but I think we should just keep going.

• 54:10Julie Piatt?

  Okay.

• 54:10Rich Roll?

  Until we get bored. But, but, but, um, my point is this. With technology advancing as quickly as it is, exponentially, you know, with every year, it's so dramatic. It's just mind blowing. That, I think that, that, you know, a lot of these rules of education don't really apply anymore. And that the future of employment is really going to be skill driven in a way that we can't really anticipate. And so, you know, I think that, that, I mean, is it, what's more valuable? Like, graduating from a good college with a degree in history? Or really knowing how to use Final Cut Pro really well?

• 54:52Julie Piatt?

  Right.

• 54:52Rich Roll?

  Or if you can HTML code, or you understand WordPress, or you understand how to produce a podcast? I mean, those are real life valuable skills that have immediate applicability and value in the marketplace. And those are things you're not learning, you're not going to learn in college. And they're not that difficult, but they're, they're skills that, you know, require some training. So I think it, you know, I think it's, it's worth discussing, like, a more skill specific, education based system that prepares people for, I mean, I think there's a difference between education and preparation for the workforce.

• 55:29Julie Piatt?

  For life. How about life?

• 55:31Rich Roll?

  Well, life, I mean, yeah, that's the broader issue, of course, that whole. But in terms of like, looking at, you know, our children and considering, you know, the pros and cons of homeschooling and what we want that homeschooling experience to be and look like, and what are the priorities? You know, it's, it's, it's, it's really interesting. And I think that... You know, when you look at at least the public school system where we're coming from, and you know, it's easy to see all the things that are broken about it and criticize it or whatever, and then, you know, are we discounting the positive aspects of that? Are our kids being properly socialized? Are they going to be ready for the world? Should they go to college? If so, what should they study? What do they want to study?

• 56:14Rich Roll?

  And, you know, Tyler, who's sitting here to my left, like, he wants to be a musician. He picked up a guitar when he could barely speak and has never put it down, and is, it's pretty convinced that he wants to, you know, develop that as much as possible, and that he wants his life to be about that. So as a parent, what is the responsible or appropriate response to that to help prepare him for the world?

• 56:42Julie Piatt?

  Well, I mean, yeah, I know. I mean, all of that is, is, uh, is all really relevant, and, uh, the, well, I wanted to talk a little bit about the boys because they had a different experience. You know, they went to private school as young, young children through middle school, and then they moved to public school for financial reasons. But, you know, they're very academically smart, and they can kind of maneuver in that world. Both of, both of the boys, Trapper and Tyler, who are 16 and 17, are both homeschooled. It's Trapper's first year of being homeschooled. Tyler's been homeschooled two years in a row. And in their case, they're just getting the, they're just doing the curriculum, but doing it at home, you know, because they're almost done.

• 57:27Julie Piatt?

  So, rather than, you know, try to find some alternative thing for them, we were just like, you know, just finish it, get your, get the high school done. But, you know, you and I asked them about their college desires, and if they went to college, you know, where would that be? And the thing that surprised us is we were thinking, well, maybe they want to travel overseas, or they want to go to Europe, or they want to do something like that. And both of their answers were that they wanted to stay close to us. They, that, you know, we have a very close, creative, interactive family. And, you know, last year, I mean, I think the classes, the colleges that they looked at were in Pomona in California, some liberal arts colleges or something like that, but...

• 58:10Julie Piatt?

  You know, the year, first year Tyler was home, homeschooled, he produced my record. So it's like, here he is, he's playing, you know, eight instruments in the studio with me producing, he produced the whole thing. I mean, as a seventeen year old, he has, he produced a record, like, under his belt, and quite amazingly. So, as a mother, it's a complete triumph for me, I mean, for him. And, you know, if, if, if our children didn't have direction, or didn't know what they wanted to do, then I think we would be asking a different set of questions. But, they're not, you know, they're not lazy, they're not hanging around, you know, they're actually doing stuff.

• 58:51Julie Piatt?

  And now, you know, they have, between them, probably eighty songs, between the three of them, and they're going to be recording their own record, you know, for their band, Analemma. And, you know, they're actively engaged in, in, in something that fulfills them at a soul level. And, you know, you can't buy that, you can't create that. I mean, I feel so blessed that they know who they are. And the one thing that I want to just mention, too, for, you know, parents with kids that are in high school, you know, um, the, the thing that breaks my heart, heart the most about the current system is that there is no, there's no room for spontaneous creativity in that culture.

• 59:33Julie Piatt?

  Because, both of my kids are amazing musicians, and none of their friends, almost none of their friends even knew that they were musicians, because they would never even say, out of fear, that it would be the wrong kind of music, and someone might not like it, and they would then be pigeonholed, or, uh, had sort of labeled for the rest of their high school career. So what that does, is it makes kids walk a very narrow line. They never want to do anything, or say anything spontaneous, or just be free, because there's this culture that judges them. And to me, that's a very sad environment to be in, and not one that I would ever want anybody to spend any time in.

• 1:00:13Rich Roll?

  Yeah, it's interesting, I mean, and reflecting back on my experience in, in school, and... You know, I was very awkward throughout elementary school and junior high and high school and, you know, I sort of fell into swimming was my soulless, you know, it was my escape, like it was, I could go to the pool and I could be away from school because I just couldn't relate to the kids in my classroom. I just, I couldn't connect. I was an outsider. I wasn't part of like, you know, the scene or whatever. And I found my way out of that through water, really, which saved me in many ways. But, but at

• 1:00:52Rich Roll?

  the same time, I was in a very, you know, very kind of hardcore academic environment, very kind of focused on academic excellence. And it was, it's a game, you know what I mean? Like it's a game, it's like get into this, get into this junior high and then get into this high school. And then if you do these things, then, you know, when you put this on your college application, then you'll be in a good position to get into this school. And, and, you know, I just took that lockstep like all the way to the end. You know, I just, I was so focused on like moving the pieces around the chessboard or

• 1:01:32Rich Roll?

  whatever, as well as I could, that I never stopped to think like, well, what, you know, like what do I want? Like what is, what's beating my heart? Like what is it that, that I'm interested in or I'm passionate about? Or what would I like to devote my life to? That's, that's, that's not part of the inquiry. The system is not set up ironically for you to ask those questions or to kind of probe internally into, you know, what it is that you want to get out of this short life that we're, that we're living. It's sort of, well, you know, just, you know, the better school you get into and the more jobs you can get, then the more opportunities you'll have and, and, you know, then you can make those decisions then, or whatever. And like I went through the whole thing.

• 1:02:17Rich Roll?

  Never want saying, "What is it that I want?" It was just like, "Well, if I do this, then I can get a good job, and that will have a high-paying salary," and blah, blah, blah. And so, shocking, big shock when I have this incredible spiritual crisis after I'm running into all these addiction problems and having all these issues. Because I wasn't living a life that was authentic to me or in alignment with who I was, and I didn't even know who I was. I was so disconnected from myself, I didn't even know what questions to ask myself to even get to that place. And so, the last eight, 10, 12 years have been about doing that. But I look at Tyler, I look at Trapper, I look at the girls,

• 1:03:00Rich Roll?

  and I think, "God, what if I had had that opportunity at that age and was able to know myself and what I wanted out of life at a young age? How different would my life have been?"

• 1:03:19Julie Piatt?

  Well, that was always the point. And I mean, when you and I discuss it at length, you would talk about all your education, because it's an amazing thing. I mean, your education and the world of education is an amazing thing. Having gone to Stanford and then Cornell, and you were accepted into every single Ivy League school. You could have gone anywhere. I mean, that's incredible. And yet, you had this challenge with alcoholism. And we always talked about, "Well, what was the thing that was missing for you?" And it was spiritual connection. So, it's like, we have it backwards. It's the spiritual connection first that plugs you in and connects you to your heart, and then everything else emanates out of that.

• 1:04:02Julie Piatt?

  And the same reason we were at a PTA meeting at this really great school and saw this film called Race to Nowhere. And it's a tragic story about a middle school girl who actually takes her life because she's not making grades and she's stressed out from being on this hamster wheel of test-taking and achieving certain results. And the film was basically backing up everything I had been fighting for or arguing for with you and with the community and other parents and everybody that I've been talking to. And you thought I was gonna stand up and really say something at the meeting.

• 1:04:47Rich Roll?

  I was scared.

• 1:04:48Julie Piatt?

  No, but the thing is, is that I just sat there in silence because the parents stood up and said, "Oh, well, it's the children's fault. My child isn't like that." And then another parent stood up and said, "Oh, it's the parents' fault because those parents are weird." And then another parent stood up and said, "Oh, it's the teacher's fault." And the point is, is that nobody is connecting to this divine consciousness that is all of us. And that is the beginning, middle, and end of the problem, right there. And I'm not talking about religion. I'm not religious. I'm talking about the force that is all of us with no separation, no boundaries. So if that's intact, in our homeschool, we started every day with a humming meditation

• 1:05:30Julie Piatt?

  that is an ancient Tibetan technique. And it's a Maha mantra, which is like a great, a very powerful mantra. And it's meant to open the heart, and it's one that we offer on our website. And it's one that led me to becoming a songwriter and actually letting that out of my life at, you know, late in my life after I had my children and was married for a long time. But it's this connection to the heart that will allow everybody to remember who they are. And if all of us can remember who we are, then there will be a lot of beauty. Because I really believe that at the divine plan, we were created in perfect harmony

• 1:06:15Julie Piatt?

  to interact with each other. And not everybody has the same path at all. We all come from the same source, but we're all very individualized. And we need everybody to be more of who they are so that we can... Have fun, so that we can be blessed and enjoy and create and dance with other individuals.

• 1:06:37Rich Roll?

  But what do you say to, and I want to get into that, I want to talk about creativity too. But what do you say to somebody who might be listening to this and says, "Well, that's great, but you know, you know, I gotta be at work at 5:30 and you know, I gotta get up at 4 and I gotta take the ki- and I pick up the kids, blah, blah, blah, I have to do all this stuff, like I'm stuck." You know, like that's great, you know, be your authentic self or whatever, but like I don't really have that luxury. Like I'm stretched to the max right now and I can barely pay my bills and I don't, you know, I can't, you know, I think there's a, there's sort of a, you know, uh-

• 1:07:14Julie Piatt?

  Helplessness.

• 1:07:15Rich Roll?

  Yeah, yeah, and I think, you know, we're in, look, it's tough times, man, you know. It's a lot of people that are really hurting and, and, you know, for the record, like, we've gone through it. Like we, it's been, you know, it, you know, yeah, I had my-

• 1:07:30Julie Piatt?

  We've been through a financial-

• 1:07:31Rich Roll?

  We've done some really cool things, like the past couple of years has been amazing, but financially, very, very difficult time, and we've weathered some very difficult times. So, you know, I am, I have a lot of empathy and compassion for people that feel stuck or feel helpless or whatever. But, you know, is there something that you can offer?

• 1:07:52Julie Piatt?

  Well, I would say, yeah, I mean, I would say, first of all, that, you know, we feel, we feel your pain and we, and we have been through it. We, I call it burning in the fire, the dismantling of burning, burning in the fire, which removes all of your seeming security, you know, away from, you know, all of the illusion of security. So, you know, things like the structure, like bank accounts and savings accounts and insurances and 401Ks and, you know, and those kind of things. And I just think one of the greatest- Tragedies of the current system is that we judge beings based on their bank account. I mean, you know, what is that? Like, you know, it's just, it's incredibly violent.

• 1:08:34Julie Piatt?

  You know, as we have seen over the past years, the veil is starting to come down on the real, just what's really going on, what's really going on with the banks, what's really going on. And we were all sold this kind of fantasy that we too could live the American dream and have this little sliver if we were good enough, or creative enough, or smart enough, or clever enough. And it's been, it's been really, really violent. So I feel like the shift of all of these, of all of these structures is now going to reveal a lot of really amazing artists and amazing beings who are trapped in other, in other walks of life, like you were. You know, you were a lawyer, so, you know, how much more of service have you been now

• 1:09:19Julie Piatt?

  that we had the courage, we took the risk, and we said that we would make the, you know, leap? And so how much more of service have we been able to be since we, you know, took the risk, I guess?

• 1:09:36Rich Roll?

  Yeah, well, a lot, but it's also about being in the mindset of being of service, as opposed to like, what am I going to get out of this? You know, like, what, you know, what's in it for me? And approaching scenarios from like, how can I be of service to this?

• 1:09:49Julie Piatt?

  But I think, I think, actually, I don't really think you can be in service until you know who you are. So that, the authentic service, because service just for charity, you know, like, I'm going to be involved with a charity, that, the ego that's, that's collecting money for the charity can be the same ego as that of an actress. Okay? So we're talking about really being of world service, which in order to do that, you have to be dismantled. You cannot read about it in a book, or decide it's a nice idea, until you have lived it in your souls. So for anybody that's having a difficult moment, and who has, deep inside them, some

• 1:10:30Julie Piatt?

  spiritual awareness that they are, you know, that there is something greater, I would say...

• 1:10:37Julie Piatt?

  Congratulations and amazing for you and amazing for all of us. And I so understand how difficult it is. And we, you know, we weathered things. I mean, we'll speak about it more and we'll write about it more, you know, as we start to come into this next year. But just trust me, it is not for the weary. It has not been easy in any way, shape, or form. And Rich and I have been, often he has said, you know, I've never been more on the edge of complete annihilation or complete expression before in my life. Like, it was literally like a razor's edge.

• 1:11:12Rich Roll?

  Yeah, it was like living this dichotomy of like, either everything's gonna completely fall apart or it's gonna blossom into the most beautiful flower. Like, I can't tell which one.

• 1:11:21Julie Piatt?

  And it's 50/50. It could be either way, like, no idea, right?

• 1:11:24Rich Roll?

  And just, you know, getting back to dismantling. I mean, you know, really like when, when systems are falling apart or things aren't working out in your life or you're having a crisis over this or you suffer this loss or, you know, something bad perceivably bad, I suppose, happens. You know, these are opportunities. I mean, everything is an opportunity for growth. And it's annoying and it sounds trite and flip to say that. And the unfortunate fact is that it's true. You know, like, if something happens, it's an opportunity. It's an opportunity for growth. Okay, well, you know, here's what happened. What am I gonna do with this information? How am I gonna collate it? What am I, how am I gonna organize it?

• 1:12:08Rich Roll?

  And what am I, what are the actions that I'm gonna take in response to it?

• 1:12:13Julie Piatt?

  Right, well, it's not, it's not what happens to you. It's who are you in, in that process? Who are you in that process? And what are you able to hold? And I think that, you know, holding neutral compassionate awareness for the whole, you know, unfoldment is really, really the tool, really the technique that can get you through all of it. The other thing is,

• 1:12:38Julie Piatt?

  As I was saying a little bit earlier, the service has to come after you find out who you are. So you were asking me, what would I say to the person that said that they're stuck? So getting back to that point, I just want to make sure that I address that. And I would say it's really, really important that you find out who you are and that you connect to your heart. And the way that you might do that is by engaging in a humming meditation or engaging in any meditation. But the humming meditation is just the one that helped me the most. I think we have a forklift coming in.

• 1:13:12Rich Roll?

  I know, we're in a warehouse right now.

• 1:13:14Julie Piatt?

  It's getting really loud.

• 1:13:15Rich Roll?

  It's a place of work, so sorry for the background.

• 1:13:17Julie Piatt?

  Yeah, so sorry about that. But, no, I mean, you have to know who you are. And the way you know who you are is you start to listen to yourself. And we have so much external stimulus coming at us from every which way. We have kids, we have, you know, jobs, we have technology, we have TVs, we have everything else. So find a way to start to access your heart, whether it's through training, whether it's through meditation, whether it's through singing, whatever it is. Try to start to listen to your soul and really take a review of your life and find out what parts of your life are designed by you and what parts of your life were designed by society or parents

• 1:14:02Julie Piatt?

  or some idea of who you thought you needed to be in order to be loved. And the one core message that can hold you through this whole process is that the divine, and I wrote about this in an article that I wrote about Rich and my relationship and some deep awareness that came to me through my journey with him, through man and wife and... and man and wife.

• 1:14:26Rich Roll?

  Man and wife.

• 1:14:27Julie Piatt?

  Man and woman.

• 1:14:28Rich Roll?

  It's like some kind of weird antiquated language that you're speaking over there.

• 1:14:31Julie Piatt?

  Whoa. Anyway, through our relationship is, you know, the divine loves you just exactly how you are right now. It loved you the minute you came into birth, the minute you arrived. So, we can all kind of relax and stop beating ourselves up that we haven't done something amazing, or we haven't achieved some, you know, great feat, or, you know, or done some amazing, I don't know, activity, or whatever. The divine loves you simply because you are, you exist, right? So, it's like the sun, the sun doesn't choose who to shine on. It doesn't say, "Oh, well, I like Rich better than Julie, so I'm gonna shine more on him today than I am on her."

• 1:15:15Julie Piatt?

  It's equal, it's through all of creation.

• 1:15:19Rich Roll?

  But you can hide in the basement.

• 1:15:20Julie Piatt?

  Well, that's true. So, I would say, "Come out in the sunshine." No, you really just need, you need to find out who you are. I mean, that is, that is kind of your biggest task. Because if you, if you can access that, and you can find out what your thing is, and it's gonna be something that gives you extreme joy, and something that, when you're doing it, and when you're engaged in it, you actually lose time. And when you start to drop out of the mind, and drop into the heart, and start to feel your body, and feel how things feel to you, then you can start to make a shift from living someone else's life. Or, you know, I mean, listen, those corporations aren't gonna care. They don't care if at the end of your life,

• 1:16:04Julie Piatt?

  you're sick and on the floor, and you missed your bliss. You know, no one cares. And the life is so short, it's so, so short. It goes by in a blink. So, I always say, I mean, I've studied with many different spiritual teachers for, you know, 30 years, and I've read nothing but spiritual texts for 25 years. I think I read my first book-

• 1:16:25Rich Roll?

  Believe me, it's true.

• 1:16:26Julie Piatt?

  It's true. I read my first, like, book, book, maybe, since I was a kid, like, last year. But, anyway.

• 1:16:37Julie Piatt?

  The one thing that I got from all of my travels, and the only thing that I can count on, you know, because some people say, "Oh, it's, this is what's gonna happen," or, "You know, it's the end of the world, the Mayan calendar." It's not the end of the world. But, you know, everybody has a different perspective of how things are gonna be. And at the end of the day, the only thing you can do is serve your own heart. Because at the end of your life, it's your life. It was your choice. It was for you to discover, for you to learn, for you to live. So if you... Every day when we lay our head down on the pillow in our family, we try to say that we lived our hearts as fully as we could. And that takes a lot of hard work. It takes a lot of courage.

• 1:17:21Julie Piatt?

  It has a lot of joy, and a lot of bliss, and a lot of fun in it as well. Not a lot of certainty in it at all.

• 1:17:28Rich Roll?

  No. It's hard as shit, actually.

• 1:17:31Julie Piatt?

  It's harder than for rich.

• 1:17:32Rich Roll?

  Yeah, it sounds all good, but it's actually quite difficult.

• 1:17:35Julie Piatt?

  It's very hard.

• 1:17:36Rich Roll?

  But I think, you know, just, you gotta cut the chatter out. And, you know, like, our minds are going a million miles an hour, and we're so overstimulated. And it's like, you know, you are not your mind. There is your mind and what it does. And then there is your higher consciousness. And these two things are... Not only are they not the same, they're not always friends. You know, and I think it's important to realize that, that, you know, if you're not careful, your mind will run the show. But your mind necessarily doesn't always have your best interest at heart, the interest of your higher self. And you have to, you have to learn how to divorce your consciousness from your mind at times, and develop tools and strategies for controlling your thought patterns. Because otherwise,

• 1:18:21Rich Roll?

  those thought patterns just run on a loop, and they control you. They control your behavior, your decision-making, all these sorts of things. It's like this cycle that takes over your life. And it's very easy to just not be aware of that and just go about your day. And so, you know, things like meditation, or, you know, like, even extreme measures, like the, you know, those isolation tanks, or, you know, for me...

• 1:18:46Julie Piatt?

  Floating tanks.

• 1:18:47Rich Roll?

  Yeah, flotation tanks. Or, you know, for me, it's like going out on a trail run or whatever to try to quiet that mind. And it's only when you can get into that quiet space and really, you know, cut through that chatter and find a way to, like... Connect, you know, be completely present and connect with your higher self and and your environment, that you allow that opening, that space for the the good stuff to happen. And, you know, that comes back to talking about creativity. I mean, you talk to great writers, great musicians, you know, stand-up comedians, all of these people will will tell you emphatically, without fail, that's that their best work happens when they're not trying. Like, they're just tapped, they're connected, because they're, they're,

• 1:19:31Rich Roll?

  they are still, their mind is still, they are present, they're tapped into their higher self, and it just comes. You know, it's like, oh, the song wrote itself. Like, how did you write that song? That song that is, everybody knows. Well, you know, I just, it just occurred to me, it just happened, you know, and my hand just wrote it out. It's like, it's like something's working through you, you know, and you're just the vessel for expressing that, you know, you're an antenna, and you have to tune your antenna into the frequency, you know. So, the work is in tuning the antenna so that you can receive the message and express it.

• 1:20:06Julie Piatt?

  That's true, that's very true. And just being open, and, you know, I mean, I consider myself just a channel. I, I have expressed myself in many, many different forms of art, and I'm, I'm not technically trained in any of them. But, yeah, it's, it's an ability to just tap into your heart and open up, and really have the courage to. And I think another element is, is to be in non-judgment, and the, the acceptance and, and non-judgment has to be of yourself first, you know, so that you can then, you know, express that out. But, if you're non-judgmental of yourself, and so you're, you're not caught up in the technique or any idea of your head, well, this has to be good, or I don't know what

• 1:20:49Julie Piatt?

  I'm doing, or I'm not trained, and you just throw it out the window, and then just let it, let it come through. Let it come through.

• 1:20:56Rich Roll?

  You have to allow it, rather than force it, or using your self-will to make it happen.

• 1:21:01Julie Piatt?

  Yeah, that's true.

• 1:21:02Rich Roll?

  And that process of surrender is a very tricky thing. Like, that was the thing I struggled with the most, trying to get sober, you know, and sort of the critical aspect of... Learning how to let go of things and embrace and lean into a new way of doing things that is more on the allowing side as opposed to the, you know, make it happen, push it, make it happen through your will.

• 1:21:24Julie Piatt?

  Right, well, and even one step like beyond that, the humming meditation, you know, I started the humming meditation when I was going through a very difficult break with a spiritual teacher of mine that had happened in a very violent way. And I was in a lot of pain and I couldn't talk to anybody about it because nobody understood what it was that I was going through. And I started to just get up at 4:30 in the morning and hum, really just release my heart because I had so much hardness in my heart. I didn't understand all these events that had happened and it didn't make sense to me. And I was really, really, really struggling and I wasn't even trying to write a song

• 1:22:07Julie Piatt?

  and all of a sudden the music started coming. And that was the most pure expression for me because as a designer, a fashion designer, an interior designer, or a painter, or a sculptor, I would create things, but it was always in the sort of waking state and with some idea in mind of what I might want to, you know, achieve. Like, I think, you know, I want it to be like this, I want it to be like that. And here the music just came in my lap and I think the first time, you know, I think I wrote this song called "The New Earth" and I was like, "Oh my God, you know, Rich, I think I'm a folk singer." Like, that's tragic because I'm not a huge folk fan, but, and it's...

• 1:22:48Rich Roll?

  But it's the, it's essentially what you're saying is, it's getting out of the way.

• 1:22:54Julie Piatt?

  Totally getting out of the way.

• 1:22:55Rich Roll?

  It's getting out of the way. And like in my own experience, I know, like, listen, you know, I would not have predicted that this is what I would be doing with my life. It was not my plan. It's fantastic and I wouldn't trade what I'm doing and what I've done and kind of, you know, what I've decided to devote my life to. I wouldn't change that for anything. But, you know, six years ago, I would never have predicted this to be my trajectory in a million years.

• 1:23:19Julie Piatt?

  Absolutely not.

• 1:23:20Rich Roll?

  And the only reason it's... and I didn't make it happen. I didn't like wake up and come up with a plan for how I was gonna get from where I was to what I'm doing now. What I did was, I did some work to get out of the way. And let... and allow things to happen and allow myself to be guided. That doesn't mean I... and I think people make the mistake of thinking, well, you're just... like, I think people think that means you don't do work, or you don't... you're not like actively engaged in your process.

• 1:23:49Julie Piatt?

  Right, you're just sitting around.

• 1:23:50Rich Roll?

  You know, it's sort of like, people who watch that movie, The Secret, and they're like, "Oh yeah, you just lay in bed all day, and like, you know, you make millions of dollars" or whatever. That's not what it's about. There's a lot of work that goes into it.

• 1:23:59Julie Piatt?

  Right.

• 1:24:00Rich Roll?

  But it's a different kind of work, I think.

• 1:24:01Julie Piatt?

  Yeah. It's not really work, it's letting go. It's really letting go. And we call it detached action, right? So, so you're participating in action, but you're not... it's like AA, you're not attached to the outcome. So you have no expectation of the outcome. You may have an amazing vision, and so you're gonna play all out, like, play to your best of your ability, and then you wait and see. You know, you're completely released, you offer that activity and service.

• 1:24:35Rich Roll?

  You control the things you have control... you work on the things you have control over, and with respect to things you don't have control over, you divorce yourself from the outcomes, essentially.

• 1:24:43Julie Piatt?

  That's right, let go. I know.

• 1:24:45Rich Roll?

  Yeah, that's really hard. It's hard to... very, very hard to do.

• 1:24:48Julie Piatt?

  It's hard to do, but it's actually easy. It's really easy to do. It's a lot easier to do that than it is to try to hang on tight. If you just feel like yourself clenched up and trying to stop something, to be in non-resistance is actually very easy. You just let go. But yes, I understand what you're saying.

• 1:25:06Rich Roll?

  So, we're gonna have to wrap it up. I could talk like for three hours, no problem.

• 1:25:11Julie Piatt?

  Did you learn anything about me that you didn't know before we started?

• 1:25:16Rich Roll?

  We'll talk about that later.

• 1:25:17Julie Piatt?

  Can I just, can I just ask you one thing? I just want you to say one thing, let's just say one thing about our relationship.

• 1:25:23Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 1:25:24Julie Piatt?

  And, um, so...

• 1:25:26Rich Roll?

  About that fight we had yesterday?

• 1:25:27Julie Piatt?

  About that knock. That's the one thing about being in the Yurt village is that we can't, we can't fight freely without the possibility of fallout.

• 1:25:36Rich Roll?

  Repercussions.

• 1:25:37Julie Piatt?

  Somebody's like, "Oh, God, you know, they're not really happily married because they fought," you know, or whatever. So I was like, "Oh, man, that's not so good." No, but, um, I just wanted to, uh, to say that it is a pleasure to be your first guest on your podcast.

• 1:25:55Rich Roll?

  I hope this is recorded. I think it did.

• 1:25:58Julie Piatt?

  I can see something on the...

• 1:26:00Rich Roll?

  It's a pleasure. Ladies and gentlemen, my beautiful wife, Julie Piatt. You can find her on Twitter, @JaiSeed, but on Instagram, you're Srimati, right? She has lots of names, it's very confusing.

• 1:26:17Julie Piatt?

  But then say my music, please.

• 1:26:18Rich Roll?

  I will. Relax.

• 1:26:20Julie Piatt?

  I love you.

• 1:26:21Rich Roll?

  Julie is a healer, an artist, a sculptor, a painter, a mother. She's many things, she defies definition. But most dear to her is that she is a musician, so check out her music. Her music is at srimatimusic.com, that's S-R-I-M-A-T-I music.com. So check it out, it's pretty cool. So, we have to wrap it up because we got other things we gotta do. Yeah, I know, relax, I'll make all the plugs.

• 1:26:54Julie Piatt?

  Okay.

• 1:26:55Rich Roll?

  Okay? Otherwise I could talk for hours. And I think in the future, I do want to do, like, I want to just go where the conversation leads and go as long as it goes. If it goes for three hours, then that's awesome, but we just had a, we had a hard out today.

• 1:27:07Julie Piatt?

  I hope you'll have...

• 1:27:08Rich Roll?

  That's a radio term, right? Hard out? What? I'll have you back. Definitely we'll have you back and again, this is our first episode. So this thing will slowly congeal over time and we'll kind of get our voice and you know, find our legs and hopefully you know, get some nice equipment and a real studio and get it as professional as possible. I would like to be able to broadcast it live on livestream and you know, have YouTube videos of the whole thing and all that kind of stuff. So we'll be getting all of that underway and taken care of hopefully in the next couple of weeks. In the meantime, this podcast was brought to you by Jai Lifestyle. What is Jai Lifestyle? What does Jai mean?

• 1:27:48Julie Piatt?

  Jai means victory or praise or hail in Sanskrit.

• 1:27:52Rich Roll?

  Yes, the ancient language Sanskrit. It's our wellness company with products and services. So check it out, Jai Lifestyle, J-A-I Lifestyle.com. We have a plant-based athletic recovery supplement product called Jai Repair. It's my formulation, it's pretty cool. It's a tri-blend of three different types of plant-based protein. It's hemp protein, sprouted brown rice protein, and pea protein. It also has all these awesome antioxidants like resveratrol, really pure resveratrol, and grape skin extracts. It has your daily RDA of vitamin B12.

• 1:28:37Rich Roll?

  But the kicker, the special secret ingredient is the cordyceps mushrooms extract, which have been proven to boost endurance. They're great with enhancing your body's ability to utilize and uptake oxygen, increases lung capacity and the like. I've been using them for years, it's fantastic. So it's not a cheap product. It's expensive.

• 1:28:59Julie Piatt?

  Sorry about that.

• 1:29:00Rich Roll?

  Yeah, I know. We're working on coming out with some more affordable... Products, but really my marching orders from the beginning were to just offer the best products possible. And at the time, I was like, I remember when I was coming up with Jai Repair, I was like, I don't care what it costs, I just want to make the best thing. It'll cost what it costs, and people who want it will buy it, and if they can't or they don't want it, then that's fine. So it is what it is. But we're working on some new stuff that's going to be more commercially available. Right now, this stuff's only available at jailifestyle.com. We also have our cookbook, Jai Seeds, $9.99. It's a downloadable PDF, 77 pages of plant-based recipes, beautiful layout, it's like a coffee table book for the iPad.

• 1:29:45Rich Roll?

  And we're actually in the middle of working on our second edition of that, which is going to be pretty cool. It's going to blow you guys away. I think it's going to be like double the size, and we're really, we're going to dial in some cool, interactive stuff with videos and all kinds of stuff. So that's still a ways away, but we're working on it. The meditation program that Julie was talking about, the humming meditation, that's also available on Jai Lifestyle. And do we have anything else? Oh, we're coming out with a vitamin B12 supplement, and that should be ready in the next couple of weeks, I think. We've got your logo. We've got it all dialed in. Yeah, it's great. It's a, basically, just a little spray that you can, you spray in your mouth, just one spray every, you know, other day or something like that.

• 1:30:29Rich Roll?

  Take care of all your vitamin B12 needs. If you're a vegan, you're on a plant-based diet, you know that the one nutrient that you can't source from your diet is vitamin B12, so it is important to supplement with that. So why not check out ours? It's going to be, this one's going to be affordable, too. I'm not sure exactly what the price is yet, but it's going to be cheap. So that's it for Jai Lifestyle. Also, Ju, you know what? We talk a lot about the Vitamix. We use the Vitamix blender in all of our recipe videos, and, you know, and in our cookbook and stuff like that. It's an incredible machine. It'll literally make juice out of anything. It'll change your life if you don't have it. But if you are in the market for one, you can

• 1:31:12Rich Roll?

  get free shipping if you click on the banner ad on RichRoll.com or JaiLifestyle.com. So it's still expensive. If you can find it cheaper elsewhere, like Costco, sometimes they carry them, then you should do that. But if you can't, then you know, buy it from us and you kick us like five cents and help keep this podcast alive, right? For the bandwidth. Hopefully, we'll be getting a lot of bandwidth. We don't know yet. Right now, there's zero people listening, so that could be all very presumptuous. Going to try to do this a couple of times a week. I've got a couple of guests lined up for later this week, so stay tuned. I've got to figure out how to get all this up on iTunes, which I'm going to take care of in the next couple of days. I'll have show

• 1:31:56Rich Roll?

  notes on my blog where I'm going to host this, so just go to RichRoll.com and I'll try to put up all the links of stuff that we mentioned in the shows. And also, I would love your feedback and comments, so please leave a comment on my website, RichRoll.com. Tell us what you'd like to hear, issues you want to hear about. Tell us what you thought about today's episode. Did you like it? Did you not like it? Should Julie come back? I don't know.

• 1:32:23Julie Piatt?

  Please invite me back.

• 1:32:25Rich Roll?

  So we'll know when you let us know, okay?

• 1:32:28Julie Piatt?

  Can I just say one thing?

• 1:32:29Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 1:32:30Julie Piatt?

  You're done. No, I just wanted to say that please...

• 1:32:34Rich Roll?

  Are you done talking?

• 1:32:35Julie Piatt?

  No, please, please do let us know your comments and keep in touch with us. And please know that any of you who have ever sent an email, or left a comment, or contacted us, that it means a lot to us. And so many times, when we are at a very, very low point, we will get some epic, amazing email, or letter, or note from somebody, just saying how something that we did affected your life in a positive way. And we thank you for that from our hearts. So please keep connected and keep in contact with us, because we

• 1:33:17Julie Piatt?

  need the exchange and we love it. So thanks.

• 1:33:22Rich Roll?

  Speak for yourself. No, it's awesome. I appreciate all the support. It's been an incredible year traveling around with the book. I get lots of emails from people from all over the place. It's amazing. It means more to me than you know. It's really been incredible. And so now it's just about how can we continue to put a positive message out there? You know, there's people that want to improve their lives. And if we could play a small, tiny part in that, that's a presumptuous statement too, isn't it? But anyway, we'll do our best.

• 1:33:54Julie Piatt?

  Now, if we can be of service by living authentically ourselves, then that would be very lovely for us.

• 1:34:01Rich Roll?

  All right, let's wrap it up. So let us know, richroll.com, follow me on Twitter @RichRoll, jylifestyle.com, shrimatiemusic.com. What else? Do we have any other links? Anything else you want to share? Yeah, I said that a few times.

• 1:34:16Julie Piatt?

  You said it, with shrimatiemusic.com?

• 1:34:19Rich Roll?

  Yeah, I did. Are there any other websites we want to talk about?

• 1:34:23Julie Piatt?

  At I see just Common Ground.

• 1:34:27Rich Roll?

  Now, it's getting confusing, of course.

• 1:34:29Julie Piatt?

  Yeah, please.

• 1:34:30Rich Roll?

  So, please, Common Ground. If you want to learn more about what's going on at Common Ground, which I urge you to do, you can find them online at c g kauai.net. C G K A U A I dot net. I think they're going to be redoing their website pretty soon. There isn't that much information up there. But amazing things are happening here. Support local agriculture. Support your local communities. Buy local when you can. Eat clean, eat healthy. We're out, right? We're done.

• 1:35:04Julie Piatt?

  We're done.

• 1:35:05Rich Roll?

  All right, everybody. Peace, plants, until next time.