A Skeptic’s Guide To Meditation: Bob Roth On The Science & Extreme Benefits of Transcendental Meditation

Bob Roth is one of America's most experienced meditation teachers and executive director of The David Lynch Foundation. This conversation explores the intersection of ancient transcendence and modern necessity. We discuss Bob's 50+ year practice, David Lynch's final words about happiness, the neuroscience of "effortless meditation," and why accessing the fourth state of consciousness isn't a luxury, it's survival technology for the age of AI. He shows how 20 minutes rewires your brain, cuts cortisol by up to 40%, and unlocks "unbounded awareness." Bob democratizes transcendence. This is meditation without the mysticism. Enjoy! Show notes + MORE Watch on YouTube Newsletter Sign-Up On: High-performance shoes & apparel crafted for comfort and style 👉on.com/richroll Eight Sleep: Get $350 off your Pod 5 Ultra with code RICHROLL👉eightsleep.com/richroll AG1: ​​Get a FREE bottle of Vitamin D3+K2 AND 5 free AG1 Travel Packs 👉drinkAG1.com/richroll OneSkin: Get started today with 15% off using code RICHROLL at oneskin.com Airbnb: Your home might be worth more than you think. Find out how much 👉airbnb.com/host Check out all of the amazing discounts from our Sponsors 👉 richroll.com/sponsors Find out more about Voicing Change Media at voicingchange.media and follow us @voicingchange 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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• 1:05Bob Roth?

  It's no longer a luxury to say, "I'm gonna take some time out to meditate." It's now a necessity. Meditation just means thinking. And as the world gets more intense, we want to have practical tools that can help us deal with what's coming. Transcendental meditation sets up the condition for the attention of your mind to turn within, and then automatically, your active-thinking mind just begins to settle down towards that unbounded source of thought. The mind is not a monkey. The mind does not wander aimlessly. The human brain and nervous system are hardwired to take deep rest at will. We've forgotten how to do it.

• 1:51Rich Roll?

  Hey, everybody. Welcome to the podcast. Today, we are gonna continue our ever-evolving and ongoing exploration into meditation. And we're gonna do it with Bob Roth, a man who has played quite a large and important role in pioneering meditation as this mainstream practice in the West. Specifically, the practice of a very specific type of meditation called transcendental meditation, or what is commonly referred to as TM. Bob first discovered meditation as a freshman at Berkeley during the height of the 60s, and with absolutely extraordinary consistency ever since, meditation is something

• 2:35Rich Roll?

  he has practiced every single day, twice a day, for more than 50 years, which I think authorizes him to have authored what is considered the authoritative text on TM titled simply "Transcendental Meditation." Now Bob is one of the most experienced and sought-after meditation teachers in America, and he's also the Executive Director of the David Lynch Foundation, where he has helped bring TM to more than 1.5 million children and adults, with this really beautiful focus on inner-city youth, veterans, domestic abuse victims, and more recently firefighters and everyday people who lost everything in the recent LA fires.

• 3:18Rich Roll?

  This is Bob's second appearance on the show, his first being episode 372, some six years ago, and I'm excited for him to return because our first conversation was a little bit short due to scheduling commitments, and also because my relationship with meditation has grown considerably in the many years since. So today, we're going to dive a bit deeper into meditation, what it is and what it isn't, the benefits of it, and why we should all be doing it, and what distinguishes TM from other voyages into the realm of the mind and enhanced states of consciousness. Bob also shares plenty of actionable advice to kickstart and sustain a practice, along

• 4:03Rich Roll?

  with a deep dive into this idea of transcendence, what it means to him, what it means to me, and many other topics, which of course include some great stories about the great David Lynch. Bob is a gift, it was a gift to spend this time with him, and hopefully you will receive this conversation as a gift, so here it is, this is me and Bob Roth.

• 4:29Rich Roll?

  Bob, you're back in the house. It's been something like six or seven years.

• 4:33Bob Roth?

  Seven years, yeah.

• 4:34Rich Roll?

  Since we first did this. It's great to see you. You haven't aged a day. If anything, the meditation is serving you well in that regard.

• 4:41Bob Roth?

  It's nice to see you too, Rich. Thank you for having me on.

• 4:43Rich Roll?

  We're going to talk all things meditation today, but I think I'd like to, you know, begin with a few reflections on your friend and your colleague, David Lynch. She passed recently in January. We talked about him a little bit last time, but he's very much top of mind in the culture. He was a beloved figure in the culture, and his passing has resulted in sort of this watershed of, you know, people loving on him and sharing clips of him that were circulating around the internet. And I've spent a lot of time thinking about him lately. So, you know, where are you at in your heart and your mind with the passing of your friend?

• 5:25Bob Roth?

  Well, since we started the foundation together 20 years ago, I probably talked to him every day, you know, every other day for 20 years, working on the foundation and just as a friend, and we traveled all over the world. And I learned so much from him, the way he lives his life, final cut. And towards the end, we were talking less, you know, he had emphysema, so he was talking less. But then I had no idea who was going to go, and he went. So, we would just chat, and just for a few minutes. And it's funny, I said, "How are you feeling, David?" He said, "On the outside, my body's not so good, but Bob, Bob, on the inside, I'm happy." And he was that way. He was like a fearless guy. So, it's been hard.

• 6:09Bob Roth?

  I miss him. I miss him a lot. He was one of my best friends. And nobody sort of knows, they know David Lynch, they don't know the side of him with meditation and the foundation. But I miss him, but I've learned so much from him.

• 6:21Rich Roll?

  That is an aspiration of mine, to be happy and lighthearted all the way to the end.

• 6:27Bob Roth?

  Yeah.

• 6:28Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 6:29Bob Roth?

  Genuinely authentic, you know, sometimes people would say, "Well, you know, David Lynch, he makes these, you know, dark, weird movies, and how can he, you know, Mr. Bliss with meditation and all that?" And David's line was, "You don't have to suffer to show suffering, and you don't have to die to do a death scene, and the happier, the more clear, the more focused, the more resilient you are, the more creative you can be." He said, "You know, if you're stressed out of your mind, or you can't get out of bed, or you're depressed, you know, how can you create?" And so, he was genuinely, deeply happy, edgy person.

• 7:06Rich Roll?

  Mm-hmm. How do you reconcile those two sides of him? This fascination with the dark underbelly of human nature, with the childlike, creative nature of this artist?

• 7:18Bob Roth?

  The way I talk to people, David was fascinated by the whole, full circle of life and death. Like, we're watching a movie together, and sometimes I'd avert my eyes, and he never did. He was as fascinated by the natural system, like, here's a little hamster that's growing up, little infant hamster, grows bigger, bigger, bigger, matures, and then dies, and then the body decays. And for David, none of that was off limits. That was all part of the natural processes. Sometimes people would say, "David, how can you do this stuff?" He said, "Have you ever read the Old Testament? Mine was, you know, nothing."

• 7:53Rich Roll?

  Well, he talked a lot about the wheel of birth and death.

• 7:56Bob Roth?

  Yeah, yeah. A lot. And I remember thinking the other morning, waking up, I said, "David and I used to talk a lot about what happens after you die," and I thought, "Well, now he knows."

• 8:07Rich Roll?

  What was his take on that?

• 8:09Bob Roth?

  Reincarnation.

• 8:10Rich Roll?

  Yeah, I mean, yeah, clearly, that comes across.

• 8:12Bob Roth?

  Yeah, reincarnation. He didn't think that it just, consciousness or life was an epiphenomenon of just the electrical and, you know, chemical interactions in the brain. He thought, this is his take, that there was a soul, and you inhabit a body, and when the body drops, then you continue learning lessons. You take another body, you take another body, and you keep learning lessons.

• 8:31Rich Roll?

  Do you think that he has transcended the mortal coil, or will he be coming back for another spin on the wheel?

• 8:36Bob Roth?

  Personally, I wouldn't mind if he'd come back.

• 8:38Rich Roll?

  Yeah, we don't know how he's gonna come back. Maybe he's already back.

• 8:41Bob Roth?

  I know who he's gonna be.

• 8:43Rich Roll?

  Was there a memorial?

• 8:45Bob Roth?

  Yes.

• 8:46Rich Roll?

  Did you attend the memorial?

• 8:47Bob Roth?

  We did it online. If you ever want to see this, it's on YouTube. It was about an hour.

• 8:51Rich Roll?

  Oh, I did see that. I did see a video, like a prepackaged sort of video where it was just voiceover of him talking and stuff from his life.

• 8:59Bob Roth?

  Oh, that three minute thing.

• 9:00Rich Roll?

  Yeah, I did watch that.

• 9:01Bob Roth?

  It was sweet. That was put together by just a meditator and a David Lynch fan. But online, it's, if you just do a Google on YouTube, David Lynch tribute, January something 2025.

• 9:12Rich Roll?

  I miss that. I pride myself on my research, too.

• 9:15Bob Roth?

  No, and we may do something. His 80th birthday would be January 20th next year. And we're thinking to do a tribute fundraising concert for the foundation.

• 9:24Rich Roll?

  Well, he's deeply missed and I love it.

• 9:27Bob Roth?

  What did you appreciate most about him?

• 9:29Rich Roll?

  I appreciated his daringness and his courage in his art and the way that he would pull covers on reality, but do it in this really terrifying, but also uniquely him sort of way that allowed you to glimpse human nature in all of its, you know, colors and spectrum, you know, like I'll, I still think about like the opening sequence in Blue Velvet where, you know, there's the front lawn and the grass growing and the guy mowing his lawn and then he keels over and dies and then you kind of go into the soil and it's like, he's just basically saying like, this is life and if you look really closely, like

• 10:10Rich Roll?

  it's all happening if we pay attention to it. And so he's not like revealing anything that isn't true and he's not even casting aspersions on anything. He's just, he's kind of just putting his lens, you know, very consciously on aspects of who we are.

• 10:27Bob Roth?

  And how he would create. He said he never sort of had a big picture ever. He always thought that he wrote this book, Catching the Big Fish.

• 10:34Rich Roll?

  Yeah, I love that book.

• 10:35Bob Roth?

  Yeah. And that was, you get an idea and then that idea is like bait and then attracts a bigger fish and then it's something and then that's a bait bigger and bigger and bigger. But he never went into anything. He was really like a witness of the whole thing, his creative process. And he never steered anything in one particular direction. And people used to say, why don't you make him film on meditation or something? He said, if you want to send a message, call Western Union. You know, that's not my thing.

• 11:02Rich Roll?

  Yeah. I also think that it's inspiring to see somebody just boldly be who they are and live such an uncompromising life. Because I think we're all, to one degree or another, like trapped in, you know, kind of various roles and aspects of that. And he was somebody who just lived his life in a way that was really free of all of those things, like on his own terms.

• 11:26Bob Roth?

  Final cut.

• 11:27Rich Roll?

  Really didn't care like what anyone thought. I think that that is, you know, refreshing.

• 11:34Bob Roth?

  Yeah, this idea of final cut, you know, you don't, you don't want to give up. He did that once on Dune. When he made Dune, somebody had control. And he said, never again.

• 11:44Rich Roll?

  Never again.

• 11:44Bob Roth?

  Never again. And his whole life was that. And yet, he wasn't some sort of on the spectrum-y guy. He had a big heart and he was very kind. And even with the foundation, he didn't just put his name to that on meditation. We traveled all over the world. He wrote books, he did everything because he believed deeply in it. And he really did, he really thought that meditation could help alleviate suffering. So he was, he was, what do they say? Clear mind, warm heart. And I think he had.

• 12:11Rich Roll?

  Yeah, he was certainly that. How would you describe the relationship between his meditation practice and his creativity? Is it impossible to separate those things?

• 12:23Bob Roth?

  Yeah, I think it's impossible to separate. He didn't say that his meditation, he always made it clear that his meditation practice did not inform his creativity. It wasn't like, oh, now I'm a meditator and now I'm going to make all these happy, happy. What it did is it allowed him to be true to himself, to become a conduit or, you know, those deep creative ideas to come forward and then have the resilience and the strength and whatever to do it against considerable odds. So I think that it did that. I don't think there was a, oh, we meditate and then you're going to make Blue Velvet or something like that. But you meditate and then you're more yourself.

• 12:59Rich Roll?

  Let's talk about meditation.

• 13:01Bob Roth?

  All right.

• 13:01Rich Roll?

  How do you define meditation?

• 13:05Bob Roth?

  Meditation just means thinking, you know, thinking. So you meditate on this, so thinking. But then in meditation, you've got, you know, a concentration type of thinking. You've got mindfulness type of thinking. You've got transcending type of thinking. And so, thinking, and there's different types of thinking. So, you know, in church, they have a medit- here's some silent meditation. So you read about something. So I think meditation itself is just taking time to mull things over or to consider. What you're doing during that time differs greatly.

• 13:37Rich Roll?

  That's an interesting definition. I wouldn't have expected you to define it that way because I always associate meditation with non-thinking or at least the, you know, the attempt to, you know, quiet the thinking part of the mind.

• 13:50Bob Roth?

  Well, you start with thinking. And then what you do to get to that silent is the process. So meditation is thinking. And then you have mindfulness thinking. So then you're, you're dispassionately observing your thoughts. You have focused attention thinking, where you're concentrating your mind so that, you know, your thoughts and your mind doesn't wander. And then you have transcending, transcendental, TM, transcendental meditation, where you go to a hypothetical source of thought, the field of silence that lies within. Meditation is where you start. And then where, and then how you get there is the technique.

• 14:24Rich Roll?

  So obviously, there's various traditions and strains of meditation, many ways to approach it. So, share with us what transcendental meditation is and how it's distinct from these other various ways of approaching meditation.

• 14:41Bob Roth?

  I like to use the analogy of a cross-section of an ocean. We have choppy waves on the surface and the ocean is silent at its depth. And the mind is like that. The surface of the mind is often called the monkey mind, the gata, gata, gata mind. And that's our active thinking mind. And so, there are, as I just mentioned, there's one, according to brain research, there's three different distinct types of meditation. Focused attention, which is a controlling, control, concentrate the mind to stop the mind from wandering. And the brain research on that shows that it produces, among other things, gamma brainwaves, 20 to 50 cycles per second.

• 15:17Rich Roll?

  And what are the gamma?

• 15:18Bob Roth?

  Gamma brainwaves are 20 to-

• 15:19Rich Roll?

  And what are they responsible for?

• 15:21Bob Roth?

  Focus, working hard, working hard. And when you're concentrating on something, when you're really zeroing in on something, and that burns up a lot of energy because you're tired and you've worked hard. And so that's what gamma brainwaves do. And then the other is open monitoring, which is sort of a mindfulness, which is observing your thoughts and moods and feelings dispassionately. And that creates theta brainwaves, which are similar to dream, four to eight cycles. And then transcendental meditation, Rich. These two are called cognitive approaches to meditation, addressing your thoughts, manipulating your thoughts, controlling your thoughts, observing your thoughts. Transcendental meditation, automatic self-transcending, is allowing the mind to settle down

• 16:06Bob Roth?

  to a deep, quiet source of thought.

• 16:09Rich Roll?

  So you go below the waves?

• 16:10Bob Roth?

  Way below the waves.

• 16:11Rich Roll?

  Still waters?

• 16:12Bob Roth?

  Yeah, which always exists, which you don't have to visualize. You don't have to believe in it. It's there, and we've lost access to it. Sometimes we have access to it, transcendent moments, when you're with a newborn child or you're running or something, you have a flow state. Sometimes you have access to that, but generally not.

• 16:30Rich Roll?

  You mentioned this phrase, automatic self-transcending. What does that mean?

• 16:35Bob Roth?

  Automatic self-transcending means, so you've got the waves on the surface, and transcendental meditation sets up the condition for the attention of your mind to turn within, sets up the condition, and then automatically and effortlessly, this is why a 10-year-old kid can do this and a PhD and whatever could do this, automatically, your active thinking mind just begins to settle down, automatically drawn to quieter and quieter and quieter levels towards that unbounded source of thought. I'll come back to that. When you have that experience, it's a distinct brainwave signature. It's called alpha 1, and that's eight to 10, and this is complicated words, but eight to 10 cycles per second. And that's a state of restful alertness.

• 17:19Rich Roll?

  So what is it about TM that allows you to achieve this in ways that these other variations on meditation don't?

• 17:31Bob Roth?

  It's a fundamental principle, underlying principle to the other forms of meditation, that the mind wanders. Even at the beginning of this conversation, you know, when you said, "Oh, while you're thinking, aren't you supposed to get to no thinking?" And so, the understanding is, mind is a monkey, or the mind wanders. And what can I do to get my mind not to wander? What could I do to have my mind be calm? And that would be, if you use that ocean analogy, you say, "Okay, I want to have a calm ocean." What disrupts a calm ocean? Waves, stop the waves, you'll have a calm ocean. In this meditation, you say, "Okay, with the mind, thoughts disturb a calm mind, stop your thinking, and then you'll have a calm mind."

• 18:13Bob Roth?

  But that's close to impossible on that surface level. Transcendental meditation sets up the conditions. And I'll explain, they turn, like a dive, you teach a child how to dive. Give the attention of the mind an inward direction, and automatically, the child goes into the water. And meditation set up the conditions, and automatically, we're drawn inward. Why? Because the mind is not a monkey. The mind does not wander aimlessly. The mind is in search of happiness, in search of something satisfying. You're in a room, working on some mindless work, doing some mindless work on your computer, and in the other room, unbelievably exquisite music comes on. Where's your attention go?

• 18:54Rich Roll?

  Mm-hmm.

• 18:55Bob Roth?

  Or you go on a vacation, and someone gives you two books to read. One is dreadful, and you can't read a word, the other's great. Hours go by. So what is that? Mind is drawn to something more satisfying, and inside, very satisfying. My own innermost self. All we have to do with TM is set up the conditions, give the attention, as I said, the attention of the mind in inward direction you receive from a teacher. A mantra, which is a word or a sound that has no meaning to it, a couple syllables. And that takes a second. Over an hour a day, over four days, you're taught how to use the mantra. It's a funny word for people, innocently, effortlessly, no force, no strain, no agenda.

• 19:38Bob Roth?

  And set up the conditions so that the mind naturally is drawn inward, because deeper levels are more satisfying. If that didn't make sense.

• 19:45Rich Roll?

  No, it makes sense. It makes sense. So the active ingredient here is the mantra as a sort of focal point, right? And then there's all this instruction around how to use it, et cetera. I think for a lot of people, an impediment or a barrier to really embracing TM is the fact that it is shrouded in a little bit of mystery here, as opposed to other types of meditation, which are kind of more open source and available on the internet. Like, you know, how do you justify that? Or what is the explanation for that?

• 20:15Bob Roth?

  So it was interesting that I had a conversation with a person who's high up in the mindfulness world, Sharon Salzberg.

• 20:22Rich Roll?

  Sure. Yeah. She's been on the show.

• 20:24Bob Roth?

  Yeah.

• 20:25Rich Roll?

  A long time ago.

• 20:26Bob Roth?

  She's a good friend. She's great. And was talking about how what TM has done well is we have a very rigorous teacher training program. You know, it could take months to become a teacher. And this very rigorous upholding of the instruction. She said mindfulness has completely lost its brand, completely. Anybody can say they're doing anything. The problem in science is that if you put a mindfulness program in a school in Spokane, Washington, it has some results, the people in St. Petersburg, Florida have no idea what they did because there's so much fuzziness, so much whatever. And so with TM, we decided early on that we want to make this thing sort of, you know,

• 21:08Bob Roth?

  rigorous. And so there's a rigorous training program. And it's not that the mantra, I mean, you can go online, there's millions of mantras, you know, it's just a sound. But almost more important is how to use it properly. And that's why it's taught one to one from a teacher. And people say, well, you can't scale it if you do it that way. And my attitude is, I'd rather teach one person to do it right than 50 people to do it wrong. And the foundation is set up. So now we're offering, there's no impediment for learning for finances. People can learn it for free. But I say, if you're serious about wanting to meditate, call me or find a teacher and take an hour a day over four days and learn it right.

• 21:53Rich Roll?

  And it's a four day thing. So

• 21:56Bob Roth?

  One hour a day.

• 21:57Rich Roll?

  Broadly, like, you know, what's going on during those four days? Why does it take four days to learn how to practice it?

• 22:01Bob Roth?

  So the first day is actual personal instruction. It takes one day to actually learn the technique, one to one with the teacher. The next three days are Oh, that was an interesting experience. What was that? Or, how do I know if I'm doing this right? Or, I had all these thoughts. Or, I fell asleep. Or, my arm, I had an itch. Can I scratch it? So many people have tried different types of meditation that much of this is to unlearn. Because, no, it's okay. Thoughts are a part of the practice. They're not your enemy. And if you have an itch, scratch it. And if you fall asleep in meditation, fine, it's natural. And that takes those three days, just to be sure the person is doing it correctly.

• 22:45Bob Roth?

  And then they're on their own. Although, once you've learned, you have for the rest of your life, access to a real human being teacher to ask your questions. Because that's another thing, is when people learn off of a, out of a book or online, they don't know if I'm doing this right or wrong necessarily. And I also say, this is not an either/or. I know a lot of people who do TM and then do a mindfulness practice. Or they do TM, or they run, or they do TM. It's just, it's a tool, a significant tool in the toolbox.

• 23:19Rich Roll?

  And the practice of it is 20 minutes in the morning and 20 minutes-

• 23:22Bob Roth?

  15 to 20 minutes, morning and evening.

• 23:24Rich Roll?

  In the evening.

• 23:25Bob Roth?

  Just sitting comfortably.

• 23:26Rich Roll?

  It's a twice a day experience.

• 23:27Bob Roth?

  You do it first thing in the morning to set you for the day, wakes you up and energizes you so that there's not these dips throughout the day. And it also makes you a little bit more resilient to whatever demands and stresses you have. And then it's done at the end of the day, four, five, six o'clock, something like that, to wash off the stress from the day or whatever you've picked up, and then enjoy the evening and sleep better at night.

• 23:52Rich Roll?

  And what is the value proposition of this, Bob? Like, why should we be meditating? Why should we be doing TM? What can we expect to learn about ourselves or experience in our lives as a result of devoting ourselves to this? You know, it's like, okay, 20 minutes here, 20 minutes, you know, twice a day. It doesn't seem like that much, but there is a commitment here. And, you know, for a lot of people, it's asking a lot, especially for people who've never meditated before. So, you know, what's the pitch? You know, like, how you make the case?

• 24:25Bob Roth?

  Well, I say there's 1,440 minutes in a day. And we want to do things to maintain our health. And so much what we do is from the neck down. I exercise, I eat properly, I get enough sleep, from the neck down. I'm saying for a few minutes, twice a day, you do something that absolutely, according to the research, wakes up the creative networks in the brain, calms the amygdala, which the amygdala is your fear emotional center, calms the sympathetic nervous system, which is your fight or flight, activates the parasympathetic nervous system. And when you do the meditation, it creates, as I said earlier, this alpha one, this restful alertness in a coherent way.

• 25:09Bob Roth?

  It bathes the whole brain during that 20 minutes. And the reason why we're doing it is not for that 20 minutes. The reason why we're doing it is for the 10 hours afterwards. That's where all the data is. That's where all the results are, where it shows that that, for example, it reduces cortisol levels by 30 to 40%. Cortisol is too much of a terrible stress hormone. Nothing else does that. It raises serotonin levels. It increases dopamine. And it just makes us more healthy and ourself. And later on, we can talk about what it does sort of with the other parts of the brain for creativity and problem solving. But it's done as an investment in the 10 hours that follow. And you learn it, and then you do what you want to do with it.

• 25:53Bob Roth?

  I mean, the reality is you learn a tool. And I always say, learn it, do it for a month, see what the results are, and then you decide, I'm going to do this twice a day, I'm going to do this once a day. But you try it because these days, we were just talking earlier about AI. Forget about AI. How we human beings are going to handle this? I was just out at TED Talks in Vancouver. Oh, you were? Yeah, yeah. Every year, it's about AI. But what are we, how are we going to handle this? Not having jobs or this upheaval, this disruption? And that's going to, I like to say, it's no longer a luxury to say, I'm going to take some time out. To meditate is now a necessity and it's coming fast.

• 26:37Rich Roll?

  But there's also quite a bit of mainstream adoption at this point. Even in the kind of intervening years since we last spoke, like there's very few people who aren't aware of meditation. And a large percentage of the population has at least flirted with it on some level. So we are in a different world in terms of like our acceptance of this and also our understanding of the very real evidence-based benefits of it. Stress reduction, anxiety reduction, enhanced creativity, equanimity. Like all of these things are pretty commonly understood at this point.

• 27:16Rich Roll?

  I like to think of meditation not as something I just do at a specific period of time every day, but a practice that I bring into my life. So there isn't like the meditation and then my life. It's to bring that some version of that experience into my actual lived experience in the remaining hours of the day. Call it mindfulness, whatever you want to call it. But I'm trying to blur the lines between the rigor of the practice itself and then the rest of my life so that these things become more and more of a piece with each other.

• 27:55Bob Roth?

  And you made a really good point, blur the lines. And the whole purpose of meditation is to blur those lines. So we end up not having to meditate for the rest of our life. We actually, by dipping into that transcendent field, that silence that lies within, and then bringing that out, then we're bringing more and more and more of that inner equanimity that's there, that inner equanimity, that healthier, more integrated style of functioning into our life. So it's a seamless, it's a beautiful description. But if there's not as much inner there at that time, if I'm going nuts because I'm a single mom and I got all this problem and I feel anxious. It's a wonderful thing to be able to take a few minutes and in a matter of minutes, reduce the cortisol and all of that. And then you just forget the meditation.

• 28:40Bob Roth?

  You just plow into your daily life. And as far as, some people say, I get a lot. They say, I'm not skeptical that TM works. I'm skeptical that I could do it. Or I'm skeptical that I'll take the time because I've tried meditation. If you're anxious, it's difficult to do some mindfulness types of meditation. And so the main thing is just to say, well, give it a try. Because I teach kids on the autism spectrum disorder. I teach kids who can close their eyes for more than 30 seconds. And they love, they do 10 minutes of meditation. It's a very satisfying, enjoyable experience, not hard. You're not battling your thoughts. You're just diving within. And one last thing. Sure. You get to be 100% this is me.

• 29:24Bob Roth?

  People ask me, I'm not exactly what you would consider your classic meditation teacher. I'm like a skeptic. I love science. I love data. I'm not into all the philosophies so much. And you could be 100% skeptical. You could think everything that I'm saying is a crock. Doesn't make any difference. It'll work just as well as anything else. You just do the thing. You just do it. You're already hardwired for it. You already are drawn to. Is it hard to watch a great movie? No. Is it hard to watch a bad movie? Yeah. Is it hard to be in an interesting conversation with someone? No. Hard to be in a bad one? So the mind, it's hardwired. I want, I'm drawn to something more satisfying. But I'm always looking out through my senses. This, this, this, this. Now I close my eyes and for a few minutes, turn within and then

• 30:09Bob Roth?

  effortlessly sink and die within. And I remember telling someone once, this Wall Street guy. He said, wait, wait, wait, you're settling your 20 minutes and you're settling down to this inner calm, this pure consciousness? How do you know when your 20 minutes are up? And I said, you look at your watch. You're not going someplace. You're just settling. Your nervous system can go faster and your nervous system also has the ability to decompress, to settle down.

• 30:36Rich Roll?

  I suspect one of the other things that you get a lot of is, "I hear you, Bob. That's great, but my meditation is, fill in the blank, running, or doing laundry, or you name it, some kind of activity that on some level probably activates the unconscious mind." So I'm interested in how you draw the distinction between perhaps something that might be considered like a mindful practice versus the formality of what you're suggesting, which is like, this is what you do, and you follow the script, and it works every time. That's very different from going out into the woods for a walk.

• 31:15Bob Roth?

  Well, first of all, I think you should do all those things. I think everything we do in our life should be that mindful approach, should be going for a walk in the woods, the foods you eat, the people you're around, the work that you do. All those things should be life-affirming, should be enlivening of all the different happiness hormones and all of that. You keep coming back to the thing of the rigor, and I am abhorrent to sort of rigor myself.

• 31:41Rich Roll?

  Good, yeah, tell me more.

• 31:43Bob Roth?

  No, because I-

• 31:44Rich Roll?

  I guess I'm trying to just get at the formality of it, like, this is what I'm doing right now, and there is a way of doing it.

• 31:50Bob Roth?

  Do you sit down and have lunch? Yeah, you eat a meal. Do you lie down and go to bed at night? The formality of going to bed at night?

• 31:57Rich Roll?

  Maybe the rigor is in pushing through whatever resistance you have around, like, okay, now I'm gonna do this thing. It's the leading-up part.

• 32:06Bob Roth?

  Yes, and I find that from people, and I would just say, you just give it a try, because it's actually something that you look forward to, because within minutes, your body gains it. There was a study that was done at Harvard Medical School way back in the 70s that compared oxygen consumption, which is a level of metabolic rest, oxygen consumption with TM and what happens when you go to sleep. And they found that it took about five and a half or six hours of good night's sleep- For oxygen consumption to drop 8%. And in 20 minutes of TM, oxygen consumption dropped 16%. I look forward to that deep rest. And it can be, I can be in a crazy day. I can be in the back of a cab.

• 32:47Bob Roth?

  It's not like I have to go to my pillow and my cushion and I have to sit like this. I did it at Yankee Stadium. It was a bad game. You can do it anywhere. So it's not this, and it's not like I have to do it at 5:15 and in the evening and 6. I do it. I'll do it. Usually I get up first thing in the morning, pee, sit up in bed, meditate. And then sometime in the afternoon, I find time for 15 or 20 minutes to do it. And it's very rejuvenating. And if I don't do it, fine. But if I do do it, I feel better.

• 33:19Rich Roll?

  On the rejuvenation piece, talk a little bit about the deep rest aspect of it.

• 33:25Bob Roth?

  Scientists are discovering this term like they just coined it, "deep rest", which is different than the rest you gain during sleep, which is sort of up and down. You never know. And it comes in waves. You know, there's sleep and dream and sleep and dream. And it turns out that the human nervous system is hardwired to be able to access a state of deep rest at will. In the case, which you're going to see in the case of, you know, you have that alpha 1 and all that. But we've lost the ability of doing that. And some researchers believe the fact that we've lost that ability of that, they call it a fourth state of consciousness, different from waking, dreaming and sleeping. It's inherent. It's who we are. We've lost access to it.

• 34:05Bob Roth?

  That lack of access to that has given rise to all this stress and stress-related disorders. Because only in that state of deep rest can the body heal itself from deeply rooted traumas and tensions and stresses. And so TM accesses that. Other things can access it. And I would say it's not an either/or when you say, "Well, I'm going to do this or that." It's a yes and. And as the world gets more intense, we want to have practical tools that can help us deal with what's coming.

• 34:44Rich Roll?

  Is there science around the deep rest and the trauma healing piece?

• 34:49Bob Roth?

  Yes, yes.

• 34:49Rich Roll?

  That's very interesting to me.

• 34:51Bob Roth?

  So, we are working, we've done a lot on this. We have worked for 10, 15 years now with veterans, offering TM to, with veterans with post-traumatic stress disorder. We also work with women survivors of domestic violence. In New York City, they have something called the Family Justice Centers, where we've taught 1,000 women. And we're working with firefighters and police officers. And what they find is, they call it a state of restful alertness, that the benefits of TM show a reduction in symptoms more effectively than the gold standard, which is called prolonged exposure. I don't know if you know what that is. Prolonged exposure is reliving your experience. More effective than prolonged exposure.

• 35:36Bob Roth?

  And one reason is, is, I mean, and the veterans like meditating and they don't like prolonged exposure. What happens in that instance is, again, there's a calming of the amygdala, which is that emotional center, there's a calming of the sympathetic nervous system, there's a reduction in cortisol, so we're less reactive. And one of the biggest things is, people sleep better. So many of the symptoms of PTSD are exacerbated by the inability to sleep. So, my friend Vin, who runs our veterans program, said that one of the first things vets say is, "Oh my God, for the first time in four months, I slept through the night." So, there's a lot of, a lot of benefits for, for trauma.

• 36:20Rich Roll?

  Yeah, so, you've worked with veterans and at-risk youth in, in, you know, at-risk neighborhoods, et cetera, trauma survivors, victims of abuse, and now you're working with victims of the LA fire, people who have been displaced, and also the LA firefighters. I mean, that's quite a service, and I'm interested in-

• 36:43Bob Roth?

  All for free.

• 36:44Rich Roll?

  What you're hearing-

• 36:45Bob Roth?

  All for free.

• 36:46Rich Roll?

  Yeah, all for, all for free through the David Lynch Foundation. What you're hearing from, from the people who worked and also suffered through the LA fires?

• 36:57Bob Roth?

  Just imagine if in the midst of all the chaos and frenzy and uncertainty in your life, and it's all happening around you, and you have the ability to sit down against a tree in a chair and just do this simple effortless procedure that gives your body a state of rest in many regards, deeper than the deepest part of deep sleep, in minutes, in minutes. It's transformative. It's absolutely transformative. And not only do we do it in Los Angeles, we did it in Asheville after that hurricane there. We got 600 or 700 people there. And this is relief of stress and tension and fear. And it's transformative.

• 37:40Bob Roth?

  I want, we're talking to the Red Cross, because the Red Cross goes into these areas, and they say, okay, we're going to build new roads, we're going to build bridges, we're going to, you know, fix hospitals. But no one is dealing with trauma, Rich. No one is, on a scalable way, are we going to give everyone Ambien? We're going to, you know, we're going to give everyone talk therapy? So here is a tool that's scalable that they can use, and they love it. And we're doing the research to show that it works so that Red Cross, or Blue Cross Blue Shield, or Aetna will reimburse for instruction.

• 38:16Rich Roll?

  Right. That was my next question. Like, how is it working with healthcare and insurance reimbursement? Because that's really the crown jewel here, right? If you can get coverage for this, then it can be something that is widely prescribed.

• 38:28Bob Roth?

  So when you want to get something reimbursed or covered by a third party, and not just insurance companies, carriers, there's every business, or some of them have their own self-insurance. There's research you have to do. Phase one trials with 60 people to show that it works. A phase two trial is with 100 or 200 people in one hospital to show that it works. Now we're at the point of a phase three trial, which is four or five different hospitals, 600 peoples to 500 people. And if we get the same results that we've gotten in hundreds of previous studies, then that's going to be the basis for leveraging reimbursement. Now, before COVID, the idea of insurance companies covering

• 39:08Bob Roth?

  meditation or TM, a joke. But now we're living, as I'm sure you know, in a crisis of mental health. You know, and there's no, if I cut my arm, I get infected and the doctors know what caused that and there's an antibiotic. Nobody knows why a person gets depressed. Nobody understands a million reasons a person is anxious, can't sleep. So they created some medicines that work, but they don't work, they work for a minority of people. So now the research has shown the TM in frontline hospitals, doctors and nurses that it, um, within two weeks, that's, they did the research, we didn't. And so when we do that from 100

• 39:49Bob Roth?

  people to 500 people, the research, then I think we're just a couple of years out.

• 39:54Rich Roll?

  Well, all you have to do, I would imagine, is establish that this practice leads to positive health outcomes in such a way that saves them money over time. Like, look, you can pay this right now to teach these people this, or you can pay later when, you know, their PTSD or whatever isn't healed and suddenly they're addicted to opioids or whatever happens downstream of that, like, which obviously becomes, you know, a much more expensive proposition.

• 40:24Bob Roth?

  That's actually, I'm glad you brought that up.

• 40:25Rich Roll?

  It's economics from their perspective.

• 40:27Bob Roth?

  That's our focus now, cost savings. So in this, the Department of Defense back in 2016 gave $2.5 million for a study on TM and PTSD. And they compared it with this prolonged exposure, gold standard. And they found that TM was more effective than prolonged exposure. So then another researcher just now went in and looked at the data and see how much would it save. He said, okay, there's 6 million veterans getting treatment right now for any range of, if 100,000 of those 6 million learn TM, it would save the government $375 million.

• 41:06Bob Roth?

  Because those treatments don't work. They just, more medicines, more medicines, more medicines. And the suicide rate is going up. And, yeah, it's a pretty interesting time.

• 41:19Rich Roll?

  Are there any studies that distinguish people who have suffered acute trauma? Like soldiers, et cetera, domestic abuse victims versus like low-grade chronic trauma, you know, over many, many years?

• 41:34Bob Roth?

  Well, first of all, low-grade chronic trauma, if you're living with it all the time, like an alcoholic parent, that's something called complex PTSD. And actually, you can start having symptoms of PTSD even though you've not been in war. But for, and so it helps there. But just regular old life, I mean, I've been talking, the foundation is focused on people who are really suffering. But TM has been learned by, you know, 15 million people, and it's just regular folk who find that they, you know, there's sort of, as they get a little older, they think, well, I'm not sleeping quite as well as I was, or like getting my buttons pushed a little faster, getting triggered, little memory I can't focus like I used to. That's where most of the people are who learn it.

• 42:17Rich Roll?

  Right. Some varying degree of stress and anxiety or low-hanging neurosis.

• 42:24Bob Roth?

  Yeah, that's right. Very low-hanging. I would also say that there's more interest now, because I teach a lot of, with David, through David, he introduced me to a lot of very creative people in the arts.

• 42:37Rich Roll?

  You've taught a lot of interesting people.

• 42:39Bob Roth?

  I have. I remember once, like 30 years ago, thinking, you know, I've never, seriously, I've never met, I've never met a famous person, never in my life, you know? And then with David, I've taught lots of people. But as I'm sure you'll know, when you sit down with anyone, particularly when I teach them to meditate and I look in their eyes, they can't sleep, or they're worried about their kid, there's another human being, just because their face is plastered all over a screen, doesn't mean anything.

• 43:08Rich Roll?

  When I think of like low hanging neurosis, it's like Jerry Seinfeld comes to mind.

• 43:12Bob Roth?

  Yeah, no, exactly.

• 43:13Rich Roll?

  Who taught him, right?

• 43:14Bob Roth?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, he'd been meditating, actually, we're good friends. He'd been meditating since 1972. He learned when he was a kid in Long Island.

• 43:23Rich Roll?

  Same with Howard Stern, right? I remember like as a young person, when he was a radio DJ in DC growing up and he was on the radio every morning and he would talk about TM.

• 43:32Bob Roth?

  Yeah, he learned because he and his father were really worried about their mother, who's having all these depressed qualities and all this stuff and deep depression. Then he called his mom up one time and he said, "I heard something in your voice." I said, "Mom, what's going on?" She said that she had learned TM. And he said that was enough for him because there was something lifted in her voice, a heaviness, and he'd been doing it for 50 plus years. Another example, you just become more of who you are. Meditation doesn't sort of wash you out, TM, just more who you are.

• 44:07Rich Roll?

  It seems like there's a very high, what's the right word? Not adoption rate, but like sustained practice rate with TM that also, you know, from an outsider looking in on it, looks like it distinguishes it from other traditions. Like, you know, I like sort of dabble in all different kinds of things, but people who do TM, like they're all in and they maintain it over extremely long periods of time with like great consistency.

• 44:34Bob Roth?

  Yeah, it's enjoyable.

• 44:35Rich Roll?

  Is it just the effectiveness of it? Like, how do you?

• 44:38Bob Roth?

  Two things. It's an enjoyable thing. It's not like I gotta go beat my head against, you know, I gotta beat my, to do this thing and I gotta fight my thoughts and it's that 20 minutes and you look at your watch and no, that's a minute and a half. It's not that way. You look forward to it. It's really enjoyable and afterwards, the results are very real. In the case of Jerry, Jerry was meditating once a day. He didn't realize you're supposed to do it twice or could do it twice a day. And...

• 45:04Bob Roth?

  Backstory, I was teaching the rest of his family to meditate. He'd been meditating about 20 years. And I was teaching the rest of his family. And I said to them, he was sitting in on a meeting. And I said, "Well, you know, then you'll do your afternoon meditation." At this time, he said, "Wait, what? What? You haven't been meditating for 30 years? There's a second meditation?" And then he started doing it.

• 45:21Rich Roll?

  Who instructed him then?

• 45:22Bob Roth?

  He forgot.

• 45:23Rich Roll?

  Did you?

• 45:23Bob Roth?

  No, no, he forgot. And, uh, and he said, he has so much energy now from that second meditation. He used to just knock out at 1 o'clock in the afternoon. Now he's so much energy. And he said, if he'd been doing twice a day, Seinfeld would still be on the air. So these words.

• 45:41Rich Roll?

  Did he get Larry David into it?

• 45:42Bob Roth?

  No, he said Larry. Talk about low hanging fruit.

• 45:45Rich Roll?

  Larry, Larry's like not gonna go there.

• 45:46Bob Roth?

  No, no, no, no.

• 45:48Rich Roll?

  Who is the most surprising, like, well-known person that you would never suspect? I mean, I don't want you to talk about anything that's not public knowledge, but somebody you might not have expected to be into this, you know, coming to you and you teaching them.

• 46:03Bob Roth?

  I don't know, because everybody's got stress these days or, you know, anxiety. I'll tell you, the kindest, most genuine person I taught is Hugh Jackman.

• 46:12Rich Roll?

  Oh, interesting.

• 46:13Bob Roth?

  He's, he's the real deal. He grew up very humble upbringing and he's very kind.

• 46:17Rich Roll?

  It's not surprising, though. I mean, that guy is very focused on his well-being. I mean, just unbelievably talented, but also, you know, committed person in what he does for a living. But it seemed to carry over in all aspects of his life.

• 46:32Bob Roth?

  No, and just genuine, and you see him in crowds, and he's very kind and puts attention on people. And I really, I admire him a lot.

• 46:39Rich Roll?

  You mentioned that you're fundamentally a skeptic. So, we talked about this a little bit last time, but let's, let's trace this back a little bit to the origin story. Like, how did you overcome skepticism? What was your introduction to this? How did you get into this?

• 46:55Bob Roth?

  So, I was just like a regular dumb kid growing up, you know, in the 50s and 60s in the Bay Area. And just regular, just never thought about anything. And we got really involved in politics in my family. It was Democratic, you know, interested in Kennedy and Johnson. Yeah, I mean, you're in the Bay Area during the 60s. This is ground zero. I went to Berkeley. Yeah. Ground, ground zero. Anyway, I worked for Bobby Kennedy, Sr., and I really, I remember going to an event where he spoke to 2,000 people in San Francisco on June 1, 1968, and thinking, not Republicans or Democrats, we're going to change this world. I had this sort of wanting to. And then I saw him, was assassinated four days later on television. And I decided I was going to go to Berkeley. I was going to Berkeley.

• 47:39Bob Roth?

  I would go to law school and I'd be a US Senator like Bobby Kennedy. I wanted to change. Those are the days you wanted to change the world. Took me about a month at Berkeley to realize that politics was not going to heal the soul of the nation. It's important, but it wasn't going to be my path. And so, my mom was a teacher, then I thought, okay, maybe I'll write educational curriculum, get a degree in that, teach inner-city school kids to do it, help them navigate their way. So I was, here's to TM. So I'm going to Berkeley, working full-time, well, going to school full-time, working a lot, and tanks parked outside my door for Vietnam War and it was right near People's Park. And I was very stressed, although I didn't know that.

• 48:21Bob Roth?

  And I was, I knew that there had to be some inner anchor, because everything was just so crazy, some inner anchor. And I didn't want to, I mean, Berkeley was a hotbed of crazy town, and I didn't want to get into a religion, I wasn't a political extremist. You weren't banging the bongos in the tie-dye shirt at the protests? No, I was just this naive, just this kid who wanted to make a better world, and I was really stressed out. And a friend of mine I was working with at a Swenson's Ice Cream Parlor, 1960. I remember Swenson's. Yeah. Scooping the hazelnut or whatever. And he was the one guy at Berkeley that I thought was sane. He was nice, quiet, calm, clear, focused, and it turned out he was doing TM. And I said, I don't believe in any of that stuff.

• 49:06Bob Roth?

  My father's son, he was a scientist and a doctor and a researcher. And he held up a pen, and he dropped the pen in his hand, the other hand. And he said, you don't have to believe in gravity for gravity to work. In this meditation, you don't have to believe in anything. So I said, I told him, I'm going to go for three minutes. If I'm weirded out, I'm leaving. He said, go for one minute. And one of my first meditations was so... Profoundly relaxing and unique, different than I had any experience I'd ever had. And a few days later, I thought, maybe this is a tool I'll teach those kids. Because I wanted to help kids. And that was June 28, 1969. Now 50, 50-plus years later.

• 49:49Bob Roth?

  I founded foundations and brought it to a million and a half kids. And we want to bring it to 10 million in the next five years.

• 49:55Rich Roll?

  The tradition of TM is rooted in, in the teachings of Maharishi Mahesh Yogi. Is he the, like, the founder of this? What is the lineage?

• 50:06Bob Roth?

  So transcendental meditation goes back, this effortless transcending. Maharishi has said, this was an original form of meditation, effortlessness, not, not straining. This idea of having to concentrate or clear the mind is very difficult and unnatural in a way. And he said that the innocence and the effortlessness of transcending, which just means settling down, had been lost over time and effort crept in. But the meditation goes back thousands, you know, predates, people say, oh, this is Hinduism. This predates Hinduism, like, what, 3,000 years old? People have been meditating for, forever. So it predates all those isms. Maharishi was a physicist, trained as a physicist in India.

• 50:51Bob Roth?

  And then he had a chance to study for 13 years with a great meditation teacher, name was Gurudev, in India. And then in 1955, Maharishi started going around the world, offering the meditation. The first thing he did is he went to scientists at Stanford and said, you should, and UCLA, said, you should study this thing. He wanted it to be, like, seen as a health, healthcare intervention, not as some, healthcare intervention, not just to deal with stress, to wake up the full creative potential of the brain, you know, that enlightened idea. But it would be rooted in science. So he was the one who brought it back out.

• 51:27Rich Roll?

  He popularized it.

• 51:28Bob Roth?

  Popularized it.

• 51:29Rich Roll?

  And so TM sort of gets associated with him. And he was a, you know, like, a controversial figure on some level, but people know him. The Beatles went and saw him and, you know, he's sort of well-known for many people making a pilgrimage to, you know, come and sit at his feet.

• 51:45Bob Roth?

  Well.

• 51:47Bob Roth?

  So let's unpack that statement.

• 51:49Rich Roll?

  Yeah, yeah, please.

• 51:50Bob Roth?

  Yeah. Controversial figure only because the Beatles went and studied. He traveled around because I had an opportunity to work with him or around.

• 51:59Rich Roll?

  Did you go to India to see him? Or when he came to?

• 52:01Bob Roth?

  No, he was in Europe. I did see him in India, but I interned. He had established something Maharishi European Research University, which was doing research on brain. And that was in Switzerland. And then I moved over to Holland. He was a scientist. I mean, he loved the science of consciousness. He loved the whole thing. But he was under the radar. And then I'm friends with, I name drop, Paul and Ringo. And they told me the story that Maharshi was giving a talk at a Hilton Hotel in London in 1967 with a handful of people. And all of a sudden, three young guys walked in, and it was the three of the Beatles. And they said, and then the press. And Maharshi didn't even know who they, what that was.

• 52:44Bob Roth?

  And so then, he taught them in Wales. And then the next year, they went to Rishikesh to take a break from all the crazy and just have like a retreat. All the controversy was around that, oh, he had Rolls Royces, not true. This thing, not true. It just got out there, people. He alarmed a lot of people. But a lot of people learned to meditate because of the Beatles. But 30 years later, some reporter said to him, you must be very happy because look what the Beatles did. They brought all this attention to you. And he said, they were very creative young men, but he set my work back 30 years because it became flower power rather than science.

• 53:23Rich Roll?

  Yeah, it got associated with something non secular. That becomes alienating to a lot of people. And I think that association is still somewhat pervasive.

• 53:34Bob Roth?

  Our generation, or my generation, your generation, but the kids who are in their 20s and 30s, you know, it'll outlive that.

• 53:41Rich Roll?

  Yeah. What I think is interesting here is this idea of transcendence. You're talking about transcendence in a very specific kind of secular way of becoming a little bit more of a master of the self, right? Like transcending your mind so that you can be more calm, more present, more have more mental acuity and creativity and light and joy and equanimity, et cetera. I think of transcendence a little bit differently as sort of the peak of Maslow's hierarchy of needs in a broader, kind of more spiritual sense, like a non-secular sense. Like, what does it mean to transcend?

• 54:24Rich Roll?

  In my mind, has more to do with, you know, I don't want to use the word enlightenment, but how can you like overcome the things that hold us back as human beings? Like our attachment to the material world and to our identities and all of these things that keep us separate and challenge our ability to live more freely and with more unconditional love and gratitude and things like that. Like, maybe I have a little bit of a broader lens on it.

• 54:54Bob Roth?

  No, no, I agree with you 100%.

• 54:56Rich Roll?

  But I think you're very, you're very careful with your language, like in the way that you describe transcendence.

• 55:00Bob Roth?

  Because what I focus on is the benefits for a person busy. I like to call this the democratization of meditation. This for everybody. I don't want vocabulary to get in the way. This is for, everyone can benefit from this, everyone. And I love what you said about Maslow, because it wasn't until near his death that he came out and said, "Well, self-actualization's not actually the hierarchy of needs, it's transcendence." And he said, "Part of something bigger."

• 55:30Rich Roll?

  And that's making room for the ineffable.

• 55:32Bob Roth?

  That's right. And that transcendent field that one accesses during meditation, that settled, quiet level of the mind. And I would have brought this out earlier, but I knew you were, you were wanting to talk about it. But that transcendent field is that field, that universal field of consciousness. That is that level of connectivity. And that is only where fulfillment can lie. It doesn't, otherwise TM is just self-actualization. You know, it's great for self-actualization.

• 55:58Rich Roll?

  It's like, quote unquote, optimization.

• 56:01Bob Roth?

  Yes, but, but, on the way to, it's not distinct from, on the way to...

• 56:08Bob Roth?

  To that transcendence is optimization. It's not distinct from, it's a continuum on that. And there's even when they talk about the science of higher, quote unquote, higher states of consciousness. So this waking, dreaming and sleeping states of consciousness. And then the meditative state is the fourth state of consciousness. They call it turiyateet in Sanskrit, means the fourth. And that's that accessing that transcendent within you, which is unbounded awareness. And then what grows is, and this goes back to, hearkens back to what we were talking about earlier, what blurs is the line between the two. I live more and more of that inner as I grow an outer.

• 56:51Bob Roth?

  And as I am fully aware within myself, they call it a fifth state, cosmic consciousness. But then it goes on to unity consciousness, which is wholeness, oneness of everything. And the interesting thing, when Margie was in a conference, a science conference about this, and he said, yes, and there will be a neuroscience to every state of consciousness. This is not make believe. This is what the human being is hardwired for. It's his or her birthright to have that unified level of consciousness.

• 57:20Rich Roll?

  Are there neuroscience studies on what's going on in the brain when somebody is experiencing unified consciousness?

• 57:27Bob Roth?

  There is that, what happens, I mentioned earlier, where you have the EEG correlate, that alpha one. And some meditations will have, it changes in the front left lobe, an area, it wakens and builds up more gray matter in the front left lobe, or this area, this area. But what happens in that transcendent experience is it creates this coherent brainwave pattern across the whole brain. So that's during meditation. And what they're finding now is because the neuropathways, they say, you know, the neurons that fire together, wire together, that the coherent brainwave pattern is maintained at the same time as your waking state.

• 58:11Bob Roth?

  And that's correlated with that feeling of inner calm, inner unboundedness in the midst of everything that you're doing.

• 58:16Rich Roll?

  See, I want to inhabit the fifth state, Bob.

• 58:20Bob Roth?

  Yeah, I think you're...

• 58:23Rich Roll?

  I don't think so. I do, I do. If you had a window into my mind, it's a, you know, it's, it's, it's a bit of a mess. Should you ever want, I will teach you. I've had flirtations with that, though. No, tell me, tell me, tell me. Well, I've had moments of transcendence in meditation, also in endurance sports. And then more recently and more vividly, I had, I had, for the very first time, I underwent like a medically supervised psychedelic experience. So that obviously, you know, was a much more intense experience. I had never done anything like that before. And so I had no frame of reference for what that experience was gonna deliver to me.

• 59:08Rich Roll?

  But I would say that it over-delivered in every category. It allowed me to glimpse something I'm not sure even a lifetime of meditation would have been able to reveal to me, which is a complete dissolution of, you know, identity and boundaries and self and, and time and, you know, all, like, it was a disassemblage of everything that allowed me, you know, now in my, in my normal day life, to, to have a different perspective on what matters that has stayed with me in a very meaningful way and has also informed my meditation practice, which is not yet TM, even though we talked about

• 59:51Rich Roll?

  it last time, but now you've, you've sold me, like, I'm in, has made me much more committed and devoted to that practice. Like, in the kind of integration months subsequent to that experience where you have a higher degree of, of brain plasticity, like, I very consciously leverage that to deepen my meditation practice and that has proved beneficial. But there's something indelible about that experience that, you know, because it's so intense, just allowed me, like, you know, I'm very caught up in my intellectual mind and I get in my way and all these sorts of things. It's very difficult for me to transcend that, you know, in and of itself. So this just, this just allowed me to like, see that there's more, more out there.

• 1:00:36Rich Roll?

  And has now made me much more interested in the nature of consciousness itself. And these higher states of it and what they avail us of. I mean, every happiness expert that I've had on this podcast has talked extensively about what drives happiness and what drives us away from it. And it's pretty clear and they're all, you know, they have different views on this, but they all pretty much agree that it's connection and it's, you know, it's love and it's family and it's some relationship with the divine, whether you call it faith, whatever you label it, you have to have a connection with the ineffable, a power greater than yourself.

• 1:01:16Rich Roll?

  And short of that, you are shortchanging yourself of happiness that's otherwise available to you. And I think that can be a struggle for the Western mind. It certainly has been for me, but I have changed my mind.

• 1:01:33Bob Roth?

  So I would like to comment on a few things. When you talked about that experience, I liken that too. I worked as a kid in a, in addition to Swenson's, I worked as a, at a plant nursery. And in the spring, early spring, they used to, we'd get two different types of azaleas would come in. One azalea was this in a five gallon, I don't know if there's still five gallon cans, five gallon can, this little budding with a few buds in the azalea. And then come a greenhouse, hot, you know, this azalea fully bloomed, just absolutely exquisite, just.

• 1:02:09Bob Roth?

  Well, the problem was that fully bloomed azalea sort of got its system blown out and never really recovered from that. Whereas the little five gallon can planted properly and grown properly grew every season more and more and more and more and more. So in terms of sustainability, that azalea planted in the ground is not as much of a quick hit, but it did give you an idea of where this plant was going. But I think you could, you could have experiences that way, but the sustainability is the nervous system likes to grow sort of steadily and sustainably and naturally. And as far as meditation could never develop all of those experiences, there are some,

• 1:02:54Bob Roth?

  you read the saints and sages of the past, there's some pretty heavy duty experiences they talk about.

• 1:03:00Rich Roll?

  Sure, yeah, but there are outlier people who I'm sure are able to inhabit that state, you know, on their own, you know, on their own chemistry. I just don't know that I would have ever been able to do that, you know, on my own. And it's not like I need to go back and do this a bunch of times, you know, there's more for me to learn in that, but it's not like, oh, I need to, you know, immediately jump back into that. Like I got what I needed from that and I'm trying to, you know, use it and not just consider it a peak experience and move on.

• 1:03:32Bob Roth?

  Which is a way to take advantage of that experience, grow from that experience.

• 1:03:45Rich Roll?

  So we're agreed on transcendence then, I guess.

• 1:03:47Bob Roth?

  We are, completely. And I want to talk about something else. I don't know if you ever had this fellow, Dacher, oh, I had his name, wrote a book on awe, just, he's great, and the transformative power of the experience of awe. And he said that human beings are lacking the emotion of awe. We have emotions of shame or embarrassment or anger, this things, and that has an effect on the nervous system. But the experience of awe, which we probably had more thousand years ago, and you could look up into the night sky and you could see the Milky Way and, or whatever, and that he described as an experience of something vast, unbounded. And if you look up the definition of the word transcend, it means to go beyond ordinary human experience.

• 1:04:29Bob Roth?

  And we're always looking for transcendent moments. I mean, to the small things of let's go to a different restaurant here, or let's go to a different place for vacation to, I'm going to join a theater group, or something that breaks our boundaries to, I'm going to meditate, or I'm going to do what you did. We look for something that breaks our boundaries because human beings need awe. And everything is so calculated these days, and everything is so, you know, uh, uh, uh, that we don't have that. And when the research is done on awe, said that it reduces stress, and it improves reasoning and clarity and health and all of that. Well, this is what I like about transcending, is that if you use that cross-section of the ocean analogy,

• 1:05:12Bob Roth?

  as the mind settles down, it expands. It's like a triangle from the point at the top, it expands, and that they use the term unbounded awareness. Never really knew what that meant when I first learned meditation, but it's not that bound, it's that universality of awareness. So what I focus on, what are the health benefits of that experience? But the experience is that human beings need awe. They need unboundedness. They can't live their life every day through the minutia of point, point, point, point, point.

• 1:05:47Rich Roll?

  Yeah, it's interesting that we're in a moment in which we have to be told, okay, you have to go out and like get awe in your life.

• 1:05:53Bob Roth?

  No, go for a walk in the, yeah.

• 1:05:55Rich Roll?

  Yeah, but it's, we have to seek it out. It doesn't, we're not, you know, it doesn't happen naturally. And because of the, you know, way, the gestalt of modern life, it's not going to happen unless you intentionally pursue it. But I just know for myself, even if I said, okay, I got an hour, you know, before I have to do the next thing, I'm going to go out here and I'm going to go on a walk because this is my awe time.

• 1:06:20Rich Roll?

  You know, I'm probably not going to experience awe. Awe happens also like in the in-between moments, like not necessarily when you're seeking it, but when you are present enough in your life to make yourself available to it. And I think one of the benefits of meditation is it teaches you how to be present in your life such that your attention becomes unbounded, or at least expands such that you're able to see things that generally elude your notice. And those things tend to be the kinds of things that a lot, you know, make space for the experience of awe. Like, I would think that the guru who's in the cave, who's been, you know, one of

• 1:07:02Rich Roll?

  those outlier people, can experience awe in the most mundane of moments on a moment-to-moment basis because of their, their absolute expanded awareness and, and, and ability to be present on a level that is, you know, beyond what mere mortals are capable of.

• 1:07:22Bob Roth?

  So you just made a really telling point of the point that I was making. Yeah, so he says you're supposed to have awe. Well, again, if I'm got worried about job and I'm worried about this and I'm going to go out and I'm going to have awe.

• 1:07:34Rich Roll?

  Yeah, no fucking way.

• 1:07:36Bob Roth?

  But if I have a direct experience of that unboundedness inside of me, not trying to control my mind, not trying to stop the waves, not trying to manipulate that mindfully, just if I just settle effort, the key word is effortless, no, no effort, any effort stops it, just settle down and expand. Then when I come from that 20-minute period, or if it's a kid, 10-minute period, I have a broader vision. I can appreciate everything more, the mundane and the extravagant more. So what is the preparation for that? I was just saying that it was interesting that psychology is now moving in the direction of recognizing the value of awe. But where do you find that?

• 1:08:18Bob Roth?

  Well, you find out where it is right here, right inside you.

• 1:08:22Rich Roll?

  Right. I guess the point I'm making is you can go out to New Mexico and where you can get a clear view of the night sky, right, and have that experience. But if you're super dialed, you can watch an old woman at the checkout counter, you know, buying her groceries and just be absolutely amazed by that in a way that instills you with some level of awe.

• 1:08:44Bob Roth?

  And that's that higher state of consciousness. That's that fifth state. That's that state of having that equanimity within me and absolutely attentive of what's going on. And again, I'll go back to David Lynch.

• 1:08:55Rich Roll?

  Yeah, I was just gonna say, like, him and the hamster, or whatever it is, like, you know, he would put, like, the dead animal on the concrete in his garage and watch it decay over days and just be fascinated by that.

• 1:09:05Bob Roth?

  Because that's his, and that's not my fascination, that's his fascination. Everybody gets to be more and more of themselves. And it's not of themselves that's shrouded by stress, or past traumas, or adverse childhood experiences. The human nervous system, given the opportunity, and one of the key elements here is deep rest, the human nervous system is incredibly resilient and incredibly, you know, regenerative. And you just have to have that experience of that transcendence inside to enjoy the outside more.

• 1:09:35Rich Roll?

  Why do we get in our own way so much with this kind of stuff?

• 1:09:40Bob Roth?

  The world is not exactly conducive right now to turning within. There's nothing in our public square, there's nothing in advertising, "Hey," you know, like you were saying at the very beginning, that's a big investment. It's not like you wake up and you say, "Hey, I got 20 minutes to kill this morning. What am I gonna do?" We have to make the time because the world has gotten so crazy.

• 1:10:02Rich Roll?

  We're still very much lizard brains. Like, we want instant gratification and convenience. We want everything expedited, just the way we want it, when we want it, all of these sorts of things. These aspects of modernity that on some surface level have made our lives better, but actually are driving us away from the core aspects of what make us feel happy and fulfilled. And we have to override those. But it seems to be that you're saying on some level that, that there is some instant gratification to this practice.

• 1:10:35Bob Roth?

  No, that's, again, I go back to the research. Here it is, the middle of COVID, full-on COVID, we're in Miami, frontline hospitals. We taught like, I don't know, 60 or 70 doctors and nurses in the ICU and the emergency rooms. And then they did a study, and within two weeks, there was a significant, statistically significant reduction in depression and anxiety. Now, if you take an anti-anxiety medication, it's two months, or antidepressant medication. Now, that doesn't happen with everybody at every time, because we're all different. But it is not an aberration. The fact is, the human brain and nervous system are hardwired to take deep rest at will. We've forgotten how to do it.

• 1:11:17Bob Roth?

  Maybe hundreds of years ago, in an agricultural world, when you're more in the flow of everything, but today, we've forgotten how to access that. And so, when you do that, it has a transformational effect. You know, I work with schizophrenics, or people who have serious problems that could take longer, but, you know, regular folk, like everybody, yeah.

• 1:11:37Rich Roll?

  Yeah, so, you're saying, short of a very acute mental health disorder, somebody who is experiencing some level of depression, or has some narrative around victimhood that's related to childhood trauma, like, kind of more like garden variety, you know, health conditions?

• 1:11:57Bob Roth?

  Run-of-the-mill Americans.

• 1:11:58Rich Roll?

  How do you think about, like, how meditation fits in when people need outside help? Or, I know you're very careful to not, like, overstate claims. This isn't like a prescription for, for mental health disease, or, you know, on some, you're not saying that, but like, how does this fit into?

• 1:12:14Bob Roth?

  It's adjunctive. It's, it's an adjunct. If a person has high blood pressure, sure, there's a ton of research showing that TM reduces high blood pressure. In some regards, more effectively than antihypertensive medication. When I teach a person who has high blood pressure, I say, "Talk to your cardiologist. In a few months, you may not need as much..." High blood pressure medication. But if it's a genetic predisposition, you may need but high blood pressure medication for the rest of your life. Well, I'm not a doctor. No TM teacher is a doctor. We say this is an adjunct to the treatment that you're having. It can, if you can reduce anxiety, if you can reduce cortisol levels, it can only help sleep better, make better decisions for eating, any of those things.

• 1:12:58Rich Roll?

  So you've been doing this for over 50 years.

• 1:13:00Bob Roth?

  Meditating for 50.

• 1:13:02Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 1:13:02Bob Roth?

  Yeah, 50.

• 1:13:03Rich Roll?

  Twice a day, every day. There must be days where you've missed.

• 1:13:06Bob Roth?

  Of course, of course. No, I'm not like, I'm not a crazy person here, Rich. No, but, but I prefer doing it, but it's not like, of course.

• 1:13:14Rich Roll?

  And so from a personal testimony perspective, like, how do you, like, how is your life? I guess you've been doing it so long that you don't know what it's like to not do it. So you have nothing to compare it to. But like, how would you say, from your personal view, how it's nourished and improved your life?

• 1:13:29Bob Roth?

  Well, I run a foundation and anybody who's ever run a foundation knows, they say for every yes, you stand on a mountain of no's, you know? So running a foundation and, and doing something that's against the, when I started this 50 years ago, started, I mean, Arshy brought it out well before that. You know, there's a lot of resilience. There's old people saying this is nuts, or this, or that, or that. And I just believed in the science of it. And I thought this is something that could help people. So I would say resilience and I would say conviction and persistence. It allows me to have, even with what you're doing, you're, you know, you're expanding. There's a lot of conviction, a lot of persistence. This is a big thing you're doing. And meditation helps with that.

• 1:14:14Bob Roth?

  And I think that's what helped with David Lynch with him. Because again, if you're going against a grain, if you're doing something that's never been done before, then it takes conviction, which you have to be rooted in yourself, and you have to have that over time. So I would say that's helped me a lot.

• 1:14:28Rich Roll?

  Yeah, conviction requires clarity.

• 1:14:30Bob Roth?

  Yes.

• 1:14:30Rich Roll?

  Like, you need clarity of purpose.

• 1:14:34Bob Roth?

  Deep clarity.

• 1:14:34Rich Roll?

  And that's what generates the conviction, right? But in order to have that clarity, you have to have like a calm state of mind and a perspective on your own life and what's important to you.

• 1:14:44Bob Roth?

  If what this person said hurt my feelings or that or that, then like I never, you just get, and then persistence is the energy to keep going. So I have a ton of energy from the meditation.

• 1:14:55Rich Roll?

  And the resilience is the ability to weather obstacles without letting them throw you off course, right? That's of a piece with equanimity, like not getting derailed because of something somebody said or getting a bunch of no's.

• 1:15:09Bob Roth?

  I remember those, I don't remember, those bozo the clown balloon things, you knock it down, it bounces up, you know, you hit it, you remember those things?

• 1:15:15Rich Roll?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 1:15:16Bob Roth?

  So just, just keep going, just keep going. Because again, I'm sure there's times in your life that you've had to do those same things.

• 1:15:23Rich Roll?

  Sure. At this point, the foundation has taught a million and a half people?

• 1:15:30Bob Roth?

  Just the beginning.

• 1:15:32Rich Roll?

  Wow. So it focuses on these people who are more at risk or, you know, people who are suffering from PTSD, et cetera, but it seems to be expanding out, like with the LA firefighters and things like that. Like, what's the cohort that you think is most in need of this that you're trying to connect with?

• 1:15:48Bob Roth?

  Transcendental Meditation has its own nonprofit organization and there's 150 or 200 teaching centers in the United States and people, nonprofit, and people come and learn TM. The foundation, David Lynch Foundation, was started because David and I wanted to bring this to people who are in need, who may not have access. Like the women who are at the Family Justice Centers in New York, they're not going to know to go over to a TM center in Manhattan and learn TM. So we bring it to them. So the David Lynch Foundation is, our common theme is trauma and toxic stress. Well, when we started that 50, you know, or 20 years ago, that was a few number, but now. I mean, I teach people, CEOs, who come in and they look, you know, great.

• 1:16:31Bob Roth?

  He or she looks great. And then you talk to them and there's a lot of trauma in there, a lot of pressure, a lot of concern. And it's whether it's their life or they're worried about their kids. I mean, we're doing a lot of fam- teaching a lot of families now because children and grandchildren with the social media, there's a lot of, you know, the number two cause of death among teenagers is suicide.

• 1:16:52Rich Roll?

  Social media, the loneliness epidemic, yeah, we're seeing, you know, the rise of a lot of-

• 1:16:58Bob Roth?

  And I want to go back to your point, the happiness, talking about connection with people, you know, you're talking about that. I believe that that transcendent field, well, not I believe, the transcendent field we're talking about is, in Sanskrit is called Ananda, which means bliss, bliss consciousness. Jesus said, "The kingdom of heaven is within you." Psalms 4610 said, "Be still and know that I am God." Lao Tzu said, "To he whose mind is still, the universe surrenders." So I think it's the connection with one's own innermost silent self. Still, not thinking about the self, not reading about it, not, but actually accessing that, that is where the foundation of true happiness is. You've got to find it

• 1:17:43Bob Roth?

  in yourself, but it's not like, "Oh, true happiness lies within and, you know, cutesy, cutesy." It's a very real experience. Then you're in a position to enjoy that inner happiness more and more.

• 1:17:56Rich Roll?

  What is your experience sharing this and teaching this with children?

• 1:18:02Bob Roth?

  Children from the age of about five until 10, they have what's called a word of wisdom. So they get a mantra, but they do it for five minutes and they do it, you know, when they're playing or drawing or something, or their parents take them for a walk. From about the age of 10 or 11 or above- They all love it. My experience is kids, when their parents tell them to do it, some kids will do it, but some kids will reject it after a while. But then when they're 16 or 17 and they start experiencing, if they started at 12, and they go, "Mom, I'd like to get my meditation refreshed. Is Bob still around?" And then they go for it. They go for it.

• 1:18:42Rich Roll?

  What is the status in terms of getting it in the curriculums at schools? Just meditation generally?

• 1:18:50Bob Roth?

  Schools have become such political hotbed right now. It's just, everybody's afraid of anything. You know, so you can't do yoga in schools because that's this or that. So, we were really successful. We were in schools all over the country and it was going great. And then it just got to be not just us, but everybody. And we thought, we want to bring this to kids. We now go to community centers.

• 1:19:13Rich Roll?

  I see. It's just too much of a mess in the school systems.

• 1:19:17Bob Roth?

  It's a mess. And the principals, I mean, the administration hates the teachers, the teacher's this. And it was like, the kids loved it, but it just got too much. So now we're working in community centers where whole families learn to meditate.

• 1:19:30Rich Roll?

  It just seems so obvious that teaching this to young people at the earliest, you know, phase where they can really understand it is so critical. Like, we look at our education system and it's just, it's a, it's a vestige of a bygone era, the way in which we teach and instruct kids.

• 1:19:48Bob Roth?

  How so?

• 1:19:49Rich Roll?

  Well, I think that the basic format of it was created at a time where we were trying to raise people to become people we could plug into the factory system and have a good workforce, essentially, right? And it doesn't seem that it's changed that much. And yet, the world has changed drastically and radically. And the rate at which that change is accelerating right now is bewildering. So, the fact that we would still be instructing young people in the way we always have doesn't seem to make any sense. And In a world in which like learning facts and memorizing really isn't all of that relevant anymore, what's really relevant is learning how to, how to think, how to

• 1:20:32Rich Roll?

  communicate, how to cooperate, and how to develop the internal skills to follow your own compass and have conviction and resilience and self-esteem and know who you are.

• 1:20:47Bob Roth?

  And it's ironic that the things that could do that, like meditation, in some regards, in general, is seen far too controversial, even though there's all this data. And I think in the name of what? They're undermining a whole generation of young people who can't, I mean, the ability to deal with change is going to be the key to, I think, to

• 1:21:07Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 1:21:08Bob Roth?

  We talked about earlier AI and I, I worry that, that there's forces that are trying to stop kids from having tools to really be able to change and grow. And as you said, all those qualities, I don't, I don't understand. We're ready and willing, but it's just crazy.

• 1:21:28Rich Roll?

  Yeah. And so you're forced to go to these community centers, but those are fewer and far between compared to what it used to be. There, there isn't that kind of after-school infrastructure that used to exist.

• 1:21:40Bob Roth?

  We continue to do the research. My feeling is, it's sometimes it's a voice of a few people who create fear, but you know, oh, this is a religion, or this is this, or this is that. And when there's, which it's not, but you show overwhelming data, then it'll just make people shut the other people up. You just say, no, no, no, no, this is not the Middle Ages anymore. You know, this is.

• 1:22:05Rich Roll?

  People love neuroscience.

• 1:22:06Bob Roth?

  Yeah.

• 1:22:07Rich Roll?

  You know, and the more clinical trials that you can run and the more, you know, the more you can kind of make that, that, you know, library of evidence-based data robust, I think that's, that's the way you win.

• 1:22:20Bob Roth?

  Mayo Clinic is coming out now on a big meta-analysis of all the work we've done in hospitals. That's going to open the doors for, again, coverage. We have a hospital in New York City that just gave the foundation quarter million dollars to teach doctors and nurses. Another hospital pays for all of their employees to learn to meditate. Firefighters and police officers in, in New York City are learning, covered by the foundations there. So it's happening. The door is opening.

• 1:22:50Rich Roll?

  What is the message that you give to the skeptic? Like, you're a skeptic. Somebody comes to you because their friend dragged them. How do you get into that person's mind?

• 1:23:04Bob Roth?

  I just, I say to them, I say, I mean, everyone's different, but I'll say, does the idea of sleeping better at night and all these different things, all these benefits, lower cortisol, all of that, does that, does that sound appealing to you? Yeah. Okay, there's no obstacle because you don't have to believe in this thing. There's no obstacle for you having those benefits. If you're a skeptic, I congratulate you. You should be, people should be skeptical. I think it's a healthy response. What is this song and dance? You know, what is this all about? I think it's healthy. I'm a skeptic. I love big ideas, but I like them to be rooted in reality. You know, something down to earth.

• 1:23:45Bob Roth?

  And so skeptics, I enjoy teaching skeptics almost more than anybody else because it's, wow, that, I didn't, where was that experience in my life? Or you've had it occasionally, like in running or something. But there's not, that, if a person is willing to give it a try, I think there's a difference between skepticism and cynicism. Cynicism, that, you know, it's just going to get out, whatever. Although being cynical, it turns out-

• 1:24:12Rich Roll?

  I mean, that's dismissiveness.

• 1:24:13Bob Roth?

  Yeah, and it's very unhealthy, turns out, what it does to your brain and body to be cynical. But skeptical, I think, is really healthy.

• 1:24:19Rich Roll?

  Mm-hmm. You mentioned you were just at TED, and I know that TED this year was programmed pretty heavily around what's happening with AI right now. I saw some clips of Chris Anderson talking with Sam Altman and the Peanuts cartoon and, and Sam sort of just saying, yeah, well, you know, you guys can say whatever you want, but like, enjoy, right?

• 1:24:42Bob Roth?

  Like- It's coming.

• 1:24:43Rich Roll?

  There is a lot that's coming. And when I think about that in the context of meditation, it seems to me, and I'm interested in how you think about this-

• 1:24:55Rich Roll?

  All of us are increasingly more and more in our own bespoke information silo, right? Like, everybody's feed is different. And these feeds are increasingly being populated by AI-created content. I've been deep faked a couple of times in this past year, and they were terrible deep fakes. But those are the worst they're ever gonna be. And when you see it, you're like, oh, in the not-too-distant future, it's gonna be very easy to make it identical to me, this person saying things I've never said, talking to somebody I've never met. And when you scale that out, like, what does that mean for how we're consuming information?

• 1:25:38Rich Roll?

  And the only way to find your ballast in that is to go inside and develop your own inner compass and sense of self to guide you, because you can no longer rely on, like, whatever you're seeing throughout the day to be accurate or real or something created for the purpose of manipulating you.

• 1:26:00Bob Roth?

  In the Bhagavad Gita, it talks about having a resolute intellect. And the resolute intellect is described as a candle flame in a windless place. And that is the ability to be true to yourself and not be swayed by all this outer stuff. I mean, you take in all the information, you have to take it in, but then you make your decision that's clear and self-aware. And I think that's what meditation does. It allows you to settle down, again, in that ocean analogy, cross-section, those quieter levels of the ocean, that is where you can see deeply into things, and you know yourself, and you can be true to yourself. And I think that is essential, because what's coming with all that, we have that moral compass.

• 1:26:45Bob Roth?

  And they call it, in the ancient texts, they say that that level, deep within Rittambhar Pragya, which means that level of life where only truth exists, it's like, true, you're locked into the universe. And we need that, because there's so much misinformation, and so much seduction, and so much, all of that stuff. And there was an interesting, I was at a press conference once with Maharishi, and a reporter asked him, "What's the key to happiness in life?" And I thought...

• 1:27:16Bob Roth?

  It was an unusual question because it was all about, and I thought, well, kindness, love, compassion. And he said, discernment, the ability to make the right choice. He said, every day you make choices. What am I going to eat? Who am I going to be with? Should I have that extra brownie? Should I do that? Every single decision we make impacts us in one way or another. And the ability to make the right choice, clear-headed, calm, with discernment, is key. And then he said, ultimately, you want spontaneous right action. Ultimately, like you're a plant-based, I am too. I'm not tempted to eat something else. It's just spontaneously, I eat what I eat. And he said, you want to be on that level, that fifth state, where you're just spontaneously making right decisions. But

• 1:28:00Bob Roth?

  I thought discernment was very interesting.

• 1:28:02Rich Roll?

  That is. That's very astute. Discernment can only occur when, on some level, you like, know yourself, right? Like, sort of the yogis, like, what is your purpose here on earth? To know yourself, which is easy to be dismissive about, but when you actually think about that, it is the most profound thing.

• 1:28:24Bob Roth?

  The Temple of Apollo in Delphi, what does it say? First thing, know thyself. And then the next instruction, then it says, know thyself, Maharshi talked about, know yourself, then be true to yourself. That's the second thing he said. So know thyself. So I know who I am. Now be true to that. And then he said, do what you know to be right, and don't do what you know to be wrong. And he said, that's the essence of every religious and wisdom tradition. Know yourself, be true to yourself, do what you know to be right, and don't do what you know to be wrong.

• 1:28:53Rich Roll?

  And that is put into action by dint of making decisions.

• 1:28:58Bob Roth?

  Yes, that's right.

• 1:28:59Rich Roll?

  And those decisions have to be made with discernment in order to adhere to that code.

• 1:29:03Bob Roth?

  Yeah, not reactive. And he said, the gap, you mentioned the gap, the gap between action and reaction. That's where everything happens. Something happens, and do I have a moment to react, or do I just react? Somebody says something, I just fight back? Or is there a moment, just a gap, to say, oh. I did a lot of work in San Quentin Prison, teaching inmates there. And you talk to every one of them. I blacked out, I don't remember. Some of them are pretty calculated, but a lot of them, they just blacked out, they didn't remember doing it. And I think they just overcome with rage. There's no, there's no freedom there. There's no freedom.

• 1:29:41Rich Roll?

  That is like, for somebody who's brand new to meditation, I think that is the most powerful, like, wisdom nugget. Like, what if you could just get an extra moment of pause before responding? So that you're not just impulsively reacting? And you have that minute, or that brief moment, to say to yourself, like, what's the best thing to say here, or best thing to do? Like, just that alone, like, if you scale that out over the course of a day, or a life, could dramatically change the trajectory of your life. Because we all have those experiences where we're like, "Why did I say that thing? I just reacted." Or, you know, we get ourselves in trouble all the time

• 1:30:25Rich Roll?

  because of our failure to have that buffer, to widen that gap a little bit.

• 1:30:30Bob Roth?

  Have you ever heard the term that your amygdala hijacks your brain? So the hijack, there's a technical term that somebody wrote. So the amygdala is your, it's in the limbic system. They used to call it the fear center, but it's actually all basic emotions is governed from there. And what happens, you have someone walking down the street, and it's dark, and you see that, and your amygdala goes, "Whoa." What's supposed to happen is that information's supposed to ping up to your prefrontal cortex. And then the prefrontal cortex is, "No biggie, it's just a tree," or something like that. But what happens is when the amygdala, when I'm tired or stressed, the amygdala hijacks the brain, and it just sends it down to the adrenal glands. And now you're pumping out cortisol,

• 1:31:15Bob Roth?

  and you're pumping out adrenaline, and you're all freaking out. That's so anger takes over your brain. And when a person has that rage, or every moment, then it happens is that you've been hijacked. The higher brain, the prefrontal cortex, which is judgment, and rational thinking, and rational filter against impulsive decisions, goes offline. And now I'm just a... I have no break in there. So meditation calms the amygdala.

• 1:31:43Rich Roll?

  So you've gone into San Quentin?

• 1:31:45Bob Roth?

  One of the first places I ever taught. Well, backstory, my dad was a doctor in World War II, and he was injured badly in combat in World War II. And he got a job at the VA hospital in San Francisco. So I remember on Saturday, this is my interest in vets and inmates. On Saturdays, he used to come into my room and said, Bobby, you know, get up, we're gonna, I'm gonna read one x-ray at Ford Miley Hospital. Then we'll go to Candlestick Park, we'll watch Willie Mays, you know, it's like going to heaven. And then he'd take me to VA hospital and I'd be there for hours because one emergency became another and another and another. And I saw all these World War II veterans and Korean War veterans rolling by in wheelchairs. And it was just, I was, made a searing impression.

• 1:32:29Bob Roth?

  He also used to volunteer at San Quentin Prison. And I used to go with him to San Quentin Prison as a 12-year-old. So I saw, and my mom worked with under-resourced kids. So I was like, at an early age, saw all these people that, in many regards, not fault of their own, suffering profoundly from trauma. So when I became a teacher, I loved teaching. But I always thought, okay, I, I used to think, why isn't there a foundation that will give us money so we can, I could pay some TM teachers to go into schools and teach TM for free? And then I kept saying, my friend one time said, stop whining, start your foundation yourself. So I called up David, and that's what we did. That was 20 years ago.

• 1:33:11Rich Roll?

  Did you, so you knew David before?

• 1:33:14Bob Roth?

  A year, a couple of years before, through meditation.

• 1:33:16Rich Roll?

  I see.

• 1:33:17Bob Roth?

  He'd been meditating since 1973. He had a great story on how he learned.

• 1:33:22Rich Roll?

  What is that?

• 1:33:24Bob Roth?

  He was like, 1972, and you know, he had graduated and he had, he got money. And he had this great Doheny Park in Los Angeles where he could, had a studio where he could, everything, and he had everything he'd want as a young filmmaker. And he said, and I wasn't happy. I had everything and I wasn't happy. And he never took any drugs. And he said, he was wondering, where do I find happiness? And he remembered the story, true happiness lies within, which he called the cruelest of all statements because they don't tell you where where the within is and they don't tell you how to get there. And then he was on the phone, talking to his sister one time. And he heard a difference in her voice, like I said before. And he said, what are you doing? And she said, transcendental meditation.

• 1:34:09Bob Roth?

  Next day, he went out and learned. And he famously said, he never missed a meditation in 50. And I'm not in that boat.

• 1:34:18Rich Roll?

  That's a great story. He seems like, he's such a curious mind that if somebody says, oh, this is, this helped me. Like, he's somebody who would actually do it. Like, oh, I'll go, well, I'll go check that out.

• 1:34:29Bob Roth?

  No, because he read deeply. He heard in the voice, deep in the voice, truth. Whereas also, because he's a director, a great director, that if there wasn't truth in what an actor was saying, he stopped it and had him do it again. So he was always looking for authenticity. And I learned a lot from him. When I would get up and speak at events and I'd be a little nervous and I'd, and people say, oh, Bobby, you did great. And I'd say, David, and he'd say.

• 1:34:55Rich Roll?

  Like, he doesn't care if you follow the script. It's like, did you, did you show up, you know, as yourself?

• 1:35:00Bob Roth?

  Exactly right. And I learned a lot from that, from him. I got, just be yourself.

• 1:35:03Rich Roll?

  Yeah. But when I think about those experiences, you just shared about your dad and the VA hospital and going to San Quentin, like, it all makes sense now. Like, the meditation piece was, or is, on some level, like, your vehicle to, to like, help people in a way that is somewhat similar to what your dad was doing.

• 1:35:25Bob Roth?

  Well, I like, I was thinking about that. First of all, Kierkegaard one time said, life is lived forward, but can only be understood looking backward. So it all makes sense now.

• 1:35:34Rich Roll?

  Right, yeah, yeah.

• 1:35:35Bob Roth?

  But, oh, so my dad was a doctor. So I looked at meditation as a healthcare intervention. My mom was a teacher. And I always wanted to do something like politics. My thing was, I wanted to go into politics so you could change the laws so that everyone had equal access. What people did with that, but there should be no law that doesn't allow everyone to have equal access. And so, in a way, but it's scalable for happiness, pursuit of happiness. So meditation is a medical intervention, it's an educational tool, and it can be scalable through the healthcare system.

• 1:36:07Rich Roll?

  And what you're doing is providing equal access to themselves, right?

• 1:36:13Bob Roth?

  Yeah.

• 1:36:14Rich Roll?

  The laws are like a top-level thing, but like going to, you know, the inward journey is the foundation upon which you build a better society.

• 1:36:22Bob Roth?

  Exactly right. It has to be. Even, I think that Jefferson said that you couldn't have a democracy unless you had an educated electorate. And educated then was you knew how to, you know, grow crops or agri, he was an agricultural guy. But now educated means, I think meditation is the foundation of education, particularly as our usefulness as a vehicle for knowledge. I mean, why should a kid memorize the state capitals?

• 1:36:49Rich Roll?

  I know. Doesn't make any sense. Especially when you look at the kind of erosion of ethics and the decline of like higher awareness in modern society. Like if you want society to not just cohere but flourish, like you have to tend to people's souls and their spirits and teach them tools to better comport themselves and believe in themselves and feel connected to themselves and as a result of that, other people and the world that we share. Like you can't have a compassionate society if we don't provide people with the tools for their own self-compassion.

• 1:37:31Bob Roth?

  Yeah, I mean, I always thought of that with any of these political parties, you know, they say, "Well, the government should get out of people's business." It's like, whatever. But if a person doesn't have the tools, as you just said, nothing's gonna work. Nothing's gonna work.

• 1:37:46Rich Roll?

  What is your forecast for the near future, Bob?

• 1:37:51Rich Roll?

  You were in a very interesting moment.

• 1:37:52Bob Roth?

  What do you think?

• 1:37:54Rich Roll?

  I feel like we're on the precipice of tremendous change. That's clear, right? And I feel like the script hasn't been written yet and it can go one of two ways, but it will go one of two ways. It's either going to go off a cliff and maybe that is what needs to happen in order to like rebuild. Or we can look at it as an opportunity for a breakthrough in higher awareness and higher consciousness. Like there is something to all these, you know, advance of artificial intelligence that could be leveraged for the many things that you're you care about and that you're you're talking about. Will that happen? I mean, all the incentives are pointing in the other direction right now.

• 1:38:34Bob Roth?

  I think that we have advanced artificial intelligence and I think we need advanced human intelligence. And I think that's not just a, you know, pablum or just one word. And I think the meditation techniques, not just TM, but these tools for inner to develop the interior of the brain, interior of life. That is how we're, right now, we're thinking, okay, how are we as human beings, as little human beings, going to handle this big, huge advent of artificial intelligence? But we're sort of limiting who we are. And I think that who we are could be much greater. You've talked about it, much bigger, but that has to happen so we can manage the AI. Otherwise, the AI is going to take over. Who we are today, we're just, you know, so many, the diet we eat, the medicines we

• 1:39:19Bob Roth?

  take, all these things are just dumbing us down.

• 1:39:21Rich Roll?

  We're just, we'll increasingly outsource all of our decision making. And what does that do to our ability to be discerning?

• 1:39:29Bob Roth?

  Yeah, yeah. That was one of the scariest things when I was at TED. Wasn't so much that, you know, it was inspiring what's happening in healthcare and education. And now with AI, a kid in Africa can have the access to the best teachers and tutors in the world. But it was when they were talking about defense and weaponry and the decisions that have to be made, human beings are too slow to make those decisions, to calculate. It's just going to, like wars could be fought. Out of our hands, like an automated chess match.

• 1:40:02Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 1:40:02Bob Roth?

  But I think that, I don't know, I think this coming up, I think meditation and these ancient practices, just like healthcare's been improved by these traditional systems of healthcare, medicine, traditional system of medicine. Who would have known all these different things? And I think, well, I'll just put it this way, I would like to do the most I can as fast as I can.

• 1:40:23Rich Roll?

  Well, all of these things have to have their counterbalances in a yin yang kind of way. And as we see this explosion in all things artificial, there has to be

• 1:40:35Bob Roth?

  Yes.

• 1:40:36Rich Roll?

  a corresponding reaction in what is authentic, right? And what is, there is a craving and a yearning and an appetite for like real human connection and experience. And what you're teaching and what you offer is the juice, right? It is the conduit to all of those things that we're increasingly going to be desiring and yearning for, because we need them to be human.

• 1:40:58Bob Roth?

  Even I was talking, yes, and I was talking to this one young woman, she's now 40 or something like that, baby. She said that even the younger generation, when it comes to meditation instruction, they want a teacher. They want to move away from, you know, just everything, all online tech and all that, that people want that human connection. And yeah, I think this is, it has to counterbalance. You have to, as they say, as the rose gets bigger, the thorns get bigger.

• 1:41:27Rich Roll?

  I think that's a good place to land the plane.

• 1:41:31Bob Roth?

  Yeah.

• 1:41:32Rich Roll?

  On a high note.

• 1:41:33Bob Roth?

  Yeah.

• 1:41:34Rich Roll?

  You're a gift, Bob. I love the work that you do and you're just a brilliant ambassador for this movement and meditation more broadly. So I salute you and the incredible service that you provide to, you know, a million and a half people and growing at this point is really a beautiful, beautiful thing. It's inspiring to me.

• 1:41:58Bob Roth?

  Now I get to say something. I am honored to be on this show. I'm honored to sit across from you. I think you provide a great service and an actual blessing to your audience, which is ever-growing. And I said to you before, of all the shows, when I did it seven years ago, this is, that was the best interview. This is too. And when I said, you said you want to be in the fifth state. Enlightenment is not some woo-woo thing. I think it's the best of humanity. It's the best of clarity. It's the best of kindness. It's the best of compassion. It's the best of insight, discernment. And you're a great ambassador for humankind. So, thank you for having me on.

• 1:42:35Rich Roll?

  That means a lot to me. Thank you. And I gotta learn.

• 1:42:37Bob Roth?

  I'll teach you.

• 1:42:38Rich Roll?

  Okay, good. This time I'm gonna do it.

• 1:42:40Bob Roth?

  Another seven years.

• 1:42:42Rich Roll?

  No, that's not gonna happen. I'm gonna learn how to do this. So, thank you, my friend. I appreciate it.

• 1:42:47Bob Roth?

  Really great.

• 1:42:48Rich Roll?

  And maybe you can come back sooner than seven years from now.

• 1:42:51Bob Roth?

  Anytime.

• 1:42:52Rich Roll?

  All right. Cheers.

• 1:42:53Bob Roth?

  Cheers.

• 1:43:00Rich Roll?

  That's it for today. Thank you for listening. I truly hope you enjoyed the conversation. To learn more about today's guests, including links and resources related to everything discussed today, visit the episode page at richroll.com, where you can find the entire podcast archive, my books, Finding Ultra, Voicing Change, and The Plant Power Way, as well as The Plant Power Meal Planner at mealplanner.richroll.com. If you'd like to support the podcast, the easiest and most impactful thing you can do is to subscribe to the show on Apple Podcasts, on Spotify, and on YouTube, and leave a review and/or comment. And sharing the show or your favorite episode with friends or on social media

• 1:43:42Rich Roll?

  is, of course, awesome and very helpful. This show just wouldn't be possible without the help of our amazing sponsors, who keep this podcast running wild and free. To check out all their amazing offers, head to richroll.com/sponsors. And finally, for podcast updates, special offers on books, The Meal Planner, and other subjects, please subscribe to our newsletter, which you can find on the footer of any page at richroll.com. Today's show was produced and engineered by Jason Camiolo. The video edition of the podcast was created by Blake Curtis and Morgan McRae, with assistance from our creative director, Dan Drake. Content management by Shana Savoy. Copyrighting by Ben Pryor.

• 1:44:26Rich Roll?

  And of course, our theme music was created all the way back in 2012 by Tyler Pyatt, Trapper Pyatt, and Harry Mathis. Appreciate the love, love the support. See you back here soon. Peace. Plants. Namaste.