Millennials & Why It’s Cool To Be Conscious and Actively Involved

The subject of “Millennials” generally conjures up adjectives like lazy or entitled. No work ethic. Spoiled brats, the lot of them. TIME Magazine went so far as to call millennials the “Me Me Me Generation”. This has not been my experience with the teens and twenty-somethings among us. In fact, I can honestly say that I find myself relating to many millennials better than I relate to my own generation. Maybe that just makes me juvenile. But that's a perspective lazier that the millennial stereotype itself. Admittedly, my exposure to this cross-section of our society is somewhat self-selecting. But it's worth noting that over the last several years I've had the good fortune of meeting dozens of incredibly dynamic, conscious and entrepreneurial young people. Kids highly engaged in things my generation didn’t give a crap about like permaculture, social issues, sustainability, conservation and mindfulness. Students with doctorates and business degrees who could be on Wall Street instead toiling away on organic farms, working for non-profits, or starting their own — choosing career paths based not on security and salary but on impact. People leveraging the power of social media to challenge societal norms, disrupt outdated modalities, create self-styled careers that didn't previously exist and launch their own grassroots movements. The common thread is the singular goal — to make the world a better place for all of us. Jackson Foster is one of these guys — the best kind of millennial. A guy whose life presented him with every open door possible, it would have been easy for Jackson to simply step into a safe and secure (an illusion I know, but you get my point) high paying business career. But Jackson has other plans. In high school, while most of Jackson’s teen peers were playing video games, partying and generally just acting like, well teenagers, Jackson spent a year in the Colorado wilderness. After being accepted into the prestigious Rhode Island School of Design, he decided instead to defer so he could travel – a year spent bicycling across the US, hiking the John Muir Trail, mountaineering in Laos and even working at an orangutan orphanage in Borneo. These experiences left him thinking about one thing: food. Jackson noticed how food greatly affected the livelihood of different communities around the world, which motivated a desire to immerse himself in diet and lifestyle study. This exploration left him with no choice but to walk his talk; a wholesale transition from a beer drinking, weed smoking, junk food vegetarian teenager reborn as a whole food plant-based activist and educator. Jackson transferred from RISD to Colorado College as an Environmental Policy major and went to work. Outside his college coursework he found the time to: become a Certified Yoga Instructor; obtain a Certification In Plant-based Nutrition through the T. Colin Campbell Center for Nutrition Studies ; start the website Plantriotic ; found and chair a vegan student group at Colorado College; write for Vegan Health and Fitness Magazine ; spend his summers working with environmental groups like 350.org ; help with student recruitment for the recent... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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

• 0:00Rich Roll?

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• 0:44Rich Roll?

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• 1:06Rich Roll?

  Welcome to the Rich Roll Podcast, episode 106 with Jackson Foster.

• 1:19Speaker 01

  The Rich Roll Podcast.

• 1:22Rich Roll?

  All right, let's do this, people. Rich Roll here. This is the RRP. Welcome to my podcast, the Rich Roll Podcast. Thank you for tuning in. Thank you for listening. Thank you for sharing the show with a friend. And thank you for supporting the show by clicking through the Amazon banner ad at richroll.com for all your Amazon purchases. This really helps us out. So, thank you so much to all of you out there who have been supporting us in this way. Come on, don't forget. You know you're buying stuff on Amazon. Click through, click the banner ad. Do it. All right, let's broaden our horizons. Let's think more critically about things. Let's set aside old habits, preconceived notions, assumptions. Let's challenge the status quo, people.

• 2:02Rich Roll?

  Let's ponder the possibility of a new and better way, not just for us, but for our kids and the planet. That's what I'm here to do. So each week, you know what I do. I sit down with people who challenge and inspire me, thought leaders, artists, entrepreneurs, world-class athletes, doctors, nutritionists, trainers, and even everyday people. People who have managed to do amazing things to transform their lives. Paradigm-busting minds and personalities here to educate, motivate, and inspire you on your own unique path to uncover, unlock, and unleash your best, most authentic self. I want to talk about millennials. You know what I'm talking about.

• 2:44Rich Roll?

  All these crazy kids, these young people, the lazy, the entitled, these spoiled brats, the kids who are lacking a work ethic. Time Magazine even called millennials "the me, me, me" generation. But I'm here to say that this has not been my experience. In fact, I relate to so many members of this generation better than I relate to people of my own generation more often than not. Maybe that just makes me juvenile. Maybe, I suppose. I don't know. But I will say this. In the last few years, I've met tons of really inspiring young people. In fact, when we lived at Common Ground on this organic farm on the north shore of Hawaii

• 3:26Rich Roll?

  about two years ago, I was immersed with 20-somethings, 21, 22, 23-year-olds. All these kids with master's degrees in things like permaculture and sustainability. Kids who could be out making bank and instead working on a farm, interested in things my generation really didn't give a crap about, things like permaculture and social issues, sustainability, conservation, disrupting old modalities, challenging the status quo to find ways to do things better.

• 4:02Rich Roll?

  These kids are choosing career paths based not on security and salary, but on impact, challenging the societal norms established by their predecessors and searching to implement a better path for all of us. And today's guest, Jackson Foster, he's one of these guys. He's a guy whose life presented him with basically every open door possible, and it would have been very easy for him to simply step into a very comfortable cushy life in business, or just having a high-paying career, a nice, secure life. But Jackson has other plans. I first met him when he invited me out to speak at his school, Colorado College,

• 4:44Rich Roll?

  where he's a student. And I was really struck by his passion and his dedication to an ideal of a better world. And I really wanted to take the opportunity to share his message with all of you guys, which is what we're doing here today. Jackson is a dude of infinite passions. He's a yoga teacher. He's a college student. He's a vegan animal liberation activist. He's a plant-based educator. He's a bodybuilder. He's an artist. He's a chef. He's a journalist. He's a writer. He's a vlogger. He's an athlete. And he's a member of a really cool family of exceptional people that I've had the honor of getting to know a little bit. He has some siblings that are doing amazing, interesting things, different, but also equally impressive

• 5:27Rich Roll?

  to Jackson. And it was a pleasure to sit down with them. And the thing about him is that, you know, while most of Jackson's teen peers were out playing video games, or partying, or generally just acting like, you know, teenagers, Jackson decided that he was going to opt out of high school, and he spent a year in Colorado, in the Colorado wilderness. And then he went back to school, and after being accepted in the prestigious Rhode Island School of Design, RISD, he decided to, again, defer. He took a gap year so he could travel. And he bicycled across the US. He hiked the John Muir Trail. He was mountaineering in Laos, and he worked on an orangutan orphanage in Borneo. All the while, like gaining life

• 6:12Rich Roll?

  experience, and developing his authentic self, and searching for greater meaning, and what he wanted his life to be all about. And these experiences left him thinking, basically, about one thing. Food. He noticed how food greatly affected the livelihood of different communities around the world, which in turn led him to delve into studying diet and lifestyle. And in his mind, this left him with no choice but to transition from a beer-drinking, weed-smoking, junk-food, vegetarian teenager into what he is today, which is a pretty hardcore, whole-food, plant-based activist and educator. Since then, he's gone on to become a certified yoga instructor.

• 6:55Rich Roll?

  He's certified in plant-based nutrition through the T. Colin Campbell Center of Nutrition Studies. He transferred as an environmental policy major from RISD to Colorado College. He started a website called Plantreotic.com, which we're going to talk about. He's written for Vegan Health and Fitness Magazine. He's worked with environmental groups like 350.org, which is where he was interning last summer. That's the environmental group that has taken the stage in combating the fossil fuel industry. And he was helping with student recruitment for the recent People's Climate March in New York City, which was just this past week. And he's even working on his first book. Can you imagine writing a book when you're like 21 years old? Anyway, his story, his evolution from typical high school student to really

• 7:40Rich Roll?

  an independent thinker and someone devoted to educating the public on how to live a more peaceful, healthy, sustainable, happy, enjoyable life is really interesting and really inspiring. What I always say here on the show is, take what resonates with you, discard the rest. Jackson is nothing if not ardent, passionate, and at sometimes a bit radical, admittedly so on his part. So even if you happen to disagree with certain aspects of his point of view, you will be hard-pressed not to be impressed by this young man's conviction, his passion, his devotion to service, and the selfless choices that he's made in hopes

• 8:21Rich Roll?

  of, again, just making this world a little bit better. I thoroughly enjoyed sitting down with him. I'm proud and happy to share his message with you. And it's encouraging and makes me optimistic that there are young people out there like Jackson who are fighting hard to implement change for the better for all of us. So let's check him out. Let's see what his vibe is all about. Hope you enjoy the conversation.

• 8:57Rich Roll?

  I just had slight dental surgery today. They're cutting open my gum and shooting my face with Novocain, so if I'm slurring, I'm not drunk.

• 9:06Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 9:07Rich Roll?

  I just had a dentist appointment.

• 9:09Speaker 01

  That is wild.

• 9:10Rich Roll?

  Bear with me. So, just before we started, you said you only got an iPhone like four or five months ago.

• 9:16Speaker 01

  It is true. I got an iPhone and a Facebook within the same week of each other for very specific reasons as well. But yeah, I went through all of high school with this waterproof flip phone. I was really into ceramics and it allowed me to get clay and water all over my phone. And I also wanted to be sort of the renegade, non-iPhone dude, and I rolled with that for a long time. And I got, and I'm, you know, I got an iPhone when I was 21, which I am right now. So yeah, I went through all of high school with that one.

• 9:48Rich Roll?

  And did you, did you previously have a Facebook page that you deactivated?

• 9:52Speaker 01

  That is right. So, I had a Facebook in middle school and high school, and I deactivated that my, right after I graduated high school and started a gap year of, you know, experimentation and adventure and spiritual development. And I just decided to detach during that time, which I do not regret whatsoever. That was a really important thing for me to do.

• 10:16Rich Roll?

  And so what brought you back to the iPhone?

• 10:18Speaker 01

  Oh my gosh.

• 10:19Rich Roll?

  The end of your ceramics career?

• 10:21Speaker 01

  No, no. I am currently the ceramics teacher at Colorado College, in fact, including as I'm a student. No, it was vegan activism and everything that I do, the person that I'm trying to become of educating my peers and the entire planet on, you know, getting on a healthier wavelength. And I realized that I needed social media, Facebook, and iPhone, easy access to the public in order to really have a voice. And it was sort of a dropping my ego. I was really into being the cool kid that was so off the grid and, you know, mountain man, backpacker.

• 11:03Speaker 01

  Vegan dude and finally got to the point where I had to break down my ego that I liked from that in order to give in to the mainstream in order to have a positive effect and it has been totally fruitful, so.

• 11:18Rich Roll?

  Yeah, it's a tool. I mean, if you, it's all in your relationship to it, but that's, you made a very interesting point, which is the ego attached to a certain identity. And, you know, you could say, well, you know, I've deflated my ego, you know, like I'm not on social media and I'm not, but there's a certain kind of identity and ego that attaches to that just as well, that could be equally nefarious or unhealthy.

• 11:39Speaker 01

  Exactly. It's truly the same thing. It's just associating your ego with anything that you're trying deliberately to define yourself, whether it's you're obsessed with Facebook or whether you're too cool for Facebook, they're equally as demonstrative. We have this whole mentality, especially in my generation, like if you're checking your Facebook, which a lot of people do, your friends will be like, oh, you're that, you're on Facebook, Facebook's not cool, even though we all use Facebook and it's really cool. But at the same time, I was being that person without a Facebook and people judging me for that and myself judging myself for that, it just got.

• 12:17Rich Roll?

  Or having some kind of pride about that.

• 12:20Speaker 01

  A lot of pride about it.

• 12:21Rich Roll?

  Right. So now it's a tool, you're using it healthy. But I think, you know, that also brings up this idea of, you know, being, whatever it is, whatever team that you're on, creating an identity around that. So you're a vegan dude, right? And you have a whole identity around that. So how do you keep the ego in check with respect to how you identify yourself publicly and to yourself when your head's on the pillow at night?

• 12:47Speaker 01

  You are asking that to me directly to my face. That's what I ask myself every moment of my life. That is through the practice of yoga and meditation and constantly keeping yourself in check of the person that you're trying to become so that it doesn't become something that's also going to destroy you.

• 13:11Speaker 01

  I became a yoga teacher this year. I did my certification. And I was vegan prior to even getting into yoga. And from balancing both of them together, they've only both heightened my interest. And I've found the inner connectiveness of both of those things, instead of independently practicing each. There was like a definitive moment where I was getting into yoga and I was doing my vegan education and activism stuff completely separate. And when I finally brought that together, it sort of blossomed into this whole new realm of what I knew both of them could do with each other.

• 13:53Rich Roll?

  And what is that realm?

• 13:54Speaker 01

  Oh, man. Nonviolence, pretty much. I got into the whole vegan movement purely through nutritional stuff. It happened during my gap year, which we can delve into as well.

• 14:13Rich Roll?

  Yeah, let's just take it back.

• 14:14Speaker 01

  Yeah, I think that's right, in order to get a nice picture.

• 14:18Rich Roll?

  You grew up in Brentwood, right? Here is like a tony neighborhood of Los Angeles. You're an LA kid, born and raised. And you've had, I mean, I've had the great, you know, the honor, nice opportunity of meeting your parents and one of your brothers. Super nice people.

• 14:35Speaker 01

  Loving people on the planet.

• 14:37Rich Roll?

  Yeah, I mean, it seems like you had a pretty charmed upbringing.

• 14:40Speaker 01

  I did. I am the most privileged person on the planet. I know a lot of people could say that, but I truly think that I am so privileged in so many ways. And growing up in that private school, LA, wealthy upbringing has its demons with it, there's no doubt. And that is, that's how I, it was being amongst that community that allows me now to go back and now rethink all of the normalities that I grew up with in order to define what

• 15:19Speaker 01

  Means anything to me anymore. Because I realized that I grew up with sort of this shield, cloud, fog of who I was supposed to be and what I was supposed to like and how I was supposed to define success that really no longer pertains to how I do. So yeah, I grew up, I went to, it sort of all begins at Harvard Westlake High School, where I went to school, which is a great place.

• 15:45Rich Roll?

  Right, for people that are listening out there, Harvard Westlake is like the Antoniast sort of private high school in Los Angeles. Like the most prestigious high school that you could go to.

• 15:54Speaker 01

  And I can only say a lot of great things about it because they have a lot of amazing qualities. I found an amazing creative arts community in there and I never let it sort of strangle me. But the mainstream college student, the, sorry, the mainstream high school average student at Harvard Westlake, people sort of say are either like super geniuses or like kind of bought into the system.

• 16:17Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 16:18Speaker 01

  It's just like how it is. And so I grew up at that school, really defining like a cool person, a successful kid, was someone that got the best grades, literally had a fancy car, like 12-year-old girls walking in with like thousand-dollar handbags into, into school. And I just never got it. Like I never understood why I should be coming into that mentality of how I should, you know, promote myself to my peers on the planet.

• 16:55Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 16:56Speaker 01

  And, you know, there's a classic story. My parents always say that my first like words when I was a baby, I would run around the house naked, like banging on the glass doors, just like screaming outside. Cause that's like what-

• 17:10Rich Roll?

  You wanted to be outside.

• 17:11Speaker 01

  That's where I wanted to be. And I had a best friend, Rabbit, and we just hung outside in the dirt. And I never found that connection at Harvard Westlake. And so that forced me, thankfully, to leave Harvard Westlake my junior year of high school. And I got into this program called the High Mountain Institute in Leadville, Colorado, which is a place where you can apply in anyone from around the country or world. We had a kid from Panama there, but mainly from the US. And you leave your home school, your junior year of high school, and spend a semester out in the Rocky Mountains at 10,000 feet in Leadville. Yeah, Leadville is super high up there. Yeah, it's like one of the highest cities in the country. How many kids were part of that program?

• 17:56Speaker 01

  There's 40 to like 45 kids per semester, and you can only go there for one semester, and you have to be a junior. And so what's a day in the life like at that place? So, everything is so spontaneous, there isn't really a day in the life. The way the program works is that you're on campus, which is sort of like three large cabins with electricity and internet and very livable, comfortable structures, where we have a couple classrooms and a small library, you know, the size of a room. And we spend three weeks on campus, getting all our regular studies in. You can take AP US History, Calculus,

• 18:38Speaker 01

  you know, Science, whatever. And your teachers are between the ages of like 25 and 35, like there's no one there over like 35 years old. And so you have, so it kind of feels like summer camp. You're with 20 guys and 20 girls your age, and it's super fun, and we all cook meals together. And you just take class for about three weeks. And then after that three-week period, your academic teachers take you in groups of like 10 on a two-week, super rural, backcountry backpacking trip in the middle of the Rockies. Wow, so it's three weeks of school, two weeks of expedition, and then repeat? Yep. And in total, you have three expeditions and like three sections on campus. So it comes out to be about four months.

• 19:21Rich Roll?

  Right. I mean, looking at you, you know, headband on, long hair, you got the plugs in your ears and the whole thing. It's like, I have such a hard time seeing you.

• 19:29Speaker 01

  Tattoos, yeah.

• 19:30Rich Roll?

  Tattoos, yeah, seeing you at Harvard Westlake.

• 19:32Speaker 01

  Yeah. You know, I've changed a lot. Like, my best friends, you know, we need to have like a meeting every year to say like, here's who I am now. Like, I'm ready to re-meet you because I'm changing a lot. Like, I grew up the hipster skinny jean-wearing, you know, weed-smoking high school kid. That was, that was who I am. And I'm, I'm proud of everything that has happened because it has led me to where I am right now. And I see a really just fruitful, peaceful, nice path ahead of me. But, um, yeah, there's been lots of changes. And HMI allowed me to accept that I didn't need to go back to Harvard Westlake and fit into the community that I was simply placed in.

• 20:14Speaker 01

  And that was the first time that I gained the confidence because I was in such a place of just like, what, what they valued was, don't, don't stress about US history, don't stress about math class, work hard, go into the mountains, find your connection with nature, read some John Muir, and you'll, you'll probably be happier.

• 20:35Rich Roll?

  Right. It's that idea of if you can connect with yourself, your higher self, and figure out what it is that is deep within you that you want to express more fully, then that's going to set you on a path towards exploration and, you know, expressing that in your life that's ultimately going to make you a more fulfilled, happy person.

• 20:52Speaker 01

  And no matter how great the teachers at Harvard Westlake are, or XYZ High School in America, you're not going to be told what you just said.

• 21:00Rich Roll?

  That's not, that's not part of the Harvard Westlake curriculum, or the curriculum really of any, of any public or private school, for that matter.

• 21:07Speaker 01

  Right. And this is why, I mean, HMI is a, was a life-saving tool.

• 21:14Speaker 01

  In every way.

• 21:16Rich Roll?

  Your parents must have known like, oh, well, this kid's a little bit different. Like, what are we gonna do with this guy?

• 21:22Speaker 01

  Of course.

• 21:23Rich Roll?

  Yeah, I mean, all your, all your, your siblings are all doing extraordinary things. So clearly, your parents had, you know, the acumen or the foresight to be able to say, all right, how are we gonna, you know, design, help, you know, sort of foster this child?

• 21:37Speaker 01

  Foster, no pun intended.

• 21:39Rich Roll?

  Right, foster this child into being, you know, the person that they're supposed to be. Because it'd be very easy, I mean, your dad's a really successful business person, you know, I know where you grew up and all of that, it'd be very easy to say, no, look, you go to Harvard Westlake, you're in the best college you get, or you go become an investment banker or a doctor.

• 21:54Speaker 01

  And that's why I go back to, I'm the most privileged person in the world, because despite all those comforts that I grew up with, my parents never, ever, ever forced us to be something that we didn't want to be. And I truly mean that, from dressing up as a girl when we were little, to just doing whatever we want, there was no rules that were silly rules. We had rules like, don't drink, don't smoke, don't be violent, but we, we grew up in a safe, open atmosphere where we could be who we are and experiment. And, and that's what allowed me to always strive towards, okay, I can take a step back, and I can figure out who I am, and I'm probably gonna be happier for that reason.

• 22:38Speaker 01

  And now I've only taken that to a further extent.

• 22:42Rich Roll?

  Right, with what you're doing now, but was, was HMI your, like, was that your idea? Or how did you figure out that that was something you wanted to do?

• 22:48Speaker 01

  I totally just heard about it. My cousin had done a similar experience at another school called the Mountain School. There's tons of semester high school programs, and that one's in Vermont. It's sort of focused on farming, super cool. And I found HMI, and, you know, I grew up, like, for, despite how much I love my parents so much, getting to like, take a bike ride to the beach was like, my form of like, going camping. That's how like, indoors my family is.

• 23:17Rich Roll?

  Well, that's life in LA, too, you know?

• 23:20Speaker 01

  Yeah, but I grew up with a lot of friends that, you know, their family would go to Yosemite over the summer, or they'd go to a national park. Like, our vacations were go to New York, go to Seattle, you know, go even around the world to cities, because that's what my dad does. He's in the movie business, we go to movie premieres, that's like the fun weekend thing. And both my brothers are really happy with sitting on a couch and watching a good movie and reading a book, and like, that's a great day. And that's just not-

• 23:48Rich Roll?

  That's not your thing.

• 23:49Speaker 01

  That's not my thing.

• 23:52Speaker 01

  So HMI was, I just found it, and my whole family knew it was going to be a positive thing for me. And I wasn't in any trouble, like, all my, you know, all my, like, mom's friends were like, "Oh yeah, Jackson's like in the mountains for the semester," and they're like, "Uh-oh."

• 24:09Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 24:10Speaker 01

  What happened? And there's like, "No, it's like a prestigious program, it's like, really great."

• 24:15Rich Roll?

  It's like code for rehab.

• 24:17Speaker 01

  Yeah, exactly.

• 24:18Rich Roll?

  For like troubled kid or something like that.

• 24:19Speaker 01

  And there's a lot of great programs for people that, you know, need to have that experience, some wilderness experience for rehabilitation reasons. But, so while I didn't go to HMI for any substance abuse reasons, it was rehab for people that aren't clinically addicted to something. Like, I was addicted to my LA fast, non-natural lifestyle, and I needed an alternative. And I went out in the mountains and met a bunch of amazing people, and got the confidence to have just formal backpacking skills that I now use forever. And it literally liberated me to be an adventurer and seek higher consciousness,

• 25:03Speaker 01

  when I never knew it was an option.

• 25:05Rich Roll?

  It is a weird thing that, you know, if you do any, if you just take a left step or a right step, any way outside of the norm, especially, you know, during the high school years or the college years, that something must be wrong, right? That it's, "Oh, he's doing what? Like, what happened?" You know, instead of like-

• 25:22Speaker 01

  If you get off the path, oh no.

• 25:23Rich Roll?

  Right, yeah, if you get off the, or what's gonna, how is it gonna affect how you're getting into colleges, and what are people gonna think, and all that kind of stuff comes- Into play and it's that's messed up, man.

• 25:34Speaker 01

  And it hurts a lot of people.

• 25:36Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 25:36Speaker 01

  We don't associate a lot of the problems that our generation is going with, you know, millennials, we have all these issues, kids, you know, getting addicted to cigarettes and drugs when they're 12 and teen pregnancy and just all these things that we deem as bad things in our world, whether that's right or wrong. There's always a reason to that. There's a root cause to a lot of things and just as in veganism and preventative medicine, there's preventative medicine in growing up to be a depressed or a happy person. And I think that all starts at a very young, young age and being told that you belong on a path that everyone else is following. And if you veer off in any way, you know, you're fucked over your other friends.

• 26:22Rich Roll?

  That just promotes fear, like just keep toeing the line.

• 26:25Speaker 01

  And fear is suffering.

• 26:27Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 26:27Speaker 01

  And fear leads to suffering, so yeah.

• 26:30Rich Roll?

  So you return from this experience and then you go back to Harvard Westlake?

• 26:33Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 26:34Rich Roll?

  After having this mountain experience.

• 26:35Speaker 01

  Yeah, so I went.

• 26:36Rich Roll?

  What was like reentry like?

• 26:38Speaker 01

  Oh, man. It was a combination of I am just on this other higher consciousness level and I'm going to make any environment work. A combination of like, I'm so grateful for what I just experienced and it's going to change my life with a combination of, you know, being a teenager and just being like, I hate my life now.

• 27:02Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 27:02Speaker 01

  Cause I'm back in LA with all the same people who don't understand the experience I just had. I went by myself. There was no one, no other students from my school, so.

• 27:11Rich Roll?

  You don't know what it's like, man.

• 27:13Speaker 01

  Yeah. You don't know what living in the mountains and, and, and these profound experiences I've, I had, I mean, I, keep in mind, I'd never like had a real backpacking camping experience. And I found myself, you know, on day 12, like usually the expeditions were like 14 days, like on day 12, in literally sub zero temperatures, summiting the highest peak in Colorado, Mount Elbert, you know, without much food, carrying.

• 27:40Speaker 01

  Everything on my back in a landscape that you literally are like on another planet. It was like, it was a trippy, spiritual, incredible experience. And I came back and my friends are doing the same thing and doing their high school thing and worrying about college. And that was the last thing on my mind. And, and it was hard to immerse back into that community. And because of that, I became a bit of a loner. There's no doubt.

• 28:05Rich Roll?

  Right. I mean, I, my, I envisioned high school at Harvard Westlake as being something out of like a Bret Easton Ellis book. Like, you know, like, like, what is the social strata like and what are the parties like?

• 28:17Speaker 01

  Yeah. So it's not like a conventional high school where there's like the jocks that like in their, you know, leather jackets that run the place. Like it is a creative artsy hipster vibe that the cool kids, but.

• 28:34Rich Roll?

  But it's not crossroads either.

• 28:36Speaker 01

  No, no, it's way prepier and more formal and like that, but you know, like drugs just formed high school. The high school experience, like if you did not do drugs or drink, no matter if you were a jock or an artsy kid, like you probably weren't cool.

• 28:56Rich Roll?

  And what kind of drugs are people doing in high school these days?

• 28:58Speaker 01

  Just.

• 28:59Rich Roll?

  I'm just, I'm being voyeuristic.

• 29:01Speaker 01

  Yeah, sure.

• 29:01Rich Roll?

  I'm like old enough to be your dad. Like, I'm just curious.

• 29:04Speaker 01

  It's my dad, it was my dad's 52nd birthday yesterday and we went to Gracias Madre.

• 29:09Rich Roll?

  Oh, cool.

• 29:09Speaker 01

  And it was very nice, but um, like just kids, kids got really into smoking weed.

• 29:16Rich Roll?

  It's easier to get weed here in LA than it is to buy a six pack.

• 29:19Speaker 01

  Right. And literally by like 10th or 11th grade, when people were turning 18 or their siblings were turning 18, like there was no like drug dealing, like people literally left school, went to the marijuana club and like got their weed for the weekend. Yeah. And, and like if one kid got their club card, you know, for complete BS reasons, they would literally go to a doctor.

• 29:39Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 29:40Speaker 01

  Say, I have a, you know, ache in my back and I go to a stressful school and they give you your card. And so I began to, like, I was always a little distant. I I I came a little later. It was actually coming back from HMI that I started to smoke more. And I was never much of a drinker, but I the the the one thing that my brothers and I sort of talked to my parents about now that we don't agree with and the way they raised us was like drugs and alcohol are gonna kill you. And if you experiment with that stuff like you're going down. And I wouldn't, you know, if I had children this moment, I would now reflecting on that, give them that message.

• 30:22Speaker 01

  Cause it's just not true. It's just another experience like anything to have, and I think it's valuable. And I experimented with casually smoking pot for a few years, like 11th and 12th grade. And keep in mind, oh, gosh, I I was a junk food vegetarian at that time. So I became a vegetarian when I was in eighth grade purely because.

• 30:45Speaker 01

  I didn't realize it went back that far. Yeah, and my my mom was like pseudo vegetarian, like she just didn't eat meat. Really for just like to be lean and healthy, but like she would eat fish and and and whatever. She wasn't a vegetarian, but.

• 31:02Speaker 01

  Yeah, so I became a vegetarian in eighth grade. What prompted that? What was the catalyst? Since I can literally remember thinking every single moment that I ate meat, I would feel like a jerk. Literally from three years old. So just in your core and your constitution, that's just how you're hardwired. Was I don't wanna be involved with killing animals. And. She had that awareness and consciousness very early. And I was in love with animals growing up and I manifested that in keeping animals in enslaved captive environments. That when I was younger, so another way of saying having pets. But I like to have, no, that that language is a big thing for me right now, especially when you're trying to communicate to people.

• 31:46Speaker 01

  I think it's, it can be a really powerful tool to not use these fake words, you know? Meat is flesh, you know? Bacon is pig, whatever, so. But if you have a dog, you're not enslaving your dog. No, so dogs are very different. We can get into that whole concept. I don't want to get too sidetracked onto this. We shouldn't, but sort of the, the, the big differentiating figure is that the modern dog from the golden retriever, you know, to the pug are not wild animals. There's literally not one wild golden retriever on the planet. These are species. No, it's actually pretty crazy when you think about it. Every dog comes from the wolf, which is a wild animal.

• 32:29Speaker 01

  And however many years ago, probably in some cold climate, wolves realized that if we team up with these humans, they can provide us with food and shelter and we can pull their trolleys and whatever. So it's like a mutual thing and we both do work for each other. And then that came into crossbreeding and whatever, which makes our dogs. So literally the purpose of the dog is to serve human. And I think there's a lot of wrong things with that because when you think about it, how many dogs are in America that are just soaking up resources? I mean, we love them. I love my dogs. I have dogs in my house, but they do not balance the ecosystem in any way. And here's me talking just very scientific and practical.

• 33:13Speaker 01

  We no longer need the, the canine to, to make our lives function. They're purely recreational for us now. Emotional. They, they can emotionally balance people. Right. But how much meat is being eaten by dogs being grown on factory farms in our country in order for us to have that emotional connection to our dogs? It's, it's a lot, whatever. Thought about it that much. Yeah. I, I was just talking this about my friends and they were getting mad at me because like to be mad at. Just relax, come on. Yeah. And you know, that's a huge thing that I struggle with. Like I am, you know, I, in, in a way, I sometimes think I, I've grown up too fast.

• 33:54Speaker 01

  Cause I am the, you know, I'm 21. I should be raging in college, just not thinking about anything. And instead I haven't done any drugs or alcohol in over two years. I'm. Vegan, I make 100% of my own food. I spend my time practicing yoga and working out and writing, writing material, writing a book.

• 34:18Rich Roll?

  Yeah, where did it all go wrong, Jackson?

• 34:20Speaker 01

  I know, like, I'm a 21-year-old 90-year-old, like.

• 34:35Rich Roll?

  But anyway, you, you, you come back to Harvard Westlake and you're, you're having this surreal experience after being in the mountains. But then you're in your, you're in your final year, right?

• 34:45Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 34:46Rich Roll?

  So gearing up for the whole college experience?

• 34:48Speaker 01

  Yes. So as a ceramicist, I was just really into pottery in high school.

• 34:53Rich Roll?

  They, they, so they taught you that in high school?

• 34:56Speaker 01

  We have an unreal ceramic studio at Harvard Westlake that literally any professional would pay to have. And it's because our teachers, this one guy named John Gilbert Lupto, he is like 90, 80-year-old ceramic and glass artist that is the teacher. He's literally taught there for like 50 years, something crazy. And he was my escape in the Harvard Westlake day. So I would go through my classes mindlessly. I, I mean, I just hated academic class because when you just say to yourself that you hate school, you're gonna hate school so much. I love school now because when we'll go into it, I got the time to literally not

• 35:40Speaker 01

  go to school for like 20 months or something like that in between high school and college.

• 35:46Speaker 01

  But you know, just going through, hating your stupid math classes that you think are pointless and you're never gonna use. And I was in the arts department and this man, Mr. Lupto, he, he has, he's really old, has a massive like walrus mustache. And he teaches the clay class, the pottery class. He's an amazing artist. And he would talk to us like we were real human beings. And we would engage in conversation during class. And he was just sort of a radical hippie dude. And, you know, he would throw F bombs here and there. And like, he made us feel like we were with our friends instead of that formal, you know, teachers at Harvard Westlake are like in suits and ties.

• 36:30Speaker 01

  And they're not your friends, like they're your enemies in a way. They can be. And maybe they're not trying to create that, but you sort of create that mentality.

• 36:39Rich Roll?

  So this guy's different. This guy's, you're connecting with this guy in a different way.

• 36:42Speaker 01

  Yeah, so ceramics became a really important thing to me. I started doing it in ninth grade and I, it was my focus all throughout high school. Like, I won the Arts Award, Best Artist at Harvard Westlake my senior year. And that was my thing. And I was good at it and I was creative. And after coming back from HMI, I became that sort of off the grid, different, creative guy. And I liked it. And so I thought I was really into clay and pottery. So I applied in my senior year to the Rhode Island School of Design, which is another super prestigious, just like my track of my prestigious elementary school, to middle school, to high school. And obviously, you know, I thought that was the next step to go to RISD.

• 37:25Rich Roll?

  Yeah, it's a badass place.

• 37:27Speaker 01

  It is, it's great. And if you want to study art, it's probably the best place for you to be. So I got into RISD early.

• 37:34Rich Roll?

  Oh, you did, wow.

• 37:34Speaker 01

  Yeah. And that was so awesome and I accepted. And that sort of HMI looming cloud in my brain said, take a step back. You got into this awesome college. Why don't you defer for a year? And so I called them up and say, I accept, but can I enter the following year? So just have a full year in between high school and college, free to not have to worry about school. I was into school. And they said, yeah, that's totally cool. So, once I graduated high school, instead of all my friends packing up to suit up for college, giving them not one breath of air in between this insane high school experience

• 38:16Speaker 01

  that we've all had, going straight to this other crazy experience. I took a step back and I started to plan a little gap year. And that is where the journey truly, truly begins.

• 38:29Rich Roll?

  Yeah, and I think that's another example of where your parents have been amazing because most parents would have been like, are you insane? You know, no, you're not doing that.

• 38:36Speaker 01

  Exactly.

• 38:37Rich Roll?

  Get moving with your life. It's time to move on.

• 38:39Speaker 01

  Thank you, Mom and Dad.

• 38:40Rich Roll?

  Mm-hmm. So, yeah, they had the foresight to see that this was something that was in your best interest, or at least, you know, where your passion lied, and they supported that.

• 38:49Speaker 01

  They were totally confident in me that I would not spend my year sitting on the couch, you know, with a joint in my mouth. They knew that wasn't gonna be the case, and I proved that. So, what I decided to do was I went to summer camp that summer as a counselor, as I did with all my friends.

• 39:09Rich Roll?

  Nice Jewish boy.

• 39:10Speaker 01

  Yep, and that is a great place that I also, very HMI-like in terms of how I learned what love was. This camp is about, Camp Hess Kramer, it's up in Malibu, was about how to give love and to receive love. Forget the Judaism, they don't focus on that. You know, there's arts, and hiking, and the ocean, and singing, and hugging. That is what Hess Kramer is.

• 39:34Rich Roll?

  Is it overnight camp, or just during the day?

• 39:37Speaker 01

  No, it's overnight camp. So, you go for a full month. Yeah, and I went since I was eight years old. And I developed my best friends there. It's like an escape from your parents when you're that young to like, discover love and friends. Like, it's unbelievable.

• 39:51Rich Roll?

  It's cool. I ride my bike by that camp all the time.

• 39:53Speaker 01

  Exactly, yeah.

• 39:54Rich Roll?

  It's Yerba Buena right there, I think, right?

• 39:56Speaker 01

  Yep, exactly.

• 39:56Rich Roll?

  Yeah, right on the corner where Neptune's Net is. Right by Neptune's Net. Yeah, and I looked down into the campus down there, and I was like, that looks pretty cool down there. I wonder what goes on down there.

• 40:04Speaker 01

  Amazing things. So, I spent, so I graduated high school, went and did my summer camp, which is always fun, and, you know, all my friends were getting ready for college. They're talking about, oh, I got in here, I got in here. And I'm like, yeah, I'm taking this gap year. And my best friend in the world, who was also goes to camp, his name is Jason Boxer, and I convinced him, he was going to NYU. He had just gotten into NYU and was about to enter in September, and literally in like, July, I convinced him to defer. From NYU and I had the idea of riding my bicycle across America from coast to coast.

• 40:44Rich Roll?

  Wow, so his parents must have been stoked.

• 40:46Speaker 01

  And I convinced him to do that like too much, two months before starting school. And he is a great mindful person and convinced his parents that it was gonna be alright. And so we developed, we began developing that plan.

• 41:04Rich Roll?

  That's cool. So, so you would have to figure out like, how are you gonna get from point A to point B? What is the route you're gonna take? Where are you gonna stay? I mean, you just get like panniers for your bike?

• 41:14Speaker 01

  Yeah, so we got touring bicycles. I rode a Trek 520, just super, super simple with a big disc. So you can like go up, you can climb really easily. And so, yeah, he got a surly long haul trucker and we had panniers, two in the back and two in the front. And we were iPhoneless. We both had flip phones and I actually, we recruited one more member, which is my older brother Drew, and he was at Brown. He had just finished his sophomore year, I believe at Brown University and we, and I got him to take a semester off

• 41:52Speaker 01

  from Brown to go on this bike trip. And so, you know, September 1st came and we got everything together in LA, our bikes, our panniers, and we picked out the route. We were gonna start in Virginia Beach, Virginia, and make it to our home in LA.

• 42:08Rich Roll?

  Oh, so you flew to the East Coast and you're working your way back the other way?

• 42:11Speaker 01

  Actually took a train.

• 42:12Rich Roll?

  Oh, you did?

• 42:13Speaker 01

  Just for, just for kicks.

• 42:15Speaker 01

  So, and keep in mind, what was really interesting is that my older brother, like I was the older brother in this sort of adventurous situation.

• 42:25Rich Roll?

  Cause you'd already, you'd already, you had more experience.

• 42:28Speaker 01

  A lot more experience. I was the leader, he was following me. And that became its whole dynamic, which taught us a lot during the trip. Cause he was always the older brother to look up to. And then, you know, on day two, I was the one changing his tires when he got a And we really grew to just love each other so much more and learn from each other through that. But, um, so yeah, we, we got, um, we, we decided to do the Trans America route, which is Adventure Cycling is this company that sells like bike maps for cross-country distances. And so there's this route that goes from Astoria, Oregon to Virginia Beach, Virginia. And we decided we would follow those maps.

• 43:13Speaker 01

  They're just paper maps that say like, here's a good country road to take, and then here's another good one. So it's not like a GPS or anything. It just gives you a guided route of like, here's how to stay off the freeway and still like make distance. And it also says, here's a, there's a convenience store this many miles away, so you know you can get food or whatever. And so we thought it'd be kind of fun and funny to take a train across the country with our bikes. So we took a train from like Seattle, um, through like Montana, North Dakota, uh, down to like, all the way to DC. And we hung out with a friend in DC for like two days, got everything together, and then they drove us to Virginia Beach and say goodbye.

• 43:56Speaker 01

  And we got our bikes out and we dunked them in the Atlantic Ocean and just started riding home. And that feeling of the first 10 minutes of your cross-country bike trip. Like, what are we doing? Where your bike weighs like 3,000 pounds. No, our bikes were like 60 pounds with gear. Right. Cause we had, we had everything. We had our, our spare parts, our, you know, we would keep like two days of food as a ti- at a time, cause it's not like a camping trip. You're going by gas stations and restaurants and whatever all day, but it was, it was a pretty rural trip, especially in, you know, rural Virginia, Kentucky. So the whole route was Virginia, Kentucky, Southern Illinois, Missouri, Kansas.

• 44:39Speaker 01

  And then once we got to Pueblo, Colorado, it was like November. So instead of going over the Rockies, yeah, we, we hit snow in the Grand Canyon, actually. But so, and so at Pueblo, we went down south to, uh, New Mexico, Arizona, then California. Gotcha. So that was the whole route. Right. And so how many miles were you covering a day? About between 70 and 90 a day. And just camping at night? Yeah, that, so that was the best part.

• 45:06Speaker 01

  We literally did not plan one night of sleeping. So like on the first day, we did not know where we were going to be sleeping that night. And we mainly stayed, we camped on the side of the road, not like the side of the road, but we would end in like, you know, literally the populations of the towns we were going through are like, like 200, like, and I had never seen places like this before. And this is, this is where my veganism began to engage. Cause I was a vegetarian through the whole trip, but a vegetarian happily eating milkshakes and grilled cheese and french fries and Coca-Cola all day. Cause when you- That's all you're gonna get. Exactly, but I didn't know that. I grew up in LA where I could have an organic salad any day I want. Where's the gracias madre?

• 45:49Speaker 01

  Exactly, like truly, that's how sheltered I really was. And I found myself- What? No cafe gratitude? In the Bible Belt. Yeah, like I would have to literally describe what a vegetarian was to waitresses, like in diners. Like I would say, hey, can I have the black beans? But I'm a vegetarian, so I, so is that okay? And they didn't know what a vegetarian was, a lot of people. So I really like, was like, whoa, we, I am eating milkshakes and eggs and fried food all day, but I thought that this was the part of the country that the food was supposed to come from. Cause we were passing by farms all day, every day, miles and miles a day.

• 46:34Speaker 01

  And so finally- You're like, where's the fresh produce? Yeah, I thought this is like the nature way of American living. I grew up in the concrete jungle and it was pretty good, like this must be better. And it was literally the opposite. The people like, so, so we would sleep in city parks, uh, in tiny little towns, outside of courthouses, we would stay in churches, we would ride up in our little spandex and some old granny would come out and literally give us cornbread and we would charm them and say, hey, we're, you know, we're college students biking across the country, you know? We need a place to stay. And we would get put in, put up by people all the time. You're staying in people's houses.

• 47:16Speaker 01

  Staying in people's houses, you know, if they fed us, we'd stay there for a day or two, take a rest. Did you ever get busted by the cops for sleeping where you shouldn't sleep? Um, not, not that I can think of. It went pretty smoothly. Um, we figured out that if you call, um, fire stations, the day, like in the morning and say, hey, we're biking across the country, we're college students. We think we're going to end up in your town. You know, do you have any room in your firehouse? We stayed in so many fire. Really? That's interesting. I didn't know that. Really fun. And so this trip was, you know, me, my best friend and my brother, you know, biking stoned all day, every day across America, drinking pints of beer, you know, coming straight from high school.

• 48:01Speaker 01

  It was literally glorious. It was, it was amazing. And on the fifth day of the trip, the trip was 81 days. And on the fifth day, we were riding by, you know, massive, um, hay bales. And we found, um, this man also with a, with pantiers, um, on the side of the road, taking a picture of these hay bales. Right. And we went over and said, hey, what's going on? You look like you're taking a long, you know, cycling trip too. Um, and he's like, yeah, I started in Pennsylvania and I'm, and I'm actually going to California. And we're like, hey, we're going to California too. And this was in Virginia. And we said, you want to like go to lunch together? Like you look like a cool guy. He was a little older than us.

• 48:45Speaker 01

  Um, like 28 ish. And we went to lunch at some random diner that day. Got to, he was doing it solo, got to talking with him and we literally did the entire trip all the way to our house with this man that we met. Wow, that's cool. And he is now a brother and a best friend of mine and we see each other multiple times a year. Yeah. I mean, you just can't, I mean, I can't imagine.

• 49:10Rich Roll?

  Going through something like that with other people and not coming out the other side, just completely bonded, either totally fractured and or forever bonded together.

• 49:20Speaker 01

  It's interesting. There was a bit of both of that. There was a bit of both of that. But this guy, Adam Gruber, he was from rural Amish Pennsylvania. Dad was a truck driver. He worked construction, lived out in the boonies. And here were these three Jewish kids from LA, you know, who had never been in middle America. So we couldn't have been different from each other. And the whole trip was constantly teaching each other about our lifestyles.

• 49:50Rich Roll?

  Interesting.

• 49:51Speaker 01

  It was amazing.

• 49:52Rich Roll?

  Have you, are you familiar with this guy Jedediah Jenkins?

• 49:55Speaker 01

  I am not.

• 49:56Rich Roll?

  He's the dude, this is amazing. This guy's riding his bike from Oregon to Patagonia. And he's been Instagramming his trip along the way. You should check out his Instagram feed.

• 50:08Speaker 01

  I need to.

• 50:09Rich Roll?

  Yeah, he posts these amazing pictures and he's writing a book about it.

• 50:10Speaker 01

  You know what kind of bike he's using?

• 50:12Rich Roll?

  I don't, I don't know. But his Instagrams are amazing.

• 50:16Speaker 01

  Yeah, because I want to do that trip someday, too. And I was always thinking, like, you could ride a touring bike, road bike in America, but you probably need more of a mountain style, sturdier tires when you're getting through Central America.

• 50:29Rich Roll?

  Yeah, because this guy's going on dirt roads and all kinds of stuff like that.

• 50:32Speaker 01

  That is awesome.

• 50:33Rich Roll?

  So, for the future, right? Buckle up, let's find him for the future.

• 50:37Speaker 01

  Another, another social media person to follow.

• 50:39Rich Roll?

  So what's, so what's the takeaway from this experience?

• 50:43Speaker 01

  So the takeaway, once we got home, you know, we got into crazy situations, just crazy things. One of the best things that happened was we stayed in a, in people's, a person's house in Kentucky that like turned out to be swingers. Like, just crazy stuff happened every day. Like, we always said-

• 51:03Rich Roll?

  Having like a swingers party when you were there?

• 51:05Speaker 01

  Like, wanted us to be the party. No, like, it was, it was amazing. It was just amazing. Random things happened. And, you know, lots of just fun, you know, country American alcohol and, and, you know, finding weed places and-

• 51:23Speaker 01

  It was, it was just great and fun.

• 51:25Rich Roll?

  You can't call the fire station for that, right?

• 51:28Speaker 01

  Uh, no, but, but we definitely broke some laws in fire stations, I'll tell you that.

• 51:33Rich Roll?

  Alright.

• 51:34Speaker 01

  Um, yeah, it was, it was just kooky and now reflecting on it, while I would take a very different trip if I took it now, all of those steps were puzzle pieces and what turned out to be Jackson at this very moment, which will be different from Jackson tomorrow. But, what I took away from this trip was food related, and I didn't think that. I was a happy junk food vegetarian for like seven, five to seven, or seven years, coming to that. And I realized, the people that we met on that trip, were fat, sick, depressed, pill popping Americans. And a lot of people were really nice and really great, almost everyone, but they were trapped, eating at gas stations while they were growing the genetically

• 52:19Speaker 01

  modified corn that they were selling to someplace where they'll, where they'll never see it again. That wasn't going to feed humans. And I never knew that, because I didn't have any farmer friends, growing up at Harvard Westlake. And, I was just so ignorant to all this stuff that really disturbed me. And, so I began to marinate on that experience, reflect, and I had set up, um, two weeks after I got home, I actually shipped off solo to Southeast Asia, and volunteered on an orangutan orphanage in Borneo, Indonesia.

• 52:52Rich Roll?

  Mm-hmm.

• 52:53Speaker 01

  So boom, going straight from-

• 52:55Rich Roll?

  Where does this harebrained idea come-

• 52:57Speaker 01

  Confederate America to a rural jungle village. So, my dad, um, you know, he, his company shoots documentaries, nature documentaries, and I'd seen this movie about, um, orangutans, Born to be Wild, a couple of years before, and it looked super cool, and I called up the orphanage and they're like, "We love American volunteers whenever, like, we won't pay you, but we'll let you stay in like, one of the local people's houses and they'll feed you and you can just like, work for us, that'd be great." And I said, "Wonderful." And so I did a little touring around Laos and Thailand and Vietnam and did my whole backpacker crazy thing where everything is so cheap and fun, and it just felt a little

• 53:40Speaker 01

  meaningless, while I had crazy experience backpacking in the limestone mountains of Laos. Um, but-

• 53:49Speaker 01

  I ended up at this orangutan sanctuary orphanage and living with a family that worked there. They had just gotten electricity about a year before I came. The electricity turned on at 6:00 PM and turned off at like 5:00 AM. So the roads were being paved. It was an off-the-grid place that I'd never experienced before. Coming from just the heart of America to this place where they were making literally $70 a month, most of the families. There were no cows on the island to milk.

• 54:30Speaker 01

  I was fed rice, fruits, and vegetables for three meals a day, every single day, and I was chasing orangutans up trees and picking fruit.

• 54:40Rich Roll?

  And what is the purpose of the sanctuary? I mean, are those animals in jeopardy there? Or what's the...

• 54:46Speaker 01

  So orangutans on the island of Borneo, it's the biggest population in the world, and they're endangered. They're being extremely threatened from palm oil plantations. And palm oil is an ingredient in a lot of processed food and soap products and shampoos.

• 55:02Rich Roll?

  Peanut butter.

• 55:03Speaker 01

  And it's the greatest place to grow palm oil in Borneo. So what happened was the government about 60 years ago started to allow companies to come in, deforest the island in order to have some source of economy. Because they were just literally a random jungle country. You know, they're part of Indonesia, but they're their own island. So orangutans are terrible for palm oil plantations because the orangutan doesn't know that it's not their land. Of course, it is. It's all of our land. And palm oil farmers would shoot orangutans when they came and foraged on their trees. So they became endangered very quickly.

• 55:46Speaker 01

  And this amazing woman named Berute Galtikas in the 60s went to Borneo, bought 25 acres of wild jungle land, gathered up all the orphaned orangutans. So orangutans live with their mother for like five years of their life, like attached. So if you see an orangutan that is under the age of six or seven, its parent has been killed. And she gathered them all up, built a little enclosures for them to live in, and essentially is preserving the species.

• 56:16Rich Roll?

  Interesting. That's amazing. So when you were working there, what was your responsibility?

• 56:20Speaker 01

  So I was, it was the same as every single person in the village was employed by this orangutan orphanage. And it's sad. When you go there, they're in these cages. We're not trying to obviously hurt them. We need a place to enclose them so they don't go and get killed by farmers. So they're in these enclosures and our job is to every morning, take out all of the orangutans from their cages, bring them into our 25 square acre playground of a jungle, let them forage and hang out all day. It's literally patrolled by people's people, you know, soldiers so that palm oil people don't come in and take the land.

• 57:01Speaker 01

  Let them do their natural things so they don't become just a species in captivity and literally make sure that they all come into camp by the end of the night.

• 57:10Rich Roll?

  Yeah, how do you herd them back to return at night?

• 57:12Speaker 01

  It's the hardest work I've ever done in my life. Like they're literally orang- like each person, there's like 40 people that work. I mean, this village was tiny. And there were like 40 or 50 people that would take out the orangutans, including myself. And each one would be in charge of like three or four. And so you'd literally like, there's no leashes. Like we would put them up into a tree and five seconds later, they're 200 feet away from you, 40 feet in the air. And orangutans are incredibly smart creatures. And there is a sense that they know what's going on and you can communicate with them. And at the end of the day, we get them back. So sometimes if one is being stubborn and knows that we're going to come out with their favorite treat,

• 57:57Speaker 01

  you know, to, to hold up a piece of corn in a tree for them to come down, they'll wait till you have three pieces of corn in your hand. And when I came there, it was like orangutans know the social dynamic of like the new kid. So there were some people that... Had worked there for like thirty years that had known some of these orangutans their whole lives that they could literally like say in Bahasa Indonesia, which is their language, like, "Come over here, go get me that stick, you know, don't go too far away from me." And the orangutans would listen. It was like these people could speak to, and it was literally incredible. And me coming in, they knew that I had treats in my bag, and I had fun things to play with, and I was a new kid, and I would find myself walking

• 58:42Speaker 01

  around the jungle, keeping my eye on my orangutans, and three big males would start walking up to me, start slapping my face, laughing, stealing my water bottle, throwing it around to each other, like bullying me.

• 58:56Rich Roll?

  Right. They're like, "We can, we can get over on this dude."

• 58:58Speaker 01

  Yeah, he doesn't know what he's doing. And eventually, you know, I, like, some of the men that had been in the community for a long time would help me out and show me, like, you know, you got a rough house with them. They're like indestructible. They can fall out of like a thirty-foot tree on their backs and be fine. So, you know, you just push them around, give them a little yell, say, "I'm the man." And after a couple weeks, I became like a, like a cool dude in the community, and they would listen to me.

• 59:25Rich Roll?

  You gotta earn their respect.

• 59:25Speaker 01

  And I earned their respect.

• 59:26Rich Roll?

  But during the day, after you let them out, do you have to follow around your four or five and keep track of them all day long?

• 59:31Speaker 01

  Yeah. So, my days, all day, were just knee-deep in, you know, watery, swampy, mosquito-biting jungle. In the heat, it would, it would rain about every day. It's about a hundred degrees every day, and it would rain. It's like what you think of a rainforest, is what it is. And, yeah, I would just walk around and, you know, just zone out, be in nature, and chill, and, and follow my orangutans, and pick wild fruit, and, you know, eat rice all day. And so this is where I, I sort of woke up and was like, "I feel like a superhuman." Like, what is going on? I'm working with guys that are 90 years old that can beat me in a sprint race.

• 1:00:15Speaker 01

  And there was no heart disease in the community.

• 1:00:17Rich Roll?

  Mm-hmm. These old guys are climbing trees like crazy, probably, and gathering food for the village.

• 1:00:23Speaker 01

  Yeah. And living off of $70. And we would laugh at night and just hang out. And things were so peaceful. And so many of the stresses that I had experienced on my cross-country bike trip just didn't exist in this community. And it really, like, it just clicked. It was like, whoa.

• 1:00:43Rich Roll?

  Well, it's a heavy juxtaposition because you go from middle America where you're eating these foods that, you know, aren't so good, and you're seeing people that aren't so happy, aren't so healthy. And then you go to this extremely exotic place that we've been programmed to believe is backwards or behind.

• 1:01:00Speaker 01

  Inferior.

• 1:01:01Rich Roll?

  Inferior, what have you. And you're seeing people that are happy, incredibly

• 1:01:04Speaker 01

  They're only elevated.

• 1:01:05Rich Roll?

  incredibly healthy, and they're eating fruit and rice.

• 1:01:07Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 1:01:08Rich Roll?

  Basically.

• 1:01:09Speaker 01

  Basically. That is the key point. So I had the opportunity, for the first time in my life, to actually eat, or not for the first time I was comfortable with actually trying to eat an animal. So they would, about once a week, some of the families, they would take a chicken that roams around the community, they would kill it, and they would eat it that night. And the kids, the younger kids, my generation, ate a lot more meat than the older people, but it was becoming a thing in the community.

• 1:01:52Speaker 01

  So while the diet was predominantly vegan, they did eat animal products very sparingly, literally, once a week. And they would eat a whole chicken, and that would be their meat for the week. And keep in mind, I had not been, you know, relatively plant-based as a vegetarian for nutritional reasons. That meant nothing to me at that time. It was purely an ethical thing. And I didn't like, growing up in LA, the disconnect between killing an animal. You have no idea who killed it. You have no idea what kind of torturous situation it was grown up in, what it was fed. All these illusions that we are raised with in America. You know, the concrete slaughterhouse walls that we can never see and we go to jail if we film something in it with gag logs, things like that.

• 1:02:37Speaker 01

  And I finally had the opportunity to take an animal in my hands and feel the suffering and pain of what it's like to kill an animal and consume it. And I decided that would be best for me to do. And so, for the first time in five years, I, with my house dad, after a couple of weeks of being there, I told him the situation, and he knew I was vegetarian. And we went outside at like 5:00 PM and grabbed a chicken that just lived its life roaming around and showed me what to do. I took it between my legs, kind of pinched it in my knees, grabbed the head of a chick, grabbed the head of it, kind of stuck it out, and had a huge knife, and I slit its throat,

• 1:03:22Speaker 01

  and I drained the blood into a big bucket that we would cook with later. And I then laid the chicken on the ground. It took about five to 10 minutes to take its last breath, so I just watched it sort of breathing and dying from blood loss. And it was about, yeah, five or 10 minutes, then I took it, once it was dead, and soaked it in like a tub of hot water for like 15 minutes, and then de-feathered it, which was very easy, surprisingly. Chickens have so many feathers and they just came right out. And then with my house mom, we then cut off the limbs, so cut off the head and cut off the feet, and we actually fed that to, we had dogs, and they ate that.

• 1:04:05Speaker 01

  And then we opened up the rib cage, pried it open, took out all the guts, so I got my hands deep in intestines and hearts and lungs and all these things that I had seen growing up in anatomy class that were in my body too. And we took that all out and cleaned all the blood out and chopped it into the ideal pieces that we like to eat, the wings, the breasts. And then I ate chicken for the first time for dinner since I was 14 years old. And I was 18, 19 at the time. Right, and so how was that experience? So...

• 1:04:43Speaker 01

  By the time it was dinnertime and I had done all that process that I just very described in a detailed way, I was already messed up in the head. From, because I'd never experienced that before. Like, I'd never taken a life before. I had swatted a fly, but when you swat a fly, its intestines and heart don't spill all over the place.

• 1:05:05Rich Roll?

  Right, so what, I mean, what was it that made you want to have that experience? Just so you could say, okay, so I've had this tactile experience of, you know, what it actually entails to, you know, kill an animal, to eat it. I just want to know what that feels like, so I can speak to that?

• 1:05:18Speaker 01

  Yeah, I'd become a vegetarian because of the disconnect between kill and eat.

• 1:05:23Rich Roll?

  Right, so here you are.

• 1:05:24Speaker 01

  I had the first opportunity.

• 1:05:26Rich Roll?

  Right, so here you are with the opportunity to actually.

• 1:05:28Speaker 01

  And I'm on my gap year, and it's about experience, and it's about trying new things, and I experienced it. And I ate it, and obviously, I got a massive, massive stomach ache. When you eat food like that, that you're not used to eating, your body reacts in a crazy way. So I had terrible digestive problems that night from eating chicken for the first time. And I also just felt like an asshole. I just felt like a jerk, that I saw life in front of my eyes, you know, an hour before eating it, that was running around, doing its thing, doing the things that I do, walking on its feet, breathing my air, drinking my water.

• 1:06:11Speaker 01

  And then, I took that life only to have a stomach ache.

• 1:06:16Rich Roll?

  Mm-hmm.

• 1:06:18Speaker 01

  What was the point of that? I had lived pretty good the past five years, eating mainly plant foods, that don't have brains and don't have nervous systems. And I just questioned, what was the point of that? It tasted disgusting. You know, in America, when we eat food with MSG and sodium and salt and all these spices, which come from plants, meat tastes pretty good. But if you graze a raw piece of meat over your tongue, your instant sensation is not, this is what I want. When you graze a strawberry or an orange, you practically, you know, have an orgasm in your mouth. Like, it's so good.

• 1:06:58Speaker 01

  And so I got a real idea of what meat is, what meat tastes like, what it goes through in order for us to consume these foods, and... From then on, I was a vegan.

• 1:07:11Rich Roll?

  So that was the defining moment.

• 1:07:13Speaker 01

  I experimented it a little bit more. I ate a fish.

• 1:07:18Speaker 01

  I had like four more weeks there. I stayed in Indonesia for like eight weeks, like two months. And I experimented a little, came back home and put down my vegan flag and began to educate myself.

• 1:07:33Rich Roll?

  And meanwhile, you're seeing these older people who are so vital, you know, on this island.

• 1:07:38Speaker 01

  And the kids were getting fat. And yeah, like the kids that were going into the town over, which was like a 30 minute drive on a motorbike and like eating processed food. It didn't have the vitality of like the 80 year olds in the community, like straight up. And that was, and so I just began to make these connections that I had never made before. And I came home from that. My gap year was coming to an end. I had like four more months before school started. And I fully, from the grace of Mother Earth, got hooked into Colin Campbell and the whole crew of plant-based educators and scientists and nutritionists and began to educate myself on, because I like wanted to solve a puzzle.

• 1:08:21Speaker 01

  Why, why were these people in America that I had experienced doing so poorly? Why does 18% of our gross domestic product go to healthcare? When like this community, it's like zero. Like why? And so I just tried to solve the problem and happened to get tuned into the books that I now believe in, know are true. And once you educate yourself, there is no going back.

• 1:08:47Rich Roll?

  Right. So the books you read were obviously The China Study.

• 1:08:50Speaker 01

  I read The China Study. You watched Forks Over Knives. You, you know, watch any YouTube video from Caldwell Esselstyn, read Engine 2, read Finding Ultra, and hear about all these cool people doing, from the science background, from the spiritual background, from the athletics. Just everywhere, this one fits all solution. We're so used to in our reductionist society of you can have one problem and there's one thing that's going to fix that problem. Problem, but you can't use any other solution. And when it comes to plant-based nutrition and eating high-vibration, healthy foods, it fixes millions of things.

• 1:09:29Speaker 01

  It fixes our environmental crisis, our health crisis, a lot of the depression in our country, economics, it's like, it's a miracle.

• 1:09:41Rich Roll?

  Right, it's like a turnkey solution for all of these things that ail us.

• 1:09:45Speaker 01

  And where, what else, where else does that exist? So like, literally, I got into nutrition just because I realized how fucking cool it was. And, you know, if you had asked me, like, if you'd said the word "plant-based nutrition" to me when I was 18 years old, I would have put my hand in your face, like, "Don't talk to me about boring stuff." And I realized this was literally the most exciting thing in my life. The stuff that I'm reading, and if it's true, I need to, I need to scream this message to the world. And I've spent the past two years doing that research, and it only gets better every day.

• 1:10:21Speaker 01

  Oh, man, so.

• 1:10:22Rich Roll?

  And you're, yeah, your megaphone is getting bigger and louder, and you're unequivocal, and you're passionate in your messaging.

• 1:10:29Speaker 01

  Yes, I, I am doing all I can right now to be a young, confident educator in spreading this word because we need it. Obviously, we are the first, my generation is the first generation that's said to live shorter lives than their parents, potentially. We are hooked into things that actually distract us from finding true success, which is happiness and satisfaction and peace. And we're seeing the problems. If you just watch the news today, like, the issues in our world every week, it seems like, get exponentially more intense. From the environmental crisis to religious wars, politics, I mean.

• 1:11:13Speaker 01

  It's insane. And like with the amount of information that I take in per day, if I did not have a spiritual releasing mechanism, which is yoga and meditation for me, amongst other things like exercise, I would explode. I would be

• 1:11:33Rich Roll?

  Too overwhelming.

• 1:11:34Speaker 01

  Destroyed. Yeah. And like so many people, I think, my, a lot of my peers who are equally as stimulated and interested in making the world a better place, I see the people that don't allow themselves that detailed path to, to consciousness and to calmness, aren't able to do the things that I've been able to do because it's too overwhelming. And so there's no like, that's why I say veganism and yoga are not two separate entities. I couldn't have one without the other.

• 1:12:11Rich Roll?

  Yeah. I mean, I think that, that if you really look at it, sort of adopting a plant-based diet, wherever you come into it, whether you come into it for health reasons, or animal rights advocacy reasons, environmental reasons, it really, you know, behind the whole thing, it's kind of a spiritual trip. You know what I mean? And once you get invested in it and you start to realize the benefits and, and, you know, I say this all the time, but it's sort of like taking the red pill in the matrix and your eyes get open and you're like, well, wait, what's going on with deforestation? What's going on with species extinction? Where's all the water going? Like, what are we doing? Like, look at our system of industrialized livestock agriculture. This is completely insane. This is not sustainable. We can't continue to feed all the people on the planet this way. What are we doing about it? Why

• 1:12:54Rich Roll?

  aren't we talking about this? Why are, why are so many people sick? Why is, why are we in a healthcare crisis?

• 1:12:59Speaker 01

  And I'm just going, ah! I mean, already, like, just all that information will make you an insane person. If you If you don't allow yourself to get educated and find solutions, if instead, what a lot of people do is take in that information and go party instead. And say,

• 1:13:18Rich Roll?

  Numb out.

• 1:13:19Speaker 01

  Numb out. I can't handle that. I, my one impact is not going to change everything. If I ride my bike every day and don't drive a car, the ice caps aren't going to freeze again. And we have this idea that we are meaningless. We can have no impact. We, our voice isn't loud enough. And that's how we've been, been raised. And it's scary. It's totalitarian. It's 1984 like versus coming together, educating yourself, finding the numbness through a productive means. You know, I've known the numbness of doing drugs, of drinking. And as someone who has been sober just for choice the past two years,

• 1:14:05Speaker 01

  I'm able to get nummer than all my other friends from my morning meditation and getting out of a two-hour yoga class. And I truly am, I'm saying that honestly.

• 1:14:14Rich Roll?

  So, but that's numbing in a different kind of, there's a different connotation to that than, I mean, numbing implies like sort of a negative tuning out or removing yourself as opposed to just a better way of processing information.

• 1:14:29Speaker 01

  Well, I, I think, I actually think they're more similar than that. I think that numbing out for a short period of time that will enhance your ability to think mindfully later is necessary. When I'm in meditation, I'm not thinking, I'm, I'm not saying to myself, I'm going to be a productive vegan activist and save the world. I'm trying to actually tune all of that out. I'm trying to accept every single meat eater, which I do. I'm trying to accept all the violent things in my life and find this level of peace and calmness where I don't really care about all of the things that go through my mind 24/7 that I'm trying to save and solve.

• 1:15:13Speaker 01

  And it allows me this recharge, you know, cycling phase to stop and in order to tap back in. And I'm able to do it to a higher level than I could before.

• 1:15:26Rich Roll?

  Right, but I think that involves just being more grounded and present in the moment and having greater control over, you know, the ruminations of the thinking mind, whereas numbing really implies kind of like a denial or just trying to like a conscious ignorance.

• 1:15:41Speaker 01

  Totally.

• 1:15:42Rich Roll?

  So those things are different, but you know, what's inescapable to me is is just this kind of inversion of, you know, the conventional wisdom that surrounds our millennial generation. You know, when you talk about millennials, people say, oh, entitled, bratty kids. They don't want to do anything. They're not motivated. They just want the whole world handed to them. And, you know, time and time again, I'm proven wrong with this when I meet young people like yourself who, I mean, when I was 18, 19, 20, 21, like I was a mess. You know, I didn't know what I wanted to do. All I wanted to do is party.

• 1:16:24Rich Roll?

  And, you know, I didn't, I wasn't thinking beyond two days later or whatever my next class was in college. I had zero sort of consciousness or awareness or care for anything outside of my own selfish concern. And so when I meet someone like yourself and other people who are so aware and passionate and devoted to change and optimistic and actually doing things about it, I think that we need to redefine what we mean when we're talking about millennials.

• 1:16:52Speaker 01

  I agree. I would say that as a millennial, I would like us to redefine that definition and show that we have incredibly passionate, driven, smart, you know, young adults and kids in our planet right now that are doing amazing things that no one has ever done before at our age. But-

• 1:17:13Rich Roll?

  And it's like hip to do so. Like it's cool to go work for a nonprofit.

• 1:17:16Speaker 01

  It's not cool to be a schlub. It is not cool to not be active. Like the cool kids at my school now, Colorado College, where I transferred to, are the mindful, environmental, you know, cool kids that plan events and plan screenings and, you know, are the heads of different, you know, academic groups and teams and stuff like that. Like it is cool to be active because we have these platforms that never, in any time in history, we've had in order to have a loud voice. Anyone can have it. And if you don't use that opportunity, it's like, what are you doing? But I do want to say that there are a lot of, like, at the same time, while there are a lot of kids

• 1:18:01Speaker 01

  that are being woken up, quote unquote, waking up, kind of getting in tune at a younger age, there's equally just as many that more than ever in history are being forced to tune out.

• 1:18:16Rich Roll?

  Why being forced? What do you mean about the forcing part?

• 1:18:20Speaker 01

  While the iPhone and Facebook can be an incredible tool for the motivated, passionate person to educate the world on whatever they care about, it can also be a tool to prevent you from learning about, you know, what it means to kill a chicken.

• 1:18:39Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 1:18:39Speaker 01

  Or what ends up on the end of their forks, actually the true effect that that has on their lives in the future.

• 1:18:50Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 1:18:51Speaker 01

  We have more distractions than we have ever had.

• 1:18:56Rich Roll?

  The distractions are endless. It's crazy. You can just disappear down the rabbit hole completely. And I think it's, you know, again, it goes back to how are you using these modalities of technology? And, you know, we talk about, my wife and I talk about this all the time because we have little kids and, you know, we have a couple iPads in the house and computers and things like that. And, you know, my perspective on it is, I don't say, get off the iPad or get off the computer. My litmus test is, are you using it passively or are you using it actively? Like, if you are watching a movie or a television show, then all you're doing is losing yourself in somebody else's creative product.

• 1:19:34Speaker 01

  Unless it's forks over knives.

• 1:19:36Rich Roll?

  Right, or you're using it to educate yourself, right. But if you're just using it to tune out and sort of, okay, I'm passively absorbing the result of somebody else's creative fruits of labor, that's one thing. But to then, what if you're actually using it to make your own movie or record your own podcast or write your own blog or doing something like that? That's an active use that it has a positive impact. So it's not like, how much time are you spending on the iPad? It's like, what are you actually using it for?

• 1:20:03Speaker 01

  That line is dangerous because it is so dangerous to...

• 1:20:08Speaker 01

  To give our entire generation all these products and say, "You better do something good with them." Because that's not the message we're getting. Because when you see a iPhone ad, or a ad for KFC, or just all of these products, no matter what it is, jeans, clothing, it's never, "Hey, you can be a really sexy environmental activist in these jeans." It's like, "No, you're gonna look good at the club in these jeans." Or, "Here's your iPhone. You should use it to photograph mountain top removal and tar sands mining." No, they're saying you can listen to great music at a party, or just whatever.

• 1:20:53Speaker 01

  We are not being fed through the mainstream political and sort of corporate industrial complex that is our country. We are not being given good messages. I can say that confidently. Because if we were, I wouldn't have had to do all of the off-the-grid work.

• 1:21:15Rich Roll?

  You'd have had to extract yourself out of your environment to have that discovery.

• 1:21:17Speaker 01

  Every kid should get out of high school ready to be an activist to make the world a better place. But no, instead, a lot of kids get Wall Street internships. Like, there's a reason for that. We're not just dumb kids. No one is a victim. No person that has heart disease, cancer, Alzheimer's, osteoporosis, all these purely nutritional diseases, they don't deserve these things because they didn't have the will to become vegan. It's a lack of education. We're all victims. None of us are evil. We're not enemies. We're simply fed garbage, literally and metaphorically, in terms of the imagery that we are, that we get from literally age one,

• 1:22:00Speaker 01

  as, you know, my little cousin is two years old, and he doesn't know my name, but he can click his favorite iPad game on the iPad and play it.

• 1:22:11Speaker 01

  Like, we're, we're turning into some, and I'm making generalizations, but if you really take a step back, these funny words like addicted zombies, like, if, if you, if you looked at what the world was, is, is right now, and take yourself out of the context of what is normal to you, which is what I've been trying to do the past few years, like, think of what was defined as normal to me growing up, take a step back, say maybe it could be another way, and redefine it for myself. If you did that for every single thing, from what you're eating, to what you think of when you wake up, to the way you view your family, to the way you think of class,

• 1:22:54Speaker 01

  if you take a step back and rethink all those things, your world is going, you're gonna come into a different world, because you don't realize how brainwashed you've been in nice or not-nice ways, from your family, from your school, from your teachers, from your friends. Like, we are the people that other people make us. If we were raised in a black hole in space, we, we wouldn't be human beings. We're, we're not human beings on our own. We're human beings by the experiences that we have of other people.

• 1:23:27Rich Roll?

  I'm speechless. I don't even know, I don't know how to respond to that.

• 1:23:31Rich Roll?

  It was very well put. But I think that you have to bear, bear in mind that, you know, we do, we live in this world. These things are not going away, whether it's technology, or, or whatever systems that we've kind of unconsciously subscribed to. So how do you navigate the modern world? And, you know, without becoming a pariah and moving to Borneo, you know, just for somebody who's listening out there, who's like, "Yeah, but, you know, I go to my job every day, and I got kids, I gotta support, and, you know, how can I try to divine a better, more conscious existence out of my day-to-day, without having to, you know, radically let everything go and move to the jungle?"

• 1:24:12Speaker 01

  So, speaking from my experience, unfortunately, I think the first step is to get pretty disturbed.

• 1:24:20Speaker 01

  There needs to be, just as I was disturbed through my experience of cycling across America, while it was so amazing and I had so many amazing experiences, there was one thing that felt really wrong to me. This idea of people living in practically poverty, growing food not to be fed to humans, but to be fed to animals later, for these animals to be killed and abused for us to eat them. And that disturbed me. And that tortured me. And that's what allowed me to say, "I'm gonna be above this, and I need to educate myself in order to find a higher consciousness." And also, I have to say, and I'm sure you can speak to this too, that sobriety is a pretty big part. Because it is really easy, even in our generation, to go to class and talk about capitalism.

• 1:25:05Speaker 01

  Colorado College, we just, we literally just talk about "corporate America, capitalism, like, oh, industrial food system, this stuff sucks." And then, turn 10 o'clock, if you have a couple of drinks in you, you find yourself at KFC drinking Coca-Cola.

• 1:25:24Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 1:25:24Speaker 01

  And you wouldn't do that. Like, you would not do that if you were not under the influence of an external substance that's dictating your emotions and your behavior. So, consciousness. Essentially, drugs and alcohol take away your consciousness. They take away your ability to make thoughtful decisions, right?

• 1:25:45Rich Roll?

  Well, there's no question about it. I mean, removing drugs and alcohol is the first step towards, you know, mental clarity, of course. But really, developing a higher state of consciousness. And then you become more and more aware, like, the road gets narrower. And then you start to realize, like, "Oh, television is impacting my consciousness in a way that's kind of similar to drinking. Like, I don't know that I can do that anymore." And then you gotta, like, remove that. And then you're like,

• 1:26:11Speaker 01

  "Huh, wait a second."

• 1:26:12Rich Roll?

  "Wow, I look at my phone a lot, you know, like, that's just, that's taking me out of the moment."

• 1:26:16Speaker 01

  "I drink Cheerios, I eat Cheerios with milk every day. Like, I'm pretty, you know, I'm ticked off in the morning if I don't get that fixed. Like, is that an addiction?" And, and it's a slow process of like, and then, once you realize that you can become a more heightened, more productive, even more successful human being by having that sort of tortured episode, and then starting to simply educate yourself. So just take a step back, think mindfully. You realize that you can make your life a much brighter... Entity than it was before. And that's how you get started.

• 1:26:53Rich Roll?

  It's terrifying, though. It's terrifying for most people.

• 1:26:56Speaker 01

  You have to go through all that work.

• 1:26:58Rich Roll?

  Well, pain is the ultimate motivator, right? Like, you had to be tortured. Or you had to have an experience that shook you up enough for you to look at that. You know, I had to, like, hit my bottom with drugs and alcohol before I was willing to change, even though I knew it was destroying my life, I didn't care, right? So, you know, you're lucky if you have those bottoms or you have those moments of clarity or those reckonings. But, you know, I think it's also important to always be aware that, you know, if that elevator's going down or something isn't serving you, that, you know, you always have the choice to say no to it. It's just harder, you know, when you're not in pain. You know, when you're in pain, that choice becomes easier to make.

• 1:27:38Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 1:27:39Rich Roll?

  Right? So if you're just cruising along and your life's pretty good, you know, it's harder to...

• 1:27:43Speaker 01

  It's hard to wake up.

• 1:27:44Rich Roll?

  Yeah, if somebody is, you know, in a job that's not great, it's not what they really want to be doing, but it pays well and they can feed their family and they live in a nice house and there's two cars in the driveway, it's pretty hard for that person to wake up until something intervenes, like, you know, it's the trite thing, like, somebody gets cancer or something like that.

• 1:28:02Speaker 01

  Yes, and that is why the tools of, um, the tools of a Gary Yurovsky speech or a PETA video that shows, you know, um, industrial animal agriculture and the abuse that 60 billion land animals are going through per year in order for humans to eat them and thus get diseases from them. If you see those, if you get hit in the face with those things that are so hard, that's what, I guess, our disillusioned species, we need something that intense in order to wake up. If you ask the person that is going through their path very happily, um, not thinking

• 1:28:43Speaker 01

  about the impact that their individual life is having on the rest of the world and eventually themselves, and you say them and you ask them when they're eating their salmon, like, "How do you feel about the fish that you're eating?" Like, I've been there. I wouldn't care. You don't care.

• 1:29:01Rich Roll?

  Listen, you know, if you show the average person a Gary Yurovsky video, or a PETA video, or sort of cattle prod them, or, you know, sort of gut check them on their food choice, they're gonna tell you to fuck off.

• 1:29:12Speaker 01

  Exactly.

• 1:29:13Rich Roll?

  They don't want to see that. They don't want to, you know, that, that way of messaging doesn't work for a lot of people.

• 1:29:19Speaker 01

  Exactly. And that is why what I'm doing right now, and we can get into this, I think is the future of animal liberation and vegan activism, which is, instead of showing people, "Look at how terrible and disgusting the, you know, eating animals is, and you should be a bad person." Why don't you look at Robert Cheek and say, "Hey, you can be a bodybuilder if you go vegan, or you can be an ultra runner, you know, and triathlete if you go vegan." How cool is that? Like, you can achieve these goals in a quicker, faster, more healthy, more sustainable, cheaper way than you could eating your normal sad, standard American diet. So, right now, I'm going through an episode. I've been, you know, a vegan educator

• 1:30:03Speaker 01

  to my friends and family and school community for a couple of years now. And I've been into yoga and running, and I'm a super lean, healthy, you know, vegan. I'm about 6'2", I weighed 140 pounds for, for my first two years of going vegan.

• 1:30:18Rich Roll?

  That's super skinny.

• 1:30:19Speaker 01

  Super skinny. I have pictures that I look at now. And, you know, it was a big problem in my family. When I went vegan, and I was eating larger quantities of food than anybody else. And I took veganism in a really, really hardcore way. I was tofu, tempeh, and seitan free for two full years, oil-free, two years, zero processed sugar, zero wheat. Still, most of those things are true. I now eat tofu and tempeh, tempeh and soy foods, because I've actually educated myself on the health benefits of those. But I am completely oil-free and processed sugar-free. And because I read these books, like the

• 1:30:59Speaker 01

  Gerson Therapy and the China Study, I drafted my unique vegan diet in order of the people that were trying to help people with terminal cancer. Like, I, I treated myself as a cancer patient as a healthy 18-year-old. And so, I got, like... I literally wouldn't go to Cafe Gratitude the first year and a half of being vegan if you paid me. I was like, oh no, that's not gonna give me all my micronutrients that I need. I need to make my own food, that's what I do, don't threaten my health.

• 1:31:34Rich Roll?

  Are your parents tripping?

• 1:31:35Speaker 01

  My parents are tripping, they're like, this is, this is so great, Jackson, but you literally look like, you know, you just came out of like a concentration camp, like, seriously, I was really thin, I thought I was great. My hands are bright orange from eating so much betacharotene. And, um, you know, I was active, it's not like I was like comatose on a couch, like I was running, you know, 10 plus miles a week, nothing crazy, but I was getting my, a lot of exercise in, just cardio based, cuz I was just into being the lean skinny vegan guy.

• 1:32:06Rich Roll?

  But a lot of people would say that being that ardent, like that, that controlling is, is, that's really a form of an eating disorder on some level.

• 1:32:13Speaker 01

  Now reflecting on it, while it, while I don't wanna say I have an eating disorder, cuz I don't wanna offend people that have different types of eating disorders, I had a version of that, there's no doubt about it. And it wasn't an eating disorder in that I was calorie restricting, I was the opposite of calorie restricting. Within my diet of what's okay, so cooked lentils, cooked beans, rice, quinoa, tons of raw fruits and vegetables, nuts, seeds, I was eating massive, massive, massive amounts of food.

• 1:32:41Rich Roll?

  But the control aspect of it is the same, because that's really, the, the real derivation of that disorder is that, is this drive to control every aspect of.

• 1:32:49Speaker 01

  Literally, it was truly insane. And, you know, to an extent, like I, I'm much better now than when I started, but because I educated myself on these, um, you know, works from Colin Campbell to Call the Wesselston, whatever, I, I took it in a really, really, really extreme way. I am an evangelical vegan, there's no doubt.

• 1:33:10Rich Roll?

  Right, like if you had avocado, you were suddenly gonna have a heart attack?

• 1:33:15Speaker 01

  Uh, no, I, I was into avocados.

• 1:33:18Rich Roll?

  Or just like a dab of olive oil.

• 1:33:20Speaker 01

  I was whole food plant based.

• 1:33:21Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 1:33:22Speaker 01

  No, like literally, if there was olive oil on something and I was starving, I wouldn't eat it. So yeah, it was an eating disorder, there's no doubt. And as a result, I was, you know, 6% body fat for like two full years, 6'2", 140 pounds. And I, and but when I looked in the mirror, I was like, I am frickin rad. I look great, I'm awesome, I'm doing this cruelty-free lifestyle and I'm super lean and everyone wants to get lean, so this must be great.

• 1:33:49Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 1:33:50Speaker 01

  And finally, as I got into college and a couple of months ago, you know, as I'm educating people and going up and talking to people, I keep getting the same message like, "Well dude, I don't want to look like you." Why should I listen to you?

• 1:34:06Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 1:34:06Speaker 01

  If, you know.

• 1:34:08Rich Roll?

  You're unbeknownst to you, you're actually perpetuating the stereotype that you're trying to overcome.

• 1:34:14Speaker 01

  Exactly, exactly. So I, you know, got into my research, alright, what do people want? People generally want to look healthy, have muscles, be strong, you know, all of our superheroes are, have six packs and big arms. And my goal in anything I do from now on is to get this message out of animal liberation. And while, while it turned out, while it started way more of a health-related thing for me, what's the optimal human diet? While that's equally as important to me now, the ethics and environmental portion of veganism wasn't as important to me when I started. And it now takes the, takes the highest regard in terms of why I continue to do this.

• 1:34:58Rich Roll?

  Right, but being in conscious, conscious of like, how are you carrying this message? So that you can impact the most number of people possible, understanding that you're gonna have to sort of.

• 1:35:08Speaker 01

  Buy into the system.

• 1:35:09Rich Roll?

  Yeah, well, not buy into the system, but maybe, you know, carry yourself or appear in.

• 1:35:15Speaker 01

  Cater to the mainstream audience, sort of.

• 1:35:19Speaker 01

  And so I, you know, got tuned into Robert Cheek and Derek Treysize and Giacomo Marchese and all these vegan bodybuilders and said, what is the la- and also, living in Colorado Springs, it is a conservative military town of meat eaters and Confederate flags. And being the skinny hippie, you know, ponytailed tattooed vegan is not the best way that I am go- like, the vegans will love that. They'll love to hear all that.

• 1:35:51Rich Roll?

  You look exactly like how everyone expects you to look.

• 1:35:54Speaker 01

  Yeah, so I decided I'm gonna stir things up. I'm gonna experiment with trying to talk to the people that need to hear this message more than anyone. And I'm gonna try to build a little bit of muscle. Simple goal. And, but, the reason it's profound as a vegan is 99% of probably the world population, or at least in America, think that vegan and bodybuilder is an oxymoron. It's not possible. You cannot build muscle on a vegan diet. And through not changing my diet very much, but changing my exercise, I have gained over 30 pounds of mainly muscle. If you look at me now, I'm very lean, still have a six pack, 30 pounds in the past five and a half months.

• 1:36:38Rich Roll?

  Right, that's not that long.

• 1:36:39Speaker 01

  Which is a lot.

• 1:36:40Rich Roll?

  Yeah, so you're starting to get buffed.

• 1:36:42Speaker 01

  So I am, I am trying to do that in order to be the best vegan educator that I can.

• 1:36:49Rich Roll?

  Did you, uh, did you listen to that NPR piece that was on the other day?

• 1:36:53Speaker 01

  I did, I just listened to it, yeah.

• 1:36:54Rich Roll?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 1:36:55Speaker 01

  And we were just hanging out with him at the Meet Us For Pussy.

• 1:36:57Rich Roll?

  Right, exactly. So for the listener out there, a couple of days ago on NPR, they did a story on the relationship between diet and our ideas that surround masculinity. And they interviewed a bunch of people, a bunch of vegan dudes who were at a vegan barbecue in Brooklyn. It was at, at our friend Joshua Catcher's.

• 1:37:18Speaker 01

  A lot of muscly dudes.

• 1:37:19Rich Roll?

  Yeah, like a, a bodybuilder, Joshua's a big CrossFit guy and a triathlete, and there was a quip by John Joseph in there. And it was cool, it was a short little piece or whatever, but, um, you know, Joshua, as always, was very well spoken, and he said something, I'm gonna botch his quote, but maybe you remember it, but the idea that, uh, that, uh-

• 1:37:45Rich Roll?

  You know, sort of mainstream ideas about masculinity are an impediment to sustainability. Right. It was something along those lines. And in order to kind of carry the message, you know, you have to exude health. Right. And so when we were talking to Joshua at John Joseph's book party a couple of weeks ago, he was talking about how, you know, he's super into CrossFit now and he goes to this CrossFit gym. And I was saying, oh, well, there's, you know, there's a lot of paleo people there. How do they perceive you as being a plant-based person? And he's like, I'm in the top 10% of the strongest people there. So I get respect and it's a great opportunity to have productive dialogue with people. And it's been cool. And he loves CrossFit and that's kind of awesome. Right? So, you know, in a similar respect, I would imagine you being in the gym, you know, all

• 1:38:30Rich Roll?

  of these places are all opportunities when you interface with people to have a different kind of conversation about this kind of lifestyle.

• 1:38:38Speaker 01

  When, when you really think about it, a, a wimp, a, you know, non-manly figure is someone that doesn't act on optimal potential for success. If you sort of just like, break it down to the simplest form of like, what our socially constructed idea of a successful male figure is right now, it's the conventional family with the, you know, with a lot of money, with nice clothes, just, just a, just a man, like aggressive in ways, simply in that animalistic

• 1:39:18Speaker 01

  way of you have control of a situation. Being manly is to be in control. And if you educate yourself on what the impact of a large portion of the country eating animal products is, it is, if you have seen Cowspiracy, which most people hopefully will, will try to see at this point.

• 1:39:41Speaker 01

  Or if you just watch any simple YouTube video, if you read The Food Revolution, tons of books and content out there, you will realize that being addicted and consuming animal products is going to result in the destruction of all human control. And it sounds apocalyptic, but it is the most vulnerable point. Climate change is, is nature taking the manliness from the human race.

• 1:40:09Rich Roll?

  That's interesting. Explain.

• 1:40:12Speaker 01

  Well, in the, in a World Watch study, which was put out in 2009, I believe, it found that 51% of all US greenhouse gas emissions, so the driving force of global warming and climate change, over half were connected and a result of livestock, animal agriculture. That means growing animals as food, so chicken, steak, hamburgers, to milking cows for milk and cheese, to raising eggs. And that didn't even include the 90 billion marine animals that are farmed and, and eaten in our world every single year for human consumption, which has a huge environmental

• 1:40:57Speaker 01

  impact as well. So that was a conservative estimate that was done through years of research, that essentially the largest form of climate change and global warming is because we put animals onto the planet in order to kill, murder and eat them, or put them on our cars, or put them on our feet in the form of leather and things like that. A lot of people say, and this is just someone who clearly hasn't done their research or thought very much, if you stop eating animals, there's gonna be wild cows roaming the, roaming the streets.

• 1:41:33Rich Roll?

  You'll see cows everywhere.

• 1:41:33Speaker 01

  Chickens are gonna be in your, in your house, like.

• 1:41:36Rich Roll?

  Well, it wouldn't happen overnight. It would be a slow deceleration of this system over time.

• 1:41:41Speaker 01

  Right, but we, we need to remember that almost 99 point whatever percent of the animals that. Human beings eat in our world today are just as much pieces of technology as our iPhones or computers. They were bred and created by human beings to be put onto our planet. No cows breed anymore even. We artificially inseminate animals in order to produce more animals like a factory in order for us to sell and consume these products. So, think about,

• 1:42:20Speaker 01

  I mean, it takes 660 gallons of water to produce one hamburger, one pound of meat.

• 1:42:27Rich Roll?

  I think, I think it's

• 1:42:28Speaker 01

  A quarter pounder?

• 1:42:29Rich Roll?

  A quarter pound hamburger.

• 1:42:30Speaker 01

  Sure, so, and inversely, to produce the exact same amount of calories of plant foods, it takes about 50 gallons of water. So, these animals that do not need to be on our planet, do not need to be fed, do not need to drink, because they don't need to exist, because we put them into captivity and enslavement, they're taking a majority of the resources that could be going to human beings to feed them. One in seven people on the planet is starving of calories, starving of food, when over 80% of the calories grown by plants in our country is fed to animals for billions of calories to be lost while they're hungry people. It's criminal.

• 1:43:15Rich Roll?

  Right, but bringing it back to this conversation about masculinity and control. So, the idea that you're trying to get across is

• 1:43:22Speaker 01

  I really lose, lose track here. You got a real

• 1:43:25Rich Roll?

  You went down the, you went down the statistic

• 1:43:28Speaker 01

  The activist

• 1:43:29Rich Roll?

  Yeah, the black hole of statistics.

• 1:43:30Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 1:43:31Rich Roll?

  But, but no, those are, it's, those numbers are powerful. They're very powerful. But, but this idea of, you know, what it means to be a man and sort of being able to exert control, the other point that was made in this NPR story was, it was made by some professor, but she was saying something like, it's actually masculine to be in control of your, your diet. Like vegans, there's more vegan men than vegan women. Like, there's more vegan, there's more vegetarian women than men, but there are more Men of that population are vegan. And there's something about the kind of control aspect.

• 1:44:05Speaker 01

  It's just like John Joseph said in his book opening. It's not manly to not be able to walk up a flight of stairs and take it and shitting in a bag when you're 60 years old because you have all these health problems. What is manly about that? I mean, it is manly to be 50 years old, look like you're 35 and be able to beat anyone, you know, in a race or have huge muscles or, you know, be able to care about the planet. That, that is manly.

• 1:44:33Rich Roll?

  Right. I think it's about reframing this idea around compassion being, you know, a weakness as opposed to a strength. And when you look at any great leader throughout history, the greatest leaders of all time were the most compassionate. They were strong and they exerted that strength when they needed to, but they also showed extreme compassion.

• 1:44:54Speaker 01

  And now getting into political figures, that is why I have created the brand website, future book title, Plantriotic, which is something that I've created and I trademarked the term. And it is defined, as you can read on my shirt here.

• 1:45:12Rich Roll?

  Right. Plantriotic, honoring, honoring the planet by practicing a healthy, ethical and sustainable plant-based diet. So patriotic to the plant, like what is the idea here?

• 1:45:20Speaker 01

  No, patriotic to your country, patriotic to your community, patriotic to your body, to Mother Earth, to your wallet, to your health. The greatest thing you can do for America, let's even take, you know, good old USA. The best thing you can possibly do for our country in order for us to grow. I mean, what, what built our country? Having ample food, having beautiful landscapes, having wild species, having a thriving population of human beings.

• 1:45:55Speaker 01

  Veganism is the only way we're going to be able to do that. We've already proven, we already have the information that the way we eat right now, if we continue to eat processed food and animal products from dairy, eggs, meat, fish, our country is sooner than later going to be in crumbles. We won't be able to grow food. The temperature will be too hot in a matter of 15 to 20 years if we continue to emit the greenhouse gases that we emit right now. You can see that in 350.org's little documentary, Do The Math by Bill McKibben.

• 1:46:24Rich Roll?

  Which is where you worked this summer, and I want to hear about that in a minute.

• 1:46:28Speaker 01

  Cool.

• 1:46:28Rich Roll?

  But go ahead.

• 1:46:30Speaker 01

  I mean, just as bringing it back to the beginning, the one fix all of all these problems in order for us to have a prosperous country and world, I know can only be achieved if more people adopted a healthy, plant-based vegan diet. Undisputed. There's too much information.

• 1:46:50Rich Roll?

  Now you're just talking crazy talk.

• 1:46:52Speaker 01

  I'm a radical, crazy, wacko because I think McDonald's is going to destroy the world. I mean, this shows how truly brainwashed and taken control over we are, that we don't associate what ends up at the end of our fork with ultimately the destruction of ourselves and the planet. And again, if you take a step back, if you take a day to do research, I have no doubt that any person will be put on the right path. It's that easy.

• 1:47:23Rich Roll?

  But there's a gap between information and implementation. You know what I mean? Like, the information is out there. Every side of the equation can look at the numbers when it comes to the environmental impact of animal agriculture, and it's not in dispute. There's nobody who's saying these numbers are wrong, or people are lying or hiding the truth. Like, that's just, that's just is what it is, regardless of your political, you know, point of view. But it's about, it's about actually taking action on that.

• 1:47:55Rich Roll?

  And when you were talking about, you know, we've never been more distracted, or there's just a, you know, we're just not as, this is not the 1960s where we're going to take to the street like they did over the Vietnam War. Like, what would it take now in 2014 to get people super riled up? I mean, we couldn't even get Prop 37 passed on GMO labeling. So what are you going to get people, what are you going to, how are you going to get people to turn Dancing with the Stars off and start to get active?

• 1:48:23Speaker 01

  So first off, to have to, as a yoga teacher, I'm first gonna address the issue with a glass half-full perspective rather than half-empty. That revolution that you were just talking about is already in full swing. There's no doubt about it. Compare the vegan, plant-based movement 25 years ago, 50 years ago, to what it is now?

• 1:48:45Rich Roll?

  How about five years ago?

• 1:48:46Speaker 01

  Five years ago. I mean, like, I have so many friends that are casually vegan. You walk around the street with a lot of vegans out there, and that has never been the case in the past couple hundred years. So the movement is already there. You don't have to create a movement. If you want to get into it, all you have to do is join, because the platform is already in full swing. From animal liberation, I'm working with NY Class this summer, just volunteering. I'm working with 350.org, but, and they're not directed to any animal liberation or food-related things, but rather the fossil fuel industry, which is the catalyst to allow us to grow animals as food. But I'm volunteering with

• 1:49:27Speaker 01

  NY Class, which is trying to ban horse carriages in Central Park. So you can take that route if you care about, you know, just animal ethics. You can, you can join PETA. PETA's its own revolution. You know, Veggie Grill, that's its own revolution. Like, you can get into it, you can get into it in whatever area you want, whether you care about the environment, whether you care about culinary arts, health, athletics, animal liberation. We already have this power team of millions of people around the world that are screaming at the top of their lungs that this solution is veganism. We just are still getting everyone educated on it, and it's going to take some time. It is truly...

• 1:50:12Speaker 01

  And I'm gonna make this comparison, I think the animal liberation vegan movement is the next civil rights movement.

• 1:50:18Rich Roll?

  There's a lot of people that feel that way.

• 1:50:20Speaker 01

  It is.

• 1:50:20Rich Roll?

  And I think that, you know, in messaging people, like, I'm always conscious of trying to meet people where they're at, and a lot of people just aren't, they don't want to hear about animal liberation, you know what I mean, they're not, it's not their thing, whatever, you know, it doesn't matter, but people get into it for different reasons, you know, the way that PETA messages people appeals to, you know, a certain kind of person.

• 1:50:43Speaker 01

  Some people, but not others.

• 1:50:44Rich Roll?

  And other people are very turned off by that.

• 1:50:46Speaker 01

  And your story.

• 1:50:47Rich Roll?

  Some people just want to lose five pounds, and if they think that eating plant-based is the best way to get them there, then that's all they want to know about, whatever, and that's all good, I think your point ultimately is that there are so many points of intersection and so many points of entry that there's something for everybody, no matter where you're coming from.

• 1:51:06Speaker 01

  I have.

• 1:51:06Rich Roll?

  And that you can be welcomed in, but I think it brings up another interesting point, which is, you know, there's a lot of sort of subcultures within this movement, you know, like we just referred to, you know, you have people that are super into animal rights, and then you have other people that just don't want to have a heart attack, they couldn't give a shit about the animals, and you have the fruitarians, and you have the people that are on the sort of no-oil Esselstyn diet.

• 1:51:30Speaker 01

  And the junk food vegans.

• 1:51:31Rich Roll?

  And then you have the, you know, the sort of David Wolfe, you know, the avocado.

• 1:51:35Speaker 01

  Yeah, cacao people.

• 1:51:36Rich Roll?

  Yeah, all these like very, yeah, and there seems to be, I mean.

• 1:51:40Speaker 01

  It's all okay.

• 1:51:41Rich Roll?

  But on the bigger issues, they all agree, there's just, there's a lot of quibbling over the details there that I think ultimately.

• 1:51:47Speaker 01

  Why are people making such fusses about these minute?

• 1:51:51Rich Roll?

  Here's my analogy, you ready for this?

• 1:51:52Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:51:53Rich Roll?

  Tell me what you think of this.

• 1:51:54Speaker 01

  Oh, gosh, I'm excited.

• 1:51:55Rich Roll?

  So if you look at, no, if you look at, if you look at our political system, right, if you look at the Republican Party, well, maybe not lately, but take the Republican Party five or 10 years ago, extremely organized, extremely consistent in their messaging, very on point, and everybody's on board, they're completely all marching in the same direction, and the Democratic Party, they're all fighting amongst each other, they can't get their shit straight, there's a lot of, you know, dissonance and people thinking this way or that way, and, and as a result, they have a harder time getting organized and moving their particular agenda forward. Similarly. If you look at that in the diet context, you look at the paleo world, very organized, very vertically integrated with the CrossFit gyms. They have their shit together. Like,

• 1:52:38Rich Roll?

  they know how to message. They know how to connect with people and they are very united in how they do that. And it's extremely effective. And there's a lot of good that has come of that. People who have gotten off the standard American diet to, you know, sort of wing themselves off dairy and processed foods. And I have no problem with that whatsoever. If you look at the plant-based world, it's like the Democratic Party, you know, like there's a lot of arguments. It's true, right?

• 1:53:01Speaker 01

  Absolutely true.

• 1:53:02Rich Roll?

  So, so my interest is in trying to sort of, you know, overcome that just by making it as inclusive as possible and focusing on, you know, the bigger picture as opposed to the small arguments that I think are cutting us off at the heels.

• 1:53:19Speaker 01

  I think that is an extremely astute and mindful discovery that a lot of people in the vegan world get into their dogma rather than their end result. And they get lost in, in something that create, that they create in their own minds of what needs to be done and creating this sub, sub-movement when the most powerful thing is numbers, is to all come together at the idea that our diet is what's killing us. It's also killing lots of animals and we need to get away from that and eat more plant foods.

• 1:53:54Rich Roll?

  We've got to realize, most people are going to McDonald's and Wendy's all the time and they don't care about, you know, what this faction thinks about that faction.

• 1:54:01Speaker 01

  When I, when I talk to a friend that's like, "Hey, I eat a standard diet. I eat milk and dairy and meat and eggs and I'm thinking about going vegan or vegetarian. What should I do? What if the first thing I said was, 'Olive oil is gonna kill you.'" Like, that's crazy. Like, it's not about that. One, it's not even true, but there's so many categories of some people in the movement that would say that. My first step is, "Hey, introduce more plants into your diet." You know, maybe say, "One week, I'm gonna cut out chicken. The next week, I'm gonna cut out, or in a month, I'm gonna cut out steak." And-

• 1:54:40Speaker 01

  Like, you can't give people all of these crazy, sometimes dogmatic, health and diet-related, you know, I can even call them fads, instead of just giving them the overall encompassing concept of like, eat plants, not animals, and see how that, see what that does for you.

• 1:55:02Rich Roll?

  Yeah, you have to respect people to go on their own journey with it. You have to create like a soft landing pad, a comfortable door to walk through, and allow them to make their own discoveries. Because where you're at is not where you were at, you know, when you first landed in the jungle in Borneo.

• 1:55:18Speaker 01

  Exactly. It's constantly, constantly changing. It's always evolving.

• 1:55:22Rich Roll?

  Right. So, tell me about what's going on at 350.org.

• 1:55:26Speaker 01

  Yeah, so 350.org is an awesome organization that has kind of taken the stage around the world and battling the fossil fuel industry. Just, and that's a scary, scary job to have, and I commend everyone at 350 for taking it upon themselves to work on that. It's a really cool organization. It was started by Bill McKibben, who was a teacher at Middlebury College in Vermont, and he started a club like five or six years ago with a bunch of environmental-related students, you know, kids that were 19, 20 years old, and they tried to create a little, you know, activist outreach company about that. And it has blossomed

• 1:56:08Speaker 01

  into a environmental powerhouse of, you know, from lobbying in Congress to making the largest environmental mobilizations America has ever seen. They run all of the Keystone XL Pipeline protests and help organize for that. And they're such an intersectional organization. They don't only care about the, you know, whales, bears, and seals of the world. The main focus of 350 and most of the big environmental organizations are about social justice. It's the fact that, you know, dump sites in communities, like toxic waste dumps, always get put in communities of color and in poverty. And that's why the

• 1:56:53Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's like a NIMBY thing, not a My Backyard thing. Exactly. And that's a really cool movement from, what is it, the 60s or the 70s of people gathering around and saying, "Hey, we realize," and this is a governmental thing, of deciding where to put, you know, our trash, our consumer items that we put in our trash, they end up somewhere. Landfills are a thing. Most people know the word and have never seen one. And those things get placed in communities that they know won't have the resources to get up and shout about it and say, "This is wrong." And so 350 is really all about that, that we cannot function as a peaceful, functioning society

• 1:57:32Speaker 01

  if we continue to rely on digging up Mother Earth's fossil fuels and then burning that fuel, putting it into the atmosphere in order to continue civilization. And that's been proven. This is a resource that we've already hit peak oil. So we've already dug up enough oil for it to be the cheapest. It's now a precious item that we are soon going to run out of. Oil, this mythical fantasy name that gets put out of a gasoline thing at every corner street, is actually the fossilized dug-up bones of dinosaurs and plants. It's amazing. And this stuff belongs underneath the ground as carbon.

• 1:58:13Speaker 01

  And when we take those millions and billions of years' worth of living matter, take it out of the ground and put it up and burn it into the atmosphere,

• 1:58:24Speaker 01

  at a certain point, we're gonna dig up more than has ever been created. And it takes a long time for, because our bones one day will become oil. And we've gotten to the point where we've actually, literally, think of it as a big pool. And we just suck out water from the pool, and that's how we drive our cars, and that's how we grow our genetically-modified food to feed the cattle, to eat meat, and...

• 1:58:48Speaker 01

  This resource is actually soon to be gone. So what are we gonna do if we haven't created an infrastructure in our world and country where we can rely on actual sustainable forms of energy that we know aren't going away? AKA, the sun and the wind that passes by every day, and hydropower and lakes and stuff like that. And if we convert our system to functioning off of those forms of energy that we know aren't gonna go away, there's another bringing in the manly aspect. It would be manly to have a sustainable energy future versus our government, which subsidizes coal and oil production, which is gonna be gone, probably within my lifetime even.

• 1:59:31Rich Roll?

  That's why Elon Musk is the most masculine man on the planet right now. We're always waiting for him to figure it out for us.

• 1:59:37Speaker 01

  I don't know enough about Elon Musk.

• 1:59:43Rich Roll?

  Well, he's just getting it, like, you know.

• 1:59:45Speaker 01

  Well, he's into space.

• 1:59:46Rich Roll?

  Right, but he's also, he's also getting, he's getting into like sustainable energy sources too, so.

• 1:59:51Speaker 01

  Okay, cool.

• 1:59:52Rich Roll?

  Anyway, that's cool. So what were you doing at 350 this summer?

• 1:59:56Speaker 01

  Yeah, so I'm actually still there. This is my week.

• 1:59:58Rich Roll?

  Oh, you're on back.

• 1:59:59Speaker 01

  Week trip, yeah. I am even in California right now because this Friday in two days, I am shipping off to Austin, Texas to go to the Naturally Fit Games to watch the plant-built vegan bodybuilding team.

• 2:00:13Rich Roll?

  Oh, the plant-built guys, cool.

• 2:00:14Speaker 01

  Compete, and I actually just got a gig with Vegan Health and Fitness Magazine, and I'm gonna be writing a piece that's gonna be in that magazine. So I'll be following around the plant-built team, so Giacomo Marchese, Robert Cheek.

• 2:00:27Rich Roll?

  Giacomo was part of that NPR story, wasn't he?

• 2:00:29Speaker 01

  He was, yeah.

• 2:00:30Rich Roll?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 2:00:31Speaker 01

  And they have Jahina Malik, who ju- do you know her?

• 2:00:34Rich Roll?

  No, I don't.

• 2:00:35Speaker 01

  She, so to get into professional bodybuilding, like the MLB or the NFL of bodybuilding, you need to win a certain caliber competition first place and you get your pro card, okay? To become an IFBB. Bodybuilding professional and this woman who lives in Brooklyn, Jahina Malik, just became the first vegan since birth. Her parents raised her vegan.

• 2:01:01Rich Roll?

  I think I heard about this.

• 2:01:02Speaker 01

  She just became the first vegan since birth IFBB pro professional bodybuilder.

• 2:01:07Rich Roll?

  Yeah, that's great.

• 2:01:07Speaker 01

  And she's competing too. I mean, how amazing is that?

• 2:01:09Rich Roll?

  That's cool. So the plant-built team is like a team.

• 2:01:12Speaker 01

  She's gonna be at the seed.

• 2:01:13Rich Roll?

  So the team is, I don't know, how does team sports work in bodybuilding?

• 2:01:18Speaker 01

  So I'm just getting into this, so I'm no, you know, professional on the topic, but like at a bodybuilding competition, it's not just, hey, best bodybuilder go up. There's men's bodybuilding, men's swimsuit, men's physique, men's fitness, women's, you know, there's a million subcategories of different body types that people spend years crafting what the judges want to see for that specific look. And so the plant-built team has men's heavyweight, men's lightweight, men's swimsuit, men's fitness, men's powerlifting, women's bikini. They have, they have competitors that are all vegan in all the different categories and then they come into a competition and

• 2:02:03Speaker 01

  try to take first place in every single role. And last year at the Naturally Fit Games, they took like 40% of all the competitions, which was the best team in the whole thing. And this year, it's only gonna be better, so.

• 2:02:15Rich Roll?

  Cool. Well, that'll be fun, man.

• 2:02:17Speaker 01

  Yeah, it'll be fun. I'm just gonna hang out with them. Sure, we're gonna eat a lot of good vegan food, because bodybuilders going up to a competition while they look really good, they're in their weakest state, because they've been like starving themselves to get super lean.

• 2:02:28Rich Roll?

  That's a whole freaking weird world.

• 2:02:29Speaker 01

  It is really weird. I never want to be a professional bodybuilder. I'm simply building up my body to present myself to the vegan movement, so that more people will want to listen to me, simply put. But it's gonna be fun, because they'll probably like pig out on a bunch of vegan food right after the competition, so.

• 2:02:48Rich Roll?

  They'll say I had a Robert for me.

• 2:02:50Speaker 01

  Yeah, definitely.

• 2:02:51Rich Roll?

  So when are you doing that?

• 2:02:53Speaker 01

  So I leave for that on Friday and then that's Friday, Saturday, Sunday, I'll be there. Then I go back to New York and I finish up my internship with 350 and then I am ending my summer going to the Woodstock Fruit Festival.

• 2:03:07Rich Roll?

  Oh, you are, okay.

• 2:03:08Speaker 01

  Which will, which will be really great and I am not fruitarian. I have experimented with it. I am a full believer in the potential of a fruit-based diet. I've done it and felt so wonderful by it, probably better than I, than I ever have. But right now with some of my bodybuilding goals, I know there are fruitarian bodybuilders, but I'm having success with what I'm doing, eating legumes and rice and tofu and I'm feeling good about that, so I'm not full-blown fruitarian. Also, as a college student, like I already have enough things that make my life, you know, off like, off the beaten path and hard to work with within the college environment. I don't eat at the cafeteria, I bring my Tupperwares around.

• 2:03:49Rich Roll?

  You make it, so you make all your own food in college?

• 2:03:51Speaker 01

  I literally do. I'm not on the meal plan. I'm probably the only, I'm, I am the only student at the school to do it. I live in an on-campus house. I actually live in like the sober quiet house, just because I knew there's a huge kitchen that no one would be using and so that's my little office. And I wake up every morning an hour before I need to and make my meals for the day and bring them around with me and that's what I do here, too.

• 2:04:12Rich Roll?

  Wow, that's cool. So what do the other college students think of you?

• 2:04:15Speaker 01

  Okay, so the, last year was my first year at CC and I came in just as-

• 2:04:20Rich Roll?

  So you went, we skipped over the whole thing about like how you were supposed to go to RISD and then what happened?

• 2:04:24Speaker 01

  Oh, man, yeah. Let's, let's go back a little bit.

• 2:04:26Rich Roll?

  We're running out of time though, dude. We gotta wrap it up here, but I, to explain that really quick.

• 2:04:29Speaker 01

  Well, pretty much, I went to RISD like four months before going into RISD. I knew that I'd be transferring because I wanted to study environmental and food-related things and RISD is a strict art school and that's all you can study.

• 2:04:41Rich Roll?

  So as a result of your gap year, you just, your, your mind was blown and then suddenly that whole idea of being an artist was not as important to you anymore?

• 2:04:48Speaker 01

  You said it beautifully, so-

• 2:04:50Rich Roll?

  All right, cool. So, so CC, Colorado College.

• 2:04:52Speaker 01

  But I had put into, well, no, there's, there's a little, little, one, one more chapter that I can talk about very quick. So I went into RISD because I'd put down a deposit. Because I deferred, so I had to go there. My parents were like, "Just try it out. Who knows? Maybe you'll think it's really cool and you'll be able to fit in your passion there." And so I went for first semester and it just, you know, I knew that I had a brighter future somewhere else. So I went for that semester, had a great time and took off second semester.

• 2:05:20Rich Roll?

  You just can't stay in school longer than like a...

• 2:05:22Speaker 01

  And worked on, well, this year at college has been the longest I've been at school in the past three years. So I, and I worked on an organic farm right outside of Yosemite for four months. Second semester of, I guess, two years ago.

• 2:05:35Rich Roll?

  Past couple of years, you've been out of school way more than you've been in school.

• 2:05:38Speaker 01

  And you know what? I have learned more about myself and about the world and become a smarter person than I ever have in school. School's a great thing, but look at so many countries around the world, Israel and Europe. People take like three years in between high school and college to work, get their feet dirty, realize what they're passionate about. And then when you're paying thousands of dollars of your money, you actually know what you're doing. 90% of my friends are just having fun in college, not knowing what they want to do. And that's really fun, but you can, you can learn a lot from taking a step back, discovering something that a conventional education system simply couldn't teach you. And then you can go in it as, you know, full-blown passionate about what you care about.

• 2:06:22Speaker 01

  So now that I'm at Colorado College, I am the radical vegan hardcore environmental dude. And in a way, that is isolating. I, just to make myself feel better about what I'm doing, I remind myself that all the most innovative people throughout history were extremely criticized with what they were doing at the time of when they were doing it. And then, you know, it takes time for the mainstream to get tuned in to what you're talking about. But there's a lot of people that respect what I'm doing and I hold protests. And I also obviously started plantreotic.com and CC Plant Strong, which is the first vegan club on campus.

• 2:07:02Rich Roll?

  Right, and you're bringing, I mean, that's how we met.

• 2:07:04Speaker 01

  Where we met each other. Last year I brought you, I brought Susan Levin from Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine. And I also brought in Ocean Robbins. And next year, Gene Bauer will be coming, which will be awesome amongst many others. So I'm starting this community of this, you know, vegan movement within my school. And it's a small school. There's like 2,000 undergrad and no graduate program. So people know you around school. And, you know, I am someone that does not shut up. There's that guy. There's that guy. You know, but I have friends and like they think it's cool. But no, I mean, there's no doubt that like, and I can say this, you know, my social life,

• 2:07:45Speaker 01

  because of what I care about and the impact that I want to have, it is a lot easier to be on your path, go to the parties, be quiet and shy and shy and just like do your thing. But I have this urge to literally change the world. And despite the obstacles that come in my way, I need to fulfill that because I know it's what's going to be best for myself and the planet. Well, I think you're doing it, man. And I appreciate all of your support and everyone's support that has been helping me out on Facebook, on YouTube to get this message out. Because, I mean, I've had friends, you know, recently that have been like, hey, you know, me and my mom have reconnected because we make sure to watch your video like every night.

• 2:08:28Speaker 01

  And it's so cool and we're making all these recipes. And I'm sure you get that, you know, thousands of that a day. And because the reality is what we have to offer people, we're not in it for the money. We are in it for the impact and for benefiting the planet and the animals and the people. And there's no gimmicks to being a vegan. You can do vegan cheap, you can do vegan expensive and fancy. But all you need to know is that it's going to have a profound impact on your spirituality, on your health, on your physical development, on the planet. It's amazing. Right.

• 2:09:05Rich Roll?

  That was awesome, man. I think that's a great place to end it.

• 2:09:07Speaker 01

  Beautiful.

• 2:09:08Rich Roll?

  Cool. How do you feel?

• 2:09:10Speaker 01

  I feel great. I want everyone to have that motivation to kind of break out of the bubble that they may be afraid to sort of wake up to a higher vibration and a consciousness that it's going to be too scary, but honor that no one goes through anything alone. We are all holding each other's hands. There's no one vegan activist or environmental speaker that is in the hierarchy in this movement. This is about numbers. This is about coming together. It is about peace. It is about being a plantariot, a plantirotic supporter. And exactly, get your feet dirty. Take a step back. Know that getting off the beaten

• 2:09:55Speaker 01

  path is ultimately going to put you on a better path in the future and take risks, take failure as a success, and go vegan.

• 2:10:07Rich Roll?

  All right, man. If you're digging the Jackson vibe, the best way to connect with him online, now that you have an iPhone and you're actually on the internet,

• 2:10:15Speaker 01

  That is right.

• 2:10:15Rich Roll?

  is the Plantirotic YouTube page, right?

• 2:10:18Speaker 01

  Facebook page, a Plantirotic Facebook page. My personal Facebook page is Jackson Foster and YouTube is Plantirotic as well. And I'll say it now, written in stone, so I can't back out. I have a book that will be out called Plantirotic, which is going to be a just overall guide, just pretty much defining the definition. So a breakdown in a very fun, easy, and digestible way to read of why adopting a healthy, whole-food, plant-based diet is ultimately the best personal impact you can have to benefit your country, world, yourself, and beyond.

• 2:10:57Rich Roll?

  All right, man. Well, I look forward to checking that out.

• 2:10:59Speaker 01

  It's going to be rad.

• 2:11:00Rich Roll?

  You're close to being done with that? You're working on it now?

• 2:11:03Speaker 01

  Writing-wise, it's almost fully written. I've been working on it for over a year. So now it's going into the editing with my beloved family, who's very nice. They're going to be my initial editor. My little brother Lucas is an amazing poet and writer, so it's going to go into that, and then I'm going to start taking it to the official bureaucratic steps of getting a book published.

• 2:11:26Rich Roll?

  All right, man, well, good luck with that.

• 2:11:28Speaker 01

  It's gonna happen.

• 2:11:29Rich Roll?

  You'll have to come back and tell us all about it.

• 2:11:30Speaker 01

  Definitely.

• 2:11:31Rich Roll?

  All right, well, thanks for talking to me.

• 2:11:32Speaker 01

  It was lovely.

• 2:11:33Rich Roll?

  Peace. Plants.

• 2:11:43Rich Roll?

  All right, you guys, that's the show. I hope you dug it. I hope you dug Jackson's vibe. I really like that kid. If you're in Los Angeles, don't forget to check out Joy Cafe, J-O-I. It's 100% awesome, 100% organic, 100% plant-based. It is our new restaurant that we've partnered in, and we're really excited about it. Also, if you want to sit down and say hi to me, I can generally be found there around lunchtime. Not every day, but quite often. So please stop in, introduce yourself, ask questions, enjoy a delicious meal, and leave healthy and happy. Want to stay current with all things plant-powered? Subscribe to my newsletter at ritual.com. It's free. I won't spam you. Just a couple emails here

• 2:12:24Rich Roll?

  and there, podcast updates, emails about discounts, giveaways, contests, and the like on some of our merch and products. If you're feeling stuck in life, check out my Art of Living with Purpose course at mindbodygreen.com. If you want more plants in your life, check out my Ultimate Guide to Plant-Based Nutrition course also at mindbodygreen.com. Both are multiple-hour online video courses with tons of downloadable tools and an interactive online community. I'm really proud of these courses. They're great, and you can learn more about them by just going to the homepage at mindbodygreen.com. Scroll to the bottom, and you'll see all kinds of stuff about it. If you listen to this show on a Macintosh,

• 2:13:07Rich Roll?

  Apple device, like an iPhone or an iPad, get our app, the Ritual app. It's in iTunes App Store, and it's the only way to access the entire catalog of this podcast. As you know, on iTunes, they only post the most recent 50 episodes, but if you want to listen to all of them, all the way back to number one, all 106 episodes. The only way to do that is through the app. So check that out and give us a review on that, too. Of course, go to richroll.com for all your merch needs, all our nutritional products, our plant-based protein product called Repair. We've reduced the price on it because we've changed the way that we're doing business

• 2:13:51Rich Roll?

  on it with some new vendors and some new partners, and we were able to drop the price down. Also, on all our products, we now have flat-rate domestic shipping for just $4.99. No matter how many things you order, no matter how heavy the box is, that price will always be $4.99 because we're getting a lot of issues with shipping rates, and this is a solution that I think really makes it work for everybody. We have our ion electrolyte supplement. We have our vitamin B12 supplement. We have our Jai Seed E cookbook. We got a meditation program. We got T-shirts, all kinds of stuff. So check that out. Support the show, tell a friend. That's all we ask, use the Amazon banner ad if you feel like it. We love it. Keep sharing the pictures of you enjoying the show on Instagram.

• 2:14:35Rich Roll?

  As you know, I love that. And follow me on social media, @Richroll on Twitter, same thing on Instagram. And I've been posting fun videos on Snapchat, but my username there is a little bit different. It's IAMRichroll, I-A-M, Richroll, R-I-C-H-R-O-L-L. And you can kind of follow me along. I post little videos of training stuff and just fun family stuff. And, you know, they're just hacky little videos, but I'm having a good time with it. All right, this week's assignment, here's what I want you to do. I want you to think back on what you were doing when you were a college student or a young person around the age of 21. What did that look like?

• 2:15:19Rich Roll?

  And what were your hopes and your dreams at that time? Now, let's compare this to who you are now, what you're doing now. I want you to do an inventory. What's missing? What did you love then that got brushed aside? Then I want you to identify one thing, one activity, one hope, one aspiration, and make a decision to begin to find a way to express that in your current life.